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After three decades serving as the senator from California, a serious conversation is brewing about whether or not Democratic Sen. Dianne Feinstein is capable of continuing in her role.

Feinstein’s hometown paper, the San Francisco Chronicle, reported that in multiple conversations with unidentified sources, people confirmed what many say has been going on for years: The senator has difficulty remembering conversations and people she knows and depends heavily on her staff. As painful as it is to admit, perhaps it’s time this great leader steps aside.

“It’s bad, and it’s getting worse,” one unnamed Democratic senator told the Chronicle. An unnamed staffer for a Democrat in California said, “There’s a joke on the Hill, we’ve got a great junior senator in Alex Padilla and an experienced staff in Feinstein’s office.”

RELATED STORY: ‘The day I found Harvey Milk’s dead body was the moment I knew’: Cleve Jones, famed LGBTQ activist

Many of those who spoke about the 88-year-old senator did so prior to the death of her husband Richard Blum, a wealthy financier who died in February following a long battle with cancer. They say his death took a toll on her.

“The last year has been extremely painful and distracting for me, flying back and forth to visit my dying husband who passed just a few weeks ago,” Feinstein wrote in a statement sent to the Chronicle on March 28. “But there’s no question I’m still serving and delivering for the people of California, and I’ll put my record up against anyone’s.”

Sen. Alex Padilla told the Chronicle that he’s familiar with the conjecture around Feinstein’s mental capacity, but he added, “as someone who sees her multiple times a week, including on the Senate Judiciary Committee, I can tell you she’s still doing the job and doing it well.”

Padilla is not the only lawmaker who came to the senator’s defense. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi sent a statement to the Chronicle denying that she’d seen anything out of the ordinary with regard to the senator.

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“Senator Feinstein is a workhorse for the people of California and a respected leader among her colleagues in the Senate,” Pelosi wrote. “She is constantly traveling between California and the Capitol, working relentlessly to ensure Californians’ needs are met and voices are heard.”

She added that it was “unconscionable that, just weeks after losing her beloved husband of more than four decades and after decades of outstanding leadership to our City and State, she is being subjected to these ridiculous attacks that are beneath the dignity in which she has led and the esteem in which she is held.”

Still, numerous staffers told the Chronicle confidentially that it was a challenge working with Feinstein. The outlet reports a high turnover in her office.

“It’s really hard to have a micromanager who is not fully remembering everything that we’ve talked about,” one staffer told the Chronicle. “My biggest concern is that it’s a real disservice to the people of California.”

Feinstein began her career in 1970, serving on the San Francisco Board of Supervisors for eight years. Following the assassinations of Supervisor Harvey Milk and Mayor George Moscone, Feinstein took over as mayor of San Francisco and served for a decade.

Feinstein was elected to the Senate in 1992 and in 2013, she and California Sen. Barbara Boxer became the first pair of women to represent a state.

Feinstein’s term officially ends on Jan. 3, 2025, but if she continues to serve through Nov. 5, 2022, she will become the longest-serving woman in U.S. Senate history.

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As more details have come out about the missile strike that crippled the Russian warship Moskva, every one of them only seems to increase the feeling—already well earned on the ground—that the Russian military is simply incompetent at the most basic things. The idea that the Neptune missiles launched at the Russian flagship were skimming the waves and operating under the cover of a carefully planned operation that misdirected the ship’s attention toward a distant drone is attractive. It’s probably even correct. But it isn’t the whole story.

Neptune missiles have active targeting systems. That is, unlike some of the systems directed to specific targets by observation drones or just looking through cameras, the Neptune is tossing out its own radar signal all the way in. In an electronic sense, this is a noisy system. It’s exactly the kind of system that multiple layers of defensive weapons should have seen coming. Even if every sailor on the ship was sleeping off a vodka hangover, even if everyone on the bridge was watching a Bayraktar flying far off to the west, automated guns should still have flipped out from the Moskva’s deck and rained an unholy hail of bullets at those incoming missiles, shredding them before they got a chance to cause damage. That’s the whole purpose of such defensive systems. This is exactly the kind of attack they should have stopped. But didn’t.

This likely speaks most directly to the level of maintenance on the ship. Unless Ukraine got just massively lucky (which … that happens) the defensive systems were at the best ineffective. More likely, they were not operational. Hell, they may not even be present. Somewhere up the line, there’s no doubt someone who pocketed a few dollars by not doing routine checks and maintenance. There may be someone who sold the whole system.

The situation with the Russian warship also speaks to Russia’s obvious inability to coordinate actions. As kos noted, “A fleet exists for a reason. They work together. This one is listening for submarines, that one is looking out for mines, and hey, let’s keep an eye out in the sky.”

The ability of Ukraine to pull off this attack in the first place is heavily dependent on Russia’s inability to generate any kind of unit cohesion and cooperation, at sea or on land. 

That kind of command and control failure opens up large armies to being destroyed by smaller forces that are able to move quickly in a coordinated manner to bring more force to bear on isolated portions of the enemy.

When each battalion tactical group, and each warship, is fighting as if they are on their own rather than part of a larger integrated system, it doesn’t matter how many other Russian forces are available. The whole Russian army might as well be one BTG or one Moskva for all the good it does for the people fighting.

I’ve brought up before the Battle of Prokhorovka, which was probably the largest clash of armored vehicles in combat history. In that battle, the Soviets lined up 600 tanks and essentially just told them all “Go!” No complex instructions. No real goals other than to shoot any German tanks that happened to be in front of them. 

This brainless advance cost the Soviets 400 tanks. But still, it was a victory. It accomplished the critical goal of slowing the German advance if only because—and this is true—the Germans ran out of shells and got simply exhausted by Soviet tanks. The Soviets held the field and they kept on moving forward.

This is exactly the sort of strategy that can be achieved when a large mass of untrained, inexperienced soldiers are treated as utter muppets, there’s no good communication, and the general in charge has to keep things down to kindergarten-level simplicity. In other words, it’s the kind of tactic you might think Russia could use today, and might be planning as it piles up thousands of armored vehicles in eastern Ukraine. 

Except there’s one officer who seems to be relentlessly effective on the Ukrainian side: General Mud. Because of that general’s legions of raindrops, which have been falling in the Kharkiv area most of the week and are expected to resume on Saturday for another unbroken week of deluge, Russia has had little choice but to restrict its movements to paved highways.

That turns every little road into a chokepoint subject to being hit from both sides. It makes it difficult for Russian observation drones to spot Ukrainian traps. It makes small rivers, and even streams, difficult to ford when bridges are down. Russian BTRs are supposed to be notable for being “nimble” and “fast” when compared to other armored vehicles. None of that matters when they are in the middle of a convoy shuffling single-file down a rain-slick road at 5 mph. We keep seeing burned out Russian vehicles along highways rather than out in fields, not just because that’s where they’re easier to photograph—it’s where the battles, such as they are, are being fought.

Rather than being able to line up their tanks and overwhelm Ukraine with a second Prokhorovka, Russia is forced to fight a hundred little Thermopylae, where every highway in Kharkiv and Donetsk oblasts might as well be the “Hot Gates.”

Of course, Ukraine also has difficulty massing its forces under these conditions, but chokepoints always favor the defense. So long as Gen. Mud keeps up his assault, Russia can’t execute any Big Dumb Actions. It’s forced to stick to Small Dumb Actions. Which keeps them from making large advances, and allows Ukraine time to both dig in for defense and bring more Western weapons to the front.

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On Wednesday, the Tennessee State Senate voted 22-10 to pass a bill that criminalizes homelessness in the the Volunteer State. The bill, sponsored by right-wing extremist state Sen. Paul Bailey, “expands punishments for unauthorized camping on state-owned property to all public property.” It will now be sent to Gov. Bill Lee’s desk for his signature. It is expected to be signed into law as Lee is the kind of guy who ignored children’s pleas to not allow “permitless” gun ownership in Tennessee.

The bill gives local authorities the discretion to bring more severe charges against unhoused Americans. Proponents of the bill say that they’ve tried nothing, and since nothing has worked, we need to allow police to scatter encampments of unhoused people, or threaten them with jail. Opponents of the bill say that instead of wasting resources on destroying campsites, we could apply that same energy and purpose towards building housing that people can afford, or even help subsidize homes and shelter for people.

During the state senate floor debate on Wednesday, Republican state Sen. Frank Nicely got up to talk about homelessness and the need to light a fire under homeless folks. Nicely is given to revisionist history lessons lauding treason and fascism, and Wednesday’s tedious folkism was no different. In fact, this was an inspirational story about Adolf Hitler.

Nicely began by saying: “I haven’t given y’all a history lesson in a while and I wanted to give a little history on homelessness.” Maybe one of the reasons Nicely hasn’t y’all’d up a history lesson for a few months is because the last time he did, he told the world that the South not only didn’t lose the Civil War in 1865 when Confederate General Robert E. Lee surrendered—they’re actually “winning.”

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Nicely then launched in: “Nineteen and ten, Hitler decided to live on the streets. So for two years Hitler lived on the streets and practiced his oratory and his body language and how to connect with the masses. And then went on to lead a life that got him in the history books. So, a lot of these people it’s not a dead end. They can come out of these homeless camps and have a productive life, or in Hitler’s case a very unproductive life.”

Let’s follow your logic: Hitler was homeless for a time and then became the historic monstrous antisemite who ruined a mustache and set of names for generations, and this means that homeless people can be important people to history—but don’t be Hitler. Or be like Hitler, but more “productive?”

Side note: The Tennessee blunderhead even got this history wrong: Hitler was fancying himself a struggling artist in Vienna, Austria, and went from being unhoused in 1909 to a men’s hostel set up exactly for the purpose of housing homeless Germans in 1910.*

Double side note: According to City-Date.com and bestplaces.com, the Strawberry Plains region of Tennessee that Nicely represents matches the financial demographics of the medians in income and housing costs of the rest of the state, but is also about 95% white. That’s pretty homogeneous for Tennessee. Guess that’s where that “we didn’t lose the Civil War” talk comes from?

Nicely’s comments were in opposition to Democratic state Sen. Brenda Gilmore of Nashville, who wondered how criminalizing being poor helped children. “It just breaks my heart that we are criminalizing people who have no where else to go. And if you take and incarcerate their parents, then I think that again only multiplies the issue of taking their parents away from these children simply because they are poor.”

RELATED STORY: Tennessee Republican stands in chamber, claims the Civil War isn’t over—and the ‘South is winning’

Open Table Nashville’s Paula Foster said the state senate’s vote filled her with “Sadness and disgust.” She went on to point out the obvious need for real solutions. “The answer to homelessness and we’ve said it over and over is more housing. We need to put the resources that we are spending making more laws that are clearly inhumane into the resources we need to build more housing units.”

Cathy Jennings, director of the local news paper sold by homeless people, The Contributor, told the Tennessean: “The only answer to homelessness is housing. Not fines. Fines just push people out of sight, further away from existing services, and make it harder for them to become housed.”

Director of Homeless and Supportive Housing in Chattanooga Sam Wolfe told News Channel 9: “If every single person experiencing homelessness in our community showed up to shelters and said, ‘Yes, please give me a place to sleep,’ the reality is that there’s not enough spaces for them.” Being diplomatic, Wolfe went on to try and appeal to the drip of humanity that may or may not be left in Tennessee GOP legislators. “I think that really underscores the importance for us to act sooner rather than later to create those options for folks. It doesn’t take an ordinance going through the Senate for anyone to look in our community and see that the problem of homelessness is far greater than it ever has been.”

Here is the American embarrassment that is Frank Nicely.

*The hostel was set up and funded by wealthy Jewish families, by the by.

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Right-wing Texas Gov. Greg Abbott’s political stunt that has forced commercial truckers to undergo unnecessary secondary inspections and resulted in massive delays and financial losses has been an absolute trainwreck—and he knows it.

That’s why he sat down for a photo opportunity on Wednesday to sign a supposed deal with the governor of the Mexican state of Nuevo León. The agreement purports to “ease commercial traffic at the Laredo-Colombia bridge,” The Texas Tribune reports. Patting himself on the back for claiming to nix a problem he created—gotta hand it to that guy.

But in reality, the agreement “provides little relief for the overall trade logjam” created by Abbott in retaliation for the Biden administration’s just decision to stop enforcing Stephen Miller’s anti-asylum Title 42 policy. A dozen other crossings remain impacted by Abbott’s stunt, including the Pharr Bridge, the busiest crossing in terms of getting Mexican produce to the U.S.

RELATED STORY: Greg Abbott’s own party slams his unnecessary secondary inspections as ‘political theater’

While he may have gotten one Mexican governor to sit for a photo op with him, Abbott is overall at the center of international ire. In the U.S., the White House has criticized the inspections as “unnecessary and redundant,” adding that food disruptions are “raising prices for families in Texas and across the country.” Customs and Border Protection also called the inspections “unnecessary,” noting they happen after commercial vehicles have been “comprehensively inspected and cleared to enter the United States by CBP.”

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Across the border, “Mexico’s government said in a statement it ‘rejects’ the inspections imposed by Texas,” Reuters reported, estimating “significant revenue” losses for both nations. The Texas Tribune reports that the governors of two Mexican states have also criticized Abbott’s stunt as “overzealous,” with Chihuahua’s governor “concerned over how the added inspections have affected both countries’ economies,” the report said.

Mexican truckers have also mounted protests over the stunt, recently telling The Texas Tribune that “no one has told us what the reason for this is or asked what solutions we can come up with together … All we know is that it’s an order from the governor of Texas.”

As previously noted, Abbott is also facing pressure from within his own party, after Texas Agriculture commissioner and fellow right-winger Sid Miller slammed the stunt as “political theater” and “economy killing action.” The policy forcing unnecessary secondary inspections “has been such a disaster that Abbott was even excoriated for it by the conservative Wall Street Journal editorial page,” The Washington Post noted.

“Idled trucks are costing businesses millions of dollars a day and risk food spoilage,” that editorial said. “Supermarkets are scrambling to restock shelves.” It also pointed to a complaint from Miller, who said that Abbott’s political stunt would lead to $5 avocados. Hey, as a Mexican American, I’d be mad too.

“Texas food-growers say enhanced border inspections are threatening business,” KVUE reported. Little Bear Produce, a grower and shipper of green onions and melons, said it’s had trucks stuck for two to three days. 

“These fruits and vegetables that we’re bringing are perishable, they’re highly perishable, especially the greens,” Senior Vice President of Business Affairs Bret Erickson told the outlet. “So every hour, every day, that goes by, the quality of these products are diminishing. Once you harvest the commodity, it’s a race to get it to the grocery store shelf, so that you can get it to the final end use, consumer, as fresh as possible.”

Abbott knows he created a big fucking mess, which is why he’s tried really hard to make his grotesque bussing of asylum-seekers to Washington, D.C., the story everyone pays attention to. He’s already pledged to do it again.

“As a long-time DC resident, I hate seeing our town used again as a political prop,” American Immigration Council Senior Policy Counsel Aaron Reichlin-Melnick tweeted to Abbott. “Guess what, Greg Abbott. We’re not afraid of migrants. We are a vibrant immigrant community that has already welcomed tens of thousands of migrants in the last few years. We have heart—unlike you.”

RELATED STORIES: Abbott’s increased truck inspections in response to Biden admin leading to huge delays, rotting food

Local advocates say they’re ready to aid asylum-seekers sent to D.C. under Abbott’s despicable stunt

Escobar says Abbott’s plan to get asylum-seekers out of Texas is more ‘politics of hate and cruelty’

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Months after his initial subpoena, former President Donald Trump’s senior aide and speechwriter Stephen Miller is reportedly testifying before the Jan. 6 committee on Thursday.

The select committee is steadily rolling toward what will soon be weeks of public hearings beginning in late May or June. Private depositions, including this one with Miller, however, are still helping investigators tick off any final boxes in a probe that has collected more than 800 interviews behind closed doors. 

RELATED STORY: Stephen Miller sues to block cell phone records because he’s on his parents’ family plan

According to the Associated Press, sources were unclear on whether Miller would appear in person or virtually. A committee spokesperson did not immediately return a request for comment to Daily Kos.

The New York Times reported just 24 hours ago that the committee met with two of Trump’s most trusted attorneys, Pat Cipollone and Patrick Philbin, on Wednesday. They were not formally subpoenaed. The attorneys were not under oath nor was their testimony transcribed. They are, however, likely to return, and on those visits, their engagement with the committee could be more formal. 

Why the attorneys would meet with the committee this week is also being kept under wraps, but the National Archives on Wednesday did notify the panel it would soon begin transmitting a completely new tranche of records from the Trump White House.  

National Archives Letter to Transmit Records Notice by Daily Kos on Scribd

Those documents are expected to be remitted to the committee within 15 days—barring a court order stopping the hand-off.

This February, Trump notified National Archivist David Ferriero that he would claim privilege over thousands of records in what will now be the seventh transmission. 

Trump to Archives Feb 2022 by Daily Kos on Scribd

Trump has been on a consistent losing streak, though, in trying to legally shroud Jan. 6 documents from Congress. President Joe Biden overruled Trump’s executive privilege assertions, and courts have reinforced that decision.

The Archives will soon hand off Philbin’s records to the probe and that includes correspondence about the lawsuits he launched on Trump’s behalf to challenge Biden’s electoral victory. As for Cipollone, he was present for many meetings of critical importance to the Jan. 6 committee’s probe. 

Cipollone was privy to meetings where Trump allegedly leaned on his other attorney, Rudy Giuliani, to call the Department of Homeland Security and demand that voting machines be seized because of widescale fraud. 

That fraud was non-existent, but nonetheless, Trump raised the prospect on more than one occasion.

Cipollone and Philbin were also in the room when Attorney General Bill Barr tendered his resignation to Trump. In his recent book, Barr described the scene as explosive with Trump’s face “quivering” in anger when Barr rejected his insistent claim that there was fraud in the 2020 election.

Miller’s appearance, meanwhile, signals a continued tightening of the committee’s focus on Trump’s innermost circle. Whether Trump asserted privilege over Miller’s testimony Thursday remains to be seen. He reportedly offered his daughter Ivanka Trump and son-in-law Jared Kushner a chance to invoke privilege during their appearance. 

Neither took him up on the offer.

RELATED STORY: It’s a family affair: Ivanka Trump appears before Jan. 6 probe

Investigators want to interview Miller about his role in Trump’s “alternate elector” scheme. In an interview with Fox in December 2020, Miller openly vowed that Trump’s so-called alternates would keep the president in power because they had the ability to stop or delay the certification of electoral votes.

Those electors, however, were unsanctioned and unrecognized in every state they formed in. The National Archives ultimately rejected all alternate slates for certification. The last hope for Trump to stay in power was to have then Vice President Mike Pence stop the proceedings. Pence did not.

There are also questions about Miller’s involvement in crafting Trump’s Jan. 6 speech. The ex-senior adviser has a penchant for inciteful rhetoric.

Trump’s onetime bodyman turned personnel director John McEntee met with investigators on Wednesday, too. It was revealed in November that McEntee played a critical role in having Trump’s Defense Secretary Mark Esper ousted despite being a political neophyte with zero experience in the defense arena.

He was, however, one of Trump’s pets inside the administration because he took it upon himself to root out any and all anti-Trump sentiment in the White House’s ranks and report on his findings. 

RELATED STORY: Newly revealed memo firing former Defense Secretary reveals unsettling influence of Trump’s stooges

The Times reported that other Trump White House officials like Anthony Ornato and White House lawyer Eric Herschmann appeared this week. 

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Here’s a story that encompasses the total, flaming, corrupt disaster of U.S. politics and media all at once. In late 2020, Donald Trump told then-Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell about his plans to overturn his election loss—and McConnell remained silent because saying publicly that Trump should stop trying to overturn the election would have jeopardized Republican chances in January 2021’s Georgia Senate runoffs. That’s the flaming corrupt disaster of U.S. politics part. The flaming corrupt disaster of U.S. media part is that we are learning this now, in 2022, because some New York Times reporters saved it for a book.

Yes, once again we are learning information that it would have been good to learn at the time it was happening, or at least as soon as reporters became aware of it, more than a year later so that people with regular salaried jobs as reporters can juice their book sales.

RELATED STORY: The way The New York Times reported the story of missing documents says more about them than Trump

The reporters this time are Jonathan Martin and Alexander Burns. Back in February, it was fellow New York Times reporter Maggie Haberman, who waited for her book to reveal that White House residence staff would find toilets clogged with paper and believed that Trump was trying to flush documents. In Nov. 2021, ABC News reporter Jonathan Karl came out with a book revealing that, in the run-up to the January 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol, then-White House chief of staff Mark Meadows had sent Mike Pence’s top aide a memo outlining a plan to overturn the election. In September 2020, Bob Woodward released a book revealing that in February and March of that year, Trump had repeatedly told him how dangerous the coronavirus was, in complete contradiction to his public message or his administration’s actions, and admitted that he “wanted to always play it down.”

I am almost certainly missing some.

Time after time, reporters get information that is genuinely important for the general public to learn about, important for the future of the democracy, and … they sit on it for months, the better to collect a big advance and rack up sales. In the past, these after-the-fact revelations were more likely to be gossip, details about internal blow-ups, and backstabbing. Thanks to Trump and the increasingly extremist, anti-democratic Republican Party, these days, the revelations are literally information about an attempted coup. That’s not something you save for the book, unless your sole concerns are money and a glitzy book roll-out with lots of high-profile coverage. Which, to be real about it, is how the entire New York Times politics desk operates these days, to a degree that shows it’s coming from the top.

So, yeah, it’s terrible that a Senate leader heard about plans to overturn an election that he knew to have been legal and fair and kept his mouth shut because he was worried about losing the next election. But it’s not the first time McConnell has done something like that, as when he blocked the Obama administration from blowing the whistle on Russian election interference in 2016. Mitch McConnell has one concern in the world, and that is Republican power. He will always act to get more of it.

But people like McConnell get the ability to act that way when no one holds them to account. When, for instance, the media doesn’t hold them to account. When the media reports brazen lies from one party as holding the same weight as largely truthful statement from the other party. And when the media simply does not report what’s going on until months after the fact because it benefits the careers of individual reporters to hold back information.

RELATED STORIES:

How much did Mitch McConnell know about Russian interference and when did he know it?

Woodward has Trump on tape admitting he deliberately underplayed the threat of COVID-19

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The longer the savagery of Russian President Vladimir Putin drags on in Ukraine, the more the conflict calls into question Donald Trump’s relentless fealty to a man who is increasingly viewed as perpetrating genocide against the Ukrainian people.

The headline of one of Wednesday’s lead stories on Politico read, “As Ukraine war intensifies, questions from first Trump impeachment linger.”

The story notes that Trump withholding military assistance from Ukraine in exchange for a political favor from President Volodymyr Zelenskyy may seem distant, but it has “a direct tie-in to today’s war.”

In the piece, former U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch, whom Trump summarily ousted from the position, says she still harbors many unanswered questions about the entire episode.

But with so many books being written by key Trump administration figures, Yovanovitch expects the truth will out eventually.

“I expect … that there will be more details forthcoming,” she says.

Indeed, keep ’em coming.

But the basic fact that Trump tried to kneecap Ukraine and Zelenskyy must remain top of mind as Republicans try to blame some fallout from Putin’s war, such as higher gas prices, on President Joe Biden. In fact, by acquitting Trump during his first impeachment trial, Republicans blessed Trump’s role in weakening Ukraine and emboldening Putin.

But Trump’s first impeachment scandal is just one discrete part of an entire “litany of Trump-Russia intersections,” as The New York Times put it in a remarkable piece featuring Russia expert and former Trump national security aide Fiona Hill. In a single paragraph, the Times connected these dots:

1. Trump’s decades-long pursuit of business opportunities in Moscow.

2. Trump’s persistent Putin worship.

3. Trump campaign aide J.D. Gordon weakening support for Ukraine in the GOP’s 2016 platform.

4. Gordon dining with Russian ambassador to the United States Sergey Kislyak that same week.

5. Longtime Trump confidant Roger Stone asking WikiLeaks through a third party to send along forthcoming Clinton campaign emails stolen by Russian hackers.

6. Trump announcing: “Russia, if you’re listening, I hope you’re able to find the 30,000 emails that are missing.”

7. The Seychelles islands getaway in which military contractor and Betsy DeVos sibling Erik Prince huddled with the head of Russia’s sovereign wealth fund to establish a pre-inaugural backchannel to Russia.

8. Former Trump 2016 Campaign Chief Paul Manafort sharing internal polling with Russian intelligence operative Konstantin V. Kilimnik.

9. Trump’s mysteriously undocumented two-hour meeting with Putin in Helsinki in 2018, after which Trump publicly sided with Putin over the U.S. intelligence assessment that Russia interfered in the 2016 election.

10. Trump & Co. spreading Russian disinformation in 2019 asserting that Ukraine meddled in the 2016 election to help Clinton.

11. Trump’s pardoning of both Manafort and Stone in December 2020.

12. Trump more recently calling Putin a “genius” and soliciting him to release dirt on President Biden’s son, Hunter Biden.

That’s a succinct dirty dozen, and it’s still just the tip of the iceberg. But all of these threads teased out over the course of the last handful of years is exactly why the phrase “Trump-Putin axis” is so resonant, particularly in light of Russia’s corrupt war and the unconscionable war crimes Putin is committing in Ukraine.

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Despite the instant birth of 1,000 hilarious memes, it turns out that Russia’s Black Sea flagship, the Moskva (“Moscow”), isn’t currently being harvested by Ukrainian tractors scouring the seafloor. It is, however, reportedly being towed back to port after suffering serious damage and a fire as a result of a strike from two Neptune missiles launched by a shore battery.

Earlier this week, the site Small Wars Journal, warned that: “… Ukraine can easily achieve a resounding victory that would combine massive substantive defeats for the Russians with tremendous symbolism and loss of prestige for Russia in addition to greatly affecting the way ground combat plays out in the south and east. I am talking about the near-annihilation of the Russian Navy presence in the Black Sea, including the entirety or almost the entirety of the substantive portion of the Black Sea Fleet.”

That sentiment echoed statements from Daily Kos community member Kokopelli2018 who wrote back on April 5 about the possibility of sinking the Moskva and the rest of the Black Sea fleet. 

On Thursday morning, it’s clear that removing “Russian warship” from the battlefield was accomplished with a plan that took practice and timing. Still, the ultimate cost of a couple of Neptunes vs. what was surely the hundreds of millions invested in the missile cruiser has elevated the question of “is the age of warships over?” just as Russia’s loss of 500+ tanks has raised the question of “is the age of tanks over?”

The answer to both is almost certainly “No.” But it’s a modified no.

Tanks—a device originally developed with idea of countering trenches and machinegun nests—have proven themselves to be effective means of projecting force on the battlefield in a way that, for the last century, was hard to counter with anything short of another tank. That value is still there, but now that a tank can be taken down with handheld weaponry that can be produced at a fraction of the cost, its worth as a piece that can take, defend, and decisively occupy territory is greatly diminished. In a battlefield of drones and missiles, a tank is a relatively slow-moving target, and despite the cleverness of alloys and ceramics and active explosive defensive systems, its armor no longer means it’s all but immune to anything but another member of its own species.

Ships have held that role at sea for far, far longer. From Actium to Trafalgar to Leyte Gulf, ships have been the ultimate form of power projection. In the modern age, they’ve been both mobile gun platforms capable of targeting sites far inland with massive shells, landing strips for planes that can range out thousands of miles, and the launching points of both short range and long range missiles. What does Russia … or China … or the United States want do when they want to show someone they mean business? They park a carrier group on their doorstep, putting an incredible nexus of power just seconds away.

But is that power now as questionable as that of land-based armor? In The Age of Missiles, where every nation with a coastline is capable of fielding low-cost weapons that punch out a hundred miles from shore, is a big ship sitting on the horizon anything but a target? The answer is … we don’t know.

There have been questions about the continued value of large ships for a long time. And there’s absolutely no doubt that the billions spent on ships ranging from cruisers to aircraft carriers are heavily swayed by feelings of tradition, national pride, and more than a little “hey, that’s a lot of jobs in my district.” Whether they are worth what they cost is an extremely good question.

But we really don’t know what the near-sinking of the Moskva says about naval power overall. Right now, we know that it says don’t build your missile cruisers with such a useless defensive system that if you’re directing your radar somewhere else, it can’t see an incoming missile. We don’t know a lot more than that. Both on land and at sea, Russia’s defensive systems have proved astoundingly flawed. However that could be just another example of Russia’s vast and public grift-driven incompetence.

Naval actions are so incredibly rare, that the only active service ship in the U.S. Navy which has ever sunk another ship in battle is the U.S.S. Constitution, which did its damage during the War of 1812. The Moskva is only the second cruiser-class ship taken down since World War II (Argentina lost one during the Falklands War). 

There’s a real danger in drawing a general example from a single incident. Even so, you can bet every admiral on the planet is sweating this morning. And when it comes to the Black Sea fleet, that sweat may be enough to raise the waterline.

It’s likely Moskva will be towed to Sevastopol, which is the home of Russia’s southern fleet. They even rented the spot from Ukraine before Putin decided to just take Crimea and save himself the monthly payments. Right now, the port at Sevastopol is about 140 miles from territory definitively controlled by Ukraine, making the ships in harbor safe from additional missile attacks. Probably. But every step that Ukraine takes in recapturing the territory north of Crimea, is also a step toward making Sevastopol a scrapyard for the Russian navy. 

And oh yeah, and idea that Russia ever had about a naval invasion of Odesa? That is long gone.

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As most LGBTQ+ people know, we can face queerphobia pretty much anywhere and from anyone. This is especially true if you live with multiple marginalized identities or are visibly “different” in some way. Sadly, likely due to increased hysteria and hatred from the right, it seems people are not only unleashing vitriol toward adults but on children.

For example, Twitter user Robbie Pierce tweeted a heartbreaking thread on Wednesday, April 13 detailing what he says occurred while he, his husband, and their two children were riding the Amtrak for a trip. Pierce said a stranger approached the family and shouted to their small children that Pierce and his husband were “pedophiles” who “stole” them and accused them of being “rapists” and an “abomination.” According to Pierce, this all unfolded in front of his children, who, unsurprisingly, began crying.

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The full thread is ten posts long, and you can click through this first one to read the entire thing on Twitter.

In his thread, Pierce said it was no longer an “absurd, abstract” attack from a disembodied voice on the internet, but a real horror his children were forced to deal with. Pierce says he handled the situation by removing his children while his husband shouted at the stranger to leave them alone.

According to Pierce, a conductor eventually handled the situation, and the man was arrested after refusing to exit the train. Though Pierce’s thread has gone viral, and he spoke to The Daily Dot in an interview, his claims have not been independently verified.

Pierce told the outlet his children, who are five and six years old, woke up in tears several times the night after the confrontation. “We just talked to them and held them and slept with the light on,” Pierce told the outlet, adding that they know there is “nothing scary” about their family. He also shared he’s faced homophobic attacks before, but the accusations of pedophilia and rape are new to them. Pierce also noted his family lives in Los Angeles, California, so they feel it’s possible they’ve been somewhat sheltered from attacks like this one.

In his thread, Pierce thanks Fox, Rupert Murdoch, J. K. Rowling, and Qanon Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene for stirring up their “lucrative culture war,” in addition to “everyone else who harms kids” and thinks it’s “politically expedient” to project hate onto families like his.

While we obviously are missing some details for this particular story, it’s safe to say rhetoric from conservatives is downright dangerous. We’ve seen teachers attacked over mask mandates, AAPI folks attacked for simply existing, and we see police brutality against people of color—and especially Black men—on a disturbingly regular basis. And yet Republicans have no problem spewing anti-LGBTQ+, anti-immigrant white supremacy if it means they get a few more votes.

Republicans like to defend their anti-choice stance by saying they’re protecting the vulnerable, but they actually love to attack the vulnerable if it allows them to distract their voter base from the real issues and their failures to lead.

Sign the petition: Demand the Senate pass the Equality Act and protect the LGBTQ community from discrimination.

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Elon Musk is a shady plutocrat who has historically benefited from good PR, but his current shenanigans with Twitter might put a little dent in that. After becoming Twitter’s largest shareholder—and violating securities law by failing to disclose it in a timely fashion—Musk was briefly poised to join the company’s board. Then that fell apart, with Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal including the interesting detail that Musk’s entry onto the board would have been contingent on a background check. Now, Musk has announced an offer to buy Twitter and make it a private company, which he says would “unlock” the company’s “extraordinary potential.”

Musk’s signature company, Tesla, lost one racism discrimination lawsuit, with an initial judgment of $137 million recently reduced to $15 million. Other Black employees describe a horrifyingly, overtly racist environment at Tesla’s California plant, spurring a major discrimination lawsuit by the California Department of Fair Employment and Housing. The idea of Musk being the last word on acceptable speech at a major social media platform is alarming, to say the least.

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“I invested in Twitter as I believe in its potential to be the platform for free speech around the globe, and I believe free speech is a societal imperative for a functioning democracy,” Musk said in a letter to the head of Twitter’s board.

“However, since making my investment I now realize the company will neither thrive nor serve this societal imperative in its current form,” he wrote. “Twitter needs to be transformed as a private company.”

Again, there’s reason to worry about a societal imperative for free speech as determined by someone who oversees a company at which Black employees are assigned particularly difficult work in a section of the factory referred to as “the plantation,” a Black worker was fired after complaining that a supervisor called him and other Black workers “monkeys,” and use of the N-word was “the norm. It was Tesla’s tradition.” Musk may not be in that factory every day doing those things himself, but he owns it. Literally.

Musk’s takeover bid came with a threat (which he insisted, super believably, was “not a threat”): If he’s not successful, he would “need to reconsider my position as a shareholder.” In other words, he would dump his stock, to the detriment of other shareholders. On the other hand, Twitter would not be owned by Elon freaking Musk.

Musk’s self-presentation is as a completely self-made billionaire (never mind his dad’s emerald mine lurking in the background), but even as he rails against taxing people like himself, he’s benefited significantly from government funding through his career, as Greg Sargent and others have pointed out. As of 2015, his companies had gotten $4.9 billion in government money. 

The $150 million or so Musk made by not complying with securities law and revealing his Twitter stock purchases in a timely fashion isn’t the only time he’s gotten in trouble with the Securities and Exchange Commission, either. In 2018, he had to step down as Tesla’s chair and paid $40 million in penalties ($20 million from himself and $20 million from Tesla) after he … used tweets to claim he was taking Tesla private, causing “significant market disruption.” Sound familiar?

This is not a trustworthy or honest person.

In a brief statement, Twitter said its board “will carefully review the proposal to determine the course of action that it believes is in the best interest of the Company and all Twitter stockholders.”

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