Independent News
Daily Kos Turns 20: Let's showcase our best work! Up next: The man who started it all—Kos himself
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The internet—and the world—was a very different place on May 26, 2002, when Markos Moulitsas dashed off seven sentences and hit PUBLISH on the first-ever post on Daily Kos. Moulitsas—better known as the Kos in Daily Kos and Kos Media, LLC—will be the first to tell you that he never anticipated what was to come.
And now, we’re just weeks from the 20th anniversary of that iconic handful of sentences. In case you haven’t noticed, we kinda can’t stop talking about it or coming up with ways to celebrate. There are the Koscars and my fun little project—This is My Best—and so much more to come!
Some years ago, I’m told, there was a wonderful series called This Is My Best (TIMB), which encouraged Community members to share one piece of their own writing that they were most proud of, rather than the writing of others. One part self-promotion, one part self-confidence, all parts awesome, TIMB encourages writers to press pause on their roles as their own worst critics and take some time to toot their own horns.
I’m so excited to bring TIMB back for this amazing milestone, and it’s been a blast collecting submissions from the CC Team, our Daily Kos staffers, and you, dear Community.
This week we’re highlighting the writing of our fearless site founder. Since the site, you know, has his name on it and stuff, and he’s written nearly 15,000 posts since that first one, I decided he didn’t have to pick just one story.
As I noted in the first installment of TIMB, which showcased the Community Contributors, we’re challenging you to reflect on your own writing at Daily Kos and choose your own “best” story.
In the comments, sound off with your own This Is My Best submissions. We’ll be watching and taking note—and using your favorites to create new collections.
Be sure to include a link to your chosen best story and a sentence or two about why you think it’s great. Keep in mind that your “best” story doesn’t need to be your most recommended or the one that got the most comments.
You can read the second installment—which featured Daily Kos Staff and includes my own submission, toot toot!—right here. So far, we’ve got over 60 of your TIMB submissions, and we’ll be using them to keep the party going right up until our joyful 20th anniversary on May 26!
But right now, it’s time to see what stories Kos thinks are his best. He selected eight awesome stories that span both decades of Daily Kos, and deserves a round of applause just for taking on that Herculean task. He didn’t even complain about it when I asked … not too much, anyway.
Let’s go!
***
Day 1 (2002)
I hate this post. Had I known at the time that Daily Kos would become what it became, I would’ve given it more thought. But it is what it is, and it launched this amazing place.
The secret of [Howard] Dean’s success (2003)
“The formula to Dean’s success is simple: He speaks like a Democrat, particularly the part about opposing Republicans. That resonates with those of us who saw DLC-types lead our party to disaster in 2002.”
People today really don’t get just how far we’ve come as a party in the last (nearly) 20 years. It was radical for a Democrat to sound like a Democrat.
Watch Obama (2004)
I was at the DNC convention in Boston, and watched Barack Obama—then running for U.S. Senate—give his famous speech that catapulted him to national prominence. What a mess of a story—no first names or titles; I talk about Obama having his race “in the bag,” without saying what race that was. I assumed everyone reading was as much of a plugged-in nerd as I was. It was also the first time I wrote about Obama being on track to be “the first Black president.”
Saturday hate mail-a-palooza (“Dear Socialist Fuckstick” edition) 2009
Before Twitter, Facebook, and other social media, the only way for conservatives to express their hatred for me and Daily Kos was through email, which I would then publish as a weekend feature. This is the most classic of those classics.
Comedian David Cross and our own Joan McCarter read some of that hate mail for a YearlyKos feature.
Yes, I’m angry. Pissed. Livid. And yes, at pretty much everyone (2016)
The results of the 2016 election were brutal. Here’s where I lashed out.
Robert Kennedy Jr. cavorts with Nazis, and suing Daily Kos won’t make that any less true (2021)
We fight for our community, even if it means expensive litigation against a Kennedy family scion.
Anti-vaxx chronicles: Another senseless death by QAnon stupidity (2021)
Nothing particularly special about this story, except that it launched a six-month daily series that was only supplanted by the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
Ukraine update: Most Russian troops are support, not fighters, and they are stretched too thin (2022)
I’m really proud of my Russian war coverage, and this piece specifically really gets at something I’ve seen discussed very rarely in any media outlet—just how few soldiers in any army are actually combat arms.
Now it’s your turn! To make my job easier (and data entry much faster), please use this format for your submission:
Linked title of story (year published)
A sentence or two in your own words—not an excerpt—about why it’s your “best.”
See you in the comments! Remember: If you’ve already submitted, there’s no need to do it again, and we are only accepting one story per person. And if you can’t narrow down your choice before comments close, we’ll be back with another installment (and opportunity to submit) next week!
Ukraine update: 'There just isn’t enough space for the amount of death'
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On Saturday, Rolling Stone writer Mac William Bishop published an account of a visit he made to Ukrainian forces fighting in the east of the country along the Donetsk and Luhansk oblasts.
That area around the “Kramatorsk gap” represents the defensive line between Ukrainian forces and the territories that Russia, along with their separatist allies, has occupied since 2014. Since the invasion began, Russia has almost continuously attempted to push through this line from the east, making dozens of temporary breakthroughs. Day after day they’ve been pushed back. That conflict has been one of the least talked about parts of the entire invasion, but it’s been one of the most costly in terms of the lives of Ukrainian soldiers.
The Ukrainians fighting in the area include regular members of the military, reservists called up during the conflict, and volunteers who have left their day to day jobs behind to join the fight. Bishop’s visit to the area took him to an abandoned school building near Donetsk, a few miles from the front line, where a mixed group of soldiers is fighting every day at the limits of their training, equipment, and strength.
There’s a fifty-something chef who has become famous in Ukraine for walking away from his home to take the lowest rank as a volunteer among a squad of much younger marines. There are long term members of the service. There’s a grizzled guy who claims to have killed two Russians with a knife. There’s an IT manager who used to troubleshoot networks, and who asks Bishop if he can instruct him on how to fire a Javelin. Every one of these people is an individual. They are all at the center of their own story. They are all making the most terrible of sacrifices.
Olena is from Mariupol. She’s shy and diminutive, thirtysomething, with a long black ponytail. She has a fearsome reputation as a sniper. Even as her unit was sacrificing lives to stop the tide of Russian armor pushing into Donetsk, her daughter was trying to flee Mariupol. Olena could do nothing to help her daughter. Her duty was with her unit.
That sacrificing lives part is the key to this whole story. These people are tired. They’re not just tired of seeing their companions cut down—and they are getting cut down, in numbers large enough that Ukraine hasn’t given official casualty numbers in weeks—they’re tired of killing. They want to go home. They want to resume the lives they walked away from to enter this horror.
“I had a video chat with my son today for the first time in a while,” Oleksiy says happily. Then a brief flash of emotion creases his face. “He told me to make sure I didn’t die. What am I supposed to say to that?”
It’s very easy when looking at the maps and collecting images of tanks and talking about the various models of drones, to forget that at the center of this story people are being ripped apart. Sometimes metaphorically. Often literally. Those individual stories are getting shredded every day, in large numbers.
That eastern line doesn’t end where the Izyum salient extends out to the M03 highway and hooks south toward Slavyansk and Kramatorsk. It extends up to and past hard-hit Kharkiv, where Russia continues to deliver a withering daily attack from their base across the border at Belgorod. While areas around Sumy, Chernihiv, and Kyiv may now be clear of Russian troops, the same can’t be said for Kharkiv. Despite how long and how hard that city has held out, Russia is still ramping up pressure in the area.
U.S. defense officials have also reported more forces moving into the Donbas. Those officials also indicate that the roughly 1,000 troops of the mercenary Wegner Group have been moved to the Donbas. The goal of all those movements remains what is has been since the start of the invasion, and forms one of Russia’s key strategic objectives.
“We still believe that one of their objectives is to fix Ukrainian Armed Forces in the Donbas and then engage them in combat to occupy the Donbas completely.”
When they “fix,” what they mean is “pin down” or “trap.” The Russian military means to push down from the north and up from the south, isolate the Ukrainian forces fighting along the defensive lines in the Donbas, eliminate those forces and capture the whole of Donetsk and Luhansk oblast. But the constant pressure all up and down the line means it’s difficult for Ukraine to peel away any forces to meet the north-south thrust.
If Putin can do this one thing, he can claim a kind of victory. Not only would he have expanded the scope of the “breakaway republics” that he intends to immediately make a part of Russia, it would give him control of the area around Kramatorsk, which has been identified as a possible source of oil and gas that might compete with Russian fields.
With the relief of pressure on Kyiv and Chernihiv, Ukraine can also shift some forces east. If the fight at Kherson draws to some good intermediate position—like Russia retreating across the Dnipro and blowing the bridges behind them—Ukraine might be able to shift even more. And they need more. Because while their resistance to the Russian invasion has become legendary, they’re not superheroes. Their losses are terrible
On the way back to Kyiv, Bishop stops at a graveyard where the friend of one of the men he’s met is being buried.
The gravediggers are using a backhoe to cut into the asphalt of the parking lot to make room for more. They want to keep all of the fallen soldiers together in one area, and there just isn’t enough space for the amount of death.
The Russian invasion of Ukraine isn’t swatches of color on a map, or pictures of tractors pulling tanks. It’s people genuinely dying for their country, in large numbers, every day.
That territorial guardsman in the picture at the top of the page is in Barvinkove, northwest of Kramatorsk. Russian forces in tanks pushing southwest from Izyum tried to get into that man’s small town on Wednesday. They were repulsed. An air strike hit the town on Thursday. On Saturday evening, Russian forces are reported to be massing in the area for another push through this town.
The Ukrainians will be waiting.
How Ukraine transformed its military with the help of U.S. Army advisers at a former Soviet base
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Ukraine’s military was unprepared and caught off guard when Russia seized control of Crimea with only token resistance in 2014. If Vladimir Putin had launched an invasion back then, Russian forces quite likely would have taken Kyiv within a few days.
In 2014, Ukraine’s Chief of the General Staff, Viktor Muzhenko, described the situation as “an army literally in ruins.” The Ukrainian army was totally demoralized. Around 70% of the Ukrainian forces stationed in Crimea swore allegiance to Moscow after Russia annexed the peninsula, whose population was primarily ethnic Russian.
Perhaps that explains why Putin was overconfident that Russian forces would quickly overwhelm Ukraine’s military in 2022. Maybe that’s why Russian troops brought their dress uniforms for a victory parade in Kyiv. Putin overlooked that Ukraine had spent the past eight years reforming its military and preparing for the day when Russia might launch a full-scale invasion.
And a key role in transforming Ukraine’s military into a modern fighting force was played by U.S. Army advisers at a former Soviet base near Lviv in western Ukraine. Here’s an overview of the training facilities available at the Yavoriv Combat Training Center—International Center for Peacekeeping and Security:
Starting in April 2015, U.S. soldiers deployed to the Joint Multinational Training Group-Ukraine mission trained up to five battalions of Ukrainian troops per year at the Yavoriv base. In Yavoriv, U.S. military advisers, including Army Green Berets and National Guard troops from various states, trained more than 27,000 Ukrainian soldiers. The top Ukrainian trainees were then deployed to serve as instructors within other Ukrainian units.
But the training was not just about teaching battlefield tactics and techniques to Ukrainian troops. “The American mission in Yavoriv is focused on the professional transformation of Ukraine’s armed forces; specifically, helping the Ukrainians ditch the rigid, hierarchical chain of command traditions they inherited from the Soviet Union,” wrote a correspondent for the veterans’ website Coffee or Die, who visited Yavoriv in June 2021.
In the past, the role of noncommissioned officers in the Ukrainian military in battlefield decision-making had been virtually nonexistent. The Coffee or Die correspondent, Nolan Peterson, wrote that the training model was the U.S. military chain of command that “decentralizes decision-making from the upper ranks, teaching junior officers and non-commissioned officers to take the initiative and make tactical decisions based on battlefield realities.”
“It takes time because it’s actually an entire cultural shift. It’s a completely different way of thinking. … They’re surprised when they find out how far down we push those decision-making abilities, and how we maneuver those below the platoon-leader level,” said Capt. Sean Kelsey of the Washington (State) Army National Guard, whose Stryker armored fighting vehicle combat team was deployed to Yavoriv at the time.
“The overall mission is for Ukraine to be interoperable with NATO partners and NATO nations. And (to be) independent,” Kelsey added in the interview for Coffee or Die.
As late as Feb. 2022, about 150 members of Florida’s Army National Guard—Task Force Gator—were at Yavoriv training Ukrainian forces in reconnaissance, on using newly acquired shoulder-fired weapons systems, and on how to prepare their less experienced fighters who had never handled a rifle before.
One training exercise involved the use of M141 bunker-buster weapons which the Biden administration had provided to Ukraine just a month earlier. One Task Force Gator soldier, who took part in the M141 exercise but was not authorized to speak to the press, commented on Facebook that the Ukrainians were “tough and skilled hombres. The Armed Forces of Ukraine get a vote in the direction of their future.”
An unspecified number of special forces with Special Operations Command Europe were also training their Ukrainian counterparts. The Defense Department ordered the U.S. troops to leave Ukraine on Feb. 12, less than two weeks before Russia launched its invasion.
On March 13, Russian forces fired several dozen cruise missiles at the Yavoriv base, killing at least 35 people. Ukraine was using the base to train foreign volunteer fighters.
UkraineWorld, an English-language Ukraine-based multimedia project, in an analysis on the one-month anniversary of the Russian invasion, said that among Putin’s “deadly mistakes” was underestimating the Ukrainian armed forces.
The successful occupation of Crimea played a nasty trick on the Kremlin. Its leaders sincerely believed that the Ukrainian army was not combat-effective, was poorly equipped and commanded, and was poised to fall to pieces after just one serious blow. … This false perception resulted in truly suicidal tactics by Russia’s invading forces: narrow tank columns rolling over long distances with no support. Why bother with air and infantry escorts if no resistance was expected? …
The Ukrainian Armed Forces have not simply retreated or resisted passively, but have shown that they are more than a match for the Russians, capable of active mobile tactical defense and sound strategic planning. They have also demonstrated unsurpassed capacity for combined-arms warfare, coordinating of unmanned combat aircraft, artillery, and infantry.
UKRAINE’S PRO-RUSSIAN PRESIDENT LEFT THE COUNTRY DEFENSELESS
The pro-Russian Viktor Yanukovych won Ukraine’s presidency in a disputed election in 2010—with the help of U.S. political consultant Paul Manafort. Yanukovych strengthened and boosted pay for the elite riot police force, the Berkut, who brutally suppressed internal dissent. Its members were accused of killing more than 100 protesters during the Euromaidan Revolution in February 2014 that ousted Yanukovych from power.
But Putin’s puppet hollowed out Ukraine’s military, turning it into “a depleted, neglected and underfunded force.” He ended military conscription in 2013—Ukraine had 184,000 troops in 2012, but two years later, that number had dropped to 130,000, and Yanukovych’s plans called for reducing the military to half that size. Ukraine’s defense minister estimated that only about 6,000 of those troops from a rapid reaction unit were actually prepared for combat in 2014, according to a New York Times story.
The Times reported:
The Ukrainian Army was all but worthless—rife with corruption and Russian spies, and made up largely of “skeleton” battalions of officers with just a few men. About 1% of the equipment was manufactured in the past decade.
Muzhenko said that 75% of all equipment being used by the Ukrainian armed forces was more than 20 years old and had grown obsolete.
A Ukrainian Marine officer, Lt. Yevgen Zabrodsky, who had been serving at the Naval Headquarters in Sevastopol in 2014, described the humiliating fall of Crimea in a Jan. 2015 article published on a U.S. Army website. Among his duties was helping calculate precautionary measures against a possible incursion by Russia. But after Yanukovych took office, Zabrodsky said the Russian defense plans were scrapped as part of “military reforms.”
“When Yakukovych came to the president’s post, he started to say, ‘No, no, no guys,'” Zabrodsky recalled. “’Russia’s our friends, don’t even think about that, stop doing this.’”
UKRAINE’S NEW GOVERNMENT INTRODUCES WIDESPREAD DEFENSE REFORMS
When Ukraine’s newly elected president, Petro Poroshenko, took office in June 2014, Crimea had already been annexed and the Ukrainian military was barely holding on against Russian-backed separatists in the eastern Donbas region. At the time, Ukraine’s armed forces had many of the same problems that plague today’s Russian invaders, said Liam Collins, founding director of the Modern War Institute at the United States Military Academy, West Point. From 2016-2018, he helped Ukraine reform its defense establishment.
Collins wrote on The Conversation website, a nonprofit, independent news organization: “Corruption was rampant, troops were not getting paid and basic supplies always ran low. Overall logistics and command were also inefficient.”
There were certain steps that Ukraine took to upgrade its military. Within months, Poroshenko had reintroduced military conscription. Ukraine raised its defense budget by almost 25% in 2018. And by 2018, Ukraine’s armed forces were larger and better equipped than ever before, numbering 200,000 active duty military personnel, according to a report by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.
Ukraine had inherited about 30% of the Soviet Union’s defense industry when it became independent following the dissolution of the USSR., but only about 30% of that production was earmarked for the Ukrainian military. In 2009-2013, Ukraine was the world’s eighth-largest arms exporter in the world. And Russia was its third-largest customer, after China and Pakistan, according to a 2014 Carnegie Endowment report.
Russia was reliant on Ukraine for helicopter engines, transport planes, and half of the components for Russia’s ground-based ICBMs. But after the annexation of Crimea, Poroshenko imposed a ban on all military-technological cooperation with Russia, halting nearly all exports of weaponry and military equipment.
Although the procurement system for Ukraine’s state-owned defense conglomerate Ukroboronprom remained rife with corruption, Ukraine began earmarking an increased percentage of its defense production to its own military, and by 2019, Ukraine was only 12th among global arms exporters. Ukraine also started purchasing and importing weapons from other countries, including dozens of Turkish-made Bayraktar TB2 armed drones, which played a key defensive role in the first phase of the current war.
U.S. MILITARY INSTRUCTORS BEGIN TRAINING UKRAINIAN TROOPS AT YAVORIV
Ukraine’s own efforts were not enough. The Ukrainian government had revised its strategic military doctrine to identify Russia as the country’s top security threat and needed to transform its military with the objective of being able to defend against a full-scale Russian invasion, according to the Coffee or Die feature.
Poroshenko had set an ambitious goal of modernizing Ukraine’s armed forces to reach NATO standards by 2020. The ultimate goal was to prepare Ukraine for NATO membership. The Obama-Biden administration responded to Poroshenko’s request for help in training and modernizing Ukraine’s military. On April 20, 2015, 300 paratroopers from the 173rd Airborne Brigade began training members of the Ukrainian National Guard at the Yavoriv Training Center, which was once a meeting place for military leaders of the Warsaw Pact, the Soviet-led counterpart to NATO.
The training center was the responsibility of the U.S. 7th Army Training Command, based in Grafenwoehr, Germany. Poroshenko thanked the U.S. paratroopers in a speech at the opening ceremony: “Dear generals, officers, sergeants, and American Soldiers, [a] combined exercise of such scale and content is being held, probably, for the first time,” the Ukrainian president said. “Our meeting today is a symbol of our new partnership and a new future.”
Initially, the U.S. trainers conducted what amounted to advanced basic training classes to prepare Ukrainian troops for combat against Russian-backed separatists in the Donbas region. The fighting had devolved into static World War I-style trench warfare with artillery and rocket attacks, tank skirmishes, and snipers targeting soldiers.
So the exercises involved teaching such basic skills as cutting through coils of concertina wire, using encrypted walkie-talkies, searching for improvised explosive devices, building tank defenses, and saving the lives of wounded soldiers. In the ensuing years, the training exercises got more complex. Here are Ukrainian soldiers conducting a Nov. 2016 exercise in carrying out an air assault:
In 2020, Ukrainian troops honed their urban warfare skills with the help of advisers from the Illinois Army National Guard. The exercises included fighting block-to-block in a large population center, tactically entering residences and buildings, and conducting house-to-house searches.
U.S. Army Sgt. 1st Class Joshua Nickels, who had extensive experience in urban missions in the Iraq war, said in an interview on a U.S. Army website that the Ukrainian soldiers were making “quick progress.” And prophetically he added: “From my conversations with Armed Forces Ukraine Soldiers, urban operations have been a big part of their current conflict in the past and may be again in the future.”
Ukraine was not a member of NATO, but Yavoriv, in effect, became the equivalent of a NATO training base.
UKRAINE’S MILITARY GETS TRAINED TO DEFEND AGAINST A RUSSIAN INVASION
Military personnel from the U.S., Britain, Canada, Poland, and several other NATO members eventually broadened the original mission at Yavoriv to prepare Ukraine’s armed forces “to employ maneuver warfare as a defense against an outright Russian invasion,” according to a Coffee or Die reporter who visited the base in June 2021.
A cadre of 300 Ukrainian instructors took over the role of training recruits in basic combat skills. The U.S. troops transformed from trainers to advisers during combat drills. As tensions with Russia increased, Yavoriv was the site of a multinational two-week training exercise in July 2021, dubbed Three Swords-2021, involving more than 1,200 troops and more than 200 combat vehicles.
Here’s how Reuters described it: “Helicopters provided air support, armored personnel carriers rolled through fields, and soldiers fired at enemy targets … as part of a large military exercise hosted by Ukraine and also involving the United States, Poland, and Lithuania.”
U.S. Green Berets and members of the Europe-based 10th Special Forces Group stationed at Yavoriv worked with the Ukrainian military to set up and train commando units to carry out unconventional warfare and guerrilla tactics against Russian invaders. And Ukrainian troops were regularly participating in even larger NATO training exercises in Germany, with the most recent one taking place in Dec. 2021.
That exercise, known as Combined Resolve XVI included approximately 4,600 soldiers from NATO and non-NATO countries—Bulgaria, Georgia, Greece, Italy, Lithuania, Poland, Serbia, Slovakia, Slovenia, Ukraine, United Kingdom, and the United States.
And in June-July 2021, the Ukrainian Navy and the U.S. Sixth Fleet co-hosted the annual Sea Breeze exercise on the Black Sea, operating out of the port city of Odesa.
The exercise focused on amphibious and land maneuver warfare, diving operations, maritime interdiction operations, air defense, search and rescue missions, and anti-submarine warfare, according to a U.S. Navy press release.
The Navy said it involved the largest number of participating nations in the exercise’s history, with 32 countries from six continents providing 5,000 troops, 32 ships, 40 aircraft, and 18 special operations and dive teams.
And finally, there was the joint exercise that so many of us wish could become reality today, but the risks are considered too high. In Oct. 2018, Operation Clear Sky was held at the Starokostiantyniv Air Base in western Ukraine in which F-15 Eagles from the California Air National Guard flew sorties with Ukrainian Air Force MiG29 and SU-24, 25, and 27 warplanes. Pilots from seven other NATO members also participated.
”The purpose of the exercises is to increase the level of interoperability of our combat aircraft with the air forces of the United States and other member states of the alliance,” said Poroshenko, the Ukrainian president, who attended the exercise.
ZELENSKYY: “RUSSIA DIDN’T KNOW WHAT WE HAD PREPARED TO DEFEND OURSELVES”
Over the past eight years, Russia retained the Soviet chain-of-command model. Corrupt oligarchs and politicians lined their pockets with money intended for defense procurement. Ordinary soldiers pilfered gasoline to the extent that fuel was referred to as the Russian military’s “second currency,” according to a story in Politico.
The invaders found themselves battling a Ukrainian military with high morale and strong motivation to defend against an existential threat to their country. Many of the Ukrainian troops had combat experience from the war in the Donbas. And they were well-equipped and well-trained.
It seems like it was a colossal failure of Russian intelligence to overlook this. Or maybe Russian military intelligence was afraid to deliver bad news to their leader, or Putin chose to ignore reports because he was so arrogant and overconfident.
In a March 18, 2022, video address, President Volodymyr Zelenskyy expressed his gratitude to U.S. President Joe Biden for his “new and effective support” for Ukraine. Zelenskyy added that he couldn’t reveal all the details of the support packages received from the U.S. and other countries. He said:
“This is our tactic. It is our defense. Our adversary shouldn’t know what to expect from us. The same way they did not know what would be waiting for them after February 24. They didn’t know what we had prepared to defend ourselves and how ready we were to take the heat.
“The invaders thought they were going to Ukraine, which they had seen before, back in 2014 and 2015. The country they constantly corrupted and the one they were not afraid of. However, we are different.”
Starbucks workers are racking up win after win after win, despite vicious anti-union campaign
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The union effort at Starbucks went three for three in vote counts held on Thursday, at one store in Buffalo and two in Rochester. That’s pretty damn good. But on Friday, it appears to have gone four for four, with workers voting to unionize at three Ithaca stores with a combined vote of 47 to three, and the union leading six to one at a store in Overland Park, Kansas. In that case, there are seven challenged ballots—because the company challenged ballots of union supporters to drag things out.
If or when that result holds, it brings the tally to 17 union wins out of 18 votes held at Starbucks stores, with the anti-union practices employed in the 18th under National Labor Relations Board investigation, according to the union. The wins have come in multiple cities in New York; Seattle, Washington; Mesa, Arizona; and now all but certainly Kansas. But workers are organizing across the country, having filed for union representations in Ohio, Oklahoma, Colorado, Florida, Illinois, Virginia, Hawai’i, Pennsylvania, Oregon, Michigan, Missouri, and more.
Starbucks remains committed to its union-busting campaign. In March, the NLRB issued a complaint against the company for retaliating against two Phoenix, Arizona, workers for their activism. But Starbucks actually went on to fire one of those workers after the retaliation complaint. Now, the NLRB is preparing to issue another complaint against Starbucks for retaliation, this time for its firing of seven union leaders in a Memphis store.
All of this looks pretty bad, so Starbucks is going on a PR offensive. Interim CEO Howard Schultz, the company’s founder, is out here warning that “We can’t ignore what is happening in the country as it relates to companies throughout the country being assaulted in many ways, by the threat of unionization,” even as the company bullies and illegally fires teenagers for daring to speak up. In case Schultz isn’t winning over the public with that rhetoric, the company is trying to hire a crisis communications/brand reputation manager.
The alternative, of course, would be … not behaving in a way that leads you to need a crisis communications/brand reputation manager. Stop bullying teenagers. Stop illegally firing workers for exercising their right to speak out and organize. The results are clear: The anti-union campaign is not working, even though it is traumatizing workers.
Without additional support, families of preemies can fall through the cracks
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by Pamela Appea
This article was originally published at Prism.
Brooke Jones was in her late 20s when she became pregnant with her first child. Employed full time as a medical assistant in Connecticut, Jones fully expected to work right up until her due date. Jones described her pregnancy as “normal” and didn’t believe she had any symptoms that were significantly worrisome. But that changed when a routine ultrasound at 25 weeks revealed that her amniotic fluid levels were dangerously low. Shortly after, medical professionals realized Jones’ blood pressure had spiked “through the roof,” she told Prism. She was diagnosed with preeclampsia and was admitted to the closest hospital for immediate treatment.
“They told me I might give birth that day,” Jones said. She was subsequently transferred to Yale New Haven Children’s Hospital, where she was treated for a host of other complications including fluid buildup in her lungs, which meant Jones had to go on medical leave immediately. “I was on autopilot,” she said.
After two weeks of strict hospital bedrest, Jones gave birth to her baby boy at 27 weeks via an emergency C-section. A micro preemie, he weighed only 1 pound, 8 ounces at birth. Earlier in her pregnancy, Jones had carefully thought about her maternity leave schedule, finances, child care logistics and more, but suddenly she needed a whole new plan.
As Jones discovered, balancing medical care, a lack of work leave, and the need for aftercare support and mental health counseling as a caregiver often proves challenging for families with preemies. Jones’ son spent four months in the neonatal intensive care unit (NICU) where doctors treat sick and premature newborns, but her maternity leave only lasted six weeks after he was born, so she had to go back to work long before he was released from the hospital.
In search of emotional and mental health support
Women of color like Jones, who is Black, comprise a significant number of parents who give birth prematurely. According to the March of Dimes, over 380,000 babies are born preterm every year in the U.S.—about one in 10 babies of every live birth. Black and Indigenous women are 60% more likely to give birth preterm than white women.
For the families of preemies, the whole birth experience can be fraught. Often, preemie caregivers aren’t given a lot of time to process that their baby may have short- and long-term medical, developmental, and other complications that require a NICU stay, high-risk surgeries, and other medical procedures.
Additionally, caregivers can feel overwhelmed and experience a wide range of postnatal mental health issues, including depression, anxiety, guilt, and NICU-specific post-traumatic stress disorder.
“The caregivers’ primary need is emotional support. Prematurity is something that is a surprise, and it has a very traumatic effect on the family,” said Tina Tison, executive director of the Tiny Miracles Foundation. The Connecticut-based nonprofit partners with several hospital NICUs in the area to provide counseling, mentoring, and socioemotional support to preemie caregivers. Jones received peer mentor support and financial assistance from The Tiny Miracles Foundation after the birth of her son, including during his lengthy four-month hospitalization in the NICU.
“Any caregiver takes comfort in knowing that they are not alone,” said Tison.
Aftershocks of the pandemic continue to impact caregivers well after their baby has been discharged from the NICU, according to Dr. Angelica Moreyra, an expert in perinatal mental health at the Children’s Hospital in Los Angeles.
“There is currently an enhanced need for advocacy for our families that we serve due to environmental stressors that create barriers for caregiver presence in the unit such as public transit … changes in school and child care options, increased financial, occupational, and housing instability, and more,” Moreya told Prism. “When caregivers encounter barriers in being able to present in the unit, it impacts the nature of our services, as we are focused on supporting bonding/attachment between caregivers.”
Balancing work and care
Apart from the mental and emotional strain, the economic impact of having a preemie can also be significant. According to the March of Dimes, the average NICU bill starts at $65,000. But depending on surgeries, medical procedures, and other complications, many families are expected to pay hospital bills that are hundreds of thousands of dollars or higher. For many, access to health insurance or emergency state health insurance for preemies is crucial. However, more than 2.2 million women in the U.S. live in “maternity care deserts” where families often lack access to necessary prenatal care or don’t have health insurance to cover the costs.
Prematurely born babies are eligible to receive Medicaid and Supplemental Security Income through Social Security. Regardless of a parent’s income level, state insurance typically covers nearly all of the child’s NICU hospital bills, surgeries, post-discharge medical treatment, and other medical and mental health services for both the caregiver and the baby during their first year. Speech, occupational therapy, physical therapy, and other rehabilitative services are typically covered through insurance, early intervention, and occasionally through Department of Education public education services after the age of 3 to 5, depending on the state. However, the process for access to these services is fraught with governmental red tape, making it difficult for caregivers to access.
Even as families face mounting expenses, without extra paid leave caregivers of preemies can find it difficult to hold onto a full-time job given the need for medical appointments, early intervention services, special education services, evaluations, operations, and other treatments for medical issues preemies may struggle with even after “graduating” from the NICU. While Jones’ son’s medical bills and her mental health care were covered by state insurance, her husband ultimately left his job to manage their son’s care and medical appointments.
Working toward policy shifts
As Jones and her husband have looked toward the future and considered having another baby, they’ve become doubtful about the financial feasibility. Without the same state Medicaid services, more paid family leave, and the ability to take time off work for medical appointments, Jones said she was unsure they could afford another child. Her family is far from alone, and advocates for families of preemies argue that a number of policy changes need to be put in place to provide caregivers the support they need, including ensuring universal access to public health insurance programs and a minimum of 12 weeks of paid family leave, with more for families of babies with more significant health and developmental needs. March of Dimes is also pushing for the elimination of racial and geographic disparities in prenatal care and expanded access to coverage for doula and midwifery support to offer caregivers more options both during and after birth.
If she could wave a magic wand around government policy changes for family caregivers, Jones told Prism: “Let us have our time as caregivers with our children. For me, I only got six weeks. Some people are allowed more time. But as a law, I wish it was implemented to give mothers and fathers the [paid] time we need with our kids.”
Pamela Appea (she/her) is a New York City-based independent journalist. She is a contributing writer for Prism where she covers caregiving. Her work has appeared in Glamour, Salon, Wired, The Root, Newsweek, Parents.com (Kindred) and elsewhere. She received her B.A. Degree in English Literature from the University of Chicago.
Follow Pamela on Twitter at @pamelawritesnyc
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: Gearing up for a showdown in Kherson
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In the first few days after Russia’s invasion, the bridge on the north side of Kherson became famous as a sign of Ukrainian resistance. Recognizing the importance of that bridge to one of Russia’s strategic objectives—capturing Mykolaiv and Odesa—Russian forces had moved quickly to take the bridge in the first two days of fighting. But then Ukrainian forces took it back. Then Russia seemed to have control. Then Ukraine took it again.
It started to look as if Kherson might use the natural defense of the wide Dnieper River to hold out indefinitely. If things got tough, they could always blow up the critical bridge, greatly complicating Russia’s advance and forcing them to move north to fight again for the bridge at Nova Kakhovka.
Then, suddenly, Ukrainian forces were gone. Russia rolled into Kherson, bridge intact, while the troops that had fought over, and twice retaken, that bridge moved completely out of the city and hurried up the M14 highway to Mykolaiv. Russia had the city. And the bridge. One day later, they also had the Nova Kakhova bridge 40 miles upstream.
With these two wide crossings in hand, Russia was ready to move westward and complete the task of cutting off Ukraine from the Black Sea. In Odesa, mass evacuations began as citizens feared the Russians would roll into the city in a matter of days.
Exactly what happened in Kherson still isn’t clear. How did the Russian military suddenly gain such a decisive upper hand, and why did forces that had been fighting them so successfully suddenly abandon not just the bridge, but the entire city? The answer seems to be: Treason. Officials there were apparently on the Russian bribery dole for years, and unlike officials in other areas of Ukraine, they stayed bribed even after the tanks rolled. As a result, those officials systematically undermined the local territorial defense and refused to provide assistance to troops fighting to hold the city. Those officials ultimately fled the city—possibly running into the open arms of the Russian forces to hand them more information. The details won’t be known until the conflict is over, but betrayal certainly seems to be at the core of how Russia established a beachhead on the west side of the Dnieper.
In the days after Russia took Kherson, the fears of citizens in Odesa seemed justified. Russian troops consolidated their position, captured an 80 mile long swath of territory on the western bank, and began to move toward Mykolaiv from two directions—directly up the M14 from Kherson, and from the east along a smaller highway from Snihurivka.
And that’s where things got less happy for Team Russia. Having fallen back on Mykolaiv, Ukrainian troops joined up with other forces and territorial defenses that were already in place in that city. They repulsed repeated attempts by Russia to capture Mykolaiv. When Russia attempted to set up artillery positions around the city, Ukrainian forces managed to sally out and attack those positions, preventing Mykolaiv from becoming besieged. It didn’t hurt that Mykolaiv sits on a peninsula jutting far out into the wide-as-hell Southern Bug River. That essentially means it can only be attacked from one side. If you were going to design a fortress town to withstand an assault, it would be hard to do better than Mykolaiv.
Here, take a look.
Getting a force into Mykolaiv and across it’s crucial bridge means moving through that narrow choke point on the city’s eastern side, then pushing through the entire city center, to reach the possibly still intact bridge. Russia didn’t come close to making it. Instead, it exhausted its forces in one attempt after another to approach the city from the south or east. Russia brought in large numbers of helicopters and planes, positioning them at the Kherson airport just 20 miles to the south. If there was anywhere that Russia had something like decent air support, this was the place.
It still did not allow them to advance through Mykolaiv’s defenses. It’s also likely that those hold-out forces at Mariupol prevented Russia from moving all the forces they wanted to place on the western edge of the advance.
Instead, only a week after being pushed back, Ukrainian forces had begun to range out of Mykolaiv and take back towns and villages along the roads south and southeast of the city. Gradually, they rolled back Russia’s hard-won advances. On March 15, they had advanced far enough to land an artillery barrage on Kherson airport. That not only destroyed a large number of Russian helicopters in place, it forced Russia to move the remainder to a more distant location.
From that moment, Russia’s attempt to capture Odesa by land was likely done. And since multiple attempts to conduct an amphibious landing had already proved futile, the push back from Mykolaiv likely ended any chance of Russia achieving one of its primary strategic objectives. At least in this round.
Since then, Ukrainian forces have been moving from place to place in the area. On Tuesday of last week, Ukraine managed to retake a number of locations at the northeast side of the area Russia had occupied above the Nova Kakhovka bridge. Surprisingly, Russian forces responded by moving back into Snihurivka, which gave the appearance of a fresh advance on Mykolaiv, but may have actually been Russian troops falling back from positions to the north.
For a few days, things seemed to go quiet. That was until Friday, when there were signs of fighting on the south side of Kherson proper. Civilians in the center of the city reported that they could clearly hear explosions and gunfire. There have also been widespread reports of Russians looting and loading up vehicles with consumer goods, which many see as a sign they are about to get the hell outta Dodge.
Before dawn on Saturday in Ukraine, rumors began to circulate that a big action is about to take place. The suggestion here is that the battle in the south isn’t over after all. Ukrainian forces may be more focused on taking Kherson—which remains the only large urban area captured by Russia since the war began, and where over 250,000 Ukrainian citizens are thought to remain — but Russia may have another goal.
Russia may respond by blowing the bridge at Kherson (there have been images showing that Russia has mined the bridge in preparation for taking it down). This would limit any effort to pursue Russian forces across the Dnieper, because this, like the Bug, is a very wide river at the southern end.
That would leave the bridge at Nova Kakhovka. If Ukraine could move quickly toward that bridge from north and south, they could potentially cut off a large Russian force, stranding them on the west side of the river. On the other hand, there are suggestions that Russia intends to press more troops across the river at that point, resuming the attempt on Mykolaiv from the east. Which … good luck on that. See map above.
As of early on Saturday, the battle for Kherson appears to be underway with Ukrainian forces moving toward the southern part of the city both along the M14 from Mykolaiv, and by pushing along the river bank up the narrower T1501.
This still places a significant distance (about 15 miles, depending on the route) between Ukrainian forces and the Kherson bridge. In between, the Ukrainians have to do what Russia has found so difficult—capture a city center. And Ukraine will likely make this attempt without even thoughts of using artillery or MLRS systems that would have to be aimed into their own city. If Russia contests Kherson, the fight could get extremely difficult, and the city could face a level of destruction that has so far been avoided, with fighting vehicles and tanks duking it out in the streets.
But it’s not clear Russia will contest the city. The Ukrainian military has stated they expect the city to be captured “within days,” so expect an advance, but don’t expect a lightning advance. The presence of those Russian troops around Snihurivka and the suggestion that more forces could move across the Nova Kakhovka bridge to join them, certainly means that some Ukrainian forces are still in place around Mykolaiv to guard against a move on the city. There hasn’t been any news over the last few days about Ukraine recapturing more towns or villages on the north of the western bank “bulge,” so those troops may have moved into defensive positions. Or they could be preparing an advance to the south. We don’t know.
But if Ukraine can recapture Kherson, it will mean that Russia has lost the only city it managed to take, and that one came more through treachery than military prowess. If Russia blows the bridge, those forces at Kherson won’t be able to cross to attack forces north of the Crimea, and they won’t be able to restore the lock and dam that could limit water to the Crimea, which has been critical in restricting Russian development there. But if Russia blows that bridge, the Ukrainian forces in Kherson simply won’t stay in Kherson, because there will be no point.
They’ll move somewhere else, and continue the fight.
An NBC News investigation of the company that refinanced Trump Tower turns up a whole lot of weird
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In the long grind of sketchy political stories, we’ve now got enough straight-up corruption news piled up to last the rest of Donald Trump’s remaining life. It’s still not clear anything will actually come of it, because it’s also been demonstrated that you can do ab-so-lute-ly anything, so long as you are willing to pay for more lawyers than state or federal governments are willing to pay for theirs—but we have a general picture. The citrus-tinted blowhard has for decades been part of an American subclass that dabbles in everything from money laundering to tax cheating to boosting international oligarchies to sex trafficking to immigration fraud to take-your-pick, all of it backed by banks whose bottom lines depend on looking the other way and an American political class that will write new laws faux-legalizing pretty much anything you ask them to in exchange for a handshake and a four-figure check.
Then there’s the stories that are just … odd. Maybe there’s something crooked afoot, maybe there’s not, but there’s an inherent weirdness to them that can’t easily be explained away. So, for example, we’ve got this weird, weird NBC News story about the company that refinanced Trump’s flagship Trump Tower.
Trump Tower’s $100 million mortgage was the subject of some heated speculation after Trump launched a coup against the U.S. government that left people dead in the U.S. Capitol building, with some innocent souls wondering if Trump could ever find a bank sleazy enough to work with a seditionist. Things looked grimmer still when, at the beginning of the year, Donald Trump’s longtime auditors severed all ties with Trump and announced that they were no longer standing by the Trump Organization’s last 10 years of financial statements—the Wall Street way of announcing that they found something going on so sketchy that they absolutely do not want any part of it, whether Trump’s checks are clearing or not, and that they don’t intend to go to jail over it.
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But the Trump Tower’s mortgage, as it turned out, was a non-issue for Trump. Mere days after Trump’s auditors cut him loose and announced that his company’s financial statements were, screaming-between-the-lines, “Extremely Likely To Be Crooked,” Trump Tower got a $100 million refinance inked with Axos, a smallish bank previously known as the “Bank of Internet USA” and which is currently headed by an ex-Indymac executive who migrated to the company just before the whole “we nearly broke the entire world economy” Wall Street debacle of 2008.
Okay, fine, it’s a little weird that the mortgage for Trump Tower was taken on by a bank with an internet presence but no actual branches, one headed by an executive that managed to land on his feet despite his prior institution not just collapsing, but cratering so spectacularly that its failures will be a permanent mention in new U.S. history textbooks. But what we can glean from this, probably, is that none of the banks Trump had previous relations with wanted to deal with him despite the pile of money involved, while the new company figured he’d still be worth that extra risk.
But the NBC News investigation also revealed some other weird things at play here. Things that all look a bit sketchy to us laypeople, but which may also plausibly be just the way everything in Wall Street tends to roll these days—at least, that’s how the company is trying to sell it.
Weird things ranging, for example, from the two ex-employees suing the company after they were fired for flagging sketchy behavior ranging from allegedly hiding problems with shaky loans …
… to offering “cash recapture” loans of a sort that can facilitate international money laundering …
… to joining up with other companies to offer the small business equivalent of “payday loans,” loans that evade typical regulations limiting how much interest those companies can charge.
Which, okay, sounds a bit weird! The ‘hiding problems with shaky loans’ bit is straight out of the 2008 financial crisis, but I imagine none of us are really expecting that banks are not diving right back into the break-the-economy behaviors that gets the breakers big bonuses before everything goes to hell.
It’s a bit weird that the company has been accused of making things too easy for money launderers, given that Trump Tower and Trump’s other real estate ventures have been noted for decades to be hubs of Russian money laundering. But again, real estate laws have been very carefully crafted to facilitate money laundering, so can we even count it as “weird” anymore? Or is it just business as usual?
And the last one, the charging grotesque interest rates through loopholes in laws barring such things, which NBC refers to as an alleged “rent-a-bank scheme,” is a bit weird only because it turns out it was the Trump administration that put the rule allowing it in place, and it’s already being rescinded by the Biden administration for being obviously sketchy. So, um, extra points to them for managing to squeeze some profit out of a fleeting rule change that was pretty much destined to be yanked back again the second a non-sketchy administration took charge. I guess.
But it doesn’t even end there. NBC News also notes that the company has a history of going after anonymous bloggers who call attention to their weirdness and that the company head responded to an auditor’s whistleblowing by suing him and the auditor’s mother for taking “confidential” information, which, ok, bringing in the guy’s mom definitely ranks high on the old financial company weird-o-meter but in a world with Elon Musk, Peter Lawsuitguy, and a man who hand-stuffs each of his famously crappy pillows with sedition-promoting conspiracy theories, it barely rates. We just have to live with the knowledge that our rich betters are super, super not-pleased with our common rabble opinions these days.
The question NBC News is raising with all of this is what the hell we outsiders are supposed to be making of all of it. Donald Trump had his bacon saved mere days after his company’s auditing firm publicly told the world that there was Something Extremely Sketchy Going On with his bookkeeping, and a look at the low-profile company that bailed him out suggests both that they’re a company that specializes in loans that are a little sketch and has ex-employees who claim that they got fired for pointing out the sketch, which makes the company sound like it went to prep school with Eric Trump or something.
The company’s defense to ex-employee charges that it’s being too permissive with potential money-laundering behavior, by the way, is an assertion to NBC News that such loans are subject to “a full, know-your-customer investigation” before approval, which … okay. Sure, that would be responsible behavior. It’s difficult to imagine a company staying in business very long if they didn’t do such things.
I’m not sure how a company like that would miss a red flag as big as “mere days before we signed this paper, the company we provided a loan to was fired by its own auditors for up to ten years of misleading or fraudulent financial statements” but none of us here are bankers, and we don’t know how this stuff works. It’s all just a bit weird.
It’s gonna be even weirder if some company that once called itself “Bank of Internet” ends up foreclosing on Trump Tower if and when Donald Trump’s finances collapse yet again, but we’re not going to put odds down on that one, either.
McConnell, master of red-line drawing, draws the line at morality
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Whenever someone starts asking Minority Leader Mitch McConnell about morality, it’s bound to get uncomfortable. Over the years, McConnell has made it perfectly clear that his world is singularly ordered around the pursuit of power—a scheme in which morality has found no audience.
Luckily for McConnell, nearly every Capitol Hill reporter has given up on trying to figure out where the longtime GOP leader might draw the line on the path to his Holy Grail—what might be a bridge too far. Instead, D.C. reporters uniquely obsess over the strategic considerations of the supposed mastermind—who incidentally whiffed on his golden opportunity to sideline Donald Trump forever electorally during his second impeachment.
McConnell is, in fact, an avid purveyor of red lines. Increasing taxes on wealthy individuals and corporations is a red line for him, as was supporting a pandemic relief package that didn’t include liability protections for companies that put their workers lives at risk. Indeed, McConnell’s pronouncements over the years have been riddled with so-called red lines.
That’s what made a line of questioning this week by Axios’ Jonathan Swan about McConnell’s “moral red line” so entertaining.
Initially, McConnell thought he could slide right past the query without too much scrutiny. In response to Swan’s description of him as politically “ruthless,” McConnell joked that his wife thinks he’s nice, his kids like him, and then further ribbed that he was “shocked to hear such a comment.”
But Swan wasn’t playing McConnell’s game. “So moral red lines, where do you draw them?” Swan repeated.
McConnell, treading water, actually asked Swan to repeat the term, as if the concept was so foreign, it didn’t quite compute.
Finally, McConnell offered, “I’m very comfortable with my moral red line.”
After Swan asked the question, lingered on it, and then dug a little deeper, McConnell finally said, “You want to spend some more time on this?”
“I actually do,” replied Swan.
Of course, he did. It was a sit-down interview in front of a live audience. McConnell was captive, without the ability to simply walk away from the mic the way he routinely does at press conferences. The whole exchange was so cringey, it was delightful.
Then Swan invoked Liz Cheney, noting that she had the same view as McConnell about Trump being culpable for Jan. 6. But while McConnell has said he would vote for Trump if he were the 2024 nominee, Cheney has made perfectly clear that Trump must be destroyed.
“I’m just actually trying to understand,” Swan offered, “Is there any threshold for you—”
“You know, I say many things I’m sure people don’t understand.”
In short, no.
Watch it:
Proud Boys fold like a cheap suit, Oath Keepers raked by judge on way to trial
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In one courtroom in Washington, D.C., on Friday, a leader of the neofascist, pro-Trump Proud Boys, Charles Donohoe, pleaded guilty to conspiracy to obstruct the 2020 election and assaulting a police officer during the melee at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.
In another courtroom just nearby, nearly a dozen members of the Oath Keepers listened in as a federal judge gave the extremist group’s defense attorneys a heaping dose of reality as they—and the nation—careen toward a historic seditious conspiracy trial later this year.
Proud Boy enters guilty plea, others follow
Donohoe, 34, is just the latest member of the Proud Boys to flip on his friends in the face of jail time. Once the leader of the network’s North Carolina chapter, Donohoe could receive up to seven years at sentencing. As a part of his plea agreement, he must cooperate with the Justice Department’s massive probe of Jan. 6 on their command.
Charles Donohoe Plea Agreement by Daily Kos on Scribd
According to court records, Donohoe admitted that around Dec. 19, 2020, Proud Boys leader Henry “Enrique” Tarrio enlisted him into a special division of the group known as the Ministry of Self Defense.
It would focus on planning and executing national rallies, and communication was hot and heavy through messaging apps like Telegram.
Donohoe said that under Tarrio’s leadership, he and co-defendants Ethan Nordean, Joseph Biggs, and Zachary Rehl were given a series of tasks aimed at stopping the certification of the election by Congress on Jan. 6.
Tarrio, Nordean, Biggs, and Rehl vow they are not guilty.
But according to Donohoe, it was up to him to recruit new members for the Proud Boys’ Jan. 6 mission, and just after Christmas, it was Tarrio’s warnings about the “D.C. government” that he reposted in their group chat.
The message suggested Congress was preparing to “limit access to Washington on Jan. 6” in order to “deny [that] Trump has the people’s support,” court records show.
“We can’t let them succeed. This government is run FOR the people, BY the people… Congress needs a reintroduction to that fact,” Donohoe wrote on Dec. 27.
By Jan. 4, Donohoe knew the Proud Boys were discussing storming the Capitol though he had yet to make a decision about whether he would come to D.C. to help.
US v Donohoe Statement of Offense by Daily Kos on Scribd
But when he learned Tarrio had been arrested, that sealed it.
Tarrio had an outstanding warrant following his Dec. 12, 2020, theft and burning of a Black Lives Matter banner from a D.C. church. He told police he was in town to sell a Jan. 6 rally-goer a pair of empty magazines for high-capacity firearms.
RELATED STORY: Feds indict Proud Boys leader Henry Tarrio—finally
Donohoe created a “New MOSD Leaders Group” after the ringleader’s arrest and told other Proud Boy leaders to clear their chat history and hide any trace of plans to stop the count. Shortly after, he “nuked” that messaging group and created another.
In the new group, Donohoe wrote he was worried “gang charges” could be brought against them all after Tarrio was picked up. He texted members to “stop everything immediately.”
“This comes from the top,” Donohoe wrote.
But by 9:17 P.M. on Jan. 5, prosecutors say fellow Proud Boy Biggs posted to the group telling Donohoe and others there was a meeting with “a lot of guys” and “info should be coming out.”
Tarrio had been released just four hours before that message was sent on Jan. 5.
According to Tarrio’s indictment, he went straight from his release to a meeting with Elmer Rhodes, leader of the Oath Keepers, in an underground parking garage in D.C. Their meeting lasted 30 minutes.
By 9:20 P.M., Tarrio was added to the new MOSD chat, a statement of Donohoe’s offense notes. By midnight—now Jan. 6—Tarrio was allegedly posting in the group again giving instructions to meet at the Washington Monument by 10 A.M.
Donohoe was in D.C. by 6 A.M., and within a few short hours, prosecutors say he, Nordean, and Biggs led a group of more than 100 Proud Boys in a march to the Capitol.
They knew the crowd had grown aggressive and they knew Capitol Police were severely outnumbered, prosecutors say. Donohoe knew his actions were illegal when he followed Nordean and Biggs over police barricades to go inside.
Once in, Donohoe fielded more texts. One asked him if anyone had deployed mace yet.
“We are trying,” Donohoe responded before throwing water bottles at a line of police.
Donohoe eventually ran into Dominic Pezzola—another fellow Proud Boy, though Pezzola has pleaded not guilty.
Pezzola, also known as “Spaz” was carrying a riot shield he allegedly wrestled from a police officer. Donohoe took it and led Pezzola to the Capitol’s west plaza. He snapped a picture of the shield and sent a text to leadership.
“Got a riot shield,” Donohoe wrote.
Working his way back around to the rear of the Capitol, Donohoe recognized another Proud Boy, Daniel “Milkshake” Scott. Scott—who has pleaded not guilty—was in an altercation at the front of a crowd, prosecutors say, near concrete steps.
The steps were the pathway Donohoe used to push through police trying to stop their advance. He was hit with pepper balls and eventually left. Around 7 P.M., Donohoe boasted to leadership about “storming the capitol unarmed.”
In a statement Friday, Donohoe’s attorney said his client “regrets his actions and is remorseful for the conduct that led to these charges.
“He accepts responsibility for his wrongs and is prepared to accept the consequences,” public defender Ira Knight said.
He will remain in jail until sentencing which is expected sometime after July 8.
Meanwhile, other Proud Boys, including West Virginia chapter leader Jeffrey Finley and California Proud Boys member Ricky Willden have entered guilty pleas, too.
Neither Finley nor Wilden faced conspiracy charges tied to stopping the election certification by Congress on Jan. 6, but Finley, 29, faces up to a year in prison for illegally entering the Capitol. Prosecutors say he appeared in photographs standing beside leaders of the Proud Boys as they breached the Capitol.
He also donned an earpiece and engaged with Proud Boys in a Telegram chat group called “Boots on the Ground.” Prosecutors said Finley also tried to obscure his involvement, telling members to delete photos and videos.
“No talks about D.C. on Telegram whatsoever and gathering [numbers] as we speak,” Finley wrote.
Finley Plea Agreement by Daily Kos on Scribd
As for Ricky Willden, the 40-year-old self-proclaimed member of the Proud Boys pleaded guilty to one count of assaulting, resisting, or impeding officers on Jan. 6. The California resident admitted to attacking police with chemical sprays and then chucking the canister at police when it was empty.
Willden faces up to eight years in prison, but now that he has agreed to cooperate, he will likely see that shaved down. He will remain detained until his sentencing in August.
Ricky Wilden Plea Agreement Jan 6 by Daily Kos on Scribd
Jeremy Grace, another Proud Boy, also copped a deal Friday. The Battle Ground, Washington, resident flew to D.C. for the Jan. 6 rally with his father, Jeffrey Grace, on Jan. 4. They attended Trump’s speech at the Ellipse and headed toward the U.S. Capitol.
According to Grace’s statement of offense, he was behind the front line of individuals crossing barricades and eventually made his way into the Senate through a door on the northwest side. Together, Grace walked with his father to the Capitol Rotunda before climbing out of a broken window.
They took selfies and shot video as they chanted, “Our house!”
Grace’s father has pleaded not guilty.
Jeremy Grace Proud Boy Plea Ag by Daily Kos on Scribd
Tough day in court for Oath Keepers
Meanwhile Friday, defense attorneys for the Oath Keepers were put to the task by U.S. District Judge Amit Mehta.
Discovery in the sprawling and historic seditious conspiracy case is massive and in the run-up to trial, defense counsel for Rhodes has argued there hasn’t been enough time to prepare, pointing to the voluminous amounts of video footage they must comb through to make their case. They have also complained about incomplete records of evidence provided by the prosecution to the defense.
But that’s just not so, according to Judge Mehta.
He emphasized that defense attorneys have had several months to hone their case and sort out what will be relevant in the heap of evidence they have had access to.
To that point, he said, it won’t be video footage of Rhodes or some other Oath Keepers charged with conspiracy breaking a window that will make or break the defense, for example.
“What’s in the videos is not going to reveal what’s in the defendant’s state of mind,” Mehta said Friday. “What will matter is what is in these chats, what is in their social media, what is in the witness interviews. It will matter what they said to each other, what people overheard.”
There are some 45,000 text messages the government deemed important evidence to bring to the impending trial. Mehta sharply told Rhodes’s defense attorney Phillip Linder, he may want to start digging in there.
“Focus on what matters,” the exasperated judge said Friday.
The government has turned over the lion’s share of its evidence available for discovery, including 10,500 videos it seized off Oath Keeper devices alone, grand jury transcripts, and more.
There were also at least 15 Signal group chats on devices that the government found relevant to the seditious conspiracy charges.
All of this was provided to defense attorneys in October.
“Unlike a lot of other defendants, most Jan. 6 cases genuinely are primarily about what the people did at the Capitol that day. This case has to do with that, undoubtedly true, but this is much more about what was said before Jan. 6, what was done in the days leading up to it and what was done on that day and important what was done after, OK? So, I don’t think anything that was done before Jan. 6, nothing after Jan. 6 was captured in video. It’s all in the chats, in their social media. That’s where you need to be looking,” Mehta said. “That’s whats going to tell a jury, not me, a jury, whether these folks engaged in a conspiracy to interfere with Congress.”
Beyond the scope of discovery, there’s also the sheer size of the trial causing much consternation for Judge Mehta.
Much of Friday’s conference was devoted to figuring out how to best run the trials once they kick off. There are 10 total defendants, plus attorneys for each defendant, a jury, court clerks and officers, and press that would need to squeeze into a single room.
Even the large ceremonial courtroom at the federal courthouse wouldn’t suffice. If the trial is moved offsite, then questions about how to properly detain defendants during breaks arise. The same issues plague the Proud Boys conspiracy case.
Defense attorneys have pushed to keep the Oath Keepers together for trial, arguing that splitting them apart would be unfair. Mehta disagreed and proposed that the first batch of Oath Keepers— Jessica Watkins, Joseph Hackett, Kenneth Harrelson, David Moerschel, and Thomas Caldwell—go to trial this July.
Elmer Rhodes, Roberto Minuta, Brian Ulrich, Edward Vallejo, and Kelly Meggs would go to trial in September.
This spurred defense attorneys to pose an interesting proposition: If three other Oath Keepers strike a plea deal—bringing the total group to be tried down to just eight Oath Keepers instead of 10—would that mean Mehta would consider trying them at once?
The judge was careful not to appear with his thumb on the scale; he told attorneys what they decided to do with plea agreements was their decision.
Judge Mehta also informed defendant Kelly Meggs during Friday’s hearing that his attorney, Jonathon Moseley, would not be able to defend him after the commonwealth of Virginia disbarred him last week for disciplinary reasons.
Meggs, who leads the Florida Oath Keepers division, said he has had significant difficulty obtaining a new lawyer because of restrictions placed on him at the D.C. jail.
Mehta said he would contact the jail to ensure he had access and, in the meantime, encouraged Meggs to ask his wife, Connie Meggs, for help. Meggs has claimed he is innocent. He has said in court that he was trying to help U.S. Capitol Police Officer Harry Dunn during the chaos, not hurt him.
Mark Zaid, an attorney for Dunn, told Daily Kos the suggestion was purely laughable.
“It is ludicrous to assert any of the Jan. 6 seditionists in any way came to the defense or provided assistance to Officer Dunn. Nor, as the judge noted, would it be relevant to the culpability of their actions that day,” Zaid said.
And defense could comb through as much video footage of the day as they like, including any body cam footage they claim exists, Zaid said.
Meggs would be searching for something that doesn’t exist. USCP officers do not wear body cameras.
The next status hearing in the seditious conspiracy case is slated for May 6.
Saturday, Apr 9, 2022 · 10:26:56 AM +00:00
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Brandi Buchman
An earlier version of this story omitted defendant Joseph Hackett.
Ukraine update: Russia has their own 'Switchblade.' It just doesn't seem to work
This post was originally published on this site
We’re currently putting together a look at some movements going on in the area of Kherson, as well as what’s going on in the east. In the meantime, here’s a smorgasbord of smaller items from around Ukraine this morning.
After Friday’s missile attack on a crowded railway station in Kramatorsk, in which at least 50 people, including 5 children, died, attempts to evacuate civilians from the area are continuing. But on Saturday, air raid sirens are again sounding in towns across eastern Ukraine and there is word that Russia is specifically targeting the rail system. There are multiple evacuation trains scheduled for today in Slavyansk, a large town directly adjacent to Kramatorsk. So far, those trains seem to be getting away safely, but this is certainly a tense situation.
The EU is continuing to fast track the admission of Ukraine. Though emergency measures have temporarily simplified processing of those seeking to cross the border into Poland and Slovakia, and reduced or eliminated tariffs on goods, actual EU membership should help ensure that the flow of goods and people between Ukraine and the rest of Europe has fewer restrictions. The economic ties should also make Europe more invested in the success of Ukraine in holding off the Russian invasion. At present, there is no “EU military” and no mutual promise of protection built into this membership. Both things have been proposed, but are unlikely to be in place within the next few years.
The first Switchblade systems, from U.S. manufacturer AeroVironment, are now in Ukraine, but so far there has been no announcement of their use. However, there is a reminder this morning that Russia also has a “loitering munition” or “kamikaze drone” in the form of the ZALA KYB-UAV.
And, of course, this being 2022, there is also a page from the manufacturer, Zala Aero Group, to explain and market this weapon. Though the fact that their video shows nothing but repeated footage of a single Zala apparently missing a target (but hey, it gets close) doesn’t seem all that big a sales pitch.
In theory, the ZALA drone falls in between the Switchblade 300, which targets either lightly armored vehicles or people, and the considerably larger Switchblade 600, which carries a much more significant explosive capable of taking out armored systems. With a 3Kg (6.6 lb.) warhead, the Zala should be able to deliver a decent punch, possibly taking down an armored target or a group of infantry.
There have been at least two previous claims that the Russian military had deployed a ZALA drone. However, the precision loitering munition seems to be a bit … imprecise. In one case, it was found on the ground unexploded, and this time it seems to have missed the target.
Yet another of those translations from @Dmitri of Russian soldiers placing calls to their families back home.
Soldier: “I didn’t tell you yesterday.”
Wife: “What?”
Soldier: “Our whole company is f*cking gone.”
The ZALA is far from the only Russian drone flying. They also have their equivalent of the Turkish Bayraktar in the form of the Kronshtadt Orion-E. (Yes, there’s a promotional video). How many of these drones have been used in Ukraine isn’t clear, but this one is done.