Ukraine Redux?

Trump hosted Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and major European leaders in an effort to push peace talks on ending the Russo-Ukrainian war. Let me show you what Trump doesn't get about the war between Russia and Ukraine. 

But somehow, Trump managed to give a good show, expressing solidarity with European leaders and getting them to praise him for his relentless pursuit of peace guarantees for Ukraine and added that Vladimir Putin was open to such an idea.

There's just one thing - no one has told Putin that Putin is open to such an idea.

Trump made himself look like the reasonable leader in the room - he even got Zelensky to wear a suit to the White House this time =- and he was in such a good mood, he showed the Europeans his collection of Trump 2028 merchandise.  But all he really did was kick the can down the road - for Putin.  He set up an expectation for peace talks that won't amount to much of either peace or talks.

Peace In Our Time?

After his "summit" meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin in Anchorage, Alaska, Donald Trump should be arrested for indecent northern exposure.

Yesterday's tête-à-tête between the two democratically elected dictators was supposed to produce an end to the war in Ukraine that would benefit Putin - I call it "the final solution to the Ukrainian question," because that's how Putin would see it - but, thankfully, produced nothing.  Call it the art of No Deal.

The lack of a deal means that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and his people live to fight another day, and he has solid support from a coalition of pro-democracy allies led by Canada, the country that should have taken that mantle back in 1945.

Prior to this Trump-Putin meeting, everyone was comparing Trump to Neville Chamberlain, the British prime minister who sold out Czechoslovakia by letting Hitler take over the Sudetenland from the Czechoslovakian people in the hope of avoiding an unavoidable war.  That's an insult to Chamberlain.  Chamberlain actually accomplished something.  Trump accomplished nothing in Anchorage.  Because he can't do anything right.

He can't even appease right! 

Doom

After Trump and Vance bullied and ridiculed Volodymyr Zelensky in the Oval Office yesterday . . .

. . . it was obvious that the wrong president got kicked out of the White House.

They characterized Zelensky as an ingrate for not being thankful enough for aid to Ukraine in their ongoing war with Russia - a lie - and they insisted that he had no leverage to end the war on his terms and so therefore he had to cede territory to their overlord, Vladimir Putin.  Trump says he's acting in the interest of peace.  Let me remind you that even the devil himself sometimes presents himself as a man of peace.

It doesn't matter that Democratic lawmakers - who have even less leverage than Zelensky - all joined world leaders in solidarity for Ukraine and against Trump.  Trump is the one in charge and, to the world, is America.   

Meanwhile, Trump has been gutting Social Security (Martin O'Malley quit as commissioner in the nick of time), has been gutting the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (if New Jersey gets another Sandy, we'll find out too late), got Romania to free the Tate brothers (MAGA extremists involved in human trafficking), caused a rift between himself and the leaders of Britain and France when they visited the White House (on two separate occasions), and "released" files pertaining to his buddy Jeffrey Epstein that turned out to be phone logs put out four years earlier (I can't think of something to write in parentheses here!).

March is certainly coming in like a lion in America.

I don't know how long his blog can go on.  Not because I'm afraid of Kash Patel sending a goon squad to my house to arrest me, but because keeping up my commentary here is so exhausting. 😟

Europe Rises, America Falls

Having not experienced an age of antiquity, a medieval period, or a Renaissance, and having broken all ties with our mother country, which has experienced all that, the United States has long lacked the maturity or the wisdom to be a world leader.  This was evident as soon as the U.S. replaced Great Britain and France as the leading power of the West in the late 1940s, when the Chinese Communists drove Chiang Kai-shek from the mainland to Taiwan and the leading paranoiacs in Washington rhetorically asked, "Who lost China?", as if a country so old even its laundry secrets date back to antiquity was ever ours to lose.  The one thing that gave us legitimacy as a world leader was our values system - our commitment to the rule of law, our generosity to other countries in the form of the Peace Corps and the United States Agency for International Development, and our support for international health and education standards - but most of all our commitment to other countries fighting for their freedom and for their sovereignty.  Yes, we made some blunders - overthrowing democratically elected socialist governments in Latin America, invading Iraq - but overall our commitment to freedom remained strong.

Not . . . any . . . more.

This past week, American leaders, from the Orange Man in the White House to his vice presidential lackey to the drunk running the Pentagon (replacing a brilliant black man like Lloyd Austin with Pete Hegseth to lead Defense is like a '60s oldies radio station playing Sam Cooke records switching to a '90s oldies format that plays Michael Bolton covers of Sam Cooke songs), have made it clear that they will no longer back Ukraine in its fight against Russia.  Not because we can't afford it, or because we care about the carnage in the war, but because . . . we just don't want to.  Our so-called leaders have decided that a commitment to a free and democratic Ukraine and a fair and just peace for Ukraine and for all of Europe is no business of ours.  This is the same country that never recognized the incorporation of the Baltic States into the Soviet Union, of which Ukraine was one of the original republics (though not by choice).  This is the same country that, until President Biden was gone, continued to commit to helping Ukraine in its fight against Vladmir Putin.  Trump, rather than redouble American efforts to aid the Ukrainians, chose instead to have a summit with Putin for which neither Ukraine nor the European Union were to be consulted, to discuss a peace deal that neither Ukraine nor the European Union support - one that would support Russian claims to Ukrainian territory.  

Oh yeah, and Americans would get the rights to half of Ukraine's mineral resources.  Trump tried to get Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to sign a document to that effect, but Zelensky refused.  Meanwhile, Pete Hegseth reaffirmed Russian claims to Ukrainian territory and its own regional interests by saying it was inconceivable that Ukraine regain its land from before the invasion of Crimea in 2014 and should not allowed to join the European Union or NATO.  (So, even while Trump and Putin were acting like Ribbentrop and Molotov in pilfering Eastern Europe, Hegseth was appeasing the Russians for peace in our time while in . . . Munich.)

Now the Europeans, with encouragement from President Zelensky and leadership from President Emanuel Macron of France, are planning to combine their military forces to come to Ukraine's aid.  Great Britain - no longer an EU member but still having an interest in Continental affairs - has committed more aid to Ukraine.  The nations of Europe are banding together to help Ukraine because they no longer trust us anymore.  Why should they?  A plurality of us just put Trump back into the White House and he's still getting broad support in the polls.  Not only is America withdrawing from its international commitments, American voters seem to be just fine - happy, even - with that.  The Europeans knew that Trump's return was inevitable, largely, because they've long known what I said at the beginning of this post - Americans are not mature enough and wise enough to lead the world, and the large support Trump enjoys among voters signified to them that we were no longer committed to a value system - the one thing that legitimized as as a superpower in the first place.  

When Joe Biden assumed the Presidency in 2021, he famously said, "America is back!"  To which world leaders replied, "But for how long?"  The answer - four years.  And even if "America is back"  in 2029 should a Democrat be elected President, the rest of the world won't want us back.  We're too unlearned and too foolish, too mercurial and too unstable, The question is no longer whether the European Union should lead the free world . . . they must lead it!   Because not only will Trump not lead it . . . he's too busy working with Musk to make sure we're no longer part of it. 

Step It Up, Joe

The sudden disasters affecting Donald Trump, which I covered in my post before last, have certainly helped President Joe Biden in his efforts to win a second term and keep Trump out of the White House, but it's hardly going to be enough.  Biden faces headwinds within his own base, with young people, Muslims and Arab-Americans - who make up a large part of the Democratic electorate in the crucial state of Michigan - angry over his Israel-Gaza policy, as well as with blacks and Hispanics, and he may face more serious headwinds from progressives if he tries to add additional security to the southern border by executive order without the guarantee of a payoff in the form of getting Ukraine any aid.  And so many Democrats are getting dispirited with Biden even as Trump's base remains committed to their cult leader that the only wind at Biden's back, so far, is his own.

That stinks. 

David Ignatius of the Washington Post has a column out suggesting that President Biden take whatever action he can on Israel, Ukraine and the border - that is, respectively, stand up to Benjamin Netanyahu on his prosecution of the war against Hamas, find a way with House Democrats to circumvent House Speaker Mike Johnson and get aid to Ukraine, and issue executive orders to crack down on migrants crossing the U.S.-Mexico border, the Squad be damned.

Some of Ignatius's column must have gotten through to the White House.  CNN reports that the United States is promoting a new United Nations draft resolution to call for a temporary cease-fire in the Israel-Hamas war and is also planning to warn the Israelis against aground incursion into Rafah, where displaced Palestinians are now staying.  President Biden, still undecided as to what he can do, if anything, to shame Speaker Johnson into allowing a vote on aid to Ukraine, is announcing tomorrow sanctions against Russian President Vladimir Putin for being responsible for the death of Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny.   Navalny (below) was the brightest hope for a permanently democratic Russia (as opposed to the temporarily democratic Russia that Boris Yeltsin led in the 1990s), and his death has caused that hope to fade rapidly.  Biden's proposed additional sanctions would be in concert with the condemnation of Navalny's murder that has come from every major world figure.

Except for Donald Trump, who compared Navalny's torture and murder to his own legal indictments.

There are other issues Ignatius overlooked.  Biden has to find another way to promote his domestic successes, like cheaper insulin, even as he has to stop promoting economic successes that not enough voters feel ("Bidenomics" is the worst one-word slogan conceived since "Fahrvergnügen").  He also needs to remind voters that he ended the COVID pandemic in this country with his wise, prudent approach to the disease.  He should also point out that he successfully pushed through legislation to allow Medicare to negotiate lower drug prices with pharmaceutical companies.  And there are other issues I could mention as well, like, oh, I don't know, infrastructure projects?

One of the biggest issues working in his favor is abortion, yet Biden, the second Catholic U.S. President, is reportedly uncomfortable talking about it.  He'd better start getting comfortable about it.  More Roman Catholic voters actually favor Trump over Biden than the other way around, so even as Biden shouldn't be afraid of offending conservative Catholics whose votes he doesn't have a prayer - literally - of getting anyway (like all of the Catholics on the Supreme Court not named Sonia by their mothers), he, as a Catholic, should be able to espouse a pro-legal-abortion stance as a medical issue so no one gets the idea that all Catholics are, well, the bad guys.

And we'd hate for that to happen.

Look, Pope John Paul II found out the hard way that freeing Poland and Lithuania from communism wasn't going to convince everyone that he was a good guy, so Joe Biden, knowing that he can't please everyone, should just come out and declare his personal opposition to abortion while expressing point-blank his even greater opposition to imposing his personal beliefs on others.  Many Catholics won't like that.  Some pro-choice non-Catholics may be even more hostile to that message, as Catholic politicians who adhere to their faith in their personal lives even as they may contradict it in their political lives get no brownie points from the Vatican's critics outside the Church.  But the vast majority of voters would be pleased to find a Catholic President who is broadminded enough to accommodate other points of view on the topic of abortion, and it would go a long way toward defusing the growing anti-Catholicism I see in this country; I mean, how is it that some of the most vocal critics of Islamophobia have no problem dismissing Catholics offended by assaults on their own faith as a bunch of intolerant fools, when Islam is just as patriarchal and socially conservative as Catholicism, if not more so?

As for the need for Biden to get out and engage with the voters, I don't fear that he won't do so.  Remember, the only reason he didn't engage with the voters so much in 2020 was because of that crazy little thing called COVID.  But when he does get out, President Biden needs something he can engage voters with.  This blog, and David Ignatius's column, offer constructive suggestions on what Biden can bring to the campaign trail.  

Crossing the Line

The Senate, under the leadership of arch-conservative Republican James Lankford of Oklahoma (below), has conceived a tough immigration bill that cracks down on border crossings and offers no pathway to citizenship for migrants already here.  It also provides aid to Ukraine and Israel, fro a total of $118 billion.  Of course, progressives are against it, as it is too tough against people breaking the law by crossing the border illegally.  But the biggest opposition comes from MAGA Republicans who don't want the bill - which some say is the best possible border bill to be negotiated - to pass, and Republican Speaker Mike Johnson ahs promised to stop it.  Why?  Because it will help Joe Biden and hurt Donald Trump.

So, the GOP doesn't really want to solve a problem because keeping it alive is good politics.  

And why would they do this? Mainly because it works.  Americans who don't follow politics regularly already blame Biden for the crisis at the border, which is why Trump leads him in the polls in six swing states.  Biden has already indicated he will support this Senate bill, and he's prepared to remind voters that he wanted to sign it but MAGA Republicans in the House wouldn't send it to him.  The only trouble is that voters won't care.  Because the President takes all the blame with failed legislation he had nothing to do with stopping.  Voters don't seem to get that Biden can't do everything.  He's only the President.

The bill also ties aid to Ukraine with border reform, so if this bill does fail, Ukraine won't get any aid and Putin will get the upper hand with the war in Ukraine that the Russian leader started.  A lot of people have a little problem with that.  Because if Putin were to emerge victorious, he would likely start a new war against the Baltic States and reincorporate them into the Russian state.  The last time the Kremlin annexed Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania into what was then the Soviet Union, Republicans were as isolationist as MAGA Republicans are now.  Only now they're letting the Kremlin take over small countries not because they're not paying attention.  They are paying attention - to Donald Trump.  

There might be a chance for border reform, and maybe sme aid will get to Ukraine, but I wouldn't bet on it.  

Oh, and by the way, on the subject of immigration, Martin O'Malley would have done something about it . . .

Biden In Lithuania

At the NATO this past week, President Biden gave an even better speech on foreign policy than he gave in Poland in early 2022.

Biden recommitted himself to helping Ukraine fight for its sovereignty and its democracy against the Russians, having promised Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky that the United States will remain engaged in their struggle, and he drew the parallel between Ukraine and the struggle of the Baltic States - including Lithuania - during the Cold War.  He praised the Baltic peoples for standing up to the Soviet Union and using peaceful resistance to break away from the U.S.S.R. and regain their independence, setting the standard for standing up to Russian aggression.  He then pivoted to the need for all nations to work together to ensure freedom and work to guarantee a more peaceful world and reverse climate change.

All nice rhetoric, and we know Biden means it, as it came on the heels of getting Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan to bend to Swedish membership in NATO by dangling F-16 airplanes for Turkey.  Vladimir Putin couldn't be more frustrated.  Except for one thing: Putin has a Trump card.

If Donald Trump manages to win back the White House in November 2024, nothing Biden said in Vilnius is going to matter.  Trump will hold back aid for Ukraine, let Putin gain the upper hand, and likely withdraw the United States from NATO.  And don't think he can't win next year's presidential election.  Biden's popularity remains in the toilet, and his approval on the economy is even lower.  Americans still largely vote their pocketbooks, and more of them are becoming more skeptical about support for Ukraine.  And a lot of them believe climate change is a hoax.  President Biden's vision of a freer and more just world is at odds with the growing right-wing authoritarianism at home.  In short, all of his efforts to restore stability and democracy to the world could be undone in just a few hours once the votes are counted on Election Day, 2024.

And once that happens, Americans aren't safe.  Ukrainians aren't safe, either.

Quite frankly, no one will be safe.            

Biden In Poland

President Biden, fresh from his triumphant visit to Ukraine, met with leaders of NATO members along the alliance's eastern flank in Poland where he re-affirmed the organization's commitment to helping the Ukrainians stave off and repel the Russian juggernaut for the first anniversary of the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

He gave a positive speech about freedom and national sovereignty standing tall in Ukraine and elsewhere in contrast to the stark, pessimistic speech he gave in Poland over a year before.  And the Polish audience loved it, cheering almost every one of Biden's paragraphs. 

Republicans continue to complain about how Biden has not visited the train crash site in Ohio and still won't go to the border.  And I have to admit, with criticism like that, things do look bad for . . . Republicans.  After the great press and campaign-ready photographic opportunities Biden just got, how do the Republicans respond?

By sharing a story on Fox News about Biden falling up the stairs while trying to board Air Force One.

You're going to have to do better than that, guys. 

Mr. Zelensky Goes To Washington

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky visited the United States last week to confer with President Biden and address a joint session of Congress.  In his speech to Congress, in which he wore army fatigues he extolled the virtues of freedom and vividly illustrated how the people of Ukraine have fought the Russians to preserve Ukrainian national sovereignty and how continued American support for Ukraine would benefit not just Ukraine and the United States but Europe and the entire world, as it would strengthen democracy in the world and also the global order.

"Your money is not charity.  It's an investment," Zelensky said.

You know, this guy can really communicate to people.  If he hadn't gotten into politics, he might have had a good future in show biz. 😉

The speech was well-received by members of Congress, even many Republicans.  But Republicans such as Lauren Boebert - who wanted to know what the money the U.S .was giving to Ukraine was going to and why we couldn't spend the same money to keep migrants out of the U.S. - and Matt Goetz were too busy checking their cell phones for orders from Trump - or Putin.  As far as they were concerned, Zelensky might as well have been reading  a chapter "The Crying of Lot 49."  

Remember, they're part of the incoming House Republican majority that's going to be deciding on future aid to Ukraine.

Putin is licking his chops. 😢

Elders and Zion

The Islamic gerontocracy that still rules Iran after 43 years (and may continue to do so for another 43 years, despite the latest wave of protests) are selling Russia sophisticated suicide drones that are full of explosives and attack predetermined targets kamikaze-style.

Not only are Russians using Iranian drones to attack Ukraine, the Iranians are on the ground giving assistance to Russian troops that are using them.

Now why would the Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran's Supreme Leader, help the Russians fight a country Iran has no quarrel with?  Foreign-affairs experts believe that Iran, a junior partner in the post-Cold War, post-Soviet Russian bloc, wants to increase its profile on the world stage and be taken seriously by the Russians as an equal partner.

I think there's a second reason, and I'll come out and say it: Iran wants to help Russia fight Ukraine because Ukraine has a Jewish president. 

The mullahs in Iran hate all non-Muslims, but in the case of Jews that goes double.

The Iranians deny helping the Russians, of course.  They would.

The Donbas Dumbass

That would be this guy.

Vladimir Putin held sham referenda in Russian-occupied oblasts, or regions, of Ukraine in which the vote to join the Russian Federation was 103 percent - 105 percent in some areas! Then, after Putin welcomed the regions into Russia - including the Donetsk Oblast - the Ukrainian army liberated Lyman, a key city in Donetsk.  

And the Ukrainian flag flies over the city once again!

Awk-ward!

Putin has promised that any attempt by the West to help Ukraine take back the four oblasts will lead to nuclear war.

Oh, I see - he threatens to unleash the sort of power that would wipe out cities in some of our most heavily populated areas?

Someone tell Putin that Hurricane Ian already did that in Florida! 

I'm sorry, I take my humor like my coffee - black. 

No sugar.

Welcome To the Club

It's official: The once-neutral countries of Sweden and Finland have been invited to join the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and will be fully initiated in a few months. President Biden was able to get Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan to agree to the expansion of NATO despite Erdoğan's misgivings about letting them join over concerns of Kurdish terrorists (or freedom fighters, depending on your perspective) living in exile in both countries.  And the Turkish leader gets new American fighter jets in the deal.

Leaving that aside, this is what President Biden would call a big f**king deal.  Sweden, historically neutral, has not been in war since 1814, meaning that none of its veterans are alive today.  There are also dead soldiers in Finland; they're all Russian, causalities of the Winter War between Finland and the Soviet Union in 1939 and 1940.  Their abandonment of neutrality changes things dramatically.  Their proximity to the Baltic Sea will make Russian naval exercises there much more difficult, and now a NATO member - that would be Finland - shares a border with Russia that is 810 miles long, longer than the borders Russia shares with the Baltic States and Poland, all NATO members, put together.  This is precisely what Vladimir Putin did not want.

Oh, yeah, with St. Petersburg at the end of the Gulf of Finland, a body of water situated between Finland itself to the north and Estonia to the south, could make the city's maritime access, umm, complicated. Putin, who calls the city formerly known as Leningrad home, must be glad that the Russian capital has long since been moved to Moscow.

The only wrinkle is that Ukraine - the Russian invasion of which was the catalyst for NATO expansion in Scandinavia - has wanted to join NATO and has been held back, being told that it must go through a process.  Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky believes that the Ukrainian people have paid for NATO membership with four months of war with Russia.  But, despite more American shipments of weapons to Ukraine, the country will not likely join NATO until after the war is over,  Because an attack on one NATO member is an attack on all, and if Ukraine joined NATO tomorrow, the alliance would be obliged to send troops their to face the Russians.

And you know what would happen after that?  World War III.  

Putin Expands NATO?

Finland has always had an uneasy relationship with Russia.  It was part of the old Czarist Russian empire until Russia's capitulation in World War I gave the Finns the opportunity to gain its independence, but when the Soviet Union sought to reclaim land from the old empire's western frontier and fortify it against a possible German invasion at the start of World War II, Joseph Stalin made demands of the Finns, who refused to accept them.  The Soviet Union invaded Finland in November 1939, and the Finns held out throughout the winter of 1939-40 in the so-called Winter War before bowing to the Red Army's superiority.  (Finns foolishly cast their lot with the Nazis when Hitler invaded the Soviet Union, only to be on the losing side again.)  Finland had to promise to remain a neutral nation after World War II to maintain its independence, which meant not joining the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO).

Now, however, the people who invented the Molotov cocktail in the Winter War are on the verge of joining NATO thanks to the Russian invasion of Ukraine, where the the locals are mixing Molotov cocktails up in every kitchen sink they can find.  Finland is afraid of Putin possibly threatening its 800-mile border with Russia, and the Finns have begun a process to enter NATO membership.  Sweden - always hostile to Russian expansion and being the only country on Europe's far northern land mass that doesn't border Russia (yes, Norway borders Russia, check the map) - is even looking into the idea.

If Vladimir Putin thought he could intimidate NATO, he really screwed up big time.

But it's not all bad news for Putin.  French far-right presidential candidate Marine Le Pen has proposed that NATO enter an alliance with Russia once the war in Ukraine - a war President Biden is helping Ukraine fight by giving it $800 million in additional military aid - is over.

Le Pen wants France and Britain to enter into an alliance with Russia?  What is this, 1914?

For more about Russo-Finnish relations, watch this video.

Putin Us On

Just before the start of the war in Ukraine, Donald Trump, a longtime friend, confidante and sucker of Vladimir Putin, said that Putin's effort to impose a pax Russiana on Ukraine by amassing troops along Ukraine's borders with Russia and Belarus was an act of "genius."  When the fighting broke out and numerous cities were mercilessly bombed by the Russian army, Trump spoke with a great deal of rue, saying that Putin had "changed."  In fact, he hadn't.

In fairness to Trump (I . . . can't believe I just wrote that!), he's not the only one to realize that Putin is not the nice guy he was once thought to be.  When Putin was democratically elected to succeed Boris Yeltsin as president of post-Soviet Russia in 2000, he came across as a young, dynamic, Westernized leader who would bring Russia into the twenty-first century.  He welcomed free-market capitalism and Western popular culture.  And he put on quite a charm offensive.  He took George Walker Bush for a ride in his classic Volga sedan when our forty-third President held a summit with him, and Bush later said he believe he "saw his soul" by looking into his eyes.  At a concert, Putin took to the stage and sang "Blueberry Hill" - in English - to the delight of an audience that included Western movie stars such as Gerard Depardieu, Goldie Hawn and Kurt Russell.  He even got to meet Paul McCartney (below) when the former Beatle played Red Square in Moscow in May 2003.  He told Macca that he enjoyed listening to the Beatles because their music "was very popular, like a breath of fresh air, a window into the outside world."  At the concert, Putin took his seat just like any other Beatles fan.

Yes, many Westerners actually liked this guy.

He fooled everyone.  Everyone, that is, except Balts, Poles, Baltic-Americans, Polish-Americans, and Mitt Romney.  It was Romney, after all, who said back in 2012 that Putin was the greatest threat to world peace while running or President against incumbent Barack Obama.  Democrats laughed - just as they laughed at Ronald Reagan's Russophobic statements in the early eighties (except for Democrats with last names like Jonaitis or Malinowski).  Who has the last laugh now?  Well, Romney, who's suddenly being talked about as a 2024 Republican presidential candidate if the GOP comes to its senses and stops waiting for Trump.  Romney is also one of President Biden's strongest supporters on the Ukraine crisis from the Republican side of the aisle in the Senate.

Putin proved that P.T. Barnum was right, but if Trump ends up still supporting Putin after all of this, he'll only prove that, once in awhile you'll get a sucker dumb enough to fall for the same scam a second time.  Ironically, Trump is counting on his supporters to be stupid enough to fall for his scam . . . a third time.

And as to how Paul McCartney could have fallen for Putin's shtick . . . well, Macca was married to Heather Mills at the time, so you have to take that into account. 

Biden's State Of the Union Address

So I understand President Biden gave his first State Of the Union address last week . . . 

First of all, I'm glad it was only an hour long.  Secondly, I think he did a pretty good job, and the sight of maybe only three out of five hundred or so people wearing face coverings in the U.S. House chamber right after the mandate for wearing them in the House was lifted was reassuring.

Although I think Lauren Boebert and Marjorie Taylor Greene should have been required to be gagged.

I won't even repeat what they said.

President Biden made his intentions on handling the war in Ukraine clear, promising to stand behind Ukrainian sovereignty and defend freedom - certifying himself as a wartime President in a war we're not even fighting.  He also struck an even balance between liberal and centrist concerns regarding domestic issues by advocating for the more popular elements of his Build Back Better plan (a term he didn't actually use in the speech), including a $15 minimum wage, a child tax credit extension, making child care costs affordable and a call to defend, not defund, the police.

All of this even gave the President a bounce in the polls when he badly needed it.  In the first and so far only poll taken after the State Of the Union address, from Marist College and public broadcasting, his approval rating is up to 47 percent. Broken down, Biden's handling of the Ukraine crisis is up 18 points, to 52 percent,  his handling of the COVID pandemic is up 8 points, to 55 percent, and even though his handling of the economy is still under water, it's up 8 points, to 45 percent.  

All in all, he still has a good deal of work to do to put himself and the Democrats in a comfortable situation before the November midterms, but the State Of the Union address was a step in the right direction. 

A Nuclear Error

It's become obvious that Vladimir Putin will stop at nothing to make Ukraine submit to his will, even if it means making the entire country glow in the dark.

This is the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant in Ukraine, the largest one in the country and the largest such plant in all of Europe (and that's counting the one in Armenia, assuming you think of Armenia as a European rather than an Asian country).  The plan generates 20 percent of all the electricity generated in Ukraine and half of Ukraine's nuclear power.  Built in 1980 when Ukraine was a part of the Soviet Union, the plant came under fire the other day from Russian forces and radiation allegedly leaked out.  We were spared another Chernobyl - that's also in Ukraine - when radiation levels proved to be normal, but it seems that Putin was ready to blow up the plant if he had to deny Ukrainians vital power.  Now the Zaporizhzhia plant is being operated by Ukrainian plant managers with Russian guns pointed at their heads.

And who know what Putin will do next with it.  He's certainly not going to let it keep operating unless he can personally benefit from it.

Quit holding out and draw another breath . . .. 😱

A Mushrooming War

The situation in Ukraine is getting worse by the hour, and it may get worst by the minute.

Vladimir Putin has continued to expand the the fighting and the bombing in Ukraine, and he says a third world war will be nuclear.

Oh, we knew that about a third world war - we've known it for seventy years.  But Putin is suggesting that this is the war that could end up being World War III.

You know, somehow COVID doesn't seem important anymore . . . 

War In Ukraine

When Donetsk and Luhansk declared themselves "republics," Russian troops moved in the keep the peace, and they ended the separatist war in those regions of Ukraine.

Then they invaded Ukraine and started a new one. 😱

All of Ukraine is under siege, with Russian bombs, missiles, and jets attacking every corner of the country to bring it into submission.  President Biden has ordered the strictest sanctions possible to stop Russian aggression and make Vladimir Putin pay.

Gas prices are going up, stock prices have gone down, and you'd best cancel that trip to Warsaw.  And if you booked it online, you'd better cancel it before cyberattacks bring down the Internet. 

Prepare for austerity. 

Putin His Money Where His Mouth Is

 We're on step closer to a global war because of this nut.

Vladimir Putin declared the Russia recognizes Donetsk and Luhansk as independent republics and sent Russian troops into the two Ukrainian provinces to protect them from . . . Ukraine.  He has also  authorized a military operation in Ukraine, insisting that Donetskian and Luhanskian territorial claims extend into areas of Ukraine that would justify Russian expansion into the country.

Oh yeah, there's more.  Putin says that there is no real Ukrainian state or nationality - it was a fiction created by Lenin at the dawn of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, even though evidence of a Ukrainian nation goes back centuries, and the current lands within Ukrainian borders have historically been dominated by the Ukrainian people - a claim once disputed by Adolf Hitler, who insisted that the Germanic people originated in that area and so Ukraine was historically part of Germany.  Now Putin is saying that Ukrainians are in fact Russians.  The incoherence of this belief is best explained in this article.

President Biden has imposed severe sanctions on Russian oligarchs, while Germany has suspended the Russo-German gas pipeline under the Baltic Sea.  And now that it appears a war has in fact begun - explosions have been reported in Kiev  . . . Western leaders, including Biden, are now asking us to prepare for austerity . . . and Russian cyberattacks.  

At this point, it doesn't seem to matter when the pandemic will end.

The 2020s are shaping up to be the worst decade of human history.  

Putin To Ukraine - Leave The West Behind

A prosperous, democratic Ukraine with economic and political ties to the United States and the European Union?  Vladimir Putin has made it clear that that's the last thing he wants.

Controlling Ukraine - called "the Ukraine" by the Russians, as if were a possession to exploit for their own benefit (like its productive farmland, Ukraine having been the breadbasket of the old Soviet Union) - is the primary reason Putin sent troops into the eastern part of the country to aid pro-Russian separatists, and it's why he is rumored to be planning an invasion of Ukraine.  He's placed 127,000 troops along the border.  .  This would cause alarm for the Europeans, who rely on natural gas through a Ukrainian pipeline, and it would cause even more alarm for the Ukrainians, who are making a concerted effort to free itself from centuries of Russian domination and ally itself with he Western democracies.

The Russians are afraid of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) expanding into Ukraine, which would put along their border a NATO member nation much larger than the three Baltic States (note to wise guys: a Russian administrative region not contiguous with the rest of the country borders Lithuania) and bring the Atlantic defense alliance that much closer to Moscow.  The Russians have been paranoid about other power encroaching on their homeland, and have fought for centuries to expand and preserve their sphere of influence, which is why Catherine the Great wiped Poland off the map and the Soviet Communist elite tried to do the same to the Baltics.  Putin isn't just making noise about invading Ukraine - he' more or less threatening to do it.  He does not want Ukraine to look westward as long as threaten Russian hegemony in the East.

So far, efforts to ward off a possible Russian invasion of Ukraine, such as promise not to let Ukraine join NATO, and Russian demands that NATO pull military forces back to NATO countries that joined the alliance before 1999.   There hasn't been a breakthrough yet, but every little effort to preserve peace helps.  Because the last time a great power threated the sovereign of an eastern European country, it led to a world war.