🔴 Trump🇷🇺Russia Ukraine 2023
Permalink: https://wp.me/pDKwi-eOV
With Tweets, Retweets, links to articles and excerpts, I’ve tried to document this national soap opera/tragedy we’re living through. The resources at the beginning are a mixed bag of timelines and documents and I provide a clickable cast of characters (Russians, mostly).
What does this have to do with The Blacklist? A lot, actually. Russian mob figures, spies and apparatchiks. Semion Mogilevich, the Smart Don, reminds me of Red, though Red is a lot nicer and much better-looking.
Featured are drawings (she calls them “maps”) by @Jzikah, and “Mueller, She Wrote” is the best podcast I’ve ever come across. The three women who do it are comedians, though they’re all super smart and A.J. (the lead) has a PhD and is a Veteran.
Caution: You may enjoy this feature a bit more if you’re of the liberal persuasion. This is the single place on this blog where *there are politics* though I tend to stick with MSM, specialized sources (ex-Intel Community, altGov, and reputable sleuths) and other people I’ve learned to trust.
🇷🇺 Press Here For 2023 Articles and Discussion
🇷🇺 Press Here For Index to all Trump/Ukraine/Russia Files
💽Recommended⋙ Mueller She Wrote Podcast ⋙ http://bit.ly/2PgTKWs or Press ⇊ ⇊
Other Podcasts:
The Asset (Center for American Progress) 🌟
The Dworkin Report (Scott Dworkin)
Gaslit Nation (Sarah Kendzior, Andrea Chalupa)
The Lawfare Podcast (Benjamin Wittes, Brookings)
The Josh Marshall Podcast (TPM)
The Mother Jones Podcast (David Corn)
Mueller Time (Eric Leval, Chris Carey)
The Oath (Chuck Rosenberg, MSNBC)
The Report (Lawfare)
On Topic (Renato Mariotti)
Skullduggery (Michael Isikoff, Yahoo)
Trump Inc (q4- 8qProPublica)
Trumpcast (Slate)
🔊 PlayerFM: Best Trump Russia Investigation Podcasts (2019) http://bit.ly/2MKbtV8
Twitter List: INVESTIGATORS: https://twitter.com/Auriandra/lists/investigators
// Investigative reporters, Trump-Russia sleuths, Intelligence Community, Legislators, “alt-gov,” and Targets
Russian Intelligence Services:
Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR) – The Foreign Intelligence Service reports directly to the President of Russia.
GRU – Main Intelligence Directorate of the Russian Armed Forces.
Federal Security Service (FSB) – The Federal Security Service is responsible for counter-intelligence, state security and anti-terrorist operations
🔄 ECFR , Mark Galeotti [EU] (2016): Introduction: Putin’s hydra: Inside Russia’s intelligence services http://bit.ly/2NZWN1h
// 5/11/2016, Intro
⋙ 📒 ECFR, Mark Galeotti [EU] (2016): Report: Putin’s Hydra: Inside Russia’s Intelligence Services [pdf] http://bit.ly/2NYjG5b 20p
// May 2016, Full report
Key People: Alexander Abramov, Roman Abramovich, Aras Agalarov, Emin Agalarov, Rinat Akhmetov, Rinat Akhmetshin, Yulya Alferova, Yuri Andropov, Anatoly Antonov, Anne Applebaum, Andrii Artemenko, Arron Banks, Andrey Baronov, Alexander Bastrykin, Sergey Beseda, Vitaly Bespalov, Leonid “Len” Blavatnik, Anna Bogacheva, David Bogatin, Alexander Bortnikov, Victor Boyarkin, Wm Browder, Mariia Butina, Carole Cadwalladr, Michael Caputo, Yuri Chaika, Igor Chekunov, Sergey Chemezov, Anatoly Chubais, Michael Cohen, George Cottrell, Igor Danchenko, Oleg Deripaska, Andrii Derkach, Igor Divyekin, Kirill Dmitriev, Aleksandr Dugin, Arkady Dvorkovich, Paul Erickson, Oleg Erovinkin, Nigel Farage, Dmitri Firtash, John Fotiadis, Gene (Evgeny) Friedman, Igor Fruman, Daniel Gelbinovich, Valery Gerasimov, Rob Goldstone, Sergei Gorkov, Henry Greenberg, Fiona Hill, Andrew Intrater, Ivan the Terrible, Bidzina Ivanishvili, Ramzan Kadyrov, Brittany Kaiser, Mikhail Kalugin, Vladimir Kara-Murza, Saak Karapetyan, Eugene Kaspersky (Kaspersky Lab), Denis Katsyv, Irakly (“Ike”) Kaveladze, Michael Khodarkovsky, Nikita Khrushchev, Konstantin Kilimnik, Sergey Kislyak, Artem Klyushin, Ihor Kolomoyskyi, Konstantin Kosachev, Mikhail Kovalchuk, Yury Kovalchuk, Aleksandra Krylova, Elena Khusyaynova, Simon Kukes, Sergey Lavrov, Alexander Litvinenko, Howard Lorber, Alexander Lukashenko, Yuriy Lutsenko, Simona Mangiante, Alexander Mashkevich, Michael McFaul, Viktor Medvedchek, Josef Mifsud, Alexey Miller, Sergei Millian, Semion Mogilevich (Don Semyon), Konstantin Molofeev, George Nader, Valentyn Nalyvaichenko, Lyudmila Narusova, Sergei Naryshkin, Alexei Navalny, Eduard Nektalov, Konstantin Nikolaev, Vyacheslav Nikonov, Yevgeniy Nikulin, Alexander Nix, Isabel Oakeshoff, George Papadopoulos, Lev Parnas, Sam Patten, Nikolai Patrushev, Alexander Perepilichnyy, Dmitry Peskov, Peter the Great, Igor Pisarsky, Petro Poroshenko, Yevgeny Prigozhin, Sergei Prikhodko, Vladimir Putin, George Ramishvili, Dmitry Rogozin, Alexander Rovt, Giorgi Rtskhiladze, Dmitry Rybolovlev, Konstantin Rykov, Mikheil Saakashvili, Felix Sater, Igor Sechin, Leonid Shebarshin, Anastasia Shevchenko, Sergey Shoigu, Viktor Shokin, Oleg Solodukhin, Christopher Steele, Ruslan Stoyanov, Oleg Solodukhin, Peter Strzok, Sergei Surovikin, Taiwanchik (aka Alimzhan Tokhtakhunov), Bill Taylor, Andriy Telizhenko, Gennady Timchenko, Oleg Tinkov, Alimzhan Tokhtakhunov (aka Taiwanchik), Aleksandr Torshin, Vyacheslav Trubnikov, Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya, Yulia Tymoshenko, Anastasia Vashukevich (aka Nastya Rybka), Viktor Vekselberg, Natalia Veselnitskaya, Alexander Vindman, Vyacheslav Volodin, Curt Weldon, Andy Wigmore, Alexander Yakovenko, Viktor Yanukovych, Boris Yeltsin, Ivan Yermakov, Marie Yovanovitch, Viktor Yushchenko, Aleksandr Zakharchenko, Maria Zakharova, Joel Zamel, Volodymyr Zelenskyy
Bios w links (Wikipedia unless otherwise noted): Alexander Abramov, Roman Abramovich, Aras Agalarov, Emin Agalarov, Rinat Akhmetov, Rinat Akhmetshin, Yulya Alferova (National Compass), Yuri Andropov, Anatoly Antonov, Anne Applebaum, Andrii Artemenko, Arron Banks, Andrey Baranov (Bloomberg), Alexander Bastrykin, Sergey Beseda, Vitaly Bespalov (NBC), Leonid “Len” Blavatnik, Anna Bogacheva (NYT), David Bogatin (NYT), Alexander Bortnikov, Victor Boyarkin (TrumpRussia), William Browder, Mariia Butina, Carole Cadwalladr, Michael Caputo, Yuri Chaika, Igor Chekunov, Sergey Chemezov, Anatoly Chubais, Michael Cohen, George Cottrell, Igor Danshenko, Oleg Deripaska, Andrii Derkach, Igor Divyekin, Kirill Dmitriev, Aleksandr Dugin, Arkady Dvorkovich, Paul Erickson, Oleg Erovinkin, Nigel Farage, Dmitri Firtash, John Fotiadis (Archinect), Gene (Evgeny) Friedman, Igor Fruman, Daniel Gelbinovich (Daily Beast), Valery Gerasimov, Rob Goldstone, Sergei Gorkov, Henry Greenberg (Miami Herald), Fiona Hill, Andrew Intrater, Ivan the Terrible, Bidzina Ivanishvili, Ramzan Kadyrov, Brittany Kaiser (Cambridge Analytica), Mikhail Kalugin, Vladimir Kara-Murza, Saak Karapetyan, Eugene Kaspersky (Kaspersky Lab), Denis Katsyv, Irakly Kaveladze, Michael Khodarkovsky, Elena Khusyaynova, Konstantin Kilimnik, Sergey Kislyak, Artem Klyushin (National Compass), Ihor Kolomoyskyi, Konstantin Kosachev, Mikhail Kovalchuk, Yury Kovalchuk, Nikita Khrushchev, Aleksandra Krylova (NYT), Simon Kukes, Sergey Lavrov, Alexander Litvinenko, Howard Lorber, Alexander Lukashenko, Yuriy Lutsenko, Konstantin Malofeev, Simona Mangiante (Papadopoulos), Alexander Mashkevich, Michael McFaul, Viktor Medvedchek, Josef Mifsud, Alexey Miller, Sergei Millian, Semion Mogilevich (Don Semyon) …
Cover: KyivPost (10/18/2019): Shady Cast of Characters: Engineers of Trump-Ukraine Scandal http://bit.ly/2MZCilW
Valentyn Nalyvaichenko, Lyudmila Narusova, Sergei Naryshkin, Alexei Navalny, Eduard Nektalov (NYMag), Konstantin Nikolaev, Yevgeniy Nikulin, Vyacheslav Nikonov, Alexander Nix, Isabel Oakeshoff, George Papadopoulos, Lev Parnas, Nikolai Patrushev, Sam Patten, Alexander Perepilichny, Dmitry Peskov, Peter the Great, Igor Pisarsky (RIM), Petro Poroshenko, Yevgeny Prigozhin, Sergei Prikhodko, Vladimir Putin, George Ramishvili (Bloomberg), Dmitry Rogozin, Alexander Rovt, Giorgi Rtskhiladze (CNBC), Nastya Rybka (aka Anastasia Vashukevich) (WaPo), Dmitry Rybolovlev, Konstantin Rykov, Mikheil Saakashvili, Felix Sater, Igor Sechin, Leonid Shebarshin, Anastasia Shevchenko (Amnesty Intl), Sergey Shoigu, Viktor Shokin, Oleg Solodukhin, Christopher Steele, Ruslan Stoyanov, Peter Strzok, Sergei Surovikin, Taiwanchik (aka Alimzhan Tokhtakhunov), Bill Taylor, Andriy Telizhenko (BuzzFeedNews), Gennady Timchenko, Oleg Tinkov, Alimzhan Tokhtakhunov (aka Taiwanchik), Aleksandr Torshin, Vyacheslav Trubnikov, Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya, Yulia Tymoshenko, Anastasia Vashukevich (aka Nastya Rybka) (WaPo), Viktor Vekselberg, Natalia Veselnitskaya, Alexander Vindman, Vyacheslav Volodin, Curt Weldon, Andy Wigmore, Alexander Yakovenko, Viktor Yanukovych, Boris Yeltsin, Ivan Yermakov (Moscow Proj), Marie Yovanovitch, Viktor Yushchenko, Aleksandr Zakharchenko, Maria Zakharova, Joel Zamel, Volodymyr Zelenskyy
,
By @WendySiegelman
Key Documents
🔆 This❗️⋙ 💙💙🔄 LawfareBlog: Litigation Documents Related to the Mueller Investigation http://bit.ly/2OVch6n
// new November 2018, to be continually updated
🔆 This❗️⋙ 💙💙🔄 House.gov: Select Committee to Investigate the JANUARY 6TH Attack on the United States Capitol https://january6th.house.gov
🔆 This❗️⋙ 💙💙🔄 JustSecurity: Public Document Clearinghouse: UKRAINE Impeachment Inquiry http://bit.ly/2CEsQ2F ‼️ Links to ALL documents ‼️
🔆 This❗️⋙ 💙💙🔄 AmericanOversight: Trump-Ukraine Key Figures and Documents http://bit.ly/2C24bES
AmericanOversight: The Trump Administration’s Contacts with Ukraine http://bit.ly/2BYSY89 from FOIA requests
🔆 This❗️⋙ 💙💙🔄 JustSecurity, Andy Wright: Just Security Launches the Russia Investigation Congressional Clearinghouse http://bit.ly/2L21uHz
// 8/22/2019
🔆 This❗️⋙ 💙💙🔄 Lawfare: Full Text of the Mueller Report’s Executive Summaries http://bit.ly/2IFLewq
// 4/18/2019
🔆 This❗️⋙ 💙💙🔄 Lawfare: Document: The Mueller Report http://bit.ly/2vcgNpN
// 4/18/2019
🔆 This❗️⋙ 💙💙🔄≣ NYT: The Whistle-Blower Complaint: Read the Document [Interactive] http://nyti.ms/2nq4FAD
// 9/26/2019
🔆 This❗️⋙ 💙💙🔄 WaPo: Trump impeachment inquiry: Latest news and updates http://wapo.st/2P09WuE [Continually updated]
🔆 This❗️⋙ 💙💙🔄 WaPo, Kate Rabinowitz and Kevin Schaul: Who’s involved in the Trump impeachment inquiry http://wapo.st/2W673dg
// orig published 10/21/2019
By @jzikah has a new book! Cartoon President http://amzn.to/2QUeZhk @Jzikah
⋙ 💙💙🔄 📔 Court Filing (1/17/2019): Civil Action No. 1:18-cv-03501 [pdf] http://cnn.it/2CBddZy (111p) Democratic National Committee v.: Russian Federation, DJ Trump For President, Inc (and others)
// 1/17/2019
⋙ 💙💙🔄 TheAtlantic, Yoni Appelbaum: Impeach Donald Trump http://bit.ly/2FykFIP
//March 2019 cover story
⋙ 💙💙🔄 Politico Mag, Darren Samuelsohn: The Only Impeachment Guide You’ll Ever Need http://politi.co/2QHcJGi
// 1/11/2019, As talk of the I-word heats up, here’s POLITICO Magazine’s soup-to-nuts answers to all your questions about the politics—and the practical realities—of removing a president.
⋙ 💙💙🔄 WaPo, Max Boot: Here are 18 reasons Trump could be a Russian asset http://wapo.st/2D7IJQ9
// 1/13/2019
By @Jzikah
⋙ 💙💙🔄 TheAtlantic, Jeffrey Goldberg (Editor): UNTHINKABLE: 50 Moments That Define an Improbable Presidency http://bit.ly/2RvDFOn
// Jan 2019; Donald Trump’s 50 Most Unthinkable Moments ~ 50 Articles
⋙ 💙💙🔄 Wikipedia: Timeline of investigations into Trump and Russia (2018) http://bit.ly/2Bh12jP
⋙ 💙💙🔄 Axios: Timeline: Every big move in the Mueller investigation http://bit.ly/2Euh3H9
// 12/12/2018
@Jzikah’s Amazon page: http://amzn.to/3tUTM6Y
⋙ 💙💙🔄 Moyers&Co: Interactive Timeline: Everything We Know About Russia and President Trump http://bit.ly/2uVHc9j
// continually updated
⋙ 💙💙🔄📒 DocumentCloud: Steele Dossier [pdf] http://bit.ly/2y5ZhnF 35p
⋙ 💙💙🔄📒 FBIRecordsVault: Records Between FBI and Christopher Steele http://bit.ly/2KqLoF1
⋙ 💙💙🔄≣ AP: Mueller Investigation documents http://bit.ly/2ihbK0l
⋙ 💙💙🔄≣ CitJourno: Trump/Russian Mob Connections http://www.citjourno.org
@Jzikah’s Amazon page: http://amzn.to/3tUTM6Y
⋙ 💙💙🔄≣ CNN, Marshall Cohen, Tal Yellen & Liz Stark: Tracking the Russia investigations (documents) http://cnn.it/2hVCpU5
⋙ 💙💙🔄≣ NYT: Russian Hacking and Influence in the U.S. Election http://nyti.ms/2NqFXeY
⋙ 💙💙🔄≣ BrennanCenter: Trump-Russia Investigations http://bit.ly/2yRKcu6
⋙ 💙💙🔄≣ Politico: The people connected to the Russia probes [ Interactive ] http://politi.co/2FUDhz2 //➔ Democrats, Prosecutors, Law Enforcement/Lobbyists/Media,Team Trump, Foreign Nationals
⋙ 💙💙🔄 TheMoscowProject: Trump’s Russia Cover-Up By the Numbers http://bit.ly/2ycY959
// Center for American Progress; 80+ contacts with Russia-linked operatives https://themoscowproject.org/about/ http://bit.ly/2ycY959
@Jzikah’s Amazon page: http://amzn.to/3tUTM6Y
⋙ 💙💙🔄≣ NBCNews: Russia timeline: Key players, meetings and investigation details http://nbcnews.to/2vtR3YW
⋙ 💙💙🔄≣ DailyBeast: Democrats Release the Fusion GPS Testimony on Trump and Russia http://thebea.st/2qMmH1d w attachment [pdf] ⋙ via Dianne Feinstein http://bit.ly/2FjtlPP
⋙ 💙💙🔄≣ NYT: Justice Department Gives Congress Comey’s Memos on Trump http://nyti.ms/2HdLe2Z
// 4/19/2018 ➔ DocumentCloud: http://bit.ly/2HOGC4z
⋙ 💙💙🔄≣ DOJ: Indictment of Internet Research Agency LLC et al … [PDF] http://bit.ly/2CqdHzD 37p //➔ Mueller Investigation
// 2/16/2018
@Jzikah’s Amazon page: http://amzn.to/3tUTM6Y
⋙ 💙💙🔄≣ Amy Siskind: The Weekly List ~ “This is How Democracy Ends” https://theweeklylist.org
⋙ 💙💙🔄≣ NYT: Mueller Has List of Questions for Trump http://nyti.ms/2rfDuqK + http://nyti.ms/2HExEKi
// 4/30/2018, Majority Relate to if Trump Obstructed Inquiry on Russia
⋙ 💙💙🔄≣ NYT: The Trump Lawyers’ Confidential Memo to Mueller, Explained [ Document ] http://nyti.ms/2kKPgq9
// 6/2/2018, NYT article about document: http://nyti.ms/2swIZSc
@Jzikah’s Amazon page: http://amzn.to/3tUTM6Y
⋙ 💙💙🔄≣ TIME: The Arguments President Trump Has Made Against the Mueller Investigation http://ti.me/2MdeARX
// 6/8/2018
⋙ 💙💙🔄≣ TIME: Wikipedia: Links between Trump associates and Russian officials http://bit.ly/2K42VDF
⋙ 💙💙🔄≣ WaPo: Who has been charged in the Russia probe and why http://wapo.st/2toNwH2
// continually updated; WaPo Russia page
⋙ 💙💙🔄≣ ForeignAffairs Anthology: A New Cold War? Russia and America, Then and Now 1947- http://fam.ag/2KEA4dF
@Jzikah’s Amazon page: http://amzn.to/3tUTM6Y
⋙ 💙💙🔄≣ Justice.gov: Mueller Indictment of 12 Russians in the GRU for Election Hacking [pdf] http://bit.ly/2NbphV6 29p
// 7/13/2018
⋙ 💙💙🔄≣ FactCheck.org: Timeline of Russia Investigation http://bit.ly/2KZ4qaQ
// posted 6/7/2018, updated 7/13/2018; Key moments in the FBI probe of Russia’s efforts to influence the 2016 presidential election; Readable
⋙ 💙💙🔄≣ Legal Process Server: DNC Lawsuit vs Russia, Wikileaks, et al http://bit.ly/2KIOhBq
⋙ 💙💙🔄≣ NYT, Linda Qiu: Truth-Testing Trump’s 250-Plus Attacks on the Russia Inquiry http://nyti.ms/2MY609E
// 8/18/2018
@Jzikah’s Amazon page: http://amzn.to/3tUTM6Y
⋙ 💙💙🔄≣ Justice.gov: Manafort Plea Agreement [pdf] http://bit.ly/2CZiVb7 17p
// 9/14/2018
⋙ 💙💙🔄💽 NYT: Opinion | Operation Infektion: A three-part video series on Russian disinformation http://nyti.ms/2OHqSSV
// 11/12/2018
⋙ 💙💙🔄≣ PasteMag, Jacob Weindling: A Year of Trump and Russia: The 75 Stories That Defined the Mueller Investigation in 2018 http://bit.ly/2QWN1SU
// 12/28/2018
⋙ 💙💙🔄≣ LawFareBlog: Document: Indictment of Roger Stone [pdf] http://bit.ly/2UdQgmj 24p
// 1/25/2019
@Jzikah’s Amazon page: http://amzn.to/3tUTM6Y
⋙ 💙💙🔄📋 NYT: Trump and His Associates Had More Than 100 Contacts With Russians Before the Inauguration [Interactive] http://nyti.ms/2MAZCps
// 1/26/2019
⋙ 💙💙🔄 BuzzFeedNews: These Secret Files Show How The Trump Moscow Talks Unfolded While Trump Heaped Praise On Putin http://bit.ly/2DWQ2ed
// 2/5/2019; ⏳TIMELINE ⌛️
⋙ 💙💙🔄 WaPo: What we learned about Trumpworld outreach to Russia since Mueller’s investigation began http://wapo.st/2twkXYE
// 2/19/2019, And what we still don’t know.
⋙ 💙💙🔄 ◕📋 NYT, Larry Buchanan and Karen Yourish: Trump Has Publicly Attacked the Russia Investigation More Than 1,100 Times http://nyti.ms/2T2HSsN
// 2/19/2019
@Jzikah’s Amazon page: http://amzn.to/3tUTM6Y
;
⋙ 💙💙🔄 ◕📋 WaPo, Philip Bump: The 81 people and organizations just looped into the Trump probe — and why they were included http://wapo.st/2SJrw41
// 3/4/2019
⋙ 💙💙🔄≣ NYT: Full Document: Trump’s Call With the Ukrainian President [Interactive] http://nyti.ms/2lfBkbC (Annotated)
// 9/25/2019″
⋙ 💙💙🔄≣ NYT: The Whistle-Blower Complaint: Read the Document [Interactive] http://nyti.ms/2nq4FAD
// 9/26/2019
@Jzikah’s Amazon page: http://amzn.to/3tUTM6Y
⋙ 💙💙🔄 📔 This❗️⋙ HPSCI: Trump-Ukraine impeachment inquiry report http://bit.ly/2LlnJsX
// 12/3/2019; House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence
⋙ 💙💙🔄 📔 This❗️⋙ Report: House Judiciary Committee report on their articles of impeachment against President Donald John Trump http://bit.ly/2Ek2rIa 658p
// 10/15/2019
⋙ 💙💙🔄 📔 This❗️⋙ Lawfare: House Releases Impeachment Trial Brief http://bit.ly/2ucCo3Y document 111p
// 1/18/2019
@Jzikah’s Amazon page: http://amzn.to/3tUTM6Y
@Jzikah’s Amazon page: http://amzn.to/3tUTM6Y
⋙ 💙💙🔄 📔 This❗️⋙ Trial Memorandum of the US House of Representatives in the Impeachment Trial of President Donald J Trump http://bit.ly/2uePNsc
// 1/18/2020
⋙ 💙💙🔄 📔 This❗️⋙ Trial Memorandum of President Donald J Trump http://bit.ly/2NGi2XK 171p
// 1/20/2020
@Jzikah’s Amazon page: http://amzn.to/3tUTM6Y
⋙ 💙💙🔄 📔 This❗️⋙ Vox, Matthew Yglesias and Andrew Prokop: The ultimate guide to the Donald Trump impeachment saga http://bit.ly/2SoXpkm
// Updated: Feb 5, 2020, 8:06pm EST, Published: Nov 5, 2019, 8:06am EST
⋙ 💙💙🔄 📔 This❗️⋙ NYT: The Key Players in Trump’s Plot to Upend the Election, Mapped https://tinyurl.com/4w8uekjx
// 8/31/2023
⋙ 💙💙🔄 📔 This❗️⋙ 📀 Press Here For Impeachment Trial on Cspan
// 1/20/2020-2/5/2020
⋙ 💙💙🔄 📔 This❗️⋙ LawFare: Confronting the Capitol Insurrection [Index Page] http://bit.ly/3mfMDNc
⏳WaPo: The full Trump-Ukraine impeachment timeline http://wapo.st/35odsUl
@Jzikah’s Amazon page: http://amzn.to/3tUTM6Y
⭕ Feb 2021 Second Trump #Impeachment Trial
Day One: Rules etc
Day TWO: C-SPAN: U.S. Senate Impeachment Trial Day 2, Impeachment Managers’ Constitutionality Arguments http://bit.ly/3aa1CCQ
// 2/9/2021;
Day 2 of the impeachment trial of former President Trump for incitement of insurrection began with senators voting 89-11 in favor of the trial organizing resolution. Lead Impeachment Manager Representative Jamie Raskin (D-MD) then made opening remarks followed by a 13-minute video showing footage of former President Trump’s January 6, 2021, speech and of the actions of those who stormed the U.S. Capitol that day. Afterward, impeachment managers Representatives Raskin, Joe Neguse (D-CO), and David Cicilline (D-RI) presented their arguments for the constitutionality of impeaching a former president. Representative Raskin in his arguments talked about bringing his daughter and son-in-law with him to the Capitol on January 6.
@Jzikah’s Amazon page: http://amzn.to/3tUTM6Y
Day THREE: C-SPAN: Senate Impeachment Trial Day 3, Part 1 http://bit.ly/374q3zm
// 2/10/2021;
The first part of Day 3 of the impeachment trial of former President Trump for incitement of insurrection began with House impeachment manager Representative Jamie Raskin (D-MD) asserting that the former president had “surrendered his role as commander in chief” and become “the inciter in chief.” He played the January 6, 2021, video Mr. Trump posted on Twitter in which he told his supporters who attacked the U.S. Capitol to “go home.” Representative Joe Neguse (D-CO) then outlined impeachment managers’ plan for arguing their case. In the final segment of part 1, Representatives Joaquin Castro (D-TX) and Eric Swalwell (D-CA) described the former president’s actions leading up to and after the 2020 election
Day Three: C-SPAN: Senate Impeachment Trial Day 3, Part 2 http://bit.ly/3tYOS9Y
// The Senate impeachment trial of former President Donald Trump continued with House managers presenting video and tweets they say indicate that former President Trump incited the deadly January 6 riot.
Day Three: C-SPAN: Senate Impeachment Trial Day 3, Part 3 http://bit.ly/372bYSY
// Rep. Eric Swalwell (D-CA) Entire remarked on the breach of the Capitol and attacks on police officers.
Day Three: C-SPAN: Senate Impeachment Trial Day 3, Part 4 http://bit.ly/3aZ82DV
// An effort by Sen. Mike Lee to remove remarks by the House impeachment managers from the official record sparked confusion on the Senate floor.
@Jzikah’s Amazon page: http://amzn.to/3tUTM6Y
Day FOUR: C-SPAN: Senate Impeachment Trial Day 4, Part 1 http://bit.ly/3rXW1pf
// 2/12/2021
Former President Donald Trump’s defense lawyers made their case that Mr. Trump was innocent of charges of inciting an insurrection. They compared speeches by Democrats and others to the former president’s remarks in their defense, and stated that “the article of impeachment now before the Senate is an unjust and blatantly unconstitutional act of political vengeance.”
Day Four: C-SPAN: Senate Impeachment Trial Day 4, Part 2 http://bit.ly/3ddmmeG
// After a recess, Former President Donald Trump’s defense continued to make their case that Mr. Trump was innocent of charges of inciting an insurrection. In this portion of the impeachment trial, attorney Bruce Castor spoke.
Day Four: C-SPAN: Senate Impeachment Trial Day 4, Q&A http://bit.ly/3jLkwD0
// In this portion of the second impeachment trial of former President Trump, senators asked questions of both the House managers and Mr. Trump’s defense lawyers. Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) then announced that Capitol Police Officer Eugene Goodman would be receiving the Congressional Gold Medal, due to his actions during the January 6 riots.
Day FIVE: C-SPAN: Senate Impeachment Trial Day 5 http://bit.ly/3b2haHL
// 2/13/2021
The Senate acquits former President Trump of inciting an insurrection, 57-43. Earlier, the House managers and the defense made closing arguments. Also, House Manager Raskin (D-MD) read a written statement from Rep. Herrera Beutler (R-WA).
● Majority Leader Schumer on Impeachment Acquittal of Former President Trump http://bit.ly/2OFAT8V
// Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) delivered remarks after the Senate voted to acquit former President Trump, 57-43. Seven Republicans joined all Democrats in voting to convict Mr. Trump.
● Minority Leader McConnell on Impeachment Acquittal of Former President Trump http://bit.ly/3djH5NM
// Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) delivered remarks after the Senate voted to acquit former President Trump, 57-43. Seven Republicans joined all Democrats in voting to convict Mr. Trump.
@Jzikah’s Amazon page: http://amzn.to/3tUTM6Y
Twitter Threads
⭕ 9 Feb 2021 Impeachment #2: Day 1
💙 🧵 RT @atrupar Rep. Raskin’s opening impeachment trial statement: “Their argument is that if you commit an impeachable offense in your last few weeks in office, you do it with constitutional impunity.” 📌 https://twitter.com/atrupar/status/1359206921039974406?s=20
⋙ 🐣 RT @atrupar Here is the entire video timeline of the January 6 insurrection as presented by the House impeachment managers 💽 https://twitter.com/atrupar/status/1359216739054190593?s=20/photo/1
⭕ 10 Feb 2021 Impeachment #2: Day 2
🔄 💙🐣🧵 RT @jentaub It’s on. Day 2 of the Trump Impeachment Trial 2.0. February 10, 2021. We will have a dinner break at 6 p.m. ¤ 1/ 📌 https://twitter.com/jentaub/status/1359548695038087169?s=20
🔄 💙🐣🧵 RT @atrupar Raskin: “This case is much worse than someone who falsely shouts fire in a crowded theater. It’s more like like a case where the town fire chief, who’s paid to put out fires, sends a mob not to yell fire in a crowded theater, but to actually set the theater on fire.”
🔄 💙 WaPo: See all the evidence presented in Trump’s impeachment trial http://wapo.st/3qeb1ii
@Jzikah’s Amazon page: http://amzn.to/3tUTM6Y
⭕ 11 Feb 2021 Impeachment #2: Day 3
🔄 💙🧵 RT @jentaub 🇺🇸 It’s on. Day 3. The Trial of Donald Trump 2.0 continues at 12:04 p.m. on February 11, 2021 📌 https://twitter.com/jentaub/status/1359911216588685317?s=20
// Defense
🔄 💙🧵 RT @atrupar The Thursday installment of Trump’s #ImpeachmentTrial begins with a Baked Alaska clip 📌 https://twitter.com/atrupar/status/1359914413709492232?s=20
⭕ 12 Feb 2021 Impeachment #2: Day 4
🔄 💙 🧵 RT @jentaub We have begun. It’s Day 4 of the Trump Impeachment Trial 2.0. The defense is putting on their case. The first lawyer is Van Der Veen. 📌 https://twitter.com/jentaub/status/1360274181510807556?s=20
@Jzikah’s Amazon page: http://amzn.to/3tUTM6Y
🔄 💙 🧵 RT @atrupar “Lord, infuse them with the spirit of nonpartisan patriotism” — Senate Chaplain Barry Black’s prayer begins the Trump defense portion of the #ImpeachmentTrial 📌 https://twitter.com/atrupar/status/1360275280775028740?s=20
⋙ 🔄 💙 🧵 RT @atrupar [Q&A] Lindsey Graham, Kevin Cramer, and Roger Marshall use an impeachment trial question to own the libs 📌 https://twitter.com/atrupar/status/1360337066215804930?s=20
⭕ 13 Feb 2021 Impeachment #2: Day 5
🔄 💙 🧵 RT @jentaub Day 5 of the Donald Trump Impeachment Trial 2.0. February 13, 2021. Wonderful! They are going to debate whether to subpoena witnesses and documents ¤ 1/ 📌 https://twitter.com/jentaub/status/1360605971198967809?s=20
🔄 💙 🧵 RT @atrupar “Lord, touch and move them to believe that end does not justify the means” — Senate Chaplain Barry Black’s prayer begins the Saturday portion of the #ImpeachmentTrial 📌 https://twitter.com/atrupar/status/1360607971055656962?s=20
@Jzikah’s Amazon page: http://amzn.to/3tUTM6Y
⚖️ House Committee Hearings on the Jan 6, 2021 Insurrection ⚖️
Day 1: June 9, 2022: Overview
💙 ⚖️ 🧵 Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the United States Capitol https://january6th.house.gov
💙 ⚖️ 🧵 RT @jentaub Here we go ¤ The first public hearing of the January 6th Committee. Chair Thompson begins with his personal history and says each committee member has one thing in common “we swore the same oath . . to defend the Constitution against all enemies, foreign and domestic.”
📌 💽 https://twitter.com/jentaub/status/1535050380429516801?s=20/photo/1
💙 ⚖️ 🧵 RT @atrupar Bennie Thompson begins January 6 hearing: “I’m from a part of the country where people justified the actions of slavery, the Ku Klux Klan, and lynching. I’m reminded of that dark history as I hear voices today try to justify the actions of the insurrectionists on January 6, 2021”
📌 https://twitter.com/atrupar/status/1535050790720634891?s=20/photo/1
💙 ⚖️ 💽 CSPAN: First Open Testimony Before January 6 Committee http://bit.ly/3zynEvU
// After months of closed door investigations, the House January 6 Committee held its first hearing with public testimony about what transpired-and why-during the assault on the U.S. Capitol.
Day 2: June 13, 2022: “The Big Lie”
💙 ⚖️ 🧵 RT @jentaub Here we go. Day 2 of the January 6th Committee Hearings gaveled in late at 10:46 am EDT. /1
📌 https://twitter.com/jentaub/status/1536359652514213888?s=20
💙 ⚖️ 🧵 RT @atrupar The second January 6 hearing begins with Liz Cheney talking about how Trump listened to advice from “an apparently inebriated Rudy Giuliani”
📌 https://twitter.com/atrupar/status/1536361664601374721?s=20
💙 ⚖️ 💽 CSPAN: Second Hearing on Investigation of Capitol Attack http://bit.ly/39jgMrH
// The “Big Lie”; The House committee looking into the Jan. 6 attack at the Capitol held its second hearing with witness testimony to make public the committee’s findings after a year of investigations.
Day 3: June 16, 2022: “Mike Pence”
💙 ⚖️ 🧵 RT @jentaub Here we go. Day 3 of the January 6 Committee hearing ¤ Focus today is on the pressure campaign on VP Pence to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election. “We are fortunate for Mr. Pence’s courage” says Chair Bennie Thompson. ¤ “But the danger hasn’t receded.” ¤ 1/
📌 https://twitter.com/jentaub/status/1537481664821174278?s=20
💙 ⚖️ 🧵 RT @atrupar The third January 6 hearing gets underway with a clip of Greg Jacob, former counsel to Pence, telling the committee that John Eastman admitted in front of Trump on January 4, 2021, that the pressure campaign against Pence violated the law
📌 https://twitter.com/atrupar/status/1537483292886601729?s=20
💙 ⚖️ 🧵 RT @MSNBC LIVE BLOG: The House Jan. 6 committee returns today for a third public hearing focused on VP Pence. Follow along as we break down key moments.
📌 https://twitter.com/MSNBC/status/1537449714676793345?s=20
💙 ⚖️ 💽 CSPAN: Third Hearing on Investigation of Capitol Attack http://bit.ly/3xx77WC President Trump’s Campaign to Influence Vice President Pence
// 6/16/2022; The January 6 Committee held its third public hearing focusing on former President Trump’s efforts to convince former Vice President Pence to not certify the 2020 election results.
Day 4: June 21, 2022: “Fake Electors”
💙 ⚖️ 🧵 RT @atrupar Bennie Thompson begins the fourth January 6 hearing by saying: “The lie hasn’t gone away. It’s corrupting our democratic institutions. People who believe that lie are now seeking positions of public trust.”
📌 https://twitter.com/atrupar/status/1539295123107991554?s=20
💙 ⚖️ 🧵 RT @kyledcheney NEW: Trump’s plan to seize power on Jan. 6 depended on state legislatures adopting alternate electors. He leaned heavily on state and local officials to do that while his team of lawyers — Eastman et al — developed a fringe legal theory to back the push.
📌 https://twitter.com/kyledcheney/status/1539201863702261760?s=20
💙 ⚖️ 🧵 RT @jentaub Joining @MaryLTrump for today’s January 6 hearing, Live now
📌 https://twitter.com/jentaub/status/1539289189920948224?s=20
💙 ⚖️ 🧵 RT @MSNBC LIVE BLOG: Day 4 of the House Jan. 6 Committee’s public hearings begins at 1pm ET. Follow along for live updates as we break down key moments.
📌 https://twitter.com/MSNBC/status/1539262716677918721?s=20
💙 ⚖️ 💽 CSPAN: Fourth Hearing on Investigation of Capitol Attack http://bit.ly/3OhikBF President Trump’s Campaign to Influence Vice President Pence
// 6/21/2022; The January 6 Committee held its fourth public hearing to outline findings after a year of investigating the Capitol attack in 2021.
Day 5: June 23, 2022: “Department of Justice”
💙 ⚖️ 🧵 RT @atrupar Cheney begins the fifth January 6 committee hearing by saying a focus will be an unsigned draft letter Trump and Jeffrey Clark wanted the DOJ to send to Georgia officials citing known lies to urge them to convene a special session to approve a fake set of electors
📌 https://twitter.com/atrupar/status/1540050703128862721?s=20
💙 ⚖️ 🧵 RT @MSNBC LIVE BLOG: The fifth public hearing of the House Jan. 6 committee begins at 3pm ET. Follow along as we break down key moments.
📌 https://twitter.com/MSNBC/status/1540018644121427968?s=20
💙 ⚖️ 🧵 😆 RT @emptywheel Spouse, listening to his first bit of the Jan6 hearings, of Liz Cheney’s promise we’ll hear about what Trump did on 1/6: Is that called foreshadowing? ¤ Me, lit PhD: She’s making herself the omniscient narrator.
📌 https://twitter.com/emptywheel/status/1540049823365218306?s=20
💙 ⚖️ 💽 CSPAN: Fifth Hearing on Investigation of Capitol Attack http://bit.ly/3tX3gkK
// 6/23/2022; The January 6 Committee holds a fifth public hearing on the alleged pressure campaign by Trump administration officials on the Justice Department to help overturn the 2020 election results.
Day 6: June 28, 2022: “Cassidy Hutchinson”
💙 ⚖️ 🧵 RT @atrupar we’re underway with the special June 28 hearing of the January 6 committee. Yes, Fox News is taking it live.
📌 https://twitter.com/atrupar/status/1541829781385248771?s=20
💙 ⚖️ 🧵 RT @MSNBC LIVE BLOG: The Jan. 6 committee holds a last-minute public hearing at 1pm ET today, which will include testimony from a former top aide to White House chief of staff Mark Meadows. Follow along as we break down key moments.
📌 https://twitter.com/MSNBC/status/1541789726960750593?s=20
💙 ⚖️ 🧵 RT @jentaub Wow! On January 2 Rudy told Cassidy Hutchinson Trump and team were going to the Capitol on the 6th. Cassidy asked her boss about it and he said “There’s a lot going on Cass. Things might get real real bad.” ¤ She said today, “That was the first moment I remember feeling scared.”
📌 https://twitter.com/jentaub/status/1541834209265963012?s=20
💙 ⚖️ 🧵 RT @emptywheel This woman is 26. She’s about to provide really damaging testimony about one of the most dangerous men in America.
📌 https://twitter.com/emptywheel/status/1541829534248566784?s=20
💙 ⚖️ 🧵 RT @lrozen J6 hearing starting, featuring Cassidy Hutchinson, former special assistant to Trump and aide to White House chief of staff Mark Meadows
📌 https://twitter.com/lrozen/status/1541829799169122308?s=20
💙 ⚖️ 💽 CSPAN: Sixth Hearing on Investigation of Capitol Attack http://bit.ly/3bp657u
// 6/28/2022; Cassidy Hutchinson, former senior aide to former White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows, testified that President Trump said, “You know, I don’t even care that they have weapons. They aren’t here to hurt me.” Her testimony came during the January 6 Committee hearing on the investigation of the attack on the U.S. Capitol. This is the sixth in a series of hearings – after months of closed-door investigations – detailing the committee findings on the January 6 attack. Ms. Hutchinson shared her experiences of the days leading up to and after the attack, including President Trump’s alleged altercation with Secret Service in the back of the presidential limo because the Secret Service refused the president’s demands to go to the Capitol after his rally speech.
Day 7: July 12, 2022: “Assembling the Mob”
💙 ⚖️ 🧵 RT @atrupar Liz Cheney begins the July 12 hearing of the January 6 committee with this: “President Trump is a 76 year old man. He is not an impressionable child. Just like everyone else in our country, he is responsible for his own actions and his own choices.”
📌 https://twitter.com/atrupar/status/1546906042927353857?s=20
💙 ⚖️ 🧵 RT @MSNBC LIVE: Jan. 6 Committee holds seventh public hearing, focused on the role far-right extremist groups Proud Boys and Oath Keepers played in Capitol attack. Get expert analysis in real-time on our live blog http://msnbc.com/jan6hearings
📌 https://twitter.com/MSNBC/status/1546903393297465344?s=20
💙 ⚖️ 🧵 RT @emptywheel And we’re off! ¤ “We settle our differences at the ballot box.” ¤ [Note: I’m going to break off at 2 to cover some live hearings.]
📌 https://twitter.com/emptywheel/status/1546903190574071808?s=20
💙 ⚖️ 🧵 RT @jentaub Pat Cipollone agreed that Donald Trump should have conceded the election at some point and time (at least, apparently on December 14 when Electoral College met).b
📌 https://twitter.com/jentaub/status/1546909222935445509?s=20
💙 ⚖️ 🧵 RT @ECMcLaughlin Live tweet of today’s January 6th hearing is right here. ⬇️⬇️⬇️
📌 https://twitter.com/ECMcLaughlin/status/1546902951687467008?s=20
💙 ⚖️ 💽 CSPAN: Seventh Hearing on Investigation of Capitol Attack http://bit.ly/3P2quy5
// 7/12/2022; January 6 Committee Vice Chair Rep. Liz Cheney (R-WY) said that former President Trump “tried to call a witness in our investigation. A witness you have not yet seen in these hearings,” and that the matter has been reported to the Justice Department. The revelation came as Rep. Cheney delivered her closing statement during the January 6 Committee hearing on the investigation of the attack on the U.S. Capitol. This is the seventh in a series of hearings – after months of closed-door investigations – detailing the committee findings on the January 6 attack. Testifying before the committee was Jason Van Tatenhove, the former spokesperson for the extremist group the Oath Keepers, who said the group is a “violent militia” and “the best illustration for what the Oath Keepers are happened January 6th when we saw that stacked military formation going up the stairs of our Capitol.” Also testifying was Stephen Ayres, who pled guilty to breaching the U.S. Capitol.
Day 8: July 21, 2022: “Dereliction of Duty”
💙 ⚖️ 🧵 RT @atrupar Liz Cheney begins the January 6 committee’s primetime July 21 hearing by announcing more hearings are coming in September
📌 https://twitter.com/atrupar/status/1550272235709296640?s=20
💙 ⚖️ 🧵 RT @ECMcLaughlin Livetweet of tonight’s 1/6 hearing will be right here.
⬇️⬇️⬇️
📌 https://twitter.com/ECMcLaughlin/status/1550260159783378944?s=20
💙 ⚖️ 🧵 RT @MollyJongFast Letsssssssss gooooo
📌 https://twitter.com/MollyJongFast/status/1550270058752102400?s=20
💙 ⚖️ 🔲 RT @MaryLTrump Join me and @JohnFugelsang @NormOrnstein @cmclymer @AdamParkhomenko @jentaub @georgehahn @BrianKarem @WajahatAli watching the hearings NOW
📌 https://twitter.com/MaryLTrump/status/1550272287772798976?s=20
💙 ⚖️ 💽 CSPAN: Eighth Hearing on Investigation of Capitol Attack https://tinyurl.com/36ea45sh
// 7/21/2022; “For the weeks between the November election and January 6, Donald Trump was a force to be reckoned with,” said January 6 Committee Chair Rep. Bennie Thompson (D-MS), later adding, “and then he stopped. For 187 minutes on January 6th, this man of unbridled destructive energy could not be moved.” His remarks came as he delivered his opening statement during the January 6 Committee hearing on the investigation of the attack on the U.S. Capitol. This is the eighth in a series of public hearings – after months of closed-door investigations – detailing the committee findings on the January 6 attack. The chair went on to say if there is no accountability for January 6th, “I fear that we will not overcome the ongoing threat to our democracy.” During her closing testimony, Vice Chair Rep. Liz Cheney (R-WY) touched on the former president’s supporters, saying, “he is preying on their patriotism. He is preying on their sense of justice. And on January 6th, Donald Trump turned their love of country … ”
Day 9: October 13, 2022: “Summary and Subpoena”
💙 ⚖️ 🧵 RT @atrupar Follow this thread for video highlights from what is likely to be the final January 6 committee hearing
📌 https://twitter.com/atrupar/status/1580603168404037635?s=20
💙 ⚖️ 🧵 RT @emptywheel Spouse, as Liz Cheney says they may make criminal referrals: Thank you Liz Cheney, you read my mind. [He had just asked if they could do that.]
📌 https://twitter.com/emptywheel/status/1580606914505080834?s=20
💙 ⚖️ 🧵 RT @ TomDreisbach [NPR] Here we go: The latest @January6thCmte hearing has started. ¤ NPR’s livestream is available here:
📌 💽 https://twitter.com/TomDreisbach/status/1580605465796304901?s=20/photo/1
💙 ⚖️ 🧵 RT @tomlobianco [YahooNews] “Good afternoon, and may god bless the United States of America,” House Jan 6 Chair Bennie Thompson says in opening statement of #January6thHearings
📌 https://twitter.com/tomlobianco/status/1580605071498174471?s=20
💙 ⚖️ 🧵 RT @scottwongDC DAY 9 of the Jan. 6 hearings about to get underway. Follow along on our @NBCNews live blog here for all the updates: https://tinyurl.com/2wf2eyt3
📌 https://twitter.com/scottwongDC/status/1580603641878425602?s=20
💙 ⚖️ 🧵 🐣 RT @SethAbramson (📢) LIVE THREAD: This thread is a live-tweet of today’s House January 6 Committee hearing. I’m an attorney, journalist, and historian who has been contacted by the Committee and whose January 6–focused substack, PROOF, the Committee has cited. I hope you will RETWEET and follow.
📌 https://twitter.com/SethAbramson/status/1580574750581018626?s=20
By @AshaRangappa_
Day 9: July 21, 2022: “Summary and Resolution”
💙 ⚖️ 💽 CSPAN : Ninth Hearing on Investigation of Capitol Attack https://tinyurl.com/3cb42ubb
// 10/13/2022; January 6 Committee Vice Chair Liz Cheney (R-WY) offered a resolution to issue a subpoena to hear from former President Trump regarding the January 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol. She said, “We are obligated to seek answers directly from the man who set this all in motion, and every American is entitled to those answers so we can act now to protect our republic.” Her resolution came during the January 6 Committee hearing on the investigation of the attack on the U.S. Capitol after committee Chair Bennie Thompson (D-MS) said members wanted to hear from the former president because he “is required to answer for his actions.” The committee members recounted prior evidence in lockstep with newly-obtained evidence, such as the Secret Service’s knowledge of a planned attack on the U.S. Capitol prior to January 6. They also shared never-before-seen video of members of Congress seeking safety and asking for help during the attack. .
Day 10: Dec 19, 2022: “Indictment Referrals and Adjournment”
💙 ⚖️ 🧵 RT @atrupar The final January 6 committee hearing is about to begin. Follow along for a video thread.
📌 https://twitter.com/atrupar/status/1604899834191876096?s=20
💙 ⚖️ 🧵 RT @axios The Jan. 6 select committee’s final public meeting is underway.
Follow this thread for updates. 👇
📌 https://twitter.com/axios/status/1604901456091484163?s=20
💙 ⚖️ 🧵 RT @MacFarlaneNews Standing by for our CBS News special report on the final public meeting of House Select Jan 6 Cmte. And votes on criminal referrals. Starts at 1pm eastern
📌 https://twitter.com/MacFarlaneNews/status/1604897048230187014?s=20
💙 ⚖️ 💽 CSPAN: Final Hearing on U.S. Capitol Attack https://tinyurl.com/2xt5j77b
// 12/19/2022; The January 6 Committee holds its final public hearing on the attack of the U.S. Capitol.
💙 ⚖️ 📔 This❗️⋙ 📔 Lawfare: Jan. 6 Select Committee Documents https://tinyurl.com/44fxvfjk
⋙ Lawfare: Jan. 6 Select Committee Document: Executive Summary [pdf] https://tinyurl.com/42p4bkx7 154p
⋙ Lawfare: Jan. 6 Committee Issues Final Report https://tinyurl.com/4867dtra 845p
⋙ Lawfare: Jan. 6 Committee Releases Witness Interview Transcripts https://tinyurl.com/43f5k7y6
by @ErikAukan
💙 🔄 📔 MFA of Ukraine (Official): War in Ukraine: Russia Invaded Ukraine https://war.ukraine.ua
// Reports, statistics, articles
💙 🔄 RealContextNews, Brian Frydenborg: TRUMP-RUSSIA SAGA: Overview https://tinyurl.com/mr2783rc
// updated index; The biggest scandal in American history.
💙 Ukraine Twitter List: https://twitter.com/i/lists/157259218?s=20
💙 Ukraine War Twitter List: https://twitter.com/i/lists/1545071393397784576?s=20
💙 Key War Accounts: @bayraktar_1love @ChuckPfarrer @DefenseU @DefMon3 @NOELReports @TheStudyOfWar @WarintheFuture @warmonitor3 @wartranslated
💙 Tim White’s awesome log: Search @TWMCLtd ✛ “Day 999” or use dates: https://twitter.com/search-advanced
(The War started on 2/24/2022)
⭕ 31 Dec 2023
🐣📋 RT @MatthewLauseng The world is laughing hysterically at Americans for even considering Donald Trump as president. Especially since his 90+ felony indictment counts along with the fact every former member of Trump cabinet has publicly admitted he’s insane and is unfit for the presidency.
[TextLink:] https://x.com/MatthewLauseng/status/1741493026747203841?s=20/photo/1
[Txt:] BY THE END OF HIS ONE DISASTROUS TERM, TRUMP HAD:
● ADDED S7.8 TRILLION TO THE DEBT;
● INCREASED THE TRADE DEFICIT 40%;
● SEVERELY DAMAGED OUR INTERNATIONAL REPUTATION;
● WANTED US OUT OF NATO;
● WANTED PUTIN BACK IN THE G-7;
● DIVIDED THE COUNTRY;
● LOST 2.9 MILLION JOBS, FACEBOOK, TWITTER, THE HOUSE, THE SENATE AND THE WHITE HOUSE; AND,
● KILLED MORE AMERICANS THAN HITLER.
🐣 RT @PopularLiberal BOOM: It’s incredible when someone shifts from Republican to Democrat after realizing they were conned. This Patriot slams MAGA supporters for having “Trump Durain syndrome” (TDS), NOT Democrats. He will endorse President Biden with a receipt at the end of the video.
💽 https://x.com/PopularLiberal/status/1741516773076148485?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @mkikukawa46 [On Fox:] WATCH: @econjared46 on the year in review:
✅ No “inevitable” recession
✅ Unemployment below 4% for 22 months in a row
✅ Price of gas below $3.00 in 28 states
✅ Inflation falling to pre-pandemic rate
✅ Wage gains—above inflation
✅ Consumer confidence up
💽 https://x.com/mkikukawa46/status/1741474328112234912?s=20/photo/1
// chyron: “Americans hold unfavorable view of ‘Bidenomics’”
🐣 RT @Maks_NAFO_FELLA [Zelensky:]
Ukrainians are stronger than cold and darkness.
Ukrainians are stronger than intrigues, lies and pain.
Ukrainians are stronger than fear.
Ukrainians are stronger than evil.
Ukrainians are stronger together!
Happy New Year, 2024, Ukraine! ¤ Glory to Ukraine! 🇺🇦
🐣 RT @TeaPainUSA 2023 was the year of indictments. ¤ 2024 will be the year of justice.
🐣 RT @AntiToxicPeople Interesting point: Trump is not arguing in court filings that he is innocent of the dozens of crimes (so far) he is accused of. He is saying he is above *everyone else in America* & allowed to be a criminal.
🐣 RT @davidfrum I’m not sure “Happy new year” is the appropriate greeting to welcome 2024. Instead, I wish all readers a purposeful new year. May you later look back with pride that you left nothing undone to save democracy at home and abroad from Trump and his fellow-travelers.
🐣 RT @front_ukrainian ⚡️Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces of 🇺🇦Ukraine Zaluzhny:
💽 https://x.com/front_ukrainian/status/1741512402972123245?s=20/photo/1
Dear combat brothers and sisters!
The year 2023 is passing.
Another extremely difficult year of our struggle for our land and freedom. It was a year when Ukraine persevered. I survived thanks to you – Ukrainian soldiers and sailors, sergeants and officers. Thanks to each of you!I thank our military for their steadfastness and dedication to the great cause of defending Ukraine. I bow my head to the Ukrainian soldiers who died fighting for the Motherland. They are forever in our hearts.
2024 will not be easy. The fight for freedom and the future of our children continues. I believe that we will pass all tests with dignity and step by step will continue to bring our Victory closer!
Everyone who is currently in battle, at an observation post, conducting reconnaissance or destroying the enemy with a drone. Who holds the blow and strikes it back. Relatives and friends of our soldiers. Happy New Year to everyone who believes in and helps the Armed Forces of Ukraine!
Together we will win!
Glory to the Ukrainian defenders! 🇺🇦
🧵 RT @U24_gov_ua An annual update from @U24_gov_ua ¤ An admin tweet. ¤ For over 19 months we’ve been with you. ¤ And you with us. ¤ Through thick and thin. ¤ Let’s sum this up, everything’s that’s good and bad
🧵1/9👇📌 https://x.com/U24_gov_ua/status/1741530100724548076?s=20
⋙ 🐣 […] RT @U24_gov_ua 🐣 RT @Please #StandWithUkraine.
Stand with light. Stand with @U24_gov_ua. Stand with Ukrainian accounts.
There are people behind them. Grateful people who represent Ukraine and believe in miracles. Believe in yourself. Believe in Ukraine.
Happy New Year!
🐣 RT @ TimothyDSnyder And in the zones they control, Russian occupiers destroy all books in the Ukrainian language.
⋙ 🐣 RT @AKurkov Another library is destroyed by russian shelling in Kherson. It’s over 300 libraries gone now.
🐣 RT @RpsAgainstTrump “Fundamentally a second Trump term could mean the end of American democracy as we know it.”
¤ 💽 https://x.com/RpsAgainstTrump/status/1741536218054095311?s=20/photo/1
In a joint interview with ABC News, Alyssa Farah Griffin, Cassidy Hutchinson, and Sarah Matthews, three conservative former Trump administration officials warned America of the danger of a second Trump term, and pledged to vote for President Biden if Trump is the GOP nominee:
“I’ve never voted for a Democrat in my life, but I think that in this next election, I would put policy aside and choose democracy”
🐣 RT @ProjectLincoln 1ST PLACE 🏆: At last, your favorite ad that showed what a difference President Biden is making in America today as our fearless leader. In at 1st place in #TheAbes category, “Backing Biden” is our fan favorite ad, “American Story”.
💽 https://x.com/ProjectLincoln/status/1741625303863083232?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @ProjectLincoln 2ND PLACE: As we continue to count down your top picks of the year, we’ve come to our Biden ad “Decision” at 2nd place.
💽 https://x.com/ProjectLincoln/status/1741595126974038406?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @ChuckPfarrer PUTIN’S WAR: Russia’s New Year’s Eve bombardment of Ukraine continues, with strikes reported in Kyiv, Kupiansk and Odesa. More than 97% of Russian precision strike munitions are deliberately aimed at civilian population centers, with apartment buildings the most common target.
⋙ 🐣 RT @JayinKyiv Russia now only seeks to destroy ukraine’s apartment buildings. ¤ Can you imagine the savage barbarian brain that would plot out a logistical path to allocate 10% of Russian gdp to do this rather than just build some roads or buy some toilets?
🖼 https://x.com/ChuckPfarrer/status/1741641341296074936?s=20/photo/1
USAToday: Biden fast-tracks work authorization for migrants who cross legally http://tinyurl.com/zjt9stpc “‘It’s a game changer,’ said Kari Lenander, executive director of Border Servant Corps, the nonprofit hosting USCIS in its El Paso migrant logistics center.”
🐣 RT @virtaava Statement by Mr. Nagano Shunsuke, Counsellor, Permanent Mission of Japan to the United Nations ¤ There is no room for misinterpretation for one thing. As the overwhelming majority of the General Assembly have recognized,
⋙ 🐣 RT @virtaava the fact is that this heinous war of aggression was started by Russia. And Ukraine is fighting against it in accordance with the UN Charter to protect its own people, independence, sovereignty, and territorial integrity.
⋙ 🐣 RT @virtaava The sole cause of the current suffering of the Ukrainian people, especially in winter, is Russia’s aggression, which is a flagrant violation of the UN Charter. Nothing more, nothing less.
⭕ 30 Dec 2023
🐣 RT @CatherineBelton Russia has been increasing its efforts to undermine French support for Kyiv — a hidden propaganda front that is part of the war against Ukraine, according to Kremlin documents & interviews with European security officials & far-right political figures.
⋙ WaPo: Russia is working to subvert French support for Ukraine, documents show http://tinyurl.com/mpk84jww
🐣 RT @DanaSan68018976 Remember when Trump disbanded the Pandemic Response Team in 2018…then he called covid19 a hoax.. then when HE caught it..he was flown to Walter Reed Hospital for cutting edge scientific treatment, that we taxpayers paid for? Republicans really don’t care about us.
// SNL sign: “He will kill us all”
🖼 https://x.com/DanaSan68018976/status/1741139778194784285?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @atrupar If Biden is a fascist dictator then words no longer have meaning and we should close up shop, start hunting and gathering for sustenance, and just use grunts and groans to communicate with other humans when necessary, because clearly this society thing sadly didn’t work out.
🐣 RT @sumlenny A reminder that one needs to be extremely careful while reading @POLITICOEurope pieces. They easily get revealed as de facto Russian anti-Ukrainian propaganda.
🐣 RT @mmpadellan Appreciation Post: ¤ I’d like to give real props to the guy who made a substantial difference in America, but often doesn’t get the credit he deserves: President Biden.
¤ https://x.com/mmpadellan/status/1741237713632673928?s=20
Despite facing enormous challenges in a post-pandemic world, he brought us out of the place his predecessor left us in.
trump lost millions of jobs, and badly mismanaged the pandemic, while President Biden got those jobs back and oversaw the end of the pandemic.
Jobs have ALWAYS mattered, and today is no different. The job tally is 14 million under Biden, and that’s a big fucking deal.
What’s that you say? Some of those jobs were lost in the pandemic? Who’s fault was THAT? And people thought we’d never get those back. But we did, so Biden gets the credit.
He signed the largest infrastructure bill in history, as well as a bill to bring semiconductor manufactiring back. Manufacturing is back. That’s huge.
Insulin prices are locked in under $35 per month, and that matters. More Americans have health insurance under the ACA than ever before, and can’t be kicked off due to preexisting conditions.
The inflation rate is down.
Unemployment is down.
Gas prices are down.
Retail sales are up.
Consumer confidence is WAY up.
And the stock market is up.All this during a time when economic experts swore we’d be in a recession.
Is President Biden perfect? No.
Nobody is perfect.
But President Biden is EXACTLY the person we needed at the helm for this moment in time.And he’s not even finished yet.
Let’s FINISH THE JOB. 🙏💪🇺🇸
🧵 RT @MuellerSheWrote NEW: It’s here! Jack Smith has filed his response to the DC Circuit Court of Appeals opposing Trump’s immunity claim. Here is a link to the full filing. Analysis to come.
[CourtDoc:] http://tinyurl.com/yurfxz9d 82p
📌 https://x.com/MuellerSheWrote/status/1741202329351880912?s=20
🐣 RT @ProjectLincoln President Biden is one of the strongest Presidents in history with his support for freedom abroad, fighting for democratic values at home, all while creating one of the strongest economies in American history. It’s not really much of a choice between Biden and Trump.
🐣 RT @JoyceWhiteVance The opening paragraph of the Special Counsel’s brief in the immunity appeal in the Trump prosecution. Words that are meant for history as well as for today.
[TextLink:] https://x.com/JoyceWhiteVance/status/1741186799957868694?s=20/photo/1
[Text:] INTRODUCTION ¤ For the first time in our Nation’s history, a grand jury has charged a former President with committing crimes while in office to overturn an election that he lost. In response, the defendant claims that to protect the institution of the Presidency, he must be cloaked with absolute immunity from criminal prosecution unless the House impeached and the Senate convicted him for the same conduct. He is wrong. Separation-of- powers principles, constitutional text, history, and precedent all make clear that a former President may be prosecuted for criminal acts he committed while in office-including, most critically here, illegal acts toremain in power despite losing an election.
🐣 RT @ProjectLincoln 1ST PLACE 🏆: Finally, the ad that touched audiences by showing what it means to be an American, a beacon of hope for democracy, and why we should be proud of that. 1st place in #TheAbes category, “Fighting Fascism” is overwhelmingly, “Our Flag”.
💽 https://x.com/ProjectLincoln/status/1741262907566944344?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @@allenanalysis PAY ATTENTION, Republican Senator Ron Johnson has openly acknowledged his role in obstructing a border security agreement, stating it was done so Republicans could use the issue as a campaign talking point.
¤ https://x.com/allenanalysis/status/1741294857639874789?s=20
It seems like politicians prioritize their interests over the well-being of the public.
Senator Ron Johnson, who is a member of the Homeland Security Committee, revealed on Fox News’s “The Ingraham Angle” that he has played a key role in delaying a border security deal that is currently being negotiated between Senate Democrats and Republicans.
This agreement is connected to the aid package for Ukraine, which is currently stalled.
The White House and key senators have been discussing this bipartisan deal, and Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer and Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell had previously issued a joint statement indicating that the negotiations were moving forward.
Johnson’s admission suggests that there is a deliberate effort to slow down the process.
🐣 RT @ZelenskyyUa Whatever happens in other countries, whatever political changes or moods, we must have sufficient potential to do our thing, to achieve our goals. ¤ We will be fighting for our influence and for justice for Ukraine, and I am grateful to all the leaders who are assisting us, who have been with us since February 24th and will stand with us in 2024.
💽 https://x.com/ZelenskyyUa/status/1741207297500553338?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @TheStudyofWar Russian officials continued to clearly state that Russia is not interested in negotiating with Ukraine or the West in good faith and intends to achieve its maximalist objectives in Ukraine. (1/2)
🖼 https://x.com/TheStudyofWar/status/1741275528256995333?s=20/photo/1 -4
⋙ 2/ The Kremlin’s recent public rhetoric about its maximalist objectives and imperial designs in Ukraine are permeating the Russian information space. http://isw.pub/UkrWar123023
[TextLink:] https://x.com/TheStudyofWar/status/1741275530274463977?s=20/photo/1
Russian officials continued to clearly state that Russia is not interested in negotiating with Ukraine or the West in good faith and intends to achieve its maximalist objectives in Ukraine. Russian Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs Mikhail Galuzin stated in an interview with Russian state outlet RIA Novosti on December 30 that Russia will agree to a settlement when Ukraine is “neutral, non-aligned, and nuclear-free,” “demilitariz[ed],” and “denazi[fied]” — long-standing Russian demands for Ukraine’s exclusion from NATO and EU membership, the removal of Ukraine’s ability to defend its land and its people, and the replacement of the current elected Ukrainian government with a Kremlin-accepted government.[15] Galuzin also reiterated the Kremlin narrative that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky — and not Russian President Vladimir Putin — is to blame for the absence of negotiations and claimed that Zelensky’s proposed peace plan “has nothing to do with peace” but “justifies] the continuation of hostilities.” Galuzin claimed that Russia has never refused to engage in dialogue with Ukraine, but that Russia has “no choice” but to complete all its “assigned tasks” — Russia’s maximalist objectives — in Ukraine.
The Kremlin’s recent public rhetoric about its maximalist objectives and imperial designs in Ukraine are permeating the Russian information space. A prominent Russian milblogger claimed on December 30 that Western media is disseminating “rumors” about negotiations that would end the war in Ukraine by giving Russia unspecified parts of Ukrainian territory.[16] The milblogger stated that Russia is not interested in such “limited proposals,” suggesting that the milblogger believes that Russia’s war objectives extend beyond its currently occupied territory. The milblogger also claimed that Ukraine is not yet sufficiently demoralized and “exhausted” to accept a “catastrophic capitulation,” suggesting that the milblogger believes that Russia should only accept such a “catastrophic [Ukrainian] capitulation” and is calling on Russia to achieve these maximalist objectives in part through psychological means. Russian sources specifically amplified Deputy Chairperson of the Russian Security Council Dmitry Medvedev’s labelling of Odesa, Dnipro, Kharkiv, Mykolaiv, and Kyiv as “Russian cities” on December 28. The prominent milblogger claimed on December 30 that the war will end when Ukraine allows Russia to take Kharkiv, Mykolaiv, Odesa, and other Ukrainian oblasts. [17] Former Donetsk People’s Republic (DNR) People’s Militia Spokesperson Eduard Basurin claimed on December 30 that Russia’s task for the war in Ukraine was previously “blurry” and “there was no understanding of where [Russian] borders should stop” but Medvedev’s statement makes it clear that Russia has determined that its borders should allow for “complete [Russian] control” of the Black Sea and should include Kyiv.[18] Basurin called Kyiv “the capital of [Russia’s] large empire” and the birthplace of Russian Orthodoxy and the word “Rus” (in reference to Kyivan Rus). Basurin’s statements echo those of Putin, who featured similar claims in his July 2021 “Historical Unity of Russians and Ukrainians” essay and who has recently reverted to narratives about Kyivan Rus as part.
WaPo: Blue collar workers won big in 2023, defying bleak predictions http://tinyurl.com/757ek246 “The year began with a recession forecast but ended with substantial wage growth and record union contracts for hundreds of thousands of workers” //➔ Thank you, Joe Biden!
WaPo: Led by Trump, GOP candidates take polarizing stances on race and history http://tinyurl.com/39dbfz8c “The party’s three leading candidates are speaking about history and race in polarizing and provocative ways that sometimes diverge from or distort the facts”
≣ NYT Report: Where Was the Israeli Military When Hamas Attacked? [multimedia] http://tinyurl.com/54p2byv2 “One general, a reservist who fought that day, said there were many heroes on Oct. 7. But an army only needs heroes, he said, when things have gone wrong.”
🐣 RT @DefenceHQ [UK] Latest Defence Intelligence update on the situation in Ukraine
– 30 December 2023.
[TextLink:] https://x.com/DefenceHQ/status/1741026561258573901?s=20/photo/1
● During the course of 2023, the average daily number of Russian casualties (killed and wounded) in Ukraine has risen by almost 300 per day compared to 2022.
● The increase in daily averages, as reported by the Ukrainian authorities, almost certainly reflects the degradation of Russia’s forces and its transition to a lower quality, high quantity mass army since the partial mobilisation’ of reservists in September 2022. It will likely take Russia five to ten years to rebuild a cohort of highly trained and experienced military units.
● If casualties continue at the current rate through the next year, by 2025 Russia will have sustained over half a million personnel killed and wounded over three years of war. This is compared to the Soviet Union’s 70,000 casualties in the nine-year Soviet-Afghan War.
🐣 RT @GlasnostGone #Ukraine wiped out the entire crew of 98. Russian Black See Fleet press service is quoted as saying that 74 Russian sailors were killed & 27 injured in #Ukraine’s Dec 26 missile attack on Russia’s Novocherkassk landing ship in occupied #Crimea. The attack also sunk the old training ship UTS-150.
🖼 https://x.com/GlasnostGone/status/1741007176196399264?s=20/photo/1 -4
⋙⋙ RFE/RL: Russian Report Says 74 Sailors Died In Ukraine’s Attack On Novocherkassk http://tinyurl.com/4x8s6v72
⋙ 🐣 note, this was a military target, not a school, maternity hospital or an apartment building ¤ Ukr practices warfare: Ru practices war crimes
⭕ 29 Dec 2023
NYT, Tom Friedman: What Is Happening to Our World? http://tinyurl.com/2eb6j58z “Netanyahu has been out to undermine the cornerstone of U.S. Middle East policy for the last three decades — the Oslo framework of two states for two people”
WSJ: Putin and Migrants Ring Out 2023 http://tinyurl.com/39eyvrrt “Washington gridlock is usually a virtue, but not this time. Failure would do great harm to U.S. security at home and abroad.”
// The twin crises grew worse as Washington enjoyed the holidays.
🐣 RT @NoLieWithBTC Every good economic trend that happened under Trump started under Obama. ¤ Trump then wrecked it with his disastrous COVID response, and Biden fixed it.
◕ https://x.com/NoLieWithBTC/status/1740784017182519316?s=20/photo/1 -4
🐣 Call the Senators working to resolve the holdup on the Defense Supplemental. The list is below. They might listen to you!
[TextLink:] https://x.com/Auriandra/status/1741047302930706456?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @ProjectLincoln The Republican party of Trump cannot govern at any level; The MAGA parasite is eating them alive. No one is coming to the rescue who has the courage to tell the truth, only cowards who hide behind the chaos and pretend to look busy.
🐣 RT @2ug2ug 3. Have you ever been interested in which states get jobs and industrial capacity building from Ukraine aid?
🌎 https://x.com/2ug2ug/status/1740892440431915159?s=20/photo/1
😜 RT @ ProjectLincoln 1ST PLACE 🏆: Finally, in 1st place for our “Race to 2nd Place” category, we have “Electile Dysfunction.” We think the title speaks for itself.
💽 https://x.com/ProjectLincoln/status/1740900525384581244?s=20/photo/1
// Ron DeSantis
🐣 RT @mccaffreyr3 MSNBC. 29 Dec 23. Ukraine a vital defense concern for both NATO and U.S. interests. Without EU and US funding Putin crushes Ukraine and moves on to imperil more of Eastern Europe.
💽 https://x.com/mccaffreyr3/status/1740896694345277682?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @cwebbonline One thing you could always tell during Barack Obama’s & Joe Biden’s time in office together and even today — they had tremendous respect for each other and their friendship was real. ¤ That time President Obama surprised Vice President Biden with the Presidential Medal of Freedom, “with distinction”.
💽 https://x.com/cwebbonline/status/1740869336192176245?s=20/photo/1
😜 RT @kelly2277 I think I know what happened in Helsinki… #trumpshithimself #TrumpSmellsBad
🖼 https://x.com/kelly2277/status/1740856799710884028?s=20/photo/1 -3
🐣 RT @Ojeda4America No extra marital affairs, no prostitutes…..he has turned the economy around, brought NATO together to stand up against Russia, CHIPS ACT, PACT ACT, Insulin capped, 14 million jobs, actual INFRASTRUCTURE, he vaccinated America and much much more.
🖼 https://x.com/Ojeda4America/status/1740868461947936916?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @Leeeeenda3 Cost to Taxpayer: About $144,000,000**
*Daytime visits to golf clubs since inauguration, with evidence of playing golf on at least 150 visits. Our last recorded outing was on December 30, 2020.
⋙ TRUMP GOLF COUNT: 298* https://trumpgolfcount.com
// Cost to Taxpayer: About $144,000,000**
*Daytime visits to golf clubs since inauguration, with evidence of playing golf on at least 150 visits. Our last recorded outing was on December 30, 2020. Click on complete data table for a list of Trump’s outings, or view our breakdown of total costs.
** Read about the new GAO report on the cost of Trump’s trips to Mar-a-Lago.
🐣 RT @nexta_tv #US President Joe Biden on Friday demanded Congress “step up” and overcome divisions on sending aid to #Ukraine, saying that a massive #Russian air attack demonstrates that the Kremlin hopes to “obliterate” the pro-Western country.
🐣 RT @StateDept This year, Finland joined @NATO. Sweden will join soon and bring even greater capacity and capability to our defensive Alliance. We are stronger together.
// [Text:] Russia is weaker militarily, economically, and diplomatically. And NATO is bigger, stronger, and more united than at any point in its nearly 75-year history.
🐣 RT @anders_aslund This excellent article debunks the pro-Putin propaganda of the @nytimes. ¤ What a shame that the NYT is following the tradition of Walter Duranty, who denied the artificial Stalin famine Holodomor in Ukraine in 1932-33. If NYT has any honor: Apologize!
💙⋙ Fortune: ‘Parroting Putin’s propaganda’: The business exodus over Ukraine was no Russian bonanza http://tinyurl.com/55mh89nz “With industrial might below that of Chile, Putin’s Russia survives merely by seizing assets. The increasingly state-dominated economy is cannibalizing its own companies to maintain Putin’s war machine.”
// 12/20/2023; by BYJEFFREY SONNENFELD, TYMOFIY MYLOVANOV, NATALIIA SHAPOVAL AND STEVEN TIAN
🐣 RT @U24_gov_ua Today🇷🇺spent $1,27B to destroy our schools, hospitals and homes. Instead of building their own. ¤ It isn’t just a terrorist state — it’s a land of devastation. ¤ 🇺🇦don’t have this kind of money, but we have something better — your everlasting support ❤️ ¤ That’s why we’ll persevere.
BBC: At least 30 killed as ‘biggest Russian air attack’ hits Ukraine http://tinyurl.com/y9unamuc “Russia launched a ‘massive’ attack with 158 drones and missiles – the air force says it has ‘never seen so many locations targeted simultaneously’”
● At least 30 people have been killed and dozens wounded in a wave of Russian strikes across Ukraine, officials say
● Ukraine’s military says Russia launched a “massive” attack with 158 drones and missiles – the air force says it has “never seen so many locations targeted simultaneously”
● Russia “used nearly every type of weapon in its arsenal”, with homes and a maternity hospital hit, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky says
● Cities across Ukraine were attacked, including the capital Kyiv, Lviv in the west, Odesa and Zaporizhzhia in the south, and Dnipro and Kharkiv in the east
● Earlier this week, Ukraine struck a Russian warship in the occupied Crimean port of Feodosia
🐣 RT @ChristopherJM Biden on Russia’s attack: “A stark reminder to the world that, after nearly two years of this devastating war, Putin’s objective remains unchanged. He seeks to obliterate Ukraine and subjugate its people. He must be stopped.” He adds that the stakes “extend far beyond Ukraine.”
[TextLink:] https://x.com/ChristopherJM/status/1740789136108421292?s=20/photo/1
[Text:] DECEMBER 29, 2023
Statement from President Joe Biden on Russia’s Aerial Assault on UkraineOvernight, Russia launched its largest aerial assault on Ukraine since this war began. This massive bombardment used drones and missiles, including missiles with hypersonic capability, to strike cities and civilian infrastructure all across Ukraine. Strikes reportedly hit a maternity hospital, a shopping mall, and residential areas-killing innocent people and injuring dozens more. It is a stark reminder to the world that, after nearly two years of this devastating war, Putin’s objective remains unchanged. He seeks to obliterate Ukraine and subjugate its people. He must be stopped.
In the face of this brutal attack, Ukraine deployed the air defense systems that the United States and our Allies and partners have delivered to Ukraine over the past year to successfully intercept and destroy many of the missiles and drones. The American people can be proud of the lives we have helped to save and the support we have given Ukraine as it defends its people, its freedom, and its independence. But unless Congress takes urgent action in the new year, we will not be able to continue sending the weapons and vital air defense systems Ukraine needs to protect its people. Congress must step up and act without any further delay. The stakes of this fight extend far beyond Ukraine. They affect the entirety of the NATO Alliance, the security of Europe, and the future of the Transatlantic relationship. Putin has not just attempted to destroy Ukraine; he has threatened some of our NATO Allies as well. When dictators and autocrats are allowed to run roughshod in Europe, the risk rises that the United States gets pulled in directly. And the consequences reverberate around the world.
That’s why the United States has rallied a coalition of more than 50 countries to support the defense of Ukraine. We cannot let our allies and partners down. We cannot let Ukraine down. History will judge harshly those who fail to answer freedom’s call.
🐣 RT @Podolyak_M When you keep saying/discussing something about Russia, still trying to prove to yourself that it is nevertheless “a country you can agree on something with”, take a look at this morning in Ukraine.
Over 120 cruise missiles targeting major Ukrainian cities – deliberately fired across Ukraine. Launched for one purpose only – to kill as many civilians and children as possible. To cause damage to the maximum extent. To shed as much Ukrainian blood as they can. There are no more excuses, are there? There are only two models of behavior now. First: continue to watch the deliberate mass attacks/murders in the center of Europe, leisurely saying: “if we stop supporting Ukraine, how quickly will Russia slaughter the civilian population there?” And second: to make it perfectly clear to yourself that Russia must lose, that “Putin’s elite” must definitely be placed in the dock, and therefore you will continue to support Ukraine without any speculations, jointly enhancing its defense capabilities. And although the choice is obvious, it must be reaffirmed in 2024. Unless, of course, you are comfortable watching 120 missiles flying into maternity hospitals, schools, historical centers of Ukrainian cities…
🐣 RT @MuellerSheWrote NEW: The DC Circuit Court of Appeals announces that each party will get 20 minutes to argue in the upcoming January 9th trump immunity appeal, plus a 10 minute rebuttal.
[TextLink:] https://x.com/MuellerSheWrote/status/1740787829809303907?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @IrynaVoichuk The most surreal aspect is that the missile strike on a maternity hospital or a residential building no longer shocks us so much; we realized long ago that russia is capable of such actions. What is truly shocking is that the world continues to permit these atrocities.
🐣 RT @KyivPost ⚡️Ukrainian President #Zelensky visited #Avdiivka in the #Donetsk region, one of the toughest spots of the frontline.
💽 [tr] https://x.com/KyivPost/status/1740767584541421749?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @LukeDCoffey The UK government reacts quickly. Meanwhile the US government moves like pond water.
⋙ 🐣 RT @grantshapps The UK is moving rapidly to bolster Ukraine’s air defence, in the wake of Putin’s murderous air strikes. ¤ Hundreds of British made air defence missiles are being sent to ensure @Ukraine has what it needs to defend itself from Putin’s barbaric bombardment. #SlavaUkraini [att]
🐣 RT @USAmbKyiv Today Russia launched 158 missiles and drones at Kyiv, Kharkiv, Lviv, Odesa, Dnipro, Kherson, & other cities. A maternity center, kindergarten, & shopping mall were hit. The consequence? 26 civilians killed, 120 injured, w/ numbers increasing. Ukraine needs our support now.
🐣 RT @allenanalysis BREAKING. A federal appeals court in Washington, D.C., ruled that former President Donald Trump is not immune from civil lawsuits concerning his role in the January 6, 2021, Capitol riot. // [CourtDoc:] from 12/2
¤ https://x.com/allenanalysis/status/1740777678607695982?s=20
I guarantee that conservative media will find a way to criticize the person who followed the law when making this ruling.
This decision means that three civil lawsuits filed against Trump by Capitol police officers and members of the U.S. Congress can proceed.
The court found that while judicial precedent has established immunity for actions taken in the course of the presidency, this immunity has limits.
It stated that when a President acts outside the functions of the office, he does not continue to enjoy immunity from damages liability just because he is the President.
The court further determined that Trump’s speech at the Ellipse on January 6, 2021, was not within the outer perimeter of a president’s official action and, therefore, not protected by official-act immunity.
The court ruled that Trump was acting in an unofficial, private capacity when he made the speech, subjecting him to civil suits like any private citizen.
The three lawsuits stem from complaints filed by Representative Bennie Thompson (D-MS), Representative Eric Swalwell (D-CA), and Capitol Police officers Blassingame and Hemby.
These lawsuits seek to hold Trump accountable for his actions on the day of the Capitol riot.
The decision by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the DC Circuit is significant as it allows these civil lawsuits to proceed unless Trump appeals to the U.S. Supreme Court and the court decides to take up the matter
This ruling adds another dimension to the legal challenges facing Trump, representing a significant setback for him while being seen as a positive development in the pursuit of justice and accountability for the events of January 6th.
——
Federal appeals court finds Trump is not immune from January 6, 2021, Capitol riot civil lawsuits – JURIST – News http://tinyurl.com/mum7e8a3
🐣 RT @BidenHQ [Ben] Rhodes: All the quiet parts are being said out loud. Trump has called immigrants ‘vermin,’ said the ‘blood of the nation is being poisoned.’ This is the core of every fascist argument
🐣 RT @JohnMMcKee A periodic reminder that in the early 90’s Trump fell head over heels for singer Carla Bruni (later Mrs President Zarkozy). When she rejected him, as good taste demands, he found a young Slovenian model and had her SURGICALLY ALTERED to resemble her. Absolutely no shit, Sherlock.
🔄 https://x.com/JohnMMcKee/status/1191143111860215808?s=20
🔄 BuzzfeedNews (2016): Here’s Why Carla Bruni Once Said Donald Trump Was “Obviously A Lunatic” http://tinyurl.com/4pz6hdrb “In the early 1990s, the New York Post reported that Bruni and Trump were romantically linked”
// 4/5/2016; future President Nicolas Sarkozy’s girlfriend
WaPo: Russia shatters Ukraine holiday season with massive missile barrage http://tinyurl.com/v379jt7a “The scale of the attack confirmed what many in Ukraine have feared for months — that Russia was conserving its missile stocks throughout the fall for massive strikes in the winter”
🐣 RT @McFaul Members of Congress, please listen to @ZelenskaUA and give Ukrainians the capabilities they need to defend themselves. No more delays.
⋙ 🐣 RT @ ZelenskaUA Targets of the massive attack on 🇺🇦 — maternity hospital, shopping center, lyceum, medical facilities, residential buildings… There are no excuses. The dream of Ukrainians — safety and ability to go to school, kindergarten, work, and not hide. 🇺🇦 needs more protection for this.
⭕ 28 Dec 2023
NYT, Steve Rattner: More Than Words: 10 Charts That Defined 2023 http://tinyurl.com/2b9xk4s7 Incomes rose, inflation fell, the stock market surged; jobs are plentiful, the labor force strong; yet Biden scores low marks the on the economy: The Press needs to step up!
◕ https://x.com/Auriandra/status/1742171537342390334?s=20/photo/1
TheGuardian: Biden mulls border crackdown in face of Trump’s migrant-bashing rhetoric http://tinyurl.com/4ddpew2d “President faces pressure from Republican critics and Democratic allies as he struggles to address what both sides agree is a crisis”
★ MedPageToday: Brain Impairment Persists at Least 18 Months After COVID Hospitalization — Cognitive dysfunction similar to that seen in other illnesses of comparable severity http://tinyurl.com/bdzej2zm
🐣 RT @NashIsHereForIt He’s back to writing his own truths…
[TextLink:] https://x.com/NashIsHereForIt/status/1740591767433408831?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @@realDonaldTrump Crooked Joe Biden’s Prosecutorial Thug, Deranged * Jack Smith, who is fighting viciously to damage his corrupt bosses Political Opponent, ME, much as they do in Third World Countries, wants to take away my right of Free Speech. He doesn’t want me to speak about the Rigged and Stollen Presidential Election of 2020, where the Evidence is MASSIVE & CONCLUSIVE, or Nancy Pelosi’s turning down 10,000 troops for January 6th, which would have quickly ended any problems, or why and how the Unselect Committee of Political Thugs & Misfits illegally deleted and destroyed all information and evidence pertaining to their findings, which we were going to use in our defence. Why isn’t Deranged Jack investigating them for this destruction of important documents that were vital to my defense in any upcoming or potential trial? Because under Crooked Joe Biden we have become a two tiered system of INJUSTICE!
BBC: US and Mexico look to stem ‘unprecedented’ migrant flow http://tinyurl.com/ynychtde “The high-level meeting came as pressure grows on the White House to stem the influx of migrants to the US.”
🐣 RT @thehill Biden responds to Trump’s “rot in Hell” comment: “Love your enemies” https://trib.al/m9EOuBd
🖼 https://x.com/thehill/status/1740592492565688463?s=20/photo/1
ABCNews: ‘It is historic’: US poised to see record drop in yearly homicides despite public concern over crime http://tinyurl.com/2ejcvwye “The year is expected to end with over 2,000 fewer murders than in 2022”
◕ https://x.com/Auriandra/status/1740646486432493876?s=20/photo/1
// 2023 murder rate down
🐣 RT @BillPascrell Yes the Constitution forbids insurrection against the government. ¤ Yes donald trump engaged in insurrection against the government. ¤ Yes donald trump is barred from office by the Constitution forever
💽 https://x.com/BillPascrell/status/1740544286658314452?s=20/photo/1
// smartphone tracking animation from Jan6
🐣 RT @MeidasTouch [11/22] Some thoughts on #DiaperDon from @CaslerNoel
💽 https://x.com/MeidasTouch/status/1332362183452151809?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @kyledcheney BREAKING: Maine Secretary of State rules Trump is ineligible to appear on 2024 ballot. 34-page decision:
[CourtDoc:] http://tinyurl.com/3nvhhf5e 34p
⋙ 🐣 excellent exposition by the judge ¤ I hope the SCOTUS affirms that the plain meaning of the Fourteenth Amendment is the correct one, and that those who swore an oath to support the Constitution, and then betrayed it, are prevented from again running for office
🐣📋 RT @FrankLuntz “In the two years since the first U.S. patient received a COVID-19 vaccine, the country’s vaccination program has prevented more than 18 million hospitalizations and more than 3 million deaths.” ¤ Vaccines save lives. [CommonwealthFund:] http://tinyurl.com/4ns88rj5
🐣 RT @harrylitman Chesebro tells Michigan authorities that the Trump campaign planned to fly in phony elector certificates from Michigan and Wisconsin to DC to deliver to Pence in time for 1/6 congressional proceeding
🐣 RT @SteveRattner The American economy beat the odds in 2023, coming in with far lower unemployment, far higher growth, and far better stock performance than projected.
◕ https://x.com/SteveRattner/status/1740388334701097210?s=20/photo/1
⭕ 27 Dec 2023
🐣 RT @MacFarlaneNews Special Counsel Jack Smith court filing this morning:
“Through public statements, filings & argument in hearings before the court, the defense has attempted to inject into this case partisan political attacks & irrelevant & prejudicial issues that have no place in a jury trial”
⋙ 🐣 RT @MacFarlaneNews Jack Smith filing (more):
“The court should not permit the defendant to turn the courtroom into a forum in which he propagates irrelevant disinformation, and should reject his attempt to inject politics into this proceeding.”
💙 [CourtDoc:] http://tinyurl.com/4x752mb3 20p
AP: Trump ballot ban appealed to US Supreme Court by Colorado Republican Party http://tinyurl.com/29u9th6z “Trump himself has said he still plans to appeal the ruling to the nation’s highest court as well”
VOA: US, Mexico Discuss Options to Slow Surge of Migrants at Border http://tinyurl.com/4kfmcx24
🐣 RT @SecBlinken We are announcing this year’s last package of weapons and equipment under previous drawdowns to support the people of Ukraine. We continue to urge Congress to act quickly to advance our national security interests by helping Ukraine defend itself.
NYT: Blinken Meets With Mexico’s President About Surge in Migration at the Border http://tinyurl.com/bdjhftjm
// Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken’s meeting with President Andrés Manuel López Obrador comes as border crossings have reached record numbers and as a migrant caravan heads toward the United States.
🐣 RT @FT Backed by the UK, Japan and Canada, the US has proposed G7 working groups start preparatory work to be ready in time for the second anniversary of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine
⋙ FT: Washington puts forward G7 plan to confiscate $300bn in Russian assets https://on.ft.com/47hHoRR
// Proposal would accelerate preparations in time for a February summit to show solidarity with Ukraine
🐣 RT @DevanaUkraine The collapse of Russia ¤ Did you know that Russia is not a country, but a federation, which even in the Russian constitution is explained as a collection of several states that were actually occupied? Therefore, talk about the disintegration of Russia into small states makes real sense.
¤ 🌎 https://x.com/DevanaUkraine/status/1740208216359710934?s=20/photo/1
Moreover, even the armies of these countries are now fighting as part of the Ukrainian army for the freedom of their own states against Russia.
In addition to the ethnic territories of Ukraine, which occupy several regions of eastern Russia (Bilhorod, Kuban, Kazan, etc.), the following states are occupied within Russia: Dagestan, Chechnya, Buryatia, Karelia, the Republic of Adygea, the Republic of Altai, Bashkortostan, Ingushetia , the Republic of Kabardino-Balkar, Kalmykia, the Republic of Karachay-Cherkessia, Karelia, Komi, Mari El, Mordovia, Yakutia, North Ossetia, Tatarstan, Tyva, Udmurt Republic, Khakassia, Chuvash Republic… Many of them were occupied as a result of the war already after 1991. In addition, Russia has an occupied part of Georgia (Abkhazia, Ossetia), an occupied part of Moldova (Transnistria) and an occupied part of Ukraine (Crimea and part of Donbas).
St. Petersburg is a former city of Sweden, if I am not mistaken, the North of Russia is the occupied lands of Finland, Russia also occupied the territories of China and Japan. And, if all countries signed the recognition of 1991, and Russia decided to violate the treaty and attack once again, justifying it with a certain segment of history, then don’t we all together have the right to take away our lands from Russia, because they belonged to us before and give freedom to these peoples, who live under Russian occupation?
Russia also planned and even started the occupation of Belarus, Kazakhstan, Tatarstan and others in a non-military way, because Russian representatives are in power there – similar to those who are now sitting in Europe and lobbying for Russian interests, betraying their own people. Since Ukraine was the brain and the main state of the USSR – Russia, after receiving Ukraine, would become extremely powerful and could wage war against all of NATO on an equal footing, so Russia had plans to capture Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, Finland as a first step. And Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Slovenia, Romania, Moldova, Bulgaria and Georgia as a second step. That is why Russia needs Russian politicians there who would support pro-Russian sentiments in society and prepare everything for the occupation. After the occupation of all Slavic states, Russia planned to capture all of Europe, and then Asia. Communist China, North Korea – they are like dictator brothers for Russia. Perhaps there would not be a war, but a poisonous dictator and a new leader – a puppet of the Kremlin, who would unite the countries without war. And after that the war against the USA, if not before.
Everyone who knows Russia understands this. Ask the politicians of the Baltic states, ask the Slavic states, ask the Caucasian states. And even look at Russia’s allies – Kazakhstan is starting to go against Russia, even though it cannot, Lukashenko gave signals that he is against Russia and is a hostage of Putin and cannot decide anything, he is being forced. Armenia withdrew from the alliance with Russia in time after Russia showed that it could not support its allies. Yes, Russia failed to capture Ukraine and Ukraine is giving a powerful fight to Russia, destroying Russian military potential, but what would happen if Russia could? The war would already be at your home. 2024 will definitely be the last year in this war, because Ukraine will not last much longer. It is necessary to win this year and do everything for it, give the maximum already. Do not plan a war 5 years ahead, but think how to win already! And I will repeat again that peace negotiations are not an option – there is no treaty that Russia would not violate. And peace negotiations were held in all the states that Russia attacked, including in Ukraine in 1918. Russia attacked again in the same year. And didn’t Dagestan, Chechnya, and Georgia also have two wars each, because Russia lost the first, but won the second?
🖼 KyivIndependent: Ukraine’s 2023 in photos http://tinyurl.com/mtk3cmzh
🐣 RT @NBCPolitics Special counsel Jack Smith files a motion in former President Trump’s federal election interference case, seeking to block him from making political arguments and referring to conspiracy theories during the trial.
⋙ NBCNews: Special counsel Jack Smith seeks to block Trump from making ‘political attacks’ during trial http://tinyurl.com/mpbfyeck
// Smith also asked the court to prohibit Trump from blaming law enforcement for the attack on the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.
🐣 RT @2ug2ug At the end of this thread is a link to a New York Times opinion essay by Serge Schmemann, a former Times Moscow bureau chief. ¤ I think the most interesting things are the readers’ comments. TLDR; people are smarter than we sometimes fear.
⋙ NYT: Ukraine Doesn’t Need All Its Territory to Defeat Putin http://tinyurl.com/cajc84uc
🐣 RT @JoeBiden It was about slavery.
⋙ 🐣 RT @BidenHQ Asked what caused the Civil War, Nikki Haley refuses to mention slavery: “What do you want me to say about slavery? Next question.”
💽 https://x.com/BidenHQ/status/1740199494380118313?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @SecBlinken As we made clear in Mexico City today, we are committed to partnering with Mexico to address our shared challenges, including managing unprecedented irregular migration in the region, reopening key ports of entry, and combating illicit fentanyl and other synthetic drugs.
🐣 RT @ProjectLincoln1ST PLACE 🏆: Finally, the ad that really triggered him. All of our ads are meant to piss the orange tyrant off but this one sent him on a Truth Social rampage, much to our delight. In at 1st place in #TheAbes category, “Inmate #P01135809” is our fan favorite ad, “Senile.”
💽 https://x.com/ProjectLincoln/status/1740175734151500167?s=20/photo/1
NYT: The Times Sues OpenAI and Microsoft Over A.I. Use of Copyrighted Work http://tinyurl.com/muj3p6zb //➔ Not only should sources used by AI be reimbursed, but users should have access to the sources: AI uses the hard work of human sources who should be referenced
// Millions of articles from The New York Times were used to train chatbots that now compete with it, the lawsuit said
📋 MSNBC, Simon Rosenberg: Biden’s 2024 chances are much stronger than people realize http://tinyurl.com/jdsuevvv “Two things have happened to Trump since 2020 that are going to make it very hard for him to win in 2024”
First, President Joe Biden has kept his central promise in the 2020 election: that he would lead the nation to the other side of Covid, successfully. The pandemic has receded. Our economic recovery has been better than any other G7 nation. GDP grew at an annual rate of 4.9% last quarter, and more than 3% for the Biden presidency. We have the best job market since the 1960s and the lowest uninsured rate in U.S. history. The Dow Jones broke 37,000 this month for the first time. Wage growth, new business formation and prime-age labor participation rates are all at historically elevated levels. Prices fell — yes, fell — last month. Rents are softening, and gas prices and crime rates are falling. Domestic oil and renewable production are at record levels. The annual deficit, which exploded under Trump, is trillions less today.
Consumer sentiment has risen sharply in recent weeks, and measures of life, job and income satisfaction are remarkably high. There is no doubt that recent years have been hard — Covid, an insurrection at the Capitol, the Russian invasion of Ukraine, repeated OPEC price hikes, global and domestic inflation — but it is increasingly clear that America is getting to the other side of this challenging period, and are in a far better place than when President Biden took office. …
In both 2022 and 2023, Democrats prevented the historical down ballot struggle of the party in power and had two remarkably successful elections. In the 2022 midterms, Democrats’ statewide margins were greater than the 2020 presidential margins in Arizona, Colorado, Georgia, Michigan, Minnesota, New Hampshire and Pennsylvania — all recent battleground states. That showing led the party to pick up a Senate seat, four state legislative chambers and two governorships, and helped keep the House of Representatives close, making it far more likely Republicans lose it in 2024.
This year, Democrats flipped a Supreme Court seat in Wisconsin; defeated a six-week abortion ban in Ohio; kept the Virginia state house, debunking the idea that Republicans could hide behind a 15-week abortion ban; and took state legislative seats, municipalities and school board seats across the country. Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear, a Democrat, grew his margin of victory from 2019, and Republicans lost mayoral elections in Colorado Springs, Colorado, and Jacksonville, Florida, two of the largest GOP-controlled cities in the country. And in over three dozen state legislative special elections around the country, Democrats outperformed 2020 – an election we won by 4.5 percentage points — by an average of 5 percentage points.
While in 2022, Republicans could point to gains in New York and California to offset their losses in the battleground states, there were no places in 2023 where they outperformed expectations. A blue wave washed across the U.S. in 2023, and this ongoing strong performance of the Democratic Party in election after election, in all parts of the country, should fill Biden’s supporters with confidence.
Finally, while Democrats keep winning, conventional wisdom continues to overly discount Trump’s historic baggage and MAGA’s repeated electoral failures. Despite these repeated failures, Republicans are on the cusp of nominating Trump again, who this time is an even more degraded and dangerous version of MAGA than he was in 2020.
Two things have happened to Trump since 2020 that are going to make it very hard for him to win in 2024 — the stripping away of women’s reproductive rights, and his attempt to overturn the 2020 election and end American democracy for all time. Additionally, this year courts have already determined that he sexually abused journalist E. Jean Carroll in a department store; oversaw a yearslong financial fraud; and led a party-wide effort, involving hundreds of Republican leaders and thousands of willing allies, to overturn the last election, culminating in a violent attack on Congress.
Democrats will be able to argue that no one is more responsible for overturning Roe v. Wade than Trump; that his mishandling of classified documents is to blame for the most serious security breach in American history; that in concert with Russian President Vladimir Putin he will end the global liberal order that has brought America and the world unprecedented prosperity and peace; that he supports more dead kids in schools, a faster warming planet, lost health insurance for tens of millions of Americans and the end of American democracy for all time. Trump represents an unprecedented threat to the country, is even more extreme than 2020, and has, in political parlance, the highest “negatives” of any candidate perhaps in our history. It is going to be very hard for him to win next year.
For all these reasons, as we head into 2024, I am optimistic that Joe Biden and the Democrats will once again beat Donald Trump, and hopefully, this time, send MAGA into the dustbin of history where it belongs.
🐣 RT @sumlenny In Russo-Ukrainian war, battlefield is so saturated by drones, that nobody in the U.S. imagined before. We need to fully review our doctrines, say U.S. Air Force Lt. Col. “Franky” @JaharaMatisek. “Things which worked before, do not work anymore”. Watch the full interview
💽 https://x.com/sumlenny/status/1739934968439025770?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @Podolyak_M Russia actively pursues a large-scale war, overwhelmed with genocidal pleasure. Russia has turned its territory into a military camp of the rightless, where those convicted of grave crimes become the new “heroes”.
¤ https://x.com/Podolyak_M/status/1739924549230080263?s=20
Russia conducts constant mobilization having made murderers’ recruitment the only career option for Russians. Russia has wiped out all internal debate and is persecuting its own citizens on a massive scale. Russia explicitly states that it will attack, kill, and conquer. Russia has restructured its economy and spends at least 40% of its federal budget on direct military expenditures. Russia relies only on military production in an attempt to build up the means of destruction. Russia commits massive war crimes. Russia funds terrorism and the far-right and wants global mayhem…
A rhetorical question for those who still hold on to their pre-war illusions: “Why will it (Russia) have to return to an adequate state unless it loses? And why will it (Russia) have to let those it hates (democracies) exist in peace? And, finally, why should an unpunished murderer voluntarily give up his favorite pastime?
⭕ 26 Dec 2023
Barrons/AFP: Blinken Seeks Way Forward In Mexico On Migration Headache http://tinyurl.com/4yyswxvx “The Biden administration has warned that without a deal, Ukraine will soon run out of weapons needed to repel the nearly two-year-old Russian invasion”
The unusual Christmas week trip by the top US diplomat was abruptly scheduled as the rival Republican Party presses Biden for a migration crackdown in return for agreeing in Congress to one of his key priorities — support for Ukraine.
Around 10,000 people have been seeking to enter without authorization each day on the southern US border, nearly double the number before the pandemic, with a new caravan of hundreds if not thousands of people leaving by foot from southern Mexico on Sunday.
US border authorities have been so overwhelmed that they have suspended several legal crossings to focus on processing migrants.
Mexican President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador discussed migration in a telephone call Thursday with Biden, who agreed to send Blinken, who is accompanied by Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas and White House migration official Liz Sherwood.
Lopez Obrador told reporters Friday that Mexico would “reinforce our plans” to deal with US-bound migrants — few of whom are Mexicans — after his government also said it was at the breaking point on enforcement.
State Department spokesman Matthew Miller said the US delegation would speak to Lopez Obrador on the “urgent need for lawful pathways and additional enforcement actions” on migration.
Mexico, under agreements with both Biden and his predecessor Donald Trump, has agreed at least temporarily to take in migrants seeking to cross into the United States.
Trump, the frontrunner for the Republican nomination to challenge Biden in November, is again campaigning on stridently anti-immigrant rhetoric, accusing foreigners of “poisoning the blood of our country,” language that critics pointed out was similar to that of Hitler.
The package proposed by Biden to Congress would also fund 1,300 additional Border Patrol agents to help address migration.
The Biden administration has warned that without a deal, Ukraine will soon run out of weapons needed to repel the nearly two-year-old Russian invasion.
Andrew Rudman, director of the Mexico Institute at the Wilson Center in Washington, expected Blinken to seek additional support from Mexico to keep migrants within its borders, such as temporary work permits.
“The Biden administration wants to show for its own domestic political reasons that they’re doing everything they possibly can,” he said.
“One of the challenges is that everybody wants a short-term solution to a global, longstanding problem,” he said of migration. “There is no magic wand.”
“Most of these people are migrating because they make a rational decision that life for them will be better in the US,” he said.
Migrants have been fleeing Central American countries ravaged by poverty, violence and disasters worsened by climate change.
In recent months there has also been an uptick in migrants heading through Mexico from Haiti, which has been devastated by gang violence and a lack of a functioning government, and Venezuela, where basic goods have fallen in short supply after years of economic chaos.
Maria Alicia Ulloa, a Honduran who is part of the latest caravan, said that the US and Mexican officials meeting Wednesday should find ways to help the migrants.
“They have to support us because the situation is also critical in our countries,” she said, voicing fears that tougher US-Mexican immigration measures would mean returning to a country beset by crime and unemployment.
“We emigrate with the hope of giving a better life to our children, and a better life to the relatives who remain behind,” she said.
🐣 RT @BrianMannADK The leading Republican candidate for POTUS chose Christmas day to wish that his political enemies would ‘rot in hell.’ This fact drew very little mainstream news coverage. 🤔
[TextLink:] https://x.com/BrianMannADK/status/1739815963191579130?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @ProjectLincoln The stakes of the 2024 election may be the highest since the Civil War. All Americans need to realize democracy is on the ballot and 2024 could be the last free election. The nation has a stark choice between Trump’s authoritarian movement and those who serve for freedom.
🐣 RT @NoLieWithBTC Trump just posted this word cloud of what voters think a second Trump term would bring. ¤ He’s bragging about wanting “dictatorship,” “revenge,” “corruption,” and “chaos.”
[TextLink:] https://x.com/NoLieWithBTC/status/1739753070836207881?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @ProjectLincoln To squeeze a year’s worth of MAGA crazy into two minutes… We hope you enjoy this look back on the chaos, craziness, and cultish behavior of MAGA in 2023. See you all next year.
💽 https://x.com/ProjectLincoln/status/1739813451982147688?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @BillPascrell Regular reminder that Democrats build economies and republicans destroy them
◕ https://x.com/BillPascrell/status/1739684912880349434?s=20/photo/1
// New Jobs added since 1989: GOP 1.9M, Dems 47.8M (96% of jobs added)
🐣 RT @JoeNBC “If I happen to be president and I see somebody who’s doing well and beating me very badly, I say go down and indict them.” ~Trump on indicting opponents if he wins
🐣 RT @DanielS42245695 Hey Donny, lets look at the real facts.
[TextLink:] https://x.com/DanielS42245695/status/1739602730807701737?s=20/photo/1
Afghanistan Withdrawal Facts
Trump not Biden Negotiated directly with the Taliban terrorists and excluded the Afghan army.
Trump not Biden Drew down US forces from 13,000 to 2,500, making them vulnerable to attack.
Trump not Biden Ordered the release of 5,000 Taliban fighters from prison, one of whom would become the new leader of Afghanistan.
Trump not Biden Wanted to invite the Taliban leaders to Camp David on the anniversary of September 11th. Seriously.
Trump not Biden Agreed to a May 1st exit from Afghanistan, then bragged that he didn’t need an exit strategy.
Trump not Biden Refused to brief Biden’sincoming team on the situation in Afghanistan.
Trump not Biden Boasted the withdrawal of US troops he had set in motion could not be stopped.
⭕ 25 Dec 2023 🧑🎄 🎅🏼
⭕ 24 Dec 2023
AP: As conflicts rage abroad, a fractured Congress tries to rally support for historic global challenges http://tinyurl.com/bp4tkawm “We’re living in a time when there are all kinds of forces that are tearing at democracy, at here and abroad,” Senator Michael Bennet (D-CO) said
🐣 RT @lindoyle2 Posted at about the same time. Any questions?
⋙ 🐣 RT @realDonaldTrump THEY SPIED ON MY CAMPAIGN, LIED TO CONGRESS, CHEATED ON FISA, RIGGED A PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION, ALLOWED MILLIONS OF PEOPLE, MANY FROM PRISONS & MENTAL INSTITUTIONS, TO INVADE OUR COUNTRY, SCREWED UP IN AFGHANISTAN, & JOE BIDEN’S MISFITS & THUGS, LIKE DERANGED JACK SMITH, ARE COMING AFTER ME, AT LEVELS OF PERSECUTION NEVER SEEN BEFORE IN OUR COUNTRY??? IT’S CALLED ELECTION INTERFERENCE. MERRY CHRISTMAS!
⋙ 🐣 RT @POTUS This Christmas Eve, my wish for you and your family is that you take a few moments of quiet reflection and find that stillness that’s at the center of the Christmas story. ¤ May you find peace in this silent night. And warmth from those surrounding you.
🐣 RT @ZelenskyyUa The nights before Christmas are the longest of the year. However, the day has already begun to lengthen and the light has begun to prevail. The light grows stronger. Day by day and step by step, the darkness retreats. ¤ Darkness will eventually lose. Evil will be defeated. ¤ Today, this is our common goal, our common wish, and what we pray for. ¤ For our freedom. For our victory. For our Ukraine. ¤ Christ is Born! Glorify Him!
WaPo: For many Ukrainian artists, fighting Russia in war is tragic last act http://tinyurl.com/3wn6v35u “PEN Ukraine — a freedom-of-expression advocacy group — says at least 79 “people of culture” have been killed so far ”
🌎 https://x.com/Auriandra/status/1738840319716663665?s=20/photo/1
⭕ 23 Dec 2023
🧵 RT @MacFarlaneNews ALERT: Trump files late-night brief w/ DC appeals court, again trying to argue for presidential immunity: ¤ “The indictment of President Trump threatens to launch cycles of recrimination and politically motivated prosecution that will plague our Nation for many decades to come..”
📌 https://x.com/MacFarlaneNews/status/1738774352202473644?s=20
Trump Opening Brief to DC Court of Appeals [Insurrection case]
[CourtDoc:] http://tinyurl.com/yapn576
// claims double jeopardy; claims all acts are official; his claims that election was stolen persisted despite all evidence against
NYT: Putin Quietly Signals He Is Open to a Cease-Fire in Ukraine http://tinyurl.com/33yzf75e “Despite its bravado in public, the Kremlin has indicated its interest in striking a deal to halt the war — so long as it could still declare victory”
🐣 RT @Podolyak_M Ukraine’s message to the world in 2024
💽 https://x.com/Podolyak_M/status/1738560333105541128?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @RpsAgainstTrump Conservative former federal judge Michael Luttig: ¤ “It will be crystal clear to the American public that it’s the Constitution of the United States that’s disqualifying the former president from higher office…It’s not President Joe Biden. It’s not the Democrats. It’s not the anti-Trumpers.”
🐣 RT @RonFilipkowski She’s taking over.
💽 https://x.com/RonFilipkowski/status/1738678741218308316?s=20/photo/1
// Casey DeSantis really wants to be FLOTUS
🐣 RT @2ug2ug Ben Cardin chairs the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Here’s his message on Ukraine. ¤ @SenatorCardin makes some of the same points you fellas do when contacting your representatives. Take a look. ¤ People hear you. ¤ Keep advocating. ¤ #UkraineWillWin ¤ http://tinyurl.com/48z3rph6
🐣 RT @AliVelshi This summer @JudgeLuttig helped popularize the theory that Trump isn’t eligible to run for office again. Soon, the Supreme Court could weigh in. “This case tests America’s commitment to its own democracy, the Constitution, and the rule of law.” #Velshi
🧵📋 RT @SimonWDC America is ending 2023 strong:
– prices falling, consumer sentiment rising
– stock market records highs
– GDP 4.9%, best job market since 1960s, strongest recovery in G7
– wage growth, new biz starts, prime age worker participation historically elevated 1/
📌 ◕ https://x.com/SimonWDC/status/1738572599368601878?s=20/photo/1
// WSJ cover
⋙ 🐣 RT @SimonWDC America is ending 2023 strong:
– crime rates across US, rents and gas falling
– interest rates coming down in 2024
– oil and renewable production breaking records
– lowest uninsured rate in history
– $130b student debt relief
– deficit trillions less 2/ […]
⭕ 22 Dec 2023
WSJ: How Putin’s Right-Hand Man Took Out Prigozhin http://tinyurl.com/2p8xnf5j “Nikolai Patrushev, a top ally of the Russian leader for decades, put in motion the assassination of the mutinous chief of the Wagner mercenary group”
🐣 RT @BidenHQ Six years ago today, Trump signed a massive tax giveaway for the ultra-wealthy and big corporations ¤ Now this month, Trump at a private fundraiser: You’re all people that have a lot of money. You’re rich as hell. We’re gonna give you tax cuts
💽 https://x.com/BidenHQ/status/1738234236925075844?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @djrothkopf This is a good time to remember the people of Ukraine and that they are fighting and sacrificing themselves for the benefit of all of us, defending themselves against a brutal aggressor in a war that was not of their choosing. May we do better for them than we are right now.
⋙ 🐣 RT @SlavaUk30722777 [Dec 21] 🇺🇦Carol of the bells by Angelina Usanova
Miss Universe Ukraine❤️ ¤ This year, Christmas is not fun again. But Shchedryk sounds again against all odds. This is our song of Strength and Hope. I believe that the next Shchedrik will sound in war free Ukraine!
💽 🎹 https://x.com/djrothkopf/status/1738213440722801101?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @jurgen_nauditt 🥱Russia threatens to bomb NATO airbases if F-16 fighter jets transferred to Ukraine take off from there — The EurAsian Times ¤ Moscow has already warned that the use of NATO aircraft from Europe against Russia would turn the countries hosting the aircraft into “legitimate targets”.
[TextLink:] https://x.com/jurgen_nauditt/status/1738219243152273853?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @danielsgoldman To be clear, the money was transferred out of the separate investment account that Hunter had with Archer into a real estate account that Hunter was not a part of. So Hunter received none of this money.
⋙ 🐣 RT @danielsgoldman Factcheck: according to Devon Archer’s actual testimony (vis @RepJamesComer misrepresentations), the mayor’s wife is a real estate investor who mistakenly sent $2.5m of a $120m real estate investment with Archer to a wrong account w Hunter. ¤ Hunter was not involved in this deal.
⋙⋙ 🐣 RT @tedcruz Devon Archer testified that the former mayor of Moscow’s wife paid Hunter $3.5 million & met with Joe Biden. ¤ She was then left off the sanctions list when Russia invaded Ukraine. ¤ @RepJamesComer breaks down the evidence of Biden’s corruption on Verdict.
🐣 RT @carlquintanilla BMO: Powell “couldn’t have asked for a better present .. consumers are spending, the economy is rolling along creating jobs and lifting incomes, and yet inflation is simmering down nicely. .. the endgame is turning out better than the Fed or nearly anyone could have imagined ..”
◕ https://x.com/carlquintanilla/status/1738202718018113787?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @jurgen_nauditt Cooooooommmmmmming🤗
⚡️⚡️🇳🇱 The Prime Minister of the Netherlands informed Kyiv about the decision to prepare the first 18 F-16 fighter jets for delivery to Ukraine, — Zelenskyy
🐣 RT @timkaine My legislation to prevent any U.S. President from unilaterally withdrawing from NATO has passed Congress and is on the verge of becoming law. ¤ The free world remains united against authoritarianism.
WhiteHouse[.]gov: A Proclamation on Granting Pardon for the Offense of Simple Possession of Marijuana, Attempted Simple Possession of Marijuana, or Use of Marijuana http://tinyurl.com/3y4zvmsp
🐣 RT @LegalWeed4SC Bus meet Walt Nauta.
[TextLink:] https://x.com/LegalWeed4SC/status/1738219354079039968?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @realDonald Trump Many people are saying the theft of Nuclear and Military Secrets is a very serious crime. That is why as America’s Favorite President, I enforced the USA’s classified document laws very powerfully and very strongly. And that is why, when I asked my LOYAL aide Walt Nauta to pack up my Personal Papers before I left the White House, I am Confident he did not place any Nuclear Secrets in the boxes. As a Navy man, Walt KNEW that would be illegal, and could even get ME in “trouble.” Now Biden’s Radical DOJ alleges that Walt did this, but I DON’T BELIEVE THEM! So let’s just see what Judge Cannon says. Good Luck, Walt! We are behind you all the way!
⭕ 21 Dec 2023
🧵 RT @PolitiFact We don’t use the word “lie” lightly at PolitiFact. Our Lie of the Year looks back at the most significant falsehood that tried to undermine truth in 2023. ¤ The 2023 Lie of the Year goes to Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s campaign of conspiracy theories. (1/9)
📌 https://x.com/PolitiFact/status/1737836359161901300?s=20/photo/1
💙 WaPo, Dan Balz: American democracy is cracking. These ideas could help repair it. http://tinyurl.com/2p9jwm28 “The problems with the US political system can, at times, feel overwhelming and intractable. But solutions can become reality when ordinary citizens engage”
🐣 RT @@tribelaw “If the purportedly conservative members of the U.S. Supreme Court are intellectually honest about their jurisprudential approach to the law, this case should not be hard.”
🐣 RT @QuoteDigging “Donald Trump personally pressured two Republican members of the Wayne County Board of Canvassers not to sign the certification of the 2020 election, according to recordings reviewed by The Detroit News and revealed publicly for the first time.”
[Text:] [Rona Romney] McDaniel, a Michigan native and the leader of the Republican Party nationally, said at another point in the call, “If you can go home tonight,do not sign it… We will get you attorneys.” ¤ To which Trump added: “We’ll take care of that.”
⋙ DetoitNews: http://tinyurl.com/mw88rc9z
[Text:] McDaniel, a Michigan native and the leader of the Republican Party nationally, said at another point in the call, “If you can go home tonight,do not sign it… We will get you attorneys.” ¤ To which Trump added: “We’ll take care of that.”
WaPo: A deal on US border policy is closer than it seems. Here’s how it is shaping up and what’s at stake http://tinyurl.com/5ew5beca “The idea is to create a more orderly, efficient asylum system that reduces chaos at the border. … Illegal crossings topped 10K some days in Dec”
🐣 RT @SecDef Today, I spoke with my 🇺🇦 counterpart @rustem_umerov to receive an update on the situation on the ground and security assistance priorities. The 🇺🇸 and our coalition of some 50 Allies and partners remain committed to supporting 🇺🇦 in its fight against Russian aggression. [link]
🐣 RT @kvistp “We are not bombed, we are not suffering, only Ukraine can talk of war fatigue, In our countries, we can say that we are used to this war, but we are not tired. Our cities are not bombed, our citizens are not killed. Our only burden of helping Ukraine is the reception of refugees and a certain decrease in comfort, we do not feel suffering.” – Petr Pavel, President of the Czech Republic, in a interview with French Le Monde on December 20th
#ArmUkraineASAP #SupportUkraine !
⭕ 20 Dec 2023
NYT, Jesse Wegman: The Colorado Ruling Is a Rebuke for the Ages http://tinyurl.com/bdz245bn “The justices’ challenge is to not twist the law in a craven effort to appease an authoritarian movement that sees violence as the answer, win or lose”
🐣 RT @AdamParkhomenko Twitter is making this ad almost impossible for anyone to find. If you can see this please retweet it. #ConsequencesForTrump
💽 https://x.com/AdamParkhomenko/status/1291161696908779526?s=20/photo/1
🐣 📋 RT @FrankLuntz The U.S. is set to produce a global record of 13.3 million barrels per day of oil during the fourth quarter of this year – more than any other nation in history.
🐣 RT @MuellerSheWrote It’s weird to me that it’s impossible to guess how this Supreme Court will rule on something as obvious as the insurrection clause.
🐣 RT @ConanOBrien I am a lifelong student of American history, so to be able to interview @Potus at the @WhiteHouse was a dream come true. Listen to this very special episode here:
🔊 http://apple.co/TeamCoco
n🐣 RT @Acyn Biden: The guy who thinks we are polluting the blood of America. He cut taxes for the wealthy and big corporations. He shipped good paying jobs overseas, shrink public investment in infrastructure and education.
💽 https://x.com/Acyn/status/1737548930240368698?s=20/photo/1
NYT, Thomas Edsall: ‘I Am Your Retribution.’ Trump Knows What He Wants to Do With a Second Term. http://tinyurl.com/376j3ruc “The first Trump term was both deeply alarming and a comedy of errors; a second Trump administration will be far more alarming, with many fewer errors”
🐣 RT @ChrisDJackson Job growth: UP
Unemployment: DOWN
Labor force participation: UP
Inflation: DOWN
Consumer confidence: UP
Gas prices: DOWN
That’s #Bidenomics.
[TextLink:] https://x.com/ChrisDJackson/status/1737636168332890438?s=20/photo/1 -4
🐣 RT @alanfeuer NOW: Jack Smith’s filing rebutting Trump’s bid to see a sealed, ex parte brief on classified discovery has an interesting nugget on the highly sensitive nature of the docs in the case. ¤ They’re apparently so secret that TS/SCI clearance isn’t enough. Added read-ins are needed.
[TextLink:] https://x.com/alanfeuer/status/1737604002932560023?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @RpsAgainstTrump Check out this Vanity Fair piece about Donald Trump from 1990:
¤ https://x.com/RpsAgainstTrump/status/1737630552969130237?s=20
“Donald Trump appears to take aspects of his German background seriously. John Walter works for the Trump Organization, and when he visits Donald in his office, Ivana told a friend, he clicks his heels and says, ‘Heil Hitler,’ possibly as a family joke.”
“Ivana Trump told her lawyer Michael Kennedy that from time to time her husband reads a book of Hitler’s collected speeches, My New Order, which he keeps in a cabinet by his bed. Kennedy now guards a copy of My New Order in a closet at his office, as if it were a grenade. Hitler’s speeches, from his earliest days up through the Phony War of 1939, reveal his extraordinary ability as a master propagandist.”
⋙ VanityFair (Sep 1990): After the Gold Rush http://tinyurl.com/3u4xwb5d
// Unfortunately for Donald and Ivana Trump, all that glittered wasn’t gold. But the reign of New York’s self-created imperial couple isn’t over yet. Donald’s Midas touch may be tarnished, but the banks are still throwing money at him, while Ivana is busy brokering a future of her own. MARIE BRENNER reports on how the Trumps are still going for it all.
🐣 RT @ ianbremmer
“give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, the wretched refuse of your teeming shore.”
vs
“it’s crazy what’s going on. they’re ruining our country, they’re destroying the blood of our country.”
🖼 https://x.com/ianbremmer/status/1737597475236594045?s=20/photo/1 -2
🐣 RT @SecBlinken Here’s who benefits if Congress passes the Supplemental funding: our fellow citizens… our businesses and workers… our allies… our partners… people around the world who are looking to the United States to lead. ¤ Here’s who cheers if we fail: Moscow, Tehran, Beijing.
💽 https://x.com/SecBlinken/status/1737622868660224077?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @JoeBiden Trump poses many threats to our country: The right to choose, civil rights, voting rights, and America’s standing in the world. ¤ But the greatest threat he poses is to our democracy. ¤ If we lose that, we lose everything.
🐣 RT @marceelias This is the definitive must read about the Colorado disqualification decision by @ianbassin.
⋙ ProtectDemocracy, Ian Bassin: In deciding Trump’s ballot eligibility, the Supreme Court should apply the law without fear or favor http://tinyurl.com/58n9fk3w
TheAtlantic, Tim Alberta: My Father, My Faith, and Donald Trump http://tinyurl.com/dde26c4d “Here, in our house of worship, people were taunting me about politics as I tried to mourn.”
// 11/28/2023; Jan-Feb Issue
WaPo: Schumer on Ukraine negotiations: ‘Democrats are real about border security’ http://tinyurl.com/45dv5cru “The Senate majority leader also said he urged the House speaker to pursue bipartisan funding in January or face ‘disaster’”
🐣 RT @Acyn Kellyanne: I think Democrats wake up every morning and they look at the calendar on the iPhone and it says January 6th. The date never changes. And then they get into an electric vehicle and go get an abortion.
💽 https://x.com/MarkJacob16/status/1737540057286770949?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @cspan Q: Is Trump an insurrectionist, sir?
President Biden: “It’s self-evident. You saw it all. Now whether the 14th Amendment applies, I’ll let the court make that decision. But he certainly supported an insurrection. There’s no question about it. None. Zero.”
💽 https://x.com/cspan/status/1737526031697801707?s=20/photo/1
WSJ: Senate Takes Christmas Break Without Deal on Border, Ukraine http://tinyurl.com/4x7ktadn “I think we should celebrate our diversity,” Senator Mike Rounds (R-SD) said. “But we need legal immigration. Not everybody just simply overrunning the borders”
// Leaders say negotiations are making progress but final language will take more work
WaPo: Supreme Court seems destined to play pivotal role in 2024 elections http://tinyurl.com/4zv34dsc “Multiple cases involve GOP front-runner Donald Trump, including his eligibility for office and his claim of immunity from prosecution”
🐣 RT @essenviews “First, NONE OF THE JUDGES DISAGREED that Trump was guilty of insurrection. At least, none of the dissenters mentioned that in their dissents.
¤ https://x.com/essenviews/status/1737512510721544612?s=20
In other words, the CO Supreme Court ruled 7-0 that Trump is guilty of insurrection. Two of the dissenters simply believed that the disqualification should be decided at the federal level.
Second, while SC justices in CO are not party-affiliated, the 3 dissenters were all appointed by Democratic governors. So much for a partisan witch hunt.
Third, conservative retired judge Michael Luttig was a guest on MSNBC last night. Based on the unassailable arguments in the written opinion, he predicted that SCOTUS will uphold the CO decision.”
[Dkos:] http://tinyurl.com/3bhfa2tb
🐣 RT @SenWhitehouse “Clarence Thomas’s salary complaints sparked rightwing fears he would resign,” which in turn sparked the right-wing billionaires’ gifts program enjoyed by Scalia, Thomas and Alito. [Guardian:] http://tinyurl.com/mv5wfkb9
🐣 RT @Morning_Joe .@gtconway3d: I don’t know if Trump will be able to do everything he calls for if elected, “but the fact that he’ll try will cause great damage to this country… we’ll lose our democracy in the way other countries have— by disorder and chaos— and we can’t allow that to happen.”
🐣 RT @stengel Regarding the “poisoning of the blood”—the whole point of America is that we do not have and never have had a common blood. We do not have and never have had a common religion, or a common ethnicity, or a common heritage. What we do have is an uncommon set of ideas, that all people are created equal, that they are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights, life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. That, and not our blood, is what makes us Americans.
🐣 RT @MeidasTouch Trump’s War on Swifties: Donald Trump posted an article that called Taylor Swift’s Time Person of the Year award a “massive mistake” and said Trump should have received the honor instead.
🐣 RT @LHSummers Even when elections didn’t go my way, I always thought the system was robust and that pendulums swing. I do not feel that way about the prospect of a Trump presidency. I think there is a substantial risk that it would be immensely destructive because it moves the conversation into realms that we don’t usually think about. Its destructiveness won’t take the form of interest rates being 100bp lower or higher than they should have been, or the budget deficit being one-and-a-half percentage points of GDP higher or lower than it should have been. But it will take the form of destruction of the fabric of rule of law, which is the air that successful capitalism breathes. http://tinyurl.com/2255as8u via @ft
⭕ 19 Dec 2023
🐣 RT @EricLisann Judge Luttig to Stephanie Ruhle:
1) The Supreme Court will afffirm the masterful decision of the Colorado Supreme Court and disqualify Trump from appearing on the ballot.
2) This decision is not political. It has nothing to do with politics, only constitutional law.
3) Neither the Colorado Supreme Court nor the US Supreme Court is a political court. “I don’t recognize politics within the judicial system. All 9 Justices will apply the law as written and disqualify Trump.”
4) I have nothing to comment on regarding Judge Clarence Thomas. I regard the Supreme Court with reverence and no decision can change that. All Americans should accept that.
🐣 RT @NormOrnstein It is past time, way past time, for DOJ to hold insurrectionist members of Congress to account. I know the difficulties both politically, and because of the speech and debate clause. But an insurrectionist is an insurrectionist.
⋙ 🐣 RT @harrylitman Bad evening for Pennsylvania rep Scott Perry, who seems to have been neck deep in the Jeff Clark scheme to upend the election. After successfully resisting for two years, he has been ordered to turn over the majority of texts from his phone. Sh include some very incendiary texts.
🐣 RT @HNTurtledove Former President Trump has said he was willing, even eager, to terminate the Constitution. In Colorado, the 14th Amendment has said it’s willing, even eager to terminate the candidacy of Donald Trump, the failed insurrectionist.
[TextLink:] https://x.com/HNTurtledove/status/1737278770988630036?s=20/photo/1
[Text:] 🐣 RT @realDonaldTrump So, with the revelation of MASSIVE & WIDESPREAD FRAUD & DECEPTION in working closely with Big Tech Companies, the DNC, & the Democrat Party, do you throw the Presidential Election Results of 2020 OUT and declare the RIGHTFUL WINNER, or do you have a NEW ELECTION? A Massive Fraud of this type and magnitude allows for the termination of all rules, regulations, and articles, even those found in the Constitution. Our great “Founders” did not want, and would not condone, False & Fraudulent Elections!
🐣 RT @harrylitman OK sports fans, Trump has taken the country into unexplored legal territory often but rarely so far as he did Tuesday. My take on the 14th Am §3 ruling from the Colorado Supreme Ct.
⋙ LATimes, Harry Litman: A seismic Colorado court decision just upended Trump’s campaign. Here’s what comes next http://tinyurl.com/2h99emaf
🐣 RT @RadioFreeTom I’ve been utterly skeptical of suits to remove Trump from the ballot, but I also think that all the amendments to the Constitution are still in force. If SCOTUS says that states must have insurrectionists on the ballot, fine, but until then, there’s a reason we have state courts.
🐣 RT @IlyaSomin My take on Colorado Supreme Court ruling that Trump is disqualified from presidency under Section 3 of 14th Amendment. In linked post, I summarize decision, and explain why I think they got the big issues right. I hope US Supreme Court will affirm!
⋙ Reason: Colorado Supreme Court Rules Trump is Ineligible for the Presidency Under Section 3 of the 14th Amendment http://tinyurl.com/mxzjvnsr
// The Colorado court got this issue right. The case is now likely headed to the US Supreme Court.
🐣 RT @ProjectLincoln Trump is a criminal through and through, and now courts are finally calling him out for what he is. Listen to @TheRickWilson call out Trump for being the insurrectionist and loser that he is.
💽 https://x.com/ProjectLincoln/status/1737299280539361764?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @Mollyploofkins Trump threatens ‘repercussions’ for President Biden if he doesn’t ‘withdraw’ indictments.
[TextLink:] https://x.com/Mollyploofkins/status/1737273503852683459?s=20/photo/1
[Text:] 🐣 RT @realDonaldTrump So, now we have reached a point when a President of the United States has WEAPONIZED the Department of Justice as though we were a Third World Country. They don’t want to run against me, and never have. I am leading in the Polls, by a lot, and based on the results of the failed Biden Administration, this will continue. But “Justice” Weaponization is a very dirty game to play, and it can have repercussions far greater than anything that Biden or his Thugs could understand. They ought to withdraw all of their Fake, Political Indictments against their Republican Opponent, me, immediately. This is a Pandora’s Box, that works two ways, and it should be closed and tightly sealed RIGHT NOW. Withdraw your Political Indictments and Lawsuits, Joe, before itis too late!
🐣 RT @TristanSnell BREAKING: Rep. Scott Perry (R-PA) must turn over 1700 records from his phone related to J6 conspiracy, per new federal judge ruling in DC ¤ Perry must hand over records – likely a slew of his texts – to DOJ Special Counsel Jack Smith. ¤ Smith’s investigation is moving to the House.
🐣 RT @ allenanalysis JUST IN: Judge J. Michael Luttig, a retired conservative member of the U.S. Court of Appeals, expressed strong support for the Colorado Supreme Court’s decision regarding the disqualification of Donald Trump from the state’s 2024 presidential ballot.
¤ https://x.com/allenanalysis/status/1737334351551930852?s=20
He emphasized the historical and legal significance of this ruling, which was based on Section 3 of the Fourteenth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution.
Luttig highlighted that Section 3 of the Fourteenth Amendment disqualifies any individual who, after taking an oath to support the Constitution, engages in an insurrection or rebellion against it.
This, he argued, applies to the former president due to his actions and attempts to overturn the 2020 presidential election results.
Luttig also addressed concerns about this process being anti-democratic, explaining that the disqualification provision in the Constitution is not anti-democratic, but rather it’s the conduct leading to disqualification that is considered anti-democratic.
He further stated that the decision of the Colorado Supreme Court is “unassailable” under the objective law of the federal constitution and that the U.S. Supreme Court should affirm this decision.
Luttig’s view is that this case is unique as it directly addresses the applicability of Section 3 to the former president, differing from other cases decided on state law or jurisdictional grounds.
For more detailed information on Judge Luttig’s views, you can refer to the article [link]
🐣 RT @neal_katyal Some are saying this is a 4-3 decision, with 3 Justices disagreeing. True, but much of the dissents are about Colorado state election law, which is irrelevant as this case goes to the US Supreme Court. The US Supreme Ct cannot second guess the Colorado Supreme Ct on its own law
🐣 RT @lauferlaw The Colorado decision to disqualify Trump was based upon a provision in the 14th amendment which was ratified after the civil war. A war which saw hundreds of thousands of American death.
¤ https://x.com/lauferlaw/status/1737317036177420700?s=20
It was passed bc those in power knew how dangerous it would be to have someone in office who is disloyal to our Republic. Trump fits the bill considering he fomented an insurrection to prevent the peaceful transfer of power and to have him remain as POTUS. Trump does not need to be charged or convicted with insurrection – a criminal charge. Removing him from the ballot is a non-criminal civil action. A lesser burden of proof than beyond a reasonable doubt – criminal – needs to be met. It’s my understanding that the standard, evidence which is clear and convincing, be presented in order to remove him from the ballot. The decision will likely be reviewed by SCOTUS. My feeling is that they’ll uphold the decision. Regardless, we vote no matter what occurs
🐣 RT @nolanwpeterson Nearly a decade later, Putin just can’t wrap his mind around the fact that Ukrainians, of their own volition, chose to divorce their country from Russia for good. ¤ That blindness to reality led Putin to grossly underestimate Ukrainians’ will to resist in 2014, and again in 2022.
⋙ 🐣 RT @nexta_tv 🤡 Putin said the U.S. provoked Russia to start a war in Ukraine
[TextLink:] https://x.com/nexta_tv/status/1737128235748483509?s=20/photo/1
According to him, it all started back in 2014, after the change of power in Kyiv. “What did the US do in Ukraine? In fact, they deprived us of the chance to build relations with this country in a normal, political way. They acted “out of order.” Here in 2014 they organized a coup d’état and further simply forced us to respond to this lawlessness,” Putin said.
“The United States, having solved these tasks of the current plan, having torn off, as they believe, Ukraine, having severed Russia’s relations with Europe – in this respect, they have achieved what they wanted, unfortunately. We simply could not behave differently. Or we should have handed everything over and watched them eat everything our, native Russian,” he added.
WaPo Editorial: Biden can still strike a grand bargain on Ukraine and immigration http://tinyurl.com/mt2jfjtu “Too many in politics, on both the left and right, are banking on the usual forces of dysfunction. Mr. Biden and GOP leaders can seize this chance to prove them wrong”
🐣 RT @JakeSherman NEW — SCHUMER AND MCCONNELL officially say border-Ukraine-Israel-Taiwan will be “early next year.” This was obvious but a notable statement.
[TextLink:] https://x.com/JakeSherman/status/1737272757228917022?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @gtconway3d Interesting. The Supreme Court of Colorado just held that a certain rapist/insurrectionist/unrepentant sociopathic criminal bearing the number P01135809 is ineligible to serve as President of the United States. Guess who?
🐣 RT @BillPascrell The text of the 14th Amendment is crystal clear: anyone who participates in insurrection is permanently barred from public office. Donald trump incited a violent riot to overthrow American democracy. Of course he should be banned from the presidency forever.
[TextLink:] https://x.com/BillPascrell/status/1737255179634839605?s=20/photo/1
[Text:] 14TH AMENDMENT, SECTION 3
No person shall be a Senator or Representative in Congress, or elector of President and Vice- President, or hold any office, civil or military, under the United States, or under any State, who, having previously taken an oath, as a member of Congress, or as an officer of the United States, or as a member of any State legislature, or as an executive or judicial officer of any State, to support the Constitution of the United States, shall have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same, or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof. But Congress may by a vote of two-thirds of each House, remove such disability.
🐣 RT @tribelaw As I’ve been urging and predicting, the Colorado Supreme Court has ruled Trump constitutionally disqualified from the presidential primary. Trump will seek and immediately get Supreme Court review.
🐣 RT @NoahBookbinder The court’s decision is not only historic and justified, but is necessary to protect the future of democracy in our country. Our Constitution clearly states that those who violate their oath by attacking our democracy are barred from serving in government. [CREW:] http://tinyurl.com/yhm2d3f8
[CourtDoc:] http://tinyurl.com/36tmhh2p 213p
🐣 RT @davidfrum Thing I said no state supreme court would ever have the balls to do, Colorado Supreme Court just did. @tribelaw and Luttig for the win.
🐣 RT @BradMossEsq O.M.G.
🔆 This❗️⋙ 🐣 RT @kyledcheney BREAKING: The Colorado Supreme Court holds that Trump is disqualified from holding the presidency.
[TextLink:] https://x.com/kyledcheney/status/1737247893726109940?s=20/photo/1
[CourtDoc:] https://tinyurl.com/pefapmxt 213p
🐣 RT @jurgen_nauditt ❗️I am sure that the USA will not betray us and everything will be done. Completely, — Volodymyr Zelenskyi [Press conference]
Highlights from the president’s interview:
● Russia did not achieve any results for 2023;
● The fact that Ukraine does not control the sky and does not have a sufficient amount of ammunition – had little impact on the operation in the south in 2023;
● No one knows the answer to whether the war will end in 2024. This is a dialogue, these are thoughts. Opinions very often differ from reality. If we do not lose our stability, then we will end the war earlier;
● I don’t think we will lose – the central regions of our country, infrastructure facilities, roads, railways, economy – we were in a complete blockade last winter, now the situation is not even close to that;
● Unfortunately, deputies of Ukraine are not moral authorities for society. I cannot dissolve them, because now there is a war and it is not possible to hold elections. For this, the legislation needs to be changed;
● If I get rid of my team (I have 5-6 managers), then we will get rid of everything. Including air defense;
● Orban’s policy is not very friendly to us, I told him about it;
● Many men of mobilization age left Ukraine, having given someone a bribe;
● We are reducing the expenses of government officials. I am doing everything to make the government smaller, so that more money goes to the front. But there must still be people in the Government;
● The war in the Middle East has an impact on aid to Ukraine. This is Russia’s success, they achieved it on the diplomatic track. Western partners began to hesitate about whom to help;
● Help from the USA is needed now, and it will come very soon;
● Trump will definitely have a different policy if he becomes the president of the USA. But if Trump’s policy is very economical, it will greatly affect the course of the war in Ukraine. And the whole world can react to it.
🐣 RT @ZelenskyyUa Tune in as I hold my year-end press conference in Kyiv.
🔲 💽 https://x.com/ZelenskyyUa/status/1737142151316672753?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @MFA_Ukraine «The deal is fair: our partners provide us with what we need to win, and we do the rest of the job ourselves, defending not only our borders but also the borders of global democracy.» ¤ — 🇺🇦 Foreign Minister @DmytroKuleba for 🇺🇸 @ForeignAffairs: ➡️ http://cutt.ly/swDqYHm4
🐣 RT @general_ben Exactly…long-range precision strike capability can neutralize the only advantage Russia has…its massed infantry…by enabling the Ukrainian forces to destroy Russian hq’s, artillery, and the Russian Achilles Heel…their logistics.
⋙ 🐣 RT @Euan_MacDonald If Ukraine had long range fires, and intel on where the ammo was delivered, it could be taken out, significantly degrading the enemy’s potential to supply occupation forces. ¤ Why doesn’t Ukraine have those long range fires? Doesn’t the White House want Ukraine to defeat Russia?
⋙⋙ 🐣 RT @raging545 In Crimea, Ukrainian partisan groups are apparently stepping up their activities & reporting any & all Russian military movements. This is a video of newly arrived Russian ammunition trucks passing through Kerch. #Ukraine #Ukrainewar #ukraineRussiawar #Russia
🐣 RT @RpsAgainstTrump Expert Chosen by Trump To Investigate Voter Fraud Allegations Says He Proved ‘Every One’ of Them False [Mediaite:] https://tinyurl.com/ycxu93yp
🐣 RT @KyivPost The name of the American entrepreneur and philanthropist, Howard #Buffett, has been added to the list of leaders who have supported Ukraine since the beginning of Russia’s full-scale invasion.
💽 https://x.com/KyivPost/status/1737034906721571227?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @OlenaHalushka It seems that the world has forgotten what russian occupation and russian war crimes mean. The graves in the backyards, bodies of passersby on the streets, evacuation columns with kids shelled by tanks, assassinations, rape, and looting. We in Ukraine defend our right to exist
🐣 RT @nexta_tv The President of the Czech Republic foresees a “significant shift” in the Russian-Ukrainian war in 2024, but not in favor of Kyiv, – Seznam Zpravy
¤ https://x.com/nexta_tv/status/1737028544742445223?s=20
“There will be a new situation that we will have to deal with. And so far everything indicates that the shift will not be in the best sense of the word, as we imagine,” says Petr Pavel.
In his opinion, Putin is now hoping for Donald Trump to win the American elections, because “it will be possible to get along with him regardless of what Ukraine or the rest of Europe thinks.” He also believes that Putin is not going to participate in peace talks until the outcome of the US election is determined.
Politico [EU]: Ex-Wagner officer says Kremlin ordered ‘atrocities’ in Ukraine https://tinyurl.com/3pawxczm “Igor Salikov to tell ICC he witnessed war crimes and fled Russia after refusing an order to execute civilians”
🐣 RT @Podolyak_M That’s weird.
¤ https://x.com/Podolyak_M/status/1737048873716064392?s=20/photo/1
The Russian Federation is losing entire military units. Elite forces – paratroopers, marines, special forces, contract. 87% of the “regular army”, into which an incredible amount of money was pumped before the full-scale invasion and which was literally demonized in many countries, has been destroyed.
Russia is panically withdrawing the remnants of its “Black Sea Fleet” to the bays of Novorossiysk and is already silent about total control in the waters of the Black Sea.
Russia is hysterically searching for shells/ammunition anywhere and already lives under an obligation to North Korea.
Russia conducts endless recruiting in its perpetual prison camps, sending more and more convicts to the war. Russia is not advancing anywhere, piling up corpses and burned wrecks of its armored vehicles…
Yet we continue to read fabulous stories in the media that the Ukrainian offensive is not as successful as it could be (based on a classic two-hour Hollywood blockbuster) and that we should probably start negotiating with… a murderer who is in shock himself.
Weird. Weird again.
What’s the point? To demotivate their own politicians and their voters? To let Russia hope that this time too, there’s a chance to escape justice? To avoid telling about the “glaring successes” (sarcasm) of the Russians and thereby prolong the debate about the need to ramp up military production and aid to Ukraine? Maybe we should return to standards and start describing what is happening on the battlefield fairly?
And tell, for example, where the entire order-bearing Russian guard divisions disappeared and what happened to key field generals Teplinsky, Zavadsky and a dozen others? Because the objective picture of the war is somewhat different, and despite all the difficulties, Ukraine continues to effectively confront the militaristic Russian Federation for almost two years..
⭕ 18 Dec 2023
TheBulwark, Jonathan Last (12/18): The New York Times Is Part of the Effing Problem http://tinyurl.com/ujwtydty “The Times does this a lot—running cover for authoritarians by publishing outrageously misleading ‘opinion’ pieces in the name of airing ’both sides’ of the debate”
// So much both sides.
≣ AlphenGroup: Open letter to the Leaders of the United States Congress on Ukraine http://tinyurl.com/w368nt3d Letter signed by about four dozen diplomatic and military leaders from Europe, the US and NATO partners
🐣 RT @Biz_Ukraine_Mag “If the West falters in Ukraine, the Baltic States and even Poland would be squarely in Putin’s sights, raising the chances that the US will become directly involved due to its NATO treaty obligations.” [AtlCcl:] https://tinyurl.com/wwdnbttr
NYT: Hopes for Quick Passage of Ukraine Aid Bill Dim as Border Talks Drag On https://tinyurl.com/4a5nb43y “After a weekend of bipartisan negotiations, lawmakers were still short of a compromise and Republicans said they were reluctant to strike any agreement before the new year”
🐣 RT @InsideWithPsaki .@jonkarl: “There is something different about Trump this time… This entire campaign is built on something different. It’s built on this idea of retribution and revenge.”
💽 https://x.com/InsideWithPsaki/status/1736936267634426219?s=20/photo/1
📋 WaPo: Everyone expected a recession. The Fed and White House found a way out. https://tinyurl.com/5abv87h8 “The economy’s strength and stability — defying many of the most optimistic predictions — represents a remarkable development after seemingly endless crises”
[T]he economy is ending the year in a remarkably better position than almost anyone on Wall Street or in mainstream economics had predicted, having bested just about all expectations time and again. Inflation has dropped to 3.1 percent, from a peak of 9.1. The unemployment rate is at a hot 3.7 percent, and the economy grew at a healthy clip in the most recent quarter. The Fed is probably finished hiking interest rates and is eyeing cuts next year. Financial markets are at or near all-time highs, and the S&P 500 could hit a new record this week, too.
🐣 RT @DarkBlue420 NBC News reports that crime in the United States has declined significantly over the last year, according to new FBI data that contradicts a widespread national perception that law-breaking and violence are on the rise.
¤ https://x.com/DarkBlue420/status/1736809953531396428?s=20
Almost 80 percent of Americans, and 92 percent of Republicans, think crime has gone up.
Property crime fell 6.3% to what would be its lowest level since 1961, according to criminologist Jeff Asher, who analyzed the FBI numbers.
Murder plummeted in the United States in 2023 at one of the fastest rates of decline ever recorded.
Social media and other media is to blame for the discrepancy in public opinion.
🐣📋 RT @Markzandi As 2023 comes to an end, it is increasingly clear that not only did the economy avoid a widely anticipated recession, but it was also a great year for the economy. Real GDP is on track to grow a heady 2.5%, unemployment has remained below 4%, and inflation has quickly receded.
🐣📋 RT @PolitiFact President Joe Biden touted 800,000 new manufacturing jobs on his watch. The figure is accurate, and a look at history shows this rebound is the strongest post-recession comeback in 72 years. However, presidents do not control the economy single-handedly. [link]
🐣 RT @MuellerSheWrote So he’ll be a dictator on day 1,460 as well.
⋙ 🐣 RT @Indepenent Mr Trump to a crowd of cultists in Reno, NV tonight: ¤ “We’re going to win four more years in the White House, then after that we’ll negotiate. Based on the way I was treated; we’re probably entitled to another four after that.”
🐣 RT @tribelaw On Dec 17, The White House said: “Echoing the grotesque rhetoric of fascists and violent white supremacists and threatening to oppress those who disagree with the government are dangerous attacks on the dignity and rights of all Americans, on our democracy, and on public safety.”
⭕ 17 Dec 2023
FT Editorial: Benjamin Netanyahu’s failing leadership https://tinyurl.com/4wjv8mrs “At its most anguished moment, Israel needs leaders who at least recognise that reality and are willing to make the case for a two-state solution. Netanyahu has never been such a leader.”
// The US is showing signs of unease with Israel’s conduct of the war and its lack of planning for the future of Gaza
AP: Senate border security talks grind on as Trump invokes Nazi-era ‘blood’ rhetoric against immigrants https://tinyurl.com/9xwu9b2b
🐣 RT @jeffstorobinsky 12.17.23 CNN Anchor Jim Acosta @acosta w/ Staff Writer at @TheAtlantic Tom Nichols @RadioFreeTom Mr Nichols is fascinating . ¤ 11 minutes and 12 seconds of Intelligence
💽 https://x.com/jeffstorobinsky/status/1736542035069346211?s=20/photo/1
needed time off
⭕ 16 Dec 2023
needed time off
NYT (12/16): Biden’s Border Negotiations Mark Seismic Shift on Immigration Politics http://tinyurl.com/yjhydksf ‘Biden has said he is willing to make ‘significant compromises’ to satisfy Republicans, who will not support more aid for Ukraine without a new crackdown on immigration’
// The discussions over the southern border show how drastically the politics of immigration have shifted to the right in the United States.
📋 NBCNews: Most people think the U.S. crime rate is rising. They’re wrong. https://tinyurl.com/22n8f4y9 “Almost 80 percent of Americans, and 92 percent of Republicans, think crime has gone up. It actually fell in 2023. An expert blames a familiar culprit for the mistaken impression”
⭕ 15 Dec 2023
WaPo, Dana Milbank: Worst. Congress. Ever. http://tinyurl.com/mr2h4mkc
🧵 RT @MuellerSheWrote THREAD: 1512(c)(2): So SCOTUS has agreed to take up the Fischer case and everyone seems a bit worried that this could nullify two of the four counts against Trump in the DC indictment of SCOTUS finds in favor of Fischer. A little background: Fischer is a 1/6 rioter… 1/
📌 https://x.com/MuellerSheWrote/status/1735697906819359075?s=20
[ThreadReader:] https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1735697906819359075.html
[CourtDoc:] http://tinyurl.com/2a3stxzb 79p
Who filed a motion to dismiss because he argues that he didn’t obstruct an official proceeding (the 1/6 certification) by destroying or altering a document or record – despite 15 other judges ruling that’s not what the law says, and the appeals court finding for DoJ. 2/
Pretty much EVERYONE except Fischer and Trump seem to think that you have to destroy or alter records to violate 1512c. But folks are worried that SCOTUS could gut 1512c by ruling in favor of Fischer and finding that you have to screw with documents. 3/
I thought surely Jack Smith thought of this when he crafted his indictment, so I went back and read Trump’s motion to dismiss on statutory grounds (which Chutkan has not yet ruled on), and Jack Smith’s response to Trump’s citation of Fischer. 4/
SURE ENOUGH, here’s what Jack Smith has to say about it: “The indictment would likewise suffice under a narrower conception of Section 1512(c)(2)’s actus reus element—which Fischer rejected—that focused on tampering with records.” 5/
“The certification proceeding that the defendant and his co-conspirators are alleged to have obstructed is required under the Electoral Count Act, which specifies procedures that rely on specific core records: certificates of votes from each State.” 6/
“Preventing the Members of Congress from validating the state certificates constitutes evidence-focused obstruction and thus would violate Section 1512(c)(2) even on a narrower view of the statute’s scope.” 7/
“That is particularly true where, as here, the criminal conduct included falsifying electoral certificates and transmitting them to Congress.”
So EVEN IF the supremes agree with the one out of 15 judges on his interpretation of 1512(c)(2), Jack Smith has it covered. 8/
You can read Jack Smith’s opposition regarding 1512 in this November 6th filing on pages 20 and 21 here: [CourtDoc]: END/
🐣 RT @ RpsAgainstTrump 🚨WOW CNN reports that a binder containing highly classified information related to Russian election interference went missing at the end of Donald Trump’s presidency, raising alarms among intelligence officials that some of the most closely guarded national security secrets from the US and its allies could be exposed. ¤ There’s still so much more we don’t know about Trump and his relationship with Putin.
🖼 https://x.com/RpsAgainstTrump/status/1735669974570537056?s=20/photo/1
// Photo of Trump with Russians in White House
🐣 RT @SenWhitehouse I am so happy we are returning to vote on Ukraine aid next week. It would have felt filthy and small to go home for the holidays without standing by Ukraine in its frontline stand for democracy against evil.
🐣 RT @ ThePlumLineGS “While we weren’t paying attention, Rs created a politics for the attention economy. Ds are doing politics like it’s 1999.” ¤ Good @brianbeutler piece, but as a deluded lib I will note that Ds have won most recent elections and 1/6 committee = best info/warfare of our generation.
⋙ 🐣 RT @whstancil Appreciate @brianbeutler saying what should be obvious but for some reason is treated as verboten: the breakdown of news and its replacement by social media is dramatically affecting politics, even here in the US, and liberals haven’t adjusted at all. http://tinyurl.com/4urtr2d6
[TextLink:] https://x.com/ThePlumLineGS/status/1735686649026162952?s=20/photo/1 -2
🐣 RT @BidenHQ Reporter: Christmas is coming early with the stock market hitting new record highs. The economy is solid, job growth is steady, and inflation is cooling
💽 https://x.com/BidenHQ/status/1735674919084556585?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @RonFilipkowski GOP Sen Mullin points out a big problem with impeaching Biden: “the high crime or misdemeanor has to be committed while he is in office. The current office that he holds. So what he did as VP or what he did in between the two may not be impeachable.”
💽 https://x.com/RonFilipkowski/status/1735660465248731531?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @Kasparov63 Just ask the Kremlin for their copy.
🐣 RT @djrothkopf An outrageous story, not shocking but horrifying, that underscores how important it would be to have a fair trial of Trump on issues of classified document theft…which we’re not getting thanks to the biases, incompetence and irresponsibility of Judge Cannon.
🐣 RT @ChrisAlbertoLaw HUGE: A binder containing highly classified information related to Russian election interference went missing at the end of Trump’s presidency, raising alarms among US Intel that some of the most closely guarded national security secrets from the US and its allies were exposed.
🐣 RT @DavidCornDC Helluva story @CNN. Good work. I’m old enough to remember when Trump & his cult said Hillary Clinton must be locked up for mishandling emails. Here we have a trove of sensitive intel re Russia & sources and methods that went missing from the Trump WH!
⋙ CNN: The mystery of the missing binder: How a collection of raw Russian intelligence disappeared under Trump http://tinyurl.com/3xx7sddk “‘What the hell is Mark doing with the unredacted Crossfire Hurricane binder?’ Hutchinson recalled asking herself as Meadows drove away.”
🐣 RT @World_At_War_6 #US Security adviser Jake Sullivan has had conversations with Israel about ammunition, as well as how and when it is used ‘to ensure that Israel is fulfilling their obligations and responsibilities to international humanitarian law”
🧵 RT @igorsushko [thread] McGonigal was Putin’s asset for years as head of FBI Counterintelligence in NY. He may have played a key role in the subterfuge within FBI NY to force Comey to reopen a bogus investigation into Clinton just 11 days before the 2016 election & handed the win to Trump.
📌 🖼 https://x.com/igorsushko/status/1735580825834721767?s=20/photo/1
⋙ 🐣 RT @igorsushko 2016: Trump publicly asked Putin to hack Clinton’s emails, Russian Military Intelligence (GRU) then hacked her emails and leaked them. Then Kremlin asset(s) at FBI NY forced the bogus investigation into her emails TWICE. The *announcement* is what won Trump the presidency.
⋙ 🐣 RT @igorsushko 2020: Trump then tried but failed to blackmail Zelensky into *announcing* a bogus investigation into Joe Biden in the run up to the 2020 election. @YVindman & @AVindman brothers at the National Security Council blew the whistle, saving our democracy from the brink. 2024 is next.
⋙⋙ 🐣 RT @igorsushko 🚨Charles McGonigal, former head of FBI New York Counterintelligence sentenced to just 4 years for working for Russia in a non-appealable plea deal. Lenient sentence appears due to a proffer agreement with DoJ – McGonigal to cooperate with prosecution.
⭕ 14 Dec 2023
🐣 RT @World_At_War_6 #US Security adviser Jake Sullivan has had conversations with Israel about ammunition, as well as how and when it is used ‘to ensure that Israel is fulfilling their obligations and responsibilities to international humanitarian law”
🐣 RT @NOELreports A summary of Putin’s quotes during a press moment on national Russian television.
¤ https://x.com/NOELreports/status/1735235763397177474?s=20
➡️ Odesa is a Russian city, everyone knows about it, but they made up historical nonsense, and after the collapse of the USSR we came to terms with it.
➡️ The conflict with Ukraine is a tragedy and like a civil war between brothers. The southeast of Ukraine has always been pro-Russian, because these are historical Russian territories.
➡️ Russia, after the collapse of the USSR, came to terms with the departure of its original territories, but attached importance to the pro-Russian sentiments of southeastern Ukraine.He furthermore said that Russia was forced to start hostilities and that after 2014, it became clear for Russia that normal relations with Ukraine would be impossible.
🐣 RT @JayinKyiv Russia is a PRISON OF NATIONS, not a country. ¤ When “Russia” no longer has a military, all these “republics” can finally KEEP and build their massive resources instead of just watching it all being carted off to Moscow. ¤ Moscovia is going down and it’s going to be awesome.
🌎 https://x.com/JayinKyiv/status/1721968620039754038?s=20/photo/1
⋙ how many have nukes?
// best map of Russia
🐣 RT @ElevenFilms Help us get: #BidenAlwaysDelivers trending! 🇺🇸
💽 https://x.com/ElevenFilms/status/1735461685841027108?s=20/photo/1
#BidenAlwaysDelivers ¤ Democracy is under attack. Help us fight back!
🐣 RT @therecount NSC’s John Kirby blames House GOP for holding up aid to Ukraine: ¤ “I sure hope that those House Republicans … heard Putin’s message loud and clear. Instead, they’re heading home for the holidays … [Ukrainians] need our help — and they need it right now, not after the eggnog.”
💽 https://x.com/therecount/status/1735369967443280131?s=20/photo/1
NYT: Schumer Delays Holiday Break, Pressing for Border Deal to Unlock Ukraine Aid http://tinyurl.com/2n8bft3m “Changes have to be made in our policy at the border. What we currently see is unsustainable,” Senator Richard J. Durbin, Democrat of Illinois and the majority whip
🔄 💙 🔲 YouTube: Timothy Snyder: History of Modern Ukraine http://tinyurl.com/5n6fknhs
🐣 RT @kylegriffin1 Reuters: U.S. SUPREME COURT DECLINES TO BLOCK ILLINOIS BAN ON ASSAULT-TYPE RIFLES AND LARGE CAPACITY MAGAZINES
🐣 RT @ArmedMaidan Does this look like failure? Ukraine’s 2023 counteroffensive…
◕ https://x.com/ArmedMaidan/status/1735414292965454037?s=20/photo/1
➡ smashed 58% more enemy equipment per day than Ukraine’s 2022 Kharkiv/Kherson counteroffensive
➡ killed 23% more troops
➡ freed 518 sq km while attacking a heavily entrenched enemy that has air superiority and vastly more armour and artilleryLess land was freed than hoped – and less than in fall 2022 in Kharkiv and Kherson ¤ But destruction of enemy combat power was the other primary task. Mission accomplished✅
Ukraine accomplished all this while…
➡ fighting 650,000-700,000 new enemy troops that putin sent after his failures in 2022
➡ making do with far less equipment than allies had promisedCalling Ukraine’s 2023 counteroffensive a failure is like winning the Powerball jackpot one year, then being upset because you only won the Mega Millions the next year
It’s not fair to the Ukrainian troops who did the impossible
What Ukraine did to the russian empire in 2023 will go down in history. No other army in the world with the same resources would have launched such an attack – much less succeeded like Ukraine
🐣 RT @EHunterChristie A very important thread by ISW. ¤ Decision makers must understand: any outcome other than a Russian defeat – even a negotiated outcome – will leave NATO facing a battle-hardened, experienced, and very large Russian force that could be a very serious danger to many other nations.
⋙ 🧵 RT @TheStudyofWar NEW: The US has a much higher stake in Russia’s war on Ukraine than most people think. ¤ As Americans consider the costs of continuing to help Ukraine fight the Russians in the coming years, they deserve a careful consideration of the costs of allowing Russia to win. [thread] (1/19)
📌 🌎 https://x.com/TheStudyofWar/status/1735366664764702978?s=20/photo/1 -n
[ThreadReader:] https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1735366664764702978.html
🐣 RT @disclosetv NEW – Congress has approved legislation preventing any president from withdrawing the U.S. from NATO without approval from the Senate or an Act of Congress — The Hill
🐣 RT @cspan @SenSchumer (D-NY) on Ukraine and Israel funding: “After we finish today, the Senate will return on Monday. That will give negotiators from the White House, Senate Democrats, Senate Republicans a time to work through the weekend in an effort to reach a framework agreement.”
🐣 RT @SteveRattner Real wages are higher in the US today than they were before the pandemic. All other G7 countries have seen stagnation or decline.
◕ https://x.com/SteveRattner/status/1735415621548962135?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @kajakallas Historic day! Against all odds, we achieved a decision to open accession negotiations with #Ukraine and #Moldova. ¤ Both, Ukraine and Moldova have done their homework and are ready to take next steps towards joining our European family.
NYT: House Passes $886B Defense Bill, Clearing It for Biden http://tinyurl.com/27f9scmn //➔ to clarify: this is separate from the $106B Defense Supplemental bill which contains funding for Ukraine, Israel, Gaza, and the US border, which is still being hashed out
// Republicans and Democrats banded together to push through the legislation over the objections of right-wing lawmakers, who had sought abortion, transgender care and diversity restrictions.
objections of right-wing lawmakers, who had sought abortion, transgender care and diversity restrictions.
🐣 RT @Billbrowder EU Leaders Agree to Membership Talks with Kyiv in Historic Win
🐣📋 RT @SimonWDC Let’s review the encouraging economic news:
– GDP growth 5.2% q3, 3+% for Biden’s 3 yrs
– US best COVID recovery in G7
– 14.1m Biden jobs 7 times last 3 R POTUS combined
– Best job market in almost 60 yrs, lowest peacetime unemployment rate since WWII
⋙ 🧵 RT @SimonWDC [Dec 8] A jobs day thread about the very strong US economy – 199,000 new jobs, unemployment rate down to 3.7%, 5.2% GDP growth, inflation zero last month, wage growth still strong – remarkable stuff. Here’s my jobs tracker:
📌 ◕ https://x.com/SimonWDC/status/1735278814068961642?s=20/photo/1
⭕ 13 Dec 2023
AP: Biden considers new border & asylum restrictions as he tries to reach Senate deal for Ukraine aid http://tinyurl.com/z98stv7r “We have to get a lot of Democratic votes & a lot of Republicans in order to pass this & that means making sure that this is a fair agreement,” Sen Chris Murphy said
WSJ: Biden, Democrats Offer Concessions in Border Talks, Move Toward Deal With GOP http://tinyurl.com/4y89h5ka “Republicans have sought immigration-law changes in exchange for backing Ukraine aid”
🐣 RT @Acyn Powell: Forecasters were very broadly forecasting a recession for this year. Not only did that not happen, we actually had a very strong year and that was a combination of strong demand but also real gains on the supply side.
💽 https://x.com/Acyn/status/1735025615747866920?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @Steve8yanks Let me get this straight, Trump thinks he should have immunity for any crimes he committed while he was president, so does tha mean President Biden can shoot Trump in the middle of 5th ave & not be held accountable?
🐣 RT @CNN reports that nearly half of the air-to-ground munitions that Israel has used in Gaza in its war with Hamas since Oct. 7 have been unguided, otherwise known as “dumb bombs,” according to a new US intelligence assessment: [link]
🐣 RT @atrupar Biden has a historic jobs record & is presiding over a strong stock market. There’s been painful inflation but pumping $ into the economy helped US pull out of covid much more successfully than comparable countries. And yet voters are broadly negative on his econ stewardship🤔
‼️🔥 NYT: Fed Leaves Rates Unchanged and Signals Three Cuts Next Year http://tinyurl.com/yetpvcds //➔ After the announcement, the Dow soared to an ALL-TIME high
// Federal Reserve policymakers left rates unchanged and projected three quarter-point rate cuts in 2024 as their inflation outlook improved.
WaPo: Border deal shows signs of life after Biden offer http://tinyurl.com/yc7ntejz “[T]he White House has floated a proposal to allow border officials to expel migrants without asylum screenings on days when border crossings are particularly high”
// Some Democrats are slamming the proposal: ‘I don’t want the clock turned back to the Trump days’
🐣 RT @jamie_raskin The GOP’s blundering impeachment inquiry isn’t a “whodunnit.” It’s a “what-is-it,” because no one even knows what criminal or constitutional offense Biden is supposed to have committed. The purpose of the inquiry is to give Trump, the one-man crime wave, something to talk about.
🐣 RT @kylegriffin1 President Biden: “There is a lot of work to be done. But after wasting weeks trying to find a new Speaker of the House and having to expel their own members, Republicans in Congress are leaving for a month without doing anything to address … pressing challenges.
“I wake up every day focused on the issues facing the American people – real issues that impact their lives, and the strength and security of our country and the world. Unfortunately, House Republicans are not joining me. Instead of doing anything to help make Americans’ lives better, they are focused on attacking me with lies. Instead of doing their job on the urgent work that needs to be done, they are choosing to waste time on this baseless political stunt that even Republicans in Congress admit is not supported by facts.
“The American people deserve better.”
🐣 RT @Victorshi2020 WOW. The Joe Biden campaign just released a new ad that compares Donald Trump to Venezuelan dictators Hugo Chavez & Nicolas Maduro exactly one week after Trump said he’d be a dictator on day one. The Biden campaign is hitting back hard & it’s really good. More of this.
🐣 RT @SykesCharlie Good.
⋙ 🐣 RT @AccountableGOP Former House Speaker Paul Ryan praises Adam Kinzinger and Liz Cheney for standing up to Trump: ¤ “Trump’s not a conservative. He’s an authoritarian, a narcissist… Adam and Liz stepped out of the flow and called it out and paid for it with their careers.”
💽 https://x.com/AccountableGOP/status/1734999498592530862?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @ KyivPost 💬Volodymyr #Zelensky said that during a conversation with Viktor #Orban, he asked him to name at least one reason why #Ukraine should not be in the EU: ¤ “I asked him to name me at least one reason. Not three, not five, not ten, just one reason, and I am waiting for an answer,” the President said.
🐣 RT @danielsgoldman Take note GOP: voters aren’t buying your sham impeachment. They know it’s nothing but a partisan hit job meant to distract from your failure to help the American people. ¤ Come Nov 2024 they’ll remember who tried to gaslight them while Dems fought for the American people.
🐣 RT @SteveRattner A stock market record: the Dow just closed above 37,000 for the first time in its history.
◕ https://x.com/SteveRattner/status/1735057118292529377?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @rparloff Opposing expedited appeal (in DC Cir), Trump says that trying, convicting, & sentencing him before the election would “disenfranchise” his supporters. Full filing here:
[CourtDoc:] https://bit.ly/3REIDpz
🐣 RT @EHunterChristie The United States ranks only in the 30th place among allies in terms of its support to Ukraine as a % of national income (GDP). ¤ 29 European countries make a bigger effort. That’s *every* EU member, as well as Norway and the UK. ¤. This needs to be more widely known in the U.S.
◕ https://x.com/EHunterChristie/status/1734903836110700669?s=20/photo/1
⭕ 12 Dec 2023
🔄📔 Netflix: What We Watched: A Netflix Engagement Report https://tinyurl.com/27kekztc
🐣 RT @pravda_eng 🇵🇱 🔥 “We will demand full mobilisation of the West to help Ukraine. I can no longer listen to politicians talking about war fatigue in Ukraine. They tell President @ZelenskyyUa that they are tired of the situation. An attack on Ukraine is an attack us all!” – @donaldtusk, the new Prime Minister of Poland
🐣 RT @Maks_NAFO_FELLA❗️How can Ukraine simply give up its territories? This is absolute madness, – Zelensky ¤ “I have a question for those who talk about it: are they ready to hand over their children to terrorists?”
🖼 https://x.com/Maks_NAFO_FELLA/status/1734702394628272278?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @ JayinKyiv No matter what happens, Ukraine is never going to stop fighting, with or without US help.
But the damage will be done in terms of US soft power. Russia merely needed to buy a small piece of US congress to remove America from the stage and every other despotic regime has taken note, including China. ¤ The value of being a US ally is no longer incentive to go along with US policies, anywhere.
An era of global war is now inevitable.
🐣 RT @TimHermansson As a European citizen, I feel deep, deep shame that this great man who has led his people at war against barbarian hordes for 2 years now has to travel the world as a beggar to get the means to continue the fight. They fight alone, for all of us. What the hell is wrong with us?
🖼 https://x.com/TimHermansson/status/1734729045948961139?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @WhiteHouse President Biden has been clear: Congress needs to take action to ensure we continue our support for Ukraine before they break for holiday recess. ¤ Ukraine’s freedom is on the line and we must continue to stand with them.
[TextLink:] https://x.com/WhiteHouse/status/1734714256187175257?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @MarkHertling For the life of me, I cannot understand why anyone in Congress would stand in the way of providing needed aid to Ukraine. ¤ In Feb 2022, I said 1 of Putin’s 5 strategic objectives was to further divide the US & NATO. The GOP is contributing to him reaching that goal.
🐣 RT @BidenHQ Rep. McGovern reads a quote from Trump commanding Republicans to impeach President Biden to get retribution: Republicans are so afraid of him that they do whatever he asks them to do
💽 https://x.com/BidenHQ/status/1734614826507292878?s=20/photo/1
RT 📋 @RpsAgainstTrump Russia is collapsing. ¤ The WSJ reports that 315,000 Russian soldiers have been killed or injured in Ukraine, which is nearly 90% of its pre-war force. Russia also lost 2200 of the 3500 tanks it owned before the start of the war. ¤ #SlavaUkraini
🐣 RT @Maks_NAFO_FELLA 🇺🇦✅ “Ukraine will be in NATO – without a doubt. Immediately after winning this war” – Biden
💽 https://x.com/Maks_NAFO_FELLA/status/1734707618940137760?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @ProjectLincoln Russia knows that a successful Trump and MAGA GOP means a successful Russia and defeated Ukraine. It’s why democracy lovers must stand strong with Ukraine, and why America must help Ukraine fight for their freedoms.
💽 https://x.com/ProjectLincoln/status/1734755017456853008?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @kylegriffin1 New statement from President Biden:
“No woman should be forced to go to court or flee her home state just to receive the health care she needs. But that is exactly what happened in Texas thanks to Republican elected officials, and it is simply outrageous. This should never happen in America, period.
“Legal and medical chaos, as we are witnessing in states like Texas, Kentucky and Arizona, is a direct result of Roe v. Wade being overturned, and as we predicted would happen, women’s health and lives now hang in the balance. Republican elected officials have imposed dangerous abortion bans that jeopardize women’s health, force them to travel out of state for care, and threaten to criminalize doctors. Their agenda is extreme and out-of-step with the vast majority of Americans.
“The Vice President and I will continue to fight to protect access to reproductive health care and to urge Congress to restore the protections of Roe v. Wade now so that women in every state have the right to make their own health care decisions.”
🐣 RT @harrylitman The bland disclosure of expert witness #3 by Jack Smith in the 1/6 trial has to have the Trump camp totally freaked out. Expert apparently can figure out thru Twitter data not just what Trump tweeted and visited but his physical whereabouts and others who used his phone. Gulp!
🐣 RT @KenRoth Biden is finally charging the Israeli military with war crimes. He says he warned Netanyahu that Israel was losing international support because of its “indiscriminate bombing” of Gaza. Indiscriminate bombardment is a war crime.
🐣 RT @POTUS [To Zelensky] Mr. President, it’s great to be by your side once again. ¤ The American people – Democrats and Republicans alike – understand what happens when dictators don’t pay a price for their death and destruction. ¤ Congress must take action to continue our support for Ukraine.
🖼 https://x.com/POTUS/status/1734742765924143335?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @JuliaDavisNews Russian state TV propagandists discussed Zelensky’s visit to Washington, rejoiced he is being pressured to negotiate and asserted Russia would not settle for territorial concessions. They said that Trump’s return will lead to Russia’s victory over NATO.
🐣 RT @ProjectLincoln Our enemies are watching this. Republicans are yet again letting America’s allies down and weakening democracy. It’s sick, it’s wrong, it’s MAGA.
💽 https://x.com/ProjectLincoln/status/1734573820688621643?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @JayinKyiv Fiona Hill agrees, the GOP wants Ukraine to lose merely to hurt Biden’s reelection chances. ¤ No one thought Republicans would go this low, but here we are.
🧵 RT @McFaul In the 1930s, millions of Americans supported fascist leaders & movements. Many adored Hitler. These same people said that wars in Asia and Europe were not our problem. (Google The America First Committee.) They were dead wrong. Must we repeat these mistakes again? 1/ THREAD
📌 https://x.com/McFaul/status/1734648742744100996?s=2
🐣 RT @Acyn Biden: Russian loyalists in Moscow celebrated when Republicans voted to block Ukraine’s aid last week. If you are being celebrated by Russian propagandists, it might be time to rethink what you are doing.
💽 https://x.com/Acyn/status/1734696551736610956?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @michaeldweiss Fiona Hill: “They are thinking less about U.S. national security, European security, international security and foreign policy, and much more about how they can humiliate Biden.”
Semafor: Biden chief of staff jumps into faltering border talks http://tinyurl.com/57trwbtt “[T]he White House has plunged directly into the Senate’s wobbling bipartisan negotiations over a deal to potentially trade stiff new border enforcement reforms for aid to Kyiv”
⭕ 11 Dec 2023
🐣 RT @sarahrainsford Tusk tells Poles he will help Ukraine from Day 1 ¤ ‘We will demand the full mobilisation of the West to help Ukraine. I can’t listen any more to politicians who talk about being tired of the situation in #Ukraine️…An attack on Ukraine is an attack on us all’
🐣 RT @ yasminalombaert President Volodymyr Zelenskyy spoke at the National Defense University along with U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin.
💽 https://x.com/yasminalombaert/status/1734343369269096888?s=20/photo/1
In a rebuke to Republicans in Congress who have turned against US funding for Ukraine, Zelenskyy said politicians should not “betray the soldier” — and he said the drying up of US aid was being cheered by Putin.
Russia sees Ukraine as a stepping stone to challenge the freedom shared by the peoples of free democracies, and that is why Putin must be defeated, said the President.
“He ]Putin] is fighting Ukraine, but really, he’s up against all of free, united Europe. He’s wrecking everyday life in Ukrainian cities, but his real target is the freedom people enjoy from Warsaw to Chicago to Yokohama,” Zelenskyy said.
He emphasized that the Kremlin pushes its idea that dictatorships with a bit of market economy are winning a global face-off, to make democratic countries lose hope. To this end, Russia is mobilizing its “buddies” around the world, including Hamas, Iran, North Korea, and others linked by hate of freedom.
In addition, Putin is trying to spread his ideology in democratic countries, including the United States, through propaganda and disinformation.
Russia is set on more than just Ukraine’s land, resources, or people. It won’t be satisfied with just a part of Ukraine, or even all of it,” Zelenskyy emphasised.
He noted that Ukraine is only a stepping stone for Russia “to challenge a lead of freedom wherever the Russian tsar likes”.
“Putin must lose – so that everyone else, who sees Russia’s war on Ukraine as his personal lecture at the so-called “University of Aggression”, gets the message loud and clear. Putin must lose!” he stressed
🐣 RT @PopularLiberal HILARIOUS: MAGA strongly objected to Donald Trump’s admission of desiring dictatorship, expressing their disapproval through chants of “traitor” and a chorus of boos.
💽 https://x.com/PopularLiberal/status/1734398362642755883?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @ChristopherJM The @FT Editorial Board: At stake is Ukraine’s future. But also “the credibility of both the US and EU as foreign policy actors ready to do what it takes to defend their values, and the security of the European continent, against the threat from Moscow.”
⋙ FT: A crunch week for Ukraine http://tinyurl.com/4v7shv7d
// Failure to unblock US and EU aid would imperil Kyiv’s financial stability
🐣 RT @SenSchumer Dems are serious about reaching a bipartisan compromise to pass this security package ¤ If the GOP keeps insisting on Trump’s border policies, they’ll be at fault when a deal for aid to Ukraine, Israel, and humanitarian aid to Gaza falls apart ¤ The GOP would be giving Putin a gift
🐣 RT @nexta_tv Zelenskyy accused Russia of involvement in world conflict ¤ “You see the “explosion” in Europe is our war, the explosion in the Middle East, there is a great risk of an explosion with Venezuela … Certainly, one way or another, Russia is involved in this,” the Ukrainian leader said.
Zelenskyy also said he would not compromise with Putin. The President recalled that in 2014 after the occupation of part of Donbas by Russia, Putin said that he would not start a full-scale war against Ukraine.
“Everything he says is not true. He is not interested in an independent Ukraine. I can’t trade people. And with whom? With a man whose word is worth nothing. This is not a guarantee,” Zelenskyy emphasized
🐣 RT @AndrewDesiderio Lankford: “We’re not gonna be able to get [a deal] by Thursday or Friday this week. We’re still working through text… and there are large areas that are unresolved.” ¤ Says it was a “frustrating weekend” bc White House wasn’t looping him in, was only talking to Dems.
🐣 RT @McFaul We need a serious debate on immigration reform. But we should not hold Ukrainian soldiers and civilians hostage as a way to have that debate. It’s immoral. And it’s not in America’s security interests.
🐣 RT @Maks_NAFO_FELLA 👏🏼 “We will make it clear to the aggressors that it is not up to them to decide – which country will live and which must die”, – Lloyd Austin
RollCall: Zelenskyy makes one more push for aid before Christmas recess http://tinyurl.com/2jnen8hr “Let me be frank with you, friends: If there’s anyone inspired by unresolved issues on Capitol Hill, it’s just Putin and his sick clique,” Zelenskyy said Monday
// President Biden also expected to advocate for the supplemental Tuesday
🐣 RT @mikepompeo If Ukraine loses, the cost to America will be far greater than the aid we have given Ukraine.¤. The least costly way to move forward is to provide Ukraine with the weapons needed to win and end the war.
🐣 RT @MuellerSheWrote NEW: Hunter Biden’s attorneys have filed their motion to dismiss on vindictive and selective prosecution grounds. Will read and cover shortly. In the meantime, here’s the filing:
.[CourtDoc:] http://tinyurl.com/4k2fy9a6
🐣 RT @SecDef Honored to welcome President @ZelenskyyUa to the National Defense University today. ¤ Ukraine’s fight for freedom is one of the great causes of our time. The U.S. is proud to stand with Ukraine and our commitment to support Ukraine against Russian aggression is unshakeable.
WaPo Editorial: Putin has bet against the U.S. Now is the time to prove him wrong. https://tinyurl.com/rvxtdhfe “Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky faces nothing less than saving the war effort when he arrives in Washington this week”
🐣 RT @RonFilipkowski Trump is FUMING over Jack Smith’s petition to the Supreme Court have his appeal heard by them on an expedited basis, and the court granting the request to review it hours later.
[TextLink:] https://x.com/RonFilipkowski/status/1734343124766564832?s=20/photo/1
[Text:] Statement from Trump Spokesperson on Deranged Jack Smith’s Filing with the Supreme Court
“Crooked Joe Biden’s henchman, Deranged Jack Smith, is so obsessed with interfering in the 2024 Presidential Election, with the goal of preventing President Trump from retaking the Oval Office, as the President is poised to do, that Smith is willing to try for a Hail Mary by racing to the Supreme Court and attempting to bypass the Appellate Process. “Deranged” may need to be reminded that the Supreme Court has not been kind to him, including by handing down a rare unanimous rebuke when the Court overtured him 8-0 in the McDonnell case. As President Trump has said over and over again, this prosecution is completely politically motivated. It is an unprecedented attack against Crooked Joe Biden’s Political Opponent— Banana Republic style! There is absolutely no reason to rush this Witch Hunt to trial, except to injure President Trump and his 150 million, at least, supporters. President Trump will continue to fight for Justice and oppose these authoritarian tactics.” – Trump spokesperson
🐣 RT @glennkirschner2 The fact that the Supreme Court has granted Jack Smith’s motion to promptly decide if a president can commit all crimes w/absolute immunity is a good sign, IMO. Consider this: if the Supremes say a president can commit all crimes w/impunity, Biden will never need to leave office.
⋙ 🐣 in short: civil war
🐣 RT @harrylitman Sup Ct could deny cert, or take cert and decide against Trump; either way, that’s it for the immunity issue, & the coast is clear. Or they could take cert & decide for Trump, which would be as cataclysmic as Bush v Gore, and that’s the end of the case. This is now the main event.
🐣 RT @DoctorHenryCT The problem with the border is not lack of a wall. Migrants constantly go through or over them. The problem is a lack of personnel & Republicans have blocked all efforts by Biden to fund more border agents. They simply do not want a solution that might work & prove them wrong.
🐣 RT @SimonWDC The over the top demands Republicans are making on immigration and the border do suggest this was all a set up to blame the collapse of Ukraine and Israel funding and immigration/border talks on Biden. ¤ It’s not a negotiation – it’s more Republican sabotage.
⋙ 🧵 ThePlumLineGS This @DouthatNYT column urges Biden to accept an immigration deal with Republicans. But the piece largely erases GOP agency, not engaging with the ways the GOP itself is an obstacle to any deal. 1/
📌 https://x.com/ThePlumLineGS/status/1733840214869623076?s=20
[ThreadReader:] https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1733840214869623076.html
⋙ WaPo, Greg Sargent: How Trump is wrecking hopes for a ‘reasonable’ Ukraine deal https://tinyurl.com/5n88myk6 “Tillis and Lankford can either be “reasonable” in these negotiations or they can satisfy Trump and Miller. But they can’t do both. Unfortunately, they appear to be privileging the latter”
🧵 RT @Mylovanov The West has a blind spot and needs to realize Russia’s transformation. It’s no longer just a nation with unlimited numbers of bodies for cannon fodder; it’s now adept with advanced drones, from Shaheds to Lancets, and AI-driven tech for warfare 1/
📌 https://x.com/Mylovanov/status/1734328740610511296?s=20
[ThreadReader:] https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1734328740610511296.html
I hope Zelensky during his visit to the US will be able to explain this to the Washington establishment. The world must see beyond just supporting Ukraine. Russia is honing high tech skills in the Ukraine conflict, outpacing NATO in both human and technological warfare. 2/
If Russia isn’t quickly checked, it will grow stronger, gaining an unprecedented bargaining edge over NATO. If Russia’s technological development persist, future talks won’t just be about Ukraine’s borders but about limiting NATO’s presence in Eastern Europe. 3/
Russia now mass-produces Lancet attack drones, along with Orlans and Mavics, in gigafactories far from the frontline. Soon, Shaheds will join the lineup. These drones are resistant to electronic suppression. By contrast, Russia successfully surpasses their Western counterparts 4/
At this moment, Russia has no incentive to stop and negotiate. It will continue to produce drones and destroy western equipment in Ukraine, until there is not much left 5/
The issue is not any more about providing Ukraine with a good western weapons in large quantities, but about developing and strengthening Western capabilities in drone, robotic, and AI warfare. NATO is lagging behind and people are not seeing this. 6/
There is an arrogant assumption that Russia will never be a match to NATO so there is nothing to worry about. It is not true as the history has shown time and again. Russia now has the opportunity to innovate, together with China and Iran, and test on the battlefield in Ukraine7/
NATO doesn’t exploit this opportunity. Russian is significantly improving its defense industrial base. NATO doesn’t. NATO is hoping that its existing military advantage in technology and training will last. But hope is not a strategy. Instead, NATO must innovate and test 8/
NATO should also be serious about constraining the technological development of Russian defense sector. This means sabotaging and bombing factories, enforcing the sanctions, especially on technological goods, in earnest, and disrupting all technological supply chains 9/
But politicians in the West and perhaps some commanders don’t appreciate the newly emerging technological capabilities of Russia. This may be a serious if not fatal mistake. The war in Ukraine should be understood in its broader significance and become a priority for NATO 10X
🐣 RT @ DmytroKuleba We had a frank conversation with my Hungarian counterpart Péter Szijjártó in Brussels.
I informed him of the recent changes to the Ukrainian legislation on national minorities. We discussed in detail the issue of opening Ukraine’s EU accession talks.
I emphasized that the political decision on this matter is well-reasoned and timely.
Ukraine and Hungary share a common European future. We will continue our dialogue ahead of the European Council summit later this week.
🐣 RT @BidenHQ Fox host: The Republicans at this point don’t have— they have not connected the dots. They have not shown where Joe Biden did anything illegally
💽 https://x.com/BidenHQ/status/1734252990431641732?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @MacFarlaneNews FLASH: Special Counsel Jack Smith asks the US Supreme Court for prompt ruling on whether Donald Trump can be prosecuted in election conspiracy criminal case in DC ¤ Here’s his 81-page petition to Supreme Court:
[CourtDoc:] https://tinyurl.com/ysybm3vf 81p
🐣 RT @ CalltoActivism JACK SMITH’S MOVE IS GENIUS ¤ 🚨BREAKING: Special counsel Jack Smith has asked the Supreme Court to rule quickly on whether Donald Trump is immune from prosecution. ¤ Essentially he has beaten Trump in a race to bring the case. This now makes the government the plaintiff and puts the ball in Jack Smith’s court. ¤ Jack smith is playing 3D chess.
⭕ 10 Dec 2023
FaceTheNation: White House OMB director Shalanda Young says “it’s time to cut a deal” on national security https://tinyurl.com/3zw2u8u9 “We can’t do everything on the border. But we can do the things to actually begin to control the border” ~ Senator James Langford (R-OK)
🐣 RT @NakedPueblo63 FINALLY!!! The White House will intensify efforts in Congress to help #Ukraine, the senator said ¤ According to Democrat Chris Murphy, the White House will increase its engagement with #US lawmakers in an effort to reach a bipartisan deal. ¤ It should provide for the provision of military aid to Ukraine and Israel while simultaneously strengthening the security of the US borders.
🐣 RT @Biz_Ukraine_Mag If Putin succeeds in conquering Ukraine, the West will be discredited and demoralized, while authoritarian regimes around the world will be emboldened. We will enter a new era of international instability and aggression, writes Peter Dickinson
⋙ AtlanticCouncil, Peter Dickinson: While the West dithers, the future of the world is being decided in Ukraine https://tinyurl.com/mr235fhh Putin “has burned his bridges with the West, reoriented the Russian economy away from Europe, and is busy building an international axis of anti-Western authoritarians”
🐣 RT @meiselasb Hungary has 20 percent inflation and a GDP that is less than the annual revenue of many American companies yet this is the example that MAGA and the GOP wants to model America on?
🐣 RT @front_ukrainian ❗️ 🇺🇦Zelenskyi will come to the 🇺🇸USA tomorrow, where he will meet with Biden – Office of the President of Ukraine ¤ “Among the key topics at the negotiations in Washington will be the continuation of defense cooperation between Ukraine and the United States, in particular, joint projects for the production of weapons and air defense systems, as well as the coordination of the efforts of the two states in the coming year.”
WSJ: Senate Heads Into Crucial Week to Strike Deal on Ukraine, Border https://tinyurl.com/5c92be7w “We’re not going to solve the entire problem of immigration between now and the end of the year, but we can make a down payment,” Democrat Senator Chris Murphy said.
// A White House stop by Ukraine’s Zelensky adds to the pressure over the $110.5 billion emergency package
🧵 RT @capitolhunters The Heritage Foundation (who are running Project 2025) and Hungarian autocrat Viktor Orban’s team are meeting tomorrow to strategize ending aid to Ukraine. This was always the end-game. Remember Speaker Johnson’s Paris conference last month? Orban’s policy advisor was there. 1/
📌 https://x.com/capitolhunters/status/1733920942181765378?s=20
[ThreadReader:] https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1733920942181765378.html
⋙ RT @capitolhunters European and American neo-fascist “libertarians” have been in bed together for years. Now US Evangelicals have joined. Here’s part of the speaker list for 2022’s NatCon III: Peter Thiel and his proteges + Orban’s advisor Balazs Orban (red), people tied to J6 in blue/green… 2/
🖼 https://x.com/capitolhunters/status/1733923619317956810?s=20/photo/1
// group photo
🐣 RT @DanielMillerEsq Would be like if Castro came to the United States during the Cold War to advise one of our two main political parties. This is scandalous.
⋙ 🐣 RT @Billbrowder Hungarian PM Viktor Orban is travelling to DC to invite a group of MAGA Republicans to a conference to push for an end of US support for Ukraine. He seems to be putting an inordinate amount of effort into this task. I wonder what he’s getting in return?
🐣 RT @RpsAgainstTrump Shame on @Heritage for organizing this anti-Ukraine even in D.C. ¤ Allies of Hungary’s far-right prime minister Viktor Orbán will hold a closed-door meeting with Republicans in Washington to push for an end to US military support for Ukraine.
💙❤️ ⋙ TheGuardian: Republicans to meet allies of Hungary’s Viktor Orbán on ending Ukraine aid https://tinyurl.com/4h2n6fpc
// Hungarian appearance at two-day event part of Orbán’s transatlantic attempt to bolster Russia’s war
🐣 RT @U24_gov_ua This [Orban] might be the face of the end of European civilization. ¤ Wake up, Europe. It isn’t only about Ukraine now.
[Text:] “Republicans to meet allies of Hungary’s Viktor Orbán on ending Ukraine aid”
🐣 RT @Maks_NAFO_FELLA 🙏🏻 The White House is preparing an important decision on aid for Ukraine ¤ A bipartisan group working to find a compromise between Republicans and Democrats has made some progress. ¤ 🇺🇸 “The White House is going to be more active this week,” Senator Chris Murphy said on NBC News.
🐣 RT @AndrewDesiderio It is not an overstatement to say Zelensky’s meetings on Tuesday — with senators & then with @SpeakerJohnson — will be his most important foreign engagements since Russia’s invasion began.
⋙ 🐣 RT @AndrewDesiderio NEWS — Zelensky will attend an all-senators meeting on Tuesday morning at the Capitol. Joint Schumer/McConnell invitation. Zelensky will also be at the White House to meet with Biden.
🐣 RT @Kasparov63 👀 I haven’t agreed with every aspect of their coverage, but 60 Minutes continues to shine a light on the most critical event happening in the world today. Russia’s war on Ukraine will establish the world order for generations, either toward freedom or authoritarianism.
⋙ 🐣 RT @60Minutes Civilians – including a wedding planner, shop owners, and retirees – took up arms and gathered intelligence behind enemy lines. With their faces on wanted posters, 60 Minutes met Ukrainians risking their lives to defend their country. Tonight.
🐣 RT @AmbJohnBolton This afternoon, I spoke with @jrpsaki regarding what another Trump term could mean. The damage Trump could do both internationally and domestically in a second term could be irreparable. Additionally, I fear we could see further abuses made to the military, the Justice Department, and other agencies in his effort to maintain power. Watch the full interview.
💽 https://x.com/AmbJohnBolton/status/1733989409626652848?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @GlasnostGone Sounds good. President Biden will host Ukrainian President Zelensky at the White House this Tuesday. Zelensky’s currently in South America. White House said the meeting is meant to “underscore the US unshakeable commitment to supporting the people of #Ukraine as they defend themselves against Russia’s brutal invasion.”
WaPo: Biden and Congress are mulling big changes on immigration. What are they and what could they mean? https://tinyurl.com/mr4a23dh Biden “has said he is willing to make “significant compromises on the border” as Republicans block the wartime aid in Congress”
NYT: ‘Buying Quiet’: Inside the Israeli Plan That Propped Up Hamas https://tinyurl.com/ytsm47xs “Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu gambled that a strong Hamas (but not too strong) would keep the peace and reduce pressure for a Palestinian state”
NYT: Talk of a Trump Dictatorship Charges the American Political Debate https://tinyurl.com/mtax5ktt “Former President Donald Trump and his allies are not doing much to reassure those worried about his autocratic instincts. If anything, they seem to be leaning into the predictions”
⭕ 9 Dec 2023
🐣 RT @KyivPost 💬”#Ukraine is making preparations for 2024, aiming to permanently remove Russian forces from the temporarily occupied territory of #Crimea,” Ukraine’s Minister of Defense, Rustem #Umerov, said during the nation telethon.
🐣 RT @TWMCLtd “If the world gets tired, they will simply let us die.” ¤ The words of #Ukraine’s First Lady, @ZelenskaUA in a sit-down interview with the BBC to be aired tomorrow.¤ Allies have failed to deliver on promises and now the US may turn the tap off completely.
🧵 RT @MMouse44073558 UNITED24 Media Telegram Highlights ¤ According to Oleksandr Shtupun, the spokesman of the Defense Forces of the Tavria Region, Russia has withdrawn over 40,000 troops towards the Avdiyiv direction. He mentioned that the occupiers have been experiencing significant casualties in >
📌 https://x.com/MMouse44073558/status/1733440674224116150?s=20
[ThreadReader:] https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1733440674224116150.html
< of their advancement, driven more by fear of their leadership than the fear of death. ¤ Ukraine is preparing brigades for new offensive and defensive operations, — RBC-Ukraine with reference to Kuleba's statement in an interview with The Wall Street Journal. Fruitful bilateral work between Ukraine and Sweden regarding the transfer of Gripen aircraft continues, — Ministry of Defense of Ukraine. In the period from February 2022 to August 2023, parts for drone manufacturing were smuggled into Russia through more than 70 countries— Molfar research. Investigators found that despite Western sanctions, the main drone manufacturer in Russia, the Izhevsk-based Zala Aero >
⭕ 8 Dec 2023
NYT Editorial: An Aid Package That Invests in American Security Goals https://tinyurl.com/3nv3vjve “A strong and free Ukraine, one that is capable of standing up to Russian aggression, is essential to peace and stability in Europe”
WSJ: Biden’s Foreign-Policy Legacy Is Now Intertwined With Border Crisis at Home https://tinyurl.com/35t8nypd “‘The Republicans are willing to give Putin the greatest gift he could hope for and abandon our global leadership …’ Biden said this week, adding, ‘We can’t let Putin win’”
NYT: Defense policy bill stripped of most GOP culture war demands https://tinyurl.com/3hcs3pku “If it passes, as appears likely, the outcome will symbolize a defeat for the GOP’s raucous right flank”
🐣 RT @danielsgoldman [To Tapper] Chairman @RepJamesComer’s arguments always completely crumble when he’s asked to provide even a shred of evidence. ¤ Pay close attention: he always talks about crimes (that he doesn’t understand), but never actual evidence. ¤ Why? Because there is NO evidence against POTUS.
💽 https://x.com/danielsgoldman/status/1733293643945881886?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @danielsgoldman The Burisma allegations were conclusively debunked in 2019 and many times since then. But that is the only specific allegation @RepJamesComer has. ¤ Shokin was NOT investigating Burisma and was fired bc he did NOT investigate corruption. ¤ Shokin’s firing was BAD for Hunter.
⋙ 🐣 RT @Acyn Tapper to Comer: The entire western world, the European Union, the G8, there was a lot of people. Including Republican members of the House and the Senate who wanted the prosecutor fired. It wasn’t just Biden
💽 https://x.com/Acyn/status/1733247125008289809?s=20/photo/1
⋙⋙ 🐣 also: Shokin wasn’t investigating Burisma. Shokin was corrupt, he wasn’t doing his job. Shokin being fired was bad news for Burisma. ¤ all this was covered during the first Trump impeachment
↥ ↧
USAToday (Nov 2019): Explainer: Biden, allies pushed out Ukrainian prosecutor because he didn’t pursue corruption cases [pdf] https://tinyurl.com/2s3mn83x 6p
// 11/15/2019
NBCNews: Surprise: Americans are starting to feel better about the economy and inflation https://tinyurl.com/yckdh67e
// Consumers have been gloomy of late, but a closely watched survey shows they felt better about their personal situations and the economy in December.
$$ 🧵 RT @SimonWDC A jobs day thread about the very strong US economy – 199,000 new jobs, unemployment rate down to 3.7%, 5.2% GDP growth, inflation zero last month, wage growth still strong – remarkable stuff. Here’s my jobs tracker:
33.8m jobs – 16 years of Clinton, Obama
14.1m jobs – 34 months of Biden
1.9m jobs – 16 years of Bush, Bush and Trump 1/
📌 ◕ https://x.com/SimonWDC/status/1733128832087888216?s=20/photo/1 -n
EuromaidanPress: How Ukraine aid became a hostage of the US border crisis https://tinyurl.com/enar9zxm “Republicans assert the need to strengthen control along the 3,145-kilometer US-Mexico border, as the number of asylum seekers has surged to record levels”
🐣 RT @SenWhitehouse Biden: “On my watch we have achieved better growth and lower inflation than any other country. A year ago, forecasters said it couldn’t be done.”
🐣 RT @7Veritas4 BREAKING: In a 69 page opinion, the Federal Court of Appeals upholds much of Judge Chutkan’s gag order. ¤ “We do not allow such an order lightly. Mr. Trump is a former president and current candidate for the presidency, and there is a strong public interest in what he has to say. But Mr. Trump is also an indicted criminal defendant, and he must stand trial in a courtroom under the same procedures that govern all criminal defendants. That is what the rule of law means.”
[CourtDoc:] https://tinyurl.com/2whae8rp 68p
🐣 Putin supposedly wasn’t going to announce his bid for re-election until Russian forces took Avdiivka. ¤ Well, that didn’t happen ~ despite numerous “meat assaults” with daily Russian deaths exceeding 1000, and huge losses of equipment: “worse than Bakhmut”
⋙ 🐣 RT @ChuckPfarrer AVDIIVKA AXIS /2020 UTC 8 DEC/ Ukrainian forces break up 32 Russian attacks around Avdiivka. Russian attacks at Stepove, Avdiivka & Tonenke defeated.
🌎 https://x.com/Auriandra/status/1733221069228532072?s=20/photo/1
Politico: Biden the closer? Senate GOP urges president to clinch Ukraine-border deal https://tinyurl.com/yhj5sxt5 “Biden’s track record as vice president and senator is certainly one of deal-cutter, [yet] as president, Biden’s been burned by getting too close to heated Capitol talks”
// Lawmakers call on Biden to take the lead in talks to salvage his funding request for Ukraine.
Politico: Why James Lankford thinks he can secure the border, aid Ukraine, and win Democratic votes https://tinyurl.com/49kuc8dx Sen James Lankford (R-OK) has scolded the press for declaring the deal dead, found fault withthe GOP for wanting too much, and even praised Biden
// The GOP’s lead negotiator on the embattled Ukraine, Israel, Taiwan, and border security supplemental believes that a compromise will happen. But do his Democratic colleagues in the Senate and his fellow Republicans in the House agree?
🐣 RT @MuellerSheWrote BREAKING: DC Circuit Court of Appeals UPHOLDS MOST of Judge Chutkan’s limited gag order against Trump. The only difference I can see is that Trump is allowed to speak about Jack Smith. He can’t attack his family, foreseeable witnesses, counsel and their family or court staff.
[TextLink:] https://x.com/MuellerSheWrote/status/1733204683702092054?s=20/photo/1 -2
🐣 📋 RT @mmpadellan TWEEPS: Jobs help people support their families.
Rising wages help those jobs provide MORE for those families.
The November jobs report has BOTH:
199,000 new jobs were added.
Wages grew by .4%.
The unemployment rate fell to 3.7%.
THOSE THINGS MATTER.
🐣 RT @kylegriffin1 Ian Sams, White House spokesperson for oversight and investigations [on Biden impeachment inquiry vote]:
¤ https://x.com/kylegriffin1/status/1733184746656792584?s=20
“This baseless stunt is not rooted in facts or reality but in extreme House Republicans’ shameless desire to abuse their power to smear President Biden. Fox News already reported that the only reason they’re having this vote is to ‘put a GOP win on the table for the base,’ which is sad, pathetic, and a waste of everyone’s time.
“Instead of doing anything to actually help people before leaving Washington for a month, these extreme House Republicans are hoping to distract from their own failed ability to govern by trying to score cheap political points in an effort to mollify Marjorie Taylor Greene, who is in open war with her own party’s Speaker. The American people are yet again going to see a clear contrast in priorities: President Biden who is focused on solving the challenges facing America and the world, and extreme House Republicans who only focus on stupid stunts to get attention for themselves.”
🐣 RT @peterrough “Rather than search for off-ramps that don’t exist, the West should focus its efforts on moving Ukraine closer to victory w/ a sustained focus on Crimea,” say @LukeDCoffey and I @ForeignPolicy | The Shortest Path to Victory in Ukraine Goes Through Crimea [ForeignPolicy:] https://tinyurl.com/7eajcz66
🐣 RT @ianbremmer people are no longer surprised when i say the usa has become the most politically divided/dysfunctional g7 democracy ¤ (shoutout to the united kingdom, still competitive!) ¤ in my annual state of the world speech, i break down where we’re headed in 2024:
💽 https://x.com/ianbremmer/status/1733192643801174400?s=20/photo/1
⋙ 🐣 our almost 250yo Republic is quirky:
1) a vote of 60% is required to pass most leg. in the Senate
2) in the House, there (usually) must be a majority of the controlling party to bring leg. up for a vote (even if the House as a whole would pass it)
ie ”Rule of the Minority”
🐣 RT @BidenHQ Doocy: Republicans on the House Oversight Committee have been at this for years and they have so far not been able to provide any concrete evidence to justify impeachment
💽 https://x.com/BidenHQ/status/1733162079467561145?s=20/photo/1
WhiteHouse: President Biden Announces Billions to Deliver World-Class High-Speed Rail and Launch New Passenger Rail Corridors Across the Country https://tinyurl.com/akrzf82x
🐣 RT @Gerashchenko_en Tenth Russian airline plane suffered a breakdown within eight days.
¤ 💽 https://x.com/Gerashchenko_en/status/1733033160147919343?s=20/photo/1 -n
🐣 RT @wartranslated If the US gave just 20% of its Bradley stockpile to Ukraine, we wouldn’t be talking about the grave threat that the Western world is facing.
⭕ 7 Dec 2023
🐣 RT @rustem_umerov Had a meeting with U.S. National Security Adviser @JakeSullivan46 together with @AndriyYermak @r_stefanchuk ¤ We had a substantive conversation about the urgent needs of Ukraine on the battlefield. ¤ We are grateful to our 🇺🇸 partners for the joint organization of the Ukraine-US Defense Industries Conference
🐣 RT @MonicaM444 They’re not even hiding it at all anymore. The devil from Iran visits the Butcher of Moscow. They are trying to establish a new, evil World Order. The sooner it’s realized, and defeated, the safer the world will be.
⋙ 🐣 RT @Gerashchenko_en President of Iran has arrived in Moscow.
🐣 RT @general_ben Our allies around the Baltic Sea are not confused about the Russian threat and why Ukraine must defeat Russia. Most of them have lived under Russian oppression. They know what comes next if Ukraine fails. Why is this not crystal clear to the rest of us? @AnnwieAnna
⋙ 🧵 RT @AnnwieAnna Last week we kicked off the 5th #Baltic Sea Security Conference in #Stockholm, gathering representatives from 15 countries (#Nordics, #Baltics, PL, #UK, Fr, Ge, NL, #US, Ca). Here are my key take aways from the discussions, marked by a sense of urgency and severity. ¤ A thread
📌 https://x.com/AnnwieAnna/status/1732813407647085007?s=20
[ThreadReader:] https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1732813407647085007.html
Reuters: White House open to new asylum limits for Ukraine aid, source says https://tinyurl.com/jxewa3rs “White House spokesperson Angelo Fernandez Hernandez said Biden has made it clear ‘the border is broken’ and that Congress should take action to fix it”
President Joe Biden, a Democrat seeking reelection in 2024, said on Wednesday that he would be willing to make significant concessions on border security as Senate Republicans rejected a Democratic aid package with $20 billion in border funding.
The White House would be open to heightening the standard for initial asylum screenings, a source familiar with the matter told Reuters, requesting anonymity to discuss the talks.
The Biden administration also would entertain some form of a “safe third country” provision that would deny asylum to migrants who pass through another country en route to the U.S., the source said.
Another possible point of agreement could be expanding a fast-track deportation process known as “expedited removal.” The authority would be employed nationwide instead of its current application at the border, the source said.
A bipartisan group of senators trying to reach a deal are also discussing a numerical limitation on asylum claims, the source said. The Biden administration position on such a cap remains unclear. …
With that in mind, the goal seems more to strike a top-line deal and perhaps work on the exact details of the legislative text over the break, sources said.
Democratic Senator Chris Coons said Thursday the gap between his party and Republicans remains “stubbornly large” but that he remains optimistic they can find common ground. …
Republican Senator Thom Tillis, part of the bipartisan group trying to hash out a border security compromise, told reporters on Wednesday that any proposal would have to cut illegal immigration at least by half and that he did not know if a deal could be reached before Christmas. …
🐣 RT @Biz_Ukraine_Mag “The world is watching.” ¤ Indeed. ¤ The world is at a crossroads. If America abandons Ukraine, the US will cease to be seen as a superpower
⋙ 🐣 RT @POTUS History will judge us harshly if we turn our back on freedom’s cause in Ukraine. ¤ We can’t let Putin win.
💽 https://x.com/Biz_Ukraine_Mag/status/1732809608849150317?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @trajaykay 🇺🇦🔱 President Zelensky met with several Rabbis today ¤ 🔱 Zelensky The sacred Hanukkah lights that are lit on these days remind us again of the light that always overcomes evil. & about the value of life, which is worth fighting for
🧵 RT @United24media We’ve been hearing a lot about Ukraine’s Peace Formula lately, so we’ve compiled a VERY simple guide on the 10 points it consists of. ¤ What are your thoughts the #peaceformula? ¤ Let us know in the comments below 👇 1/9
📌 https://x.com/United24media/status/1732806389985067483?s=20
🐣 RT @nexta_tv Ukraine and U.S. sign statement on joint weapons production and technology sharing – White House statement ¤ According to the agreement, the emphasis will be placed on the development of air defense systems, production of critical ammunition and repair of military equipment. ¤ In particular, the Pentagon and partners will provide Ukraine with technologies to start production of hybrid air defense systems under the FrankenSAM program
⋙ 🐣 well @GOP, if you don’t want to supply Ukraine w US manufactured arms, we’ll give them the tech and let Ukraine build them there: have you seen their new inventions? ¤ they have minerals and heavy manufacturing and scientists and entrepreneurs
@LeaderMcConnell @SpeakerJohnson
🐣 RT @JuliaDavisNews The Russians Think the GOP Just Won Them the War in Ukraine: ‘WELL DONE, REPUBLICANS!’ ¤ Russian state TV celebrates the GOP move to block funding and predicts that Trump will do even better and cut off both Ukraine & Israel. ¤ My latest for @thedailybeast: https://tinyurl.com/4xhk9nyh
🐣 RT @JayinKyiv Russian channels are on fire today with celebratory talk of US congress blocking assistance to Ukraine. Russians debating the best methods to punish any surviving Ukrainians after the “inevitable” seizure of the country.
🐣 RT @RpsAgainstTrump .@SykesCharlie on Liz Cheney: ¤ “She has become probably the nation’s most powerful and eloquent prosecutor of the case that Donald Trump should never be allowed back in the Oval Office.”
🐣 RT @MeidasTouch NEW: Trump says in his stay request that he will no longer participate in the DC federal criminal case and instead will act as if a stay has been granted based on his own understanding. ¤ Expect a scathing rebuke from Judge Chutkan and Jack Smith.
🐣 RT @Tendar The Republic of Korea (South Korea) provided indirectly 330,000 artillery shells (155mm) to Ukraine, making it a larger supplier for this kind ammunition than all European nations combined. https://tinyurl.com/37se3wtc #Ukraine #Southkorea
🐣 RT @TeaPainUSA Boom! ¤ NY appeals court upholds Judge Engoron’s ruling that Trump committed ‘widespread fraud’
🐣 RT @ThePlumLineGS Please understand this: Republicans are refusing to accept billions of dollars in *actual border security money,* in part because it doesn’t include cuts to *legal* immigration. ¤ No press account should credulously describe what Rs are demanding as “border security.”
🐣 RT @KyivIndependent ⚡️Ukraine, US sign statement of intent on co-production of weapons. ¤ Ukrainian and U.S. officials signed a statement of intent on the co-production of critical weapons and data exchange between the two countries “to address the urgent needs of Ukraine’s armed forces,” the Pentagon reported. ¤ Learn more here:
🐣 RT @KyivIndependent ⚡️Ukraine, US sign statement of intent on co-production of weapons. ¤ Ukrainian and U.S. officials signed a statement of intent on the co-production of critical weapons and data exchange between the two countries “to address the urgent needs of Ukraine’s armed forces,” the Pentagon reported. ¤ Learn more here:
🐣 RT @NoLieWithBTC Kevin McCarthy: “When you look at the Democrats, they actually look like America. When I look at my party, we look like the most restrictive country club in America.”
💽 https://x.com/NoLieWithBTC/status/1732908864931057853?s=20/photo/1
🧵 RT @rparloff Some reactions to today’s 2-hr oral argument before the Colo supreme court on whether to keep Trump off ballot as insurrectionist. I thought 2 of the 7 were leaning to disqualify, but the others I couldn’t read. (All 7 were appointed by Democratic governors.) …/1
📌 https://x.com/rparloff/status/1732573536022097975?s=20
[ThreadReader:] https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1732573536022097975.html
If Trump wins, it won’t be on Judge Wallace’s grounds—that presidents aren’t covered by § 3 of 14th Am. Though I bent over backwards below to avoid calling those claims “absurd,” at least 2 justices were not as charitable … /2
“For Whatever Reason”: Will the Colorado Supreme Court Apply the Constitutional Insurrectionist Bar to Presidents?
The arguments and counterarguments that Section 3 of the Fourteenth Amendment doesn’t apply to presidents ahead of today’s oral arguments. https://bit.ly/3Ruyv2FJustice Richard L. Gabriel asked: ~How is it not absurd to say that anybody who engaged in insurrection can’t serve except the president or the vice president? How is that not absurd? /3
… Justice Monica Márquez: Return to absurdity argument. They set up a provision that punishes those who break a lesser oath—and not those that break the more stringent oath?? /4
… Márquez: [Give me a] rational reason.
Trump lawyer Scott Gessler: The historical record is devoid of that discussion.
Marquez: There’s a lot of historical evidence to contrary. What’s the rational basis? A rationale? Why? /5… Gessler: The president is different. If everyone in the country chooses him—
Justice Maria Berkenkotter: So if everyone chose [Confederate pres] Jefferson Davis that would be fine under § 3? Consistent with its purposes?
Gessler: That would be the rule of democracy. /6My impression was that if Trump still wins, it will be on either technical state law grounds or “prudential” political question/justiciability grounds. Most justices didn’t seem to doubt that there was an insurrection & that Trump engaged in it. …/7
Justice William Hood III: I don’t know that we have to come up with a test that addresses all circumstances. Why isn’t enough that a violent mob breached the Capitol when Congress was performing a core Constit’l function. Why isn’t that a poster child for insurrection. … /8
… The 2 biggest hurdles seemed to be Colorado election law issues and federal justiciability issues, esp. concerns about “chaos” if some states have Trump on ballot & some don’t. Eric Olson, a @CREW atty rep’ing the voter-petitioners, struggled to allay these concerns…. /9
@crew Finally, Justice Hood, offered him a lifeline: Isn’t part of the answer that if we say he can’t be on the ballot, SCOTUS would step in [and decide the issues] & there wouldn’t be chaos? … /10
@crew … Hood also suggested that failing to resolve this issue now might create even greater chaos in 2025. He asked: Isn’t it better to resolve this sooner than after next election? /11
@crew … Surprisingly to me, the justices did *not* spend much time on the claim that § 3 is not “self-executing” without Congressional enforcement legislation—the controversial 1869 holding of Chief Justice Salmon Chase acting as a circuit court judge. … /12
@crew … Justice Melissa Hart noted that § 3 talks about how Congress can remove the disqualification, but says nothing about any need to *create* disqualification. Hart: Doesn’t that suggest [that disqualification] attaches independent of congress? …/13
@crew Trump lawyer Scott Gessler repeatedly returned to the idea that democracy must prevail. But @CREW atty Murray countered that Jefferson Davis had a lot of popular support too. He and his @CREW colleague, Eric Olson, emphasized the fragility the Constitution’s fragility. … /14
@crew Murray: [The Constitution] has no army. No police force.
Olson: § 3 is our Constitution’s self-defense mechanism. Those who took an oath, then betrayed that sacred duty by engaging in insurrection cannot again be entrusted with public office. /15-end
KyivIndependent: Norway, UK to launch coalition for Ukraine https://tinyurl.com/yck9zeck “Both states are NATO members but not EU member states, and regularly cooperate on military training and defense matters. ¤ Few details have been announced” tbc
🧵 RT @danpfeiffer 1. Democrats have a moral and political obligation to make Trump’s plans to be a dictator on “day one” a centerpiece of the 2024 campaign, but how we talk about matters A LOT:
📌 https://x.com/danpfeiffer/status/1732779021124141259?s=20
⋙ 🐣 […] RT @danpfeiffer 4. We need to frame his authoritarian impulses as a product of his weakness and the unpopularity of his extremist agenda. […]
⭕ 6 Dec 2023
WaPo (12/6): Senate Republicans block procedural vote for Ukraine aid package https://tinyurl.com/2x7r4wbj “Biden said he supports Democrats making more concessions on border security …, but that Republican proposals have been extreme and allowed for no compromises”
“This cannot wait,” Biden said in remarks at the White House. “It’s stunning that we’ve gotten to this point in the first place … Republicans in Congress that are willing to give Putin the greatest gift he could hope for and abandon our global leadership not just in Ukraine, but beyond it.”
Biden said he supports Democrats making more concessions on border security to pass the additional funding for Ukraine, but that Republican proposals have been extreme and allowed for no compromises.
“I support real solutions at the border,” Biden said. “We all know it’s broken, and I’m willing to do significantly more.”
But, he added: “This has to be a negotiation. Republicans think they can get everything they want without any bipartisan compromise. That’s not the answer. That’s not the answer. Now, they’re willing to literally kneecap Ukraine on the battlefield and damage our national security in the process.”
The White House has warned that it will run out of funding for Ukraine by the end of the year, stressing that it does not have money elsewhere that it can allocate to the war without congressional approval.
‼️ AP: As Ukraine aid falters in the Senate, Biden signals he’s willing to make a deal on border security 👀 https://tinyurl.com/mtrr9bab “‘We need to fix the broken border system. It is broken,’ Biden said, adding that he’s ‘ready to change policy as well’”
🐣 RT @TeamPelosi What is at risk in the upcoming election? The former president already said that the the Affordable Care Act was his target. People have to know when we talk about Democracy being at stake, it’s your freedom to have health care; to have coverage for pre-existing medical conditions; to have reproductive choice.
💽 https://x.com/TeamPelosi/status/1732610926610620671?s=20/photo/1
// on @TheLastWord with @Lawrence
🧵 RT @Victorshi2020 Please don’t look away: Republicans are currently waging the *most* sustained, intense, & targeted war on disenfranchising Gen Z-ers from voting in 2024 that I have *ever* seen before. This is their new Jim Crow & we all must be alarmed & start giving this the attention it needs.
📌 https://x.com/Victorshi2020/status/1732430536893948125?s=20
[ThreadReader:] https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1732430536893948125.html
🐣 RT @MarshaBlackburn Special Counsel Jack Smith issued a warrant to Twitter demanding “all information from…Twitter users who have favorited or retweeted tweets posted by [Trump’s] account.” ¤ This is an egregious assault on the First Amendment.
🐣 RT @allinwithchris “He wanted to give people a chance to see both sides, to have the discussion, and then talk about it,” says Rob Reiner on Norman Lear’s legacy. “40-45 million people every week had a shared experience and we talked about the issues.”
💽 https://x.com/allinwithchris/status/1732585039496372538?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @RepBrendanBoyle I don’t typically criticize those on the way out. But for Kevin McCarthy I can make an exception. ¤ When the history of this era is written, it will be recorded that the person who most enabled Donald Trump and his lies was “My Kevin” McCarthy. ¤ That is his legacy.
⋙ 🐣 RT @RpsAgainstTrump Liz Cheney on Kevin McCarthy: ¤ “He’s a pathetic figure in many ways in our history, but I also think it’s important not to minimize the damage that he did.”
💽 https://x.com/RepBrendanBoyle/status/1732590838453088358?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @jeffstorobinsky GOP DEBATE 4 Here is nearly 5 minutes of shear sparring and drama as Christie comes to the rescue for Haley as Ramaswamy insults her
💽 https://x.com/jeffstorobinsky/status/1732574762495320143?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @Acyn Raskin on McCarthy leaving Congress: Good riddance to him. He did nothing for his country or his constitution at its moment of crisis
💽 https://x.com/Acyn/status/1732595713559728426?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @RonFilipkowski Christie says Trump is “a dictator and a bully who has taken shots at everybody.who disagrees with him. I understand why these 3 are timid to say anything about him. He just said this past week he wants to use DOJ to go after his enemies. He is unfit to be president.”
💽 https://x.com/RonFilipkowski/status/1732575532494062043?s=20/photo/1
// 4th GOP debate
🧵 RT @FezzikFella From Mad Magazine’s “The Mad Primer of Bigots, Extremists, and Other Loose Ends” ¤ Thanks to @DucuGavril for reminding me of this; I have this up in the attic but haven’t been able to find it. So I just searched the internet. ¤ 0/1
📌 [TextLink:] https://x.com/FezzikFella/status/1732543877326778411?s=20/photo/1 -n
[ThreadReader:] https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1732543877326778411.html
🐣 RT @MaryLTrump [12/7] If Mike Johnson doesn’t believe this, he’s a manipulative cynic. If he does, he’s psychotic. Either way, he’a a massive megalomaniac. ¤ If he wants to pretend he’s Moses, he can start by removing himself to the desert for 40 years.
⋙ 🐣 RT @RightWingWatch Mike Johnson told a gathering of Christian nationalists last night that weeks before he became House Speaker, “the Lord told me very clearly” to prepare to become a “Moses” who will lead the nation through a “Red Sea moment.” https://bit.ly/3Ni4oZH
💽 https://x.com/RightWingWatch/status/1732499752644702649?s=20/photo/1
🐣📋 RT @kyledcheney Updated stats from DOJ 35 months after Jan. 6:
¤ https://x.com/kyledcheney/status/1732430302121693677?s=20
-1,237 arrests
-714 guilty pleas
-170 convicted at trial-444 charged with assaulting or impeding police
-327 charged with obstruction
-114 charged for carrying weapons
-70 charged with destruction of govt property
🐣 RT @Victorshi2020 NEW: President Biden just forgave more student loans for over 80,000 people today. So far, President Biden has canceled student loans for over 3.6 MILLION people whose lives are now so much better. President Biden continues delivering & it’s amazing. Thank you, President Biden.
🐣 RT @ sahilkapur NEWS: Senate fails to advance Ukraine and Israel aid bill as GOP demands immigration limits ¤ Vote broke 50-50, with Republicans all voting no. Sanders voted no due to his issues with Israel money. ¤ Schumer switched to no for procedural reasons, so 49-51.
🐣 RT @BeschlossDC Very dangerous for any American to ignore, brush off or excuse Trump’s recent public campaign promises that point to a Presidential dictatorship.
🐣 RT @POTUS Republicans in Congress are threatening to cut off support for Ukraine unless they can force through their extreme partisan border policies. ¤ It’s political blackmail, pure and simple. ¤ The stakes are too high and the consequences are too significant for political brinksmanship.
🐣 RT @ZelenskyyUa Ukraine will fight for its own interests as well as the fair interests of every free nation. Because when we are able to defend ourselves, this empowers everyone across the world who values freedom and international order as much as we in Ukraine do.
💽 https://x.com/ZelenskyyUa/status/1732513690761507177?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @ Maks_NAFO_FELLA 👀 The Armed Forces of Ukraine will be able to destroy the Crimean bridge if they get enough ATACMS and Taurus missiles, – Ben Hodges ¤ “The destruction of the bridge can become the key to the victory of the Ukrainians not only in Crimea, but also in the war in general”
⭕ 5 Dec 2023
CNN: Classified briefing devolves into shouting as senators fight over border provisions in Ukraine-Israel aid package https://tinyurl.com/y96eueyx
🐣 LegalInformationInstitute: 18 U.S. Code § 3 – Accessory after the fact https://tinyurl.com/3r2h82u8
[TextLink:] https://x.com/Auriandra/status/1732236531115475239?s=20/photo/1
Whoever, knowing that an offense against the United States has been committed, receives, relieves, comforts or assists the offender in order to hinder or prevent his apprehension, trial or punishment, is an accessory after the fact.
Except as otherwise expressly provided by any Act of Congress, an accessory after the fact shall be imprisoned not more than one-half the maximum term of imprisonment or (notwithstanding section 3571) fined not more than one-half the maximum fine prescribed for the punishment of the principal, or both; or if the principal is punishable by life imprisonment or death, the accessory shall be imprisoned not more than 15 years.
(June 25, 1948, ch. 645, 62 Stat. 684; Pub. L. 99–646, § 43, Nov. 10, 1986, 100 Stat. 3601; Pub. L. 101–647, title XXXV, § 3502, Nov. 29, 1990, 104 Stat. 4921; Pub. L. 103–322, title XXXIII, §§ 330011(h), 330016(2)(A), Sept. 13, 1994, 108 Stat. 2145, 2148.)
🐣 RT @Acyn. Johnson: We have to blur some of the faces of persons who participated in the events of that day because we don’t want them to be retaliated against and to be charged by the DOJ
💽 https://x.com/Acyn/status/1732069208404730041?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @Gerashchenko_en The Soviet Union lost about 15,000 soldiers dead in Afghanistan over 10 years. In the First Chechen war, the number of Russian casualties amounted to 5,000-14,000 in almost two years (estimates differ). In both cases, USSR/Russia acknowledged their defeat and left (with Chechnya, Russia returned three years later).)
¤ https://x.com/Gerashchenko_en/status/1731985264011047229?s=20
Russian losses due to their aggression in Ukraine already amount to hundreds of thousands. Yet, Putin shows no intention to stop, and Russians seem to be OK with that.
Both Ukrainian military leadership (this was confirmed by the Commander-in-Chief Zaluzhny) and our allies assumed that there is a certain number of losses that Russia will consider unacceptable. Then, either Russian leadership would make the political decision to look for ways to exit the conflict or the Russian population would somehow revolt against such a huge number of pointless deaths (e.g., in both Afghanistan and Chechen wars, committees of soldiers’ mothers were eventually an influential power).
As we now know, these assumptions were wrong. The Kremlin regime has mostly mobilized and recruited men from the poorer parts of Russian society where the value of human life is smaller than the chance to receive a free Lada car.
In the same logic, our Western allies also believed that Russian authorities would somehow be more pragmatic and rational. So their idea was to “make the war too costly for Putin” (with sanctions, for example) but at the same time not to threaten Putin and allow him to keep a good face. “Making the war too costly” assumes that there is a “price” after which the war is recognized as “unprofitable” and the regime then would look for a way out.
(In many instances, this position remains strong among our allies).
The logic of the Kremlin regime is completely different. There is no “acceptable” or “unacceptable” price, there is only victory or defeat. The Kremlin has decided that winning the war is the only way for the current regime to retain power, and for the people at the top to stay alive and free. Thus, defeat in the war is a “point of no return” and any price of victory is acceptable.
What to do, then? First – accept the new reality. Then, look for the enemy’s weak points that are more valuable and painful to them than loss of cannon fodder.
Undermining and lessening Russia’s combat potential still remains a key task. When given the right tools, Ukraine is very effective at that. Therefore, Ukraine needs to receive what we need – in full amounts and on time. Some decisions might need to be reconsidered (like forbidding strikes on Russian territory. Such strikes would undermine Russian logistics significantly and would save a lot of Ukrainian lives).
Sanctions still remain a key area. Closing loopholes that are used to circumvent them is crucial.
While Russia remains in its current state, it will continue being a threat to the security of the region, the whole world and itself. The imperial behemoth is incapable of real change, which plays into the hands of Putin’s regime.
Ukrainian victory must mean Russia’s defeat, not deterrence. That is a crucial paradigm shift that would allow to end this war sustainably and not just be a ceasefire to restore Russia’s military potential.
Source: Yevhen Dykyj, Ukrainian military analyst, and my thoughts and comments
🐣 If MAGA can conflate the “invasion” at the border (it’s not) w the actual invasion of Ukraine, they can conflate what they call the “genocide” of abortion (it’s not) w the actual genocide of Ukrainians. ¤ There will be no end to blackmail based on Trumpian demolition of language.
🧵 RT @LisaDNews OK. I have a lot of reporting on the – what is the right word? – unusual, explosive briefing that just happened in the U.S. Senate on Ukraine and border.1/
📌 https://x.com/LisaDNews/status/1732153930614763605?s=20
[ThreadReader:] https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1732153930614763605.html
First, the room, briefing. TOP officials. Some of the most important military and diplomatic personnel in the world
Sec of State, Antony Blinken
Secof Defense, Lloyd Austin
Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General C.Q. Brown
USAID Deputy Administrator, Isobel Coleman
Then senators of both parties.Early on, Sen. McConnell tells the group something along lines of “no one supports Ukraine more than me. But we have to talk about the U.S. border.”
He turns it over to Sen. James Lankford, R-Okla., who makes his best pitch for GOP plan.
Schumer would later say McConnell “hijacked” the meeting.After Lankford speaks, composed, not tense about the border. Schumer then seemed to feel need to respond to the GOP pitch.
Schumer said, essentially, we are not here to talk about the border. We are here for Ukraine..
Then, several Republicans – including Romney – shouted and stood. Irate at the idea that the border was off the table for discussion/questions.
Sen. Cramer asked Joint Chiefs Chair Brown, essentially “don’t you think we need to be doing this to secure the border?”Brown, answered, essentially and I’m told straight-forwardly that this is not his job.
Then a senator (mixed reporting on who, working on it) asked the Joint Chiefs Chairman: “Have you even been to the border?”Gen. Brown: I am from Texas.
Senator: But were you born there?
(Brown was born in Texas.)Among those incensed and shouting was Sen. Lindsey Graham, who at one point, I’m told, shouted something like, “can we fucking get someone in here who knows anything?”
Senators also shouted at Schumer, “ask your mayor!” pointing to migrant issues in NYC.At one point a senator said to Sec. of State Blinken, “you need to tell this to the President – you need to make him understand” where Republicans are, how furious they are about the border.
(Brown was born in Texas.) Among those incensed and shouting was Sen. Lindsey Graham, who at one point, I’m told, shouted something like, “can we fucking get someone in here who knows anything?”
🐣 Aid to Ukraine is being held hostage by a poison pill which is the MAGA House‘s HR 2 which is a reincarnation of Trump’s draconian border policy. ¤ The Dem Senate previously voted down HR 2.
🐣 RT @OlgaNYC1211 Ukrainians are dying & Republicans decide to attach border issue which they haven’t solved in 4 decades to Ukraine aid. Should Ukrainian women/children tell Russia to stop bombing while GOP devises a security border plan. This is reprehensible and dangerous. China is watching
🐣 RT @WalshFreedom This is a bullshit, cowardly move @SpeakerJohnson. Have the balls to put a stand alone Ukraine funding bill on the floor for a vote and a stand alone border security bill on the floor for a vote. Why combine two unrelated issues?
⋙ 🐣 RT @JakeSherman 🚨🚨🚨BREAKING NEWS– @SpeakerJohnson says in letter to the White House that Ukraine aid is “dependent upon enactment of transformative change to our nation’s border security laws.” ¤ This is a bad sign for supporters of aid to Kyiv.
🐣 RT @Morning_Joe “The Republican officials who understand Trump, who worked with Trump, his cabinet officers, his national security advisers who know exactly how dangerous he is should begin to campaign now, they should go around the country and speak as a group.” –@anneapplebaum
💽 https://x.com/Morning_Joe/status/1731999314291970217?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @Gerashchenko_en On December 5, 1994, the leaders of Ukraine, the United States, the United Kingdom, and the Russian Federation signed the so-called Budapest Memorandum in Budapest.
¤ https://x.com/Gerashchenko_en/status/1732089007767515190?s=20
This happened after Ukraine joined the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons. According to the document, Ukraine voluntarily gave up nuclear weapons in exchange for guarantees of territorial integrity and security.
Nevertheless, in 20 years, Russia would violate the Memorandum, annex Crimea and part of Donbas, and then wage an open war against Ukraine in front of the whole world.
By the way, on the same day, in 1978, the USSR and Afghanistan signed the Treaty of Friendship, Good Neighborliness, and Cooperation. A year later, Soviet troops invaded Afghanistan.
🐣 RT @Morning_Joe .@Liz_Cheney on the future of the GOP: “I don’t know if our party can be saved. We may need to build a new party…But I think those issues have to come after this 2024 cycle, because the focus right now has to be on making sure we don’t return Donald Trump to the White House.”
🐣 RT @AndrewDesiderio Wow. Schumer just accused McConnell of “hijacking” the briefing. Schumer says instead of asking the briefers a question, McConnell called on Sen. Lankford to give an update on the border talks.
🐣 RT @AccountableGOP Trump’s former Defense Secretary Mark Esper on the threat of a second Trump term: “He’ll be able to enact his policy of revenge that he’s been talking about and retribution. And look, it’s quite a dangerous time for our democracy if that were to happen.”
🐣 RT @RonFilipkowski Kash Patel says as Trump’s next CIA Director he will lead “patriots” appointed by Trump in an all-out effort to prosecute and jail people in government and the media: “We will find the conspirators in govt and the media. Yes, we are going to come after the people in the media.”
🐣 RT @AliVelshi Ukraine could lose its war with Russia if the U.S. delays military aid, top Ukrainian official says
🐣 RT @cspan .@SenSchumer (D-NY) on Ukraine funding bill: “If this fails because of border, that’s not a bipartisan failure. That’s a failure of Republicans and the Republican leadership.”
💽 https://x.com/cspan/status/1732149340297191618?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @GlasnostGone Never thought I’d see the day when American politicians sold out democracy, sold out Europe – all for the sake of petty internal politics. Thank God these people weren’t in power during WW2, or we’d all be speaking German. While they squabble, Ukrainians are dying & Putin’s rejoicing.
⋙ 🐣 RT @Mike_Eckel This seems to be the reason why Zelenskiy decided to (was advised to) cancel his appearance.
💽 https://x.com/Mike_Eckel/status/1732138824006799785?s=20/photo/1
// Mitch McConnell speaking
⋙⋙ 🐣 RT @jimsciutto Breaking: Ukrainian President Zelensky will not attend classified briefing virtually anymore because of a “last-minute” matter, says Sen Schumer. Zelensky also didn’t end up appearing virtually at the House briefing, lawmakers said.
⋙⋙⋙ 🐣 RT @PaulaChertok It’s despicable for Republicans to hold Ukrainian lives hostage to their own political agenda. Trump was impeached for doing that. GOP again toying w/ Ukraine, an ally in a critical war, is also a loud invite for Russia to attack the 2024 election. Unconscionable on every level.
🐣 RT @RonFilipkowski Kash Patel says as Trump’s next CIA Director he will lead “patriots” appointed by Trump in an all-out effort to prosecute and jail people in government and the media: “We will find the conspirators in govt and the media. Yes, we are going to come after the people in the media.”
💽 https://x.com/RonFilipkowski/status/1732130346010063053?s=20/photo/1
// Steve Bannon’s podcast
🐣 RT @AnthonyMKreis Jack Smith submits notice to the court in the D.C. election case of his intention to introduce evidence before and after the charged conspiracy to illustrate Trump’s intent– including election fraud claims and attacks on Georgia election workers. #gapol
[CourtDoc:] https://tinyurl.com/yn4a8nx8 9p
[TextLink:] https://x.com/AnthonyMKreis/status/1732101868774388186?s=20/photo/1 -3
🐣 RT @ProjectLincoln Watch the (non-AI) ad that caused Trump’s late night loopy senile rant
💽 https://x.com/ProjectLincoln/status/1732039522882617784?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @anders_aslund The EU needs to disarm Viktor Orban before he destroys the EU. At the very least, Hungary should be deprived of its vote in accordance with Article 7 in the EU Treaty, but preferably Hungary should be suspended since it violates all EU rules and values.
⭕ 4 Dec 2023
🐣 RT @AccountableGOP Liz Cheney: “Trump is not an acceptable alternative. He is not the lesser of two evils. He is a completely unfit man for office. He’s already shown us what he would do, and he can never be near the Oval Office again.”
💽 https://x.com/AccountableGOP/status/1731872582087967169?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @cspan National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan: “Congress has to decide whether to continue to support the fight for freedom in Ukraine as part of the 50 nation coalition…or whether Congress will ignore the lessons we’ve from history and let Putin prevail. It is that simple”.
💽 https://x.com/cspan/status/1731761860779606261?s=20/photo/1
🐣 Look at the drop in Chinese imports and the increase in imports from Canada, Mexico and the EU. This is known as “friend-shoring”
⋙ 🐣 RT @VisualCap Visualizing 30 Years of Imports from U.S. Trading Partners 🤝 https://tinyurl.com/2akdx4dw
◕ https://x.com/Auriandra/status/1731837002851451033?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @AndrewDesiderio New — Schumer says President Zelensky will join the classified Senate briefing tomorrow afternoon via secure video. More pressure on senators as WH warns Ukraine could be left in the dust soon
🧵 RT @judgeluttig The causes of our times are America’s Democracy and Rule of Law, and American Bar Association President Mary Smith @ABAPresident has convened a blue-ribbon Task Force for American Democracy to steady, protect, and preserve our faltering democracy in the years ahead.
📌 https://x.com/judgeluttig/status/1731785331521822978?s=20
// Former Secretary of Homeland Security Jeh Johnson and I are honored to serve as co-chairs of this critically important ABA Task Force.
🐣 RT @anno1540 ⚡️ What has #Ukraine been doing since 2014? There should already be mountains of artillery ammunition – @general_ben
“Yes, one can be disappointed that the West does not provide more. And what did Ukraine do after 2014 to increase its own ammunition production?”
¤ https://x.com/anno1540/status/1731595442943586681?s=20
💙 Part 2: WaPo: In Ukraine, a war of incremental gains as counteroffensive stalls https://tinyurl.com/y4x3zpb6 “This account of how the counteroffensive unfolded is the second in a two-part series and illuminates the brutal and often futile attempts to breach Russian lines”
💙 Part 1: WaPo: Miscalculations, divisions marked offensive planning by U.S., Ukraine https://tinyurl.com/293wc2bt “This is the first of two parts examining the Ukrainian counteroffensive that launched in June”
🐣 RT @GlasnostGone You’re damn right. Vote against #Ukraine funding & you vote for Putin. Vote against Ukraine is a vote for the murder, rape and torture of Ukrainian men, women and children. So get your shit together America & #StandWithUkraine, not Russia’s child kidnapper Putin.
🐣 RT @ProjectLincoln Well, yes.
⋙ 🐣 RT @Acyn Reporter: Are you saying any member of congress who votes against aid to Ukraine is voting for Putin? ¤ Sullivan: I believe that any member of congress who does not support funding for Ukraine is voting for an outcome that will make it easier for Putin to prevail.
💽 https://x.com/Acyn/status/1731759540280938738?s=20/photo/1
🧵 RT @SpencerGuard I just watched the roughly 45-minute footage of October 7th at a private screening in NYC. Here are my immediate thoughts minutes after watching it.
📌 https://x.com/SpencerGuard/status/1731761693737308427?s=20
[ThreadReader:] https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1731761693737308427.html
John Spencer (@SpencerGuard) was allowed to see a 45 min video of what happened in Israel on Oct 7. He describes what he saw here: https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1731761693737308427.html
Even his descriptions are horrifying, so I can’t recommend even reading it. But it’s important to know what set this off.
Wikipedia: John W. Spencer is a retired United States Army officer, researcher of urban warfare, and author. He “currently serves as the chair of urban warfare studies at the Modern War Institute, codirector of the Urban Warfare Project, and host of the Urban Warfare Project Podcast,” at West Point.[1]
🐣 RT @WesClarkjr Supplying Ukraine the armaments needed to defend themselves from a genocidal invasion is more important to American security than any other conflict. If Ukraine wins, most the rest of the bullshit will stop as Putin’s been manipulating conflicts to distract from his invasion.
🧵 RT @McFaul U.S. security interests in helping Ukraine defeat Russia are clear. … THREAD
📌 https://x.com/McFaul/status/1731738245313273928?s=20
(1) A Ukrainian victory will dramatically diminish the threat from Russia, allowing us to spend less on European defense and send fewer soldiers to NATO bases in the Baltics
(2) A Ukrainian victory will make Chinese President Xi Jinping think harder about invading Taiwan; 2/
(3) A Ukrainian victory would be a win for all those wanting to preserve the rules-based international order established and maintained by the United States since the end of World War II; and 3/
(4) A Ukrainian victory will advance democratic ideas around the world, including in neighboring Russia and Belarus, and in our great power competition with China and Russia in the 21st century, our democratic values are one of our greatest advantages. 4/
For the details read:
[Foreign Policy:] Note to Congress: Ukraine aid is not charity but serves critical U.S. interests. https://tinyurl.com/4mp77mkc
// 11/16/2023; The Case for Supporting Ukraine Is Crystal Clear
🐣 RT @AccountableGOP Liz Cheney: “A vote for Donald Trump may mean the last election that you ever get to vote in…People have to recognize that a vote for Donald Trump is a vote against the Constitution.”
💽 https://x.com/AccountableGOP/status/1731702266279731558?s=20/photo/1
🐣 📋 RT @SimonWDC The US economy:
– GDP growth 5.2%
– Inflation zero last month
– Wage growth remains robust
– Strongest recovery in G7
– Lowest uninsured rate in US history
– Median wealth up 37% 2020-2022
– Dow nearing all-time high
Well done all. More 👇
⋙ https://tinyurl.com/229873pd
◕ https://x.com/SimonWDC/status/1731720857578328492?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @anders_aslund Increasingly, the impression arises as if the White House wants Ukraine to lose the war against Russia. Why? It makes no sense. Ukraine’s loss would be devastating to Biden’s reelection chances.
⋙ 🐣 as if Russian roulette were a parlor game, the US subjects the fate of the West to its own broken and petty politics ¤ I hope Winston Churchill was right: “You can always count on Americans to do the right thing – after they’ve tried everything else.”
🐣 RT @Angry_Staffer Trump learned exactly *one* thing during his first term: ¤ Career civil servants WILL protect the country and defend the Constitution. ¤ That’s why he’s surrounded himself with sycophants and has a plan to get rid of the career staff in his way.
⋙ 🐣 RT @TheRickWilson Trump has a group of smarter, more determined, and more evil people around him than the first term. There are no “good guys” and no “experienced DC hands” around him now. ¤ They pursue their enemies mercilessly. Trump’s their figurehead. ¤ Learn their names. Return the favor.
RawStory: Jack Smith set to release ‘important evidence’ on Trump’s Jan. 6 motives: legal expert https://tinyurl.com/ysmdajz4 ‘Expect him to focus on proving Trump’s state of mind, the absence of good faith; and that the violence of Jan 6th “was no mistake”’ ~ @JoyceWhiteVance
🐣 RT @BillKristol “As John McCain often used to say (for some reason claiming he was quoting Chairman Mao!): It’s always darkest… before it turns pitch black. Then he would laugh uproariously.”
💙 TheAtlantic: What Trump Could Do With a Second Term https://tinyurl.com/88n8tfe6 The staff of The Atlantic on the threat a second term poses to American democracy.
[TextLink:] https://x.com/Auriandra/status/1731730660929196230?s=20/photo/1
David Frum on autocracy Anne Applebaum on NATO McKay Coppins on the loyalists Caitlin Dickerson on immigration Barton Gellman on the Justice Department Sophie Gilbert on misogyny Zoë Schlanger on climate George Packer on journalism
WSJ: White House Warns Money for Ukraine Will Run Out by Year’s End https://tinyurl.com/bdzxwdvx “Without new aid, U.S. will be unable to continue providing weapons and equipment to Kyiv, which would ‘kneecap Ukraine on the battlefield’”
🐣 RT @RpsAgainstTrump British Writer Pens The Best Description Of Trump I’ve Read ¤ “Why do some British people not like Donald Trump?
¤ https://x.com/RpsAgainstTrump/status/1731558484074742105?s=20
A few things spring to mind. Trump lacks certain qualities which the British traditionally esteem. For instance, he has no class, no charm, no coolness, no credibility, no compassion, no wit, no warmth, no wisdom, no subtlety, no sensitivity, no self-awareness, no humility, no honour and no grace – all qualities, funnily enough, with which his predecessor Mr. Obama was generously blessed. So for us, the stark contrast does rather throw Trump’s limitations into embarrassingly sharp relief.
Plus, we like a laugh. And while Trump may be laughable, he has never once said anything wry, witty or even faintly amusing – not once, ever. I don’t say that rhetorically, I mean it quite literally: not once, not ever. And that fact is particularly disturbing to the British sensibility – for us, to lack humour is almost inhuman. But with Trump, it’s a fact. He doesn’t even seem to understand what a joke is – his idea of a joke is a crass comment, an illiterate insult, a casual act of cruelty.
Trump is a troll. And like all trolls, he is never funny and he never laughs; he only crows or jeers. And scarily, he doesn’t just talk in crude, witless insults – he actually thinks in them. His mind is a simple bot-like algorithm of petty prejudices and knee-jerk nastiness.
There is never any under-layer of irony, complexity, nuance or depth. It’s all surface. Some Americans might see this as refreshingly upfront. Well, we don’t. We see it as having no inner world, no soul. And in Britain we traditionally side with David, not Goliath. All our heroes are plucky underdogs: Robin Hood, Dick Whittington, Oliver Twist. Trump is neither plucky, nor an underdog. He is the exact opposite of that. He’s not even a spoiled rich-boy, or a greedy fat-cat. He’s more a fat white slug. A Jabba the Hutt of privilege.
And worse, he is that most unforgivable of all things to the British: a bully. That is, except when he is among bullies; then he suddenly transforms into a snivelling sidekick instead. There are unspoken rules to this stuff – the Queensberry rules of basic decency – and he breaks them all. He punches downwards – which a gentleman should, would, could never do – and every blow he aims is below the belt. He particularly likes to kick the vulnerable or voiceless – and he kicks them when they are down.
So the fact that a significant minority – perhaps a third – of Americans look at what he does, listen to what he says, and then think ‘Yeah, he seems like my kind of guy’ is a matter of some confusion and no little distress to British people, given that:
• Americans are supposed to be nicer than us, and mostly are.
• You don’t need a particularly keen eye for detail to spot a few flaws in the man.
This last point is what especially confuses and dismays British people, and many other people too; his faults seem pretty bloody hard to miss. After all, it’s impossible to read a single tweet, or hear him speak a sentence or two, without staring deep into the abyss. He turns being artless into an art form; he is a Picasso of pettiness; a Shakespeare of shit. His faults are fractal: even his flaws have flaws, and so on ad infinitum. God knows there have always been stupid people in the world, and plenty of nasty people too. But rarely has stupidity been so nasty, or nastiness so stupid. He makes Nixon look trustworthy and George W look smart. In fact, if Frankenstein decided to make a monster assembled entirely from human flaws – he would make a Trump.
And a remorseful Doctor Frankenstein would clutch out big clumpfuls of hair and scream in anguish: ‘My God… what… have… I… created?’ If being a twat was a TV show, Trump would be the boxed set.” -Nate White
⭕ 3 Dec 2023
🔄 [Text:] 🐣 RT @realDonaldTrump So, with the revelation of MASSIVE & WIDESPREAD FRAUD & DECEPTION in working closely with Big Tech Companies, the DNC, & the Democrat Party, do you throw the Presidential Election Results of 2020 OUT and declare the RIGHTFUL WINNER, or do you have a NEW ELECTION? A Massive Fraud of this type and magnitude allows for the termination of all rules, regulations, and articles, even those found in the Constitution. Our great “Founders” did not want, and would not condone, False & Fraudulent Elections!
[In Tweet:] https://x.com/tooronlists/status/1740778283187540343?s=20
🐣 RT @Levi_Borovychok The size of the operation to destabilize Ukraine, its relations with its allies, and its image in the foreign media is incredible. ¤ Hold tight, get all your positivity out of the secret pockets and be ready to fight your own politicians.
🖼 https://x.com/Levi_Borovychok/status/1731447951388447150?s=20/photo/1
// haunting skeletal figure over bombed out cityscape
🧵 Thread: Trump is simply WRONG about Obamacare.
The Affordable Care Act (ACA) (aka “Obamacare”) has cut the number of uninsured in half, brought costs dowfor families, set rules for competition,, and even slowed the growth of Medicare, What’s more: Americans love it! 1/9
[TextLink:] https://x.com/Auriandra/status/1731584822898831590?s=20/photo/1
[Text:] 🐣 RT @realDonald Trump Getting much better Healthcare than Obamacare for the American people will be a priority of the Trump Administration. It is not a matter of cost, it is a matter of HEALTH. America will have one of the best Healthcare Plans anywhere in the world. Right now it has one of the WORST!
PeterGPeterson(Nov 9): The percentage of Americans without life insurance reached an all-time low in 2022 https://tinyurl.com/4m2j5san 2/9
◕ https://x.com/Auriandra/status/1731584824949846151?s=20/photo/1
// 11/9/2023KFF (Sept 7): As ACA Marketplace Enrollment Reaches Record High, Fewer Are Buying Individual Market Coverage Elsewhere https://tinyurl.com/mr427azv 85% of those using the exchanges get a subsidy; subsidies are based on income, family size, and the amount of coverage chosen 3/9
◕ https://x.com/Auriandra/status/1731584827017646167?s=20/photo/1
// 9/7/223🐣 Obamacare subsidies on the healthcare exchanges are but a sliver of total healthcare spending. Yet Obamacare made the entire healthcare system more efficient: 5/9
◕ https://x.com/Auriandra/status/1731584828598812965?s=20 c/photo/1What Obamare did:
● It allowed children to stay on their parents’ until they turn 26
● It made sure insurers couldn’t deny coverage based on pre-existing conditions
● It got rid of lifetime limits on benefits
6/9What Obamare did (cont):
● It established baseline coverage standards for insurance.
● It required organizations with more than 50 full-time employees to purchase group insurance
● It encouraged insurers to compete, both on the exchanges and in Medicare Advantage plans
7/9NYT (Sept 9): Does Obamacare Explain Medicare’s Spending Slowdown? https://tinyurl.com/4m2j5san “The [ACA], which passed in 2010, should get credit for a significant share of Medicare’s savings during this period — and it may be responsible for a larger share than can be easily measured” 8/9
◕ https://x.com/Auriandra/status/1731584833669742790?s=20/photo/1
◕ https://x.com/Auriandra/status/1731586298693968140?s=20/photo/1
// 9/9/2023Last but not least:
MotherJones (June 29): America finally loves Obamacare https://tinyurl.com/ycea3s5y 59% of people are fine with Obamacare: Trump is living in the past /end 9/9
◕ https://x.com/Auriandra/status/1731586300774359320?s=20/photo/1
// 6/29/2023
🐣 RT @USGLC Wars in Europe & the Middle East, competition in the Pacific, & historic levels of humanitarian need are putting America’s security at risk & time is of the essence! ¤ These retired 3- & 4- star generals & admirals say we need to pass emergency funding now.
💽 https://x.com/USGLC/status/1729194121062183036?s=20/photo/1
// ad with Admiral Stavridis
🐣 RT @un_a_valeable if there is anything that proves stancil’s emphasis on the power of media influence on voter behaviors its the american conservative brain rot is spread, shaped, and magnified by their media ecosystem
🐣 RT @ MacFarlaneNews Former Rep. Liz Cheney (R-WY) tells @cbsnewsthat the 2024 election is an “existential crisis” ¤ “The Republican party of today has made a choice. And they haven’t chosen the Constitution”¤ “It presents a threat if Republicans are in the majority (in the House) on Jan 6, 2025”
WSJ Editorial: Can Washington Still Do Anything? https://tinyurl.com/2344z73f “The inchoate Senate compromise would raise the initial asylum screening standard, limit grounds for parole, and deny asylum to migrants who cross through other safe countries”
// A border security and Ukraine-Israel aid deal is too important to fail.
Can the United States government still act to solve problems and aid allies in the national interest? It’s hard to believe it has come to this, but that’s the underlying question as President Biden and Congress struggle to pass a spending bill to help Ukraine and Israel while improving U.S. border security.
President Biden has asked Congress for $106 billion in supplemental spending, but he needs Republican votes to do it. Republicans want to do something to reduce the flood of migrants pouring across the border and burdening American cities, but they need Democratic votes to pass it. The necessity for compromise is obvious, but America’s polarized politics and Mr. Biden’s political weakness may tank the effort.
***
Mr. Biden’s aid request for Ukraine, Israel and the Pacific theater is urgent. But House Republicans moved first to pass $14 billion for Israel offset by cuts to the Internal Revenue Service. That bill has no chance in the Senate. Yet a bipartisan group of Senators has been working on a deal that includes border reforms in return for the foreign funding that should be more palatable to the GOP House.Republicans rightly note that the Administration has abused provisions in immigration law that let the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) grant parole to migrants for “urgent humanitarian reasons” and “significant public benefit.” Most migrants apprehended at the border are released into the U.S. and allowed to stay for years while awaiting asylum hearings. Some never show up.
Migrants who intend to apply for asylum merely have to demonstrate a “credible fear” of persecution in their home country to gain entry. This initial screening standard is too easy to pass. Many migrants could instead seek asylum in Mexico or other countries they pass through, but they want to live in the U.S. for economic reasons.
DHS has released more than 1.5 million migrants on parole in the U.S since the start of fiscal 2022. The Congressional Budget Office projects that more than 4.5 million migrants will be paroled over the next decade, and about 500,000 will eventually receive asylum. Most qualify for federal welfare benefits after being in the U.S. for one year.
The surge of migrants is overwhelming border communities and big cities like New York and Chicago, which don’t have the resources to care for them until they receive work authorizations or get on the federal dole. The border mess has become a political liability for the President and Democrats in Congress.
The inchoate Senate compromise would raise the initial asylum screening standard, limit grounds for parole, and deny asylum to migrants who cross through other safe countries.
Yet some on the right say these significant reforms aren’t enough. They demand that Congress pass H.R. 2, which mandates that employers use e-Verify to confirm legal status of employees, requires that DHS build at least 900 miles of physical barriers along the border, and codifies many Trump immigration regulatory changes, among other things.
Conservatives for years have railed against “comprehensive” immigration reform, and here’s an opportunity to pass discrete measures that finally fix some of the problems at the border. But some on the Trumpian right don’t want to solve the problem; they want to keep the border as a political issue to bludgeon Democrats.
Meantime, some progressives oppose any changes to immigration law because they favor open borders. Some Senate Democrats also are refusing to support a deal that doesn’t provide legal status to young adults who were brought to the U.S. illegally as children. But House Republicans won’t accept this, and the immediate political need is to persuade them to vote for Ukraine aid.
***
Both President Biden and Republicans have a chance to claim a substantive and political victory here. Mr. Biden would somewhat reduce his immigration problem and avoid the humiliation of losing aid that could hand Vladimir Putin a victory in Ukraine in 2024. Republicans would rightly claim the accomplishment of forcing Mr. Biden to shore up border security.Gridlock in Washington is often a virtue. But every so often Congress needs to act in the national interest. This is one of those times. Failure to strike a deal would signal that the U.S. system really is as dysfunctional as its critics claim.
TheHill: GOP Senator says GOP is ‘making progress’ with Democrats on border security https://tinyurl.com/42umwk6v “Lankford pointed to statements made by Homeland Security Secy Alejandro Mayorkas that suggested that the Biden administration wants to … ‘actually secure the border’”
🐣 RT @CBSNews A federal jury in Illinois ordered $17.7 million in damages — an amount tripled to more than $53 million under federal law — to several food manufacturing companies who had sued major egg producers over a conspiracy to limit the egg supply in the U.S.
🐣 RT @randymot4 Top attack: The “clever” Russians and Chinese decided to put all the ammo under the tank turret, because that would eliminate a loader in the crew and allow for less weight in the turret (less armor protection). This is why Russian and Chinese designed tanks blow up like volcanoes when hit.
⋙ 🐣 RT @ChuckPfarrer TANK KILLER: The NLAW is UKR’s single shot, disposable, anti-tank guided missile system. Once fired, the missile is guided by a predicted line of sight algorithm. In flight, this smart projectile can execute a vertical 180 turn to attack armored vehicles from the top.
◕ https://x.com/randymot4/status/1731295093020041566?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @RnaudBertrand There’s no overstating how extraordinary such a statement by Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin is, warning Israel it’s heading towards “strategic defeat”:
💽 https://x.com/RnaudBertrand/status/1731361257784328632?s=20/photo/1
“In this kind of a fight the center of gravity is the civilian population. And if you drive them into the arms of the enemy you replace a tactical victory with a strategic defeat.”
Essentially saying what is obvious common sense: you create more Hamas than you destroy by killing civilians. And as such what Israel has been doing so far is nothing but dig the hole it’s in deeper and deeper…
After, obviously, it’s doing all this with Pentagon weapons and support in a myriad of ways, so Austin’s words are pretty disingenuous… BUT they see Israel as their “unsinkable aircraft carrier” in the region so they must feel that were they to stop this active support it’d “sink” pretty quickly, which they aren’t ready to do.
Which actually goes to illustrate just how deep the hole Israel – and America – have put themselves in. The “unsinkable aircraft carrier” is taking water and needs constant US support to avoid sinking but the US is now telling them publicly – in very frank terms – that their actions are actually accelerating the sinking…
🧵 RT @dim0kq This is one of the darkest moments for me in the war against Russia. ¤ I just returned from visiting many our friends fighting in Donetsk region, and we had long discussions on the war, and geopolitics around it. ¤ Authentic thoughts from Ukraine’s frontlines, noted in this [thread]
📌 https://x.com/dim0kq/status/1731372798826942923?s=20
[ThreadReader:] https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1731372798826942923.html
🐣 RT @GlasnostGone With a divided & increasingly dysfunctional America. With #Poland, #Slovakia & #Hungary effectively aiding Russia’s invasion by blocking the Ukrainian border. With Germany too timid to supply long-range Taurus missiles. Please don’t forget #Ukraine. It’s the only country in this upside-down world of ours who truly cherishes democracy.
🧵 RT @Kasparov63 Maduro is eager to solidify Venezuela among the axis of autocracy led by Russia and Iran. Invading a neighbor is a popular way to do it. If the free world, the expiring Pax Americana, is too weak & corrupt to stop them, might makes right will continue to make a comeback.
📌 https://x.com/Kasparov63/status/1731445967688196105?s=20
[ThreadReader:] https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1731445967688196105.html
As I wrote a decade ago, nobody likes a global policeman until they have to live in a neighborhood without a cop on the beat. Nor do the effects of war and destabilization stay in that neighborhood for long, not in the era of globalization.
Walking away and ceding spheres of influence to hostile dictatorships isn’t only bad diplomacy & strategy that weakens allies and strengthens enemies. ¤ Declining to defend the values of democracy and liberty is a contagion that soon also spreads at home.
⋙ 🐣 Aurindra: you surely have noticed that it already is, that Trump/Tucker/MAGA are what is behind the weakening you speak of, under the influence of RussiaThe moral relativism doesn’t stop with respecting the barbarous whims of dictators and the bloodlust of terrorists. It’s ignorance and contempt for the system itself, the very foundations that provided the freedom and prosperity now exploited to attack it.
Believing that America can and should always change for the better is intrinsic to its founding principles and its greatest strength. Believing that America is the problem, that its pillars must be toppled to build something else, is wicked demagoguery from left or right.
The US cannot fail to defend the free world that has brought so many billions out of poverty and misery, a structure it created and now seems almost embarrassed about. Are sadistic monarchies better? Theocratic dictatorships? Authoritarian police states? Socialist kleptocracies?
The leaders of those nightmare regimes are united and waging war to extend a grasp that already includes a majority of the world’s population. Stop trying to make deals with dictators & terrorists who want only to kill you and everything you believe in and care about. Fight.
🐣 RT @POLITICOEurope All eyes are now on when retired Israeli general Benny Gantz is going to make his move against PM Benjamin Netanyahu.
⋙ PoliticoEU: Benny Gantz eyes his moment to topple Israel’s Netanyahu https://tinyurl.com/36hr5w5u
// Former defense minister is emerging as most likely candidate to call time on leader’s long political career.
🐣 RT @RpsAgainstTrump Tucker Carlson told Jon Karl that Donald Trump is “far more radical” in his support for Putin than what he says in public. ¤ Shocking!
💽 https://x.com/RpsAgainstTrump/status/1731347409618292788?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @tribelaw Even if you think it’d be better for Trump to be defeated decisively in the 2024 election than to be kept off the ballot using the 14th Amendment, you can’t read this brief with an open mind without concluding that the Constitution bars his candidacy:
[CourtDoc:] https://tinyurl.com/32nh4zyp 67p
🐣 RT @BillPascrell Recently the washington post reported trump is planning to impose a dictatorship if he seizes power and here he publicly admits it. I’m going to post this clip repeatedly so no one can say they haven’t been told.
⋙ 🐣 RT @MeidasTouch TRUMP CONFESSES ¤ “We’ve been waging an all out war on American democracy.” ¤ Donald Trump’s cognitive decline led him to tell the truth to voters in Iowa.
💽 https://x.com/MeidasTouch/status/1731066847150342411?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @Jamie04381095 US Congress will approve the allocation of an additional $60 billion to Ukraine for the holidays – Speaker of the House of Representatives Johnson
Given this & the record increase in the Russian defense budget (70% more than 2023), 2024 will be a very fierce year at the front.
⋙ 🐣 he doesn’t mention the quid pro quo which is to solve the Mexico border crisis which has been tried and failed many times ¤ by giving in to Republican demands, Democrats will lose support from their pro-immigration left wing in the 2024 election ¤ it’s a trap
🐣 RT @MilitaryLab Prepare for the next stage folks 👀 I think that’s what he’s trying to say because instead of delivering the necessary military aid they have “decided” to add a little thrill to it by not supplying enough for a certain time. Let’s see how that will work…what could go wrong?
⋙ 🐣 RT @NOELreports “A critical situation has developed in Ukraine, which may worsen due to insufficient western assistance, said NATO Secretary General Stoltenberg. ¤ “We need to prepare for bad news. Conflicts develop in stages. But we must support Ukraine in both bad and good times,” he added.
¤ https://x.com/NOELreports/status/1731245202998755455?s=20
// see comments: desperation
🐣 RT @OlenaHalushka Truck drivers of Poland, Slovakia, and Hungary blocked the border with Ukraine. Now stuff important for our survival amidst genocide in winter can’t get through. These guys have somehow forgotten their nations are next on russia’s kill list if Ukraine fails
🐣 RT @RonFilipkowski Praying over Trump in IA: “The Gates of Hell will not prevail over him. I pray for protection over him & his family. All the weapons formed against him will not prosper. There is a great victory coming for this nation & the world because of the calling you’ve placed on this man.”
💽 https://x.com/RonFilipkowski/status/1731318920605294680?s=20/photo/1
// tags: exorcism of Trump exorcism ➔ really just “praying over”
🐣 RT @wartranslated Precisely. If the US + Europe together are incapable of holding off an army of convicts and pardoned cannibals, whilst having all the means to do so, then they deserve what’s coming. Enjoy Netflix and Disney+ while you can.
⋙ 🐣 RT @KramarenkoMari3 Zelenskyy will resign at some point- that’s obvious he won’t be here forever. Yes, 10s of millions more refugees to EU. ¤ Budanov won’t do that. ¤ I am tired of all these illusions. ¤ It will be a problem of NATO and EU, not Ukraine anymore. We are done. Figure it out for yourself.
🐣 RT @ChakhoyanAndrew Should russia be split apart as a punishment for its belligerence, the criminal wars it started, and the nuclear blackmail it practices?
🌎 https://x.com/ChakhoyanAndrew/status/1731234262899212766?s=20/photo/1
No, as in, this question deserves no answer because it’s a trap.
British, French, Portuguese empires FELL apart — a historical inevitability grounded in the following facts: Brazil is not Portugal, Algeria is not France, India is not Britain
Let us remember that Ichkeria is not Moskovy, Tatarstan is not Moskovy, Komi is not Moskovy, etc.
The sooner we acknowledge what is obvious, the better
The eventual disintegration of the russian state will be a question of freedom for the Peoples oppressed by Moscow for centuries
It’ll be a quest for agency, where 100M+ inhabitants will hopefully figure out how to take responsibility for themselves and their governments.
Very few in the contemporary russia are willing to accept responsibility for what THEIR STATE is doing in THEIR NAMES — this stems directly from the imperial nature of the polity.
russia kills — russians cheer, or hide, or look away, or stay “apolitical,” and are ALWAYS A VICTIM.
There are few brave people who understand the concept of Reponsibility (like
@vkaramurza), but the colonial essence of the russian federation gives cover to the rest of the “russian people” as they absolve themselves of responsibilitylet us not fear the collapse of the evil/russian Empire. Let us welcome it instead. ¤ 🛑#RussianColonialism
🐣 RT @Rail_splitter1 A little-appreciated fact: Even before 2014, NATO had given up on the Black Sea, focusing instead on the Baltic. The Black Sea became the new Caspian, a Russian lake. Until recently, when a country with no navy and already under attack effectively evicted the Russian fleet.
🐣 RT @Podolyak_M There is no doubt that now a new stage in the war has begun for everyone (including Ukraine’s partners). A stage when it is necessary to abandon excessive conservatism (rather, passivity) and finally decide on the ultimate goals.
¤ https://x.com/Podolyak_M/status/1731257794408468528?s=20
It is no longer possible to sit on the fence, expecting that everything will be resolved on its own and that the Russian Federation will suddenly return to its pre-war (ostensibly peace-loving) state and become capable of negotiating with and economically oriented… It will not. For the umpteenth time I suggest we abandon dangerous illusions. Instead, it will persistently destroy peace, rules, law. It will actively provoke, blackmail, humiliate, kill, invade, interfere, terrorize.
That is why more fundamental decisions are needed at this stage.
First: sanctions that are more deeply and systematically considered. Sanctions that genuinely start to diminish Russia’s financial capabilities.
Second: comprehensive and stringent restrictions on oil/gas. No more hypocritical intermediary services that allow Russia to sell large volumes. Also, concerning liquefied gas. Money, of course, doesn’t smell, but the blood that Russia will ultimately shed does indeed stink.
And the third thing is to try to strike the right balance in the supply of military equipment. Without bureaucracy and doubts. Stake on technological solutions – aviation, drones (including as partial compensation for ammunition deficits), radio-electronic control systems, long-range missiles. Quantity, speed, logistics. That’s the only way.
Anything else is a path to an extremely abhorrent future..
.
🐣📋 RT @gabriel_zucman “For the 1st time in the history of our study, new billionaires acquired greater wealth through inheritance than entrepreneurship ¤ During the next 20-30 years, over 1,000 billionaires are likely to transfer more than $5.2 trillion to their heirs“
⭕ 2 Dec 2023
🧵 RT @MuellerSheWrote BREAKING: Judge Chutkan DENIES what I call Trump’s “monarchy motion” to dismiss his DC indictment on claims of total presidential immunity & Double Jeopardy. She opens by footnoting that potential interlocutory appeals, ones that can delay the trial, must go first. 1/
📌 [TextLink:] https://x.com/MuellerSheWrote/status/1730749014751199634?s=20/photo/1 -n
[ThreadReader:] https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1730749014751199634.html
[CourtDoc:] https://tinyurl.com/ys6mtfyc 48p
🐣 RT @Acyn Trump: The most important part of what is coming up is to guard the vote, and you should go into Detroit, Philadelphia, and some of these places, Atlanta, and you should go into some of these places, and we have to watch those votes..
💽 https://x.com/admcrlsn/status/1731064015814603109?s=20/photo/1
WaPo: Lankford enters arena of bipartisan talks, with global security package on the line https://tinyurl.com/yc7p9xxj “The low-profile Republican leads talks on the difficult issue of border security that is pivotal in the broader deal” ~ including aid to Ukraine
WSJ: Mike Johnson Becomes Surprise Champion of More Ukraine Aid https://tinyurl.com/bdzynv2w “Recently elected House speaker links Kyiv funds and U.S. border security in push to win over skeptical Republicans”
🐣 RT @jurgen_nauditt 👍👍👍 Ex-head of the CIA Petrius [Petraeus] analyzes why there was no breakthrough in the Ukrainian counteroffensive.
We have seen our delays in providing military equipment to Ukraine, our tanks have only recently reached them.
➡️ Our delay in making decisions about the M1 (Abrams),
➡️ delays with the approval of Leopard tanks,
➡️ we delayed decisions on cluster munitions, which could have been very useful,
➡️ missile systems with a longer radius of action for rocket systems of salvo fire,
➡️ and finally, Western-style airplanesRetired General David Petraeus lists these factors as to why this year’s counteroffensive failed.
🧵 RT @RadioFreeTom I know it’s obvious that Trump changes positions on a dime and how it’s mystifying that his cult doesn’t care, but picking all this apart is a fool’s errand. ¤ They stick with him because he channels their diffuse anger about their lives at other Americans. But it’s worse now: /1
📌 https://x.com/RadioFreeTom/status/1731124353842995330?s=20
[ThreadReader:] https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1731124353842995330.html
After 2016, Trump voters thought they’d really made their point, pushed back change in America, and gained respect by electing a POTUS. ¤ All that blew up in their faces: They found out they’re not a majority, and worse, the disdain of their fellow citizens only intensified. /2
2020 and J6 compounded their sense of humiliation and grievance. The know Trump is making fools of them, but they will never admit it. And Biden winning was like a national slap in the face. ¤ So now they’re with him no matter what. They don’t care about policy or positions. /3
And this time, they’ll support him as he does even more desperate and hideous things. He could call for open borders and free abortions and most of them wouldn’t care. All they care about is that he’s promising to go after people they hate even more now than in 2016. /4
Talking about how he and Biden “differ on Issues X/Y/Z” is pointless and a distraction. It’s all part of the “normal political horse race” narrative that is blinding people to the danger ahead. /5x
NYT: Trump’s Defense to Charge That He’s Anti-Democratic? Accuse Biden of It https://tinyurl.com/3cnvkkmd //➔ the “I’m rubber, you’re glue” defense
// Indicted over a plot to overturn an election and campaigning on promises to shatter democratic norms in a second term, Donald Trump wants voters to see Joe Biden as the bigger threat.
🐣 RT @ifindkarma “[Trump] is lifting not just rhetoric but actual plans from the authoritarian playbook… I study the breakdown of democracy, and I cannot say this more clearly: We are sleepwalking towards authoritarianism.” @BrianKlaas @JoeNBC #VoteBlueForDemocracy
🐣 RT @Acyn Trump: We’ve been waging an all out war on American democracy.
💽 https://x.com/Acyn/status/1731063712637727061?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @Acyn LOL The real time reaction from President Biden seeing video of an unhinged outburst from Lauren Boebert is definitely worth watching
💽 https://x.com/Acyn/status/1730710452412584266?s=20/photo/1
// quote of Biden saying billionaires pat only 8% income tax
🐣 RT @RealEmirHan Best war movie of all time?
🔲 https://x.com/RealEmirHan/status/1731050366588846s557?s=20/photo/1
// See comments; mine: Catch-22, Generation War, Gettysburg, Full Metal Jacket, The Pianist, Platoon, Schindler’s List, Cold Mountain
To watch: Tropic Thunder, River Kwai, Last Samurai, 1917, Dunkirk, All Quiet, 300, Band of Brothers,
🐣 RT @BeschlossDC Jacqueline Kennedy’s first public words about JFK’s assassination, from interview with Theodore White, Life Magazine, sixty years ago this week:
[TextLink:] https://x.com/BeschlossDC/status/1731030473273401599?s=20/photo/1
// An Epilogue, Life Magazine; “for one brief shining moment, there was Camelot”
// tags Theodore H White 1963 Jackie Kennedy President John F Kennedy assassination
⭕ 1 Dec 2023
🐣 RT @tribelaw “This is how fascism comes to America, not with jackboots and salutes (although there have been salutes, and a whiff of violence) but with a television huckster, a phony billionaire, a textbook egomaniac “tapping into” popular resentments and insecurities, and with an entire national political party — out of ambition or blind party loyalty, or simply out of fear — falling into line behind him.” — Robert Kagan in May 2016!
⋙ WaPo: https://tinyurl.com/9p4k38ne
🐣 RT @tribelaw Trump’s “service as Commander in Chief did not bestow on him the divine right of kings to evade the criminal accountability that governs his fellow citizens,” Judge Chutkan ruled in a powerful 48-page opinion shredding Trump’s claim to be above the law.
🐣 RT @Kasparov63 Putin uses the war on Ukraine to further his goal of Russia becoming a hollow petro-state. One class of royalty, and one of poor and immigrant laborers to work as servants and to keep the gas and oil flowing. And to die in his useless wars, of course.
⋙ 🐣 [McCain quote cartoon]
😅 🖼 https://x.com/Auriandra/status/1730768173475954695?s=20/photo/1
⋙ 🐣 RT @GlasnostGone Putin’s desperate for fresh meat in #Ukraine. Unprecedented raids on conscripts are taking place in Moscow. Military registration & enlistment offices en masse organize a “one-day conscription”, sending people with serious illnesses & even visitors from other regions to the army. [BBC:] [Ru link]
⋙⋙ 🐣 RT @franckvanhout I am deeply sorrow; but nobody in Europe care anymore. Maybe a trip to Normandie will help to put things in perspective [pics]
⋙⋙⋙ 🐣 many people care, but many countries are now dealing with Russia-fueled rightwing movements: Hungary, Holland, Slovakia, even the US, France and Germany ¤ even the Hamas uprising is not unconnected to Russia; these are dangerous times
🐣 RT @dcpetterson We have two advantages over Germany in the 1930s, two things that might help us defeat fascism this time:
1) We have a quarter-millennium-long tradition of democracy. The Weimar Republic had only a few decades.
2) We have the example of what happened to Germany in the 1930s.
🐣 RT @7Veritas4 The House Committee to protect Donald Trump is demanding all documents and communications pertaining to the Special Counsel’s authority to assemble a grand jury, offer immunity to potential witnesses and any DOJ oversight in the decision to indict their Overlord. ¤ Cover your ears. Hide the kids. ¤ Things are about to get nasty.
[TextLink:] https://x.com/7Veritas4/status/1730757183447396427?s=20/photo/1 -3
🐣 RT @MuellerSheWrote BREAKING: Judge Chutkan DENIES what I call Trump’s “monarchy motion” to dismiss his DC indictment on claims of total presidential immunity & Double Jeopardy. She opens by footnoting that potential interlocutory appeals, ones that can delay the trial, must go first. 1/
[TextLink:] https://x.com/MuellerSheWrote/status/1730749014751199634?s=20/photo/1 -n
[CourtDoc:] https://tinyurl.com/ys6mtfyc p48
[ThreadReader:]
💙 ⋙ 🐣 RT @MaryPatFlynn REMINDER: “Presidents are not kings, and Plaintiff is not President,” Chutkan wrote in her 2-year-old ruling, a rebuke that is sure to echo as she prepares to preside over the newest criminal case against the current GOP frontrunner for the presidential nomination in 2024.
🐣 RT @marceelias 🚨BREAKING: DC Circuit REJECTS Trump claims of presidential immunity in civil lawsuit over January 6th incitement.
[CourtDoc:] https://tinyurl.com/2cmvpax4 67p
[TextLink:] https://x.com/marceelias/status/1730617494904221954?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @ @OccupyDemocrats BREAKING: Donald Trump hit with nuclear bomb of bad news as a U.S. federal appeals court rules that he CAN be sued in civil lawsuits related to the deadly January 6th insurrection.
¤ https://x.com/OccupyDemocrats/status/1730637534647251424?s=20
This is the worst case scenario for Trump…
The court’s decision has been the subject of much speculation and will have far rippling effects. It leaves Trump vulnerable on countless legal fronts and could lead to his final and total financial ruin.
Right out of the gate, the ruling will allow numerous high-profile lawsuits to proceed. There are three from Capitol Police officers and members of Congress who experienced emotional distress and physical injury as well as at least half a dozen other lawsuits that may now spring back to life.
The court’s opinion, penned by Chief Judge Sri Srinivasan, states that a president does not enjoy total exemption from liability for everything he says or does while in office.
The president “does not spend every minute of every day exercising official responsibilities” the opinion reads. “And when he acts outside the functions of his office, he does not continue to enjoy immunity. … When he acts in an unofficial, private capacity, he is subject to civil suits like any private citizen.”
Perhaps worst of all for Trump, the court’s decision could inform how judges weigh arguments of supposed immunity that Trump wants to make in his federal criminal case around the 2020 election.
Anyway you slice it, this is a total disaster for Donald Trump. […]
🐣 RT @Timodc “Again—and I cannot emphasize this enough—this is not a prediction from me and my weirdo, Never Trump friends. This is what the people who worked for Trump believe he will do.”
[TextLink:] https://x.com/Timodc/status/1730636508040659238?s=20/photo/1
⋙ TheBulwark, Jonathan Last: There’s a storm coming. We all know it. And yet Americans are pretending that everything is normal https://tinyurl.com/54w5ptwr
// We are going to be confronted with an existential crisis eleven months from now. And the majority of Americans don’t care.
[Text:] Jonathan Karl is a straight-news reporter. He talked with Bill Kristol this week about a Trump second term and Karl might as well have been lan Bassin.
Why is Karl so alarmed that he sounds like a pro-democracy activist? Because he’s spent the last year reporting on Trump. He’s interviewed Trump and loads of Republicans. He told Kristol that 95 percent of the sourcing for his book came from Republicans, many of whom worked for Trump. And the picture they painted for Karl was dystopian.
● Acting appointments from top to bottom.
● A cadre of thousands of political appointees, pre-vetted for personal loyalty to Trump, replacing career civil servants.
● An understanding among Trump lieutenants that they are free to break the law because they will be pardoned.
● An overriding desire on the part of Trump to seek retribution against perceived enemies.Again —and I cannot emphasize this enough —this is not a prediction from me and my weirdo, Never Trump friends. This is what the people who worked for Trump believe he will do.
ImmigrationImpact: What We Know About the Senate Negotiations That Could Wreck Asylum in the US https://tinyurl.com/58a6vej9 //➔ very useful for understanding terminology, policy, and options involved addressing the difficult immigration crisis
PBS (May 26): Republican 2024 hopeful Ron DeSantis is ‘blazing a trail’ on book bans https://tinyurl.com/mr3f2bxr
// 5/26/2023
“He really is blazing a trail,” said Tiffany Justice, the Florida-based co-founder of the conservative parents group Moms for Liberty, whose members have filed challenges to books in libraries in several states. “What Ron DeSantis does that I think is effective is he uses all the levers of power to make long-term change happen.”
🐣 RT @kyledcheney BREAKING: A federal appeals court has ruled that Donald Trump *can* be sued for inciting the Jan. 6 crowd. He is not “immune” because he was president, the circuit rules. ¤ Details of the ruling to come soon.
BoingBoing (2022): Site documents Republican “sexual predators, abusers, and enablers” https://tinyurl.com/yp86n5vm here’s a list link to GoogleDocs file; 900✛ cases with receipts
🐣 RT @TheRickWilson Oops. Accused rapist and sexual batterer (and thruply swinger) Florida GOP chairman @chrismziegler has an online love-me wall of pictures of him with every GOP pltayer today. ¤ Also, the pathetic ego-jerking of posting grip-and-grins is so cringe.
⋙⋙ https://www.christiangop.com/photos/
⋙ 🐣 RT @BigLeeBronzer Moms4Liberty blocked Moms3Liberty today. Someone is afraid of a three party system.
📊 NBCNews (Oct 5): Poll finds Democrats’ handling of immigration at all-time low https://tinyurl.com/efe88tf3 “President Joe Biden has had an immigration problem for much of his first three years in the White House. ¤ And that problem appears to be getting worse. @ChrisMurphyCT
◕ https://x.com/Auriandra/status/1730561607611126104?s=20/photo/1
// 10/5/2023
⭕ 30 Nov 2023
🐣 RT @MorningConsult NEW: Global Leader Approval: *Among all adults [in each country]
*Updated 11/30/23 https://morningconsult.biz/3XcRtfw
◕ https://x.com/MorningConsult/status/1730611484693078114?s=20/photo/1
.
Modi: 77%
López Obrador: 63%
Lula da Silva: 52%
Albanese: 47%
Meloni: 43%
Biden: 38%
Sánchez: 37%
Trudeau: 31%
Sunak: 27%
Macron: 23%
Scholz: 22% […]
WaPo: Florida GOP chairman ensnared in inquiry involving alleged sexual battery https://tinyurl.com/2x98n7y4 “Ziegler is the husband of Sarasota County School Board member and Moms for Liberty co-founder Bridget Ziegler.” MFL members have filed challenges to books in school libraries
Ziegler is the husband of Sarasota County School Board member and Moms for Liberty co-founder Bridget Ziegler. …
The Zieglers are considered rising stars in Florida’s conservative movement, having become among the most prominent Republicans in the state. ¤ Christian Ziegler rose through the ranks of Florida’s Republican Party to become its chairman in February after serving as the party’s vice chairman and as a Sarasota County commissioner.
Florida’s Republican Party said in a statement that the organization “is aware of the allegations related to Chairman Christian Ziegler” and declined to comment further about an ongoing investigation.…
NYT: Democrats Clash Over Move to Add Asylum Changes to War Funding Bill https://tinyurl.com/5a2wv5h4 Dems and the WH “have agreed in principle to raise the threshold for asylum claims as part of the bill to fund wars in Israel and Ukraine, but liberals are livid — and Republicans want more.”
🐣 RT @wartranslated Strong but humble messaging by President Zelensky:
● We’ve already done the unthinkable and we will do more.
● Frankly admits the counter-offensive in the south did not achieve desired results (no “goodwill gestures” or “regroupings”).
● Ukraine is preparing for a protracted war.
● Ukraine is becoming self-sufficient in terms of domestic arms production. If you don’t want to give us weapons to protect you, give us the means to produce them.
● Attention is key. Anyone capable of keeping attention on Ukraine should continue doing so. This includes all of us – keep talking, keep posting.
● The President, despite exhaustion, will continue to lead the world to a new fair security model.
I would also add that if you decided to somehow write off the Ukrainian army, you’re deeply wrong. And that’s a good thing. Stay delusional. You will be surprised.
⋙ AP: The AP Interview: Ukraine’s Zelenskyy says the war with Russia is in a new phase as winter looms https://tinyurl.com/j2dwd89r
TheBulwark, Ilya Somin: Yes, Trump Is Disqualified from Office under Section 3 of the Fourteenth Amendment https://tinyurl.com/3ss6me5p “A president who tried to use force and fraud to stay in power after losing an election should not be allowed wield the power of office ever again”
🐣 RT @tribelaw “We continue to drift toward dictatorship, still hoping for some intervention that will allow us to escape the consequences of our collective cowardice, our complacent, willful ignorance and, above all, our lack of any deep commitment to liberal democracy. As the man said, we are going out not with a bang but a whimper.”
⋙ WaPo, Robert Kagan: A Trump dictatorship is increasingly inevitable. We should stop pretending. https://tinyurl.com/56yzy9tu Trump “is running on the platform of using unprecedented power to get things done, to hell with the rules. And a growing number of Americans claim to want that”
WaPo: Henry Kissinger’s central role in the U.S. carpet bombing of Cambodia https://tinyurl.com/4m9hrfkw “[T]he U.S. bombing campaign contribut[ed] to the rise of the totalitarian Khmer Rouge regime, which carried out a host of atrocities during its four-year rule”
Nowhere is the debate over the legacy of former U.S. secretary of state Henry Kissinger more searing than in the countries that bore the brunt of his military policies, such as Cambodia. Historians say his decisions led to decades of violence that have continued to haunt Cambodian society. …
“The sad reality is, he leaves this legacy which many, many Cambodians still pay the price for,” said Sophal Ear, a Cambodian American political scientist. “To this day, there are people who … lose limb and life in the process of trying to make a living in a land that has been filled with bombs.” …
From 1969 to 1973, as national security adviser and secretary of state under President Richard M. Nixon, Kissinger directed the carpet bombing of large swaths of Cambodia that U.S. officials at the time claimed were sanctuaries for communist insurgents from South Vietnam as well as North Vietnamese soldiers. Ben Kiernan, a historian at Yale University and a leading scholar of the U.S. legacy in Cambodia, has estimated that around 500,000 tons of U.S. bombs were dropped on Cambodia during this period and killed as many as 150,000 civilians.
The scale of this bombing campaign, internally called Operation Menu, was kept secret from the American public for many decades, though leaked and declassified records have revealed that Kissinger personally “approved each of the 3,875 Cambodia bombing raids.” In 1970, according to declassified transcripts of his telephone conversations, Kissinger spoke to Nixon about the situation in Cambodia before relaying the following order to his deputy Alexander Haig: “He wants a massive bombing campaign in Cambodia. … It’s an order, it’s to be done. Anything that flies, on anything that moves. You got that?” …
Historians have also widely credited the U.S. bombing campaign with contributing to the rise of the totalitarian Khmer Rouge regime, which carried out a host of atrocities during its four-year rule, including the genocide of minority groups. An estimated 2 million people — or about 1 in 4 Cambodians at the time — were killed under the Khmer Rouge, led by dictator Pol Pot. Of 5 million survivors, at least a quarter live with trauma, say local researchers. …
NYT: Israel Knew Hamas’s Attack Plan More Than a Year Ago https://tinyurl.com/mr35yvwb
// A blueprint reviewed by The Times laid out the attack in detail. Israeli officials dismissed it as aspirational and ignored specific warnings.
The approximately 40-page document, which the Israeli authorities code-named “Jericho Wall,” outlined, point by point, exactly the kind of devastating invasion that led to the deaths of about 1,200 people.
The translated document, which was reviewed by The New York Times, did not set a date for the attack, but described a methodical assault designed to overwhelm the fortifications around the Gaza Strip, take over Israeli cities and storm key military bases, including a division headquarters.
Hamas followed the blueprint with shocking precision. The document called for a barrage of rockets at the outset of the attack, drones to knock out the security cameras and automated machine guns along the border, and gunmen to pour into Israel en masse in paragliders, on motorcycles and on foot — all of which happened on Oct. 7.
The plan also included details about the location and size of Israeli military forces, communication hubs and other sensitive information, raising questions about how Hamas gathered its intelligence and whether there were leaks inside the Israeli security establishment.
The document circulated widely among Israeli military and intelligence leaders, but experts determined that an attack of that scale and ambition was beyond Hamas’s capabilities, according to documents and officials. It is unclear whether Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu or other top political leaders saw the document, as well. …
Then, in July, just three months before the attacks, a veteran analyst with Unit 8200, Israel’s signals intelligence agency, warned that Hamas had conducted an intense, daylong training exercise that appeared similar to what was outlined in the blueprint.
But a colonel in the Gaza division brushed off her concerns, according to encrypted emails viewed by The Times.
“I utterly refute that the scenario is imaginary,” the analyst wrote in the email exchanges. The Hamas training exercise, she said, fully matched “the content of Jericho Wall.”
“It is a plan designed to start a war,” she added. “It’s not just a raid on a village.”
Officials privately concede that, had the military taken these warnings seriously and redirected significant reinforcements to the south, where Hamas attacked, Israel could have blunted the attacks or possibly even prevented them. …
🐣 RT @TheRickWilson If the head of the Florida Democratic Party was accused of rape and sexual battery stemming from a long-running polyamorous relationship, Republicans would be screaming it from the rooftops, Fox would go to live 24/7 coverage, and Twitter would melt down.
🐣 RT @SenateFinance WATCH LIVE: Chairman @RonWyden is on the Senate floor to talk about how his Billionaires Income Tax will restore fairness to the tax code by ensuring billionaires finally start paying their share.
💽 https://x.com/SenateFinance/status/1730258391317069999?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @EuromaidanPress Hungary to oppose EU membership talks with Ukraine, said Gergely Gulyas, the chief of staff to Hungarian PM Viktor Orbán ¤ He also stated Hungary would not support amendments to the EU’s budget, part of which would provide $54.5 billion to Kyiv
🐣 RT @JoyceWhiteVance Senate Democrats have succeeded in getting subpoenas issued in the SCOTUS ethics hearings investigation, despite GOP efforts to prevent light from being shined on these issues.
⋙ 🐣 RT @SenWhitehouse It shows how *desperately* Republicans want to prevent Americans from seeing what’s been going on between the right-wing billionaires and the gift-taking justices. It has to be really bad to trigger that barrage of procedural weapons.
⋙⋙ 🐣 RT @SenWhitehouse But the upshot was: “Following the outburst, Democrats succeeded in authorizing the subpoenas, part of a probe into Supreme Court ethics practices, on an 11-0 vote that saw Republicans walk out and boycott the vote entirely.”
🐣 RT @RpsAgainstTrump “I would ask that all members vote to support the expulsion of Representative Santos.” ¤ -House Ethics Committee Chair GOP Rep. Michael Guest
💽 https://x.com/RpsAgainstTrump/status/1730332786844692951?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @TheEconomist For the first time since Vladimir Putin invaded Ukraine, it looks as if he could win. His biggest asset is Europe’s fatalism, complacency and shocking lack of strategic vision.
⋙ TheEconomist: Is Putin Winning? https://econ.st/47DL80U
🐣 🐣 RT @NoLieWithBTC Wow. The Chairman of the Florida Republican Party, Christian Ziegler, is now under criminal investigation for rape and sexual battery. ¤ His wife is the the founder of Moms for Liberty. ¤ He is so far refusing to resign.
🖼 https://x.com/NoLieWithBTC/status/1730314664536354981?s=20/photo/1
// photo of both with Trump
🐣 RT @MuellerSheWrote NEW: Dems on the Senate Judiciary just suspended the rules that would have allowed Republicans to procedurally drown subpoenas for Leonard Leo and Harlan Crow with amendments. All republicans walked out. Dems voted to subpoena Crow and Leo. EXCELLENT.
🔄 🐣 RT @KarenHawki54525
[TextLink:] https://x.com/KarenHawki54525/status/1730288393270009907?s=20/photo/1
// “List of Convicted Republican Pedophiles”
🐣 RT @MeidasTouch Report: The Chair of the Florida GOP, Christian Ziegler, and his wife Bridget, who is a co-founder of Moms For Liberty, are being investigated by the Sarasota Police Department for an alleged Sexual Battery stemming from a ménage à trois relationship. https://tinyurl.com/5aw59pwt
PravdaUA: Timothy Snyder to lead new international research project on Ukrainian history https://tinyurl.com/4u92cuta
⋙ Ukrainian History Global Initiative https://uhgi.org
↥ ↧
1) EuromaidanPress (2021): Why have two revolutions won in Ukraine but none in Russia or Belarus? Historian Hrytsak answers https://tinyurl.com/w9xrtytr
⇈ ⇊
2) EuromaidanPress (2021): Is Ukraine European? Historian Yaroslav Hrytsak answers https://tinyurl.com/23nru637
WaPo, Jim Geraghty: The evangelical case for U.S. military aid to Ukraine https://tinyurl.com/bdf8nd8z “Russia is seemingly attempting to wipe out evangelical churches in occupied Ukrainian territories”
🐣 RT @MuellerSheWrote I guess @mehdirhasan asked too many tough questions. It’s a mistake to cancel his show while keeping those who fail miserably to challenge lies in real time.
🐣 RT @frankrunyeon New: Trump’s NY gag orders are reinstated by the appellate court.
🐣 RT @SquawkCNBC “I can’t say he’s in serious cognitive decline –but he appears to be in decline,” says Former Speaker of the House @Pryan on criticism of President Biden’s age. “What I don’t want to do is blow another presidency and Trump would blow it for us.”
💽 https://x.com/SquawkCNBC/status/1730219363049881919?s=20/photo/1
NYT, Ben Rhodes: Henry Kissinger, the Hypocrite https://tinyurl.com/v7ukvc6s “As imperfect as we are, the United States needs our story to survive. It’s what holds together a multiracial democracy at home and differentiates us from Russia and China abroad.”
// “No one can expect perfection in the affairs of state any more than in relations among human beings. But the United States has paid a price for its hypocrisy”
🐣 RT @ SquawkCNBC.@elonmusk did not hold back at yesterday’s @Dealbook Summit. Here are some highlights, including his message to advertisers leaving @X. @andrewrsorkin, @JoeSquawk, and @BeckyQuick discuss:
💽 https://x.com/SquawkCNBC/status/1730227822738772018?s=20/photo/1
⭕ 29 Nov 2023
🐣 RT @MrKovalenko Pentagon: In the U.S., support for #Ukraine has mobilized the defense industrial base in ways that haven’t been seen in decades. Coast-to-coast, the Defense Department’s more than $27 billion in obligations for PDA replenishment and USAI orders are directly impacting prime vendors and critical suppliers in 37 states.
🌎 https://x.com/MrKovalenko/status/1730052534264352959?s=20/photo/1
⋙ DOD: Ukraine Security Assistance Strengthens Nation’s Defense Industrial Base https://tinyurl.com/y6zdrnjm
🐣 RT @ThePlumLineGS Just as Elon won’t admit his own embrace of white genocide theory is largely what drove advertisers away, here again he insists that advertisers fleeing because of *him* can only reflect badly on *them.* A black hole of bad faith and megalomania.
⋙ 🐣 RT @brianstelter After telling brands like Disney to go fuck themselves, Musk said: “What this advertising boycott is going to do, it’s going to kill the company. And the whole world will know that those advertisers killed the company. [We] will document it in great detail.”
🐣 RT @TheStudyofWar #Russian Off. Campaign Assessment, Nov. 29, 2023: The apparent Russian failure to establish a cohesive cmd. structure among forces defending on the east (left) bank of #Kherson Oblast continues to degrade Russian morale & combat capabilities. 1/6 Full: https://isw.pub/UkrWar112923
[ThreadReader:] https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1730036624833061100.html
🐣 RT @oneunderscore__ It’s going great.
⋙ 🐣 RT @jd_durkin whoa — “go fuck yourself,” Elon Musk says to Bob Iger and others who pull advertising from X ¤ at this point it’s almost as if he’s watching the old Iron Man movies and doing a reverse Tony Stark impression
⋙⋙ 🐣 RT @oneunderscore__ He’s like Midlife Crisis: The Person.
🐣 RT @POTUS New data released today shows that investments spurred by our Inflation Reduction Act are going to communities historically left behind. ¤ When I took office I vowed to be a president for all Americans. ¤ And we’re delivering on that promise.
⋙ 🐣 RT @NBCNews President Biden’s landmark climate law is driving outsized clean energy funding into low-income, less-educated and fossil fuel towns, according to a new analysis the Treasury Dept. is set to release Wednesday. https://tinyurl.com/3bvycs3e
🧵 RT @Laurie_Garrett Last night #JoeBiden gave a speech in Denver: a few quotes:-This month in local elections, “The American people voted to protect the fundamental freedoms, like the right to choose. They voted to protect democracy. They voted against the extremism of our opponents.”MORE
📌 https://x.com/Laurie_Garrett/status/1729968828426150292?s=2/photo/1 -n
[ThreadReader:] https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1729968828426150292.html
2/#Biden -“Democrats up & down the ticket ran on our record. They’re proud of that Biden-Harris agenda…each of the people who won this off-year election cited the record they ran on. And it’s a winning election.”
-“the only reason there’s a ban on #abortion –”3/#Biden -“…& the circumstances in many places is because of #DonaldTrump .”
-New #Democrat election victories are, “just because the #Republican friends found out the power of women in America. Well, Donald Trump is about to find out about the power of women in 2024.”4/#Biden -#DonaldTrump announced his latest idea…He said he wants to get rid of the Affordable Care Act…There are 40 million people in America today who get their health insurance through the Affordable Care Act. His plan is to throw every one of them off that.”
5/#Biden -He’s in Cong. #LaurenBoebert district, where, “We’re going to a wind energy company that plans to invest an additional $200 million to expand the facility in Colorado, double its production, add 850 new jobs — good-paying jobs.
But the congresswoman…”6/#Biden -“…along with every single one of her #Republican colleagues, voted against the law I signed that made these investments possible. And then she voted to repeal it, and she called it a massive failure…And she went on and voted against the Bipartisan…”
7/#Biden -“…Infrastructure Law. She called it garbage. It’s building bridges, roads, Internet, et cetera. And she called it a scam.”
-“One of the ways that we paid for our investments & cut the debt by $7 billion — is by making corporations pay their fair share…”8/#Biden -“…Remember back in 2020, there were 55 corporations in the Fortune 500 corporate world that made $40 billion in profit who didn’t pay a single penny in tax. But by making sure they pay that 15 percent minimum tax, we paid for everything that we’ve proposed.”
9/#Biden -“We had 750 billionaires b4 the #pandemic . You know what their tax rate is? Eight percent…That’s wrong. That’s why I’m proposing a billionaire minimum tax…at just 25%. That’s a hell of a lot less than all of you pay.”
-“I’m tired of trickle-down economics.”10/#Biden -“I guarantee that no one making less than $400,000 a year would pay a penny more — in federal taxes — as long as I was President of the United States.”
-“Our democracy is at stake…because the same man who proclaims himself to be a proud election denier..”11/#Biden -“…the same man who is promising pardons for the January 6th insurrectionists, the same man who said, and I quote, he wants to terminate — quote, ‘termination of all rules, regulations, articles, & even [those] found in the Constitution.’ He means it.”
12/#Biden -#Trump “intends to use the presidency for he says, ‘revenge & retribution.’ It’s a President of the United States saying those things…And on more than one occasion, he’s made a joke about the assault on Paul #Pelosi , Speaker Pelosi’s husband, with a hammer..”
13/#Biden -“…to the head trying to kill him. Well, guess what? If you can joke about that, you really have no business being anywhere near the presidency…we’ve never talked this way b4 in American politics…And there’s no place in America for political violence…”
14/#Biden -“…under any circumstances. None, zero, ever.”
-“#Trump said if he returned to office, he would go after all those who oppose him, root out what he called the ‘vermin’ in America…These are his quotes. That’s a specific phrase with a specific meaning…”15/#Biden -“That goes to the language we heard in Germany in the ‘30s. #Trump also talked about, quote, ‘the blood of our country is being poisoned,’ end of quote. God Almighty.”
-“Folks, we just can’t fall numb to #Trump & the threats he poses. #DonaldTrump & the…”16/#Biden -“…extreme MAGA Republicans are determined to destroy American democracy as we know it.”
-“When I look at America, I see the strongest economy in the world, an America that’s once again leading the world in foreign policy. #DonaldTrump sees an angry, dark…”17/#Biden -“…dismal, divided future of America, but I don’t. Folks, I mean this from the bottom my heart: I’ve never been more optimistic about America…Like I said, we just have to remember who we are.”
WaPo: Ukraine funding’s fate hangs on thorny immigration issue in Senate https://tinyurl.com/yeyunkrx “Some Democrats concede that changes to the asylum system are needed and could help the party politically, but face ire from parts of their base”
// A group of seven senators is working to find a compromise on border issues as part of larger package of funding for several nations.
◕ https://x.com/Auriandra/status/1729934902274003122?s=20/photo/1
WaPo: Ukraine funding’s fate hangs on thorny immigration issue in Senate https://tinyurl.com/yeyunkrx “Some Democrats concede that changes to the asylum system are needed and could help the party politically, but face ire from parts of their base”
// A group of seven senators is working to find a compromise on border issues as part of larger package of funding for several nations.
🐣 📋 RT @BillPascrell Wow new data today shows that the American economy is growing even faster than previously thought and is booming more than any other industrial nation in the world
◕ https://x.com/BillPascrell/status/1729915736397685189?s=20/photo/1
// G7: US 7.4%, Can 3.5, Ita 3.3, Jap 2.4, GB 1.8, Fra 1.8, Ger 0.3
🐣 RT @LeaderMcConnell Border security is national security. It’s foundational to national sovereignty. Just ask America’s friends in Europe, the Middle East, and the Indo-Pacific. Fixing @POTUS’ open borders isn’t extraneous to the Senate’s work – it’s essential.
⋙ 🐣 borders aren’t open: the system is overwhelmed and needs more judges to process, according to US asylum law; people have the right (under intl law) to seek asylum ¤ what happened to your fervent support for Ukraine and America’s role in the rules based order vs Putin’s autocracy?
⋙ 🐣 The GOP has resisted addressing immigration reform for decades (it’s so useful for “othering” brown people) but now you want to cram through an extremist House 🤡 bill in a couple of weeks ¤ People in Ukraine are dying waiting for you to get your act together
🐣 RT @ Maks_NAFO_FELLA ✈️ “The transfer of F-16 to Ukraine will not change the situation on the battlefield, we need to prepare for a long war” – Stoltenberg
🐣 RT @RoKhanna The national debt was caused by 4 things:
1) Reagan’s tax cuts,
2) Bush’s tax cuts,
3) Trump’s tax cuts, and
4) Bush’s overseas wars.
We don’t need a fiscal commission to study it. Everyone knows Johnson’s fiscal commission will recommend cuts in Social Security & Medicare. Instead, we need to end the tax breaks for the ultra-rich and make a moonshot investment in American industry.
⋙ 🐣 RT @benshapiro Tax cuts aren’t government expenditures. My income isn’t the government’s money. Defense spending is not the predominant spending problem. The debt is from Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, and other exorbitant social redistributionist spending programs. Full stop.
⋙⋙ 🐣 Medicare/caid and SocSec MIGHT be redistributionist if contributions weren’t capped ¤ The debt does indeed match the GOP tax cuts which have mostly benefited the wealthy ¤ The US has closest to the lowest tax burden of OECD countries with the highest wealth inequality
◕ https://x.com/Auriandra/status/1729895748483858831?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @Podolyak_M Russia, deliberately starting a large-scale war in Ukraine, was driven solely by an unequivocal desire to completely obliterate Ukraine’s agency and sovereignty, —
¤ https://x.com/Podolyak_M/status/1729813840999669773?s=20
— to seize, absorb, and devastate as much Ukrainian territory as possible, and to install a puppet government at the helm of the ravaged country, leaving it entirely dependent on Russia’s wishes and plans. A more extensive plan of the Russian Federation aimed to frighten Western elites by initiating a bloodshed war with Ukraine, to kickstart the restoration process of the USSR, and to ensure subsequent aggressive dominance on the European continent.
Therefore, there were and could be no “real peace talks” in February/March 2022, or at any other time, let alone today. Don’t live in illusions. Russia has never engaged in negotiations; instead, it has issued ultimata, demanding recognition of its right to kill. Currently, Russia continues to demonstrate that it needs to accomplish “all objectives of SVO,” to secure legal acknowledgment of Russia’s ownership rights over all annexed territories. Most importantly, Russia is determined not to lose in the war under any circumstances in order to avoid accountability for massive demonstrative war crimes.
Thus, any statements by the aggressor country about “negotiations” or claims that “the Russian Federation never intended to conquer Ukraine”, despite the evident large-scale invasion, mass killings of civilians, systematic construction of torture chambers and filtration camps in the occupied territories, and the abduction of children, are unequivocal attempts to justify aggression, to avoid responsibility, to absolve themselves of accusations of one-sided aggression with clear genocidal intentions and… to gain an operational/tactical pause in the war. In order to finally plunge Ukraine’s partners into information chaos during the pause, make adjustments to their military strategy, update military production and sharply escalate destructive actions at the next stage of the war. ¤ Russia never offers genuine negotiations until it suffers significant defeats.
🐣 RT @politicsusa46 I want EVERY AMERICAN to watch this. Why?
💽 [TextLink:] https://x.com/politicsusa46/status/1729851863934079391?s=20/photo/1
2024 will be the first election in American history, where a presidential candidate is making no secret of his intent to rule as a dictator.
Aside from his own terrifying words, plans are already underway to put people in place to meet these objectives. Over 50,000 hand picked political operatives are as we speak, being trained to replace long serving public servants across all of government.
This is not some fanciful idea, it is REAL work in progress as you read this post.
Regardless of your politics, you should be outraged, that a small group of lunatic right would be fascists, see this as an opportunity to rule you, not govern you.
#DemsAct #DemVoice1 #wtpBLUE #ONEV1 #FAM46
🐣 RT @RoKhanna The national debt was caused by 4 things:
1) Reagan’s tax cuts,
2) Bush’s tax cuts,
3) Trump’s tax cuts, and
4) Bush’s overseas wars.
We don’t need a fiscal commission to study it. Everyone knows Johnson’s fiscal commission will recommend cuts in Social Security & Medicare. Instead, we need to end the tax breaks for the ultra-rich and make a moonshot investment in American industry.
🐣 RT @JonLemire Trump again threatening to use the power of the government against media he believes is being critical of him: ¤ “More to come, watch!”
[TextLink:] https://x.com/JonLemire/status/1729837765813051483?s=20/photo/1
[Text:] 🐣 RT @realDonaldTrump MSNBC (MSDNC) uses FREE government approved airwaves, and yet it is nothing but a 24 hour hit job on Donald J. Trump and the Republican Party for purposes of ELECTION INTERFERENCE. Brian Roberts, its Chairman and CEO, is a slimeball who has been able to get away with these constant attacks for years. It is the world’s biggest political contribution to the Radical Left Democrats who, by the way, are destroying our Country. Our so-called “government” should come down hard on them and make them pay for their illegal political activity. Much more to come, watch!
🐣 RT @anno1540 Stoltenberg announced the colossal losses of the #Russian Federation in Ukraine ¤ “Militarily, Russia has lost a significant part of its conventional armed forces – hundreds of aircraft, thousands of tanks, and more than 300,000 casualties,” the #NATO Secretary General noted. [links]
¤ https://x.com/anno1540/status/1729870943609295309?s=20
By: Kateryna Bilobrov
NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg noted that during the full-scale war in Ukraine, the Russian army suffered colossal losses. It is not only about personnel, whose victims have long been counted in the hundreds of thousands, but also about expensive military equipment.The politician stated this during a press conference held at the headquarters of the Alliance in Brussels, reports Ukrinform. He noted that these are significant losses for #Moscow, some of them irreparable. [links in Ukr]
Militarily, Russia has lost a significant part of its conventional armed forces – hundreds of aircraft, thousands of tanks and more than 300,000 casualties,” the head of the North Atlantic bloc explained.
We will remind, according to Stoltenberg, the Alliance sees the current achievements of Ukraine on the battlefield, despite the fact that the front line is almost not moving. According to him, the allies are impressed by the bravery and professionalism of the Ukrainian defenders and their ability to strike at the rear of the occupiers
The day before the #Ukrainian Defense Forces eliminated 860 servicemen of the Russian army. The enemy was also deprived of a number of units of military equipment and weapons
⭕ 28 Nov 2023
🧵 RT @pevchikh 1/15 Did you know that Putin’s ex-wife owns two flats in Spain🇪🇸, and she is still welcome to use them?Did you know that Russia’s deputy prime minister, responsible for fighting poverty, owns a Spanish golf resort and this €18m villa? ¤ If you didn’t, this thread is for you
📌 https://x.com/pevchikh/status/1729464012209877059?s=20
💙🐣 RT @Trump_Detester Melania Trump is sitting beside Michelle Obama at Rosalynn Carter’s funeral. Let us never forget the time the racist birther trash plagiarized Michelle Obama’s speech…
💽 https://x.com/Trump_Detester/status/1729572431113666805?s=20/photo/1
// speeches juxtaposed, overlapping audio: wow!
🐣 RT @AndrewDesiderio McConnell says he called Biden last week and reiterated that the Senate won’t pass a comprehensive foreign aid bill (Ukraine/Taiwan/Israel) without a “credible” border security fix.
🐣 RT @LeaderMcConnell National security begins with border security, and on @POTUS’ watch, record illegal migration has left our asylum and parole systems in desperate need of reform. To pass the Senate, supplemental national security legislation will have to make meaningful policy changes to address the border crisis.
⋙ 🐣 seems like you and Schumer have outlined your positions, but both sides need to give a bit or Ukraine will be sacrificed and the US’s position in the world dealt a mighty blow. ¤ Biden has indicated some openness. Maybe you could bring him in.
🐣 RT @dcpetterson I wrote this 7 years ago, after the election but before Trump’s inauguration. I got almost everything right. ¤ Too many have forgotten how bad the Trump Reich was, since now we’re again talking about the things we worked on in the Obama years. ¤ We could lose them all permanently.
[TextLink:] https://x.com/dcpetterson/status/1729553686710374530?s=20/photo/1
🔄🔄 ⋙ 🐣 I understand. Here’s mine …
[TextLink:] https://x.com/Auriandra/status/1729573991344435637?s=20/photo/1 -2
🐣 RT @nexta_tv Putin urged Russian families to have eight children
¤ https://x.com/nexta_tv/status/1729548789206139086?s=20
Russia is facing “the most difficult demographic challenges,” and to overcome them, it is necessary to revive the tradition of large families, Putin said Tuesday.
Many peoples of Russia “retain the tradition of a strong, multi-generational family, where four, five or more children are brought up,” Putin said, speaking at a meeting of the World Russian People’s Council. He recalled that just a few generations ago families had seven or eight children each, or even more. “Let us preserve and revive these wonderful traditions. Having many children and a large family should become a norm, a way of life for all peoples of Russia,” the Kremlin press service quoted Putin as saying.
🐣 RT @RepDanGoldman .@GOPOversight has a track record of manipulating closed-door testimony to spread false info about @POTUS. ¤ If @RepJamesComer refuses to accept Hunter Biden’s offer to testify publicly, he will be admitting that this is a purely political sham investigation. [link]
🐣 RT @Victorshi2020 Wow. A new study finds CNN, Fox, & MSNBC covered Hillary Clinton’s “deplorable” comment NINE times more than Trump using the word “vermin” for his enemies & the big 3 networks spent 18 times longer on Hillary’s comment than Trump’s. This is why our media is failing us. Horrible.
[Source Link:] https://x.com/MattGertz/status/1729526822033895912?s=20
🐣 RT @DmytroKuleba To those who have missed the previous 30 years, here is a short list of the results of negotiations with Russia that it never respected:
¤ https://x.com/DmytroKuleba/status/1724427557016043668?s=20
1. The Budapest Memorandum of 1994. Russia agreed to “respect independence, sovereignty, and the existing borders of Ukraine” as well as “refrain from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of Ukraine”. Breached by Russia invading Crimea in 2014.
2. The Russian-Ukrainian Friendship Treaty of 1997. Russia agreed to respect Ukraine’s territorial integrity and “reaffirmed the inviolability of the borders” between the two countries. Russia breached it in 2014.
3. The OSCE Istanbul Summit in 1999. Russia committed to withdrawing its troops from Moldova’s Transdniestrian region and Georgia until the end of 2002. That never happened.
4. The 2008 Georgia ceasefire agreement following Russian aggression against the country. Russia agreed that “Russian military forces must withdraw to the lines prior to the start of hostilities”. That never happened.
5. The Ilovaysk “Green Corridor” in August 2014 and other “humanitarian” death corridors. Russia pledged to let Ukrainian forces leave the encircled town of Ilovaysk in the east of Ukraine, but instead opened fire and killed 366 Ukrainian troops. In the following years, Russia attacked numerous humanitarian corridors in Syria.
6. The “Minsk” agreements of 2014 and 2015. Russia agreed to cease the fire in the east of Ukraine. There had been 200 rounds of talks and 20 attempts to enforce a ceasefire, all of which the Russian side promptly violated. On February 24th, 2022, Russia launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine.
7. The 2022 Black Sea Grain Initiative. Russia pledged to “provide maximum assurances regarding a safe and secure environment for all vessels engaged in this initiative.” It then hindered the initiative’s operation for months before withdrawing unilaterally a year later.
NB: I am only focused on deals made with Russia to address specific issues and conflicts. I am not mentioning almost 400 international treaties that Russia has breached since 2014.
There are no conclusions to be drawn here, except that no one can seriously use the words “Russia” and “negotiations” in the same phrase.
Putin is a habitual liar who promised international leaders that he would not attack Ukraine days before his invasion in February 2022.
Russia’s tactic has remained consistent in its many wars over the last three decades: kill, grab, lie, and deny.
Why would anyone genuinely believe that Russia in 2023 is any different from Russia in 1994, 1997, 1999, 2008, 2014, 2015, and 2022?
🐣 RT @OversightDems NEW: Ranking Member @RepRaskin issued the following statement after Chairman @RepJamesComer rejected Hunter Biden’s request to testify before the Committee in a public hearing: https://tinyurl.com/y8fjmrvu
[TextLink:] https://x.com/OversightDems/status/1729536412335153349?s=20/photo/1
[Text:] “Let me get this straight. After wailing and moaning for ten months about Hunter Biden and alluding to some vast unproven family conspiracy, after sending Hunter Biden a subpoena to appear and testify, Chairman Comer and the Oversight Republicans now reject his offer to appear before the full Committee and the eyes of the world and to answer any questions that they pose? What an epic humiliation for our colleagues and what a frank confession that they are simply not interested in the facts and have no confidence in their own case or the ability of their own Members to pursue it. After the miserable failure of their impeachment hearing in September, Chairman Comer has now apparently decided to avoid all Committee hearings where the public can actually see for itself the logical, rhetorical and factual contortions they have tied themselves up in. The evidence has shown time and again President Biden has committed no wrongdoing, much less an impeachable offense. Chairman Comer’s insistence that Hunter Biden’s interview should happen behind closed doors proves it once again. What the Republicans fear most is sunlight and the truth.”
🐣 RT @ZaleskiLuke There is no deep state. Trump lost. Vaccines work. Elon is a rightwing oligarch. Taxes help pay for things we all need and use as a society. Politicians lie. Trump lies more than any other US politician. His Big Lie is the basis for the insurrection. Trump incited the j6 attack.
🐣 RT @Maks_NAFO_FELLA 🇺🇸🇺🇦 [General] Ben Hodges: “So far US has not fully committed to Ukrainian victory” ¤ “Our willingness to commit to Ukraine actually winning is the key and so far. I am proud of what the US has provided but it has only been enough to keep Ukraine in the fight”
🐣 📋 RT @JayinKyiv Russia will now allocate an incredible 39% of its entire government budget to its global wars of conquest, officially putting the country at a deficit of $9.5 billion/year. ¤ The collapse of this USSR is going to be even more awesome than the first.
[TextLink:] https://x.com/JayinKyiv/status/1729384048974282875?s=20/photo/1
⋙ “Looking at pledges of military aid to Ukraine between January 24, 2022 and July 31, 2023, the U.S. government committed a total of €42.1 billion. In relative terms, however, This military aid commitment amounts to approximately 0.2 percent of U.S. GDP” Statistica https://tinyurl.com/2veh5xx5
◕ https://x.com/Auriandra/status/1729398157899886889?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @clashreport Netanyahu to his party (Likud) members:
I’m the only one who’ll prevent a Palestine state in Gaza, Judea and Samaria.
I’m the only one who can withstand U.S. pressure.
I know Biden for 40 years.
I know how to manage American public opinion.
⋙ 🐣 he knows he’s complicit in lowering vigilance in Gaza while diverting military to infringe further into the West Bank; he knows what the investigation will find ¤ I hope he also knows Biden has agreed to consider making aid to Israel “contingent” on Israel showing constraint
⭕ 27 Nov 2023
WaPo: What to expect during Congress’s final sprint this year: The national security supplemental https://tinyurl.com/dy8273st “[T]hree developments — growing skepticism toward Israel aid among Democrats, waning support for Ukraine aid among Republican voters and deep divisions between the parties over border policy — make passing Biden’s aid package difficult”
🐣 RT @BillPascrell Icymi here’s a recent clip of a top House republican admit that he can’t name one meaningful thing the republican party has done in power. No one can!
⋙ 🐣 RT @Acyn [Chip] Roy: One thing. I want my Republican colleagues to give me one thing. One. That I can go campaign on and say we did. Anybody sitting in the complex, if you want to come down to the floor and come explain to me, one meaningful, significant thing the Republican majority has done
💽 https://x.com/BillPascrell/status/1729195705548636541?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @ BradMossEsq This is the legal technicality upon which his lawyers have successfully relied in the past. Terrible political optics but I doubt voters will pay any attention to it.
⋙ 🐣 RT @BillPascrell Wow in a legal proceeding trump is now arguing he didn’t violate the 14th Amendment by inciting the Jan 6 insurrection because he “never took an oath to support the Constitution of the United States.” This treacherous criminal is head of the republican party.
🐣 RT @ JoeTrippi He says he “did not take an oath to support the constitution of the United States”. What was that thing he did in front of that “record” crowd then?
⋙ 🐣 RT @MuellerSheWrote NEW: Trump’s appeal in the Colorado case to keep him off the ballot pursuant to §3 of the 14th amendment has been filed. Here is what Trump is *actually* arguing.
[TextLink:] https://x.com/JoeTrippi/status/1729311515495293386?s=20/photo/1
[Text:] SUMMARY OF THE ARGUMENT
The framers excluded the office of President from Section Three purposefully. Section Three does not apply, because the presidency is not an office “under the United States,” the president is not an “officer of the United States,” and President Trump did not take an oath “to support the Constitution of the United States.”
The trial court lacked jurisdiction to hear this constitutional claim under Section 113.
The court’s factual findings should be struck because it lacked jurisdiction, and its findings about engagement and insurrection are highly prejudicial dicta.
The court lacked jurisdiction because Section Three is not self-executing and Congress has not passed an enabling statute authorizing state courts to address it. Section Three raises non-judiciable political questions, and states cannot create and enforce the additional qualification for a candidate to seck office.
President Trump did not engage in an insurrection: “engaged” does not include “incite,” he did not have the “specific intent” to cause the riot and launch an attack on the Capitol, and his specch was protected by the First Amendment. Further, the events of January 6″ were not an insurrection.
🐣 RT @JohnWDean Trump’s making it very clear that if he wins the White House again in 2024 he will be an authoritarian chief executive, sometimes better known elsewhere as a dictatorship. This appears to be okay with the GOP, many of whom no doubt aspire oligarchy status!
🐣 RT @ ZelenskyyUa Since February 24, one of Ukraine’s greatest achievements has been forcing the Russian Navy out of the Black Sea.
Today, I addressed the International Maritime Organization, emphasizing that it is in the Black Sea that Ukraine has demonstrated not only that it will continue to contribute to global security, particularly food security, but also that it is capable of protecting security.
6 million tons of cargo have already been transported to countries on three continents via our alternative export routes: Africa, Asia, and Europe.
Freedom of navigation is and will remain inviolable. No matter how powerful the force seeking to destroy it is, the force of cooperation between nations will always be stronger. Always. ¤ 🇺🇦🇺🇦🇺🇦
🐣 RT @anders_aslund At least 50 top Russian businessmen, mostly rather young, have died strangely since Putin launched his war against Ukraine. This requires serious investigation. […]
🐣 RT @anno1540 By @Anne_Hidalgo Why I’m leaving Twitter. …
¤ https://x.com/anno1540/status/1729318479713513514?s=20
⋙ 🐣 If there were a single place to go, I might join you, but there are 10 or more … ¤ I manage by using Lists and Mute and Block. This place still has the depth (eg Covid) and international reach (eg Ukraine) that I want. If a SINGLE site with such a broad user base emerges, great!
🐣 RT @PodSaveAmerica “And my predecessor has once again, God love him, called for cuts that could rip away health insurance for tens of millions of Americans, and Medicaid. They just don’t give up.” —President Biden on Donald Trump’s call to repeal the Affordable Care Act
💽 https://x.com/PodSaveAmerica/status/1729256159084003340?s=20/photo/1
⋙ 🐣 don’t forget that Obamacare, which Trump wants to replace with — ?? —, also lets parents keep kids on their parents‘ health insurance until age 26, establishes standards of care and coverage for ALL plans, and requires all large companies to insure their workers
🐣 RT @ProjectLincoln It’s no coincidence that Trump’s rhetoric encourages hate. We’ve seen time and again how his instincts are towards violence and chaos.
💽 https://x.com/ProjectLincoln/status/1729349395722973192?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @ProjectLincoln👇
⋙ 🐣 RT @TheRickWilson [Aug 4] We’re coming after you, @realDonaldTrump. We’re going to break you, humiliate you, defeat you at the ballot box, shatter your movement. You’ll spend your sorry last years weeping in a lonely prison cell, your hideous legacy a warning to future generations, your shame eternal.
[TextLink:] https://x.com/ProjectLincoln/status/1729243700432167087?s=20/photo/1
[Text:] 🐣 RT @realDonaldTrump IF YOU GO AFTER ME, I’M COMING AFTER YOU!
🐣 RT @NOELreports “Ukraine is another priority. We can’t allow Vladimir Putin to march through Europe. We understand the necessity of assisting there. What we have said, we also have to work on our own border policy and those two things have to move together,” US House Speaker Johnson said.
💽 https://x.com/NOELreports/status/1729247996544721384?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @ianbremmer tens of millions were fed algorithmically promoted disinformation about this strike ¤ but this headline is far less outrage inducing, and won’t anywhere near the same traction (just like this post of mine)
[TextLink:] https://x.com/ianbremmer/status/1729262573470802249?s=20/photo/1
// “Human Rights Watch says rocket misfire likely cause of deadly Gaza hospital blast”
🐣 RT @AccountableGOP Former Bush aide Peter Wehner’s message to Christians who are supporting Trump despite his dehumanizing rhetoric: ¤ “You’ve jettisoned almost everything that you claim to most cherish in your life to make inner peace with this man who’s a sociopath, an unfiltered sociopath.”
💽 https://x.com/AccountableGOP/status/1729264172880318662?s=20/photo/1
🐣📋 RT @ArmedMaidan Ukrainian figures are certainly more plausible than much lower Western estimates of 👹 killed ¤ Those are virtually impossible mathematically and seem based on ultraconservative OSINT burial data that represents minimum possible numbers, not the likely ones
⋙ 🐣 RT @ArmedMaidan
🧐 Many Western estimates of Moscow’s war losses are ridiculously low and even mathematically impossible
🤡 If one recent UK estimate was right, Russia would have 2-4 times more troops fighting Ukraine than anyone believes it actually does!
#Ukraine #UkraineRussiaWar
[TextLink:] https://x.com/ArmedMaidan/status/1729212167327776806?s=20/photo/1
🐣 📋 RT @ReneDuba This is very important: data comparisons show that Ukranian numbers of Russians killed were correct all along. ¤ The total number of Russian casualties is over a million of which (in september) there were around 300.000 dead and 700.00 wounded. ¤ Numbers have risen since.
[TextLink:] https://x.com/ReneDuba/status/1729225082214756714?s=20/photo/1
// Source: UK Defense Intelligence Agency
🐣 RT @SophiePerrin18 “Democrats are preparing for the likelihood that they’ll have to accept significant border policy changes. Sen. Peter Welch (D-Vt.), a staunch progressive, told us that it’s “not sustainable” for Democrats to maintain the status quo at the border.”
🧵 RT @Mylovanov British intelligence says Russia’s losses over the past six weeks are the highest since the full-scale invasion began. ¤ But WSJ says this will be a difficult defensive winter for Ukraine and its position could weaken ¤ NATO Secretary Stolenberg reconciles these views. 1/
📌 https://x.com/Mylovanov/status/1729224994054705640?s=20
[ThreadReader:] https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1729224994054705640.html/photo/1
He says: Military success can be measured in square meters gained but also in losses inflicted on the enemy ¤ So, while there is little frontline movement, Ukraine has caused significant Russian capability losses 2/
Ukraine has also succeeded in pushing the Russian Black Sea Fleet out of much of the Black Sea, a major achievement ¤ Stolenberg says not to forget early predictions of Ukraine’s swift defeat. Instead, by end-2022 Ukraine liberated large areas of territory 3/
The Wall Street Journal also says that despite difficulties Russia may impose on Ukraine, it is also unlikely to achieve major gains despite its advantages 4/
Furthermore, Russia has more manpower and Putin is militarizing the economy using high oil revenues. Meanwhile political paralysis in the US and Europe threatens the weapons and money Ukraine relies on 5/
So while Russia has the upper hand militarily, politically, and economically, the limits of its offensive capabilities mean it may only achieve minor victories rather than a breakthrough 6/
Putin remains far from conquering the Ukrainian regions Russia claims, let alone achieving its main goal of subduing Ukraine as an independent nation 7/
Russia’s material advantages in 2024 don’t seem decisive enough for it to reach its political aims. It would be wrong to say Russia is winning the war. But unless the right choices are made regarding Ukraine’s approach and Western resources, Ukraine’s prospects look dim.
Russian losses and capability limits appear to be plausible. ¤ British intelligence cites Ukrainian General Staff data showing Russia’s average daily losses in November were 931 personnel per day 9/
The previous peak was in March 2023 during the battles for Bakhmut, with 776 dead Russian occupiers per day on average. ¤ While it cannot verify Ukraine’s methodology for calculating Russia’s losses, the British intelligence says the numbers appear credible. 10/
Even with the transfer of strategic air defense systems from Kaliningrad and Black Sea Fleet logistics issues hampering missile strikes, Russia is still taking unsustainably high casualties trying to advance in eastern Ukraine. 11/
Meanwhile, Zelensky says Ukraine to receive military ships to secure vessels in the “grain corridor” in the Black Sea 12/
President Zelenskyy considers the establishment of the “grain corridor” without Russia one of Ukraine’s biggest achievements in the past year. Ukraine is working to ensure the security of ships going through this corridor. 13/
Zelenskyy says Ukraine has “concrete agreements” to receive ships, calling it a matter of the near future. The ships will escort vessels in the sea to guarantee their safety. 14/
Zelenskyy also states that the Odesa region will be protected by additional air defense systems that have been agreed upon with partners. He says a specific request has already gone out and been approved. 15/
Ukraine expects a major decision on its accession process to the EU. European Commission Vice President Vera Jourová has arrived in Kyiv to discuss Ukraine’s EU accession with parliamentarians. She says it is about quality and speed 16/
She reiterated the EU Commission’s recommendation for Ukraine to work on four reform priorities before March 2024: fighting corruption, de-oligarchization, lobbying regulation and the law on national minorities 17/
An EU report in November recommended starting accession talks with Ukraine but said some unfulfilled reforms need to be completed first. Ukraine says it’s highly prepared to join and can finish talks in two years 18/
EU leaders will decide in December whether to open accession negotiations with Ukraine. Hungary is threatening to block a positive decision for Kyiv 19/
The US support for the next year is still in question. Last week, US Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin visited Kyiv. He believes there is still bipartisan support in Congress for Ukraine. 20/
Austin acknowledges some in Congress have “reasonable questions” about supporting Ukraine that the US will answer. ¤ He argues that what’s happening in Ukraine matters not only for Ukraine but the whole world, as it concerns the rules-based international order 21/
Politico reports Senate Majority Leader Schumer plans to hold a vote the week of December 4 on Biden’s request for billions in assistance to Ukraine and Israel. This aims to create urgency for lawmakers to reach a border security deal that can pair with aid for allies
Schumer blames the border demand as the “biggest holdup” to delivering new Ukraine defense funds. He says the decades-old partisan issue has been injected into the bipartisan Ukraine priorities 23/
A bipartisan Senate group hopes to marry Biden’s $100 billion+ request for Ukraine and others with changes to asylum and parole policies. The asylum issue was the main sticking point in talks before Thanksgiving 24/
Republicans warn they won’t approve more Ukraine aid without border provisions, believing the House won’t pass a bill lacking such language. The December Senate vote deadline adds pressure for a deal. 25/
Schumer argues faltering US support for Ukraine would make autocrats like Putin happier and embolden Russia. This concerns not just European security but American security 26/
So, in summary, Ukraine appears to be ok, but any progress depends on the Western funding, which is victim to domestic politics. I hope it gets resolved soon. ¤ These are historical events in the East of Europe. If Russia is stopped and the EU enlarged, the world will be better X
🐣 RT @NOELreports Speaker Mike Johnson said he’s “confident and optimistic” Congress will be able to pass additional funds to help Israel and Ukraine before the holidays — provided lawmakers are able to coalesce around border security policy changes wanted by the GOP.
🐣 RT @BillPascrell American building is booming thanks to 3 laws Democrats passed. How did republicans vote?
🏭100% voted no to factory building
🛣️94% voted no to new roads & bridges
👷🏽♂️89% voted no to bringing jobs home
◕ https://x.com/BillPascrell/status/1729232286212923404?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @JayinKyiv The US economy grew 4.9% in the 3rd quarter 2023. ¤ Russia’s economy is only 5.9% the size of the US economy. So, the US grew one entire Russia. ¤ Putin’s hellscape consists of propaganda machine, some oil wells and 70 years stockpiled military garbage. ¤ Don’t fall for it.
[CNBC TextLink:] https://x.com/JayinKyiv/status/1729231983757103336?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @GOP4Ukraine Speaker Mike Johnson: “Ukraine is another priority…We can’t allow Vladimir Putin to march through Europe.”
💽 https://x.com/GOP4Ukraine/status/1729219484852895961?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @anders_aslund This seems serious. The 4th Guards Kantemirovskaya Order of Lenin Red Banner Tank Division named after Yuri Andropov (4-я гвардейская танковая Кантемировская дивизия имени Ю. В. Андропова) was considered one of the two elite tank divisions defending Moscow (beside Tamanskaya).
⋙ 🐣 RT @ officejjsmart A 🇺🇦 drone “hit the building of the 🇷🇺 Kantemirovskaya Division, which houses the 275th self-propelled artillery regiment. ¤ 🇷🇺 officials, who publicly declared that the 🇺🇦 drone had been ‘shot down,’ are mum about the number of casualties. ¤ – 🇷🇺 News
💽 https://x.com/officejjsmart/status/1728845153442660760?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @AndrewDesiderio NEWS from Sarasota, Fla.—@SpeakerJohnson says Ukraine is a “priority” & “we can’t allow Vladimir Putin to march through Europe, and we understand the necessity” of aiding Ukraine. ¤ Also says he’s in touch w/Senate group negotiating on border ¤ @JakeSherman
🐣 RT @DavidCayJ California did far better at saving lives during the pandemic than Florida, a smart @latimes piece shows with solid data, the latest sign of the dramatic revival of that newspaper. ⋙ LATimes: https://tinyurl.com/37s7tk3a
[TextLink:] https://x.com/DavidCayJ/status/1729212935946342781?s=20/photo/1
Given how different California and Florida are – in terms of the age of their populations, overcrowded housing and the like – it’s hard to establish a definitive scorecard of who handled COVID-19 better in terms of policy. Structural factors may have provided one state an advantage at any point in time.
But in raw terms, significantly more Floridians died on a per capita basis during the COVID-19 emergency than Californians. Of the four most-populous states, California had the lowest cumulative COVID death rate: 2,560 for every 1 million residents. Florida’s rate was 60% worse, with 4,044 COVID fatalities for every 1 million residents, according to a Times analysis of Johns Hopkins University data through early March, when the university ended its data tracking.
In other words, Florida’s raw death tally — 86,850 in early March — came close to California’s total, 101,159, despite California having roughly 18 million more residents.
🐣 RT @Gerashchenko_en “One of Ukraine’s greatest achievements since February 24 is the expulsion of the Russian military fleet from the Black Sea.
https://x.com/Gerashchenko_en/status/1729192951081799924?s=20/photo/1
It was in the Black Sea that we managed to prove that Ukraine will not only remain a contributor to global security, including food security, but is also capable of protecting security.
Thanks to our alternative export routes, we have already managed to transport 6 million tons of cargo for countries on three continents – Africa, Asia and Europe,” – President Zelenskyy at the 33rd session of the International Maritime Organization Assembly.
🐣 RT @lyssafella So this was taken down on TruthSocial hours after I posted it 😂😂 ¤ Haven’t the slightest clue why…🤔😂
💽 https://x.com/lyssafella/status/1729148409209348518?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @AntiToxicPeople Desperately. Deranged. Lying. Lunatic.
[TextLink:] https://x.com/AntiToxicPeople/status/1729159433270575233?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @realDonaldTrump Whenever I sarcastically insert the name Obama for Biden as an indication that others may actually be having a very big influence in running our Country, Ron DeSanctimonious and his failing campaign apparatus, together with the Democrat’s Radical Left “Disinformation Machine,” go wild saying that “Trump doesn’t know the name of our President, (CROOKED!) Joe Biden. He must be cognitively impaired.” No, I know both names very well, never mix them up, and know that they are destroying our Country. Also, and as reported, I just took a cognitive test as part of my Physical Exam, and ACED it. Also ACED (a perfect score!) one taken while in the White House. Biden should take one so we can determine why he wants Open Borders, No Energy Independence, A Woke Military, High Inflation, No Voter I.D., Men playing In Women’s Sports, Only Electric Cars & Trucks, A Weaponized DOJ/FBI, and so many other CRAZY things!!!
⭕ 26 Nov 2023
WaPo: Republicans want to pair border security with aid for Ukraine. Here’s why that makes a deal so tough https://tinyurl.com/589rmhe7 “Republicans argue that Ukraine aid could be a tough sell to some of their voters, and the border policy is the compromise.”
🐣 RT @WajahatAli Many Arabs & Muslims will still vote Biden. But the fear is a depressed vote bc of what is perceived as Biden’s support for Netanyahu’s war. They know Trump is terrible but some can’t support Biden Administration as it allows Israel to keep killing kids. Voters are emotional.
⋙ 🐣 RT @JoyceWhiteVance As an American, I vote for candidates I believe will serve my country best. As someone who fought for my Muslim community as a US Atty & against Trump’s Muslim ban as a private citizen I can’t fathom why any citizen would risk returning Trump to power & destroying our country.
⋙ 🐣 what I see is that Biden’s intervention with Netanyahu has resulted in fewer Palestinian kids from being killed than if he weren’t involved; from the first day the “laws of war” have been cited over & over ¤ I’m concerned the violent protests in this country will help elect Trump
⭕ 25 Nov 2023
🐣 📋 RT @SteveWoodsmall Mike Johnson wants to gut Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid because “we’re drowning in debt.” In fact, 100% of our nation’s $34 trillion debt was caused by Reagan, Bush, and Trump tax cuts along with the $10 billion in illegal wars Bush and Cheney lied us into.
⋙ 🐣 RT @SteveWoodsmall Reagan’s tax cut added $19 trillion in today’s dollars. Cuts by Trump and Bush added $10 trillion to the debt. $29T out of $33T, so pretty much.
ABCNews: How the debate over Ukraine aid became tangled up in US border security https://tinyurl.com/47pksdvh “Ukraine is at a critical point,” said Sen Jack Reed [D-RI], Chair Senate Armed Services, “The Russians are just counting on us to give up and walk away—& then they walk in”
DCExaminer: Congress races to pass aid for Israel and Ukraine before Christmas https://tinyurl.com/2v2bce3p “Democrats, seeing Ukraine aid is at risk, have agreed to negotiate more narrow changes to immigration law.”
// Sen Thom Tillis [R-NC], “who is supportive of providing funding to both Israel and Ukraine, emphasized time is of the essence when it comes to approving aid to both countries”
🐣 📋 RT @JamesHu298124
Population of California: 39,538,223
Population of Wyoming: 578,803
The 40 million people who live in the 22 smallest states get 44 senators to represent their views. The 40 million people in California get two. This is undemocratic and an unfair representation of voters.
⭕ 24 Nov 2023
🐣 RT @BMeiselas Joe Biden is not just a good president. ¤ He is an exceptional president.
¤ https://x.com/BMeiselas/status/1728277917258715477?s=20
While Trump inherited a booming and prosperous economy, Biden took over a country in the worst shape since the Great Depression from a maniac who tried to overthrow the government and refused to participate in the transition process.
Biden got Americans vaccinated, delivered stimulus checks straight to the American people, added 14 million jobs, spearheaded and signed some of the most consequential bills in history (Infrastructure Act, Inflation Reduction Act, CHIPs Act), capped insulin for seniors on Medicare at $35 a month, delivered for our veterans with the PACT Act, protected Social Security and Medicare, ended the forever war in Afghanistan, supported Ukraine from Russian aggression, oversaw the expansion and strengthening of NATO, led the nation to the longest stretch of below 4% unemployment in over 50 years, brought America the greatest post-COVID recovery of every single G7 nation with the highest GDP growth and lowest inflation, signed the most comprehensive climate legislation in history, restored America’s leadership on the global stage, joined the UAW picket line and helped them achieve the biggest pay raise in decades and so much more.
It’s nothing short of historic and it’s past time for folks to acknowledge the reality.
🐣 RT @ProjectLincoln Now more than ever, a leader like President Biden is needed. Governing for all of America and putting country first, his dignity and diplomacy are healing our nation. We know it and the numbers prove it: President Biden is good for our country.
💽 https://x.com/ProjectLincoln/status/1728050935694242087?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @FedorovMykhailo Technologies change the course of the war and push the development of Ukrainian defense tech. @BRAVE1ua made a fast track for defense developments possible. Future of warfare is creating by Ukrainians; take a look at innovations in a video by @United24media.
💽 https://x.com/FedorovMykhailo/status/1728072070565695607?s=20/photo/1
⭕ 23 Nov 2023 🍁
🐣 RT @MikeSington The distinguished ex-president posts a warm and loving Thanksgiving Day message. (Guy is a raging, unhinged psychopath.)
[TextLink:] https://x.com/MikeSington/status/1727670707704967638?s=20/photo/1
[Text:] 🐣 RT @realDonaldTrump Happy Thanksgiving to ALL, including the Racist & Incompetent Attorney General of New York State, Letitia “Peekaboo” James, who has let Murder & Violent Crime FLOURISH, & Businesses FLEE; the Radical Left Trump Hating Judge, a “Psycho, Arthur Engoron, who Criminally Defrauded the State of New York, & ME, by purposely Valuing my Assets at a “tiny” Fraction of what they are really worth in order to convict me of Fraud before even a Trial, or seeing any PROOF, & used his Politically Biased & Corrupt Campaign Finance Violator, Chief Clerk Alison Greenfield, to sit by his side on the “Bench” & tell him what to do; & Crooked Joe Biden, who has WEAPONIZED his Department of Injustice against his Political Opponent, & allowed our Country to go to HELL; & all of the other Radical Left Lunatics, Communists, Fascists, Marxists, Democrats, & RINOS, who are seriously looking to DESTROY OUR COUNTRY. Have no fear,however, we will WIN the Presidential Election of 2024, & MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!!!
🐣 📋 RT @spectatorindex GDP per capita, 2022
.
🇺🇸 US: $76,000
🇦🇺 Australia: $65,000
🇩🇪 Germany: $48,000
🇬🇧 UK: $45,000
🇫🇷 France: $42,000
🇮🇹 Italy: $34,000
🇯🇵 Japan: $33,000
🇸🇦 Saudi: $31,000
🇷🇺 Russia: $15,000
🇨🇳 China: $12,000
🇹🇷 Turkey: $10,000
🇧🇷 Brazil: $9,000
🇮🇩 Indonesia: $4,800
🇮🇳 India: $2,300
🐣 RT @nexta_tv EU countries perceive Russia as the number one threat to European security and are preparing for war with it in the foreseeable future, said Czech President Petr Pavel.
.
“All NATO countries perceive Russia as the number one threat in Europe, and this implies the need to prepare realistically for such a threat. All armies take this threat seriously, all armies are preparing for the possibility of a high-intensity conflict in Europe,” Pavel said at a meeting of the “Visegrád Group” presidents.
🐣 RT @KenRoth Putin has become accustomed to surrounding himself with sycophants and suppressing dissent, so he finds it disconcerting when at the G20 summit for “the first time he had to listen to direct, public criticism of the invasion at an international event. ”
⭕ 22 Nov 2023
🐣 RT @ PuestoLoco CREW Appeal shows how Judge Wallace erred by absurdly claiming:
1• President is not an “officer of the United States”;
2• Presidency is not an “office under the United States”;
3• Presidential oath is not an oath to support the Constitution.
➔ https://tinyurl.com/3jk7dx63
🐣 RT @RpsAgainstTrump Conservative former judge Michael Luttig: ¤ “The Republicans, led by the former president, instigated a war on American democracy on January 6th, 2021, and now…We know that they are determined to prosecute that war to its catastrophic end” ¤ Never Trump.
🐣 RT @DarthPutinKGB Russia violates:
UN Charter 45
Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty 70
Helsinki Accords 75
Belovezha Accords 91–92
Budapest Memo 94
Black Sea Fleet Treaty 97
Friendship Treaty 98
Treaty on Azov Sea & Kerch Strait ‘03
Karkiv pact ‘10
But Ukraine is “unwilling to engage in talks”.
🐣 RT @NOELreports The EU is preparing a plan to provide Ukraine with long-term security commitments. It includes a mechanism of long-term military support, training of the armed forces and support for the development of the state’s defense industry.
⭕ 21 Nov 2023
NYT, George Conway, Michael Luttig and Barbara Comstock: The Trump Threat Is Growing. Lawyers Must Rise to Meet This Moment. https://tinyurl.com/3bdeesyp “We must rebuild a conservative legal movement that supports & defends American democracy, the Constitution & the rule of law”
CNN: Fears grow in Congress over Ukraine and Israel aid amid dispute over immigration and spending cuts https://tinyurl.com/438rhvtp
ResponsibleStatecraft: The Ukraine war has been a ‘great bargain’ for US in the Black Sea https://tinyurl.com/yr5kbtba “Officials boast that Washington and NATO’s foothold has opened up much-desired energy opportunities”
NYT: Political Pressures on Biden Helped Drive ‘Secret Cell’ of Aides in Hostage Talks https://tinyurl.com/4wezd9b9 “The deal came as Democrats are increasingly divided over Mr. Biden’s embrace of Israel, particularly as the civilian toll in Gaza grows.”
🐣 RT @ralakbar JUST IN: Statement from President Biden on the Hostage Release in Gaza
[TextLink:] https://x.com/ralakbar/status/1727178029133447628?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @POTUS I thank Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad Al-Thani of Qatar and President Abdel-Fattah El-Sisi of Egypt for their critical partnership in reaching this deal. And I appreciate Prime Minister Netanyahu’s commitment in supporting an extended pause to ensure this deal can be fully carried out.
WaPo: Israel and Hamas agree to hostage release deal, 4-day pause in fighting https://wapo.st/3SQ00ok
Israel and Hamas early Wednesday agreed to a hostage release deal that will involve a four-day pause in fighting — the first cessation in Israel’s six-week air and ground assault on the Gaza Strip, after Hamas’s Oct. 7 attack. At least 50 women and children among the estimated 240 people held hostage in Gaza will be released over that period, the Israeli government said in a statement. Hamas said on Telegram that the deal will involve the release of 150 Palestinian women and children from Israeli prisons, and “intensifying the entry of trucks for humanitarian, relief, medical and fuel aid into all areas of the Gaza Strip.” Qatar, which has been mediating the talks, confirmed the deal for a “humanitarian pause,” adding that the starting time of the pause will be announced within the next 24 hours.
🐣 RT @ProjectLincoln For 4 long years, Donald Trump made us a laughingstock, kowtowing to authoritarians across the globe. ¤ Under President Biden, America once again leads the free world. Our allies are stronger, and our enemies are weaker. President Biden is an American President.
💽 https://x.com/ProjectLincoln/status/1726993878698668138?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @JoeBiden Donald Trump is running for president bragging about how he “killed Roe v. Wade.” ¤ Let’s be clear: The only reason a fundamental right has been stripped away from the American people for the first time in American history is because of Trump.
🐣 RT @mehdirhasan Two possible members of a future Trump administration, and one former member of the last Trump administration, have spent the past 48 hours threatening to ‘denaturalize’ and ‘deport’ me, as well as ‘indict’ me (for what?) ¤ Tell me again how we’re not facing fascism from the GOP?
🐣 RT @petestrzok The whole quote from Ty Cobb is worth absorbing in full
[TextLink:] https://x.com/petestrzok/status/1727139247600308490?s=20/photo/1
[Text:] “He has never cared about America, its citizens, its future or anything but himself. In fact, as history well shows from his divisive lies, as well as from his unrestrained contempt for the rule of law and his related crimes, his conduct and mere existence have hastened the demise of democracy and of the nation,” Cobb wrote in an email. “Our adversaries and our allies both recognize that even his potential reelection diminishes America on the world stage and ensures continued acceleration of the domestic decline we are currently enduring. If that reelection actually happens, the consequences will extinguish what, if anything, remains of the American Dream.”
🐣 RT @AntiToxicPeople This man is objectively an unhinged, dangerously deranged lunatic.
[TextLink:] https://x.com/AntiToxicPeople/status/1727123012644975016?s=20/photo/1
[Text:] 🐣 RT @realDonaldTrump A Rigged Trial going on against me by a corrupt N.Y. State Attorney General and an out of control Judge. They brought Values down to a FRACTION of what they are really worth, like Mar-a-Lago, and then called me a Fraud. They are the FRAUDSTERS, and the whole system is CORRUPT. I didn’t even include one of my most valuable assets, BRAND VALUE, in my Financial Statements. Also, this Psycho Judge refuses to acknowledge the fact that I have a 100% Disclaimer Clause on the First Page of my Statements – “DO YOUR OWN DUE DILIGENCE.” But it all doesn’t matter, because regardless of what we say to show our TOTAL INNOCENCE, and it has been proven in many ways, and many times over, this political, Trump Hating Judge, together with his horrendous, seething with ANGER Law Clerk, with her illegal campaign contributions, will find me guilty as hell. NO JURY ALLOWED, A STATUTE NEVER USED FOR THIS BEFORE, A RIGGED TRIAL, A RACIST & CORRUPT ATTORNEY GENERAL. A TRUMP HATING JUDGE. ELECTION INTERFERENCE!
🐣 RT @judgeluttig This is the most powerful, most compelling brief on a question of (profoundly important) constitutional law that I have ever read. There is simply no answer to the constitutional case made by @CREW-crew for the former president’s disqualification .
[CourtDoc:] https://tinyurl.com/3hb6dj7y 67p
🐣 RT @Morning_Joe “It’s time that fascism is called fascism and Americans know exactly what they’re voting for.” — @joenbc discussing NYT reporting on Trump’s authoritarian bent
💽 https://x.com/Morning_Joe/status/1726926047755542624?s=20/photo/1
⭕ 20 Nov 2023
🐣 RT @USNATO Ukraine has taken back more than half of its territory seized by Russia’s forces since February 2022. In this tough and dynamic battle, Ukraine’s soldiers are fighting bravely every single day, and they continue to inspire the world with their bravery and courage. We will continue to support them to be in the strongest possible position at the negotiating table when the time comes. We continue to stand #UnitedWithUkraine while they defend their freedom.
⋙⋙ 🐣 The US has always said that, in the end, conditions will be ironed out at the negotiating table. We have said only Ukraine can decide when that happens. I don’t think this statement represents a change in policy.
⋙ 🐣 RT @USNATO Let’s be clear: we reaffirm our enduring commitment to Ukraine and its people. A just and durable peace means not caving to Russia’s brazen attempts to redraw borders by force. This battle is not over, it is winnable. We will continue to support Ukraine for as long as it takes.
🐣 RT @NBCPolitics House Speaker Mike Johnson, who recently made clear his endorsement of Donald Trump in 2024, met with the former president Monday night, two sources familiar with the meeting say.
WaPo, Philip Bump: What happens after Donald Trump’s ‘final battle’? https://tinyurl.com/z3ufabd4
🐣 RT @ProjectLincoln Stop pretending that things will go back to being normal. Trump will continue his cruel, anti-democratic, authoritarian crusade. It’s time for all of us to put country over party and come together to defeat Trump, once and for all.
💽 https://x.com/ProjectLincoln/status/1726722124302225874?s=20/photo/1
🐣📋 RT @David_Charts 10 of last 11 recessions started under Republicans. The odds of flipping 11 fair coins and getting 10 heads is about 11/2048, 0.537% or about 5 in 1000. ¤ Either Republicans are very unlucky, or they are doing something very wrong.
[TextLink:] https://x.com/David_Charts/status/1726728589603737673?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @SecDef I came to Kyiv today with an important message – the United States stands with Ukraine, and we are going to be with them for the long haul.
💽 https://x.com/SecDef/status/1726690969985359896?s=20/photo/1
WaPo: As Ukraine fears U.S. will cut off aid, White House sends reassurances https://tinyurl.com/mrwv9ate “Zelensky and other top Ukrainian officials are adamant that any territorial concessions to Russian President Vladimir Putin would merely reward his military aggression.”
💽 MSNBC: Steve Rattner: Confusion, misinformation clouds immigration debate https://tinyurl.com/2dapmc9y
// Morning Joe economic analyst Steve Rattner discusses immigration as a 2024 election issue and why he says the debate about immigration policies is filled with confusion and misinformation.
🐣 RT @BillPascrell 🚨Today three republican judges issued a despicable decision destroying the Voting Rights Act to make it easier for the far right to steal your right to vote and rig elections. This preposterous holding must be overturned.
⋙ 🐣 RT @ZachMontellaro Holy moly: 8th Circuit has found that there is no private right of action for the Voting Rights Act Section 2. This (has to?) go to SCOTUS, but the inability for private parties to bring VRA claims would be … crushing to it.
🐣 RT @ProjectLincoln “Pure democracies are not the way to run a country” ¤ This is why the Republican Party will continue to lose over and over and over again. They hate democracy because when we vote, they lose.
💽 https://x.com/ProjectLincoln/status/1726676832471126445?s=20/photo/1
// Rick Santorum on Newsmax
🐣 RT @mehdirhasan Nothing to see here, just the former Gorsuch law clerk touted as Trump’s next attorney-general, threatening to indict, detain, & deport me (for what?) & put Tim Miller, who is gay, in a women’s prison. ¤ Nothing at all unconstitutional, fascistic, or bigoted about any of this. 🤷🏻♂️
¤ https://x.com/mehdirhasan/status/1726673303581155837?s=20
🐣 RT @AnIllarionov [tr] McCall on Zelensky’s meeting in Congress. ¤ The speaker expressed full support for Zelensky. We are disappointed by the slowness of the administration. If [the US] does not provide weapons, then I have included requests for the types of weapons that the Ukrainians are asking for in the appropriations bill.
⋙ 🐣 Note: Rep Michael McCaul is chairman of the US House of Representatives Foreign Affairs Committee
⋙ 🐣 There is a special bill, the Defense Supplemental, which includes aid for Ukraine, Israel, Gaza (humanitarian), and Pacific (esp Taiwan) which is bundled with US border security. The border security is the hold-up. He’s saying if the Supplemental bill fails, he will have the $$ for Ukraine included in the regular defense funding bill (Jan or Feb).
🐣 RT @BradMossEsq With oral arguments in the gag order case over, my official speculation is the following:
1) the Circuit will uphold the permissibility of a gag order w/r/t Trump; but
2) it will further polish and refine Chutkan’s order to give Trump clearer guidance on what he can say.
🐣 RT @ChakhoyanAndrew If you’re feeling hopeless, take 5 minutes to watch @FareedZakaria present a winning argument for how the world must #makerussiapay
💽 https://x.com/ChakhoyanAndrew/status/1726619354123694365?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @disclosetv JUST IN – United States will continue to support Ukraine’s “fight for freedom” against Russia — Pentagon
[TextLink:] https://x.com/disclosetv/status/1726594636259656010?s=20/photo/1
[Text:] RELEASE IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Secretary of Defense Lloyd J. Austin III VisitsUkraine
Nov. 20,2023Secretary of Defense Lloyd J. Austin IlI traveled to Ukraine today to meet with Ukrainian leaders and reinforce the staunch support of the United States for Ukraine’s fight for freedom. He will also underscore the continued U.S. commitment to providing Ukraine with the security assistance it needs to defend itself from Russian aggression, while also discussing a long-term vision for Ukraine’s future force.
During his visit, Secretary Austin will engage in high-level talks with Ukrainian leadership. The discussions will focus on further bolstering the strategic partnership between the United States and Ukraine, to include ensuring Ukraine’s armed forces have the battlefield capabilities they need for both the winter and to defend their country against future Russian threats.
🐣 RT @BillPascrell Recently the head of the republican party donald trump called his political opponents vermin to be exterminated. I am going to post this odious clip repeatedly so no American can say they weren’t told.
⋙ 🐣 RT @MeidasTouch [11/12] Here’s Trump echoing Adolf Hitler during his rally yesterday saying he will “root out the communist, Marxist, fascist and the radical left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country…”
💽 https://x.com/MeidasTouch/status/1723776391664320739?s=20/photo/1
WaPo: Appeals court to hear arguments over Trump gag order in Jan. 6 case https://wapo.st/3MS9qMb
// The gag order imposed by U.S. District Court Judge Tanya S. Chutkan is on hold until the appellate court weighs in. You can listen to the audio feed here, or follow along with us (or both!).
🐣 RT @DylanBurns1776 It’s been two years since my favorite tweet was posted
[TextLink:] https://x.com/DylanBurns1776/status/1726537868682961186?s=20/photo/1
[Text:] 🐣 RT @ASBMilitary NATO is mistaken if they think that a Russian offensive would be met by resistance from Ukraine. Majority of Ukrainian soldiers will lay down their arms & join the Russians before they shoot a brother. The west will never understand the cultural link
between Russians & Ukr.
12:04 AM • 20 Nov 21 • Twitter for iPhone
🐣 RT @anneapplebaum Russia is throwing everything it has – bribery, propaganda, migrants, energy blackmail, hackers – at Europe and the US – with the clear (and often stated) intent of destabilizing Western democracies. When will we begin to take this challenge seriously?
⋙ 🧵 RT @emilkastehelmi. Recent developments in Finland: ¤ Over the past few days, Russia has sent an increasing number of migrants to Finland’s borders. Finland has closed several border crossing points due to the authorities’ threat assessment. ¤ A video surfaced of the Russian operation. 1/
📌 https://x.com/emilkastehelmi/status/1726349169869377855?s=20
🐣 RT @SophiePerrin18 “Earlier this weekend, U.S Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer said he will prioritize passing further military aid packages for Ukraine and Israel so that they are approved before Christmas.” [KyivIndependent]
¤ https://x.com/SophiePerrin18/status/1726491068386906570?s=20/photo/1
⭕ 19 Nov 2023
NYT: Trump’s Dire Words Raise New Fears About His Authoritarian Bent https://tinyurl.com/437carnx “During a Veterans Day speech, Mr. Trump used language that echoed authoritarian leaders who rose to power in Germany and Italy in the 1930s”
// The former president is focusing his most vicious attacks on domestic political opponents, setting off fresh worries among autocracy experts.
[…] During a Veterans Day speech, Mr. Trump used language that echoed authoritarian leaders who rose to power in Germany and Italy in the 1930s, degrading his political adversaries as “vermin” who needed to be “rooted out.”
“The threat from outside forces,” Mr. Trump said, “is far less sinister, dangerous and grave than the threat from within.”
This turn inward has sounded new alarms among experts on autocracy who have long worried about Mr. Trump’s praise for foreign dictators and disdain for democratic ideals. They said the former president’s increasingly intensive focus on perceived internal enemies was a hallmark of dangerous totalitarian leaders.
Scholars, Democrats and anti-Trump Republicans are asking anew how much Mr. Trump resembles current strongmen abroad and how he compares to authoritarian leaders of the past. Perhaps most urgently, they are wondering whether his rhetorical turn into more fascist-sounding territory is just his latest public provocation of the left, an evolution in his beliefs or the dropping of a veil.
“There are echoes of fascist rhetoric, and they’re very precise,” said Ruth Ben-Ghiat, a professor at New York University who studies fascism. “The overall strategy is an obvious one of dehumanizing people so that the public will not have as much of an outcry at the things that you want to do.”
Mr. Trump’s shift comes as he and his allies devise plans for a second term that would upend some of the long-held norms of American democracy and the rule of law.
These ambitions include using the Justice Department to take vengeance on his political rivals, plotting a vast expansion of presidential power and installing ideologically aligned lawyers in key positions to bless his contentious actions.
Steven Cheung, a campaign spokesman, responded to criticism of the “vermin” remarks by saying it came from reactive liberals whose “sad, miserable existence will be crushed when President Trump returns to the White House.” Mr. Cheung did not respond to requests for comment for this article.
Some experts on authoritarianism said that while Mr. Trump’s recent language has begun to more closely resemble that used by leaders like Hitler or Benito Mussolini, he does not quite mirror fascist leaders of the past. Still, they say, he does exhibit traits similar to current strongmen like Viktor Orban of Hungary or Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey. …
He has insinuated that the nation’s top military general should be executed and called for the “termination” of parts of the Constitution. If he wins back the White House, he has said, he would have “no choice” but to imprison political opponents. …
Crowds at Mr. Trump’s events have generally affirmed his calls to drive out the political establishment and to destroy the “fake news media.” Supporters do not flinch when he praises leaders like Mr. Orban, Xi Jinping of China and Vladimir V. Putin of Russia.
Standing amid nearly two dozen American flags at an Independence Day celebration in South Carolina in July, Mr. Trump promised retribution against Mr. Biden and his family. ¤ “The gloves are off,” he said. The crowd unleashed a resounding cheer. ¤ Supporters roared in approval when Mr. Trump called Democrats in Washington “a sick nest of people that needs to be cleaned out, and cleaned out immediately.” …
“He’s absolutely ratcheting it up, and it’s very concerning,” said former Gov. John Kasich of Ohio, who ran for the Republican presidential nomination in 2016 against Mr. Trump. “There’s just no limit to the anger and hatred in his rhetoric, and this kind of poisonous atmosphere has lowered our standards and hurts our country so much.” …
Fascism is generally understood as an authoritarian, far-right system of government in which hypernationalism is a central component.
It also often features a cult of personality around a strongman leader, the justification of violence or retribution against opponents, and the repeated denigration of the rule of law, said Peter Hayes, a historian who has studied the rise of fascism.
Past fascist leaders appealed to a sense of victimhood to justify their actions, he said. “The idea is: ‘We’re entitled because we’ve been victimized. We’ve been cheated and robbed,’” he said.
Recent polls have suggested that Americans may be more tolerant of leaders who violate established norms. A survey released last month by the Public Religion Research Institute found that 38 percent of Americans supported having a president “willing to break some rules” to “set things right” with the country. Among Republicans surveyed, 48 percent backed that view.
Jennifer Mercieca, a professor at Texas A&M University who has researched political rhetoric, said Mr. Trump had wielded language as a chisel to chip away at democratic norms. ¤ “Normally, a president would use war rhetoric to prepare a nation for war against another nation,” she said. “Donald Trump uses war rhetoric domestically.”
YahooNews: Congress to approve additional aid for Ukraine and Israel by Christmas https://tinyurl.com/mr995tw8 Proponents cited: Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, House Foreign Affairs Committee Chair Michael McCsul, Rep Don Bacon, Armed Services Committee
🐣 RT @RBReich A jury ruled that Trump committed violent sexual assault.
A judge ruled he committed financial fraud.
Now another judge has found (what we all saw for ourselves) that he engaged in an insurrection.
How is it possible that he’s still a candidate for president?
🐣 RT @_waleedshahid NOW, Senator @ChrisVanHollen: “So many of us were concerned… when the White House National Security Spokesperson was asked if the US has any red lines, and the answer was ‘No,’ which means anything goes. That cannot be consistent with American interests and values… We have a policy of trying to make sure that our funds are used in a manner that advances our interests and values.”
⋙ 🐣 exactly; Biden has made clear how the US expects Israel to act (eg, re: laws of war; not occupying Gaza); but then Bibi goes on tv and makes clear he will not do so; the US has its own interests and Israel can’t just flaunt them ¤ Bibi should have resigned already; he is complicit
🐣 RT @McFaul “Without any direct U.S. involvement in fighting Russia, U.S. assistance has helped substantially degrade a major military threat to U.S. allies and potentially the United States itself—a strategy called “offshore balancing.” A defeated or vastly depleted Russian army will allow the United States to spend less on European defense, send fewer soldiers to NATO bases in the Baltics and Poland, worry less about being drawn into a future European war, and shift its money and attention toward other problems at home and abroad.”
⋙ FP, Michael McFaul: The Case for Supporting Ukraine Is Crystal Clear https://tinyurl.com/2s3ft9vy
// Note to Congress: Ukraine aid is not charity but serves critical U.S. interests.
🐣 RT @PopularLiberal NEW LEAKED AUDIO: Trump confesses lying to supporters claiming they came to Washington DC because they “THOUGHT” that the election was stolen and acknowledges his choice to not prevent the violent attack. Trumpers fell for the con.
💽 https://x.com/PopularLiberal/status/1726068590162460701?s=20/photo/1
// Jonathan Karl interview
// comment: he doesn’t confess to “lying” on this tape nor does he claim it was his “choice” to not go to capitol ~ tape itself is valuable, but improperly framed
🐣 RT @BillPascrell Regular reminder that Democrats build economies and republicans destroy them
◕ https://x.com/BillPascrell/status/1726236749624660229?s=20/photo/1
// “DEMOCRATIC PRESIDENTS HAVE CREATED 96% OF NEW JOBS,SINCE 1989”
🐣 RT @tooronlists #MAGACult, Two days before J6, at Trumps direction, Acting Sec of Defense Chris Miller issued a memo that told VA National Guard to stand down. He denied 14 requests to activate National Guard. He wanted the insurrection to succeed. Not Adam Schiff, not Nancy Pelosi. Full Stop!
⋙ 🐣 RT @AmoneyResists He not only *didn’t* authorize the national guard, he had his acting Secretary of Defense Christopher Miller put out a memo on January 4th (two days before the insurrection) stating that ANY REQUEST FOR MILITARY/DOD/NG ASSISTANCE must BE APPROVED BY HIM. He denied 13+ requests.
[TextLink:] https://x.com/tooronlists/status/1726254884952199321?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @BillPascrell Historic unemployment rates. Over 14,000,000 jobs created. Factories booming. Meanwhile every single republican in Congress voted against lowering inflation.
◕ https://x.com/BillPascrell/status/1726277273236685141?s=20/photo/1
// “U.S. INFLATION RATE IS LOWEST AMONG G7 COUNTRIES”
⭕ 18 Nov 2023
🧵 RT @judgeluttig The Colorado state court decided the most pressing constitutional question facing the nation today, holding that the former president did engage in an insurrection to overturn the 2020 presidential election.
📌 https://x.com/judgeluttig/status/1725865526952362193?s=20
[ThreadReader:] https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1725865526952362193.html
I cannot imagine this fundamental finding of constitutional fact and law being overturned by the Colorado Supreme Court.
But the court erred in holding that the “Office of President” is not an “office under the United States,” turning constitutional interpretation upside down by finding the unambiguous text of Section 3 ambiguous because of a sliver of debate history
that is not only itself ambiguous, but is rendered singularly unpersuasive by other exchanges in the debate history that clearly reflect the understanding that the “Office of President” is an “office under the United States” from which a person can be disqualified by Section 3.
It actually appears the court had initially concluded that Section 3 does apply, but then, admittedly grasping for anything it could find to support its eventual contrary conclusion, the court ultimately became enamored with this fallacious argument from the debate history.
The court’s hyper-technical, overwrought reasoning in order to find the “Office of President” not to be an office from which a person can be disqualified by Section 3 should have brought to the court’s mind Chief Justice Marshall’s admonition that, ¤ “[We] must never forget that it is a constitution we are expounding.
🐣 RT @RonFilipkowski He left out the “vermin” part this time. Kindler, gentler Trump.
[TextLink:] https://x.com/RonFilipkowski/status/1726045373100126598?s=20/photo/1
[Text:] 🐣 RT @realDonaldTrump 2024 is our final battle. With you at my side, we will demolish the Deep State, we will expel the warmongers from our government, we will drive out the globalists, we will cast out the Communists, Marxists, and Fascists, we will throw off the sick political class that hates our Country, we will rout the Fake News Media, we will evict Joe Biden from the White House, and we will
FINISH THE JOB ONCE AND FOR ALL!
Oops: [Updated] WaPo (10:58pm): U.S. close to deal with Israel and Hamas to pause conflict, free some hostages https://tinyurl.com/38wft8pw
// A five-day pause in fighting, monitored by aerial surveillance, could see dozens of women and children freed from captivity in Gaza, according to people familiar with the terms of an emerging agreement
⇈ ⇊
WaPo: Israel and Hamas reach tentative U.S.-brokered deal to pause conflict, free dozens of hostages https://tinyurl.com/38wft8pw “A five-day pause in fighting, monitored by aerial surveillance, could see dozens of women and children freed from captivity in Gaza”
// A five-day pause in fighting, monitored by aerial surveillance, could see dozens of women and children freed from captivity in Gaza, according to people familiar with the terms of the agreement
WaPo, Dan Balz: Voters must take Trump seriously and literally. The stakes are that high. https://tinyurl.com/26er63f5 “Trump’s rhetoric has become more extreme; it is language associated with authoritarian leaders of the past”
// Trump may be a performance artist, but with his shocking provocations, he is telling us what he would do in a second term as president. That’s why taking him seriously and literally is required.
[…] The Economist summed up why a Trump victory in 2024 could be materially different from his first in 2016. “A second Trump term would be a watershed in a way the first was not,” the editors wrote. “Victory would confirm his most destructive instincts about power. His plans would encounter less resistance. And because America will have voted him in while knowing the worst, its moral authority would decline.” […]
🐣 RT @PopularLiberal GOP WANT TO REWRITE HISTORY: Liz Cheney’s ad exposes Donald Trump as the first president to refuse a peaceful transfer of power, revealing his manipulation and incitement of a violent mob to overturn a fair election. “COUP” Watch this vital clip for a comprehensive understanding of the truth. Republicans made a dangerous choice for our country. #MAGACult
💽 https://x.com/PopularLiberal/status/1725923099508429154?s=20/photo/1
WaPo: Hunter Biden’s career of benefiting from his father’s name https://tinyurl.com/d7asw7bt
// 11/18/2023; The president’s son has had a complex, even tortured relationship with the ‘Biden brand’
🐣 RT @spectatorindex BREAKING: Israeli foreign minister says that, after the war, there ‘will be Israeli security control from the Jordan River to the [Mediterranean] sea at all times’
🐣 RT @rshereme The EU is the main provider of financial aid to Ukraine. The US is the main provider of military aid. Both are important investments in the peace and security of the world. Yet, the highest price is paid by Ukrainians – they pain in human lives.
◕ https://x.com/rshereme/status/1725973352613892528?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @MeidasTouch MAGA propagandists can’t gaslight their way out of a Trump conviction. ¤ We all saw what happened on Jan 6. ¤ Anyone defending this attack against the United States is a traitor.
💽 https://x.com/MeidasTouch/status/1725917917286715531?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @tribelaw Bingo! And it’d be more than a “get out of jail free” card. It’d be a “get back into the Oval Office again” card — one no other insurrectionist could qualify for. The decision of the Colorado trial court putting Trump above the law and the Constitution isn’t long for this world.
⋙ 🐣 RT @VelshiMSNBC “The idea that any official who would engage in insurrection would be barred from taking office except the Presidency is incredibly surprising,” says CO Sec of State @JenaGriswold. “It basically means that the Presidency is a get out of jail free card for insurrection” #Velshi
💽 https://x.com/tribelaw/status/1725968448092537315?s=20/photo/1
🧵 RT @David_Charts Monthly economic review for the October data. First, record level of people with jobs, 156.9 million, up 14.0 million since Biden inaugurated and 4.6 million since pre-pandemic peak regained in June ’22. 1/
📌 ◕ https://x.com/David_Charts/status/1725930668096377094?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @POTUS The choices we make today will determine the direction of our future for generations to come. ¤ So, will we relentlessly pursue our vision or allow others to drag the world into danger and division? ¤ America cannot, and will not, let that happen.
⋙ 🐣 RT @PostOpinions The world looks to us to solve the problems of our time @potus writes in a guest opinion. ¤ “That is the duty of leadership, and America will lead.”
⋙⋙ 🐣 WaPo: Joe Biden: The U.S. won’t back down from the challenge of Putin and Hamas https://wapo.st/3QO57mr
Today, the world faces an inflection point, where the choices we make — including in the crises in Europe and the Middle East — will determine the direction of our future for generations to come. ¤ What will our world look like on the other side of these conflicts?
Will we deny Hamas the ability to carry out pure, unadulterated evil? Will Israelis and Palestinians one day live side by side in peace, with two states for two peoples? ¤ Will we hold Vladimir Putin accountable for his aggression, so the people of Ukraine can live free and Europe remains an anchor for global peace and security?
And the overarching question: Will we relentlessly pursue our positive vision for the future, or will we allow those who do not share our values to drag the world to a more dangerous and divided place?
Both Putin and Hamas are fighting to wipe a neighboring democracy off the map. And both Putin and Hamas hope to collapse broader regional stability and integration and take advantage of the ensuing disorder. America cannot, and will not, let that happen. For our own national security interests — and for the good of the entire world.
The United States is the essential nation. We rally allies and partners to stand up to aggressors and make progress toward a brighter, more peaceful future. The world looks to us to solve the problems of our time. That is the duty of leadership, and America will lead. For if we walk away from the challenges of today, the risk of conflict could spread, and the costs to address them will only rise. We will not let that happen. […]
🐣 RT @POTUS The choices we make today will determine the direction of our future for generations to come. ¤ So, will we relentlessly pursue our vision or allow others to drag the world into danger and division? ¤ America cannot, and will not, let that happen.
⋙ 🐣 RT @PostOpinions The world looks to us to solve the problems of our time @potus writes in a guest opinion. ¤ “That is the duty of leadership, and America will lead.”
⋙⋙ 🐣 WaPo: Joe Biden: The U.S. won’t back down from the challenge of Putin and Hamas https://wapo.st/3QO57mr
🐣 📊 RT @ AgatheDemarais What if middle powers were forced to choose between US and China?
• @ecfr poll shows South Koreans, Indians, Brazilians, South Africans, Turks, Saudis would pick US side
• China remains unattractive for many emerging economies; overall most states do not want to choose
◕ https://x.com/AgatheDemarais/status/1725514130063564891?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @HPM1984Concord NK supplied shells causing barrels to explode in RU arty
⋙ 🐣 RT @wolfy9435 In their own tests firing at a stationary Island, they had a working condition rate of 4%
🐣 RT @RussianEmbassy 🇷🇺President Vladimir Putin: The #globalisation and cultural expansionism, have led to cultural suppression and deprivation and have multiplied the potential for conflict.
⋙ 🐣 Russia prefers the law of the jungle to having to abide with international rules like the humanitarian law of war, the UN declaration of human rights or the international criminal court ¤ Why? because they LIKE to invade, pillage, rape, torture and kill innocents
🐣 RT @WhiteHouse Because of the Biden-Harris Administration’s investments, millions of American households are now saving $30-75 a month on high-speed internet. ¤ This Administration will continue to fight to lower costs for families so they have more breathing room.
🐣 RT @tribelaw The Colorado judge created a wall of findings too high for anyone to scale and then tossed Trump a lifeline too weak and frayed for anyone to use. ¤ She found him guilty of trying to terminate the Constitution he swore as president to defend and held that would bar anyone else from running for president. ¤ But she then held the Framers left a loophole in the wall they built to protect our republic by naming the president as the one officer who could engage in insurrection against the Constitution without losing the chance to run again!
⭕ 17 Nov 2023
🐣 RT @gtconway3d In the next two or three months, the Supreme Court will probably have to grant cert before judgment in one of the federal cases presenting the 14A3 disqualification question. There’s probably not enough time for full intermediate appellate review of any of these cases, and no procedure for granting cert before judgment in any case not in a US court of appeals. And they’d really have to decide the issue before the end of the current term ….
🐣 RT @amanpour “If America is not supporting Ukraine here, Russia will win,” warns Estonia’s Prime Minister @kajakallas, who has just returned from Washington. As world attention has moved away from Ukraine, Kallas cautions that “what is at stake here is really [the] fight for freedom.”
💽 https://x.com/amanpour/status/1725577704165023954?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @Mollyploofkins 138 police officers sustained injuries from violent MAGA protesters.
350 people were charged with assaulting, resisting, or impeding officers.
110 people were charged with using a weapon or causing serious injury to police.
💽 https://x.com/Mollyploofkins/status/1725715339114070436?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @InsideWithPsaki “Their goals are the same—to root out dissent and the other. It all has the makings of basically an authoritarian meets zealot buddy movie that really no one needs in this country.” @jrpsaki ¤ on Mike Johnson and Donald Trump.
💽 https://x.com/InsideWithPsaki/status/1725702569371046297?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @RonFilipkowski Buckle up, because this week was pretty crazy … ¤ THIS WEEK IN THE REPUBLICAN PARTY ¤ 11/9 – 11/16, 2023
💽 https://x.com/RonFilipkowski/status/1725647176540279192?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @Tendar When news broke out that North Korea was delivering a million artillery shells to Russia, my first thought was how good the quality would be of those shells. We have the first statements relating to this questions and the answer is that they are of poor quality. In some cases the dimensions of the munitions was so much off the acceptable levels that it led to the explosion of the barrel.
Full podcast: https://spotify.link/a/key_live_pfaV
🐣 RT @JayinKyiv Even after preparing for this invasion for the past decade and utilizing 70 years of weapons stocks, this barbaric empire of savages with the backing of North Korea and Iran still can’t take little Ukraine.
🌎 https://x.com/JayinKyiv/status/1725511315903377909?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @ProjectLincoln Antisemitism is not foreign to America. We must remain vigilant in our fight to resist it. If you don’t believe it, just see it for yourself.
💽 https://x.com/ProjectLincoln/status/1725627495704154360?s=20/photo/1
// American Naxi Rally at Madison Square Garden pre-WW2
🐣 RT @BidensWins In the last day, President Biden participated in nearly 12 consecutive hours worth of events, met with multiple world leaders, including Xi Jinping, and secured the return of Pandas to our Zoos. Don’t tell me President Biden doesn’t have the stamina to be President.
🧵 RT @judgeluttig I have been asked time after time over the past year and a half, “Is there any hope for America’s Democracy and, if there is, where is it to be found?”
📌 https://x.com/judgeluttig/status/1725535837314531480?s=20
[ThreadReader:] https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1725535837314531480.html
I’ve always answered, “Yes, there is always hope, even in the midst of seeming hopelessness, and we can find that hope in the American People. The American People will never allow their democracy to fail.”
I had this thought again this morning when I saw that Thursday’s tweet of a quotation from one of our Founding Fathers to another almost 230 years ago has been viewed over 2.3 million times in the past thirty-six hours. I could not have imagined.
I want to believe that this response to a mere quotation from the distant past is itself evidence that there is hope, evidence that we Americans are desperate for answers to the questions of our times, “Who have we Americans become? Is this who we want to be?
And if it is not, who is it that we Americans want to be, and what is it that we want our America to be?”
I am as certain of this as I’ve ever been of anything: Once we Americans do begin to ask these questions of ourselves, the answers will come fast. We will not fail our America. We will save our imperiled democracy from those who want for its demise.
That’s my Thanksgiving wish, at least!
⭕ 16 Nov 2023
TheAtlantic, Tom Nichols: Trump Crosses a Crucial Line https://tinyurl.com/hryadywf
// But Americans can still choose a better path.
🔊 NPR: Senate Foreign Relations Chair says funding for Israel, Ukraine is ‘critical’ https://tinyurl.com/msfz25hp “President Biden’s supplemental requests have funds in for the border. So I think there is room here for Democrats and Republicans to reach an agreement” ~ Senator Ben Cardin
WaPo: ‘Signs of life’ on longshot Senate border deal https://tinyurl.com/25437hwb Biden has proposed a bill combining aid for Ukraine, Israel, Gaza and the Asia Pacific with funds for US border security. The border has faced partisan wrangling, but now there are some green shoots
🐣 RT @Acyn Audio of Trump claiming he wanted to go to the Capitol on January 6th to stop the problem but the Secret Service wouldn’t let him.. he says he would’ve been well received by rioters
💽 https://x.com/Acyn/status/1725308779049156870?s=20/photo/1
// taped interview with Jonathan Karl (w captions)
TheEconomist: Donald Trump poses the biggest danger to the world in 2024 https://tinyurl.com/hjm6syys ‘There is nothing wrong in countries being transactional … But, Mr Trump’s lust for a deal and his sense of America’s interests are unconstrained by reality and unanchored by values’
// What his victory in America’s election would mean
🐣 RT @McFaul My latest: ¤ The Case for Supporting Ukraine Is Crystal Clear
Note to Congress: ¤ Ukraine aid is not charity but serves critical U.S. interests.
⋙ ForeignPolicy, Michael McFaul: The Case for Supporting Ukraine Is Crystal Clear https://tinyurl.com/4mp77mkc
// Note to Congress: ¤ Ukraine aid is not charity but serves critical U.S. interests
Last year, the Ukrainians defeated Russia’s invading army on the battlefield, denying Russian President Vladimir Putin all of his core objectives for the war. He failed to de-militarize Ukraine, install a puppet government in Kyiv, bring Ukraine back into Russia’s fold, and stop NATO expansion. Today, Ukrainians are more committed to their nationhood than ever, and their democratically elected president, Volodymyr Zelensky, remains in power. Ukraine now has a stronger military and closer ties to NATO than ever before; Finland has joined the alliance, and Sweden is set to follow. In 2022, Ukraine’s armed forces won the Battle of Kyiv, the Battle of Kharkiv, and the Battle of Kherson, liberating more than 50 percent of the territory that Russia had occupied since launching its full-scale invasion. … $
🐣 RT @JStein_WaPo Pretty amazing chart in The Times today matching what CBO and others have found
— Top 1% owns 31% of US wealth
— Bottom 50% owns 2.5%
// 90-99% 37.6%;
// 50-90% 28.6%
// top 10% 68.6%
◕ https://x.com/JStein_WaPo/status/1725228522040406193?s=20/photo/1
// Source: NYT: Bidenomics Has a Mortal Enemy, and It Isn’t Trump https://tinyurl.com/2ppwav5z
🐣 RT @RBReich Meta will allow political ads that claim the 2020 election was stolen. ¤ YouTube will no longer remove videos making similar claims. ¤ Don’t even get me started on this website. ¤ Monetizing lies has become a big business in America. It’s one of the core challenges to democracy.
🐣 RT @RadioFreeTom And therefore….? | Sen. Joe Manchin says Donald Trump would destroy US democracy if he wins a second term as president
😂 RT @RandyRainbow RUN KITARA!!! #TBT
💽 https://x.com/RandyRainbow/status/1725184163592957986?s=20
// about George Santos
🐣 RT @MrSantosNY If there was a single ounce of ETHICS in the “Ethics committee”, they would have not released this biased report. The Committee went to extraordinary lengths to smear myself and my legal team about me not being forthcoming (My legal bills suggest otherwise). […]
¤ https://x.com/MrSantosNY/status/1725182414769512783?s=20
🐣 RT @MaryLTrump “They concluded that Santos was at the center of a ‘complex web of unlawful activity’ as he ‘sought to fraudulently exploit every aspect of… (his) candidacy for his own personal financial profit.” ¤ Sound like anybody else we know?
CNN: Special counsel investigating Joe Biden’s handling of classified material is not expected to bring charges https://tinyurl.com/3hphrapk
🐣 📋 RT @ChuckPfarrer BURN RATE: To date, Russia has sustained casualties of between 300,000 and 400,000 killed & wounded in the Ukraine War. In the Adviika Area of Operations alone, Russia is losing between 500 and 1,000 troops killed in action–every day.
⋙ TheGuardian: https://tinyurl.com/bp8ah392
TheDispatch, Bennett Murray: Inside Ukraine’s Revolutionary Warfare https://tinyurl.com/hmauyzb4 “As the Russo-Ukrainian War revolutionizes warfare, other combatants are deploying these new tools in conflicts far removed from the battlefields of the Donbas.”
// Low-cost DIY technology is changing how battles are fought.
🐣 RT @ianbremmer we’re doomed
◕ [TextLink:] https://x.com/ianbremmer/status/1725216502259896643?s=20/photo/1
// Pew Title: “About a third of U.S. adults under 30 now regularly getnews on TikTok”
🐣 RT @SpencerGuard Israel media reporting @IDF have found bodies of Israelis kidnapped on October 7th in the Shifa Hospital complex (only a small portion has been entered, cleared, searched).
⋙ 🐣 I hope they weren’t killed because of thd raid
🐣 RT @JayinKyiv Crazy.. ¤ Under the cover darkness, Ukrainian special forces snuck into a Russian base, killed the guards, then massacred most of the Russian soldiers present. ¤ Footage from Russian side of immediate aftermath.
💽 https://x.com/JayinKyiv/status/1725218132858482919?s=20/photo/1
// graphic footage
🐣 RT @ford_nik so. is. russia.
⋙ 🐣 RT @MalcolmNance HAMAS is watching & going WTF? Did we order this? ⇊
⋙⋙ 🐣 RT @ amuse Insurrection at DNC HQ in DC.
🖼 https://x.com/MalcolmNance/status/1724996938062299374?s=20/photo/1
⋙⋙⋙ 🐣 Free speech ⇈ ¤ Meanwhile, in St Petersburg court has sentenced Russian artist Sasha Skochilenko to seven years in prison for putting up anti-war stickers. ¤ Putin, seeing both, says: “We made the right choice”
🐣 RT @maxseddon A St Petersburg court has sentenced Russian artist Sasha Skochilenko to seven years in prison for putting up anti-war stickers – one of the most draconian “fake news” cases since Putin invaded Ukraine. ¤ “Even though I’m behind bars, I’m more free than you,” she told the court.
https://x.com/maxseddon/status/1725145536829771838?s=20/photo/1
🧵 RT @kajakallas During my visit to D.C., I had many good meetings on the Hill with Senators and Representatives. ¤ The meetings focused on the global threat landscape and security, including defence cooperation between Estonia and the U.S. and supporting Ukraine. ¤ Here’s a recap: 1/
📌 https://x.com/kajakallas/status/1725215147642212667?s=20
[ThreadReader:] https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1725215147642212667
🐣 RT @yasminalombaert After a meeting with his US counterpart Joe Biden, president Xi Jinping said his country was ready to be a partner and friend of the US and ‘will not fight a cold war or a hot war’ with any nation. ¤ The meetings between Xi and Biden are rather good news, obviously not for Russia, which is the best news. ¤ Russian media and Pro-Russian bloggers don’t really appreciate that Xi is putting on a friendly face in the U.S.
🐣 RT @NewVoiceUkraine Members of the Servant of the People faction in parliament will submit a resolution to the Verkhovna Rada to recall Oleksandr Dubinsky, a suspect in high treason, from the post of deputy chairman.
🐣 RT @MrKovalenko Alexei #Arestovych, a pro-Russian influencer and former presidential speaker of Zelensky gets criminal cases as a Christmas tree gets decorations.👉
¤ https://x.com/MrKovalenko/status/1725210754737922249?s=20
Today, the #Ukraine police opened a second criminal case against him. This time it is for the deliberate attempt to accuse a person of committing a non-existent crime. Once upon a time, Arestovych filed a criminal complaint against a patriotic member of the Parliament Natalia Pipa. He wanted law enforcement to punish her for not allowing a street musician in Lviv City to sing a song in Russian. That was a symbolic rock song from the Soviet times. Now he’s facing justice for his wrongful statements.
In 2022-2023, @Arestovych was a spokesman & an aide of Andriy Yermak @AndriyYermak, the head of Volodymyr #Zelensky’s presidential office. Currently, #Yermak is touring the U.S. courting the American establishment to continue the financial support. But how could Yermak even hire such a radical Russian apologist in the first place?
[Source: https://t.me/UA_National_Police/15999 Photo is by presidential office]
🐣 📋 RT @GlasnostGone Russia’s sustained staggering casualties of between 300,000 and 400,000 killed and wounded in #Ukraine. In current fighting around the eastern town of Avdiivka, it’s also losing between 500 and 1,000 men a day, according to a briefing by western officials. They also report Ukraine’s managed to get a sizable force across the Dnipro river into occupied southern Ukraine. https://tinyurl.com/bp8ah392
🖼 https://x.com/GlasnostGone/status/1725198365246287896?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @atrupar I will just reiterate that nobody this time around can say they didn’t see it coming or delude themselves into believing Trump really won’t be that bad. Anything but a vote for Biden is a vote to ban Muslims, for mass deportation and arrests, and the end of democracy. Full stop.
🐣 RT @JRubinBlogger Based on what has been revealed, having such figures testify at trial will go a long way toward eviscerating any argument that Trump merely relied on “advice of counsel” and could undermine Trump’s expected defense that he lacked criminal intent.
💽 https://x.com/JRubinBlogger/status/1725149325586526480?s=20/photo/1
⋙ WaPo, Jennifer Rubin: The trifecta that could sink Trump’s favorite defense https://tinyurl.com/2vy282wk
[F]ormer Trump attorneys Jenna Ellis, Kenneth Chesebro and Sidney Powell and Atlanta bail bondsman Scott Hall delivered statements concerning their knowledge of facts critical to the prosecution’s case. ¤ Ellis claimed that on Dec. 19, 2020, she told Trump aide Dan Scavino that Trump was running out of options. According to Ellis, Scavino replied, “Well, we don’t care, and we’re not going to leave.” He reiterated, “The boss is not going to leave under any circumstances. We are just going to stay in power.” …
Moreover, as Just Security co-founder Ryan Goodman noted, this testimony is consistent with another key witness’s account. He pointed to Cassidy Hutchinson’s testimony about Trump finding out on Dec. 11, 2020, that he lost the Supreme Court case: “I don’t want people to know we lost, Mark [Meadows]. This is embarrassing. Figure it out. We need to figure it out.” Again, if Trump knew he lost, the prosecution practically has a slam dunk on proving criminal intent. (Goodman also reminded us that after the last case was lost on Dec. 11, 2020, Trump’s campaign lawyers “bowed out” of any effort to reverse the results.)
To be clear, Trump’s “I thought I won” is no defense. Even if he believed that, it would not excuse alleged illegal actions ranging from acquiring phony electors to attempting to disrupt an official proceeding. However, evidence that he knew he lost and was intent on staying anyway certainly would help prove “corrupt intent” beyond a reasonable doubt. …
For her part, Powell buried the advice of counsel defense. She acknowledged that Trump paid attention to Rudy Giuliani and her, despite her lack of election law experience, “because we were the only ones willing to support his effort to sustain the White House. I mean, everybody else was telling him to pack up and go.” …
The latest evidence from the lips of Trump’s own lawyers makes his conviction that much more likely — and suggests his nomination would be an act of political suicide. Republicans seem bent on going down that path. Well, they will not be able to say they weren’t warned.
🐣 RT @lauferlaw Weaponized propaganda is bending minds in this nation. Our education system is failing us. TikTok should have been banned already but the admin didn’t want to upset millennials & Gen Z. We need to take the threats to our nation seriously or risk being brainwashed into submission.
⋙ 🐣 RT @alexplitsas We have some soul searching to do as a country. Antisemitism is skyrocketing, the Bin Laden “Letter to America” is trending, Russian propaganda is being consumed and believed without question.
🐣 RT @ProjectLincoln Jenna Ellis admits it herself: it was a coup from the start. Trump knew he lost, yet he still tried his hardest to illegally maintain power.
💽 https://x.com/ProjectLincoln/status/1725159290153971945?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @mfa_russia 💬 FM Lavrov: The most popular topic at the 2nd #RussiaAfrica Summit was that Africa does not want any longer to be a very rich continent which does not enjoy its richness, like in the colonial times, when most of the resources are being pumped raw into developed countries.
⋙ 🐣 Note: The United States has never been a colonial power, whereas Russia has been for centuries. ¤ Russia continues to invade its neighbors and threatens not only Ukraine, Belorussia, Moldova and Georgia, but also the Baltics, Poland and even Germany. ¤ Buyer Beware.
🌎 https://x.com/Auriandra/status/1725127898976162223?s=20/photo/1
// clear map of peoples
🐣 RT @Podolyak_M Cautious optimism. The meeting between the leaders of the United States and #China, #Biden and #Xi. This is a great signal to the world – dialog instead of confrontation, a new global order, rules are needed necessarily, stability and predictability.
And the second point is that #Russia has finally been removed from the list of those who really influence global processes. Russia has practically zero agency. Because it bets on chaos, destruction, support for violence as an instrument of foreign policy. And has a disgusting reputation that you can’t smear yourself with. All this is not necessary for those who want to see horizons, the future, mutual restrictive rules…
🐣 RT @ TraciDegerman Volodymyr #Zelenskyy did not inherit a fortune from his father. He went to law school and graduated, then decided to do something he loved, built a career as popular entertainer, and established a successful production company. Then he wanted to do something for his country, ran for president, and won.
¤ https://x.com/TraciDegerman/status/1725032707091251242?s=20/photo/1
When his country was invaded on the whim of EM’s pal Putin, President Zelenskyy became the most highly regarded wartime leader since Churchill, raised the global profile of Ukraine and Ukrainians, and rallied world leaders and millions of people to support his nation’s fight for survival. And he did all that without being born into great wealth.
That gives me an inkling of why certain prominent people (such as EM) criticize and try to discredit #Zelenskyy: they are not predominantly self-made, and they probably realize that they couldn’t have achieved their current status without their inherited wealth.
Feelings of inadequacy can lead to jealousy. Jealousy can lead to resentment. And resentment can motivate a person to sabotage the source of their feelings of inadequacy. I know this because I’ve been the target of it, and now recognize this cycle of behavior in others. I’m sure there are also avaricious motivations for EMs’ alignment with Putin against Zelenskyy, and with Russia against Ukraine. Maybe some kompromat, too, and perhaps a tinge of antisemitism, but I believe his underlying resentment made it easier for him to choose the side of evil. Had he been born with Zelenskyy’s character and instinct for public service in addition to wealth, EM may have become the world’s greatest philanthropist, funded countless worthy causes, and be beloved worldwide. But he didn’t, and here we are.
Regardless of who they are, though, NO ONE will be able to erase Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s accomplishments. That history has already been written. They can try to undermine his current objectives and thwart their fulfillment, but doing so could possibly erase Ukraine’s future as a sovereign, democratic nation. And they should understand that their role in that tragedy will be immortalized in history as well.
#ZelenskyyWarHero
#ZelenskyyIsNotAlone https://twitter.com/JoriCahaya/status/1724824474321834263
🐣 RT @lilirutai Following months of hard work with the @EBU_HQ Investigative Journalism Network and public broadcasters, our investigation is out, exposing how the occupiers are systematically Russifying residents of Ukraine’s four annexed regions with coercion & pressure
⋙ ≣RurovisionNews: Russification in Occupied Ukraine https://tinyurl.com/4fxf3mze
// An investigation by the EBU Investigative Journalism Network
🐣 RT @markets President Xi Jinping says China wants to be friends with the US and that his nation won’t fight a war with anyone, one of his clearest remarks yet proclaiming a desire for peaceful ties between the world’s two largest economies https://trib.al/fN0RrUB
// speech to business leaders in SF
⋙ 🐣 hope Biden and Xi made progress on: Taiwan ¤ intellectual property ¤ arming Russia
🐣 RT @JayinKyiv Given the suicidal nature and scale of Russia’s recent campaign of kamikaze attacks on 3 fronts, one can assume that Putin has issued directive to make gains before announcing his “candidacy” in the upcoming “election”. ¤ The Russian army is just being massacred. ¤ Night hunting.
💽 https://x.com/JayinKyiv/status/1725077248019963921?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @ @officejjsmart ❗️ “The Ukrainian Armed Forces 🇺🇦 have launched an offensive on the city of Horlivka, Donetsk Region which has been under 🇷🇺 Russian control since 2014. ¤ Russian military correspondents are reporting on the successful attack.” ¤ Freedom from 🇷🇺 fascism. ¤ 🇺🇦👏🇺🇦👏🇺🇦👏🇺🇦👏
🐣 RT @RpsAgainstTrump Former Trump WH lawyer Ty Cobb says Trump’s “off the rails” comments against judges & prosecutors will lead him to prison: ¤ “I believe that at some point comments like this will result in Trump not only being sanctioned… but at some point, these types of comments will result in him being put in jail pending some of these trials”
⭕ 15 Nov 2023
🐣 RT @iAmTheWarax “maybe bin laden was right and the west is evil” videos trending on chinese govt controlled tiktok is a total coincidence, im sure
🐣 RT @OlgaNYC1211 Strange there are no protests to address terrorist Russia’s continuing atrocities, war crimes, genocide, crimes of aggression in Ukraine. When it comes to Ukraine many think Ukraine should just surrender. Guess because it’s Russia committing these crimes
⋙ 🐣 RT @OlenaHalushka Separate cells to rape young women, medieval torture instruments, and burning prisoners alive: after one year in captivity, a Ukrainian medic who treated torture victims details the horrors in Russian prisons https://tinyurl.com/3xuywxmv
🐣 RT @Acyn Roy: One thing. I want my Republican colleagues to give me one thing. One. That I can go campaign on and say we did. Anybody sitting in the complex, if you want to come down to the floor and come explain to me, one meaningful, significant thing the Republican majority has done
💽 https://x.com/RonFilipkowski/status/1724859302639186333?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @Acyn Roy: One thing. I want my Republican colleagues to give me one thing. One. That I can go campaign on and say we did. Anybody sitting in the complex, if you want to come down to the floor and come explain to me, one meaningful, significant thing the Republican majority has done
🐣 RT @SenSchumer Keeping the government open is a good outcome, but we have a lot to do.We must finish passing @POTUS’s supplemental with aid to Israel, Ukraine, humanitarian assistance for civilians in Gaza, funds for the Indo-Pacific. We must complete our work on the annual defense bill.
🐣 RT @EdwardGLuce Owner of this platform is now explicitly pushing the great replacement theory – that Jews seek to outnumber whites with immigration. A rubicon has been crossed by the world’s richest man. Anti-semitic charge has been misused & leveled at many who aren’t. @elonmusk is.
⋙ 🐣 there are fewer than 15M Jews in the entire world
their pop. still hasn’t recovered from Hitler’s genocide
they are certainly not going to “outnumber whites”
Musk is a damn fool
🐣 RT @ChrisDJackson 🚨 BREAKING In a big win for America, President Biden and Xi agree on curbing fentanyl production and resuming military talks. ¤ This is Biden diplomacy.
👏 👏 👏 👏
🐣 RT @SteveRattner The number of international students from India at U.S. universities has skyrocketed over the last three years.
◕ https://x.com/SteveRattner/status/1724812258914558254?s=20/photo/1
// decrease in China, increase in India
🐣 RT @SteveRattner “A little over a year after the passage of President Biden’s landmark climate bill…a disproportionate amount of wind, solar, battery, and manufacturing investment is going to areas that used to host fossil fuel plants.” CC: @washingtonpos
🌎 https://x.com/SteveRattner/status/1724876139766669532?s=20/photo/1
// mostly red states: CO MS PA MT NM TX WV
🐣 RT @SteveRattner The US has had a much stronger 2023 than its neighbor across the Atlantic… ¤ CC: @FT
◕ https://x.com/SteveRattner/status/1724846743550861723?s=20/photo/1
// GDP growth 2022 to present, US vs Eurozone
🧵 RT @atrupar Biden announces that he had a positive meeting with Xi today and they are resuming cooperation on counter-narcotics and military-to-military contacts
📌 💽 https://x.com/atrupar/status/1724961960700022791?s=20/photo/1
🧵 RT @TheStudyofWar The positional war is not the result of fundamental realities in modern warfare that can only be changed with a technological or tactical revolution. Neither does it rest on a permanent parity in military capacity between Russia & Ukraine regardless of Western support to Kyiv. [thread]
📌 https://x.com/TheStudyofWar/status/1724849825319924034?s=20
[ThreadReader:] https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1724849825319924034.html
⋙⋙ 🐣 RT @TheStudyofWar The positional war in #Ukraine is not a stable stalemate, writes @criticalthreats’ Fred Kagan in a new essay for @TheStudyofWar. The current balance is in fact highly unstable and could readily be tipped in either direction by decisions made in the West: https://isw.pub/Ukraine111523
[TextLink:] https://x.com/TheStudyofWar/status/1724819553601957957?s=20/photo/1
[Text:] If the West Cuts Aid to Ukraine, Russia Will Win. ¤ If the West Leans in, Ukraine Can Win.
November 15, 2023 ¤ By Frederick W. KaganThe positional war in Ukraine is not a stable stalemate. It is not the result of fundamental realities in modern warfare that can only be changed with a technological or tactical revolution, as was the First World War’s stalemate. Neither does it rest on a permanent parity in military capacity between Russia and Ukraine that will continue indefinitely regardless of Western support to Kyiv. It results, on the contrary, from self-imposed limitations on the technologies the West has been willing to provide Ukraine and constraints on the Russian defense industrial base largely stemming from Russian President Vladimir Putin’s unwillingness so far to commit Russia fully to this war. The current balance is thus, in fact, highly unstable, and could readily be tipped in either direction by decisions made in the West.
2/ It results, on the contrary, from self-imposed limitations on the technologies the West has been willing to provide #Ukraine and constraints on the Russian defense industrial base largely stemming from #Putin’s unwillingness so far to commit #Russia fully to this war.
3/ Western arsenals already possess the weaponry necessary to address nearly all the challenges confronting the combatants in #Ukraine, and the full mobilization of the Russian economy and society for war could counterbalance its technological limitations.
4/ Furthermore, #Ukraine’s ability to prevent Russian forces from conducting large-scale mechanized maneuver warfare, most crucially, remains absolutely dependent on the continued provision of Western aid on at least the current scale.
5/ Facilitating Ukraine’s ability to reinstate maneuver on the battlefield doesn’t necessitate extensive transformations. It requires leaning into the provision to Ukrainian forces of weapons and systems already in Western arsenals on the scale needed to allow Ukraine to succeed.
6/ US policymakers must understand, above all, that the current positional war in #Ukraine is not a stable or permanent reality inherent either in the nature of war today or in the relative balance of military power between #Russia and Ukraine.
7/ Ending or significantly curtailing American military support to #Ukraine will enable #Russia to win this war on the battlefield. That would be a catastrophe not only for Ukraine, but also for NATO and for the United States.
🐣 RT @POTUS I’ve just concluded a day of meetings with President Xi, and I believe they were some of the most constructive and productive discussions we’ve had. ¤ We built on groundwork laid over the past several months of diplomacy between our countries and made important progress.
PravdaUA: US Senate to consider aid to Ukraine and Israel after 23 November https://tinyurl.com/j5rmp6mu “US President Joe Biden is trying to convince the US Congress to support … a new US$106 billion aid package, which includes more than US$61 billion in funding for aid to Ukraine”
⭕ 14 Nov 2023
🐣 RT @SenMikeLee Every single Senate Democrat just voted to stop aid to Israel. ¤ I am glad they are on the record.
⋙ 🐣 needs context ¤ Dems support the defense supplemental, which combines Israel, Gaza (humanitarian), Ukraine, Taiwan and border aid ¤ they oppose the stand-alone bill
⋙⋙ 🐣 RT @JSKatsky Curious that they opposed the stand-alone though..
⋙⋙⋙ 🐣 they took Biden’s supplemental, cut out humanitarian aid to Gaza, and added a ‘pay-for’ that would cut IRS agents and actually add to the deficit; (Budget office did an analysis) ¤ Rs knew Ds would never vote for it, but they wanted to say ‘Ds voted against Israel’; pure politics
🐣 RT @MillenPolitics Hakeem Jeffries’ speech and delivery at #MarchForIsrael was pitch perfect. ¤ This man has what it takes to be President one day. ¤ If you watch one thing, make it this
💽 https://x.com/MillenPolitics/status/1724583645208354830?s=20/photo/1
“The moral case for Israel is anchored in the painful history of the Jewish people.
For centuries, Jews have been persecuted and brutalized by anti-semitism, and violently thrown out of country after country.
The Jewish people were violently expelled from Jerusalem by the Roman Empire.
The Jewish people were violently expelled from Alexandria.
The Jewish people were violently expelled from France.
The Jewish people were violently expelled from England.
The Jewish people were violently expelled from Spain.
The Jewish people were violently expelled from Switzerland.
The Jewish people were violently expelled from Portugal.
The Jewish people were violently expelled from countries all throughout Europe.
The Jewish people were violently expelled from the Middle East.
And the Jewish people were systematically murdered by the Nazi regime.
The Jewish people were violently attacked again by Hamas on October 7th, resulting in the largest loss of Jewish life in a single day since the Holocaust – so we are here, more than 100,000 people strong, to unequivocally declare Never Again.
The State of Israel must always exist as a safe haven for the Jewish People.
And so we stand together with the Jewish community in Israel.
We stand together with the Jewish community in America.
We stand together with the Jewish community all throughout the world.
We stand together in the effort to crush anti-semitism.
We stand together in the effort to crush anti-Jewish hate.
We stand together in the effort to bring home the hostages.
We stand together in the effort to make sure that America will always be a safe space for the Jewish community, in every single zip code.”
RBC-Ukraine: U.S. Senate outlines timeline for considering Biden’s aid request to Ukraine https://tinyurl.com/bdfv3c5u “Schumer (D-NY) expresses a strong desire for all four of the President’s requests to be approved – Ukraine, Israel, humanitarian aid, and the Indo-Pacific region”
🐣 RT @chkbal .@judgeluttig: “American democracy is in greater peril today than it has ever been in American history.”
💽 https://x.com/chkbal/status/1724447978302132298?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @AlexThomp Inbox: Biden campaign singles out the NYT. “For the political press corp – especially our friends at the Gray Lady – it’s time to meet the moment and responsibly inform the electorate of what their lives might look like if the leading GOP candidate for president is allowed back in the WH.”
🐣 RT @Acyn 209 Democrats and only 127 Republicans vote to fund the government and prevent a shutdown
◕ https://x.com/Acyn/status/1724560840194719866?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @stats_feedWorld’s World’s biggest economies in 2028, projected by IMF:
¤ https://x.com/stats_feed/status/1724500678742356121?s=20
🇺🇸 United States: $32.69 trillion
🇨🇳 China: $23.61 trillion
🇮🇳 India: $5.94 trillion
🇩🇪 Germany: $5.46 trillion
🇯🇵 Japan: $5.16 trillion
🇬🇧 United Kingdom: $4.58 trillion
🇫🇷 France: $3.63 trillion
🇧🇷 Brazil: $2.77 trillion
🇨🇦 Canada: $2.7 trillion
🇮🇹 Italy: $2.57 trillion
🇲🇽 Mexico: $2.36 trillion
🇰🇷 South Korea: $2.13 trillion
🇮🇩 Indonesia: $2.09 trillion
🇦🇺 Australia: $2.05 trillion
🇷🇺 Russia: $1.99 trillion
🇪🇸 Spain: $1.93 trillion
🇹🇷 Turkey: $1.58 trillion
🇳🇱 Netherlands: $1.34 trillion
🇸🇦 Saudi Arabia: $1.28 trillion
🇨🇭 Switzerland: $1.19 trillion
🇵🇱 Poland: $1.07 trillion
🇹🇼 Taiwan: $0.96 trillion
🇮🇪 Ireland: $0.76 trillion
🇸🇪 Sweden: $0.75 trillion
🇧🇪 Belgium: $0.74 trillion
🇧🇩 Bangladesh: $0.73 trillion
🇦🇷 Argentina: $0.73 trillion
🇵🇭 Philippines: $0.69 trillion
🇹🇭 Thailand: $0.68 trillion
🇳🇬 Nigeria: $0.68 trillion
🇮🇱 Israel: $0.66 trillion
🇻🇳 Vietnam: $0.65 trillion
🇦🇪 UAE: $0.65 trillion
🇦🇹 Austria: $0.64 trillion
🐣 RT @LahavHarkov The final estimated turnout for the rally for Israel and against Jew hatred is now 290,000, making it the Jewish community’s largest turnout ever. The previous record gathering was 250,000 to free Soviet Jewry in 1987.
🖼 https://x.com/LahavHarkov/status/1724538066386165990?s=20/photo/1-4
🔄 💙 🐣 RT @ DmytroKuleba To those who have missed the previous 30 years, here is a short list of the results of negotiations with Russia that it never respected:
¤ https://x.com/DmytroKuleba/status/1724427557016043668?s=20/photo/1
1. The Budapest Memorandum of 1994. Russia agreed to “respect independence, sovereignty, and the existing borders of Ukraine” as well as “refrain from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of Ukraine”. Breached by Russia invading Crimea in 2014.
2. The Russian-Ukrainian Friendship Treaty of 1997. Russia agreed to respect Ukraine’s territorial integrity and “reaffirmed the inviolability of the borders” between the two countries. Russia breached it in 2014.
3. The OSCE Istanbul Summit in 1999. Russia committed to withdrawing its troops from Moldova’s Transdniestrian region and Georgia until the end of 2002. That never happened.
4. The 2008 Georgia ceasefire agreement following Russian aggression against the country. Russia agreed that “Russian military forces must withdraw to the lines prior to the start of hostilities”. That never happened.
5. The Ilovaysk “Green Corridor” in August 2014 and other “humanitarian” death corridors. Russia pledged to let Ukrainian forces leave the encircled town of Ilovaysk in the east of Ukraine, but instead opened fire and killed 366 Ukrainian troops. In the following years, Russia attacked numerous humanitarian corridors in Syria.
6. The “Minsk” agreements of 2014 and 2015. Russia agreed to cease the fire in the east of Ukraine. There had been 200 rounds of talks and 20 attempts to enforce a ceasefire, all of which the Russian side promptly violated. On February 24th, 2022, Russia launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine.
7. The 2022 Black Sea Grain Initiative. Russia pledged to “provide maximum assurances regarding a safe and secure environment for all vessels engaged in this initiative.” It then hindered the initiative’s operation for months before withdrawing unilaterally a year later.
NB: I am only focused on deals made with Russia to address specific issues and conflicts. I am not mentioning almost 400 international treaties that Russia has breached since 2014.
There are no conclusions to be drawn here, except that no one can seriously use the words “Russia” and “negotiations” in the same phrase.
Putin is a habitual liar who promised international leaders that he would not attack Ukraine days before his invasion in February 2022.
Russia’s tactic has remained consistent in its many wars over the last three decades: kill, grab, lie, and deny.
Why would anyone genuinely believe that Russia in 2023 is any different from Russia in 1994, 1997, 1999, 2008, 2014, 2015, and 2022?
🚫 WaPo: Amid competing U.S. security priorities, Ukraine could get left behind https://tinyurl.com/mdd2s4kk
// Kyiv is low on money and time, its advocates say, but in Congress the desire to continue funding its fight against Russia has reached new lows
⭕ 13 Nov 2023
🔄🔄 📔 ICRC: Fundamental principles of International Humanitarian Law of War https://tinyurl.com/35uat35n
↥ ↧
🐣 RT @SpencerGuard And still “nothing I have seen shows that the Israel Defense Forces are not following the laws of wars in Gaza…So far I have seen the IDF implementing – and in some cases going beyond…best practices developed to minimize the harm of civilians”
⋙ CNN, John Spencer (Nov 7): Opinion: I’m an expert in urban warfare. Israel is upholding the laws of war https://tinyurl.com/37wchcbh
All war is hell. All war is killing and destruction, and historically civilians are inordinately the innocent victims of wars. Urban warfare is a unique type of hell not just for soldiers, who face assaults from a million windows or deep tunnels below them, but especially for civilians. Noncombatants have accounted for 90% of casualties per international humanitarian experts in the modern wars that have occurred in populated urban areas such as Iraq’s Mosul and Syria’s Raqqa, even when a Western power like the United States is leading or supporting the campaign.
The destruction and suffering, as awful as they are, don’t automatically constitute war crimes – otherwise, nearly any military action in a populated area would violate the laws of armed conflict, rules distilled from a complicated patchwork of international treaties, court rulings and historic conventions. Scenes of devastation, like Israel’s strikes on the Jabalya refugee camp in northern Gaza earlier this week, quickly spark accusations that Israel is engaging in war crimes, such as indiscriminately killing civilians and engaging in revenge attacks. But war crimes must be assessed on evidence and the standards of armed conflict, not a quick glimpse at the harrowing aftermath of an attack.
Hamas forces indisputably violated multiple laws of war on October 7 in taking Israelis hostage and raping, torturing and directly targeting civilians, as well continuing to attack Israeli population centers with rockets. Years of intelligence assessments and media reports have shown that Hamas also commits war crimes by using human shields for its weapons and command centers and by purposely putting military capabilities in protected sites like hospitals, mosques and schools.
On the other hand, nothing I have seen shows that the Israel Defense Forces are not following the laws of wars in Gaza, particularly when the charges that the IDF is committing war crimes so often come too quickly for there to have been an examination of the factors that determine whether an attack, and the resulting civilian casualties, are lawful. The factors that need to be assessed are the major dimensions of the most commonly agreed to international humanitarian law principles: military necessity, proportionality, distinction, humanity and honor.
President Joe Biden and multiple European countries, including the UK, Germany and France, are supporting Israel’s self-defense even as they express concerns over the humanitarian situation in Gaza. Though Gaza’s legal status is unresolved under international law, Israel needs no permission to enter the territory and resort to using force in order to wage defensive operations because Israel’s right to immediate and unilateral self-defense in accordance with Article 51 of the UN Charter is universally recognized.
Israel has pledged to obey international law, and one of its cornerstones is proportionality. The concept is often misunderstood to allow only for equal numbers of civilian casualties on both sides, with any lopsided numbers considered disproportionate. But proportionality is actually a requirement to take into account how much civilian harm is anticipated in comparison to the expected concrete and direct military advantage, according to UN protocols. In other words, a high civilian death count in Jabalya could potentially be considered legal under international law so long as the military objective is of high value. The Israel Defense Forces said the intended target in this case was the senior Hamas commander who oversaw all military operations in the northern Gaza; neutralizing him is an objective that most likely clears the proportional bar. Furthermore, Israel pointed out that the loss of life was compounded because Hamas had built tunnels that weakened the targeted structure that then collapsed in the strike.
The attack also passes muster on the level of “military necessity,” the principle that the action was necessary to pursue an allowed military goal (killing enemy troops), rather than an illegal goal (causing civilians to suffer). The IDF has said that its aim is to remove the rockets, ammunitions depot, power and transportation systems Hamas has embedded within their civilian population. So far, a number of military experts have assessed that Israel appears to be trying to follow the law of armed conflict in its Gaza campaign.
Of the remaining principles of the law of war – distinction, humanity (which, as the International Committee of the Red Cross phrases it, “forbids the infliction of all suffering, injury or destruction not necessary for achieving the legitimate purpose of a conflict”) and honor in conduct of waging war – the principle of distinction is the most complex. Distinction requires Israel to “distinguish between the civilian population and combatants” and between civilian facilities and military targets, while taking all feasible precautions to avoid civilian casualties. So far I have seen the IDF implementing – and in some cases going beyond – many of the best practices developed to minimize the harm of civilians in similar large-scale urban battles.
These IDF practices include calling everyone in a building to alert them of a pending air strike and giving them time to evacuate – a tactic I’ve never seen elsewhere in my decades of experience, as it also notifies the enemy of the attack – and sometimes even dropping small munitions on top of a building to provide additional warning. They have been conducting multiple weeks of requests that civilians evacuate certain parts of Gaza using multi-media broadcasts, texts and flyer drops. They’ve also provided routes that will not be targeted so that civilians have paths to non-combat areas, though there have been some tragic reports that Palestinians from northern Gaza who have relocated to the south were subsequently killed as the war rages throughout the strip.
When Hamas uses a hospital, school or mosque for military purpose, it can lose its protected status and become a legal military target. Israel must still make all feasible attempts to get as many civilians out of the site as possible, but the sites don’t need to be clear of civilians before being attacked.
Unfortunately, it’s essentially impossible to empty a city of all civilians before conducting an urban battle. Some people always stay, and it can be impossible for the elderly, infirm, hospitalized and similar to evacuate. In the densely populated Gaza Strip, where most Palestinians have nowhere to fully escape the dangers of the war, the proportion of those who remain is likely to be higher, as border crossings remain closed to nearly all Gazans, many Palestinians object to leaving and Hamas has warned others not to go.
Still, even if Hamas has no interest in meeting its obligation to take all feasible precautions to minimize harm to civilians, Israel does and should. The IDF should take steps like constraining its forces to smaller portions of larger urban areas while continuing to provide safe areas and routes out of the combat areas. It should continue its calls for civilian evacuations. It should restrict the use of air strikes and artillery near certain safe areas or gatherings of civilians. It should continue to cooperate with the US in facilitating the entry of humanitarian supplies into Gaza (though it’s reasonable to block fuel, which Hamas can use in its attacks and which the group is also stockpiling while refusing to share it with its own people).
There is no escaping that pursuing a terrorist organization touches off a nightmarish landscape of war. The visually repulsive imagery in Gaza essentially recreates the same scenes that unfolded under American and allied campaigns fighting Al Qaeda, ISIS and other terror groups, because that is what it looks like when you are forced to uproot a sadistic terror organization embedded in an urban area. Sadly, successful US-led or supported campaigns in places such as Mosul and Raqqa caused billions of dollars in damage and killed and displaced hundreds of thousands of civilians; that is the hellish reality of defeating terrorism.
Like all similar conflicts in modern times, a battle in Gaza will look like the entire city was purposely razed to the ground or indiscriminately carpet bombed – but it wasn’t. Israel possesses the military capacity to do so, and the fact that it doesn’t employ such means is further evidence that it is respecting the rules of war. It is also a sign that this is not revenge – a gross mischaracterization of Israeli aims – but instead a careful defensive campaign to ensure Israel’s survival.
🐣 📋 RT @BidensWinsBREAKING: New reports indicate, largely because of the Biden Administration’s focus on revitalizing manufacturing in America, China’s economy size has slipped to 64% of the size of the U.S. economy. For the first time in 40 years, the U.S. economy is outpacing China’s economy.
⋙ 🐣 China faces numerous problems: its slow emergence from the pandemic, a failing overbuilt real estate market, an aging population and high youth unemployment. “Home-shoring” and “friend-shoring” have resulted in slipping foreign investment.
TheEconomist: From Gaza to Ukraine, wars and crises are piling up https://tinyurl.com/7t2dr467 “America and its allies cannot intervene as easily or cheaply as they once did. Adversaries such as China and Russia are more assertive, and working more and more together”
// How diplomats and generals are running out of bandwidth
RawStory: A ripped-up note could give Jack Smith what he needs to prove Trump’s Jan. 6 intent https://tinyurl.com/3f3957vn
⋙ 💽 from @DeadlineWH with @NicolleDWallace and @AWeissmann_
A furious Donald Trump ripped up a note about top Army leaders who said the military could not involve itself in the election. Then he tweeted that would “change the course of history,” calling supporters to Washington on Jan. 6, 2021: “Be there. Will be wild.”
The note — written by a Trump staffer affirming the president’s intention to fire army leaders should they publish another public statement — appears in Jonathan Karl’s widely anticipated new book “Tired of Winning” set to be released at midnight.
“Doesn’t that get right at his intent of what he wanted them to do?” asked MSNBC’s host Nicolle Wallace, referencing Jack Smith’s indictment over the 2020 election and Jan. 6. riot.
“Absolutely,” replied NYU law school professor Andrew Weissmann, who previously served as the FBI general counsel. “That note gets ripped up into pieces so no one could find it.”
[Note:] The White House | Chris Miller spoke to both of them and anticipates no more statements coming out (if another happens he will fire them)
[Ripped up note from Johnny McEntee to Trump (Photo: National Archives via Jan. 6 Committee)]The note, written after Army Secretary Ryan McCarthy and Army Chief of Staff James McConville issued a statement affirming the military would play no role in determining the outcome of a U.S. election, was eventually found and pieced back together by the National Archives. It appears in its entirety in the book’s pages, Weissman pointed out.
Then Weissman dove into why it matters. ¤ As much of you think of it as a military organization with a hierarchy, they are also trained they do not violate the Constitution,” Weissmann said. “And when there’s an invalid order, they cannot follow it because the Constitution comes first.
“So, to me, this is right to the heart of Donald Trump brushing up against one guardrail,” he continued.
Weissman praised the book, explaining that this piece of the Trump election scandal always drew his attention.
“I have always been fascinated by the fact you had had the Defense Department and [Gen. Mark] Milley, with a lot going on behind the scenes, pushing back because you can’t engage in a coup without military backing,” he said. “And the fact that Kash Patel was there, a figure with no military expertise whatsoever, and was in installed there, to me, is always this unwritten story about what was happening.”
Weissmann said his time in the FBI and the Justice Department showed him that the military is “incredibly law-abiding” and genuinely “stand for the rule of law.” So, he doesn’t see them participating in a coup any time soon, even if the commander-in-chief orders it.
Weissmann recalled Justice Department friends telling him Trump’s tenure was “malevolence matched by incompetence.” After Trump and his allies found the light switches, the next time around, he will know better how to recreate the U.S. government in his image and dismantle much of what is in place now.
This is already a plot in the far-right wing of the Republican Party being pushed by the Heritage Foundation. It’s known as Project 2025.
i’m
🐣 RT @MeidasTouch 🚨 During her proffer session before Georgia prosecutors, Jenna Ellis said Trump aide Dan Scavino told her weeks after the 2020 election that “the boss is not going to leave [The White House] under any circumstances. We are just going to stay in power.”
💽 https://x.com/MeidasTouch/status/1724194924218954059?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @ProjectLincoln It’s time to confront reality: Joe Manchin’s run for president, like Phillips, West, and RFK Jr., will usher a 2nd Trump term back into the White House and spell the end of our democracy as we know it. [link]
💽 https://x.com/ProjectLincoln/status/1724245771220918637?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @NTenzer The decisive war is the one we must win against Russia.
It begins in Ukraine, where Russia must be defeated as swiftly as possible. We, the democratic nations, have the means to do so now.
Then it will be fought elsewhere.
This is the war whose outcome determines everything else.
🐣 RT @ChuckPfarrer HYPOCRISY: Russia has destroyed more than 703 hospitals and clinics in UKR: not a peep from the UN. Tens of thousands of UKR children kidnapped by RU: not a peep from the UN. 96% of RU precision strike weapons target UKR civilians: not a peep from the UN. Shall I go on? [UN tweet link]
🐣 RT @ AntiToxicPeople 🚨🚨BREAKING from WaPo: ¤ Ken Chesebro disclosed in his recorded statement in GA that at a previously unreported WH meeting, he briefed Trump on assembling fake slates of electors in AZ. ¤ Chesebro’s disclosure shows that Trump was personally involved in the fake elector scheme.
🐣 RT @ProjectLincoln For 4 long years, Donald Trump made us a laughingstock, kowtowing to authoritarians across the globe. ¤ Under President Biden, America once again leads the free world. Our allies are stronger, and our enemies are weaker. President Biden is an American President.
💽 https://x.com/ProjectLincoln/status/1724200472238580221?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @Kasparov63 Doing everything to help Ukraine defeat Russia as quickly as possible is the clearest mandate the free world has had since the end of the Cold War. Like so much in the defense of the democratic world and its values, failure is a matter of will, not of capability.
⋙ 🐣 RT @bctallis 3 former Generals – Brauss & Bühler (🇩🇪) & @general_ben Hodges (🇺🇸) all argue that we should have supplied 🇺🇦 with tanks & other weapons earlier but that despite the Russian defences, the stalemate can be broken, and that #Ukraine should be given #Taurus
🐣 RT @ProjectLincoln “If we elect Donald Trump again, we will not have the country that we believe exists today.” He is the most direct threat to our democracy and liberty with a MAGA authoritarian regime. We will lose everything that America stands for. @TheRickWilson has more on @AliVelshi.
💽 https://x.com/ProjectLincoln/status/1724170418825711984?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @SueSandersHere Remember when the press told us he’d leave, but needed to cry it out first?
[TextLink:] https://x.com/SueSandersHere/status/1724184319399522414?s=20/photo/1
“And he said to me, in a kind of excited tone, ‘Well, we don’t care, and we’re not going to leave,'” Ellis said of the alleged Dec. 19 conversation with Scavino. “And I said, ‘What do you mean?’ And he said ‘Well, the boss’, meaning President Trump — and everyone understood ‘the boss,’ that’s what we all called him — he said, ‘The boss is not going to leave under any circumstances. We are just going to stay in power.'” Ellis continued, “And I said to him, ‘Well, it doesn’t quite work that way, you realize?’ and he said, ‘We don’t care.'”
🐣 RT @gtconway3d If admissible, this would potentially obliterate P01135809’s pretend “I truly believed I won” (non-)defense, which was factually dubious and legally insufficient to begin with
⋙ 🐣 RT @BradMossEsq This is devastating in my view. Trump never had any intention of complying with the election results. He was told repeatedly in the presence of a convicted co-defendant that he had lost. He ignored it and conspired with his lawyers to overthrow the election anyway.
[TextLink:] https://x.com/BradMossEsq/status/1724183969409749143?s=20/photo/1 -3
⇈ ⇊
🐣 RT @OliviaRubinABC BREAKING: @ABC News has exclusively obtained videos of the proffer sessions Jenna Ellis and Sidney Powell did with Fulton County prosecutors as part of their plea deals– ¤ Full story with @wsteaks
⋙ ABCNews: ‘The boss is not going to leave’: Proffer videos show ex-Trump lawyers telling Georgia prosecutors about efforts to overturn 2020 election https://tinyurl.com/39er5wkf
// ABC News obtained video from interviews held with Jenna Ellis and Sidney Powell.
🐣 RT @AntiToxicPeople 🚨BREAKING: ¤ Ukraine charges Rudy Giuliani’s top local ally with Moscow-linked *TREASON* ¤ Ukraine’s security service says MP was undermining Kyiv-Washington relations under Russian military intelligence orders.
⋙ Politico: Ukraine charges Rudy Giuliani’s top local ally with Moscow-linked treason https://tinyurl.com/38kp76f7 In 2019, ‘Dubinsky and Derkach gave several press conferences at which they claimed they had uncovered corruption and money-laundering schemes related to Burisma’
// Ukraine’s security service says MP was undermining Kyiv-Washington relations under Russian military intelligence orders.
Oleksandr Dubinsky, together with ex-Ukrainian lawmaker Andriy Derkach and ex-prosecutor Kostyantyn Kulyk, had joined an organization formed by chiefs of Russia’s Military Intelligence (GRU), Ukraine’s Security Service (SBU) said in a statement on Monday. …
Dubinsky met Giuliani during his visit to Kyiv in December 2019 while the former New York City mayor and failed U.S. presidential candidate was filming a documentary aimed at discrediting an impeachment probe into Trump.
“The main task of this organization was to take advantage of the tense political situation in Ukraine and discredit our state in the international arena. For this, the group was getting money from Russian military intelligence. Financing amounted to more than $10 million,” SBU said.
According to SBU, Dubinsky, guided by GRU, spread fake news about Ukraine’s military and political leadership, including claims that high-ranking Ukrainian officials were interfering in U.S. presidential elections. SBU said the Ukraine group was run by GRU deputy head Vladimir Alekseyev and his deputy Oleksiy Savin.
If found guilty, Dubinsky faces up to 15 years in prison and forfeiture of his assets, SBU added. Both Derkach and Kulyk are now in hiding abroad. …
In October and November 2019, Dubinsky and Derkach gave several press conferences in Kyiv at which they claimed that based on an investigation by Kulyk, they had uncovered corruption and money-laundering schemes related to Burisma, a gas company which had future U.S. President Joe Biden’s son Hunter on its board of directors.
In 2020 the U.S. Treasury sanctioned Derkach as a Russian agent undermining America’s political system. In 2021 Dubinsky and Kulyk were also sanctioned by the U.S. as foreign actors involved in spreading fraudulent allegations involving a U.S. political candidate.
🐣 RT @ninaburleigh RIP Maryanne Trump, who famously said of her brother: “All he wants to do is appeal to his base. He has no principles. None. None. .. His goddamned tweet and lying, oh my God. I’m talking too freely, but you know. The change of stories. The lack of preparation. The lying. Holy shit.”
⋙ WaPo (2020): In secretly recorded audio, President Trump’s sister says he has ‘no principles’ and ‘you can’t trust him’ https://tinyurl.com/3mak2pye
// 8/22/2020
🐣 RT @Kasparov63 Indeed. It’s pathetic how history and observation are lost. Repeating old mistakes, ignoring lessons learned only a few years ago, and refusing to do what works and discard what doesn’t in the face of clear evidence. It’s madness.
⋙ 🐣 RT @MaxBoot If Trump regains the White House, he would be likely to abandon both NATO and Ukraine. U.S. allies in East Asia which depend on U.S. troop deployments – notably South Korea and Japan – would also be at risk of abandonment.
⋙ 🐣 RT @MaxBoot For the first time since Pearl Harbor, there is a substantial isolationist movement in the US that wants to repudiate a bipartisan, stunningly successful post-World War II foreign policy based on free trade and security alliances with fellow democracies.
⋙⋙ WaPo, Max Boot: Political dysfunction, not China, is the greatest threat to the U.S. https://wapo.st/3sn9Nrn
🐣 RT @axios 🚨 NEW: Hundreds of people are spending tens of millions of dollars to install a pre-vetted, pro-Trump army of up to 54,000 loyalists across government to rip off the restraints imposed on the previous 46 presidents. [link]
🐣 RT @tribelaw With “Vermin,” Trump is now using straight-up Nazi talk. His danger to everyone’s freedom and to each person’s very survival is increasingly plain. Please believe your eyes and ears. Trump is exactly what he appears to be!
WaPo: Supreme Court under pressure issues ethics code specific to justices https://tinyurl.com/2s4xj8c8 “Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.), the lead sponsor of a bill to impose ethics rules on the court, said legislation is still needed”
⭕ 12 Nov 2023
TheHill: Border fight in Senate raises risks for passage of Ukraine aid https://tinyurl.com/4ewe3dcy “Democrats are demanding that Republicans deal not just with border security but with measures that would allow people to immigrate into the country”
🐣 RT @spectatorindex BREAKING: Netanyahu says ‘Israel is fighting according to international law. The Israeli army is doing an exemplary job trying to minimize the civilian casualties.’
// it doesn’t appear so
🐣 RT @JChengWSJ “China May Stay Permanently Behind the US in Generative AI…There are three factors that contribute to this permanent gap: China blocking quality datasets, the quirks of Chinese language on the Internet, and new AI regulatory burden.” @kevinsxu
🐣 RT @TreasChest ⚡️Over one and a half thousand Jewish graduates will no longer donate to Harvard University because of anti-Semitism. ¤ All this because there are pro-Palestinian actions on campus, which the university administration seems to ignore. Ending donations could have a significant impact on the university. ¤ Channel 24
🐣 RT @ProjectLincoln The narrative that’s been set is a sham. Both President Biden and Trump are old. The real question is if you’d rather have someone who’s old, accomplished, and democracy-loving or old, crazy, and democracy-destroying. @TaraSetmaye and @TheRickWilson know who they would choose.
💽 https://x.com/ProjectLincoln/status/1723868448122409237?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @QuoteDigging Joe Biden – Old. Donald Trump – Corrupt, treasonous, dangerous, traitorous, felonious, fascist, racist, rapist, misogynistic, incompetent, anti-abortion, tax-cheating, dishonest, egomaniacal, idiotic, grifting, swindling, selfish…AND ALSO OLD.–@TrumpsTaxes
🐣 RT @TimInHonolulu This purports to be the video where Nikolai Patrushev, former FSB head and current secretary of the Security Council of the Russian Federation, is reported to be giving what was termed Putin’s obiturary. I’m guessing it has something to do with Putin’s reported
⋙⋙ 🐣 RT @realwarmonitor Nov 9This video is for Russian speakers. Nikolai Patrushev’s obituary for Putin. Weird? #NikolaiPatrushev #Patrushev #obituary
🖼 https://x.com/TimInHonolulu/status/1723897762973147363?s=20/photo/1
⋙ 🐣 RT @TimInHonolulu decision to run for President again. There have long been reports of Patrushev trying to angle is son Dmitry into the succession but Putin has not addressed the issue according to earlier reports. The large Russian media sites don’t report anything unusual with the one ¤ caveat that the Tass website appears to not be functioning at least for me.
⋙ 🐣 RT @TimInHonolulu With the reports the Kremlin will likely try to provide some proof of life. He’s reported to be ill and could be in the hospital. Or perhaps he’s just getting a little Botox for the holidays.
🐣 RT @MarkHertling Pretty wide-ranging interview with @Acosta …from the Biden-Xi talks, to Taiwan and Indo-Asia region, to US strikes in Syria, to hostages, to terrorist using hospitals as part of their human shield approach. Certainly an indication of the state of part of our world.
⋙ 🐣 RT @jeffstorobinsky 11.12.23 7:25 PM EST CNN Anchor Jim Acosta @Acosta w/ CNN Military Analyst Lt General Mark Hertling US Army (ret) @MarkHertling (9:17)
💽 https://x.com/MarkHertling/status/1723862038949048479?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @tribelaw These are the stakes. Nothing less:
⋙ 🐣 RT @ProjectLincoln Nov 11 We made this pre-election, thinking that we’d never have to release it. After the events of today, we decided to post, #Bloodlines
💽 https://x.com/tribelaw/status/1723806588631134400?s=20/photo/1
// footage of Hitler Stalin extermination camps
⋙⋙ 🐣 RT @PuestoLoco Trump is escalating his fascist threats of violence as part of his plan to become America’s 1st dictator. And “to end multiracial pluralistic democracy & replace it with Christofascist plutocracy” under his “Agenda 47 & Heritage Foundation Project 2025.”
🖼 https://x.com/PuestoLoco/status/1723906405759902166?s=20/photo/1 -2
WaPo: Trump calls political enemies ‘vermin,’ echoing dictators Hitler, Mussolini https://tinyurl.com/529nszw2
// On Veterans Day, the former president vowed to “root out” his liberal opponents, drawing backlash from historians who say his rhetoric is reminiscent of authoritarian
🐣 RT @Apex_WW NYT: The Pentagon has quietly dispatched to Cyprus commando teams from the Joint Special Operations Command, including the Army’s Delta Force and the Navy’s SEAL Team 6, to stand by in case they are needed to help evacuate American citizens from the region.
🐣 RT @nsideWithPsaki .@jrpsaki: “Donald Trump would prosecute anyone he deems an enemy, unleash troops on protestors, and essentially unravel the rule of law as we know it… But sure, Joe Biden is three years older and occasionally trips.”
💽 https://x.com/InsideWithPsaki/status/1723749130806145428?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @ProjectLincoln Trump claims he will use our country’s institutions to pursue his own political vengeance agenda. This is not the mark of a leader, but of a narcissistic lunatic. His lunacy will not keep him out of office, only voting him out will. @TheRickWilson has more on @KatiePhangShow.
💽 https://x.com/ProjectLincoln/status/1723800489395995088?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @officejjsmart Patrushev, 9 days ago, in a highly publicized statement said something unusually consolatory, as it did not refer to “Ukrainian Nazis” or any of the tropes typically used in justifying Russia’s war in Ukraine.
¤ https://x.com/officejjsmart/status/1723762980930638061?s=20
In fact, he shifted the blame off of Ukraine (and Russia) entirely: ¤ “There is no war between the peoples of Ukraine and Russia. ¤ There is only the open aggression of the United States. ¤ As a result, our country is defending our land and our people.
We are sure of our victory. ¤ The West did not succeed in overthrowing the [Belarussian Government] in 2020… ¤ I wish to note that the conflict in Ukraine is not beneficial to anyone – except the United States.”
🐣 RT @officejjsmart PUTIN REALLY IS KAPUT??
¤ https://x.com/officejjsmart/status/1723750183911977416?s=20
// [see comments]
📌 Nikolai Patrushev, Head of 🇷🇺 National Security Council, dressed in all black, gave a speech on the great leadership & virtues of Putin.
❗️ HOWEVER, Patrushev spoke IN THE PAST TENSE as photos of Putin went on the screen in an event eerily similar to a Russian memorial service.
📌 Patrushev is a powerful Kremlin insider, spymaster, & it has been rumored, for years, that he (or his son, Dimitri) would one day replace Putin.
📌 A few weeks ago, retired KGB General Valerii Solovei, who lives in Moscow 🇷🇺, began giving interviews saying Putin had died, naming the precise time & place.
👉 Gen. Solovei is rumored to be behind the Telegram channel that first spread the Putin-death story.
👉 Gen. Solovei, despite making claims that would typically get one arrested in Russia, has not been harassed by 🇷🇺 intelligence & Solovei himself has said it is because he is well connected in 🇷🇺 intelligence – who are the ones who told him Putin is dead.
📌 Historically, around announcing the death of a Soviet leader, those who could pose a threat to the new regime were “neutralized.”
👉 Chechen dictator Ramzan Kadyrov is Patrushev’s enemy. Recently, Kadyrov’s 15 year-old son was publicly presented in a manner indicative of him being his father’s heir. Kadyrov’s last public appearance was September 9 & his present location is not clear.
👉💥So, is Putin dead?💥👈
🔥🔥 We can offer it all of our “thoughts & prayers” that Putin has passed his expiration date.🔥🔥
❓Would Patrushev be better for Ukraine 🇺🇦?
👉 Likely, yes. Patrushev is a hawk but will need to rapidly consolidate power in Moscow to prevent counter-coups to his reign.
👉 Patrushev has less influence with the 🇷🇺 military, than the intelligence branches, & so cutting a deal with the bleeding military would be a priority.
❓ What to look out for next?
👉 If more of Patrushev’s enemies go missing, like 🇷🇺 Minister of Defense Shoigu, something is cooking.
👉 Putin, likely, uses body doubles, so not acknowledging Putin’s death could continue for a long time.
🤷♂️ All is possible, maybe Putin is dead, maybe not. 🇺🇦 intelligence thinks this may all be a ruse to identify who is not loyal to Putin… I lean towards the misfortune that this may be true.
🧵 RT @David_Charts [Thread] Perhaps the best way to measure each president’s deficit & debt performance is to compare what CBO forecast just prior to inauguration vs. what actually happened. ¤ From Bush 43 to Biden, deficits ended up $12.6T worse than forecast under R’s vs. $6.3T worse under D’s. Why? 1/
📌 ◕ https://x.com/David_Charts/status/1723661568850711026?s=20/photo/1 -4
🐣 RT @Data_Statistica 🥙 Countries with Highest Food Inflation in Percentage 🥙
◕ https://x.com/Data_Statistica/status/1723635028612280484?s=20
Türkiye : 75.1 🇹🇷
Hungary : 13.2 🇭🇺
Iceland : 12.4 🇮🇸
United Kingdom : 12.2 🇬🇧
Colombia : 11.5 🇨🇴
Spain : 10.5 🇪🇸
France : 9.9 🇫🇷
Japan : 9.7 🇯🇵
EU : 9.4 🇪🇺
New Zealand : 8.9 🇳🇿
Italy : 8.5 🇮🇹
Germany : 7.7 🇩🇪
Mexico : 5.9 🇲🇽
Canada : 5.8 🇨🇦
South Korea : 5.1 🇰🇷
Australia : 4.7 🇦🇺
Switzerland : 3.8 🇨🇭
USA : 2.4 🇺🇸
🐣 RT @JayinKyiv After weeks of kamikaze attacks on Avdiivka, Russian dead litter the landscape for miles around. ¤ Unable or unwilling to evacuate the dead, with little to no armor remaining, complaining of no artillery, this will just continue to be a death mill for undersupplied Russians.
💽 https://x.com/JayinKyiv/status/1723632795031933377?s=20/photo/1
⭕ 11 Nov 2023
🐣 RT @radleybalko The guy who’s a coin flip to be the next president is using sort of language that has historically resulted in mass graves.
[TextLink:] https://x.com/radleybalko/status/1723488296611766557?s=20/photo/1
[Text:] 🐣 RT @realDonald Trump In honor of our great Veterans on Veteran’s Day, we pledge to you that we will root out the Communists, Marxists, Fascists, and Radical Left Thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our Country, lie, steal, and cheat on Elections, and will do anything possible, whether legally or illegally, to destroy America, and the American Dream. The threat from outside forces is far less sinister, dangerous, and grave, than the threat from within. Despite the hatred and anger of the Radical Left Lunatics who want to destroy our Country, we will MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!
🐣 RT @MeidasTouch Here are 27 insane things Trump said he will do if he gets a 2nd term. This needs to be shared far and wide. Thanks to @TheJFreakinC for making this go viral on TikTok.
💽 https://x.com/MeidasTouch/status/1715767530185437491?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @Gerashchenko_en 105 years ago, World War One ended – at the 11th hour on the 11th day of the 11th month. Nine million soldiers were dead, 21 million more wounded, the world changed forever.
¤ https://x.com/Gerashchenko_en/status/1723374963141251442?s=20/photo/1
The Great War, as it was called, “the war to end all wars”, has, in fact, directly and indirectly led to World War Two.
This day is Remembrance day in many countries – to honor the sacrifice of the soldiers who fought in past wars. And today, the largest war on the European continent since the 1940s is waged. The world is in turmoil.
The “axis of evil” who want to and will benefit from throwing the war into a global war again, must not prevail.
Today’s war(s) must not become world ones and take millions of victims with them. There’s still time.
🐣 RT @atrupar While gushing over Orbán, Trump once again gets confused and claims that Obama is the current president
💽 https://x.com/atrupar/status/1723425108872597871?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @Victorshi2020 Please don’t look away. In only 2 hours, Donald Trump has attacked Nancy Pelosi & her husband, echoed Hitler, praised dictators, confused Biden with Obama, & went after Jack Smith & his wife. Be alarmed. If we elect Donald Trump again, our democracy will die. It’s that simple.
🧵 RT @Mylovanov Military Mechanics: ¤ Ukraine now has underwater attack drones ¤ Naval surface and new submarine drones allow Ukraine to project power from a distance against Russian forces ¤ Russia faces asymmetric threat from Ukraine’s ingenuity in naval drone deployment ¤ Details: 1/
📌 🖼 https://x.com/Mylovanov/status/1723276308694638988?s=20/photo/1
🐣 📊 RT @randymot4 “Three-quarters of Americans say that it is important to the United States that Ukraine wins the war against Russian aggression, including bipartisan supermajorities of Democrats (86%) and Republicans (71%).” Reagan Institute polling. The doubt in some minds is that Ukraine is not or cannot win. Id. That is a bogus assumption. See comments.
🐣 RT @ProjectLincoln “Trump ‘stands alone in American history for his alleged crimes,’ the special counsel writes. ‘No other president has engaged in conspiracy and obstruction to overturn valid election results and illegitimately retain power,'”
🐣 RT @PaulaChertok More good news?? Lots of rumors Putin is dead. Helped by Patrushev dressed in black giving a eulogistic speech referring to Putin repeatedly in the past tense. One guy says he died on Oct 26 and is currently at home in a freezer because they don’t know what to do with his body.
🚫⋙ 🐣 RT @anders_aslund The most remarkable event in Russian domestic politics for quite some time was Nikolai Patrushev’s hagiographic speech about Putin in past tense & dressed in black, as if Putin is already dead. Can anybody enlighten us on what this means?
🖼 https://x.com/PaulaChertok/status/1723517767767466221?s=20/photo/1 -4
🚫 WaPo: Ukrainian military officer coordinated Nord Stream pipeline attack https://tinyurl.com/bdhk8rvd “[T]he Nord Stream operation was designed to keep Zelensky out of the loop, people familiar with the operation said”
// Roman Chervinsky, a colonel in Ukraine’s special operations forces, was integral to the brazen sabotage operation, say people familiar with planning
⭕ 10 Nov 2023
TheAtlantic, Anne Applebaum: The West Must Defeat Russia https://tinyurl.com/5fhck8h5
// Putin hasn’t given up his plans. He thinks Ukraine’s allies will lose interest.
They planned to take Kyiv in three days, the rest of Ukraine in six weeks.
More than 21 months later, Russian forces have withdrawn from half the territory they occupied in February of last year. At least 88,000 Russian soldiers are likely dead—a conservative estimate—and at least twice as many have been wounded. Billions of dollars worth of equipment, Russian tanks, planes, artillery, helicopters, armored vehicles, and warships have been destroyed. If you had predicted this outcome before the war—and nobody did—it would have seemed fanciful. No one would have believed that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, a professional comedian, could lead a country at war, that the democratic world would be united enough to help him, or that Russian President Vladimir Putin would endure such a humiliation.
Ukraine, the United States, and the European Union have achieved something remarkable: Working together, they have not only preserved the Ukrainian state, but stood up to a bully whose nihilism harms the entire world. Putin backs far-right and extremist movements in Europe, provides thugs to support African dictatorships, and colludes with China, Iran, Venezuela, and other autocracies. From the beginning, Putin hoped the war would demonstrate that American power and American alliances can be defeated, not only in Ukraine but everywhere else. He still does, and for this purpose the war remains useful to him.
The fighting creates food shortages in Africa, thereby generating more unrest and more demand for Russian mercenaries. The war stokes discontent in Europe as well, giving pro-Russian parties a boost. Americans and Europeans view turmoil in country after country as a series of isolated conflicts, but Putin doesn’t think that Ukraine and the Middle East belong to different, competing spheres. On the contrary, since the conflict in Gaza erupted, he has intensified his relationship with Iran, invited leaders of Hamas to Moscow, and attacked Israel because of its links with the U.S., hoping that the spread of violence will decrease Western support for Ukraine. Iranian drones have terrorized Ukrainian cities; Iran, in turn, distributes Russian weapons to its proxies. Hezbollah is thought to have Russian anti-ship missiles that it could use against U.S. warships in the Mediterranean at any minute.
The allied fight against Russia in Ukraine has damaged Russia’s ability to project negative power in Europe, the Middle East, and Africa. But despite his extraordinary losses, Putin still believes that time is on his side. If he can’t win on the battlefield, he will win using political intrigue and economic pressure. He will wait for the democratic world to splinter, and he will encourage that splintering. He will wait for the Ukrainians to grow tired, and he will try to make that happen too. He will wait for Donald Trump to win the 2024 U.S. presidential election, and he will do anything he can to help that happen too.
Right now, Putin’s bets are on the Republicans who repeat Russian propaganda—Senator J. D. Vance, for example, echoes Russian language about the Ukraine war leading to “global disorder” and “escalation”; Representative Matt Gaetz cited a Chinese state-media source as evidence while asking about alleged Ukrainian neo-Nazis at a congressional hearing; Vivek Ramaswamy, a GOP presidential candidate, has also called Zelensky, who is Jewish, a Nazi. Putin will have been cheered by the new House speaker, Mike Johnson, who is knowingly delaying the military and financial aid that Ukraine needs to keep fighting. The supplemental bill that he refuses to pass includes money that will keep Ukrainians supplied with the air-defense systems they need to protect their cities, as well as the fiscal support they need to sustain their economy and crucial infrastructure in the coming months.
The U.S. is supplying about a third of Ukraine’s financial needs—the rest comes from the European Union, global institutions, and the taxes paid and bonds purchased by the Ukrainians themselves—but without that help Ukraine will have trouble surviving the winter.
Part of the Republican resistance to helping Ukraine fight an American adversary is simply the perverse desire to see President Joe Biden fail. Another part comes from the fear that Ukraine is not able to win. The Ukrainian summer counteroffensive did have some success, especially in the Black Sea, where a combination of drones and missiles has badly weakened Russia’s navy and forced some of its ships to leave the Crimean port of Sebastopol. But the progress on land was slow. Ukraine’s ability to inflict huge casualties on Russia was not enough to create a backlash, or a reconsideration, in Moscow. General Valery Zaluzhny, the Ukrainian commander in chief, has recently spoken of the war as a “stalemate.” …
… A cease-fire, temporary or otherwise, means that both sides have to stop fighting. Right now, even if Zelensky agrees to negotiate, there is no evidence that Putin wants to negotiate, that he wants to stop fighting, or that he has ever wanted to stop fighting. And yes, according to Western officials who have periodic conversations with their Russian counterparts, attempts have been made to find out.
Nor is there any evidence that Putin wants to partition Ukraine, keeping only the territories he currently occupies and allowing the rest to prosper like South Korea. His goal remains the destruction of Ukraine—all of Ukraine—and his allies and propagandists are still talking about how, once they achieve this goal, they will expand their empire further. Just last week, Dmitry Medvedev, Russia’s former president, published an 8,000-word article calling Poland Russia’s “historical enemy” and threatening Poles with the loss of their state too. The message was perfectly clear: We invaded Poland before, and we can do it again.
In this sense, the challenge that Putin presents to Europe and the rest of the world is unchanged from February 2022. If we abandon what we have achieved so far and we give up support for Ukraine, the result could still be the military or political conquest of Ukraine. The conquest of Ukraine could still empower Iran, Venezuela, Syria, and the rest of Putin’s allies. It could still encourage China to invade Taiwan. It could still lead to a new kind of Europe, one in which Poland, the Baltic states, and even Germany are under constant physical threat, with all of the attendant consequences for trade and prosperity. A Europe permanently at war, an idea that seems impossible to most people in the West, still seems eminently plausible to the Russian president. Putin spent a memorable part of his life as a KGB officer, representing the interests of the Soviet empire in Dresden. He remembers when eastern Germany was ruled by Moscow. If it could be so once, then why not again?
The stark truth is that this war will only end for good when Russia’s neo-imperial dream finally dies. Just as the French decided in 1962 that Algeria could become independent of France, just as the British accepted in 1921 that Ireland was no longer part of the United Kingdom, the Russians must conclude that Ukraine is not Russia. I can’t tell you which political changes in Moscow are necessary to achieve that goal. I can’t say whether a different Russian leader is required—maybe or maybe not. But we will recognize this change when it happens. After it does, the conflict is over and negotiating a final settlement will be possible.
To reach that endgame, we need to adjust our thinking. First, we need to understand, more deeply than we have done so far, that we have entered a new era of great-power conflict. The Russians already know this and have already made the transition to a full-scale war economy. Forty percent of the Russian state budget—another conservative estimate—is now spent annually on military production, about 10 percent of GDP, a level not seen for decades. Neither the U.S. nor its European allies have made anything like this shift, and we started from a low base. Jack Watling of the Royal United Services Institute told me that, at the beginning of the war, the ammunition that the United Kingdom produced in a year was enough to supply the Ukrainian army for 20 hours. Although the situation has improved, as production has slowly cranked up all over the democratic world, we are not moving fast enough.
Secondly, we need to start helping the Ukrainians fight this war as if we were fighting it, altering our slow decision-making process to match the urgency of the moment. Ukraine received the weapons for its summer fighting very late, giving the Russians time to build minefields and tank traps—why? Training by NATO forces for Ukrainian soldiers has in some cases been rushed and incomplete—why? There is still time to reverse these mistakes: Zaluzhny’s list of breakthrough technologies, which includes tools to gain air superiority and better wage electronic warfare, should be taken seriously now, and not next year.
But the path to end this war does not only lead through the battlefield. We need to start thinking not just about helping Ukraine, but about defeating Russia—or, if you prefer different language, persuading Russia to leave by any means possible. If Russia is already fighting America and America’s allies on multiple fronts, through political funding, influence campaigns, and its links to other autocracies and terrorist organizations, then the U.S. and Europe need to fight back on multiple fronts too. We should outcompete Russia for the scarce commodities needed to build weapons, block the software updates that they need to run their defense factories, look for ways to sabotage their production facilities. Russia used fewer weapons and less ammunition this year than it did last year. Our task should be to ensure that next year is worse.
The West has already sanctioned Russia and put export controls on electronics and many other components necessary for the Russian defense ministry. Paradoxically, there may now be too many of these sanctions, which are difficult to keep track of and enforce, especially when materials go through third or fourth countries. Instead, we should target the most important supply chains, depriving the Russians of the specific machine tools and raw materials that they need to make the most sophisticated weapons. At the start of the war, the U.S. and its allies froze Russia’s foreign-currency deposits. The assets of many Russian oligarchs were frozen too, in the hope that this would make them more inclined to resist the war. With some exceptions, it did not. Now it’s time to take those assets and give them to Ukraine. We need to demonstrate that our commitment to the principle of Russian reparations for Ukraine is real.
But some of our money is needed too. Spending it now will produce savings down the line, and not just because we can prevent a catastrophe in Ukraine. By learning how to fight Russia, a sophisticated autocracy with global ambitions, we will be better prepared for later, larger conflicts, if there is ever a broader struggle with China or Iran. More important, by defeating Russia we might be able to stop those larger conflicts before they begin. The goal in Ukraine should be to end Russia’s brutish invasion—and to deter others from launching another one somewhere else.
🐣 RT @DemocraticDaisy Peter Thiel says Trump administration was ‘crazier’ and ‘more dangerous’ than he expected
🐣 RT @danpfeiffer Speaker Mike Johnson: “There is insufficient evidence at the moment to initiate formal impeachment proceedings”
⋙ WaPo: Momentum behind impeachment inquiry slows under new speaker https://tinyurl.com/4xbnbcy6
// The inquiry stagnated during the 3-week fight to elect a new speaker. Now, James Comer has sent out new subpoenas as Speaker Mike Johnson strikes a more reserved tone.
WaPo, Jennifer Rubin: Republicans have become a threat to democracy and national security https://tinyurl.com/3vc5868e “The GOP, which once boasted it helped defeat the Soviet Union … , now cannot be trusted to lead in a uniquely dangerous and complex international landscape”
[…] Democrats would be foolish to ignore their opponents’ dangerous dereliction of the first responsibility of government: ensure the safety and security of Americans. But they must also disavow elements on the far left spouting “colonialism” poppycock about Israel and insisting we distance ourselves from our closest ally in the region. President Biden and the vast majority of Democrats understand that the survival of both Israel and Ukraine are national imperatives for the United States.
Biden needs to reiterate the message. “History has taught us that when terrorists don’t pay a price for their terror, when dictators don’t pay a price for their aggression, they cause more chaos and death and more destruction,” Biden said in his Oct. 19 Oval Office address. “They keep going. And the cost and the threat to America and the world keep rising.” He and his supporters need to emphasize that there are few people who could steer the United States and our allies through a perilous time for the international community.
Sadly, only one party has a coherent, responsible view of U.S. leadership in the world based on our national interests and values. The GOP, which once boasted it helped defeat the Soviet Union and end the Cold War, now cannot be trusted to lead in a uniquely dangerous and complex international landscape. Every despot, from Putin to Saudi Arabia’s Mohammed bin Salman, would cheer Trump’s return. Biden cannot let voters ignore this frightful possibility.
… [T]here have been two other recent developments that suggest the rule of law still has a pulse. ¤ First, the center-right group originally called Checks and Balances relaunched this week as the Society for the Rule of Law. “This marks a major nationwide expansion aimed at protecting the Constitution and building a broad-based movement of conservative and center-right legal practitioners, scholars, and law students committed to defending the rule of law from mounting threats,” its news release noted. With prominent figures including George T. Conway III, retired judge J. Michael Luttig, former congresswoman Barbara Comstock (Va.), former acting attorney general Stuart M. Gerson and former Reagan White House lawyer Alan Raul, it will expand its activities to include public education, events “aimed at engaging those in the legal community and law schools in the vital work of supporting and preserving America’s legal institutions from those actively working to undermine them” and a nationwide membership drive.
In an appearance on Morning Joe, Conway explained: “We are absolutely determined to get our message across of the danger of a second term.” The group understands the problem is not solely Trump but the entire MAGA movement he spawned. “What is at stake now goes way beyond … one deranged, deluded, disordered man. … The termites are loose in the basement of the house.” He reiterated, “This goes to the fundamental aspect of what makes America America.” If principled conservatives can provide an alternate affiliation to the hyper-politicized Federalist Society, young lawyers and practitioners alike might come to recognize the necessity of preserving a system that promises no one is above the law and holds attorneys responsible for attempting to subvert democracy.
In other positive news, a California judge last week delivered a blow in defense of the rule of law and potentially a knockout punch to former Trump attorney and coup architect John Eastman. In a state bar proceeding stemming from Eastman’s effort to overthrow the 2020 election, State Bar Court Judge Yvette D. Roland issued a preliminary finding of culpability for multiple ethics violations. This “marks a key moment in the months-long case against Eastman, who could face sanctions as severe as disbarment,” CNN reported.
The ruling means the state bar has rejected Eastman’s scheme to negate Biden’s victory as within the realm of reasonable legal advice. This is consistent with rulings from district courts in California and D.C. that pierced the attorney-client veil between Eastman and Trump because their conduct amounted to probable criminal activity. Multiple experts have testified that Eastman’s theory allowing then-Vice President Mike Pence to throw out electoral votes was absurd and that there was no plausible evidence of fraud.
These developments highlight two critical aspects in the battle to preserve the rule of law, a key component of our democracy. First, people on the right must take up the cause. Defense of principles such as “equal justice under the law” should not be a partisan effort. Conservatives might be the only ones who can sway still-reachable Republicans to preserve the impartial rule of law and reject the MAGA cult leader eager to use the Justice Department to enact revenge on opponents. And it is only when lawbreakers, especially lawyers, face consequences — be it criminal charges or loss of their license — that we can deter future lawbreaking. Democracy defenders should hope these events signal a rebound for the cornerstone of American democracy.
🐣 RT @tribelaw Trump’s Nov 9 remarks on Univision are the most candid public revelations so far of the anti-democratic and indeed dictatorial power he would bring to a second term as president. Nobody but his boot-licking loyalists would be safe.
⋙ TheGuardian: Trump suggests he would use FBI to go after political rivals if elected in 2024 https://tinyurl.com/33d64w8n
// Trump said: ‘If I happen to be president and I see somebody doing well and beating me very badly, I say go down and indict them’
🐣 RT @ProjectLincoln It’s time to face reality. Trump is more desperate, cruel, and dangerous than ever before, and no amount of debating or policy papers will stop him. We know that it’s America or Trump. With less than one year until #ElectionDay, we are all in on stopping him.
💽 https://x.com/ProjectLincoln/status/1722977412374560800?s=20/photo/1
CBSNews: Bipartisan group of senators working through weekend to forge border security deal: “We have to act now” https://tinyurl.com/j2tfpc5u Tightening of asylum policy would become part of a national security package which includes aid to Ukraine, Israel, Gaza and Taiwan
// Sens. Michael Bennet (D-Colo.), James Lankford (R-Okla.), Chris Murphy (D-Conn.), Kyrsten Sinema (I-Ariz.) and Thom Tillis (R-N.C.) are negotiating a compromise to overhaul how migrants are processed along the U.S.-Mexico border
⭕ 9 Nov 2023
MSNBC: Judge Luttig explains why Donald Trump is disqualified from the presidency http://tinyurl.com/3pt8y3r6
// The conservative retired jurist broke down the 14th Amendment, Trump’s immunity argument, and what a second Trump term would mean.
🐣 RT @djrothkopf No. There’s not. Not now. The stakes are too high. Any such movement now is seeking to clear the path to another Trump presidency and the end of democracy in America. That’s the core hypocrisy in statements like this one.
⋙ 🐣 RT @MSNBC_reports “There is a lane for an independent, third-party movement” @RepCharlieDent talks to @KatyTurNBC about the impact of Senator Manchin not seeking re-election.
💽 https://x.com/djrothkopf/status/1722715992692810007?s=20/photo/1
Politico: Echoes of Jan. 6 committee as Jack Smith foreshadows plan to tie Trump to Capitol riot https://tinyurl.com/4b7x6m2a “Trump’s criminal conspiracies ‘culminated and converged’ on Jan. 6, when he attempted to prevent Congress from finalizing Joe Biden’s victory”
// Donald Trump doesn’t want prosecutors to talk about Jan. 6. They want to make it central to their case.
[CourtDoc:] https://tinyurl.com/hjs92ntp
When Donald Trump faces a jury on charges stemming from his bid to subvert the 2020 election, he wants to prohibit federal prosecutors from even mentioning the chaos and violence unleashed by his supporters at the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. But to special counsel Jack Smith, Trump’s role in the riot is the heart of the case.
A new court filing from Smith’s team this week reveals that the mob that stormed Congress in Trump’s name will be the centerpiece of his trial, scheduled to begin on March 4. It wasn’t just an unfortunate reaction to Trump’s incendiary remarks that day, prosecutors contend. It was a tool that Trump used to launch one last desperate bid to cling to power.
Trump’s criminal conspiracies “culminated and converged” on Jan. 6, when he attempted to prevent Congress from finalizing Joe Biden’s victory, argued senior assistant special counsel Molly Gaston.
“One of the ways that the defendant did so … was to direct an angry crowd of his supporters to the Capitol and to continue to stoke their anger while they were rioting,” Gaston wrote in the filing.
In a way, Smith is now casting Trump’s trial as a long-awaited collision between two distinct narratives: Trump’s monthslong campaign to use lies about election fraud to pressure state and federal election officials to keep him in power; and the rioters who embraced Trump’s false claims and took violent action on his behalf on Jan. 6. Those investigations have largely moved along separate tracks in the Washington courts, where a revolving door of Jan. 6 riot defendants have faced punishment while Smith’s grand jury, just a few paces down the hall, worked secretly on the Trump probe. …
By combining the Trump allegations with the riot, Smith is unlocking a mountain of case law developed in those Jan. 6 riot cases to tie Trump more clearly to the violence than he has been to date. In short, he’s casting Trump as one of the 1,200-plus riot defendants who have already been charged.
“[T]he defendant here is charged with four related criminal counts, including conspiring to obstruct and obstructing the official certification proceeding on January 6,” Gaston wrote. “Essential to those charges are factual allegations and evidence that the proceeding was in fact impeded — namely, by a large crowd, including individuals whom the defendant had directed at the Capitol, that violently advanced on the Capitol building to create ‘a catastrophic security risk.’” …
[T]he argument that Trump bears responsibility for causing and exploiting the riot is also familiar; it harkens directly to the one made by the House Jan. 6 select committee in its public hearings and report. Trump didn’t just assemble and stoke the violent mob that day, the panel argued; he used it to keep pressure on lawmakers and then-Vice President Mike Pence to further derail the day’s constitutionally mandated proceedings. …
Smith also intends to show that Trump was fully knowledgeable of the violence underway at the Capitol — and the threat to lawmakers and Pence — when he refused entreaties to calm the crowd and instead inflamed them further by tweeting that Pence “didn’t have the courage” to block Biden’s election. He instead used the delays caused by the mob to continue leaning on members of Congress to lodge objections to the election results and buy more time to stave off Biden’s victory.
Smith’s description of the case he plans to lay out was a response to Trump’s demand that U.S. District Court Judge Tanya Chutkan strike references to the Jan. 6 riot from the language of the indictment. He argued that the charges against him aren’t related to the riot and the references to the attack were inflammatory “surplusage” intended to stir the passions of prospective jurors. …
Trump has argued in civil lawsuits and other filings that he was using common political metaphors when he urged the crowd to “fight like hell” to prevent Biden from taking office. The Jan. 6 committee presented evidence that Trump was aware of the presence of weapons in the crowd he addressed and that he sought to travel with the crowd to the Capitol, only to be overruled by the Secret Service.
⭕ 8 Nov 2023
📋 GoldmanSachs: Macro Outlook 2024: The Hard Part Is Over https://tinyurl.com/4j6drw74 GDP is up as are wages, unemployment is down, inflation should fall back to 2-2.5% in 2024, and a soft landing (no recession) is expected; US GDP growth outpaces all other G7 countries
🐣 RT @SteveRattner State after state, we’ve see pro-choice politics cross partisan lines. ¤ In 516 out of 524 counties across the 7 states with post-Dobbs abortion ballot measures, the pro-choice side garnered more support than Biden did in 2020.
◕ https://x.com/SteveRattner/status/1722270443435176345?s=20/photo/1
related:
◕ https://x.com/SteveRattner/status/1722274325355757838?s=20/photo/1
◕ https://x.com/SteveRattner/status/1722090732767310190?s=20/photo/1
Semafor: Key Democrats temper expectations for a border deal as Ukraine aid hangs in the balance https://tinyurl.com/sre8b3x4 “Senate Republicans have insisted they won’t throw their support behind further assistance to Kyiv unless they secure more restrictive border policies”
🧵 RT @David_Charts [thread] A collection of slides placing Biden’s outstanding economic performance in context vs. other presidents. ¤ First, Biden has the fastest job creation of any modern president, even if start point is June ’22, when the pre-pandemic peak jobs level was regained.
📌 https://x.com/David_Charts/status/1722366788095131721?s=20/photo/1 -n
😅 RT @realHirondelle Have you seen this? There’s a shoutout to NAFO … wait for it.
💽 https://x.com/realHirondelle/status/1722387570888462772?s=20/photo/1
// leaders of NATO countries
🐣 RT @ProjectLincoln These are the polls that matter when we talk about 2024. President Biden and Trump are the nominees. Democracy versus authoritarianism. Biden is the only choice for rational and democratic governance.
🐣 RT @djrothkopf I’ve taught foreign policy & national security at the graduate level for many years. Not one person on the GOP candidate stage-including the former UN Ambassador-would get a passing grade. Their answers are extreme, unrealistic, & would make every situation they describe worse.
🐣 RT @digby56 And now for something actually relevant. The SAG strike has been settled. Lots of people going back to work. Another success of the union movement.
🐣 RT @SecBlinken The @G7 is more united than ever. We stand united in our condemnation of Russia’s war in Ukraine, in support of Israel’s right to defend itself in accordance with international law, and in maintaining a rules-based international order.
🐣 RT @JoyceWhiteVance Women: Thank you, but we’ll make our own decisions. That’s our right. ¤ Ohio House Speaker: We’re coming for you again.
⋙ 🐣 RT @karenkasler And Ohio House Speaker Jason Stephen says in a statement: “I remain steadfastly committed to protecting life, and that commitment is unwavering. The legislature has multiple paths that we will explore to continue to protect innocent life. This is not the end of the conversation.”
🐣 RT @AymannJames Under Trump’s Tax Cuts:
The Waltons of Walmart – $53 Billion Tax Cut!
The Koch Brothers – $34 Billion Tax Cut!
Trump’s Children – $4 Billion Tax Cut!
99.8% of Americans – Not One Nickel!
🐣 RT @RpsAgainstTrump BREAKING: ¤ Donald Trump says he’d consider picking unemployed podcaster and notorious Kremlin propagandist Tucker Carlson as his running mate if he wins the nomination: ¤ “I like Tucker a lot. I would, I think I’d say I would because he’s got great common sense.”
🐣 RT @CENTCOM Following a series of attacks against U.S. persons in Iraq and Syria, U.S. Central Command (USCENTCOM) forces conducted an air strike against a facility in Syria used by Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) and affiliated groups. We will take all necessary measures to defend our people against those who are responsible for the attacks and will respond at a time and place of our choosing.
🐣 RT @Acyn [On Fox] Jessica: The main headline is Democrats continue to over-perform in the Biden era. Republicans haven’t had a good showing since in 2016. ¤ Watters: They took the House in 2000 ¤ Jessica: It was 2022. That was your red wave when you got 3 seats and a George Santos
🐣 RT @Gerashchenko_en 🇺🇦This is a truly historic event for Ukraine! ¤ This is a signal to Russia that the West sees Ukraine as part of the civilized world. ¤ This is a firm message that Ukraine has not been forgotten and that Ukraine is being supported. ¤ So, paradoxically, Putin did not destroy Ukraine, but only accelerated its European integration.
⋙ 🐣 RT @Gerashchenko_en❗️ European Commission officially recommends starting the process of negotiations on Ukraine and Moldova’s accession to the EU – Ursula von der Leyen ¤ Thank you to everyone who was there for Ukraine, supported and continues to support us!
🐣 RT @GlasnostGone Goodnight #Ukraine. A tale of two presidents. ¤ Putin: A cowardly, despised Stalin wannabe, who is dragging his decaying country backwards to the era of the Soviet Union. ¤ Zelensky: A caring, brave leader, loved by the Ukrainian people – who is forging ahead with reforms that will see Ukraine join the European Union & then eventually NATO.
💙 🐣 RT @DNCWarRoom Jeffries: What lesson was learned in Ohio? What lesson was learned in Virginia? What lesson was learned in Kentucky? Abortion is a choice that should be between a woman, her doctor, her faith, and her family. Not a bunch of extreme politicians
🐣 RT @TheRickWilson Looks like Klanned Karenhood is having a bad one.
⋙ 🐣 RT @CourierNewsroom Moms for Liberty tried to stack a school board in Johnson, Iowa — but as COURIER’s @IAStartingLine reports, they lost every seat they ran for to progressive candidates.
🐣 RT @shashj Blinken lays out red lines: “no forcible displacement of Palestinians from Gaza. Not now, not after the war. No use of Gaza as a platform for terrorism…No reoccupation of Gaza…No attempt to blockade or besiege Gaza. No reduction in the territory” [WaPo link]
🐣 RT @harrylitman 3 takeaways from Ivanka’s testimony so far: 1) polished, poised, polite; study in contrast w/ cretinous rest of family; 2) lots of “I don’t recalls” about specifics; 3) BUT can’t wriggle out of the relationship she (w/ Jared’s help) forged w/ Deutsche Bank, and thus Trump’s lies.
Politico: Bipartisan Senate group games out border policies to tie to Ukraine aid https://tinyurl.com/2x46dvm5 “Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell and his allies hardened their stance this week, saying a Ukraine bill without border security can’t pass the Senate”
🐣 RT @ThePlumLineGS Don’t overlook this: The big victory in Virginia isn’t just about abortion. It also shows that the reactionary “parents rights” nonsense has utterly fizzled. ¤ I talked to Dems on the ground about how the right is alienating voters. 1/
// “parents rights”= book bans
🐣 RT @USAmbKyiv [Bridget Brink] Important meeting with @SecretaryPete and @ZelenskyyUA in which we reiterated that the US will continue to support Ukraine against Russia’s unprovoked aggression. We discussed infrastructure restoration and the vital work to be done for Ukraine’s economic recovery.
🐣 RT @ProjectLincoln “Pure democracies are not the way to run a country” ¤ A political party tries to court your vote. ¤ An authoritarian movement tries to keep you from voting.
💽 https://x.com/ProjectLincoln/status/1722350779795702072?s=20/photo/1
// Rick Santorum says the quiet part out load
🐣 RT @HillaryClinton Last night, reproductive freedom was on the ballot in Ohio, Kentucky, and Virginia. It won everywhere. ¤ Women enjoy having human rights, and we vote.
🐣 RT @McFaul Some good news for all Ukrainians and Europeans. Congratulations @ZelenskyyUa!
⋙ 🐣 RT @ZelenskyyUa I welcome today’s recommendation by the European Commission to open EU accession negotiations with Ukraine. ¤ This is a strong and historic step that paves the way to a stronger EU with Ukraine as its member. ¤ I thank the EU and personally @vonderleyen for supporting Ukraine on our road to the EU. ¤ Ukraine continues on its reform path and looks forward to European Council’s decision in December.
💽 [tr] https://x.com/ZelenskyyUa/status/1722229363289231462?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @MFA_Ukraine .@EU_Commission recommends to open accession negotiations with #Ukraine. ¤ So, now we expect a positive political decision from the European Council this December 🤞🏻¤ A historic decision in the historically correct direction!
⭕ 7 Nov 2023
🐣 RT @ProfFeynman “Be a free thinker and don’t accept everything you hear as truth. Be critical and evaluate what you believe in.” — Aristotle (384 – 322 BC)
🐣 RT @Acyn Beshear: Just just look at what we were up against. Five superpacs. My opponent’s superpac, Mitch McConnell’s superpac. Rand Paul’s superpac. The club for growth, the Republican governors association… We beat them all at the same time
🐣 RT @AndyBeshearKY Tonight, our Commonwealth rejected anger politics and proved there is more that unites us than can ever divide us.
🐣 RT @davidmweissman Exactly, I keep saying don’t believe the polls.
⋙ 🐣 RT @MuellerSheWrote After very careful consideration, I’ve come to the conclusion that polls suck. All part of the rage engagement money machine.
NYT, Sasha Doyzhyk: I’m a Ukrainian, and I Refuse to Compete for Your Attention https://tinyurl.com/yec6p9xm
🐣 RT @SimonWDC In 2023 we’ve been running 8 pts above our 2020 results in dozens of state senate and house specials across the county. It’s a remarkable thing.
🐣 RT @SecBlinken Russia started the war in Ukraine and could end it at any time by withdrawing its forces and stopping its brutal attacks. Until it does, the United States has a clear way forward: ¤ Help Ukraine defend itself. ¤ Support the Ukrainian people. ¤ Hold Russia accountable.
⋙ 🐣 RT @SecYellen I joined @SecDef, @SecBlinken, and @PowerUSAID in a letter urging Congress to fully support @POTUS’ request to sustain our direct budget support to Ukraine, which plays a critical role in bolstering their military efforts to win this war.
🐣 RT @MaryLTrump I don’t think I can adequately describe how happy this makes me. #exonerated5
⋙ 🐣 RT @CharlesPPierce In another kick in the jewels for the former president*, Yusef Salaam, of the Central Park 5, wins a NYC council seat. Donnie wanted him executed once.
🐣 RT @RonaldKlain We still have a lot of work to do for 2024 — team biden isn’t arrogant or overconfident — we just believe in our candidate and his case!
🐣 RT @MakeTexasBlue22 Shontel Brown, “When people count Joe Biden out, they don’t know how to count!” ¤ Love it! ¤ #BidenHarris2024
💙 💽 https://x.com/MakeTexasBlue22/status/1722074981767495860?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @Acyn Hannity: Democrats are trying to scare women into thinking Republicans don’t want abortion legal under any circumstances.
💽 https://x.com/Acyn/status/1722078385453592676?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @ NormOrnstein A very tough night for many mainstream journalist and pundits. They will have to work all night long to turn this into the story of why it’s bad for Democrats.
🐣 RT @JoeNBC Republicans keep losing elections in the Age of Trump…and they just don’t care.
2017: Republicans Lose
2018: Republicans Lose
2019: Republicans Lose
2020: Republicans Lose
2021: Republicans Lose
2022: Republicans Lose
2023: Republicans Lose
So what’s the plan for 2024?
🐣 RT @Angry_Staffer Wanna ruin a Republican’s night? ¤ Let ‘em know that the KY Governors Race has predicted the Presidential election in the previous 5 cycles.
🐣 RT @VoteDarkBrandon Folks — I’m no pundit, but let the results so far tonight be a warning: ¤ Don’t underestimate a Biden.
🐣 RT @Beefeater_Fella Hamas terrorists’ last stand at Gaza hospital ¤ In showdown witnessed by a Telegraph reporter, Israeli warplanes, tanks and infantry corner last remains of 1,000-strong battalion. Hamas terrorists were making a “last stand” in a hospital in northern Gaza on Tuesday night in a showdown witnessed by a Telegraph reporter. Israeli warplanes, tanks and infantry cornered the last remains of a 1,000 strong battalion of the terrorist group’s forces holed up in the Indonesian Hospital and a nearby school. ¤ The fierce fighting came as Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel’s prime minister, said that Gaza was now “surrounded” and vowed that the operation would continue “to the end”.
🐣 RT @TheLeadCNN [Jake Tapper] How Hamas frames the civilian casualties of war in Gaza
💽 https://x.com/TheLeadCNN/status/1721693050940924371?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @stuartpstevens When I was a Republican campaign guy, I hated going ip against Joe Trippi because he was so smart and good. Listen to the man. I’m glad we’re on the same side now.
⋙ 🐣 RT @JoeTrippi For the record Biden is going to defeat Trump by bigger margin than in 2020. Everybody is so sold on his invincible hold on the nomination (and yes he will still most likely be the nominee) that they are completely missing his weakness in Iowa and New Hampshire. Trump is going to be a much weaker nominee than he is today. Second in Iowa is going to matter. Been there. Done that.
🐣 RT @sahilkapur NEW —> Joe Biden reaches a new milestone: 150 federal judges confirmed by the Senate ¤ Reshaping the courts is one of the most significant things he’s doing. ¤ Chuck Schumer calls it “a very important day in the Senate.”
🐣 RT @cspan Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) says “a credible solution to the wide-open border” is needed in order to pass a bill that includes funding for Ukraine and Israel.
💽 https://x.com/cspan/status/1722027665622770006?s=20/photo/1.
TheBulwark: James Comer’s Impeachment ‘Bombshells’ Keep Fizzling https://tinyurl.com/yyrys2dn
🧵 RT @shereme There is no neutrality in the face of evil. The russian war and genocide against Ukrainians have changed me. The russians killed three of my friends; they have beheaded, tortured, raped, and castrated thousands of my countrymen; they have destroyed the livelihood of millions. 1/n
📌 https://x.com/rshereme/status/1721766390099587486?s=20
💙 🐣 RT @RadioFreeTom No wonder Americans are so enraged
⋙ 🐣 RT @SteveRattner By a wide margin, the US has had the highest cumulative real (inflation-adjusted) economic growth of any G-7 country post-Covid.
◕ https://x.com/SteveRattner/status/1721942264715395216?s=20/photo/1
// GDP US v G7
🐣 RT @RepMcCaul I wrote the CHIPS for America Act to bring our semiconductor supply chain home to the U.S. — and it’s working. ¤ We’ve already seen companies commit hundreds of billions of dollars to manufacturing these national security assets in Texas & across the nation.
⭕ 6 Nov 2023
🧵 RT @rshereme There is no neutrality in the face of evil. The russian war and genocide against Ukrainians have changed me. The russians killed three of my friends; they have beheaded, tortured, raped, and castrated thousands of my countrymen; they have destroyed the livelihood of millions. 1/n
📌 🖼 https://x.com/rshereme/status/1721766390099587486?s=20/photo/1
[ThreadReader:] https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1721766390099587486.html
2/ I used to be much more tolerant and accepting of different points of view. But now, my vision is more black and white. The war became personal. The pain became personal.
3/ When you are bombed almost every night for two years and have your country invaded, it is personal. I think everyone of us has lost someone, either on the battlefield or when rockets or Iranian drones bombed civilian infrastructure.
4/ Almost every day and night, you hear explosions in the sky. You start your day by reading reports about the next few people hospitalized or dead because Iranian drones or russian rockets crashed into one more building. And that might be the building where your loved ones live.
5/ So, when I meet a person who claims to be neutral regarding the russian war and genocide against Ukrainian people, I hold them responsible for the atrocities committed by russians. There cannot be neutrality in the face of evil.
6/ A Ukrainian is judged because he or she didn’t shake the hand of a russian athlete, and some people dare to cast a judgment? How morally bankrupt do you have to be to judge a victim who doesn’t want to shake hands with the aggressor?
7/ Oh, but maybe these athletes don’t support their governments. Well, if they don’t support their governments, then speak up! Put on a shirt condemning the actions of their government. But no, they are silent. Morally bankrupt.
8/ Oh, but their government would put them in prison for their position. Give me a break! We, Ukrainians, at the cost of many lives, have overthrown several political regimes that wanted to become dictatorships. We stood up. We are free people!
9/ We paid the price and will continue to pay the price. Because freedom is not free. It comes at a price. For us Ukrainians, the price is especially high. But we are willing to pay it. Because it is better to die than to live as a slave.
10/ If you choose to remain neutral and silent, it’s your choice. But that choice defines who you are. You are a coward, a silent supporter, and history will judge you as such.
11/ To end, I want to quote some people who understood very well that there is no neutrality in the face of evil.
12/ Dietrich Bonhoeffer: “Silence in the face of evil is itself evil; God will not hold us guiltless. To not speak is to speak. Not to act is to act.”
13/ Dante Alighieri (paraphrased): “The hottest places in hell are reserved for those who, in times of great moral crisis, maintain their neutrality.”
AP: Senate Republicans outline border security measures they want as a condition for aiding Ukraine https://tinyurl.com/k7yjbvkr “‘I’ve been around this place long enough to know that sometimes when you can’t fail, you don’t,’ [Sen Chris] Murphy said. ‘And we can’t fail on Ukraine.’”
❤️ 🐣 RT @mmeadway “Trump’s allies are planning to execute multiple assaults on democracy…including the possibility of deploying the United States armed forces on Inauguration Day to put down any demonstrations against Trump’s return to the White House.” ⋙ The Atlantic, Tom Nichols: Trump Plots Against His Enemies https://tinyurl.com/2fwmvk8j “Donald Trump has been promising for two years to return to office and seize the machinery of government in order to exact revenge on his enemies. He’s not kidding”
// Inauguration Day could be a national disaster.
WSJ: Senate Republicans Demand U.S. Border Clampdown as Condition for Ukraine Aid https://tinyurl.com/y3umj5hv “In recent days, administration officials have been reaching out to prominent immigration advocates to prepare them for potential compromises they won’t like”
// White House included immigration funding in $106 billion supplemental plan, but no policy changes
Semafor: Senate GOP demands massive asylum overhaul in return for Ukraine aid https://tinyurl.com/2rmur7ct “Republican supporters of the war effort — most notably Minority Leader Mitch McConnell — have said their party won’t back additional support for Kyiv without a border bill”
🐣 RT @benshapiro Jordan is 70% Palestinian Arab. Rania is a queen because she married into the Hashemite dynasty, a true colonialist holdover from the British Mandate. Any time she wants to form a Palestinian state, all she has to do is surrender power.
🐣 RT @mehdirhasan Gaza:
More kids killed than the annual number of kids killed across all conflict zones since 2019 (Save the Children)
More UN workers killed than in any comparable period in the UN’s history (UN)
More journalists killed than in any conflict period since 1992 (CPJ)
🐣 RT @ProjectLincoln Republicans have gone from the party that is strong on foreign policy to a party that wants to cut itself off from the rest of the world. Meanwhile, President Biden is stepping up as the voice of America and doing what Republicans refuse to do: leading the fight against tyranny.
🖼 https://x.com/ProjectLincoln/status/1721663757007630458?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @JayinKyiv Russians at the Kherson front in horror, watching helplessly as Ukrainian Army is now pouring across the river with heavy equipment.
[TextLink:] https://x.com/JayinKyiv/status/1721626896868257862?s=20/photo/1 -4
WaPo, Aaron Blake: 4 things we learned from Trump’s testimony in the New York fraud trial https://tinyurl.com/2ycv3htr “Trump effectively turned a courtroom into a kind of circus that would most likely not be permitted if he didn’t have a political movement behind him” 🤡
🐣 RT @judgeluttig Only the preeminent constitutional scholar, Harvard Law Professor Laurence H. Tribe @tribelaw could have understood the horizontal and vertical rebellions against the Constitution of the United States that the Framers of the Fourteenth Amendment
⋙⋙ 🐣 RT @judgeluttig decided must, if the Nation is to endure, disqualify a person who has previously taken an oath to support the Constitution from ever again holding an “office under the United States,” such as the very highest office under the United States — the Presidency.
⋙ 🧵 RT @tribelaw Insurrections and rebellions against the Constitution of the United States — the kinds of attacks on the Constitution by former officers that disqualify them under Sec 3 of the 14th Amendment — are of two main kinds:
📌 https://x.com/tribelaw/status/1721511846836937171?s=20
[ThreadReader:] https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1721511846836937171.html
the first involve attempts to rend the constitutional fabric of the Union horizontally, through secession (as in the 1860s, in the lead up to Fort Sumter);
the second involve attempts to rend the constitutional fabric of the Union vertically, by rejecting the Constitution’s architecture of quadrennial succession, with each presidential term lasting exactly 4 years (as with Trump’s 2016-20 term in office), so
what Trump tried to do by holding onto the presidency by any means possible, from fake electoral slates to pressuring Pence to reject lawfully certified slates to fomenting violence on Jan 6, amounted to a classic case of a failed coup against the Constitution itself and not just an attempt to overthrow an agency of the government; on the contrary,
Trump sought to seize the government for himself rather than to dismantle it, a distinction without a difference when it comes to the text and purpose of the Disqualification Clause of the
14th Amendment to the United States Constitution, the clause designed to prevent treacherous oath-takers, who commit “moral perjury” when they swear to preserve, protect, and defend or support our most fundamental law, from ever again having an opportunity to take down the structure of our constitutional democracy and the republic it sustains
🐣 RT @petestrzok Worth remembering Judge Middlebrooks’ order throwing out a frivolous civil lawsuit brought by Trump (represented by Habba) for which they were slammed with $938,000 in sanctions. ¤ “He is the mastermind of strategic abuse of the judicial process”
[TextLink:] https://x.com/petestrzok/status/1721617193270452517?s=20/photo/1 [link]
[Text:] “Here, we are confronted with a lawsuit that should never have been filed, which was completely frivolous, both factually and legally, and which was brought in bad faith for an improper purpose,” Middlebrooks wrote. “Mr. Trump is a prolific and sophisticated litigant who is repeatedly using the courts to seek revenge on political adversaries. He is the mastermind of strategic abuse of the judicial process, and he cannot be seen as a litigant blindly following the advice of a lawyer.”
🐣 RT @kyledcheney JUST IN: Prosecutors have filed their motion opopsing Trump’s attempt to dismiss his DC charges. on constitutional grounds. ¤ “The defendant stands alone in American history for his alleged crimes.”
[CourtDoc:] https://tinyurl.com/2a3stxzb 79p
↥ ↧
🐣 RT @MacFarlaneNews Special Counsel blasts Trump’s request for court to strike “inflammatory” Jan 6 references in DC crim case: ¤ “Publicly, the defendant has promoted and extolled the events of that day. While the violent attack was ongoing, the defendant told rioters that they were “very special”
[TextLink:] https://x.com/MacFarlaneNews/status/1721638150185926720?s=20/photo/1
⋙ 🐣 RT @MacFarlaneNews MORE: Jack Smith argues re: Trump & Jan 6 “Evidence of the actions at the Capitol is also relevant and probative of the defendant’s motive & intent before, on, and after Jan. 6—the day that each of the defendant’s criminal conspiracies came to a head..”
[TextLink:] https://x.com/MacFarlaneNews/status/1721641697036075213?s=20/photo/1
⋙ 🐣 RT @MacFarlaneNews Jack Smith also emphasizes a core component of his Jan 6th reference in the Trump indictment ¤ “As the attack on the Capitol halted the congressional certification for several hours.. defendant & his co-conspirators sought to exploit the delay to further obstruct the proceeding”
🐣 RT @StateDept .@SecBlinken wrapped his four-day trip focused on the Israel-Hamas conflict, where he met with regional leaders on our work to prevent the conflict from spreading, protect Palestinian civilians, and increase the flow of humanitarian assistance.
⋙ 🐣 RT @StateDept In Tel Aviv, he met with Israeli officials to reiterate that Israel has the right to defend itself, but the way it does so matters. The Secretary discussed prioritizing the safety of civilians and getting humanitarian assistance into Gaza.
USDefenseDept: U.S. Has 4 Objectives in Middle East https://tinyurl.com/yfht6rv7 The Defense Department currently has four lines of effort in the Middle East, said Pentagon Press Secretary Air Force Brig. Gen. Pat Ryder, who briefed the media today.
[TextLink:] https://x.com/Auriandra/status/1721635993151811870?s=20/photo/1
[Text:] 1 Protection of U.S. forces and citizens in the region.
2 Flow of critical security assistance to Israel as it defends against further Hamas terrorist attacks.
3 Coordination with the Israelis to help secure the release of hostages held by Hamas, to include American citizens.
4 Strengthening of force posture across the region to deter any state or nonstate actors from escalating the crisis beyond Gaza.
📊 YahooNews, Dean Obeidallah: Why Democrats shouldn’t despair over concerning new polls about Biden https://tinyurl.com/453azd6e Two words: Abortion, Democracy
🐣 RT @AWeissmann_ BREAKING: AG GETS TRUMP TO AGREE THAT THE FINANCIAL STATEMENTS AND TRUMP’S PERSONAL GUARANTY WERE TO INDUCE BANKS TO LEND MONEY. KEY FACT FOR THIS FRAUD CASE.
🐣 RT @ Podolyak_M Who says #Russia is interested in “negotiations”, “diplomatic settlement” and other talks about “#peace”?
¤ https://x.com/Podolyak_M/status/1721513832995000703?s=20
Russia, in fact, is only interested in its own non-defeat in the war, mandatory retention of part of the occupied territories, impunity for war crimes, preservation of its reputation as a key lawless among specific countries, and, most importantly, mandatory surrender of #Ukraine, which can look differently. “Unfavorable ultimata”, a protracted war, or a deep internal political crisis. Don’t have any illusions about Russia! “Peace” for them is only an operational pause to carry out militaristic/propaganda modernization and continue systemic destruction of democracies… ¤ Therefore, weapons, weapons and more weapons for Ukraine. This is the only right way…
📋 MeidasTouch, Ron Filipkowski: Donald Trump Testifies in NY Fraud Trial Summary of Trump’s testimony https://tinyurl.com/4bkhaats “The AG’s office contends his net worth never exceeded $1.8B … and that lower rate caused the bank to lose $168M in interest payments”
[…] It is also the AG’s position that Trump was able to secure lower interest rates because of his misrepresentations, and that lower rate caused the bank to lose $168 million in interest payments, but Trump never mentions that.
Trump then went on a long riff about how the loan was paid off and how much money the bank made on the deal, all of which is irrelevant to whether he committed fraud to secure the financing. It is also the AG’s position that Trump was able to secure lower interest rates because of his misrepresentations, and that lower rate caused the bank to lose $168 million in interest payments, but Trump never mentions that. …
Trump then reiterated again that the accounting firm he hired undervalued his net worth because they failed to include the value of his “brand” when determining his asset values, and if the statements were inaccurate that was the reason why. He then went back to rambling about the disclaimer clause, stating that it “goes on forever.” The prosecutor responded, “That clause isn’t the only thing that goes on forever.” …
🐣 RT @MaxBoot If Congress keeps funding Ukraine and Biden defeats Trump, Putin will confront the reality that he can’t win. But if our support for Ukraine falters, then Putin could still win his war of aggression—with frightening consequences for the entire world.
⋙ WaPo: Ukraine’s top general admits the war is stalemated. Now what? https://tinyurl.com/4n8jkwet
[T]he West should provide Zaluzhny with what he needs. In an article for the Economist that accompanied his interview, he asked for more drones to attack Russian troops, electronic-warfare systems to defend against Russian drones, better counter-battery radars, advanced mine-breaching technology, and more help to train and mobilize reservists.
Retired Lt. Gen. Frederick “Ben” Hodges, a former commander of U.S. Army Europe, emphasized to me that Ukraine still needs a lot more long-range strike capacity in the form of cruise missiles, F-16s and ATACMS to target Russian airfields and logistics hubs in occupied Crimea. Even if Ukrainian ground forces switch to a more defensive strategy over the winter, Ukraine can continue to grind down Russian supply lines and command posts. Hodges points out that the Russian positions in southern Ukraine are all supplied from Crimea, “so if you’re able to make the Russian navy, air force and logistics relocate, you change the entire calculus from the Russian side.”
Ukraine has already shown that it can succeed with such asymmetric tactics. Its biggest victory in recent months has come not on the ground but at sea, even though it doesn’t have a navy of its own. Ukraine has had remarkable success in using drones and cruise missiles to attack the Russian Black Sea Fleet’s ships, shipyards and headquarters. In early October, the Black Sea fleet was forced to leave its historic anchorage in Sevastopol, Crimea, and relocate farther east to the port of Novorossiysk in Russia. As a result, Ukraine has been able to ship grain again via the Black Sea. …
If Congress keeps funding Ukraine and if President Biden defeats his likely challenger, former president Donald Trump, in 2024 (both uncertain at the moment), Putin will confront the reality that he can’t win the war. But if our support for Ukraine falters, then Putin could still emerge as the winner in his war of aggression — with frightening consequences for the entire world.
A lot of Americans say they are growing tired of the war. But we are risking nothing more than 0.65 percent of the federal budget to support Ukraine. The Ukrainians are risking their lives. They are tired too, but they know they cannot give up the struggle. Neither can we.
NATO: NATO’s approach to countering disinformation https://tinyurl.com/2s3d5sek “These activities seek to deepen divisions within and between NATO member countries and ultimately weaken the Alliance.”
🐣 RT @IDF The IDF has reopened an evacuation route for Gazan civilians to move south for their safety. ¤ The IDF has repeatedly called on the residents of Gaza City to evacuate from the area, and continues to urge them to do so. ¤ We are not at war with the people of Gaza.
⋙ 🐣 please:
● limit bombing to known military targets
● facilitate transport of humanitarian aid
● do NOT bomb the evacuation areas in the south or the Red Cross locations where refugees are
🐣 RT @JRubinBlogger His [Blinken’s] approach begins with principled empathy, which precludes snap conclusions and all-or-nothing answers. Unlike armchair pundits and instant experts in Congress, he knows there is no easy resolution.
⋙ 🐣 RT @JRubinBlogger Blinken understands what Israel’s right-wing government won’t admit: Without a permanent resolution to Palestinians’ desire for independence and self-rule, violence will continue
⋙⋙ WaPo, Jennifer Rubin: Blinken tries diplomacy built on empathy https://tinyurl.com/3s7apnew “He does not shy from the central dilemma: How does the United States support Israel’s right to exist and prevent future atrocities and also protect the lives of Palestinians?
🐣 RT @ChuckPfarrer EMPEROR FOR LIFE: Yeltsin ‘made’ Putin President on the last day of 1999. ¤ @Beefeater_Fella posts that Putin’s already served longer than any other Russian ruler since Stalin, beating even Leonid Brezhnev’s 18-year tenure. And Putin’s running again for President in March. […]
⋙ 🐣 “EMPEROR FOR LIFE: Yeltsin ‘made’ Putin President on the last day of 1999.” ¤ I was up late to see if all the computers crashed due to the Y2K bug. It was 4am or so when the news came across that suddenly Russia had a new president. ¤ Very surreal.
🐣 RT @SythUK Without googling, name one thing British people invented. ¤ I’ll start you off, and something you’re using right now… ¤ The Internet
⋙ 🐣 Timothy Berners-Lee
⋙⋙ 🐣 RT @SythUK Yep. World Wide Web. So the modern day Internet and websites and allowing pages of information anyone in the world can access and download etc. ¤ First computer to computer communication was the USA.
⋙⋙⋙ 🐣 I met him a couple of times: once at a conference and once when he came to talk to our development group at Mayo. ¤ I date the beginning of the modern era to Dec 1990.
🐣 RT @SecBlinken Arrived in Türkiye last night at a consequential time for stability and security in the region. Today, I will meet with government leaders as we seek to prevent the spread of the conflict in Gaza and find ways to increase the flow of humanitarian assistance.
FinTimes, EdLuce: Netanyahu is an albatross around Biden’s neck https://tinyurl.com/46vb7e39 “Israel’s prime minister stands in the way of the two-state solution that is the US president’s goal”
// Nov 2023
🐣 RT @ ChuckPfarrer PLEASE STAND BY: Jason Jay Smart @officejjsmart reports that Ukrainian hackers penetrated TV networks in occupied Crimea. Their message read: “Send the Ukrainian forces the coordinates of RU military positions. Liberation is coming.”
⋙ 🐣 RT @officejjsmart 🔥🔥🔥 🇺🇦 Hack of Russian TV services in 🇷🇺-occupied Crimea. ¤ An ad appeared on TV in Sevastopol, Crimea saying “Copy and send us, Ukrainian military, the coordinates of Russian military in Crimea,” and promises that liberation is coming.
🐣 RT @Beefeater_Fella (Aug) About a million Russians fled the Russia after the start of the war with Ukraine – a record outflow of the #population since the 1920s – The Economist
¤ https://x.com/Beefeater_Fella/status/1694861798246092953?s=20
// 8/24/2023
“In the first wave, which began with the invasion of Ukraine, up to 300,000 Russians could leave Russia. The second wave began when Putin announced “partial mobilization.”
Re:Russia analysts studied data from countries that received a large number of Russian emigrants and calculated that in 2022 between 817,000 and 922,000 citizens could leave #Russia. Most Russians left for #Kazakhstan and Serbia – each of these countries accepted 150 thousand Russians. At the same time, 30-40 thousand left for the USA.
“Emigration from Putin’s Russia is nothing new. During the first 19 years of his rule, 1.6-2 million people left the country (although this level was declining after the turbulent decade after 1989).
The figure rose significantly around 2012, when Putin returned to the presidency of Russia in an election fraught with fraud and protests. However, the invasion of Ukraine generated the largest emigration driven by political upheaval since the 1920s.
In general, citizens with a high level of income, social capital and education are leaving Russia.”
🐣 RT @Gerashchenko_en Putin continues to interpret history to prove that the West is Russian enemy. ¤ This time, he compared “the West” and the Horde when Alexander Nevsky (a medieval prince) supported the Mongol rule within his domains. ¤ The Golden Horde, says Putin, “behaved cruelly” – but was still better for Russia than the West.
💽 https://x.com/Gerashchenko_en/status/1721449773369037172?s=20/photo/1
⋙ 🐣 He needn’t worry about the disappearance of Russia. It’s stamped in Russia’s genetic signature, with touches of Finnish and Mongolean. Ukraine is more connected to Turkic and Mediterranean peoples
◕ https://x.com/Auriandra/status/1721463834706149416?s=20/photo/1
// haplotypes
📔 ICRC (2010): Treaties and customary law https://tinyurl.com/4wuywxh7
// 10/29/2010; Rules: https://tinyurl.com/5xwu66vw
International humanitarian law is based on a large number of treaties, in particular the Geneva Conventions of 1949 and their Additional Protocols, and a series of other conventions and protocols covering specific aspects of the law of armed conflict. There is also a substantial body of customary law that is binding on all States and parties to a conflict.
Limits on the way warfare can be conducted have existed for centuries, but until 1864 they were for the most part unwritten customs. In that year the First Geneva Convention was adopted. It proved to be the first of many treaties limiting the way wars are waged.
This part of the web site contains links to the main texts of international humanitarian law (IHL), commentaries on their application and academic articles on IHL’s development. It also provides information on the state of treaty ratification.
The core of IHL is the Geneva Conventions. The initial text of 1864 was revised and recast in 1906 and again in 1929. Their current version was adopted on 12 August 1949, in the wake of the Second World War, and is now known as the “four Geneva Conventions”. They have achieved universal ratification.
IHL covers two main areas, the protection of persons who are not, or no longer taking part in fighting and restrictions on the means and methods of warfare such as weapons and tactics.
The First Geneva Convention of 1949 covers the protection and care for the wounded and sick of armed conflict on land.
The Second Geneva Convention concerns the protection and care for the wounded, sick and shipwrecked of armed conflict at sea.
The Third Geneva Convention relates to the treatment of prisoners of war.
The Fourth Geneva Convention concerns the protection of civilians in time of war.
Since 1949 three Protocols have been added to the Geneva Conventions. Additional Protocol I of 1977 relates to the protection of victims of international armed conflicts. Additional Protocol II of the same year covers the protection of victims of non-international armed conflicts.
Additional Protocol III of 2005 created a new protective emblem, the red crystal, alongside the existing red cross and red crescent.
IHL also includes a series of other treaties relating to specific weapons, tactics or protected persons and objects such as the 1954 Convention on the Protection of Cultural Property during armed conflict, the 1972 Biological Weapons Convention, the 1980 Convention on Conventional Weapons, the 1993 Convention on Chemical Weapons and the 1997 Ottawa Convention on anti-personnel mines.
In addition to treaty law, there is a considerable body of customary international humanitarian law. This has been catalogued in a major study by the ICRC and published by Cambridge University Press. This study provides a comprehensive analysis of the customary rules that apply to armed conflict based on State practice.
⭕ 5 Nov 2023
Haaretz, Amos Harel: Despite Israel’s Fierce Attacks, Hamas Leadership Maintains Control Over Gaza https://tinyurl.com/69acwrc8 ‘[A]n important U.S. message to the world [will be] regarding the formation of a three-way alliance, an anti-Russian and anti-Iranian one.’
// As the fighting in Gaza intensifies, the IDF’s focus must be the demolition of Hamas’ tunnels ● One can sense that U.S. patience with Israel is waning as Secretary of State Blinken calls to allow increased aid to Gaza, noting that a pause in the fighting would help the efforts to release the hostages
[…] … Beirut and Tehran may be taking into consideration the U.S. military presence in the area, the high state of alert of IDF forces in the north and the risk that a regional war would lead to the destruction of civilian infrastructure in Lebanon and much of Hezbollah’s military capabilities.
In this regard it is worth noting IDF Chief of Staff Herzl Halevi’s statement, in a remark referring to the northern front, that the Israel Air Force has not yet deployed most of its capabilities in this war. …
While he drew some red lines – Hezbollah will not allow the collapse of Hamas rule in the Gaza Strip and will respond to the killing of Lebanese civilians by killing Israeli civilians – he did not state exactly what he intends to do. It all suggests that like his Iranian patrons, Nasrallah is willing to fight Israel to the last drop of Palestinian blood.
Israeli and U.S. intelligence believe that policy on this matter is decided jointly by Tehran and Beirut, and that since the U.S. assassination in 2020 of Qassem Soleimani, the head of the Revolutionary Guards’ Quds Force, Nasrallah has been very influential in setting policy for the radical anti-Israel axis. …
Several other issues came up during Blinken’s visit and in talks between the Pentagon and the IDF. First, the U.S. is asking Israel to leave dealing with the regional arena to the U.S. The Americans are involved in intercepting launches from Yemen and if needed, may take care of the Houthi rebels there. This apparently applies also to the Shi’ite militias in Iraq, which so far are focused on harassing U.S. bases in that area. Second, the Biden administration is trying to arrange a visit to Israel by Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy next week.
This will be an important U.S. message to the world regarding the formation of a three-way alliance, an anti-Russian and anti-Iranian one. Israel has evaded this for years, but now there is no choice (and is also the ethical thing to do). …
🐣 RT @elgindy_ Israel’s 4-week assault on Gaza has killed 10,000 people, including 4000 children. For perspective, that’s equivalent to killing 1.5 million Americans, including 600,000 children, in the US in under a month.
🐣 RT @ WajahatAli So…a cleansing.
⋙ 🐣 RT @DalrympleWill Even the centrists in Israel now talking about emptying Gaza of Palestinian and “distributing them around the world.”
⋙⋙ 🐣 RT @MacaesBruno This is an MK from centrist, liberal Yesh Atid, Lapid’s party
⋙⋙⋙ 🐣 RT @MacaesBruno Top Israeli official in some of the most powerful posts in the country describes his preferred plan
💽 [tr] https://x.com/MacaesBruno/status/1720807461769097490?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @1ntrl0p3r #Russia propaganda tactics include using videos from blockbuster movies from the west in an attempt to instill fear into the world. ¤ We all know by now thats its all smoke and mirrors when hollow threats come from the Krimelin.
⋙ 😂 RT @ivanastradner Tom Cruise & Nicholas Cage must dying of laughing when they see the Kremlin cutting together „Mission Impossible Ghost Protocoll“ and „the Knowing“
🐣 RT @RadioFreeTom The best part of that Russian “nuclear war on the US” propaganda reel is how they had to steal it all from American movies with good SFX because Russia just isn’t any good at that.
↥ ↧
🐣 RT @AlexKokcharov In #Russia, Kremlin’s propaganda released a short animation showing a Russian nuclear strike on the #US, with devastation of American cities including San Francisco and New York City. ¤ Kremlin’s wet dreams about the world they want to live in.
💽 https://x.com/AlexKokcharov/status/1720876418593071481?s=20/photo/1
//➔ Readers added context to this video:
The original source for this video seems not to be not the Kremlin, but rather this Twitter account: https://twitter.com/warintel4u/status/1717280454896767225
It’s a mash-up of scenes from
– Mission Impossible https://youtu.be/h2TkR0IWfmM?feature=shared&t=6
– Battlestar Galactica https://youtu.be/_39avaboNTI?feature=shared&t=146
– Terminators Genisys https://youtu.be/OpFg5-JxiSk?feature=shared&t=9
– Knowing https://youtu.be/RDdc0-JD8Dk?feature=shared&t=84
🐣 RT @toddrichman Reminder that @israel left Gaza almost 20 years ago (by the way from 1948-1967 Egypt controlled it).
¤ https://x.com/toddrichman/status/1721207330480746800?s=20
Reminder that Gaza was left with an amazing intact agriculture system that was destroyed by Gazans. Reminder that instead of building power plants, water filtration systems, tourist industry, and much more, it was spent on tunnels, weapons, hate and making the Hamas leadership rich. Reminder that Gaza has a border with Egypt and that hundreds of Palestinians left this “open air prison” to travel around the world, visit overseas relatives, seek medical care. Reminder that many Israelies were part of building industrial parks for both Israelies and Palestinians from Gaza to work together create an atmosphere of peace and hope. Reminder that on October 6th, 20,000-30,000 Gazans were entering Israel each day to work support their families and that number was about to be increased.
Reminder that on October 7th Hamas attacked Israel and violated a current ceasefire (7th, 8th or 9th time they have done this by the way). Reminder that Hamas murdered 1,400 innocent people. Reminder that they raped, tortured, beheaded, and burned people alive. Reminder that over 200 Israelis have been kidnapped and are held hostage. Reminder that the Hamas charter calls for the destruction of Israel and the killing of Jews. You want a ceasefire? Bring the hostages home, demand that Hamas should surrender, and finally come to the conclusion that
@israel is not going anywhere.
🐣 RT @AdamParkhomenko Woooowza
⋙ 🐣 RT @atrupar Wow. Stephanopoulos presses Scalise four or five times to affirm that the 2020 election was not stolen, and Scalise repeatedly dodges by changing the topic.
💽 https://x.com/AdamParkhomenko/status/1721204128829837422?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @World_At_War_6 🚨US Secretary of State Antony Blinken arrived in Turkey early Monday on the final stop of a whirlwind Middle East diplomacy trip. ¤ He has met with Israeli officials in Tel Aviv, discussed settler violence in the West Bank, and met with key regional leaders about growing calls for a Gaza ceasefire. -CNN ¤ Now Blinken will try to tame Erdogan
⋙ 🐣 in our new “multipolar world” of “spheres of interest,“ he’ll likely be trying to reconstitute the Ottoman Empire
📊 Ipsos/ABO Poll: More Americans trust Republicans rather than Democrats to do a better job handling the economy https://tinyurl.com/azwtyrx
🐣 RT @WhiteHouse The Biden-Harris Administration condemns, in the strongest terms, the alarming rise in antisemitic incidents at schools and on college campuses. ¤ There is no place for hate in America. Here are some of the steps the Administration is taking to address this alarming rise.
¤ https://x.com/WhiteHouse/status/1721192532938240376?s=20
[ThreadReader:] https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1721192532938240376.html
🐣 RT @RadioFreeTom Watching @mehdirhasan; when he got to Biden in trouble with young voters, voters of color, and Arab-Americans – all groups that would suffer even more than the rest of us under a Trump autocracy – I took a break. ¤ Not because Mehdi’s wrong, but because it’s true – and insane.
🐣 RT @ProjectLincoln We watched all of Trump’s Sioux F̶a̶l̶l̶s̶ City speech so you don’t have to. Thank us later.
💽 https://x.com/ProjectLincoln/status/1721346682225414231?s=20/photo/1
🐣 📊 RT @RpsAgainstTrump 29% of Americans have a favorable view of Donald Trump, a new ABC poll finds. Trump’s unfavorable rating stands at 60%. ¤ 29% seems way too high.
🐣 RT @randymot4 Been there. Done that.
[TextLink:] https://x.com/randymot4/status/1721136358025027691?s=20/photo/1
[Text:] Budapest Memorandum – signed 1994 by Russia: In exchange for giving up its nuclear arsenal, Ukraine received binding security assurances to respect its independence and sovereignty which guaranteed its existing borders. China and France extended similar assurances to Ukraine. It was understood, if a violation, there would be a response incumbent on the US and the UK.
⋙ 🧵📌 RT @spartyflyboy Negotiating with Russia – again? [thread] ¤ Well, why repeat a mistake when you can make one that’s much worse? ¤ Worse, because the global threat situation has changed and Russia continues to attack NATO infrastructure. Without any repercussion or deterrent. ¤ Unity seems to be one issue. ¤ 1/
📌 [TextLink:] https://x.com/spartyflyboy/status/1720967814465347908?s=20/photo/1
[ThreadReader:] https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1720967814465347908.html
Let’s leave aside, that arguably Russia is represented within NATO by Hungary’s Orban.
There is one more core issue within the 50 nations supporting Ukraine. They are presumably all powers dedicated to preserve the status quo, but most have a different outlook what that means. 2/Even important UA allies dissent:
Germany: Scholz appears to hope for “normalization” with Russia and go back to biz asap, break “US Hegemony” -> “Multipolar World”. ¤ Baltic, SE, FIN, PL: Revisionist, reign in Russia until she poses only a manageable threat to her neighbours. 3/USA: Desire to limit escalation, cautious of conflict spreading & NATO resolve being tested. Absence of a clear China policy meshes with a desire for a stable Russia. ¤ In general there seems to be a total absence of ideas how to deal with globally expanding revisionism. 4/
This lack of unity & vision is a major factor why even some key players find it hard to express that “Ukraine must win” or define “victory” euphemistically in a way that Ukraine, not Russia, has to concede territory and/or impose limits on their future foreign policy options. 5/
A “victory deal” in which Ukraine will (again) be forced to extensive concessions would yet also reflect on the alliance supporting Ukraine. ¤ It will show inability to deal with aggressive revisionism and serve as invitation to exploit this in the future. ¤ The world is watching. 6/
Russia wages an intense information war to destabilize our western liberal democracies. Weak support for Ukraine, allowing Russia an off ramp without humiliation will be disastrous for our societies already under Russian attack. ¤ Ukraine supporters will feel core western values 7/
have been betrayed & have growing doubts about the promise of western defensive alliances.
Russia’s friends & supporters will feel emboldened in their goal to replace democracy with Russian friendly autocracies. ¤ If Russia isn’t defeated Putin will retain his strong man appeal. 8/For the sake of our own democracies we need Russian revisionism to fail at a scale as grandiose as Russian imperial ambitions.Only then will we be able to effectively deal with autocratic revisionist movements in our own societies and with other revisionist actors like China. 9/
Russian internal stability can’t be of concern in regards to her war on Ukraine. Any deterrence of future revisionist ambitions/aggression will need a clear & painful humiliation for Russia.
This will automatically lead to internal stress if there is to be any accountability. 10/It simply isn’t our job to sort out the mess Russia got herself into. Helping with off ramps will only lead to Russians blaming those trying to help. Our job is to help Ukraine stop Russia.
It also would be a travesty to stabilize Russia while they attack us with info war. 11/Ukraine needs to win in 2024. Ukraine could have won in 2023 were it not for western lack of joint vision, unity and reluctance to deter Russia. ¤ The question of Ukraine’s victory is married to the question of our values, what world we want to live in. 12/
Without unity and shared vision of a status quo we vow to protect from revisionist actors we will remain stuck in indecisiveness, doing something but not enough. ¤ 2024 Ukraine needs to win or Russia might win by sufficiently destabilizing our political systems like in Slovakia 13/
Russia knows of our internal vulnerability. Their intelligence apparatus stoked it, feeds it with hybrid war and grooming a polycrisis. And if one of our western analysts says that Putin is banking on “war fatigue” in the west, they refer to the success of Russian info war. /14
🖼 https://x.com/spartyflyboy/status/1720967845654221272?s=20/photo/1
It’s high time that we move on from a purely Machiavellian understanding of international relations and ask ourselves what values, what principles and what sort of minimal status quo we want to preserve. ¤ This conversation has to come fast, and it needs Ukraine to win. 2024. 15/ Thanks for reading. …
🐣 RT @NormOrnstein Important and chilling thread
⋙ 🧵 RT @ardenthistorian Johnson is influenced by theocratic movements unfamiliar to most political analysts. I wrote for @RDispatches about Johnson’s theological beliefs, with @sarahposner and @julieingersoll providing the context that’s been missing in most of the coverage.
📌 https://x.com/ardenthistorian/status/1721310625370903031?s=20
[ThreadReader:] https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1721310625370903031.html
🐣 RT @KenRoth Nice words, but why no serious pressure on Netanyahu? It is not as if the US government lacks leverage: $3.8 billion in annual military aid to Israel and now more promised. Where is the conditionality?
⋙ ⋙ 🐣 RT @SecBlinken Met with President Abbas and affirmed our commitment to delivery of humanitarian assistance and restoration of essential services in Gaza. Made clear that extremist violence against Palestinians in the West Bank must end and reiterated our support for a two state solution.
⋙ 🐣 The House just passed a $14B SUPPLEMENTAL for Israel. The only leverage Dems have to get needed aid to Ukraine as well as aid to Gaza is to combine these with the $14B. Biden could slow-walk dispersal of the Israel aid, but only for a few months. It’s a mess.
🐣 RT @BillKristol It’s time. ¤ President Biden has served our country well. I’m confident he’ll do so for the next year. ¤ But it’s time for an act of personal sacrifice and public spirit. ¤ It’s time to pass the torch to the next generation. ¤ It’s time for Biden to announce he won’t run in 2024.
⋙ 🐣 too late, I’m afraid ¤ the only way to pull the left back in is to work to restrain Israel, work with Arab allies, and get food and supplies to Gaza ¤ the admin is working their butts off to do these things ¤ Israel has to step up and get Bibi to resign NOW ¤ Trump is getting crazier
🐣 RT @SIfill_ [Trump:] “We won 50 states. Every state.” ¤ But we’re not talking 24/7 about the mental fitness of this man. C’mon y’all. This is no joke. ¤ I do not care what polls say. Let’s get serious.
⋙ 🐣 RT @DavidCayJ Donald’s lies are becoming ever more outrageous, yet this 13-seconds of craziness apparently didn’t make the national news anywhere:
💽 https://x.com/DavidCayJ/status/1721239712982351983?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @David_Charts Biden is outperforming other presidents on key pocketbook measures such as household income and net worth, adjusted for inflation (real). ¤ Biden holds presidential records for both real median household income @ $75,455 and real household net worth of bottom 50% group @ $54,618.
◕ 📋 https://x.com/David_Charts/status/1721311138346840173?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @WhiteHouse The Biden-Harris Administration is committed to getting much-needed food, water, and medical supplies to civilians in Gaza.
⋙ 🐣 RT @StateDept .@SecBlinken discusses tangible steps being taken to increase the sustained delivery of food, water, medicine, fuel, and other essentials into Gaza.
💽 https://x.com/WhiteHouse/status/1721326562010644957?s=20/photo/1
ForeignPolicy, Daniel Kurtzer: I Worked With Netanyahu. It’s Time for Him to Step Down. https://tinyurl.com/bddh2rvc
// A former U.S. ambassador to Israel on why Bibi has lost his mandate—and the confidence of his country’s closest allies.
Benjamin Netanyahu’s days as prime minister of Israel are numbered. He can either accept responsibility for the political, intelligence, and operational failures that were evident on Oct. 7, when Hamas massacred more than 1,400 Israelis—or he will be forced out by the commission of inquiry that will follow the war. He should leave now, while some small measure of respectability is intact. …
Netanyahu has served longer than any other Israeli leader, a reflection of his astute political skills and the image he created of himself as Mr. Security. Hamas burst this image in dramatic fashion, in a barbaric attack that will tear at Israel’s soul for many years to come. … …
All of these things have made Netanyahu a conundrum, both in policy and personality. He has made security his priority but undermined Israel’s vital strategic partnership with Washington. He is more skillful politically than anyone else in the country but has partnered with the most extreme right-wing and ultra-Orthodox figures on the political spectrum. His own military chiefs have opposed him on Iran and raised questions about his approach to the Palestinian issue. And his alleged personal indiscretions have led to multiple indictments for corruption. In the past year, Netanyahu has divided the country with a contentious judicial overhaul plan, motivated in part by his own drive to avoid prosecution.
These distractions contributed to the systemic failure of the Israeli government before Oct. 7. To be very clear: Hamas and Hamas alone is responsible for the massacre that it perpetrated in violation of every human moral imperative. But Netanyahu orchestrated a policy of appeasing the group, believing it would be satisfied with a long-term hudna, or truce, rather than fulfilling its original charter, which calls for the destruction of Israel. That policy has led Israel to its deadliest war in decades.
The war in Gaza will end eventually. But when it does, Israelis and Palestinians will have no political horizon to look to, no peace process to rekindle, and little hope for a better future. That, too, is a legacy of Netanyahu’s long years in power.
Netanyahu tried to shirk responsibility several days ago by blaming the intelligence and military chiefs for the security failures that led to the Hamas attacks. The angry backlash should have convinced him that Israelis will not let him off the hook. Indeed, in a survey published this week by the Israel Democracy Institute, a significant majority of Israelis expressed more trust in the heads of the Israel Defense Forces than in Netanyahu. Most of his countrymen understand that he has placed his own interests above those of the state and its citizens. To avoid a legal reckoning surrounding his indictments, he jeopardized an entire nation. Having lost his aura as protector of Israel, and having failed thus far to define Israel’s war aims in Gaza beyond the hyperbole of destroying Hamas, Netanyahu is now clinging to power for the sake of power itself.
The Hebrew language has no specific word for accountability. Instead, Israelis use the word achrayut, which translates as “responsibility.” Netanyahu has avoided accountability in the past, … . And he is trying to avoid it now. It is time for him to bear achrayut—responsibility and accountability. It is time for him to step down.
🐣 RT @MiddleEastEye In a CNN interview on 5 November, Queen Rania of Jordan spoke about how the root cause of the Palestine-Israel conflict is an illegal occupation, with illegal settlements that abuse human rights, without regard for UN resolutions or international law
💽 [tr] https://x.com/MiddleEastEye/status/1721339145388216440?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @BernieSanders The immediate task is to stop the bombing, end the horrific humanitarian disaster in Gaza, and go forward with the entire world toward a two-state solution.
CNN: 💽 https://x.com/BernieSanders/status/1721227077561860207?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @SecBlinken During my visit to Jordan, I spoke with @UNRWA staff in Gaza. I heard about the extraordinary lifesaving work they are doing in the face of extremely difficult conditions. We are working to expedite assistance to them so that they can get it to the Palestinian people.
🐣 RT @RepSlotkin As the only Jewish member of MI’s congressional delegation, I have worked to reach out to Arab & Muslim constituents who I know are feeling fear and anguish right now, & I have tried to reflect that empathy in my approach to this crisis. I ask the same of @RepRashida. (1/3)
⋙ 🐣 RT @RepSlotkin The phrase “from the river to the sea” is one of division & violence, & it is counterproductive to promoting peace. None of us, especially elected leaders, should amplify language that inflames a tense situation & makes it harder for our communities to find common ground. (2/3)
⋙ 🐣 RT @RepSlotkin If I knew that a phrase I’d used had hurt any of my constituents, I would apologize & retract it, no matter its origin. I’d ask the same from you. (3/3)
⋙⋙ 🐣 RT @_waleedshahid Do you have a better slogan for Palestinians living under occupation, apartheid or blockades who want freedom between the River Jordan and Mediterranean Sea? I don’t think it’s about the slogan.
⋙⋙⋙ 🐣 how about one that doesn’t involve eliminating Israel but rather promotes a two-state solution and peaceful coexistence? ¤ “Side by side ¤ We can live and thrive” etc
🐣 RT @atrupar Zelenskyy on Meet the Press on Russia’s response to the Israel-Hamas war: “Russia is very happy with this war. They don’t count how many children were killed there … they just want to divide the world.”
💽 https://x.com/atrupar/status/1721187346492555623?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @ChuckPfarrer A PICTURE FOR THE WISE: USCENTCOM announces the arrival of an Ohio class (SSBN) missile submarine in its operational area. The cylindrical structure aft of the submarine’s sail (conning tower) is a Dry Deck Shelter, used for the clandestine deployment of SEAL task elements.
⋙ 🐣 RT @CENTCOM On November 5, 2023, an Ohio-class submarine arrived in the U.S. Central Command area of responsibility.
🖼 https://x.com/ChuckPfarrer/status/1721280959251661016?s=20/photo/1
⋙⋙ 🐣 RT @mhrluscombe Can’t see the 154 Tomahawks.
😜 RT @LeviYonit “Columbia Untisemity”: Israel’s No. 1 Satire program mocks the support for Hamas on college campuses @mulisegev @Eretz_Nehederet
💽 https://x.com/LeviYonit/status/1721272323087401428?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @United24media ⚡️ “The war takes the best of us: the best heroes, the best men, women, children. That’s it. But we are not ready to give our freedom to this f***ing terrorist Putin. That’s it. That’s why we are fighting”, — President Zelenskyy in an interview with Meet the Press on NBC.
💽 https://x.com/United24media/status/1721207746656186710?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @BillPascrell Yesterday donald trump openly admitted he is planning to impose a military dictatorship if he seizes power again. I am going to post this repeatedly so no one can say they haven’t been told.
[TextLink:] https://x.com/BillPascrell/status/1723017869674295548?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @Tribelaw A second Trump term would be a nonstop coup against the Constitution that Trump promised to “terminate” last year. It’s what Sec 3 of the 14th Amendment was designed to prevent by disqualifying those who swear to support the Constitution but then trash it
🐣 RT @djrothkopf This. This. This.
⋙ 🐣 RT @ianbassin Let’s call this what it is: Trump is planning a military dictatorship. This is radical stuff that would end America as we know it. It must lead every newscast until every voter fully understands what this is. Yet it’s not even the top story in the Post.
🐣 RT @peterbakernyt On Trump’s list of people to investigate and potentially imprison are his own former appointees whom he deems disloyal, including John Kelly, Bill Barr, Ty Cobb and Mark Milley. Their apparent crimes seem to be criticizing Trump.
⋙ 🐣 RT @peterbakernyt peterbakernyt Trump and allies map out plans to use the government to punish critics and even invoke the Insurrection Act on his first day in office to allow him to deploy the military against civil protests. @jdawsey1 @iarnsdorf @DevlinBarrett
⋙⋙ WaPo: Trump and allies plot revenge, Justice Department control in a second term https://tinyurl.com/hnyt3s58
// Advisers have also discussed deploying the military to quell potential unrest on Inauguration Day. Critics have called the ideas under consideration dangerous and unconstitutional.
🐣 RT @spectatorindex BREAKING: The US military announces an Ohio-class nuclear-powered submarine has arrived in the Middle East
🐣 RT @AndriyYermak In the darkest hour, the Ukrainian sun will rise☀🇺🇦 ¤ Ukraine must prevail for a brighter future, as it is a fight for freedom and peace for the entire world. Our victory will help to stop the aggressor and set an example of courage. We seek security and justice.
🐣 RT @TheEconomist The sooner that Binyamin Netanyahu is forced from office the better. His successor will need to win a mandate for a new security doctrine. ¤ At the same time the Palestinians need moderate leaders with a democratic mandate. At the moment they have none https://econ.st/3Msfpaz
🐣 RT @kangaroos991 Worst President ever, YES or no?
[TextLink:] https://x.com/kangaroos991/status/1721070392130084964?s=20/photo/1
[Text:] Trump started with a roaring economy, and in 4 years he: lost 5 million jobs, added 9 trillion dollars to the deficit, lost the senate, lost the white house, killed more Americans than Hitler, attempted a coup, got banned from social media and got impeached twice.
🐣 RT @general_ben The West should not fear Ukraine defeating Russia. This is an historic opportunity to improve security for the entire Eurasian land mass, if we can think/act decisively.
WaPo: Arrest of ex-FSB agent signals Kremlin crackdown on pro-war hawks https://tinyurl.com/5n96n8dh “‘It is too late to be afraid and wait,’ he wrote. ‘We are on the eve of the collapse of the statehood of Russia.’”
// Igor Girkin/“Strelkov” bio
⭕ 4 Nov 2023
🐣 RT @kangaroos991 Worst President ever, YES or no?
[TextLink:] https://x.com/kangaroos991/status/1721070392130084964?s=20/photo/1
[Text:] Trump started with a roaring economy, and in 4 years he: lost 5 million jobs, added 9 trillion dollars to the deficit, lost the senate, lost the white house, killed more Americans than Hitler, attempted a coup, got banned from social media and got impeached twice.
🐣 RT @ProjectLincoln It’s time to face reality. Trump is more desperate, cruel, and dangerous than ever before, and no amount of debating or policy papers will stop him. We know that it’s America or Trump. We must stand tall and fight back for 2024.
💽 https://x.com/ProjectLincoln/status/1720908801539219758?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @StateDept The United States continues to believe that the sole viable path is a two-state solution, with Israelis and Palestinians each exercising their legitimate right to live in a state of their own, with equal measures of security and freedom, of opportunity and dignity.
💙🐣 RT @AliVelshi It may seem contradictory, but there are rules to war. In the aftermath of WWII, our modern understanding of international humanitarian law took shape. Here’s what you need to know about how the world defines what a war crime is. #Velshi
💽 https://x.com/AliVelshi/status/1720866099929944429?s=20/photo/1
💙 🐣 RT @Angry_Staffer You don’t have to take my word for it, but maybe you’ll listen to Obama. ¤ “If you want to solve the problem, you have to take in the whole truth, and you have to admit that nobody’s hands are clean.”
💽 https://x.com/Angry_Staffer/status/1720890971053805864?s=20/photo/1
🧵 RT @judgeluttig I had the opportunity again yesterday on @DeadlineWH with @NicolleDWallace to make the single most important point that needs to be made about the Disqualification Clause in Section 3 of the Fourteenth Amendment:
📌 https://x.com/judgeluttig/status/1720876313953861976?s=20
[ThreadReader:] https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1720876313953861976.html
🐣 RT @carlbildt This is of course the key obstacle to the two-state 🇮🇱🇵🇸 solution that everyone now is talking about. Some of these settlers are very militant, well armed and with an open political agenda to get complete control over the entire West Bank.
⋙ 🐣 RT @ChathamHouse The UN estimates that 670,000 Israeli citizens live in 130 illegal settlements in the West Bank and East Jerusalem.
⋙⋙ ChathamHouse (10/27): Ignoring the roots of violence in the Israel–Palestine conflict challenges any future peace https://tinyurl.com/3pbds3ny “The current Netanyahu-Ben Gvir coalition government was brokered by an agreement to make West Bank settlement expansion a priority”
// Only by addressing the suffering on all sides can we understand what is happening – and what can come next.
The Hamas attacks on Israelis on 7 October shattered a growing regional and international consensus that the Israel–Palestine conflict was dormant. … ¤ These claims imply that a peace was broken by Hamas on 7 October. But what they ignore is the Palestinian reality of a conflict that has never ended. ¤ Understanding this context is not to justify Hamas’s actions but to explore the roots of it. …
… [F]or Palestinians, their lives and lived conditions were only getting worse. By September this year, according to the UN, Israeli forces had killed more Palestinians in the West Bank than in any year since the UN began recording fatalities. …
Understanding these roots also requires looking at Israel’s actions which have at times been directly violent: bombing civilians, destroying infrastructure, and forcibly removing hundreds of thousands from their homes.
According to B’Tselem, an Israeli human rights organization, between 9 December 1987 and 30 April 2021, almost 40,000 people have died from this violence, with 87 per cent of those killed being Palestinian. …
The UN estimates that 670,000 Israeli citizens live in 130 illegal settlements in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, and this year had already set an all-time record for settlement construction in the West Bank.
Israeli settler take-over of lands, particularly in the West Bank’s Area C (some 330,000 hectares of land), violates the interim agreements under the 1993 Oslo Accords signed between Israel and the Palestinian Liberation Organization, the umbrella group recognised by Western states as the representative of the Palestinian people.
Referred to as settler colonialism by the UN Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese, settlers are able to take these lands because they are supported by the Israeli military and Israeli political leaders, as well as the Israeli judiciary.
The current Netanyahu-Ben Gvir coalition government was brokered by an agreement to make West Bank settlement expansion a priority.
Last year, the UN’s Special Coordinator, Tor Wennesland, argued that ‘Israel’s settlement expansion continues to fuel violence in the Occupied Palestinian Territory, further entrenching the occupation and undermining the right of Palestinians to self-determination and independent statehood’.
Months before Hamas’s 7 October attack, hundreds of settlers entered the village of Turmusaya in the West Bank. They attacked and set fire to houses and cars, fired at residents and killed a Palestinian man, Omar Jbarah. …
The people of Gaza have lived for 16 years under a blockade that the UN has called an illegal act of collective punishment that has made their territory ‘unlivable’.
Four out of five UN Special Rapporteurs have described this situation as apartheid. Israel has rejected the term, as has the European Commission, but it has also been used by a number of Palestinian, Israeli, and international human rights organizations.
The blockade on Gaza kills people when it limits medical supplies and denies travel to Palestinians requiring access to properly functioning hospitals. It also kills when residents of Gaza die from diseases caused by a lack of access to water. …
These realities are evidence of what is academically referred to as structural violence – a persistent condition that results in casualties not from guns alone, but also as a consequence of the Palestinians’ unequal position in society, both socially and politically. ¤ This structural violence is a central root of the continuing conflict.
Scholars have argued that when inequality and corruption are widespread, a political settlement is twice as likely to collapse into some form of armed confrontation.
For Israel, responding to the killing of over 1,400 of its citizens with overwhelming military force, putting Gaza under siege in pursuit of Hamas, and locking down the West Bank will not address the roots of the enduring conflict.
In almost three weeks, Israeli bombing has already killed over 7,000 Palestinians, including more than 2,900 children, wiped out neighbourhoods, damaged over 165,000 homes, and left 1.4 million Palestinians internally displaced – roughly 75 per cent of Gaza’s population.
The violence is not solely in Gaza, as 110 people have been killed in the West Bank. Seven UN Special Rapporteurs warn that the numbers in Gaza will likely increase exponentially and these actions risk a genocide. …
To end this suffering, the international community should do everything in its power to bring about a ceasefire, facilitate the provision of humanitarian aid to all in need, and re-instigate political processes in pursuit of a just resolution to the Israeli–Palestinian conflict.
This month’s events show that an unrepresentative peace will remain perpetually unstable. Sustainable processes towards conflict resolution should consider the totality of violence experienced by all sides.
Otherwise, a military solution followed by another illusion of stability is only likely to fall apart once again, killing thousands along the way.
🐣 RT @MarinaMedvin Important video on the history of the people you know as “Palestinians” being kicked out of Arabic nations. ¤ Guess why they were kicked out. Guess.
💽 https://x.com/MarinaMedvin/status/1720755123805196510?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @DailyNewsEgypt The foreign ministers of Jordan, #Egypt, Qatar, United Arab Emirates, and Saudi Arabia starts meeting to discuss situation in Gaza ahead of their meeting with with US top diplomat @SecBlinken in Amman to look into a ceasefire in #Gaza
🐣 RT @KyivPost ⚡️Russia recently conducted failed tests of its Yars and Bulava nuclear-capable ballistic missiles, indicating significant problems with #Moscow’s ability to deliver nuclear weapons, according to the Main Intelligence Directorate (#GUR). ¤ On 1 November, an RS-24 Yars missile launched from a cosmodrome in the Arkhangelsk region toward Kamchatka deviated off course during a launch test.
🐣 RT @GlastnostGone With democratic countries still reluctant to provide #Ukraine with all the weapons and means to defeat Russia’s barbaric invasion, I’m reminded of Winston Churchills 1941 speech: It’s as if he’s talking about Ukraine.
¤ https://x.com/GlasnostGone/status/1720750239244562941?s=20
“Never give in. Never give in. Never, never, never—in nothing, great or small, large or petty—never give in, except to convictions of honour and good sense.
Never yield to force. Never yield to the apparently overwhelming might of the enemy. We stood all alone a year ago, and to many countries it seemed that our account was closed, we were finished.
All this tradition of ours, our songs, our School history, this part of the history of this country, were gone and finished and liquidated.
Britain, other nations thought, had drawn a sponge across her slate. But instead our country stood in the gap. There was no flinching and no thought of giving in; and by what seemed almost a miracle to those outside these Islands, though we ourselves never doubted it, we now find ourselves in a position where I say that we can be sure that we have only to persevere to conquer.
Do not let us speak of darker days: let us speak rather of sterner days. These are not dark days; these are great days—the greatest days our country has ever lived; and we must all thank God that we have been allowed, each of us according to our stations, to play a part in making these days memorable in the history of our race.”
💽 https://youtu.be/aKGXo4g26Ds?si=rfBkBcZLsN_NBaIf
⋙ 🐣 My guess is that the Defense Supplemental will be passed in the House along with a continuing resolution ~ by Thanksgiving, which is the deadline. The Senate GOP thinks it can get Biden to agree on some (?) border policy changes in the Supplemental, a big ask; we’ll see
🐣 RT @SecBlinken It’s critical that we make sure the Israel-Hamas conflict does not spread elsewhere in the region. Discussed with @Najib_Mikati ways to keep that from happening and secure humanitarian assistance for the Palestinian people. We also discussed Lebanon’s urgent need for a President.
🐣 RT @MalcolmNance I’m not a cheerleader but I can tell the difference between the summary individual execution of 1,400 innocent people BY HAND and the terrible collateral casualties from air strikes targeting military infrastructure.
¤ https://x.com/MalcolmNance/status/1720739820639535449?s=20
You have no fucking clue the difference between terrorism and war that terrorism brought. Wars kill civilians disproportionately. Journalists are sometimes victims. Hamas created this urban war. They’re responsible for every death.
I’m sure you took to the streets to protest the US biking alQaeda & Isis right? Did you complain about the 500,00 people killed in the Syrian civil war? No? Then just say you secretly hate Jews and be honest about it. Don’t want to hear my opinion? Great. I appreciate you assisting me in cleaning up my timeline from antisemitic bigots.
⋙ 🐣 I don’t disagree but still I am furious with Netanyahu; he is complicit and his abuse of scripture is wrong and dangerous is the extreme. Like the elite Germans did with Hitler, he coddled Hamas while encouraging extremists to infiltrate the West Bank. Now the world is on fire.
🐣 RT @general_ben Impressive. There are still some Republicans who think/act strategically and understand that helping Ukraine defeat Russia is in America’s best interest.Providing Ukraine with long-range precision strike capability, like ATACMS, will soon make Crimea untenable for Russian forces.
⋙ 🐣 RT @SenateForeign [Ranking Member] #Ukraine’s need for deep-strike capability remains urgent. The U.S. has an arsenal of ATACMS and a hot production line to backfill them. It’s time the Biden Admin finish the job on ATACMS.
🐣 RT @emilykschrader No Rashida, “from the river to the sea” is not an “aspirational call for freedom and coexistence.” It is literally the opposite.
¤ https://x.com/emilykschrader/status/1720718904392032354?s=20
It is the complete rejection of the right of Israel to exist and a rallying cry for genocide and both you and Hamas know that. Everywhere we see this chant, we see violence against Jewish people or at best, support for violence against Jewish people.
As a member of Congress, can you explain why you’re working overtime to try to clean up the genocidal reputation of Hamas supporters around the world? What are your associations with Hamas?
I think the American people are owed a full investigation into your ties given your support for a terrorist group — backed by the iranian regime — which murdered 30 Americans.
But you don’t care about American lives do you Rashida..,
⋙ 🐣 RT @RashidaTlaib Replying to @RashidaTlaib From the river to the sea is an aspirational call for freedom, human rights, and peaceful coexistence, not death, destruction, or hate. My work and advocacy is always centered in justice and dignity for all people no matter faith or ethnicity.
⋙⋙ 🐣 RT @khabibety Let’s listen to the people against Palestinian freedom on what a Palestinian call for freedom actually means.
⋙⋙⋙ 🐣 RT @emilykschrader We have. For years. It looks like this scene from the Supernova festival where Hamas massacred hundreds of Israelis. ¤ This is what “from the river to the sea” seeks to do, and this is what Rashida Tlaib is trying to whitewash even while she knows better and even while US citizens were killed. ¤ Reminder: Hamas officials stated they would commit the Oct 7 massacre “again and again” just a few days ago …
💽 https://x.com/emilykschrader/status/1720721739254993399?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @HenryJFoy Good morning from Kyiv as EU commission president @vonderleyen makes an unannounced visit aimed at reassuring @ZelenskyyUa that western support is solid & enduring despite global attention shifting to Israel-Hamas & uncertainty over long-term EU & US funding lifelines to Ukraine
🐣 RT @ @glcarlstrom “Although the terms have varied in recent weeks, Hamas has indicated most recently that it would release all civilian hostages in exchange for a five-day pause… Israeli military captives, whose precise number is unknown, would be retained.”
⋙ WaPo: Israel appears to reject U.S. push for ‘pauses’ in Gaza assault https://tinyurl.com/mr2cta53
// Hamas has claimed it would release all of its civilian hostages in exchange for a five-day pause in Israel’s offensive, diplomats say
⭕ 3 Nov 2023
🐣 RT @SecBlinken In my meeting with Minister @gantzbe, I reiterated that the United States firmly supports Israel’s right to defend itself consistent with international law. We discussed ongoing efforts to secure the release of hostages and maintain calm in the West Bank.
🐣 RT @Gabriel_Pogrund There is no durable solution to Israel/Palestine that does not address the deranged zealotry of these settlers. Very powerful visual metaphor seeing them physically attacking Israel’s own military during a time of war.
⋙ 🐣 RT @Etanetan23 Settlers attacking the military during wartime. ¤ Very soon Israelis will have to decide: either a violent settler state which will drain lives and finance, or a functioning society with clear borders. On Oct 7 we saw the result of the former.
🐣 📋 RT @UNGeneva “The Palestinian death toll has reached 9,061. Women and children are 62% of these victims.” – @unocha ¤ “Settler violence has also escalated dramatically, averaging seven attacks a day. In more than a third of these attacks, firearms were used.” – @unhumanrights
🐣 RT @KyivPost 🇺🇸The US National Security Council Coordinator, John #Kirby, referred to General #Zaluzhny’s article in The Economist as one of the important arguments confirming the urgent need for further support to Ukraine, Ukrinform reported. [link]
🐣 RT @RBReich It’s no longer simply “Democrats vs. Republicans.” ¤ We’ve been pulled into a struggle between democracy and authoritarianism, between freedom and strongman tyranny. ¤ The 2024 general election is almost exactly one year from now. Know the stakes.
🐣 RT @djrothkopf Being SecState is a nearly impossible job. You can never get everything right, control all the outcomes, please every constituency. But I can say this. I’ve been studying U.S. foreign policy my whole life & I’ve never seen a SecState who is a better human being than @SecBlinken.
🐣 RT @TheEconomist Some analysts warn that China may endure a long deflationary spiral like Japan’s in the 1990s. Yet Japanification is too mild a diagnosis of China’s problems https://econ.st/3sfc1ZF
🐣 RT @RonFilipkowski Jobs report is out. We are now in the longest period of consecutive job growth in 50 years, near full employment, and a 4.9% growth in GDP. Story …
⋙ 📋 MeidasTouch: Another 150K Jobs Added In October; 34th Consecutive Month of Job Growth https://tinyurl.com/yta7r59a
// Unemployment still at historic lows as fears of a recession disappear
🐣 RT @KenRoth “Over the past two decades Israel lost sight of the fact that Palestinians deserve a state, too. Mr Netanyahu boosted Hamas to sabotage Palestinian moderates—a cynical ploy to help him argue that Israel has no partner for peace.”
⋙ Economist: Why Israel must fight on https://tinyurl.com/yepzjvcn
// Israel’s bombardment of Gaza is taking a terrible toll. But unless Hamas’s power is broken, peace will remain out of reach
🐣 RT @ChuckPfarrer MURDER INC: Putin’s ‘plan’ for victory in Ukraine is to divide and distract Kyiv’s allies, hoping that, despite heavy Russian losses, the west will perceive a tactical stalemate. In reality, RU combat effectiveness is plummeting in a series of fruitless assaults.
⋙ 🐣 RT @AtlanticCouncil Putin will win unless the West finally commits to Ukrainian victory, writes @VerstyukIvan in #UkraineAlert. ¤ The Russian dictator is more confident than ever that time is on his side in Ukraine. ¤ Read more. ⬇️
⋙⋙ AtlanticCouncil, Ivan Verstyuk: Putin will win unless the West finally commits to Ukrainian victory https://tinyurl.com/4fb6pwze
🐣 RT @Haaretzcom Signs are heading toward Biden acknowledging the rapidly shrinking runway he has tried to provide Israel following the attack. The question now remains: what will come first — Biden’s acknowledgement of this, or the war spiraling out even further?
⋙ Haaretz: The U.S. Is Slowly and Carefully Drawing Red Lines for Israel on Gaza https://tinyurl.com/ffhu7mts
// The recent week has seen a shift in the White House’s messaging on the Israel-Gaza war, with officials talking of a humanitarian pause in Gaza and President Joe Biden pressuring Israel to rein in extremist West Bank settlers
🐣 RT @AaronBlake Mark Meadows said in his book that the 2020 election was “stolen” and “rigged.” ¤ Under legal scrutiny, he has reportedly said something quite different. ¤ Now his conservative book publisher is suing him for allegedly using false information in the book.
⋙ 🐣 RT @AntiToxicPeople “The company is asking for the $350,000 it paid Meadows as an advance for the book, $600,000 in out-of-pocket damages, and at least $1 million each for reputational damage suffered by the company and loss of expected profits for the book”
🐣 RT @MichaelArt123 Secretary of State Antony Blinken ¤ US is warning Israel PM Netanyahu to rein in “extremist” settlers in the West Bank. Settler violence against Palestinians in the West Bank has escalated since militant group Hamas launched its surprise deadly attack on Israel on Oct 7. The Hill.
⋙ 🐣 RT @BarakRavid BREAKING: Netanyahu says in a statement that he made clear to Secretary of State Blinken that Israel is going to continue the military operation in Gaza “with full force” and stressed Israel refuses to any temporary cease fire that doesn’t include release of hostages
💙 🧵 RT @ BrianTheFella Important PSA. I’ve had stress literally get me sick multiple times in the last 1.5 years because I didn’t take this advice and slow down or stop. Don’t be a martyr. You matter. Your health (mental and physical) matters. Do what you need to do to be ok. 1/
📌 https://x.com/BrianTheFella/status/1720467633278009447?s=20/photo/1
[ThreadReader:] https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1720467633278009447.html
⋙ 🐣 RT @SiSu_Eagle78 really people do this….. yes i know they do now mental health bleeding into my physical well being, yea seems that has been a multiyear, most of my life thing…..
[TextLink:] https://x.com/SiSu_Eagle78/status/1720444370061537709?s=20/photo/1
[Text:] @svmv Advice I got from my therapist today; If your mental health is starting to affect your physical health. Treat yourself like you’re sick. Minimum of 24hrs to yourself. Nap as much as you can. Drink plenty of liquids. Catch up on movies you’ve wanted to watch. The world can wait.
🧵 RT @Osinttechnical The IDF released an image reportedly showing Hamas’s defensive plans for the northwest side of Jabalya.
📌 🌎 https://x.com/Osinttechnical/status/1720510542769434822?s=20/photo/1
⋙ 🐣 RT @eLSamskar “If you built so many tunnels, why have you not built bomb shelters for the people of Gaza”? HAMAS: “We built the tunnels to protect ourselves, the people of Gaza are refugees and it’s the responsibility of the UN to protect them”. #HamasisISIS
🐣 RT @jurgen_nauditt White House National Security Council Coordinator John Kirby described General Zaluzhny’s article to The Economist as one of the important arguments that confirms the urgent need for further support to Ukraine. ¤ (PS. Cool, you noticed this) ¤ He emphasized that it would be vital for meeting current needs if Congress approved President Biden’s request for additional funding, including with the support of Ukraine. Kirby also noted that this package provides not only new opportunities for Ukraine, but also replenishment of the funds of the United States itself. ¤ PS. You give Ukraine enough to survive, but not to win.
🐣 RT @noclador I told you what would happen on the 7th… ¤ Hamas attacked and is now being destroyed. ¤ If you were jubilant on the 7th, you don’t get to pretend to care for Gaza’s people now. ¤ Only the surrender of Hamas will stop the fighting. Until then, this war will continue and rightly so.
⋙ 🐣 RT @noclador [Oct 7] People need to chill about the Israeli Air Force dropping a bit of ordnance on Gaza today… the true reckoning is about to come when 10,000s of Israeli troops reoccupy Gaza and exterminate Hamas.
⋙⋙ 🐣 RT @AdityaRajKaul [Oct 7] Israel IDF’s Major General Ghasan Alyan, declares in a message to the Hamas terror leadership in Gaza: ¤ “Hamas has opened the gates of hell into the Gaza Strip. Hamas made the decision and Hamas will bear the responsibility and pay for its deeds.
💽 https://x.com/noclador/status/1710628091960213554?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @mhmck MAGA is pro-Russian fascism and anti-American democracy. ¤ The Russian terrorist state completed elite capture of the Republican Party over seven years ago with the success of its Trump-for-President active measure. ¤ The existential threat to the United States is self-evident.
⋙ 🐣 RT @mhmck I have been warning about Trump as a Russian asset since August 2015. He’s just another Yanukovych to Putin. ¤ I’ve been warning about the Republican Party as an elite captured asset of enemy Russia since the RNC in Cleveland in 2016. It’s just another Party of Regions.
x https://x.com/noclador/status/1710628091960213554?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @OstapYarysh ‼️ The US announced an additional $425 million security aid package for Ukraine. $125 million from DoD inventories and $300 million under the USAI program (for laser-guided munitions.) Details 👇
// defense budget
• Munitions for NASAMS;
• Ammo for HIMARS;
• 155mm and 105mm artillery rounds;
• TOW missiles;
• Javelin and AT-4 anti-armor systems;
• Over 3 million rounds of small arms ammo;
• Grenades;
• Demolitions munitions;
• M18A1 Claymore anti-personnel munitions;
• 12 trucks to transport heavy equipment;
• Cold weather gear;
• Spare parts, maintenance, and other.
• Laser-guided munitions to counter UAS.
🐣 RT @ VladaKnowlton “TASS covered all this in too much detail and promptly. Some kind of insanity has happened to them. They have forgotten that their main task is not to report the news. It’s to create an ideologically correct narrative for the Kremlin,” a Russian government official said.”
⋙ 🐣 RT @JuliaDavisNews [MoscowTimes:] Kremlin Sacks TASS Chief for Wagner Mutiny Coverage https://tinyurl.com/27w5kxk3
// The TASS director’s dismissal, which took place 10 days after Wagner leader Yevgeny Prigozhin attempted to overthrow Russia’s military leadership, is the first known punishment of a senior civilian functionary in connection with the rebellion.
🐣 RT @nexta_tv WSJ: Russian PMCs “Redut” and “Convoy”, financed by oligarchs Timchenko and Rotenberg, displaced PMC Wagner in Africa after the death of Prigozhin. Deputy Defense Minister Yunus-Bek Yevkurov and GRU officer Andrei Averyanov, who was involved in political assassinations, are now in charge of Russian influence in Africa. MP Kartapolov confirmed reports about the disbandment of the PMC “Wagner”.
◕ https://x.com/nexta_tv/status/1720353538860077225?s=20/photo/1
// org chart
🐣 RT @harrylitman Unbelievable if true. Hamas murdering Palestinians to keep them from leaving the North/Gaza City. There really is no bottom to their savagery.
⋙ 🐣 RT @amjadt25 Breaking News: Just now, #Hamas snipers have reportedly killed dozens of children and women on the streets, targeting those attempting to travel from north to south #Gaza and those displaying white flags as a sign of peace. Similar acts have previously been attributed to Palestinian and #Hezbollah terrorists in Syria. They do not want civilians to leave; they want to use them as human shields and kill anyone who attempts to leave. Hamas terrorists in Gaza will, as usual, blame #Israel because it is easy and there is media that accepts this propaganda. #HamasisISIS #HamasTerrorrists
🐣 RT @Acosta Former Trump State Department appointee sentenced to 70 months in prison after assaulting police officers at US Capitol [CNN link]
🐣 RT @YasMohammedxx I don’t even understand antisemitism, tbh. It was easy to understand it growing up because it was clearly a religious demand. But I can’t figure out why secular ppl have this much hate. Like if you’re going to be so bigoted that you’re gonna hate a ppl for their religion, you skipped past the ones that actually engaged in holy wars across the planet and you decided you’d hate on the only ones that DON’T proselytize and conquer and invade and colonize? What’s your problem with 0.2% of the planet? Too many Nobel prizes? Too many successful doctors, lawyers, artists, and scientists? What exactly is it that you hate about Jewish ppl? I don’t want to hear the lies that this has anything to do w Israel when you are out there screaming gas the Jews and Khaybar Khaybar etc. This is hate for Jewish ppl and we all know it. We just don’t know why.
⋙ 🐣 you express my frustration and confusion as well; Jews is the US are overwhelmingly secular and contribute in amazing ways; I have long considered them our “secret sauce”; the recent upsurge in antisemitism took me totally by surprise. we have to get beyond this.
🐣 RT @cspan .@RepJeffries on Israel aid bill: “The overwhelming majority of House Democrats opposed the partisan political stunt that was put on the floor by my Republican colleagues unnecessarily conditioning aid to Israel, which has never been done during Israel’s 75 years of existence.”
💽 https://x.com/cspan/status/1720486072180683062?s=20/photo/1
WaPo Editorial: Speaker Johnson needs to get serious — and fast https://tinyurl.com/5f5ep7eu “In a new job with such a steep learning curve, Mr. Johnson deserves a minimum of grace and patience — but not an infinite amount”
🐣 RT @MichaelArt123 After meeting Blinken, Israeli PM Netanyahu said Israel “refuses a temporary cease-fire that doesn’t include a return of our hostages,” referring to some 240 people Hamas abducted during its attack. ABC
🐣 RT @SecBlinken Met with @IsraeliPM Netanyahu and reiterated the United States’ support for Israel’s right to self defense and reaffirmed our commitment to a two-state solution.
⭕ 2 Nov 2023
DailyBeast, David Rothkopf: Biden and Netanyahu Look Headed for a Breakup on Unqualified U.S. Support for the Gaza War https://tinyurl.com/4xsb5rud
// The president was right to support Israel after Hamas’ attacks on Oct. 7. But the U.S. must make it clear its priority is a lasting peace, not endless carnage.
WSJ, Peggy Noonan: Israel Needs a New Leader https://tinyurl.com/y2rftnsv “Sometimes a leader has too much history. ¤ Everything is being remade now; all the pieces are moving on the board. Israel’s meaning must be made new”
// Benjamin Netanyahu has proved he isn’t up to the job of protecting and uniting his country.
🐣 RT @Yair_Rosenberg Interesting Biden line from today: ¤ “There comes a time maybe every 6, 8 generations where the world changes in a very short time. We are at that time now, and I think what happens in the next 2-3 years is going to determine what the world looks like for the next 5 or 6 decades.”
🐣 RT @VisualCap Visualizing the Top Countries by Wealth per Person https://tinyurl.com/36esuhjb
◕ https://x.com/VisualCap/status/1720229438216970560?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @haaretzcom A trusteeship that removes Hamas from Gaza is a feasible option as the beginning of a postwar arrangement that could then gradually be extended to the West Bank. But for that, you would need new political leadership in both Israel and the PA / Alon Pinkas
⋙ Haaretz, Alon Pinkas: After Hamas, International Intervention Is the Only Option for Gaza https://tinyurl.com/vebd46pn
// The concept of international peacekeepers being stationed in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank as the Palestinians transition to statehood is not new, but was ignored for a long time. U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken just hinted that it might be an option the day after Hamas
🐣 RT @DelthiaRicks Aspirin can activate protective genes to prevent colorectal cancer, German scientists report. Munich team found a signaling pathway causing aspirin to inhibit tumor development. Aspirin—acetylsalicylic acid—induces 2 tumor-suppressive microRNA molecules
★ ⋙ MedXpress: Colorectal cancer: Aspirin found to activate protective genes https://tinyurl.com/4j9dxjz7
CNBC (2021): Here are the states with the longest and shortest life expectancies, according to the CDC https://tinyurl.com/2mhwz9kv
🌎 https://x.com/Auriandra/status/1720316372448866663?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @haaretzcom To Haredi Zionists, debates over civilian casualties, the laws of war and humanitarian aid are a detrimental waste of time. Gaza is Amalek, which must be wiped off the face of the earth | Opinion
🐣 RT @AliVelshi Biden officials alarmed by soaring Palestinian death toll in Gaza, and worry that the president’s quick support for Israel after Hamas’ attack could backfire.
🐣 RT @RBReich Trump’s coup never stopped. ¤ He’s smearing judges, excoriating prosecutors and harassing and intimidating potential witnesses and jurors. ¤ The goal is clear: obstruct justice. ¤ With his campaign, it will all escalate. Anyone who cares about American democracy should be prepared.
🔄🔄 🐣 RT @Israel Viewer discretion advised: some of you may have seen clips and images of the horrific war crimes committed by Hamas on October 7th. ¤ A new website archives all of this footage. ¤ We know it’s difficult to watch, but it is even more heart wrenching for the victims and the families of these heinous crimes. ¤ Please RT this and help us make sure that the world knows what happened. ¤ http://hamas-massacre.net
¤ https://x.com/Israel/status/1720088273664811259?s=20
⭕ 1 Nov 2023
VigourTimes (11/1): House and Senate GOP in heated debate over military aid https://tinyurl.com/3ftuncdk “The fate of military assistance to three of America’s democratic allies—Israel, Ukraine, and Taiwan—is hanging in the balance.” Biden has proposed $106B to cover all three.
// “news aggregator” but not bad
[TextLink:] https://x.com/Auriandra/status/1721672151403483513?s=20/photo/1
[Text:] Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) stated: “Right now, loud voices on both sides of the aisle are suggesting that American leadership somehow isn’t worth the cost. Some say our support for Ukraine comes at the expense of more important priorities. It’s a false choice. America is a global superpower with global interests. And enemies of democracy around the world would like nothing more than to outlast our resolve to resist Russian aggression.”
💽 MSNBC, MitchellReports (11/1): Rep. McCaul: House bill will have Ukraine aid ‘at the end of the day,’ threats ‘are linked together’ https://tinyurl.com/49kvwzm5 “Biden is asking Congress to pass a $105 billion aid package to fund Israel, Ukraine, Taiwan and border security”
[TextLink:] https://x.com/Auriandra/status/1721664924609356261?s=20/photo/1
[Text:] Newly-elected House Speaker Mike Johnson has proposed giving Israel $14.3 billion in aid in a stand alone bill while President Biden is asking Congress to pass a $105 billion aid package to fund Israel, Ukraine, Taiwan and border security. Rep. Michael McCaul (R-TX), the House Foreign Affairs Committee chairman, joins Andrea Mitchell to weigh in on whether the bill will pass and if the final version could include the aid requested by the president. “We’re gonna pass this measure on Israel to show our support for Israel but to your point, Andrea, all these threats in my judgment are linked together,” McCaul tells Andrea. You cannot dissect Putin from Hamas, from Iran, from China. They’re all aligned together and therefore, I think at the end of the day, I think the Senate is going to have a package that includes all these threats that we’re seeing right now from Putin to Ukraine and Europe, from Chairman Xi to Taiwan and the Pacific to the Ayatollah in Iran against Israel.”
🐣 RT @JoeNBC “The Jewish community is 2.4% of the population but accounts for 60% of all religious-based hate crimes. Wray said they uniquely are targeted ‘by pretty much every terrorist organization across the spectrum.’”
🐣 RT @gtconway3d “There is no moral equivalency here. Let’s be clear: Hamas shares no values with any Western academic institution. Hamas is an organization that has repeatedly pledged to annihilate Israel and its people. ¤ “Its ideology is antithetical to the values of human life and the liberal values we hold dear. Hamas funnels international aid into armament rather than to the welfare of its citizens. While Israel uses its weapons to shield its citizens, Hamas uses its citizens as shields for its weapons—which it hides in hospitals, schools, and mosques. It is crucial to distinguish between Hamas’ terrorist objectives and the legitimate aspirations of the Palestinian people for statehood. The conflation of the two only serves to fuel hatred and ignorance.”
[TextLink:] https://x.com/gtconway3d/status/1719883620297429411?s=20/photo/1 -2
🐣 RT @GOP4Ukraine Sen. McConnell: “We have the means to lead the free world and ensure our own security. In the face of coordinated aggression from our adversaries, we have the clearest possible objective: ‘We win, they lose.’”
🐣 RT @POTUS Today, thanks to American leadership, we secured safe passage for wounded Palestinians and for foreign nationals to exit Gaza. ¤ We expect American citizens to exit today, and we expect to see more depart over the coming days. ¤ We won’t let up working to get Americans out of Gaza.
🐣 RT @GOP4Ukraine McConnell: “The overwhelming majority of the resources approved by the Senate as security assistance for Ukraine has…gone directly to American manufacturers, supporting American jobs, expanding the American industrial base, and producing new weapons for America’s military.”
🐣 RT @Tendar Ukrainian Chief of Staff, General Valerii Zaluzhnyi, released in the Economist the essay: ¤ “Modern positional warfare and how to win it” https://tinyurl.com/yp3xc7d9
¤ https://x.com/Tendar/status/1719836379620770072?s=20
He outlined the 5 most necessary measures for Ukraine to be implemented in order to avoid a lengthy and drawn out war:
1. Gain air superiority
2. Breach mine barriers in depths
3. Increase effective counter battery
4. Built up electronic warfare (EW) capabilities
5. Create and train necessary reservesHe outlines how those aims can be achieved and what has to be done both internally and also within the context of the international community to achieve that goal.
The most important point – in my opinion – is his recommendations of extending Ukraine’s indigenous military industry. What is less known is that Ukraine has considerably changed the way how to produce weapon-grade products since February 2022. Before, Ukraine’s industrial military complex resembled more of what we saw in the Soviet Union. It was made up primarily by state-owned, very inefficient and corrupt entities. This has changed, considerably. Since the open war, a huge amount of startups have been created and they deliver a very efficient stream of innovative products, especially when it comes to the drone industry. Since those products are tested on a daily base in real life situations, they achieve proficiency which rival large military companies all over the world. Ukraine has a good chance to follow Israel in that matter which was also forced to built up a home-grown weapon’s industry and which is considered today one of the best in the world.
General Zalushny statements are a sobering reminder that despite Russia shortcomings it is imperative not to underestimate the enemy. Russia still enjoys some significant advantages, which thanks to the Ukrainian ingenuity but also heroism as well as the support from the West has been compensated. But more has to be done in order to conclude this war and throw Russia back to the 1991 borders without enduring a war which goes on for many years. This also requires the West to finally use its high potential and increase production facilities. We will need them not only for Ukraine, but also for ourselves.
¤ The whole essay can be read here: https://tinyurl.com/yp3xc7d9
🧵 RT @TimothyDSnyder Please help me protect life in Ukraine. Russia has targeted Ukrainian civilians and civilian infrastructure. This means the water supplies and energy supplies that people need to stay alive, especially throughout the winter. Last winter Russia tried to freeze the Ukrainians. 1/
📌 https://x.com/TimothyDSnyder/status/1719759789725520141?s=20
[ThreadReader:] https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1719759789725520141.html
Last year, many of you joined me in a @U24_gov_ua project to fund development and early implementation of an anti-drone system to protect Ukrainian civilians. 2/
As you might have noticed, the Ukrainian armed forces did indeed become very good at detecting and destroying Russian drones, especially the Iranian-made Shahed kamikaze systems. 3/
Russia has taken to attacking other cities and provincial towns throughout Ukraine, with the desire not just to kill some but to deprive all of water, power, and heat. 4/
Russia also sends its drones and cruise missiles to destroy ports and grain storage facilities. Since Ukraine supplies much of Asia and Africa with food, this brings starvation and conflict around the world. 5/
When I was last in Ukraine, in September, every locality I visited had been targeted. When I visited Odesa, landmarks I knew from previous visits had been destroyed. 6/
One night in Odesa I slept through the air-raid alert. It turned out that the cruise missile was headed not for the city but for the port of Izmail, to hit Ukrainian grain shipments. 7/
Such attacks have to be stopped and they can be. The Safe Skies detection system the Ukrainians have developed works. 8/
When I was visiting Ukraine I toured a Safe Skies facility. I have met some of the people involved and have had the science and the engineering explained to me. The detection is done in an extremely clever way. 9/
My new Safe Skies fundraiser aims to spread the drone-detection system throughout the entire country. Millions of people would be shielded. Thousands of lives can be saved.
I have taken responsibility for raising $950,000, which will cover 2,500 detection outposts, enough to protect a fifth of the territory of Ukraine – an area about the size of Pennsylvania or Ohio, or Bulgaria or Greece. 11/
Russia has attacked Ukraine and commits war crime after war crime. 12/
The system we are funding, which I have seen myself, is one of passive detection. It locates drones and cruise missiles while they are in the air over Ukraine, thereby giving the Ukrainians a chance to halt the instruments of Russian murder and terror – and to preserve life. 13/
I very much hope you will join me in this fundraiser. There are many horrors throughout the world. This is one you can help stop with a few clicks and a bit of generosity. Please donate and please share this thread. Thank you. 14/
🐣 RT @IAPonomarenko We’re all terribly at ease now.
¤ https://x.com/IAPonomarenko/status/1719697964606623894?s=20
We seem to have entirely forgotten the fact that — above everything else — Ukraine is fighting a war of defense against one of the world’s largest military powers that enjoys an immense stock of resources, along with a colossal material legacy of the Soviet military.
It’s a fucking man-made miracle that, over 600 days into the full-scale invasion, we are where we are, and 80% of Ukraine’s territory is free from occupation and has *relatively* peaceful life.
Neither Kyiv, nor Kharkiv, or Odesa, or Lviv, are under Russian occupation.
Just recall the days of February 2022 and Russia’s Kyiv-in-three-days bravado.
Back then, did any of the critics of today’s Ukraine expect the crushing defeat of Russia’s blitzkrieg at Kyiv?
Or the sinking of the Moskva cruiser? Or the fact that Russia still being not even close to having Donbas captured by the end of 2023? Or Ukraine’s Kharkiv breakthrough? Or the triumphant liberation of Kherson?
Or the Snake Island? Or the battle of Bakhmut that lasted a year? Or the Russian defeat at Mykolaiv? Or drone attacks on Moscow & the Kremlin? Or Russian strategic airfields and Black Sea Fleet HQs being wiped out?
Or Ukraine’s military mastering dozens of Western-provided weapon types, from artillery to advanced air defense, on the fly? Or Russia losing close to 2,500 tanks in combat? Or the fact that Ukraine survived a winter of Russian missile attacks on the heating and electric supply grid?
Or the fact that Russia was forced to declare mobilization for the first time since 1941 and 1914 and to mass-recruit suicidal convicts? Or the Kremlin begging Iran for drones and North Korea for ammo to go on?
Or the fact that Ukraine completely retook the initiative in the war and initiated a full-scale counter-offensive operation to possibly bring the war to an end? Or Ukraine talking not only about the national survival but the return to the legitimate national borders of 1991 as the war’s ultimate end goal?
How many of those things were realistically expected as half of the world was sighing, shaking its head, expressing concerns, and saying Ukraine would be done for soon?
Some of us need to come down to earth and recall it that Ukraine has stood against Russia all this time.
It’s a fucking man-made miracle that, 615 days on, we’re talking about THIS.
We’ve made a light-year-long way over the last 20 months.
Especially given the fact of how little the chances were and how disproportionate are the combating powers.
And how little and late Ukraine gets its resources to go on fighting.However, this thing works the other way around, too.
Some people need to wake up and realize that Ukraine is combating a defensive war against Russia.
So if we want this all to end in a good way, Ukraine needs to get all the necessary instruments BEFORE it mounts a potentially decisive, extremely difficult counteroffensive — not AFTER the operation fades away due to insufficient resources provided to her again due to the fear of “escalation.”
🐣 RT @brianklaas It’s worth seeing Hamas leadership in their own words, in which they vow to repeat the atrocities of Oct. 7th until they wipe Israel off the map and eliminate the state altogether. Palestinian civilians *must* be protected. But these are insane zealots.
💽 https://x.com/brianklaas/status/1719674151714111533?s=20/photo/1
⭕ 31 Oct 2023 🎃
🐣 RT @BillKristol “McConnell stressed his support for aid for Ukraine and Israel in an emergency-funding package that would include funding for Taiwan and border security. ‘If we don’t stand up to these challenges now, they will cost us a lot more in the future.’”
🐣 RT @ByMonaSalama WH OMB office said President Biden will veto Republicans Israel aid package due to proposal not providing aid to Ukraine in the same piece of legislation. The $14+ Billion Israel aid package also seeks funding cuts in order to pay for the proposal by cutting IRS funding included in Biden’s health & climate bill dubbed the “Inflation Reduction Act” ¤ [quote from doc]
[TextLink:] https://x.com/ByMonaSalama/status/1719526749690642521?s=20/photo/1 -2
[Text:] Office of Management and Budget
STATEMENT OF ADMINISTRATION POLICY
Israel Security Supplemental Appropriations Act, 2024
October 32, 2023The Administration strongly opposes House passage of the Israel Security Supplemental Appropriations Act, 2024, a bill making emergency supplemental appropriations to respond to the attacks in Israel for the fiscal year ending September 30, 2024, and for other purposes.
As demonstrated by the President’s recent supplemental funding request, the Administration strongly supports providing resources for key national security priorities, including aid for our ally Israel as it defends itself against Hamas terrorists. But rather than putting forward a package that strengthens American national security in a bipartisan way, the bill fails to meet the urgency of the moment by deepening our divides and severely eroding historic bipartisan support for Israel’s security. It inserts partisanship into support for Israel, making our ally a pawn in our politics, at a moment we must stand together. It denies humanitarian assistance to vulnerable populations around the world, including Palestinian civilians, which is a moral and strategic imperative. And by requiring offsets for this critical security assistance, it sets a new and dangerous precedent by conditioning assistance for Israel, further politicizing our support and treating one ally differently from others. This bill is bad for Israel, for the Middle East region, and for our own national security.
Denying humanitarian assistance to two million Palestinian civilians, the majority of them women and children, would be a grave mistake. A deepening humanitarian crisis in Gaza will also undercut Israel’s security and regional stability. We have a moral imperative to help those in need. Helping Palestinian civilians in need is also in Israel’s national security interest. The United States must provide urgent and sustained humanitarian assistance to the people of Gaza to alleviate suffering and bolster stability. Conflict and extremism will be much more likely to spread, which will only benefit Hamas and other malign actors in the region who will exploit the opportunity. This bill threatens the security and stability of our partners in the region. A deepening crisis will undermine the possibility of Israel’s further integration in the Middle East.
Moreover, the bill would create a dangerous precedent by demanding partisan poison pill offsets in return for meeting core national security needs of the United States. This bill would break with the normal, bipartisan approach to providing emergency national security assistance by conditioning funding on offsets, politicizing aid to Israel, and treating Israel differently from our other allies and partners. And that new and damaging precedent would have devastating implications for our safety and alliances in the years ahead. The egregiousness of this particular offset is it adds to the deficit and would help some wealthy individuals and large corporations cheat on their taxes. Congress has consistently worked in a bipartisan manner to provide security assistance to Israel, and this bill threatens to unnecessarily undermine that longstanding approach.
Bifurcating Israel security assistance from the other priorities in the national security supplemental will have global consequences. Humanitarian aid is critically needed to alleviate the suffering of civilians in Gaza, but it is also crucial support for innocent Ukrainians facing the brutality of Putin’s war. It is vital assistance for people around the world who are suffering because Putin is blocking the shipments of grain from Ukraine – which was once the world’s “breadbasket.” Failing to provide supplemental humanitarian assistance will leave displaced and conflict-affected civilians around the world – from Darfur, to Nagorno- Karabakh, from Zaporizhzhia to Gaza City, without access to food, water and sanitation, healthcare, hygiene programming, and emergency shelter support and protection.
This bill also fails to provide the resources we need to bolster integrated deterrence and maintain peace and stability in the Indo-Pacific. Our allies and partners in the Indo-Pacific face an increasingly assertive People’s Republic of China, yet this bill provides no assistance to address that threat. And despite strong bipartisan support for investing in border security as the President called for including technology to detect fentanyl and hiring more CBP officers–the bill fails to respond to the President’s request for those needed
There is strong bipartisan agreement that it is in our direct national security interest to help Ukraine defend its freedom and its sovereignty, and protect its people against the appalling crimes being committed by Russian forces against thousands of innocent civilians – and against Russia’s attacks against the Ukrainian people with Iranian weapons. We have seen Russian forces commit horrifying war crimes and atrocities. They have hideously used rape as a weapon of war, and they have kidnapped and forcibly separated thousands of Ukrainian children from their families. Yet despite that bipartisan support, and in contrast to the President’s national security package, this bill provides no aid whatsoever to Ukraine. This is an urgent requirement–as Ukraine heads into a winter of unrelenting attacks on its civilian infrastructure, they need air defense to protect their cities and munitions to keep pressure on Vladimir Putin. Failing to support Ukraine at this pivotal moment in the war would send a terrible message to Russia about our resolve, let alone to the rest of the world. We know from history that if we walk away and let someone like Vladimir Putin erase Ukraine’s independence, he will not stop there and would be aggressors around the world would be emboldened.
The Administration will continue to engage with both chambers of the Congress in a bipartisan manner to secure an agreement on the critical national security package transmitted to Congress a few weeks ago.
🐣 RT @Reuters US senators from both parties voiced doubts about House Republicans’ plan to provide $14.3 billion in aid to Israel by cutting IRS funding, without providing aid to Ukraine, and President Joe Biden threatened to veto the bill were it to pass
WaPo, Antony Blinken: Defending Israel is essential. So is aiding civilians in Gaza. https://tinyurl.com/2p8b3t9w
// 10/31/2023; comment link: https://tinyurl.com/2pt6s7cn
Comment: I realize that Israel depends on US aid for its very existence, but it is excruciating to watch the bombing of refugee camps and hospitals. Shouldn’t it be the case that, as Israel’s arms provider and benefactor, that we should be able to do more than ‘strongly suggest’ that Israel abide by the humanitarian law of war? Don’t they see the world losing sympathy with their cause and that they are putting the United States in a quandary that is difficult to justify, as Secretary Blinken’s oped illustrates?
🐣 RT @BlackKnight10k Let me stake out my Israel/Gaza position for the record so you know exactly what side I’m on:
¤ https://x.com/BlackKnight10k/status/1719519414096162926?s=20
• I support the Palestinian people
• I also support the Israeli people
• I want Hamas destroyed
• The Israeli military has taken too many civilian lives in this war
• Hamas puts as many Palestinian lives in harms way as possible
• I want Netanyahu to lose his job and go to prison
• I also want Israel to have the capability to defend itself
• I support a free Palestinian state
• I also believe in Israel’s right to exist
• I support the Jewish community
• I also support Arab people and the Muslim community
• I believe Biden should continue to send as much aid as possible to Gaza
• I believe Biden should continue to aid the defense of Israel
I hope that clears up where I stand.
🐣 RT @TocRadio NEW: Biden will veto House GOP’s Israel/IRS bill, White House says
🐣 RT @McFaul Not long ago, Japan invaded China. Some Americans said — not our problem. Italy invaded Ethiopia— again some said not our problem. Hitler invaded Poland. Some said again , not our problem. By 1941, these problems were much bigger. And we could no longer ignore them. Let’s learn from these mistakes.
🐣 RT @BettyBowers “[N]o religious test shall ever be required as a qualification to any office or public trust under the United States.” ¤ —United States Constitution, Article VI, Clause 3
⋙ 🐣 RT @realTuckFrumper Mike Johnson Urged a Religious Test for Politicians [link]
🐣 RT @ RonWyden Making it easier for rich people to cheat on their taxes isn’t an offset, it adds to the deficit. ¤ Just so we’re clear: House Republicans are using aid for Israel as a political pawn in order to slash taxes for their wealthy donors.
⋙ 🐣 RT @JakeSherman NEWS w @bresreports — HOUSE REPUBLICANS’ Israel aid bill is out. ¤ It offsets $14.3 billion in Israel aid with $14.3 bllion in cuts to IRS from the Inflation Reduction Act.
🐣 RT @cspan Senate Minority Leader McConnell explains why he’s pushing for aid for Israel and Ukraine as members of his own party criticize him for it: “My own view is that we need a to treat all four of these areas: Ukraine, Israel, Taiwan and the border.”
🐣 RT @SenSchumer Speaker Johnson, the new speaker, knows perfectly well that if you want to truly help Israel, you can’t propose partisan legislation that is full of poison pills.
🐣 RT @RpsAgainstTrump Joe Scarborough rips into Speaker Johnson’s plan to cut the IRS to pay for Israel aid: ¤ “We’ll protect the Jews if you protect the billionaires. We want billionaire tax cheats to get away with stealing more money from the American people! So we’ll let you protect the Jews, Joe Biden, but you have to let us protect our donors, our billionaire donors that are tax cheats!”
💽 https://x.com/RpsAgainstTrump/status/1719440307144511530?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @Acyn Romney: If we’re going to have a piece of legislation that becomes law, it’s going to include support for Ukraine and as well as Israel. There may be other elements.. It’s not acceptable to abandon Ukraine.
💽 https://x.com/Acyn/status/1719438424086601845?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @AliVelshi IDF confirms an attack on the Jabaliya refugee camp, in which 50 militants and a key Hamas commander were killed “as part of a wide-scale strike on terrorists and terror infrastructure.” The Gaza Government Information Office says 20 homes were completely destroyed in the attack
🐣 RT @ForeignAffairs To preserve Israeli democracy and establish a more lasting peace with the Palestinians, Israel must pave the way to a two-state solution—and Netanyahu must resign, argue Ami Ayalon, @GileadSher, and Orni Petruschka.
⋙ ForeignAffairs: Why Netanyahu Must Go https://tinyurl.com/2yvvfdkm
// After the War, Israel Will Need a Two-State Solution
🐣 RT @JRubinBlogger These are men [Trump and Netanyahu] who insist only they speak for the country, only they can shield it from harm. They dehumanize and demonize any opposition and cannot display a modicum of empathy. When their incompetence leads to avoidable deaths they deflect blame.
🐣 RT @KyivIndependent ⚡️White House accuses House Republicans of ‘politicizing national security’ after Israel, Ukraine aid separated. ¤ The White House warned U.S. House Republicans against “politicizing national security” after they introduced a bill that separates aid to Israel from assistance for Ukraine and proposes to fund the Israel aid by cutting funding for the Internal Revenue Service.
⋙ TheIndependent: White House accuses House Republicans of ‘politicizing national security’ after Israel, Ukraine aid separated https://tinyurl.com/5vem8muc “… could have devastating implications for our safety and alliances in the years ahead”
// “Demanding offsets for meeting core national security needs of the United States — like supporting Israel and defending Ukraine from atrocities and Russian imperialism — would be a break with the normal, bipartisan process and could have devastating implications for our safety and alliances in the years ahead,” the White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said on Oct. 30.
🐣 RT @GlasnostGone Today, US Defense secretary Lloyd Austin & secretary of state Antony Blinken will appear before a US Senate hearing to argue in favour of Biden’s $105bn emergency aid request for #Israel & #Ukraine. But new Speaker Mike Johnson (naturally a Republican) has proposed cutting out 🇺🇦 aid & focusing on Israel alone https://tinyurl.com/3vehx7t9
CDS, James Sherr: Putin’s Gaza front https://tinyurl.com/3eskzsk3 “If, as ‘informed sources’ claim, Hamas and Iran began planning the operation one year ago, it is most unlikely that Russia was kept in the dark”
// Russians have long understood that to win a war, you must utilise an enemy’s forces as skilfully as you use your own. As the Gaza conflict demonstrates, these forces can be far afield of the war one is trying to win. The joint attack by Hamas and Islamic Jihad on Israel on 7 October has shifted global attention away from Russia’s war against Ukraine. But it has not altered Russia’s determination to dismantle that country and cripple its so-called sponsors in the ‘collective West’.
… Putin offered no condolences to Netanyahu after Hamas’s attack. ¤ To understand why, one needs to appreciate just how radically the Ukraine war has restructured Russia’s priorities. Prior to February 2022, the 50-year special relationship with Germany was at least as important as the Russia-Israel relationship, but it was sacrificed on the altar of Russia’s ‘special military operation’. Russia has now made the same calculation with respect to Israel.
Five interests now take precedence: the rupturing of the West, the war in Ukraine, ties with Iran (which the war has made an indispensable ally of Russia), sabotaging the US-sponsored Saudi-Israel entente, and driving as many wedges as possible between the ‘collective West’ and the ‘global South’. In short, the specific conditions that spawned the Russia-Israel relationship fifteen years ago have given way to new ones.
These new conditions are at least as advantageous to Russia as the old. Today, we need to face four unpalatable truths.
First, Russia views Israel as the Achilles heel of the United States. Washington might claim that it will support Ukraine ‘as long as it takes’, but it knows that Israel cannot be allowed to fail. If Congress is forced to debate the relative priority of Ukraine and Israel, there is no debate. Israel wins.
Second, Israel’s greatest weakness is that it is predictable. History has taught its people that turning the other cheek is a recipe for extinction. The attack of 7 October was not merely, in the words of Israel’s ambassador to Germany, ‘the deadliest day for Jews since the Holocaust’, it was a stunning exercise in ‘reflexive control’: the defeat of an adversary by its own actions. Israel’s survival is more at risk today than at any time since 1948.
Third, the fates of Israel, Ukraine and Taiwan are intertwined. What links them is the commitment and credibility of the United States. The Kremlin believes that their removal from the political map would mean the end of the West as such. Possibly, it is right.
Fourth, whether or not Russia was complicit in Hamas’s attack, it had every reason to be. Its 17-year relationship with Hamas goes well beyond courtesy calls. The visits of the Hamas leadership and the head of its Politburo to Moscow in March and September this year were almost certainly about consultation rather than courtesy. If, as ‘informed sources’ claim, Hamas and Iran began planning the operation one year ago, it is most unlikely that Russia was kept in the dark.
Françoise Thom recently wrote: ‘Putin understands nothing about Western civilization. On the other hand, he has an unerring instinct for what can destroy it’. Maybe.
Over the years, Putin has proved himself to be less a master strategist than an engineer of lose-lose outcomes. He might come to regret some of these. US military power is now returning to the Middle East in earnest. It takes little effort to grasp that an Israel-Iran, not to say US-Iran war could bring a swift halt to Iran’s lifeline of military supplies to Russia. Moreover, it would swiftly expose Russia’s limitations. In such a war, Russia would have no spare military power to offer. Instead of making Russia indispensable, it might show the world that it has no clothes. In the end, Russia might pay a horrendous price for the harm it has wrought. But the end could be far away. Meanwhile, Russia’s capacity to confound, subvert and damage is likely to remain unrivalled.
🐣 RT @tribelaw It was the Constitution Trump tried to overthrow after he lost the 2020 election, as he admitted when he called for its “termination.” He took the law into his own hands in an attempt to overturn the constitutional structure itself. That is what the 14th Amendment means by “insurrection or rebellion against” the Constitution.
⋙ USAToday, Lawrence Tribe and Dennis Aftergut: Ban Trump from 2024 ballot? Why courts should rule he can’t serve as president again. https://tinyurl.com/4e9dpp6d
// To allow Donald Trump to appear on the 2024 presidential ballot, the courts will need to explain why any ruling that keeps the former president in the running doesn’t itself betray the Constitution.
⭕ 30 Oct 2023
Politico: McConnell goes all out as Ukraine fight fractures GOP https://tinyurl.com/4vxa32bj “‘These are the moments where statesmen step forward and lead a national conversation about what’s good for America,’ argued Sen. Roger Wicker (R-Miss.).”
// His intense lobbying effort puts the Senate GOP leader at odds with his new House counterpart, Speaker Mike Johnson.
WSJ Editorial: The Global War on the Jews https://tinyurl.com/3x9pra8p “The West spent the decades after the civilizational catastrophe of the Holocaust vowing never again to allow itself to slide into such barbarism. What we see now in the attacks on Jews is how that slide began”
// Anti-Semitism surges, even in the West, which shows why Israel exists.
The disturbing fact of the past month is that Jews are under attack not only in Israel and not only by Hamas. The weeks since the barbaric Oct. 7 Hamas invasion of Israel have witnessed physical assaults on Jews the world over, including in the U.S. and Europe. This most modern of pogroms—global, televised, politicized—demonstrates exactly what is at stake as Israel ramps up its defensive war against Hamas in Gaza.
The Islamist group and its Western enablers are pursuing or justifying a genocidal war against Jews, not merely a territorial dispute with Israel. And since Western governments too often seem unable to protect the Jewish minorities in their midst, Israel must defend itself as the only safe home for the Jewish people. …
Americans like to believe such things couldn’t happen in the U.S. They have. The Anti-Defamation League last week reported a 388% increase in anti-Semitic incidents from Oct. 7-23 compared with the same period a year ago. The 312 incidents the ADL recorded include a car carrying individuals with Palestinian flags allegedly swerving toward a Jewish family and several alleged assaults by pro-Palestinian protesters. The ADL tally counts 109 anti-Israel rallies that featured support for Hamas or violence against Jews in Israel. ¤ … Only anti-Jewish hate can explain how synagogues, children and airports are targets of this outrage.
Yet many Western intellectuals—and a growing number of politicians—insist on maintaining this false distinction. They’ve seen what Hamas has done to innocent Israeli civilians, and what pro-Hamas protesters have said and done in Western streets. They’d nonetheless forgive any violence by Hamas or Hezbollah against Jews as anticolonial defiance.
This is why Israel is fighting, and must fight, as hard as it is for its survival as a state. And why it’s inexcusable for any Western politician now to demand a cease-fire in Gaza. No leader who is demonstrably incapable of protecting Jews in his or her own country should try to prevent Israel from defending itself. This is how the West slips from “never again” into “nowhere is safe.”
This global war on Jews also clarifies what is at stake for Western societies in this fight. The West spent the decades after the civilizational catastrophe of the Holocaust vowing never again to allow itself to slide into such barbarism. What we see now in the attacks on Jews is how that slide began.
Before there was a Chancellor Hitler in 1933, there were roving bands of Brownshirts inflicting political and anti-Semitic violence on the streets of Germany. They too often went unchecked by police, prosecutors and politicians who didn’t understand the menace, sympathized with the offenders, or merely felt overwhelmed by the scale of the danger. Hitler gained power in part because the German state no longer could maintain its monopoly on violence in defense of democratic values.
Today’s threats to democracy are different, but one lesson is the same and is crystal-clear: A Western society that can’t or won’t muster the will to defend its Jewish neighbors and fellow citizens won’t be able to defend itself.
🐣 RT @haaretzcom Woe to the state that is led by Benjamin Netanyahu at the most difficult moment in its history. Woe to the soldiers and the civilians, whose lives are in his hands
⋙ Haaretz Editorial: Netanyahu’s Coalition Must Remove Him Immediately https://tinyurl.com/27pcd98j
[…] All of Netanyahu’s political crimes, which are too numerous to list here, are dwarfed by this wanton action against the heads of the defense establishment in wartime. “Under no circumstances and at no stage was Prime Minister Netanyahu alerted to Hamas’ intentions to go to war,” he wrote, before aiming his poison darts at his chosen targets: “Every security official, including the heads of Military Intelligence and the head of the Shin Bet [security service] believed that Hamas was deterred and sought a settlement. This was the assessment that was presented time and time again to the prime minister and to the security cabinet by all defense officials and the intelligence community, up until the outbreak of the war.”
His apology is meaningless. It was borne neither out of regret nor in response to the rebuke by Benny Gantz, who time and again is willing to sacrifice his political life in order to try to save Israel from the most irresponsible leader in the history of the state. Netanyahu apologized because the message got through, the mission was accomplished, the charging of his “poison machine” was successfully completed, the mouthpieces understood full well who should be targeted and who should be publicly vilified.
Now he can delete the post, return to the pretense of being nonpartisan and responsible and call for unity: Apologize and continue to lie about “full support for all the heads of the security forces.” What does Netanyahu know about support, and what is the value of an apology from such a cynical person who lacks all conscience or moral compass.
Woe to the state that is led by him at the most difficult moment in its history. Woe to the soldiers and the civilians, whose lives are in his hands.
Seeing as such a person cannot be expected to do the right thing and resign, a concept that is completely alien to him, or to accept responsibility – a concept that is beyond his comprehension – his party and coalition colleagues must do it for him. There is no need to explain to them the magnitude of the moment and what is at stake.
Netanyahu must be removed from power immediately, in a constructive vote of no confidence. Yoav Gallant, Yoav Kisch, Gila Gamliel, Yuli Edelstein, Danny Danon, Nir Barkat, Miki Zohar, Avi Dichter, Arye Dery, Moshe Arbel, the future of the country is in your hands: Demonstrate responsibility at this fateful time and do the right thing.
🐣 RT @simpatico771 Find out how the Israeli conflict is steeped in Biblical End Times prophecy, eschatology, and American Evangelicalism – and how Netanyahu’s messianic pretensions may soon spiral out of control: https://tinyurl.com/5zxfdcat
🐣 RT @TheEconomist China is suffering because an increasingly autocratic government is making bad decisions. After four decades of fast growth, an era of disappointment is beginning https://econ.st/45Php3u
🐣 RT @BidensWins BREAKING: President Biden just announced a HUGE $1.3 billion plan to build brand new power lines in a renewed effort to upgrade America’s aging electric grid. This is another example of how President Biden is leading an infrastructure revolution in our country.
🧵 RT @United24media [10/19] About 60% of US aid to Ukraine is spent in the US, benefiting US industry. Check out this infographic that explains how aid to Ukraine actually works. [thread] 1/8
📌 ◕ https://x.com/United24media/status/1715089625700553046?s=20/photo/1.
🐣 RT @SenatorBennet Any bill sent over from the House failing to include Ukraine aid has no path forward in the Senate. ¤ The Senate must aid both Israel and Ukraine. This is a significant test of America’s resolve. This is a moment where the rest of the world is watching how America chooses to lead.
[TextLink:] https://x.com/SenatorBennet/status/1719129807974277498?s=20/photo/1
🧵 RT @SpencerGuard Israel says they have “entered the next phase,” of their war against #Hamas in #Gaza What does that mean? What have we seen so far and what are we likely to see next? #urbanwarfare [thread]
📌 https://x.com/SpencerGuard/status/1718798604712767913?s=20
[ThreadReader:] https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1718798604712767913.html
🐣 RT @Podolyak_M The storm is undoubtedly brewing…
¤ https://x.com/Podolyak_M/status/1719057545271140499?s=20
Prerequisites formed by decades of misguided “pseudo-assimilative” policies, tolerance of the unlawful conduct of aggressive regimes violating global rules, and overt dalliance with Russian plans to “change the world order” have led to today’s sad consequences and tragedies. We are currently reaping increasingly bitter fruits: the deep-seated hatred towards various ethnic groups with subsequent attempts to annihilate them; the residual destruction of global institutions; flaunting atrocities against civilians by media and the escalation of a war with a genocidal component. For greater clarity, Russia has officially initiated anti-Jewish pogroms. This is because it still perceives the democratic world as… weak, tolerant, and incapable of resisting aggression. It is finally necessary to make the right decisions. Compromising what is undermining the global system of relations is not an option. Encouraging a demonstrative killer is unacceptable. Leaving Russia in its current state is not an option. We must avoid repeating the years 2008 and 2014. Otherwise, chaos will prevail even more…
🐣 RT @wartranslated Russian instructor describes the assault methods of penal Storm Z units in Avdiivka, who take significant losses due to being considered less valuable. He mentions irreversible losses to 40-70%.
[TextLink:] https://x.com/wartranslated/status/1719120355279659327?s=20/photo/1- 2
[Text:] Let’s return to some of our sad circumstances.
Storm-Z assault detachments in the Ardeevka direction and the southern flank of Bakhmut (I don’t know about other directions) literally in just a few days of active operations are ground down to almost zero. On average, the level of irretrievable losses varies between 40-70% and sanitary losses accordingly amounts to about 60-30% of personnel.
Firstly, we have the problem of an insufficient level of training of personnel, up to blatant situations when people are dressed and equipped rather poorly and are given weapons and sent to the front because of pressure.
Secondly, a critical problem is the lack of proper artillery support for attacks and counterattacks, which in fact turn into those notorious meat assouits.
Thirdly, there is a persistent practice of depriving assault detachments of the initiative in choosing options for carrying out the assigned combat mission even in cases where detachment commanders are able to propose and implement such options.
Fifthly [sic], the high level of irretrievable losses is due to objective difficulties in evacuating the wounded from the battlefield in conditions of predominance and even more so, domination of
enemy artillery.The combination of the above factors leads to the regular dismantling o assault troops into trash winout them achieving any significant results.
At the same time, more or less trained detachments also suffer heavy losses, with the only difference being that remnants of such detachments still periodically reach the contact line and at least take someone with them.
🐣📋 RT @KyivIndependent ⚡️ Expert: Russia sent over 8,300 Ukrainian children to ‘re-education camps’ in 2023. ¤ Russia forcibly sent at least 8,330 Ukrainian children to the so-called “re-education camps” this year for the purposes of political indoctrination and militarization, Ukrinform reported on Oct. 30, citing human rights expert Kateryna Rashevska.
🐣 RT @JuliaDavisNews Meanwhile in Russia: Sergey Markov, who recently complained that there are too many Jews and Armenians in Russia’s state media, blames Zelensky (who is Jewish) for organizing last night’s pogrom in Makhachkala, Dagestan. He implies that Russia’s embrace of Hamas is not to blame.
[TextLink:] https://x.com/JuliaDavisNews/status/1719021977275445374?s=20/photo/1
[Text:] The purpose with which Zelensky organized the Jewish pogrom in Dagestan was to show Russia as an anti-Semitic country, to glue Hamas and Russia together, to glue Israel and Ukraine together, and with the help of this to ensure that 100 billion US dollars went not to Israel alone, but to Israel and Ukraine in one package, as Biden wants. Russia should not waste time, but directly accuse Zelensky of organizing an attempted pogrom against Jews in Dagestan. These are the realities of hybrid warfare. t.me/logikamarkova/8852
🧵 RT @steveswerdlow As former monitor for the Union of Councils for Soviet Jews based in Russia’s North Caucasus & South Caucasus many years back, I extensively visited Jewish communities in the region, although visiting the ancient Jewish community in Derbent, Dagestan was always difficult.
📌 https://x.com/steveswerdlow/status/1719119334667391455?s=20
[ThreadReader:] https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1719119334667391455.html
🐣 RT @JudiciaryDems BREAKING: the Senate Judiciary Committee will vote on subpoenas for Harlan Crow, Leonard Leo, and Robin Arkley II – the next step in its Supreme Court ethics investigation.
🐣 RT @Gerashchenko_en From Shoigu’s side, the call to negotiate sounded for the first time in the many months of war. ¤ Shoigu doesn’t just speak about readiness to negotiate with Ukraine but also about figuring out relations with the West. He says there is a need to build a new security infrastructure. ¤ He made this statement in Beijing. Intensive preparations for the visit of Chinese leader to the United States are currently under way there. Xi Jinping will meet President Biden in San Francisco. Issues of global security will be discussed there. ¤ So, Shoigu’s statement was probably made with regards to China, among other things. ¤ It was also probably made with regards to Russia currently not having enough resources to continue intensive assault combat and needing time to rest and restore forces.
⋙ 🐣 RT @Gerashchenko_en While visiting China, Shoigu said that “Russia is open to discussing and resolving any security issues”. ¤ This is not the first time recently when Russian authorities have said that Russia is ready for negotiations.
💽 https://x.com/Gerashchenko_en/status/1719093580642275389?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @ CalltoActivism 🚨🚨🚨BREAKING: Michael Cohen just SKEWERED Donald for saying Cohen’s testimony “exonerated him and won the trial for him.”
💽 https://x.com/CalltoActivism/status/1719061704477147153?s=20/photo/1
“Donald Trump lives in a reality that only exists from his left ear to his right ear,” Cohen said… ¤ “There’s reality and then there’s Donald.”
Cohen then set Trump straight for implying his trial was anything but a disaster for him. 👇
“Nobody else saw or heard any testimony from me that exonerates him that he won the trial. In fact, his lawyers made a motion for directed verdict that judge Engoron said…and I never heard a judge say this before…’absolutely denied.’ ¤ Not once but twice.”Then Cohen let him have it: ¤ “So where he comes up with this nonsense that ‘we won,’ that my testimony says that he won…I have no idea what this guy talks about.” ¤ Donald keeps LYING about his trial. ¤ What are your thoughts? ¤ Is Trump terrified of losing everything?
🐣 RT @RpsAgainstTrump Former Trump AG Bill Barr warns about the danger of a second Trump term: ¤ “He’s already saying it’s going to be about retribution, and he’s a very petty man, and it’s all about him. He has a very fragile ego. Something happened to him as a kid…Things would start moving toward chaos”
💽 https://x.com/RpsAgainstTrump/status/1719034095403954669?s=20/photo/1
⭕ 29 Oct 2023
🐣 RT @SimonWDC It’s been encouraging to see the outpouring of concern for human rights on social media of late. ¤ But let’s be clear – the most egregious violation of human rights in the world rn is taking place is in Ukraine. If you’re unhappy w/Gaza, you should be screaming abt Ukraine.
⋙ 🐣 RT @SimonWDC Ukraine and Gaza are two fronts in the same conflict. GOP’s insistence on treating them separately is reckless and idiotic.
⋙⋙ 🧵📌 RT @OlgaNYC1211 Typical Russia. Russia has been fueling a global antisemitic movement and running countless disinformation operations to cause global chaos and set off a religious war. Now it’s coming back to them as Muslims in Dagestan begin to hunt down Jews
📌 💽 https://x.com/OlgaNYC1211/status/1718695615293485105?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @brett_mcgurk Readout of President Biden’s Call with Prime Minister Netanyahu of Israel | The White House
[TextLink:] https://tinyurl.com/y3byjrxu
[Text:] Readout of President Biden’s Call with Prime Minister Netanyahu of Israel | Oct 29, 2023
President Joseph R. Biden, Jr. spoke this morning with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel. The leaders discussed developments in Gaza. The President reiterated that Israel has every right and responsibility to defend its citizens from terrorism and underscored the need to do so in a manner consistent with international humanitarian law that prioritizes the protection of civilians. The President and Prime Minister discussed ongoing efforts to locate and secure the release of hostages, to include American citizens who remain unaccounted for and may be held by Hamas. The President underscored the need to immediately and significantly increase the flow of humanitarian assistance to meet the needs of civilians in Gaza. The President and the Prime Minister agreed to remain in regular consultation both directly and through their respective national security teams.
TruthSocial: 🐣 RT @realDonaldTrump The Corrupt Biden Administration just took away my First Amendment Right To Free Speech. NOT CONSTITUTIONAL! MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN…
🐣 RT @RonFilipkowski Since Bill Barr is a witness against Trump in the J6 case, this new post violates his gag order in DC.
[TextLink:] https://x.com/RonFilipkowski/status/1718790244407902556?s=20/photo/1
[Text:] 🐣 RT @realDonaldTrump I called Bill Barr Dumb, Weak, Slow Moving, Lethargic, Gutless, and Lazy, a RINO WHO COULDN’T DO THE JOB. He just didn’t want to be Impeached, which the Radical Left Lunatics were preparing to do. I was tough on him in the White House, for good reason, so now this Moron says about me, to get even, “his verbal skills are limited.” Well, that’s one I haven’t heard before. Tell that to the biggest political crowds in the history of politics, by far. Bill Barr is a LOSER!
TruthSocial: 🐣 RT @realDonaldTrump The Trump Hating Judge in this case has gone off the rails.
The case should have never been brought by the Corrupt, Racist Attorney General, but with any other Judge it would have been dismissed. Their Star Witness admitted he lied, “TRUMP did not Inflate Values.” The Judge says Mar-a-Lago is worth $18,000,000, when it’s 50 to 100 times that amount. I really believe he’s CRAZY! Also, I have a 100% Disclaimer Clause (reader beware!), and Financial Statements are Conservative. NO JURY! RIGGED CASE! He doesn’t care about Justice, but the PEOPLE, Lawyers, and Judges throughout the land see what is going on in his courtroom. Judicial and Prosecutorial Misconduct!!! Banks and Insurance Companies are witnesses for ME. They all made money, NO VICTIMS, No Defaults, No Complaints. This Corrupt Judge doesn’t even acknowledge or accept the decision of the Appeals Court. He Gags and Fines me constantly, for no reason. He should be thrown off the “Bench” as a giant Embarrassment to New York State!
🧵 RT @TimothyDSnyder [1/25/2023] In April 2016, I broke the story of Trump and Putin, using Russian open sources. Afterwards, I heard vague intimations that something was awry in the FBI in New York, specifically counter-intelligence and cyber. We now have a suggestion as to why. 0/20
📌 https://x.com/TimothyDSnyder/status/1618309363084718080?s=20
[ThreadReader:] https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1618309363084718080.html
The reason I was thinking about Trump & Putin in 2016 was a pattern. Russia had sought to control Ukraine, using social media, money, & a pliable head of state. Russia backed Trump the way that it had backed Ukrainian president Viktor Yanukovych, in the hopes of soft control 2/20
Trump & Yanukovych were similar figures: interested in money, & in power to make or shield money. And therefore vulnerable partners for Putin. They also shared a political advisor: Paul Manafort. He worked for Yanukovych from 2005-2015, taking over Trump’s campaign in 2016. 3/20
You might remember Manafort’s ties to Russia from 2016. He (and Jared Kushner, and Donald Trump, Jr.) met with Russians in June 2016 in Trump Tower as part of, as the broker of the meeting called it, “the Russian government’s support for Trump” (#RoadToUnfreedom, p. 237). 4/20
Manafort had to resign as Trump’s campaign manager in August 2016 when news broke that he had received $12.7 million in cash from Yanukovych. But these details are just minor elements of Manafort’s dependence on Russia. (#RoadToUnfreedom, p. 235). 5/20
Manafort worked for Deripaska, the same Russian oligarch to whom McGonigal is linked, between 2006 and 2009. Manafort’s assignment was to soften up the U.S for Russian influence. He promised “a model that can greatly benefit the Putin government.” (#RoadToUnfreedom, p. 234). 6/20
While Manafort worked for Trump in 2016, though, Manafort’s dependence on Russia was deeper. He owed Deripaska money, not a position one would want to be in. Manafort offered Deripaska “private briefings” on the campaign. He was hoping “to get whole.” (#RoadToUnfreedom, 234) 7/20
Reconsider how the FBI treated the Trump-Putin connection in 2016. Trump and other Republicans screamed that the FBI had overreached. In retrospect, it seems the exact opposite took place. The issue of Russian influence was framed in a way convenient for Russia and Trump. 8/20
The FBI investigation, Crossfire Hurricane, focused on the narrow issue of personal connections between the Trump campaign and Russians. It missed Russia’s cyber attacks and the social media campaign, which, according to Kathleen Hall Jamieson, won the election for Trump. 9/20
Once the issue of Russian soft control was framed narrowly as personal contact, Obama missed the big picture, and Trump had an easy defense. Trump knew that Russia was working for him, but the standard of guilt was placed so high that he could defend himself. 10/20
It is entirely inconceivable that McGonigal was unaware of Russia’s 2016 cyber influence campaign on behalf of Trump. Even I was aware of it, and I had no expertise. It became one of the subjects of my book #RoadtoUnfreedom. 11/20
The FBI did investigate cyber later, and came to some correct conclusions. But this was after the election, and missed the Russian influence operations entirely. That was an obvious counterintelligence issue. Why did the FBI take so long, and miss the point? 12/20
I had no personal connection to this, but will just repeat what informed people said at the time: this sort of thing was supposed to go through the FBI counter-intelligence section in New York, where tips went to die. That is where McGonigal was in charge. 13/20
The cyber element is what McGonigal should have been making everyone aware of in 2016. In 2016, McGonigal was chief of the FBI’s Cyber-Counterintelligence Coordination Section. That October, he was put in charge of the Counterintelligence Division of the FBI’s NY office. 14/20
We need to understand why the FBI failed in 2016 to address the essence of an ongoing Russian influence operation. The character of that operation suggests that it would have been the responsibility of an FBI section whose head is now accused of taking Russian money. 15/20
Right after the McGonigal story broke, Kevin McCarthy ejected Adam Schiff from the House intelligence committee. Schiff is expert on Russian influence operations. It exhibits carelessness about national security to exclude him. It is downright suspicious to exclude him now. 16/20
Back in June 2016, Kevin McCarthy expressed his suspicion that Donald Trump was under Putin’s influence. He and other Republican members concluded that the risk of an embarrassment to their party was more important than American security. #RoadToUnfreedom, p. 255. 17/20
The Russian influence operation to get Trump elected was real. It serves no one to pretend otherwise. We are still learning about it. Denying that it happened makes the United States vulnerable to ongoing Russian operations. 18/20
I remember a certain frivolity from 2016. Trump was a curiosity. Russia was irrelevant. Nothing to take seriously. Then Trump was elected, blocked weapon sales to Ukraine, and tried to stage a coup. Now Ukrainians are dying every day in the defining conflict of our time. 19/20
The McGonigal question goes even beyond these issues. He had authority in the most sensitive possible investigations within U.S. intelligence. Sorting this out will require a concern for the United States that goes beyond party loyalty. 20/20
🐣 RT @kyledcheney BREAKING: Judge Chutkan has denied Donald Trump’s motion to stay her gag order and lifted the temporary hold she placed on it. Details TK.
🐣 RT @RpsAgainstTrump I’m too old to remember when a statement like this would end your political career, especially in the Republican party.
⋙ 🐣 RT @BidenHQ Trump says he threatened to not support America’s NATO allies against Russia: That’s right, I will not protect you if Russia attacks
💽 https://x.com/RpsAgainstTrump/status/1718744719327440972?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @k_sonin Back 120 years ago, the Russian Empire gave birth to the word “pogrom”, when the mob hunts for Jewish people. Today, in a provincial city of Makhachkala in Southern Russia, the mob hunts for Jewish people. It always ends in pogroms, regardless of the century.
🖼 https://x.com/k_sonin/status/1718720652679471596?s=20/photo/1 -2
🐣 RT @michaeldweiss Hard to see how Israeli-Russian relations recover from this. Putin hosts Hamas in Moscow weeks after Hamas perpetrates the worst mass atrocity against Jews since the Holocaust. Now a pogrom unfolds in Makhachkala on the occasion of a flight landing from Tel Aviv.
🐣 RT @POTUS Earlier I spoke with Prime Minister Netanyahu about the developments in Gaza — we discussed efforts to secure the release of hostages and help Americans in Gaza leave safely, and I underscored the need to immediately and significantly increase the flow of humanitarian assistance to civilians in Gaza. ¤ I reiterated that Israel has every right to defend its citizens from terrorism and a responsibility to do so in a manner consistent with international humanitarian law which prioritizes the protection of civilians.
⋙ 🐣 RT @POTUS I also spoke with President Abdel Fattah Al-Sisi to share my appreciation for Egypt facilitating the delivery of humanitarian assistance to Gaza. ¤ We reaffirmed our commitment to work together and discussed the importance of protecting civilian lives, respect for international humanitarian law, and ensuring that Palestinians in Gaza are not displaced to Egypt or any other nation.
‼️ 🐣 RT @Lessafetoday08 What Donald J Trump just said in Sioux City is TREASON. He said if NATO attacks Russia he will side with Russia. Somebody need to do something about this animal. I saved the post to file.
🐣 RT @Kasparov63 The Trump Party continues its path of becoming the Putin Party. It also fulfills Russia’s hope that sparking or inflaming conflicts elsewhere would thin support for Ukraine. Especially dumb since defeating Putin would badly weaken Iran and its proxies.
⋙ 🐣 RT @atrupar “We are going to move a stand-alone Israeli funding bill” — Mike Johnson on Fox News says he’s decoupling Israeli aid from Ukraine aid, the latter of which he suggests is not the same sort of “urgent need”
💽 https://x.com/atrupar/status/1718630670409347291?s=20/photo/1
⋙ 🐣 this is a direct ask [from] Trump (and Putin) ¤ by using the Hastert Rule, the GOP can vote to table Ukraine aid so the full House never gets a vote
🐣 RT @ThisWeekABC “Israel has a right—indeed a duty—to defend itself against terrorists. Israel also has a responsibility to distinguish between terrorists and ordinary civilians,” White House national security adviser Jake Sullivan tells @MarthaRaddatz. https://trib.al/fUK9mBu
🐣 RT @AlArabiya_Eng #Israel must do all it can to protect innocent people in #Gaza by distinguishing between #Hamas militants and the civilians in the embattled Palestinian territory, the White House warns.
🐣 RT @gtconway3d someone should file a complaint with the FEC because it’s clear Mike Johnson is a living, breathing, and massive, unreported in-kind contribution to the Democratic Party
🐣 RT @John_Hudson Netanyahu apologizes for tweet throwing Israeli intelligence under the bus
[TextLink:] https://x.com/John_Hudson/status/1718625193424228819?s=20/photo/1
[Text:] Netanyahu said in a tweet early Sunday morning: “Contrary to false claims: In absolutely no way and at no stage was Prime Minister Netanvahu warned of the intentions to start a war by Hamas. On the contrary, all of the security sources including the head of the Military Intelligence Directorate and the head of the Shin Bet provided assessments that Hamas was deterred and everything on the surface appeared as normal.”
The Washington Post reviewed and translated the tweet from Hebrew before it was deleted later Sunday morning. Netanyahu then tweeted: “I was wrong. The things I said … did not need to be said and I apologize for that,” adding that he fully supports the heads of Israel’s security services and forces. “Together we will win.”
🐣 RT @ LizaRosen0000 Hamas leader, Ha-mad Al-Regeb, calls for the genocide of Jews, and prays to Allah to help Muslims behead Jews: “Oh Allah, Enable Us to Get to the Necks of the Jews”. https://t.co/M8IoL6uY7B
He explains that the conflict is not related to land disputes, but to the sins of Jews according to Islam. He claims Jews murdered prophets and are also an evolutionary source of “filthy animals” such as chimpanzees and pigs. ¤ Hamas is the obstacle to peace in the Middle East!
💽 [tr]https://x.com/LizaRosen0000/status/1718291598679609733?s=20/photo/1
⋙ 🐣 RT @ Rail_splitter1 Ok, yes, it’s not hard to call a genocidal Islamic fundamentalist terrorist for what he is. Now will you take the logical step and call the genocidal Jewish terrorist below for what he is? Any explanation for why he is officially revered and promoted by the IDF?
⋙⋙ 🐣 RT @Rail_splitter1 “Erase them and their families. Finish them off. These animals shouldn’t exist. Get a weapon and go k*ll Arabs.” ¤ You will see on X and elsewhere many statements of admiration for Ezra by a certain kind of Israelis.
💽 [tr] https://x.com/Rail_splitter1/status/1716359075150368989?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @ChakhoyanAndrew Peter Dickinson is 💯 right! ¤ “With his genocidal invasion of 🇺🇦, the Russian dictator has burned his last remaining bridges & is now completely committed to confrontation with the West. He will not stop until he is stopped. The longer Western leaders delay, the higher the price they will pay.” @Biz_Ukraine_Mag
⋙ AtlanticCouncil, Peter Dickinson: Arming Ukraine is cheap compared to the far higher price of Russian victory https://tinyurl.com/yk7vachf
🐣 RT @ChakhoyanAndrew Peter Dickinson is 💯 right! ¤ “With his genocidal invasion of 🇺🇦, the Russian dictator has burned his last remaining bridges & is now completely committed to confrontation with the West. He will not stop until he is stopped. The longer Western leaders delay, the higher the price they will pay.” @Biz_Ukraine_Mag
⋙ AtlanticCouncil, Peter Dickinson: Arming Ukraine is cheap compared to the far higher price of Russian victory https://tinyurl.com/yk7vachf
🐣 RT @ianbremmer “those who want to thwart the establishment of a palestinian state should support the strengthening of hamas and the transfer of money to hamas. this is part of our strategy.” ¤ – israel pm bibi netanyahu, 2019
🐣 RT @Tendar Czech President Petr Pavel: ¤ “If Ukraine falls, we all will fall.” ¤ There are only a few Western leaders who do not mince words when it comes to the importance of helping the people of Ukraine, and Czech President Petr Pavel is one of them.
¤ https://x.com/Tendar/status/1718613822330573154?s=20
Though the Russian army experienced severe setbacks and lost huge amounts of fighting power, it is necessary to keep the pressure up and to finish the job. Putin is has no strategy other than in “hoping” that the West stops helping Ukraine. Russia is not capable to win this war on her terms and desperately needs the West to stop. In fact, the latest Russian offensive around Avdiivka – even when it comes as a relative surprise – tells us that Russia cannot outlast a long war. It is necessary for Moscow, now, to shatter faith in a Ukrainian victory and present perceived “successes” and then to push Western leaders to “convince” Ukrainian leaders that the war must be ended asap.
This is what Putin and his failing ruling class is hoping for, and politicians like Czech President Petr Pavel are the wedge in the Russian gear, because he and others do not fail to relay what is at stake. Russia is the primary enemy of a free Europe and we are living in an unique time to remove that threat, once and for all. All what it takes is to enable Ukrainians to win this war and give them everything and more what is needed to liberate their land from the Russian aggression.
The Russian defeat in Ukraine will break the cycle of Russian imperialism, likely even the Russian Federation as an entity. In the end, this is going to be the best investment we might see in the whole of our lifetimes, exceeding the level of freedom and success the destruction of the Soviet Union brought. ¤ #Ukraine #Czech #Europe
🐣 RT @Heroiam_Slava ⚡️ Israeli minister offers Turkey to take Gaza residents
“I can offer Erdogan not only to support them from afar, but also to take them under his protection so that they can live in Turkey.” – Israeli Minister of National Security Ben Gvir.
🐣 RT @RealCynicalFox What we have here is Erdogan, the President of a NATO nation, claiming the territory of other NATO members rightfully belongs to Turkey.
⋙ 🐣 RT @abdbozkurt In a pro-Palestinian rally in Istanbul today, Turkish President Erdogan lamented for the loss of Ottoman territories. ¤ He was equating cities in Greece, Macedonia, Syria, Iraq, & Palestine to Turkish cities, claiming they were forcibly taken away from Turkish homeland
💽 [tr] https://x.com/RealCynicalFox/status/1718533355761741957?s=20/photo/1
🐣 Netanyahu’s invocation (“Do not spare them; put to death men and women, children and infants, cattle and sheep… “) is entirely inconsistent with the humanitarian laws of war that Biden has encouraged Israel to heed
[TextLink:] https://x.com/Auriandra/status/1718535531171037359?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @clashreport Netanyahu openly calling for genocide: ¤ “You must remember what Amalek has done to you, says our Holy Bible.” ¤ “Now go, attack the Amalekites and totally destroy all that belongs to them. Do not spare them; put to death men and women, children and infants, cattle and sheep, camels and donkeys” (1 Samuel 15:3)
⭕ 28 Oct 2023
🐣 RT @abdbozkurt In a pro-Palestinian rally in Istanbul today, Turkish President Erdogan lamented for the loss of Ottoman territories. ¤ He was equating cities in Greece, Macedonia, Syria, Iraq, & Palestine to Turkish cities, claiming they were forcibly taken away from Turkish homeland.
TheAtlantic, Simon Montefiore: The Decolonization Narrative Is Dangerous and False https://tinyurl.com/349k8h7t “It does not accurately describe either the foundation of Israel or the tragedy of the Palestinians”
[…] The decolonization narrative has dehumanized Israelis to the extent that otherwise rational people excuse, deny, or support barbarity. It holds that Israel is an “imperialist-colonialist” force, that Israelis are “settler-colonialists,” and that Palestinians have a right to eliminate their oppressors. (On October 7, we all learned what that meant.) It casts Israelis as “white” or “white-adjacent” and Palestinians as “people of color.”
This ideology, powerful in the academy but long overdue for serious challenge, is a toxic, historically nonsensical mix of Marxist theory, Soviet propaganda, and traditional anti-Semitism from the Middle Ages and the 19th century. But its current engine is the new identity analysis, which sees history through a concept of race that derives from the American experience. The argument is that it is almost impossible for the “oppressed” to be themselves racist, just as it is impossible for an “oppressor” to be the subject of racism. Jews therefore cannot suffer racism, because they are regarded as “white” and “privileged”; although they cannot be victims, they can and do exploit other, less privileged people, in the West through the sins of “exploitative capitalism” and in the Middle East through “colonialism.”
This leftist analysis, with its hierarchy of oppressed identities—and intimidating jargon, a clue to its lack of factual rigor—has in many parts of the academy and media replaced traditional universalist leftist values, including internationalist standards of decency and respect for human life and the safety of innocent civilians. When this clumsy analysis collides with the realities of the Middle East, it loses all touch with historical facts.
Indeed, it requires an astonishing leap of ahistorical delusion to disregard the record of anti-Jewish racism over the two millennia since the fall of the Judean Temple in 70 C.E. After all, the October 7 massacre ranks with the medieval mass killings of Jews in Christian and Islamic societies, the Khmelnytsky massacres of 1640s Ukraine, Russian pogroms from 1881 to 1920—and the Holocaust. Even the Holocaust is now sometimes misconstrued—as the actor Whoopi Goldberg notoriously did—as being “not about race,” an approach as ignorant as it is repulsive.
Contrary to the decolonizing narrative, Gaza is not technically occupied by Israel—not in the usual sense of soldiers on the ground. Israel evacuated the Strip in 2005, removing its settlements. In 2007, Hamas seized power, killing its Fatah rivals in a short civil war. Hamas set up a one-party state that crushes Palestinian opposition within its territory, bans same-sex relationships, represses women, and openly espouses the killing of all Jews. ¤ Very strange company for leftists.
… The Palestinians in the West Bank have endured a harsh, unjust, and oppressive occupation since 1967. Settlers under the disgraceful Netanyahu government have harassed and persecuted Palestinians in the West Bank: 146 Palestinians in the West Bank and East Jerusalem were killed in 2022 and at least 153 in 2023 before the Hamas attack, and more than 90 since. Again: This is appalling and unacceptable, but not genocide.
Although there is a strong instinct to make this a Holocaust-mirroring “genocide,” it is not: The Palestinians suffer from many things, including military occupation; settler intimidation and violence; corrupt Palestinian political leadership; callous neglect by their brethren in more than 20 Arab states; the rejection by Yasser Arafat, the late Palestinian leader, of compromise plans that would have seen the creation of an independent Palestinian state; and so on. None of this constitutes genocide, or anything like genocide. The Israeli goal in Gaza—for practical reasons, among others—is to minimize the number of Palestinian civilians killed. Hamas and like-minded organizations have made it abundantly clear over the years that maximizing the number of Palestinian casualties is in their strategic interest. (Put aside all of this and consider: The world Jewish population is still smaller than it was in 1939, because of the damage done by the Nazis. The Palestinian population has grown, and continues to grow. Demographic shrinkage is one obvious marker of genocide. In total, roughly 120,000 Arabs and Jews have been killed in the conflict over Palestine and Israel since 1860. By contrast, at least 500,000 people, mainly civilians, have been killed in the Syrian civil war since it began in 2011.)
If the ideology of decolonization, taught in our universities as a theory of history and shouted in our streets as self-evidently righteous, badly misconstrues the present reality, does it reflect the history of Israel as it claims to do? It does not. Indeed, it does not accurately describe either the foundation of Israel or the tragedy of the Palestinians.
According to the decolonizers, Israel is and always has been an illegitimate freak-state because it was fostered by the British empire and because some of its founders were European-born Jews.
In this narrative, Israel is tainted by imperial Britain’s broken promise to deliver Arab independence, and its kept promise to support a “national home for the Jewish people,” in the language of the 1917 Balfour Declaration. But the supposed promise to Arabs was in fact an ambiguous 1915 agreement with Sharif Hussein of Mecca, who wanted his Hashemite family to rule the entire region. In part, he did not receive this new empire because his family had much less regional support than he claimed. Nonetheless, ultimately Britain delivered three kingdoms—Iraq, Jordan, and Hejaz—to the family.
The imperial powers—Britain and France—made all sorts of promises to different peoples, and then put their own interests first. Those promises to the Jews and the Arabs during World War I were typical. Afterward, similar promises were made to the Kurds, the Armenians, and others, none of which came to fruition. But the central narrative that Britain betrayed the Arab promise and backed the Jewish one is incomplete. In the 1930s, Britain turned against Zionism, and from 1937 to 1939 moved toward an Arab state with no Jewish one at all. It was an armed Jewish revolt, from 1945 to 1948 against imperial Britain, that delivered the state.
Israel exists thanks to this revolt, and to international law and cooperation, something leftists once believed in. The idea of a Jewish “homeland” was proposed in three declarations by Britain (signed by Balfour), France, and the United States, then promulgated in a July 1922 resolution by the League of Nations that created the British “mandates” over Palestine and Iraq that matched French “mandates” over Syria and Lebanon. In 1947, the United Nations devised the partition of the British mandate of Palestine into two states, Arab and Jewish.
The carving of such states out of these mandates was not exceptional, either. At the end of World War II, France granted independence to Syria and Lebanon, newly conceived nation-states. Britain created Iraq and Jordan in a similar way. Imperial powers designed most of the countries in the region, except Egypt.
Nor was the imperial promise of separate homelands for different ethnicities or sects unique. The French had promised independent states for the Druze, Alawites, Sunnis, and Maronites but in the end combined them into Syria and Lebanon. All of these states had been “vilayets” and “sanjaks” (provinces) of the Turkish Ottoman empire, ruled from Constantinople, from 1517 until 1918.
The concept of “partition” is, in the decolonization narrative, regarded as a wicked imperial trick. But it was entirely normal in the creation of 20th-century nation-states, which were typically fashioned out of fallen empires. And sadly, the creation of nation-states was frequently marked by population swaps, huge refugee migrations, ethnic violence, and full-scale wars. Think of the Greco-Turkish war of 1921–22 or the partition of India in 1947. In this sense, Israel-Palestine was typical.
At the heart of decolonization ideology is the categorization of all Israelis, historic and present, as “colonists.” This is simply wrong. Most Israelis are descended from people who migrated to the Holy Land from 1881 to 1949. They were not completely new to the region. The Jewish people ruled Judean kingdoms and prayed in the Jerusalem Temple for a thousand years, then were ever present there in smaller numbers for the next 2,000 years. In other words, Jews are indigenous in the Holy Land, and if one believes in the return of exiled people to their homeland, then the return of the Jews is exactly that. Even those who deny this history or regard it as irrelevant to modern times must acknowledge that Israel is now the home and only home of 9 million Israelis who have lived there for four, five, six generations.
Most migrants to, say, the United Kingdom or the United States are regarded as British or American within a lifetime. Politics in both countries is filled with prominent leaders—Suella Braverman and David Lammy, Kamala Harris and Nikki Haley—whose parents or grandparents migrated from India, West Africa, or South America. No one would describe them as “settlers.” Yet Israeli families resident in Israel for a century are designated as “settler-colonists” ripe for murder and mutilation. And contrary to Hamas apologists, the ethnicity of perpetrators or victims never justifies atrocities. They would be atrocious anywhere, committed by anyone with any history. It is dismaying that it is often self-declared “anti-racists” who are now advocating exactly this murder by ethnicity.
Those on the left believe migrants who escape from persecution should be welcomed and allowed to build their lives elsewhere. Almost all of the ancestors of today’s Israelis escaped persecution.
If the “settler-colonist” narrative is not true, it is true that the conflict is the result of the brutal rivalry and battle for land between two ethnic groups, both with rightful claims to live there. As more Jews moved to the region, the Palestinian Arabs, who had lived there for centuries and were the clear majority, felt threatened by these immigrants. The Palestinian claim to the land is not in doubt, nor is the authenticity of their history, nor their legitimate claim to their own state. But initially the Jewish migrants did not aspire to a state, merely to live and farm in the vague “homeland.” In 1918, the Zionist leader Chaim Weizmann met the Hashemite Prince Faisal Bin Hussein to discuss the Jews living under his rule as king of greater Syria. The conflict today was not inevitable. It became so as the communities refused to share and coexist, and then resorted to arms.
Even more preposterous than the “colonizer” label is the “whiteness” trope that is key to the decolonization ideology. Again: simply wrong. Israel has a large community of Ethiopian Jews, and about half of all Israelis—that is, about 5 million people—are Mizrahi, the descendants of Jews from Arab and Persian lands, people of the Middle East. They are neither “settlers” nor “colonialists” nor “white” Europeans at all but inhabitants of Baghdad and Cairo and Beirut for many centuries, even millennia, who were driven out after 1948.
A word about that year, 1948, the year of Israel’s War of Independence and the Palestinian Nakba (“Catastrophe”), which in decolonization discourse amounted to ethnic cleansing. There was indeed intense ethnic violence on both sides when Arab states invaded the territory and, together with Palestinian militias, tried to stop the creation of a Jewish state. They failed; what they ultimately stopped was the creation of a Palestinian state, as intended by the United Nations. The Arab side sought the killing or expulsion of the entire Jewish community—in precisely the murderous ways we saw on October 7. And in the areas the Arab side did capture, such as East Jerusalem, every Jew was expelled.
In this brutal war, Israelis did indeed drive some Palestinians from their homes; others fled the fighting; yet others stayed and are now Israeli Arabs who have the vote in the Israeli democracy. (Some 25 percent of today’s Israelis are Arabs and Druze.) About 700,000 Palestinians lost their homes. That is an enormous figure and a historic tragedy. Starting in 1948, some 900,000 Jews lost their homes in Islamic countries and most of them moved to Israel. These events are not directly comparable, and I don’t mean to propose a competition in tragedy or hierarchy of victimhood. But the past is a lot more complicated than the decolonizers would have you believe. ¤ Out of this imbroglio, one state emerged, Israel, and one did not, Palestine. Its formation is long overdue. …
… As these past two weeks have shown, decolonization is now the authorized version of history in many of our schools and supposedly humanitarian institutions, and among artists and intellectuals. It is presented as history, but it is actually a caricature, zombie history with its arsenal of jargon—the sign of a coercive ideology, as Foucault argued—and its authoritarian narrative of villains and victims. And it only stands up in a landscape in which much of the real history is suppressed and in which all Western democracies are bad-faith actors. Although it lacks the sophistication of Marxist dialectic, its self-righteous moral certainty imposes a moral framework on a complex, intractable situation, which some may find consoling. Whenever you read a book or an article and it uses the phrase “settler-colonialist,” you are dealing with ideological polemic, not history.
Ultimately, this zombie narrative is a moral and political cul-de-sac that leads to slaughter and stalemate. That is no surprise, because it is based on sham history: “An invented past can never be used,” wrote James Baldwin. “It cracks and crumbles under the pressures of life like clay.” …
Since its founding in 1987, Hamas has used the murder of civilians to spoil any chance of a two-state solution. In 1993, its suicide bombings of Israeli civilians were designed to destroy the two-state Olso Accords that recognized Israel and Palestine. This month, the Hamas terrorists unleashed their slaughter in part to undermine a peace with Saudi Arabia that would have improved Palestinian politics and standard of life, and reinvigorated Hamas’s sclerotic rival, the Palestinian Authority. In part, they served Iran to prevent the empowering of Saudi Arabia, and their atrocities were of course a spectacular trap to provoke Israeli overreaction. They are most probably getting their wish, but to do this they are cynically exploiting innocent Palestinian people as a sacrifice to political means, a second crime against civilians. In the same way, the decolonization ideology, with its denial of Israel’s right to exist and its people’s right to live safely, makes a Palestinian state less likely if not impossible.
The problem in our countries is easier to fix: Civic society and the shocked majority should now assert themselves. The radical follies of students should not alarm us overmuch; students are always thrilled by revolutionary extremes. But the indecent celebrations in London, Paris, and New York City, and the clear reluctance among leaders at major universities to condemn the killings, have exposed the cost of neglecting this issue and letting “decolonization” colonize our academy.
Parents and students can move to universities that are not led by equivocators and patrolled by deniers and ghouls; donors can withdraw their generosity en masse, and that is starting in the United States. Philanthropists can pull the funding of humanitarian foundations led by people who support war crimes against humanity (against victims selected by race). Audiences can easily decide not to watch films starring actors who ignore the killing of children; studios do not have to hire them. And in our academies, this poisonous ideology, followed by the malignant and foolish but also by the fashionable and well intentioned, has become a default position. It must forfeit its respectability, its lack of authenticity as history. Its moral nullity has been exposed for all to see.
Again, scholars, teachers, and our civil society, and the institutions that fund and regulate universities and charities, need to challenge a toxic, inhumane ideology that has no basis in the real history or present of the Holy Land, and that justifies otherwise rational people to excuse the dismemberment of babies.
Israel has done many harsh and bad things. Netanyahu’s government, the worst ever in Israeli history, as inept as it is immoral, promotes a maximalist ultranationalism that is both unacceptable and unwise. Everyone has the right to protest against Israel’s policies and actions but not to promote terror sects, the killing of civilians, and the spreading of menacing anti-Semitism.
The Palestinians have legitimate grievances and have endured much brutal injustice. But both of their political entities are utterly flawed: the Palestinian Authority, which rules 40 percent of the West Bank, is moribund, corrupt, inept, and generally disdained—and its leaders have been just as abysmal as those of Israel.
Hamas is a diabolical killing sect that hides among civilians, whom it sacrifices on the altar of resistance—as moderate Arab voices have openly stated in recent days, and much more harshly than Hamas’s apologists in the West. “I categorically condemn Hamas’s targeting of civilians,” the Saudi veteran statesman Prince Turki bin Faisal movingly declared last week. “I also condemn Hamas for giving the higher moral ground to an Israeli government that is universally shunned even by half of the Israeli public … I condemn Hamas for sabotaging the attempt of Saudi Arabia to reach a peaceful resolution to the plight of the Palestinian people.” In an interview with Khaled Meshaal, a member of the Hamas politburo, the Arab journalist Rasha Nabil highlighted Hamas’s sacrifice of its own people for its political interests. Meshaal argued that this was just the cost of resistance: “Thirty million Russians died to defeat Germany,” he said.
Nabil stands as an example to Western journalists who scarcely dare challenge Hamas and its massacres. Nothing is more patronizing and even Orientalist than the romanticization of Hamas’s butchers, whom many Arabs despise. The denial of their atrocities by so many in the West is an attempt to fashion acceptable heroes out of an organization that dismembers babies and defiles the bodies of murdered girls. This is an attempt to save Hamas from itself. Perhaps the West’s Hamas apologists should listen to moderate Arab voices instead of a fundamentalist terror sect.
Hamas’s atrocities place it, like the Islamic State and al-Qaeda, as an abomination beyond tolerance. Israel, like any state, has the right to defend itself, but it must do so with great care and minimal civilian loss, and it will be hard even with a full military incursion to destroy Hamas. Meanwhile, Israel must curb its injustices in the West Bank—or risk destroying itself—because ultimately it must negotiate with moderate Palestinians.
So the war unfolds tragically. As I write this, the pounding of Gaza is killing Palestinian children every day, and that is unbearable. As Israel still grieves its losses and buries its children, we deplore the killing of Israeli civilians just as we deplore the killing of Palestinian civilians. We reject Hamas, evil and unfit to govern, but we do not mistake Hamas for the Palestinian people, whose losses we mourn as we mourn the death of all innocents.
In the wider span of history, sometimes terrible events can shake fortified positions: Anwar Sadat and Menachem Begin made peace after the Yom Kippur War; Yitzhak Rabin and Yasser Arafat made peace after the Intifada. The diabolical crimes of October 7 will never be forgotten, but perhaps, in the years to come, after the scattering of Hamas, after Netanyahuism is just a catastrophic memory, Israelis and Palestinians will draw the borders of their states, tempered by 75 years of killing and stunned by one weekend’s Hamas butchery, into mutual recognition. There is no other way.
🐣 RT @ulrichspeck US and Saudis have been in intense negotiations about a double deal: Israeli normalization with Saudi-Arabia plus a major Saudi defense pact with the US. ¤ The should be able to work out a plan to remove Hamas and to restart a peace process, and to sell it to major players.
⋙ 🐣 RT @BarakRavid Scoop: Saudi defense minister to visit White House amid fears of regional war. My story on @axios https://tinyurl.com/2d6av2h3
🧵 RT @Biz_Ukraine_Mag 1/6: Military aid for Ukraine may seem expensive but it is actually far, far cheaper than the price Western nations will have to pay if Putin’s invasion is allowed to succeed ¤ A THREAD ⬇️
📌 https://x.com/Biz_Ukraine_Mag/status/1718384699930787990?s=20
[ThreadReader:] https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1718384699930787990.html
2/6: If the West proves unwilling or unable to stop Putin in Ukraine, there will be little to deter further Russian aggression against smaller and more vulnerable former Soviet republics. Moldova, Armenia, Georgia, and Kazakhstan would all be immediate targets
3/6: With NATO discredited by the fall of Ukraine, Putin would then be tempted to test the resolve of the alliance in a more fundamental manner by threatening the Baltic states. Would demoralised Western leaders go to war with Russia over an Estonian border town?
4/6: Even if a direct NATO-Russia war can be temporarily avoided, Russian victory in Ukraine would oblige Western leaders to boost defense spending to levels not witnessed since the end of the Cold War. This would be ten-twenty times more expensive than arming Ukraine now
5/6: As we have seen with the recent Iranian-backed Hamas attack on Israel, the West’s indecisive response to Russia’s Ukraine invasion is already emboldening the forces of authoritarianism. Russian victory in Ukraine would usher in a new era of wars and international instability
6/6: With the invasion of Ukraine, Putin has burned his last remaining bridges and is now completely committed to confrontation with the West. He will not stop until he is stopped. The longer Western leaders delay, the higher the price they will pay
FURTHER READING:
⋙ AtlanticCouncil, Peter Dickinson: Arming Ukraine is cheap compared to the far higher price of Russian victory https://tinyurl.com/yk7vachf
🐣 RT @mccaffreyr3 MSNBC. 28 Oct 23. Israel now a nation in arms. Half a million troops active and mobilized. The 2nd battle for their independence. Facing grave threats from Hamas, Hezbollah, and possibly Syria. Orchestrated by Iran. Israel survival based on outcome.
b🐣 RT @humeyra_pamuk Oct 28 (Reuters) – Qatar-mediated negotiations between Israel and Hamas aimed at de-escalating fighting in Gaza continued on Saturday despite Israel’s escalation of attacks on the enclave, a source briefed on the negotiations told Reuters on Saturday.
🚫 🐣 RT @TreasChest “Putin died on October 26. Absolutely,” – Russian political analyst Valery Solovey …
🐣 RT @TreasChest 🇺🇸🇮🇷 Tehran will not follow US warnings against interfering in the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, – Iranian President
🧵 RT @andrewmichta [Thread] I have been back in DC for 1.5 months now, and I’m struck by the apparent lack of urgency in our national security policy debates when it comes to addressing the threats the US and its allies face, as they continue to multiply at speed. 1. #UkraineWar is in its 2nd year. 1/9
📌 https://x.com/andrewmichta/status/1718296883108474926?s=20
[ThreadReader:] https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1718296883108474926.html
2. We’re looking at potentially another major regional war triggered by Hamas’s attack on #Israel. It has expanded the front and put additional strains on America’s military resources. 3. As pressure build on Kosovo, I’m concerned that the Balkans may become another theater. 2/9
America’s adversaries are preparing for war. #China is investing heavily across the spectrum of its military capabilities, and #Russia is busy at work expanding its armor production. The “axis of dictatorships” includes also two smaller players: Iran and North Korea. 3/9
Our analysts continue to push various and sundry estimates of CHN and RUS capabilities estimates, but IMO miss the fundamentals. The baseline should be that both the Chinese and Russian militaries are being built not to deter us but to attack. This should drive our planning. 4/9
We also continue to underestimate our adversaries. A case in point: Moscow has shown it understands mass; after 1.5 yrs the Russian army is capable of fighting and mobilizing at the same time. We need to re-learn that maneuver and attrition on the battlefield are linked. 5/9
The PLA and PLAN are untested, but they’ve shown they understand mass, redundancies and the imperative of stockpiling. But we keep talking precision, investing in ever-more expensive platforms of which we can buy fewer and fewer. Plus, our defense industrial base is too small.6/9
The massive expenditure of weapons, munitions, and human life in Ukraine ought to be a wake-up call for our political leaders and military planners. We need to ask whether our all-volunteer force model is up to the task of generating the capabilities and reserves we’ll need. 7/9
The solution is not to “pivot to Asia,” but to rebuild the force, with the requisite redundancies in the reserves. Simply put, it is imperative that the United States and Europe increase their defense spending and rethink what we spend money on and how we generate our forces. 8/9
The US needs to move beyond the normative/reactive pronouncements about “defending the rules-based order.” Let’s stop talking about “great power competition” and ask instead what a geo-strategic map that favors America’s and other democracies’ interests should look like? 9/End
🐣 RT @QuantumFlux36 6 Things they didn’t Tell You
¤ https://x.com/QuantumFlux36/status/1718101036064559385?s=20
1. Iran owns Hamas. They also have troops in Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Yemen, and the West bank.
2. They aspire to recreate the Persian empire as a radical Islamic caliphate.
3. They see any Western or non-Islamic influence as an obstacle. Their holidays include “Death to America” Day.
4. Iran ordered Hamas’ brutal Oct 7 terrorist attack to derail peace. Just before the attack, Israel was to sign a major peace accord with Saudi Arabia.
5. Iran uses its trillions to control Gaza with brutal mercenaries. It indoctrinates the population and uses them as sacrificial pawns to achieve its military goals.
6. There is a battle between moderate and radical Islam. The moderate Islamic world heavily regulates radicalism because they know its dangers. The West would be wise to learn from them.
⋙ 🐣 RT @QuantumFlux36 [10/14] 10 Things you Weren’t Taught about the Conflict in Israel
¤ https://x.com/QuantumFlux36/status/1713335004699431237?s=20
1. Arabs launched a massive world conquest 1400 years ago, taking most of the Middle East, and much of Africa, Europe, and Asia. They ethnically and culturally cleansed everywhere they went.
2. Rome and Mecca created state religions borrowing heavily from existing traditions. including Judaism, which they theologically sought to replace. Both empires sought to control minds, institutionalizing xenophobia and persecuting minorities.
3. State temples often replaced sacred sites in conquered areas. Zeus was placed in Jerusalem, and later mosques. Thousands of temples were destroyed or replaced across the Middle-East, India, and Europe. Ancient Judean kings previously destroyed Goddess temples.
4. The West has not exorcised it’s hatred of Jews and pagans institutionalized by Rome. The global Muslim society is openly and brazenly antisemitic and xenophobic.
5. Judeans are indigenous to Judea. Arabs are from Arabia. The conflict isn’t about land, it’s about political control using religion and hate.
6. Arabs in Judea are part of general Arab culture, which controls 99%+ of the Middle-East. “Palestina” was the Roman name for Judea, which the British adopted, and Arabs only started using in the 1960s.
7. After WWI and the Ottomans’ fall, the League of Nations and British re-dedicated the mandate as Jewish homeland. At the last minute, 77% was given to Arabs (now Jordan). The Arabs wanted 100% and have been fighting for it ever since.
8. The Arabs near Israel are used by the greater Arab world as disposable pawns to ethnically cleanse other faiths. They’re indoctrinated with extremism from youth.
9. The Arab world sees this militancy as useful, but don’t want it in their own societies, generally not accepting them as refugees.
10. The conflict is fueled by hate indoctrination and religious intolerance. Eliminating this is the only way to peace. The higher meaning of jihad is said to be self-perfection. May we aspire to evolve ourselves and our societies towards peace, tolerance, and mutual prosperity.
🐣 RT @sovietwarrior_ This is a pivotal moment, possibly the most important moment in human history. ¤ Everyone must choose a side! ¤ There’s no room for neutrality. ¤ The question is simple: unipolar world or multipolar world? ¤ #Gaza #Israel #Palestine #Ukraine #Russia #China #Iran
⋙ 🐣 tri-polar: US, China, India ¤ BRICS is a phantasm: just a few pieces of paper drafted by the Kremlin in the last year with no coordinated economic or military infrastructure behind it ¤ Russia is a depleted den of incompetence and corruption, destined to be a vassal of China
🧵 RT @djrothkopf Israel does have a right of self-defense. It does have the obligation to keep its people safe from Hamas terrorists. But that is not enough. It also needs a plan. It needs a path to real security. It needs achievable goals. It needs to conform them to international law.
📌 https://x.com/djrothkopf/status/1718131790714413346?s=20
⋙ 🐣 Israel is to blame to the extent that it literally left the “watchtowers” unmanned due to its being distracted with eyes on land in the West Bank (that the US considers properly part of Palestine). Hamas has to go, but Israel’s politics must be addressed also.
⭕ 27 Oct 2023
🧵 RT @skedeschi This post is something people might find interesting about the crossover between left-wing extreme ideas, and antisemitism. I’m a socialist myself, but the history of this is quite interesting and sheds light on the unique construct of modern antisemitism and liberalism
📌 https://x.com/skedeschi/status/1717869271982711107?s=20
[ThreadReader:] https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1717869271982711107.html
// tags leftwing antisemitism history
NYT, Jamelle Bouie: Mike Johnson Is a Right-Wing Fever Dream Come to Life https://tinyurl.com/bdes2p62
❤️💙 NatInterest, George Bogden: Deceit, Dread, and Disbelief: The Story of How Ukraine Lost Its Nuclear Arsenal https://tinyurl.com/2w9nmf6d “The only reason Ukraine agreed to surrender its weapons is because Western powers linked that decision to ‘security assurances’ that proved hollow”
// Never-before-released archival files reveal Washington’s error in cudgeling Ukraine to give up its nuclear weapons despite the risk of a Russian invasion.
In 1994, American officials browbeat Ukraine’s newly independent leaders into giving up the nuclear weapons they inherited from the Soviet Union—weapons which could have staved off future aggression from Moscow—in exchange for nebulous “security assurances,” declared as part of the so-called Budapest Memorandum.
These assurances ultimately proved meaningless, as Ukraine’s plight shows today. Yet, the Budapest Memorandum remains settled history for many in the foreign policy establishment: something that could not have unfolded any other way.
Drawn from archives in the United States, the United Kingdom, Germany, and the United Nations, new never-before-published evidence flatly contradicts this idea. These documents are the grist of exhaustive searches and inquiries to the National Security Archive, two presidential libraries, and the Library of Congress.
These records cut sharply against the rationale for this historical resignation: that Ukraine was incapable of the technical means of operating nuclear weapons and that such weapons wouldn’t do much for its security even if it could. Moreover, their contents undermine the general belief that the effort—even if ultimately in error—was at least dedicated to the noble goal of reducing overall global stockpiles of nuclear weapons.
On the contrary, the evidence reveals President Bill Clinton’s future CIA director concluding that Ukraine did have the means to operate an arsenal. The unearthed papers show the USSR’s last foreign minister, Eduard Shevardnadze, confirming that “just one nuclear missile” in Ukrainian hands would have been enough to safeguard its independence so far as Russian strategic planning was concerned. They also show top American officials—from both parties—fretting over Russia’s belligerent, irredentist behavior during the negotiations, including repeated concerns about a potential future Russian invasion of Ukraine even as they chided “whiners” in Kyiv for expressing the same anxieties.
The same “settled history” crowd contends the Budapest Agreement—even if ultimately in error—was at least dedicated to the noble goal of reducing overall global stockpiles of nuclear weapons. We now know it was nothing of the sort. …
[T]he only reason Ukraine agreed to surrender its weapons is because Western powers linked that decision to “security assurances” that proved hollow. According to Yuri Kostenko, Kyiv’s former head envoy for disarmament, the outcome deprived his country of “the most powerful method of protecting the state.” It received nothing in return—except, perhaps, its worst fears fulfilled. Now, with forfeited Ukrainian missiles raining down on Ukrainian cities, it is time for Western policymakers to confront the past—their past—with the seriousness it deserves. […]
🐣 RT @Mikel_Jollett Hamas are not “freedom fighters.” ¤ They are blood thirsty terrorists who have been disastrous for the Palestinian cause.
⋙ 🐣 RT @GLNoronh Hamas’ leader Ismail Haniyeh broadcast this unhinged rant: ¤ “The blood of the women, children, and elderly…we are the ones who need this blood so it awakens within us the revolutionary spirit…So it pushes us to move forward.”
🐣 RT @JM_Szuba News: USMC Lt. Gen. James Glynn, dispatched by Pentagon to advise Israel on risks inherent in an invasion of Gaza Strip, has returned to the US. ¤ “Make no mistake: what is, has or will unfold in Gaza is purely an Israeli decision.” -USMC commandant Gen. Eric Smith told reporters.
🐣 RT @NTarnopolsky 💥Israel Police say they won’t permit protesters to congregate at PM Netanyahu’s Caesarea residence to demonstrate over the failures that led to the October 7 ¤ Hamas attack. Police say they will “not allow demonstrations on political, political or security issues during wartime.”
⋙ 🐣 RT @NTarnopolsky Amir Tibon: “The police, probably under pressure from Itamar Ben-Gvir, are giving Hamas a huge gift: after the terrorists proved that Israel is not a safe country for Jews, now they’ll also be responsible for dismantling democracy? A total ban on demonstrations? No way.”
⋙ 🐣 seems unwise; Israel cannot formulate a vision of what it wants/expects its relationship with Palestinians to be until it decides its own character as a country. ¤ this is anything but settled, in view of the social disruptions that led to its own failures properly defend itself
🐣 RT @mccaffreyr3 MSNBC. 11th Hour. 27 Oct 23. The second phase of the IDF battle ongoing. Reconnaissance. Intell collection. Hostage location. Killing Hamas military command and control. Push back Hamas from the border. Brutal.
🐣 RT @IDF Overnight, IDF fighter jets struck Asem Abu Rakaba, the Head of Hamas’ Aerial Array. ¤ Abu Rakaba was responsible for Hamas’ UAVs, drones, paragliders, aerial detection and defense. ¤ He took part in planning the October 7 massacre and commanded the terrorists who infiltrated Israel on paragliders and was responsible for the drone attacks on IDF posts.
🧵 RT @JacquiHeinrich THREAD: Per my conversations with two US officials, this is how we should understand the last 7 hours:
📌 https://x.com/JacquiHeinrich/status/1718042624802640157?s=20
[ThreadReader:] https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1718042624802640157.html
Today’s barrage of intensified Israeli strikes ahead of an imminent ground invasion – coupled with US calling again for a humanitarian pause – was a negotiating tool to push for hostage releases. ¤ Basically, one last big push to get hostages out before ground invasion begins. ¤ As of this AM, Israel’s plan was to send a division into Gaza as strikes intensified– beginning around noon eastern.
For the last several hours, Israel held off large-scale ground offensive, instead sending more limited force as US stepped up calls for pause to get hostages out. ¤ This was designed to allow one last chance for Hamas to be convinced that now is the time to trade // seriously discuss concessions. ¤ As of now, there is no progress on hostage discussions to announce.
That said, this time did allow for Israel to learn more about the environment, gather intel, as they prepare to do more.
I asked about ABC report that US/Israeli officials have indicated tonight’s ground incursion is not a large-scale offensive – and if that is an indication the pressure plan is working… ¤ …The response didn’t directly answer the question, but I’m told Israel “has heard our concerns” – ie. about the need to take every possible step to mitigate civilian casualties. ¤ The US continues to express support for humanitarian pauses if hostage releases would be successful.
🐣 RT @Bsamuels0 – Biden to Congress: “US stands ready to take further action, as necessary and appropriate, to address further threats”
– Lloyd Austin calls Israeli counterpart to “underscore importance of protecting civilians” and “focus on urgency” of Gaza aid delivery
NatGeo (2017): The Invisible War on the Brain https://tinyurl.com/2jzjv7xk
// Brain trauma from blast force is the signature injury of the Iraq and Afghanistan campaigns, afflicting hundreds of thousands of U.S. combat personnel. Although unseen, the damage strikes deeply into a soldier’s mind and psyche.
🧵 RT @McFaul Why Congress Must Provide New Aid to Ukraine. 1/ THREAD
📌 https://x.com/McFaul/status/1718018536092926165?s=20
[ThreadReader:] https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1718018536092926165.html
There are many realpolitik arguments for continued aid to Ukraine. Real realists understand that U.S. military assistance to Ukraine directly serves our own national security interests.
First, Putin’s Russia threatens our NATO allies’ security in Europe. By fighting, the Ukrainian Armed Forces are weakening the Russian military threat every day. 2/Ukrainians are fighting the Russian invaders today so that Poles, Estonians, and Americans do not have to do so tomorrow. 3/
This cold-hearted realism does not offend Ukrainians. In Kyiv last month, I heard many senior Ukrainian officials say that they understand that their warriors are doing the dirty work for us. & all they ask for is more and better weapons. Not our soldiers; just our ammunition. 4/
Second, some Republican elected officials argue that we need to focus on the China threat, not the Russia threat. This is a false dichotomy. Putin’s defeat in Ukraine will compel Xi Jinping to think harder about invading Taiwan. Putin’s victory in Ukraine will embolden Xi. 5/
Our withdrawal from Ukraine will confirm Xi’s assessment of the U.S. as an isolationist, weak, and declining power unprepared to deter an invasion of Taiwan. That is exactly the wrong message to be sending to Beijing right now. 6/
Third, after World War II, imperialism and annexation rightfully became taboos. If we allow Putin to annex and control Ukrainian territory through military conquest, we will be opening a Pandora’s box of anarchy. 7/
This could not be further away from serving U.S. security interests. If annexation and imperialism return as standard practices in international affairs, the U.S. will constantly be pulled into wars and conflicts like we were before 1945. 8/
After World War I, some Americans argued that wars in Asia, Africa, and Europe were not our problem. Japan’s invasion of China – not our problem. Italy’s invasion of Ethiopia – not our problem. 9/
Germany’s (and the Soviet Union’s) invasion of Poland and then other countries – not our problem. Back then, leaders of the America First Committee believed that we could stick our heads in the sand, and everything would be fine. 10/
That strategy did not work out so well back then. It will not work out well today either. 11/ END
🧵 RT @John_Hudson With Israel’s ground offensive under way, it’s worth considering how the Biden admin went from cheerleaders for the offensive to skeptics: On the week of Oct 7, many senior officials privately supported a massive response, viewing it as necessary to deter Iran and Hezbollah…
📌 https://x.com/John_Hudson/status/1718008323201479021?s=20
[ThreadReader:] https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1718008323201479021.html
⋙ But as days went by and Israelis briefed Washington on their plans, U.S. officials became increasingly concerned that a ground assault would turn into an open-ended quagmire…
⋙ After Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin visited Israel on Oct. 13, Pentagon leaders began sharing their worries with the State Department.
⋙ 3 days later, Blinken held a nearly 8-hour meeting with Israel’s war cabinet, and U.S. diplomats left the meetings worried that the Israelis had not developed a sound and workable military plan. U.S. officials came away more concerned, not less, about regional escalation
⋙ Those fears were compounded by messages from Arab leaders (Saudi Arabia, UAE, Qatar, Egypt, etc) that a full blown invasion and its requisite humanitarian disaster would destabilize the region (and their own grip on power)
⋙ Senior officials across the admin are now concerned that a ground invasion will not eradicate Hamas and could derail negotiations to free nearly 200 hostages, and result in excessive bloodshed among Palestinian civilians and Israeli soldiers alike
🐣 RT @brhodes So many innocent people are already dying in Gaza, so many more would die in a ground invasion, and so much more could escalate and go wrong for everyone involved. Meanwhile, there’s no sense at all of what the objective would be.
⋙ 🐣 RT @John_Hudson Senior officials across the admin are now concerned that a ground invasion will not eradicate Hamas and could derail negotiations to free nearly 200 hostages, and result in excessive bloodshed among Palestinian civilians and Israeli soldiers alike
🐣 RT @_waleedshahid Anyone hear from Netanyahu? Is Israel doing the extended humanitarian pause or not? Seems like Bibi’s just giving Biden the middle finger.
[TextLink:] https://x.com/_waleedshahid/status/1718056499354734692?s=20/photo/1
[Text:] Israel Widens Ground Operations as U.S. Pushes for Pause
Israel continued ground raids into Gaza amid signs the military was poised to launch an expansive operation. Israel and Hamas also continued indirect talks toward a possible hostage-release deal
🐣 RT @IDF The Shifa Hospital is not only the largest hospital in Gaza but it also acts as the main headquarters for Hamas’ terrorist activity. ¤ Terrorism does not belong in a hospital and the IDF will operate to uncover any terrorist infrastructure.
💽 https://x.com/IDF/status/1718010359397634252?s=20/photo/1
‼️ 🐣 RT @sotiridi #Breaking: Just in – Reports that hundreds of Tanks and brigades of Israeli troops have started moving over the border from #Israel into #Gaza, with the objective to capture the land and to secure it without pulling back this time, the invasion has officially started.
🐣 RT @TravelGov Lebanon: The @StateDept recommends that U.S. citizens in Lebanon leave now while commercial flights remain available due to the unpredictable security situation. Please see available flight options at Beirut–Rafic Hariri International Airport: http://beirutairport.gov.lb ¤ You should have a plan of action for crisis situations that does not rely on U.S. government assistance. The best time to leave a country is before a crisis if at all possible.
🐣 RT @therecount Someone yells, “wow!” off camera at Fox Business as the GDP came in at a whopping 4.9% in the third quarter.
💽 https://x.com/therecount/status/1717558985874669945?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @TeamPelosi Joe Biden is a great President. 14 million jobs, 4.9% GDP growth, lower health care costs, veterans cancer care, historic infrastructure and climate action, with more to come: #BidenDeliversForUS! -NP
‼️ 🐣 RT @spectatorindex BREAKING: Adviser to Israel’s PM says military operations are underway and ‘when this is over, Gaza will be very different’.
TheAtlantic, Michael McFaul: America Is Lucky That Biden’s in Charge https://tinyurl.com/2p7m392s “Everyone is looking to Washington for leadership in the Middle East”
President Joe Biden and his national-security team began their time in office in 2021 intending to concentrate on confronting China’s rise. The state of the world has not allowed such a singular focus. First came the American withdrawal from Afghanistan and the Taliban’s return to power. Next was Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Now Hamas has carried out its barbaric terrorist attack against Israeli citizens, triggering a forceful response from Israel and potentially a major interstate war in the Middle East.
Americans are lucky to have President Biden and his foreign-policy team in charge of national security right now. Their experience and knowledge extends not just to China and Asia but to the world, and they have made smart moves in defense of American interests and values.
🐣 RT @Flash_news_ua ⚡️Ukraine is testing the ST1 domestic demining drone, according to the head of the Ministry of Digital Affairs, Mykhailo Fedorov. ¤ The ST1 is an autonomous mine-hunting drone. It is equipped with an inductor and sensors that allow it to fly around obstacles at low altitude. ¤ On average, ST1 works 4 times faster than a human — this will significantly speed up the process of demining Ukrainian territories and make it safer. ¤ 👉 Follow @Flash_news_ua
◕ https://x.com/Flash_news_ua/status/1717863004539076678?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @ChakhoyanAndrew Dear @EUinRussia, Could I suggest that we wait for the russians to stop committing war crimes, raping children, torturing prisoners, killing civilians, before we come together to celebrate #russianCulture in Europe? ¤ Would that be OK with you?
🖼 https://x.com/ChakhoyanAndrew/status/1717885968563286035?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @KyivPost (@chuckpfarrer): Russia’s army is imploding & Iran will run out of proxy soldiers: Soon, both countries will lose the wars that they have started – and the explosion will be massive.
⋙ 💽 KyivPost: US Navy SEAL Squadron Leader Explains Russia’s Disaster https://tinyurl.com/bdd3casv
// Pfarrer, a special correspondent for the Kyiv Post, explains why Russian troops, despite the increase in the number of soldiers, are doomed to defeat in Ukraine.
🐣 📋 RT @TristanSnell This is INSANE. ¤ One year ago, almost every expert said the US economy was headed for a recession. ¤ Today, inflation is back to normal, unemployment is still at historic lows, and GDP grew at a 4.9% annual rate in Q3.
🐣 RT @JoeBiden When I exited that 10-hour train ride to meet President Zelenskyy in Ukraine, I didn’t feel alone. ¤ I was bringing with me the idea of America—the promise to the people fighting for the same things we fought for 250 years ago: freedom, independence, and self-determination.
💽 https://x.com/JoeBiden/status/1717926796874711302?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @SecBlinken The only road to lasting peace and security in the region is through two states for two peoples. ¤ Even as we address this immediate crisis, we must redouble our collective efforts to build an enduring political solution to the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians.
🐣 RT @JoeBReporter South Carolina was moved to the First in the Nation Democratic primary as a way to recognize that Black voters make up a significant portion of the party’s base.
⋙⋙ 🐣 RT @KlandriganUL Democratic presidential candidate Dean Phillips says if elected he would restore FITN to first on the DNC primary calendar in 2028. “I believe in tradition. I believe our entire country can and must learn from New Hampshire.” #fitn #nhpolitics
⋙ 🐣📋 RT @ Blacks are about ~20% of Dems (~15% in midterms)
~60% are White
~20% are Latin, Asian and Other
⭕ 26 Oct 2023
🐣 RT @mccaffreyr3 MSNBC. 25 Oct 23. The Iranians would be ill advised to directly confront US air and naval power which could destroy their oil production and close their ports. They are however clearly orchestrating the many threats to Israel.
🐣 RT @GLNoronha I don’t say this very often, but damn, John Kirby is 100% spot on here. Thank you for having moral clarity.
💽 https://x.com/GLNoronha/status/1717622846917050696?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @RonFilipkowski Trump said Alina Habba was like “Petty Mason” in court yesterday.
[TextLink:] https://x.com/RonFilipkowski/status/1717559284504908281?s=20/photo/1
[Text:] 🐣 RT @realDonald Trump The Radical Left Judge who should not be handling the FAKE & FULLY DISCREDITED CASE brought against me by the New York State A.G. (It should be handled by the Commercial Division, but should never have been brought!), fined me $10,000 yesterday under his so-called gag order. He is a judge that found me GUILTY before the trial even started, and long before he had the real facts, like Michael Cohen collapsing and choking yesterday under cross examination, and completely admitting that I did nothing wrong. He committed MASSIVE PERJURY, at a level seldom seen on the stand before. It was like watching the end of the best Petty Mason episode, where the defendant breaks down and cries, “Yes, I did it, I did it, I did it.” This case should be ended, NOW, but this Judge and his “boss,” Letitia Peekaboo James, will never let that happen. He even refuses to accept our big win in the Appeals Court. It is a disgrace to the legal system in the State of New York. This is a RIGGED CASE!
🐣 RT @john_sipher “For over a decade Mr Netanyahu has isolated and neglected Gaza, believing it could safely be left to fester. The attack on October 7th demonstrated how tragically that policy has failed. His politicising of the war now…could cost Israel even more.”
⋙ Economist: Israel’s prime minister and its army are damagingly divided https://tinyurl.com/58m5s3ks
// Netanyahu and the generals disagree about how to fight Hamas
🐣 RT @MikeSington Trump violates gag order again. Posts: “The New York State Attorney Generals case against me is DEAD, but the Radical Left Judge REFUSES to end it. He just can’t let it go. Their ‘star’ witness lied like a dog on the stand today, and then admitted that I did NOTHING WRONG! A total SleazeBag.”
🐣 RT @JuliaDavisNews Meanwhile in Russia: a Hamas delegation is reportedly in Moscow. It is said to be headed by Abu Marzouk, who helped found Hamas in 1987 and is a member of its Politburo as a senior leader.
🐣 RT @Acyn Strong speech from Jeffries
💽 https://x.com/Acyn/status/1717244340571967993?s=20/photo/1
// blue lines in the sand
🐣 RT @SteveRattner The US economy grew at a breakneck 4.9% annual rate in Q3, the fastest growth since 2021. ¤ Here’s a look under the hood at what’s driving growth:
◕ https://x.com/SteveRattner/status/1717528178405646628?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @aronlund The USA wants clarity on 3 things before Israel enters Gaza, report @laraseligman, @mattberg33, and @alexbward: “what governance in Gaza will look like after an invasion, how it will reduce civilian harm […] and how to free as many hostages as possible.”
⋙ Politico: The 3 plans Biden wants from Israel https://tinyurl.com/yz55wssv
🐣 RT @DefenceHQ How expensive is Russia’s ‘Special Military Operation?’ ¤ Leaked documents from Russia’s Finance Ministry suggest defence spending will surge to 30% of total public spending in 2024.
💽 ◕ https://x.com/DefenceHQ/status/1717496319554576833?s=20/photo/1
⭕ 25 Oct 2023
🐣 RT @SpencerGuard “It will be long, bloody, and complicated. That’s the way two leading experts on urban warfare described the prospect of a ground attack by Israel on Hamas’ base in the streets and tunnels of Gaza.” my talk with @peterbergencnn @LiamSCollins @CNN
⋙ CNN: Israel ground attack on Gaza would be a long, deadly ordeal https://tinyurl.com/yp23y6e
🧵 RT @MuellerSheWrote BREAKING: The DoJ has filed its opposition to trump’s motion to stay the limited gag order issued by Judge Chutkan in the DC case. Remember what I said to look for as we go through it. 1/
📌 https://x.com/MuellerSheWrote/status/1717341644201320528?s=20
[CourtDoc:] https://tinyurl.com/48dchpnn
⋙ 🐣 … RT @MuellerSheWrote The DoJ again explains that trump can disparage the president and the DoJ, but absolutely can’t go after witnesses, and recent social media posts show he’s doing just that. They also mention that trump’s stay is nothing more than his desire to “target trial participants.” 3/
⋙ 🐣 … RT @MuellerSheWrote Excellent argument: “There has never been a criminal case in which the court” has let a defendant call judges frauds and hacks, call prosecutors deranged thugs, or suggest a witness should be put to death. But Donald thinks the first amendment allows him to do just that. 6/
⋙ 🐣 RT @MuellerSheWrote DoJ then takes apart trumps argument that his speech isn’t directly threatening anyone by using language from the indictment itself. When trump told pence he would have to publicly criticize him, which caused Pence’s staff to warn his secret service detail. 7/
⋙ 🐣 RT @MuellerSheWrote DoJ asks the judge to LIFT the stay AND to modify the bail conditions. Jack Smith says what he posted this week not only violates the gag order, but it violates the bail conditions – which are not stayed. That’s the big one right there. Clarify the bail. He violated it. 8/
🐣 RT @RepMikeJohnson [2/24/2022] My statement on Russia’s Invasion into Ukraine:
[TextLink:] https://x.com/RepMikeJohnson/status/1496857289348853762?s=20/photo/1
[Text:] Russia’s invasion of Ukraine’s sovereign territory threatens the greatest destabilization of the world order since WWII and constitutes a national security threat to the entire West.
From impeding American energy production, to greenlighting Russian energy production, to dragging their feet on sanctions, to lobbying against legislation to hold Russia accountable, it is clear that the Biden Administration’s appeasement approach towards Russian aggression has failed.
It is past time for a new approach. We should impose debilitating sanctions on Russia’s economic interests. We should return to robust American energy production to provide greater stability and security here and for our European allies. We should exclude Russia from global commerce and international institutions. Even though the best time to take these actions has passed, we must act decisively. ¤ America’s prayers remain with the Ukrainian people.
🐣 RT @OurShallowState Moments ago:
Reporter to Michael Cohen: “When you looked in Trump’s eyes today in the courtroom, what did you see?”
Michael Cohen: “I saw a defeated man. Because he knows it’s the end of the Trump Organization.”
🐣 RT @cspan Former President Trump: “I just want to congratulate Mike Johnson. He will be a great Speaker of the House and we were very happy to have helped…This time yesterday, nobody was thinking of Mike, then we put out the word and now he’s the Speaker of the House.”
💽 https://x.com/cspan/status/1717278511516258507?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @warrensbuffet2 Johnson: “We’ll be talking about the support and what’s necessary to get it. We have to ensure that Vladimir Putin is not successful and I think all the House Republicans are united in that cause,” 👀
🐣 RT @Acyn Jeffries: There are only two paths in front of us. We can either stand up for Ukraine, or bow down to Vladimir Putin. That is not a difficult choice.
💽 https://x.com/Acyn/status/1717244874582298861?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @MichaelArt123 Neal Katyal If this [Trump’s] behavior continues, which I think it will, then I think we’ll be looking at jail time. MSNBC.
🐣 RT @WajahatAli Biden publicly embraced Netanyahu and has given nearly unconditional support to his attack on Gaza which by the way has no clear war plan. US is now supporting this genocidal religious fanaticism. Imagine how this plays around the world.
⋙ ‼️ 🐣 RT @disclosetv NOW – Netanyahu: “We are the people of the light, they are the people of darkness… we shall realize the prophecy of Isaiah.”
⋙⋙ 🐣 RT @WarClandestine Sounds a little like dehumanization. ¤ Sounds a little self-righteous and genocidal. ¤ Sounds like Netanyahu has been waiting for the opportunity to launch a holy war.
🐣 RT @NewsHour .@lbarronlopez: If you are reelected in 2024, are you worried that the new House speaker, Rep. Mike Johnson, will again attempt to overturn the election? ¤ President Biden: “No. … I understand the Constitution.”
🐣 RT @RachelBitecofer Imagine thinking you are a champion of individual liberty when you support criminalizing being gay and forcing women to breed to replenish the workforce. #NationalAbortionBanMike
🐣 RT @HawaiiDelilah Speaker #AbortionBanMike barely had the gavel in hand before he was blathering away about Scripture and the BIBLE in full unConstitutional Christofascist glory.
🐣 RT @ BradMossEsq I would pay serious amounts of money to have the first Muslim-American serving as Speaker of the House do this same thing and talk extensively about the Koran. ¤ Just to see the horrified looks from some of these professed people of faith.
⋙ 🐣 RT @Acyn Johnson: I believe that scripture and the bible is very clear that god is the one that raised up each of you and god has allowed us to be brought here to this specific moment and time.
💽 https://x.com/BradMossEsq/status/1717250386413674608?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @ChrisAlbertoLaw BREAKING: Judge orders Trump to take the stand in NY fraud trial, fines him $10,000 for violating gag order again. ¤ Judge Arthur Engoron handed down the fine after calling Trump to the witness stand and asking him about remarks he made earlier in the day.
🐣 RT @djrothkopf Folks, please take a moment to read this eye-opening piece about the far-right evangelical nutcase who has just been elected Speaker of the House.
⋙ 🐣 RT @Bsamuels0 House Speaker Mike Johnson holds ties to Israel’s far right — traveling on a private visit organized by a top settler, meeting with the group behind Israel’s judicial overhaul and touring the Temple Mount with an activist against maintaining the status quo [Haaretz:] https://tinyurl.com/ynrky535
🐣 RT @MissREVO He’s standing at the podium, giving a sermon like our people’s house is a southern church. ¤ How did we get here? Millions and millions of eligible voters who skip out on election day. Louisiana recently had an election with abysmal turn out.
🐣 RT @WesClarkjr We now have an enemy of the constitution as Speaker of the House.
🐣 RT @RonFilipkowski At least Republicans finally have a party platform. Force women to give birth to save Social Security. Christian nationalism personified.
🐣 RT @RadioFreeTom What’s left of the normals has given up and given in to the Sedition caucus
🐣 RT @djrothkopf As Leader Jeffries indicates, the GOP is lurching further and further right…and is out of touch with the vast majority of American people. They are signing their own political death warrant.
⋙ 🐣 RT @DNCWarRoom Leader Jeffries: Mike Johnson voted to overturn the 2020 election. He wants to end Social Security and Medicare as we know it. He, probably more than any other member of the House GOP, wants to impose a nationwide abortion ban
🐣 RT @NormOrnstein If Mike Johnson prevails, it is proof that the most radical lunatic fringe of American politics is in charge of the House.
🐣 RT @DemFromCT The insurrection party 100%
⋙ 🐣 RT @bresreports Republicans are predicting that there will be unanimous support for Johnson on their side
🐣 RT @HouseJudiciary During a House Judiciary Committee hearing, Rep. Mike Johnson attacks Roe v. Wade, insisting that if only women were compelled to bring more “able-bodied workers” into the world, Republicans wouldn’t need to slash Social Security and Medicare.
🐣 RT @ spectatorindex BREAKING: 🇹🇷 Erdogan says Hamas ‘is not a terror group’, calls it a ‘patriotic organization that defends its territory and people’
🐣 RT @Caerage Powell claims she was extorted into pleading guilty. Fine. Revoke her plea deal and convict her of all charges: racketeering, tampering with election equipment, stealing voter data, and lying to public officials about it. Release the Kraken on Powell.
🐣 RT @AVindman Hamas has been responsible for the government & administration of Gaza. It’s a legal fiction that Israel is still the occupying power under the laws of armed conflict. Hamas has blame Israel for everything, while using the effective control that it has over Gaza to wage war.
🐣 RT @john_sipher “Russian money completely corrupted the British establishment…members of the House of Lords who are on the payroll of Russia, you have people who have left parliament to go on the payroll of Russia and you have people who have left government to do so”
🐣 RT @djrothkopf We look like we may soon have a Speaker of the House who is certain to try to steal the next election if results don’t go his way. It’s not a small thing.
🐣 RT @mattmfm It’s time for the media to start reporting on what is actually happening here: Trump is working to secure a speaker who is willing to overturn the 2024 election results.
🐣 RT @disclosetv JUST IN – Israel agrees to delay ground invasion of Gaza so the Pentagon can move “air defenses” to the region — WSJ
🐣 RT @marceelias Republicans are getting exactly what they want. A hard core election denier and vote suppressor.
⋙ 🐣 RT @JakeSherman,Several House Republicans tell me they think Mike Johnson could win the speakership on the first ballot. ¤ House gavels in at noon.
🐣 RT @RonFilipkowski So, we are going to have a Speaker who tried to overturn the 2020 election, wants to impeach Biden, wanted to shut down the govt last month, cut off aid to Ukraine, and opposes gay marriage. Good luck to House Republicans in swing districts next year.
🐣 RT @Morning_Joe ‘This needs to go forward’: Petition to remove Trump from Minnesota ballot heads to court
// Gov Tim Walz
🐣 RT @costareports Important to know: Johnson was deeply involved in efforts to keep Trump in power starting immediately after 2020 election. Early Nov. 2020. I know because I spent months reporting on that period and he was part of letters and behind-scenes efforts with key outside groups. I’ve…
⋙ 🐣 RT @costareports talked with key sources from that time about how Johnson — then all but unknown — worked with allied Trump groups and conservative leaders in a coordinated way to make sure that whole orbit was working together to help Trump. More soon.
🧵 RT @Devilstower On Tuesday morning, there was no Hurricane Otis. By Tuesday night, a tropical storm had blown up into a Cat 5 hurricane with 165mph winds. That storm is now hitting Acapulco, which has seen no storm worse than a Cat 1 in 50 years. Nothing there is built to survive this. …
📌 https://x.com/Devilstower/status/1717135868433957092?s=20
KyivIndependent: Trump ally, Ukraine-skeptic Mike Johnson moves closer to speakership https://tinyurl.com/bb9e8n9j
🐣 RT @FT The US is rushing defensive systems into the Middle East amid fears that Iran and its proxies will escalate attacks on American forces and allied interests once Israel’s invasion of Gaza begins, according to officials
⭕ 24 Oct 2023
🐣 RT @MaxBoot The best hope for Gaza–and the West Bank–is a strengthened Palestinian Authority. Unfortunately, Netanyahu (in power for 13 of 14 years) has done everything possible to weaken the PA while tacitly strengthening Hamas to remove pressure for concessions.
⋙ WaPo: Israel needs a political offensive to accompany its military offensive https://tinyurl.com/yc3zsjtr
🐣 RT @jimdigs Republican party? What Republican party?
[TextLink:] https://x.com/jimdigs/status/1716998696351490528?s=20/photo/1
[Text:] Republicans are gone. What remains are narrow minded self-serving Reactionaries, Libertarians, Religious Fundamentalists & Social Darwinists. The groups that drove Donald Trump to the top and now fear the monster they created. These groups sit on their self-serving asses in Congress wearing Republican masks refusing to work with Democrats or each other. Their beliefs prevent them from accepting facts & any form of compromise. Democracy is compromise. The Constitution and the Nation were born from compromise. In other words they refuse to govern, they have not governed, they will not govern, they cannot govern.
🐣 RT @ProjectLincoln The majority of the Republican Party thinks the sitting president is not legitimate. The Democratic Party is the only party that believes in our democracy. It may sound alarmist, but it’s the truth. @stuartpstevens on @MSNBC breaks down the current state of both major parties
💽 https://x.com/ProjectLincoln/status/1716998173212688745?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @spectatorindex BREAKING: Reuters reports that the United States and Russia are now leadings calls for a pause in fighting between Israel and Hamas to allow aid into Gaza
🐣 RT @RepDonBeyer Late this evening House Republicans chose Rep. Mike Johnson as their fifth would-be speaker of the month. ¤ Johnson is one of the biggest anti-choice extremists in Congress, he wants to ban all abortions without exception — to the point of criminalization with prison sentences.
🐣 RT @BradMossEsq Guardian reporting it was limited use immunity that Meadows got. If true, Meadows’ partial denial to CBS makes some sense. He didn’t “flip”, per se. Not voluntarily.
🐣 RT @JesseFFerguson MIKE JOHNSON. Quick Rundown…
-An architect of scheme to overturn 2020 election
-He wants to ban abortion
-He wants to take away gay marriage
-He only wants tax cuts for corporations
-He wants higher drug profits for drug companies
-He opposes contraception (…)
-Opposes interracial marriage
-Opposes Violence Against Women Act
-Against Health Care for Veterans exposed to toxins
-Against Roads/Bridges (infrastructure)
-Member of the GOP’s “wacko and weirdo” caucus (aka Freedom Caucus)
…and much more. ¤ #DisqualifiedExtremist
🐣 RT @RonFilipkowski I’ve been involved in hundreds of witness tampering cases. I’ve seen many people go to prison for less than the post Trump just made to Mark Meadows. ¤ An absolutely clear and blatant violation of his pretrial release conditions and the government should file motion to revoke it.
↥ ↧
🐣 RT @RpsAgainstTrump “Terrible monster Donald J Trump.” ¤ Trump sounds angry and panicked following the news about Mark Meadows. ¤ The walls are closing in on Trump.
[TextLink:] https://x.com/RpsAgainstTrump/status/1717003272425242878?s=20/photo/1
[Text:] 🐣 RT @realDonald Trump I don’t think Mark Meadows would lie about the Rigged and Stollen 2020 Presidential Election merely for getting IMMUNITY against Prosecution (PERSECUTION!) by Deranged Prosecutor, Jack Smith. BUT, when you really think about it, after being hounded like a dog for three years, told you’ll be going to jail for the rest of your life, your money and your family will be forever gone, and we’re not at all interested in exposing those that did the RIGGING – If you say BAD THINGS about that terrible “MONSTER” DONALD J. TRUMP, we won’t put you in prison, you can keep your family and your wealth, and, perhaps, if you can make up some really horrible “STUFF” a out him, we may very well erect a statue of you in the middle of our decaying and now very violent Capital, Washington, D.C. Some people would make that deal, but they are weaklings and cowards, and so bad for the future our Failing Nation. I don’t think that Mark Meadows is one of them, but who really knows? MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!!!
🐣 RT @ dylanotes NEW: It appears the US Government has shifted its “no ceasefire” position on Gaza to advocating for “humanitarian pauses”
⋙ 🐣 RT @ElizHagedorn Blinken: “Civilians [in Gaza] must be able to get out of harm’s way… humanitarian pauses must be considered for these purposes.”
🐣 RT @ meiselasb This is haunting. This is a sick and depraved vision of America. I am at a bit of a loss of words.
⋙ 🐣 RT @Acyn Reporter: You help lead the effort to overturn the 2020 election results, do you—
Republicans: *boo* shut up
🐣 RT @Timodc Representative Mike Johnson was called “the most important architect of the Electoral College objections” in the House. ¤ A Trump as nominee and Johnson as Speaker combo would make the GOP all-in on a Trump autocracy heading into 2024.
🐣 RT @robreiner Meadows Flips. Trump is fucked.
🐣 RT @ALT_uscis Isn’t this a violation of his gag order?
[TextLink:] https://x.com/ALT_uscis/status/1716943131789410320?s=20/photo/1
[Text:] 🐣 RT @realDonaldTrump In the courtroom of the Biden inspired A.G. case in Lower Manhattan – Election Interference. If we had any other Judge, this case would have been thrown out years ago. He is a Radical Left Democrat who is totally controlled by Letitia James and her Thugs , many of whom now have Covid, but did not tell any of us who were dealing with them in the close confines of Court. In fact, they lost another Thug to Covid today. Judge would not delay this SCAM, Election Interference, No Jury Case. Judicial and Prosecutorial Misconduct!
🐣 RT @SecBlinken Nothing would be a greater victory for Hamas than allowing its brutality to send us down a path of terrorism and nihilism. We must not let it. ¤ The U.S. stands ready to work with anyone ready to forge a more peaceful future for the region – one its people yearn for and deserve.
🐣 RT @MaryLTrump Inside tip: Donald is screwed.
⋙ 🐣 RT @MuellerSheWrote 🚨🚨🚨 BREAKING 🚨🚨🚨 Jack Smith granted Mark Meadows IMMUNITY earlier this year in EXCHANGE for his testimony. This is one of the biggest developments in any case thus far.
🐣 📋 RT @ianbremmer wapo: us govt preparing for worst case scenario…mass evacuations of americans out of middle east (if war can’t be contained)
~86,000 americans live in lebanon
~600,000 americans live in israel
🐣 RT @gtconway3d “Ty Cobb … said he is not surprised that many ex-members of Trump’s legal team have found themselves in legal trouble. ¤ ‘“He’s had lawyers abandon their ethics for him for decades,’ he said. ‘And he puts enormous pressure on lawyers. That’s why Trump went through a lot of lawyers, in my own view.’ ¤ “‘Trump has no ability to be grateful,’ he added. ‘Gratitude is something that does not exist in his narcissistic world. So, the fact that these people are sacrificing their lives, reputations, and careers, that will not register with him,’ he said.” …
🐣 RT @Angry_Staffer For everyone asking how big the Meadows news is: ¤ On a scale of 1-10? 15.5 ¤ He doesn’t just know where all the bodies are buried—he helped carry most of them.
🐣 RT @FP4America Today, 304 national security leaders called on Congress to pass more aid for Ukraine, showing a clear consensus across the national security community that bipartisan support for Ukraine is an urgent priority. ¤ We’re proud to support this letter, its signatories, and its message: https://tinyurl.com/3f27pxb3
🐣 RT @MarkHertling While this was happening, those who have our nation’s best interest at heart are trying to release hostages, deter a regional war, support 2 allies who are being oppressed, improve our economy, and about a dozen other things. ¤ See the difference?
⋙ 🐣 RT @RonFilipkowski Trump sits in court all day listening to Michael Cohen testify that his business empire is a facade, has a reporter tell him about Jenna Ellis’s plea deal as he’s walking out, then gets in his car to learn Mark Meadows testified against him to a grand jury on an immunity deal.
🐣 RT @KyivIndependent ⚡️ Danilov: ATACMS exceeded Ukraine’s expectations. ¤ Secretary of the National Security and Defense Council Oleksiy Danilov said the first batch of ATACMS provided to Ukraine “exceeded expectations,” and attacks by Russian helicopters have decreased as a result of the missiles.
🐣 RT @ jonkarl “Obviously we didn’t win.” ¤ ABC EXCLUSIVE — Mark Meadows has testified before a grand jury in exchange for immunity – according to sources familiar with the former chief of staff’s conversations with the Special Counsel. ¤ Meadows told prosecutors he he agreed the 2020 election was the most secure in American history and that he repeatedly told Trump in the weeks after the election that the allegations of significant voting fraud coming to them were turning out to be baseless.
‼️ ⋙ ABCNews: Ex-Chief of Staff Mark Meadows granted immunity, tells special counsel he warned Trump about 2020 claims: Sources https://tinyurl.com/5n74huv4
🐣 RT @ thejackhopkins Watch this. As a father, I can tell you….he never held his babies more than a couple times in his life….IF that. ¤ He has no fucking idea how to hold…let alone love a baby. That would still look awkward if she had been a 10lb sack of flour.
⋙ 🐣 RT @RonFilipkowski Poor kid.
💽 https://x.com/thejackhopkins/status/1716576596390281688?s=20/photo/1
// Trump “holding” a baby
‼️ ABCNews: Ex-Chief of Staff Mark Meadows granted immunity, tells special counsel he warned Trump about 2020 claims: Sources https://tinyurl.com/5n74huv4
VanityFair, Bess Levin. (2022): Report: In New Memoir, Jared Kushner Says He Wasn’t Willing to Turn His Back on Saudi Prince Over One Measly Murder-by-Bone Saw https://tinyurl.com/8czbujun
// 7/29/2022
🐣 RT @Cocacolakid People seem to ignore what Khashoggi was investigating when murdered. He was writing about Kushner allegedly turning over classified info to MBS, who then used that to hunt down, arrest, and murder his opponents in Saudi Arabia. MBS has a financial relationship with Trump AND AMI
🐣 RT @SecBlinken Met with Israeli Foreign Minister @elicoh1 to discuss ongoing support to Israel and its right to self-defense, the importance of taking every precaution to protect civilians, efforts to get humanitarian aid into Gaza, and the need for all countries to reject Hamas’ terrorism.
🐣 RT @KFaulders NEWS – Trump’s former chief of staff Mark Meadows granted immunity, tells special counsel he warned Trump about 2020 claims: Sources. Reporting w @MLevineReports & @alex_mallin
😅 RT @BradMossEsq Sure, why not
⋙ 😜 RT @RepSantosNY03 Santos for Speaker?
🐣 RT @peterbakernyt Got a chance to read “Romney,” the new biography by @mckaycoppins and it is truly one of the best books on politics in the Trump era. Yes, it has juicy nuggets, but more importantly it explores the inherent tension between ambition and conscience, between power and principle.
🐣 RT @john_sipher “To spend time in China at the end of Xi’s first decade, is to witness a nation slipping…to stagnation and, for the first time in a generation, questioning whether a Communist superpower can escape the contradictions that doomed the Soviet Union.”
😅 RT @samstein 1/138th a Scaramucci
⋙ 🐣 RT @JakeSherman 🚨🚨BREAKING — TOM EMMER has dropped out of the race for speaker.
🐣 RT @mccaffreyr3 Sec State Anthony Blinken address to the UN simply magnificent. Logical. Objective. Principle focus on preventing escalation of the conflict by directly warning Iran that the U.S. is prepared to act. Also a clear US commitment to humanitarian relief.
🐣 RT @TheWarMonitor Looks like he just sabotaged the next Speaker vote. Dems need to break from tradition and vote for the lesser evil.
[TextLink:] https://x.com/TheWarMonitor/status/1716890590229696939?s=20/photo/1
[Text:] TRUMP knifes Emmer Truth Social “I have many wonderful friends wanting to be Speaker of the House, and some are truly great Warriors. RINO Tom Emmer, who I do not know well, is not one of them. He never respected the Power of a Trump Endorsement, or the breadth and scope of MAGA”
🐣 RT @JayinKyiv On this day in 1991, Ukraine agreed to give up its nuclear weapons in exchange for guarantees of protection.
🧵 RT @khodorkovsky_en Americans are tired of being the world police ¤ But standing by and watching will only make things worse. Amid China’s actions in HK and intentions for Taiwan, it’s vital to support both Israel and Ukraine. ¤ It’s not about countries — it’s about the world we want to live in [thread] 1/14
📌 https://x.com/khodorkovsky_en/status/1716831676469563724?s=20
[ThreadReader:] https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1716831676469563724.html
Anyone with a concept of morality was horrified by the Hamas attack on October 7, which targeted women, children, the elderly – and even a peaceful music festival. One person who was not horrified was Vladimir Putin (2/14)
For him, Hamas’ attack and Israel’s retaliation have been a welcome distraction from his own terror campaign in Ukraine. With the media focused on the Middle East, the killing of civilians in Zaporizhzhia and Kharkiv by Russian missiles has almost gone unnoticed (3/14)
Nothing implicates Putin in the Hamas attack. But it is interesting that his regime has held several meetings with Hamas over the past year, and Putin has compared Israel’s blockade of Gaza with the Nazi siege of Leningrad (4/14)
Putin called the Hamas attack ‘an example of US policy failure in the Middle East’, this is key to understanding how it serves his interests ¤ It furthers the perception that the West is weak, and that perception generates instability and emboldens autocrats and terrorists (5/14)
Western resolve has been straining for years, tested by the Syrian civil war, the Iraq debacle, the Taliban’s reconquest of Afghanistan, the war in Ukraine from 2014 and Putin’s full-scale invasion in 2022. The Hamas attack is the latest test, and demands a robust response (6/14)
However, the US has shown restraint so far – backing Ukraine just enough not to lose, but not enough to win decisively. This, for many outside the democratic world, makes America appear weak – ‘they want to win, but they can’t pull it off’, they think (7/14)
The truth is, many Americans don’t want to be the world police anymore. But if the police step back from their work, criminals cease to fear them, every lowlife out there will think they can get away with anything, and the challenges to the global order will intensify (8/14)
What will happen next? Will China, having already trampled the rights of Hong Kong, escalate its aggression against Taiwan? If not them, there are many potential flashpoints around the world, from Kosovo to Iran (9/14)
President Biden gives some hope with his response to these challenges. He realizes that Hamas and Putin share a common goal – to annihilate a neighboring democracy – as well as common tactics – those of terrorism (10/14)
While many in the US question why they should foot the bill for maintaining peace, Biden sees it as a smart investment. And he is right – the alternative, of retreating from the world and allowing bad actors to run riot – would have catastrophic consequences (11/14)
While American engagement is critical, Europe also has a role to play. Bad actors – Putin being one of them – seek to destabilize European societies, and the EU must be proactive in putting a stop to it, notably by giving Ukraine the tools it needs to secure victory (12/14)
The sooner Kyiv is able to decisively fight off the Russian invasion, the less serious the damage will be – to Ukraine, to Europe, and to the global order as a whole (13/14)
The aim of ensuring a Ukrainian victory in no way contradicts support for Israel in its fight against Hamas. On the contrary, these are two parts of the same struggle. Because a win for terror anywhere is a win for terror everywhere (14/14)
🐣 RT @MaxBoot 1/2 I was just doing a radio interview and was told by the interviewer that Americans are getting tired of the Ukraine war going on so long. That may be true but made me furious. This isn’t a TV show where we’ve watched one season and decided to change the channel….
⋙ 🐣 RT @MaxBoot 2/2 What are Americans sacrificing for Ukraine? 6/10ths of 1% of the federal budget. Ukrainians are sacrificing their lives! You think they’re not tired? And yet Ukrainians aren’t giving up. They’re fighting for their homes & families. We can’t give up either. Don’t betray them!
🐣 RT @mdubowitz The Biden administration is hardening its rhetoric against the regime in Iran. ¤ But the difference between a localized conflict and a regional war is whether Khamenei believes in American will to use force. ¤ No will >>> regional war
🐣 RT @ForeignAffairs U.S. National Security Adviser @JakeSullivan46 discusses the objectives guiding Biden’s foreign policy—and outlines how the United States can prepare for a new period of competition in an age of interdependence.
⋙ ForeignAffairs, Jake Sullivan: The Sources of American Power: A Foreign Policy for a Changed World https://tinyurl.com/yuars2tx
🐣 RT @GlasnostGone In a secret location in #Ukraine’s Kyiv region, Russian defectors are taking part in military exercises. The Siberian battalion is fighting on the side of Ukraine and made up of Russians. The battalion was set up by a former Russian military intelligence officer. [Sky: link]
😜 RT @AntiToxicPeople Michael Cohen has just taken the stand in the Trump Fraud Trial—with Citrus Caligula and his son Beavis in the courtroom.
🐣 RT @SecBlinken Let us not forget that among the more than 1,400 people that Hamas killed on October 7 were citizens from more than 30 UN Member States. The victims included at least 33 American citizens. Every one of us has a stake – and a responsibility – in defeating terrorism.
🐣 RT @Maks_NAFO_FELLA 🇺🇸 “U.S. readies plans for mass evacuations if Gaza war escalates”, – WP ¤ Officials said that the more than 600,000 Americans living in 🇮🇱 and 🇱🇧 are of particular concern, but they stressed that an operation of such magnitude is a worst-case scenario.
🐣 RT @ZelenskyyUa For years, Russia’s fleet and control over the Black Sea have created the illusion of insurmountable dominance. ¤ The relocation of hundreds of thousands of Russians and mass opression have created an illusion of a subdued Crimea. ¤ Illusions are vanishing now. We make them vanish.
🧵 RT @MarkHertling This afternoon I had a conversation w/ a very savvy Jewish journalist. We were talking about the films we’ve both seen of Hamas atrocities. ¤ The horrific murders, the beheadings, child rapes, burning of bound mothers & children…all filmed on GoPro cameras & distributed. 1/11
📌 https://x.com/MarkHertling/status/1716607268869865793?s=20
🐣 RT @clearing_fog This is actually important. ¤ One of Trump’s key lawyers, whose legal group organized election fraud lawsuits around the country, is admitting that there actually was no basis for challenging the election, and is apologizing for the role she played in perpetuating the big lie.
⋙ 🐣 RT @RonFilipkowski Jenna Ellis reads a tearful statement in court after her guilty plea where she throws Rudy Giuliani under the bus and says she wishes she had never gotten involved.
💽 https://x.com/clearing_fog/status/1716832300657451291?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @starsandstripes The Biden administration is preparing for the possibility that hundreds of thousands of American citizens will require evacuation from the Middle East if the bloodshed in Gaza cannot be contained.
⭕ 23 Oct 2023
🐣 RT @spectatorindex JUST IN: Former 🇺🇸 US President Barack Obama says ‘Israel has a right to defend its citizens against such wanton violence’ but that some actions could ‘harden Palestinian attitudes for generations’ and ‘erode global support for Israel, play into the hands of Israel’s enemies, and undermine long-term efforts to achieve peace and stability’.
🐣 RT @krassenstein The New York Times Has Just issued an Apology for their Inaccurate Reporting of the Gaza Hospital Attack. ¤ Read the full apology below:
¤ https://x.com/krassenstein/status/1716456942124613679?s=20
“On Oct. 17, The New York Times published news of an explosion at a hospital in Gaza City, leading its coverage with claims by Hamas government officials that an Israeli airstrike was the cause and that hundreds of people were dead or injured. The report included a large headline at the top of The Times’s website.
Israel subsequently denied being at fault and blamed an errant rocket launch by the Palestinian faction group Islamic Jihad, which has in turn denied responsibility. American and other international officials have said their evidence indicates that the rocket came from Palestinian fighter positions.
The Times’s initial accounts attributed the claim of Israeli responsibility to Palestinian officials, and noted that the Israeli military said it was investigating the blast. However, the early versions of the coverage — and the prominence it received in a headline, news alert and social media channels — relied too heavily on claims by Hamas, and did not make clear that those claims could not immediately be verified. The report left readers with an incorrect impression about what was known and how credible the account was.
The Times continued to update its coverage as more information became available, reporting the disputed claims of responsibility and noting that the death toll might be lower than initially reported. Within two hours, the headline and other text at the top of the website reflected the scope of the explosion and the dispute over responsibility.
Given the sensitive nature of the news during a widening conflict, and the prominent promotion it received, Times editors should have taken more care with the initial presentation, and been more explicit about what information could be verified. Newsroom leaders continue to examine procedures around the biggest breaking news events — including for the use of the largest headlines in the digital report — to determine what additional safeguards may be warranted.”
Was this enough?
🐣 RT @NoahShachtman EXCLUSIVE: Trump and his team are actively planning to pull the United States out of NATO — or, barring that, kneecap the collective defense provisions at the heart of the alliance. [RolStn:] https://tinyurl.com/58jkhkda
WaPo: Ukrainian spies with deep ties to CIA wage shadow war against Russia https://tinyurl.com/yvv3p6s4 “‘We are seeing the birth of a set of intelligence services that are like Mossad in the 1970s,’ said a former senior CIA official”
🐣 RT @ MarkRuffalo You are not alone… don’t be afraid to speak up.
⋙ 🐣 RT @DataProgress 📊 NEW POLL: 66% of likely voters agree that the U.S. should call for a ceasefire and de-escalation of violence in Gaza to prevent civilian deaths. ¤ https://tinyurl.com/2nwmpyct
◕ https://x.com/MarkRuffalo/status/1716486595451166945?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @dpatrikarakos Edelstein: ***important*** ¤ “We have evidence of #Iran involvement. I cannot elaborate too much, but there are trained cells within #Gaza.”
⋙ SkyNews: Israel says it has evidence of Iranian ‘involvement’ in Hamas attack – but ‘cannot elaborate’ https://tinyurl.com/32tsfw73
// Major General Michael Edelstein said the Hamas attackers were “well trained and well equipped” and that training sites had been set up inside Gaza.
Major General Michael Edelstein, a veteran commander who is retired but is now working with the Israel Defence Forces’ (IDF) Southern Command because of the war, said the attackers were “well trained, well equipped”.
“You definitely can see evidence, we have evidence of Iranian involvement,” he told a briefing with journalists on Monday after the Israeli military showed a nearly 45-minute compilation of footage from the 7 October carnage.
🐣 RT @JoeBiden The United States remains committed to ensuring that civilians in Gaza will continue to have access to food, water, medical care, and other assistance, without diversion by Hamas.
🐣📋 RT @SenWarren According to the IRS, @Microsoft illegally offshored profits to evade $28.9 billion in federal taxes—money that should’ve been used to fund child care, fight climate change, and help our seniors. This is flat out wrong—and I’m calling for answers.
⋙ 🐣 RT @tax [Bloomberg] Sen. Elizabeth Warren is calling on Microsoft‘s top executive to provide answers around a $28.9 billion tax bill the IRS says the software giant owes in unpaid transfer pricing tax claims. http://btaxgo.com/4wTkhrW
🐣 RT @emanumiller Hundreds of journalists and photographers from media companies all over the world attended today the screening of a film of assorted footage showing the extent of the horrors committed by Hamas. ¤ Footage was taken from numerous sources, including from bodycams worn by the terrorists, dashcams, from emergency rescue personnel and Israeli security service cameras. ¤ What they saw left many of the reporters visibly shocked and disgusted.
🖼 https://x.com/emanumiller/status/1716434509128765783?s=20/photo/1 -4
🐣 RT @ officejsmart ⚡️⚡️⚡️ US Military Bases 🇺🇸, in the Middle East, were reportedly struck by Iranian drones 🇮🇷. ¤ Pics are from a group unifying radicals in Iraq 🇮🇷, tied to Iran 🇮🇷. ¤ 👉 Today is 40 years since the Beirut Marine Barracks 🇺🇸 bombing by Islamic Jihad & Iran 🇮🇷
🖼 https://x.com/officejjsmart/status/1716558376572747935?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @SpencerGuard World War III is more likely to start from inaction opposed to action. ¤ Inaction to defend national sovereignty & borders, right of self-defense when attacked, and laws of war will lead to a sequence of events in which wars start around the world and lead to another global war.
🐣 RT @acnewsitics Just so you guys know, “Peekaboo” is an old racist term for black people, this is why Trump keeps using it. I heard this a lot by old white folks when I was growing up in some parts of upstate New York.
[TextLink:] https://x.com/acnewsitics/status/1716410570831004145?s=20/photo/1
[Text:] 🐣 RT @realDonald Trump In the Fake Biden Inspired Fraud Case against me, brought by the CORRUPT A.G., Letitia “Peekaboo” James of New York State, a sadly Crime Infested Place, where people and businesses are fleeing to other States in record numbers, it is her and the highly partisan Judge, who has been overturned many times, who defrauded me and the public by valuing my assets at a fraction of what they are worth in order to try and convict me, without a trial or jury, of FRAUD. She got him to Value Mar-a-Lago at $18,000,000, when it is worth 50 to 100 times that amount. My assets are worth MUCH MORE than listed on the 100% DISCLAIMED Financial Statements, and there are NO VICTIMS, EXCEPT ME. We WON on Statute of Limitations, and other things, at the Appeals Court, AND THIS RADICAL LEFT, TRUMP HATING JUDGE, REFUSES TO ACCEPT THEIR DECISION. THIS CASE SHOULD BE DROPPED, IMMEDIATELY. IT’S AMAZING! HE IS OUT OF CONTROL, AND TOTALLY AFRAID OF PEEKABOO. A COMPLETE MISCARRIAGE OF JUSTICE & ELECTION INTERFERENCE!
🐣 RT @wartranslated This is a helpful report by the Ukrainian journalist Butusov on the battle of Avdiivka as of late 22 October. It goes over the military formations involved in the battle from both sides and touches upon the current situation. In short, Ukrainian forces withstood what no one else could and held the main defence line, inflicting major losses on the Russian formations, but at a high price. Russian army is still involved with this campaign and will likely continue the pursuit to take Avdiivka.
[TextLink:] https://x.com/wartranslated/status/1716361754546995456?s=20/photo/1 -4
🐣 RT @TheEconomist Hamas militants and Israel have now been at war five times. We explain the conflict in maps: https://econ.st/3M3T4j5 👇
🌎 https://x.com/TheEconomist/status/1716341312943800704?s=20/photo/1
// 3 maps showing diminishing Palestinian land
⋙ 🐣 RT @BeMeHa2 Here’s the original map.
🌎 https://x.com/BeMeHa2/status/1716401931730481188?s=20/photo/1 -2
🐣 RT @BillKristol “There are decades where nothing happens; and there are weeks where decades happen.”–attributed to Lenin ¤ “In October 2023 decades seem to have happened…Both the opportunity for world-saving decisions and very real risk of failure present themselves.”
⋙ TheBulwark, William Kristol: A Month When Decades Happen https://tinyurl.com/zpybzh4t
// Like another October fifty years ago, this month’s events will shape politics at home and abroad.
At the end of September, one could seemingly have some confidence that there would, despite challenges and hiccups, continue to be bipartisan support for Ukraine in Congress. That now seem far more questionable.
On the Democratic side, October is the month in which President Biden rose to the occasion and performed admirably. It’s also a month in which voters seem disinclined to reward him for doing so. And so Democrats continue to say they would prefer a different nominee in 2024, and they seem unlikely to get one.
And in October alone, Hamas has praised Vladimir Putin; aid from North Korea flowed to Putin, who also met with China’s Xi Jinping; and Iran had made it clear that it stands with both Hamas and Putin. October seems to have been a month in which today’s axis of evil was consolidating.
On the other hand, there have been notable gains by Ukrainians on the battlefield, and by democrats at the polls in Poland. ¤ In October 2023, decades seem to have happened. And it’s not yet over. […]
🐣 RT @BillKristol “There are decades where nothing happens; and there are weeks where decades happen.”–attributed to Lenin ¤ “In October 2023 decades seem to have happened…Both the opportunity for world-saving decisions and very real risk of failure present themselves.”
⋙ TheBulwark, William Kristol: A Month When Decades Happen https://tinyurl.com/zpybzh4t
// Like another October fifty years ago, this month’s events will shape politics at home and abroad.
🐣 RT @ProjectLincoln “Rather than unifying the group and claiming the most important job in Congress, Jordan further repelled older colleagues who never trusted his recent makeover. He also infuriated newer colleagues who saw the bullying campaign on his behalf as dangerous.”
🐣 RT @HawaiiDelilah He uses terrier & violin emojis instead of the words “terrorist” & “violence & adds a for “educational” purposes” disclaimer. Changing captions makes it less likely the video will be flagged as violating rules against hateful rhetoric or violent content.
⋙ WaPo (10/20): Pro-Palestinian creators use secret spellings, code words to evade social media algorithms https://tinyurl.com/pwzrd8uv
// From ‘terrier’ to ‘P*les+in1ans,’ creators are changing up their language with ‘algospeak’ to evade Big Tech’s content rules
🐣 RT @anneapplebaum Poland’s ruling party, PiS, just lost an election which they themselves organized and manipulated to their advantage. Now PiS propagandists are suggesting *they* were cheated and somehow deserve to stay in power. Sound familiar?
🐣 RT @shashj I’ve been asked, repeatedly, and by serious people, why the media circulated “disinformation” around Hamas beheading babies. It was not disinformation. There was first-hand evidence from the start. You just didn’t want to see it.
⋙ 🐣 RT @shashj To every October 7th truther who has, for two weeks, denied the first-hand testimony that was already available and published, here is the head of Israel’s national forensic medical centre. “Many bodies, including those of babies, are without heads.”
⋙⋙ JPost: Hamas torture confirmed as Israeli forensics institute identifies victims https://tinyurl.com/4ddmkkn2
// 10/20 upd 10/22/2023; Forensic pathologists, including Israeli staffers as well as volunteers from abroad, were visibly disturbed by the evidence before them.
🐣 RT @aylushka_a BBC report, Bellingcat analysis, and now this analysis of available verified video material @WSJ — getting convinced it was a failed rocket (although ICC investigation still needed). May not affect opinions, but facts are needed. #GazaHospitalBlast #PeaceForIsraelAndPalestine
💽 ⋙ 🐣 RT @WSJ Watch: Palestinian officials blamed the explosion at the al-Ahli Arab Hospital on an Israeli strike—but a visual analysis by WSJ confirms it was a failed rocket launched from Gaza. Here’s our breakdown of what happened. https://on.wsj.com/406L1YG https://on.wsj.com/406L1YG
🐣 RT @ForeignAffairs If Israel defeats Hamas, the United States must then work with regional and international powers, including Egypt and Saudi Arabia, to transfer control of Gaza to the UN—and ultimately restore Palestinian Authority administration in Gaza, argues @sns_1239.
⋙ ForeignAffairs, Steven Simon: What Comes After Hamas? https://tinyurl.com/5btn9t72
// A Plan to Return the Gaza Strip to Palestinians and Keep Israel Safe
🐣 📋 RT @TWMCLtd An interesting and good explanation of the pressures on the Kremlin as a result of the ridiculous decision to go to, and continue, the war. ¤ On Friday #Russia may have to raise its interest rates yet again, to 14%. Soon the public will protest widely.
[TextLink:] https://x.com/TWMCLtd/status/1716359248408395941?s=20/photo/1
● Russian government spending is becoming increasingly focused on the costs of its war on Ukraine. The state’s proposed 2024 budget envisages an approximate 68% increase in planned defence spending compared to that allotted for 2023 – this puts defence spending for 2024 at around 6% of GDP. In contrast, education and healthcare spending will be frozen at the 2023 allocation, which amounts to a real term spending cut due to inflation.
● More spending will need to be allocated to fund payments and healthcare costs for the mounting numbers of wounded soldiers and the families of those killed in the conflict. More than half of those soldiers wounded severely enough to require longer term medical care have lost limbs, with one in five requiring upper limb amputations, Deputy Labour Minister Alexei Vovchenko stated on 17 October 2023. These injured soldiers will almost certainly require lifelong healthcare.
● Consistently heightened military spending will highly likely contribute to inflationary pressures within Russia. Furthermore, continued increases in military spending would force the Russian government to make difficult decisions about how to fund the war, likely increasing financial pressures on Russian businesses. However, any substantial future reduction in military expenditure would likely remove an increasingly central driver of Russian economic activity in the face of sanctions.
🐣 RT @McFaul After years of alleged rapprochement between Russia & Israel and Bibi & Putin, Putin completely threw Israel under the bus in the last 2 weeks. Hope the leaders & citizens of Israel will remember this & not be fooled again.
⭕ 22 Oct 2023
🐣 RT @clashreport IRGC deputy commander Ali Fadavi: ¤ If necessary, we will fire missiles directly at Haifa.
// Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps
⋙ 🐣 RT @adnan_syed128 Iranian religious leader Khamenei: “We said that Israel would disappear in the next 20 years, but I think they are in a hurry, they want to disappear faster.”
🐣 RT @tfa8889 how is #Avdiivka going RT? Emberassed to report about the failed russian offensive? Trying to distract? Changing the topic? Anything to avoid talking about another russian strategic loss.
🐣 RT @FaceTheNation .@LeaderMcConnell says “a significant portion” of Ukraine aid from Congress is being spent in states to make weapons. ¤ “We’re rebuilding our industrial base. The Ukrainians are destroying the army of one of our biggest rivals. I have a hard time finding anything wrong with that.”
🧵 RT @ ChrisO_wiki 1/ More details have emerged of events relating to a recent disastrous offensive in which 300 Russians are said to have died. Survivors say their commander called them “a piece of meat” and told them that he “wished them to die quickly” when he ordered a fresh assault. ⬇️
📌 https://x.com/ChrisO_wiki/status/1716171522807623857?s=20
[ThreadReader:] https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1716171522807623857.html
🐣 RT @CENTCOM In response to recent escalations by Iran & its proxy forces across the Middle East, SecDef Austin directed the USS Eisenhower, a THAAD BTRY, & additional Patriot BNs to the CENTCOM region to increase force posture, strengthen capabilities & ability to respond to contingencies.
⋙ 🐣 RT @SecDef After detailed discussions with @POTUS on recent escalations by Iran & its proxy forces across the Middle East, I directed a series of additional steps to further strengthen DoD posture in the region.
🧵 RT @djrothkopf Is Israel entitled to defend itself? Yes. Should Hamas be targeted? Yes. Should we shed a tear for any terrorist who is killed? No. But if you want to eliminate the terror threat to Israel the goal should not be to eliminate Hamas. First, it is not possible.
📌 https://x.com/djrothkopf/status/1716258184514425331?s=20
⋙ […] There is no military solution to this crisis. If there were, the vastly superior Israeli forces would have achieved it long ago. What this requires that is more important than eradicating Hamas is displacing them as Gaza’s political apparatus.
⋙ Promoting Hamas and enabling them was one of the big mistakes of the Netanyahu government. It is time to accept that the path to piece requires strong, democratic Palestinian government. But it also may require international stewardship of Gaza until that is achieved.
⋙ Ultimately, it will require a two-state solution and to achieve that a strong Palestinian government is required. (Which is why the Israeli gov’t promoted Hamas and sought to weaken the Palestinian Authority.) Committing to that is the essential goal.
⋙ Military achievements are important and called for. But within very strict limits. Political achievements are much more difficult & in many ways riskier for Israel’s leaders. But they are far more important to achieving the results the people of Israel and of Palestine deserve.
🐣 RT @spectatorindex BREAKING: Netanyahu’s office says Israel will not send aid to Gaza and will prevent the entry of aid from other countries that is sent without oversight.
🐣 RT @jconricus Maybe the mayor of Sydney won’t agree with what I said towards the end, but I firmly believe that one should take a stand, and stand for good. In this case, stand with Israel against evil.
⋙ 🐣 RT @Hjon66 Hamas says this about Israel’s stalled ground offensive. I support Israel but Israel looks weak to stall a ground offensive. Hamas will release hostages 2 at a time and will take 6 months to release them all.. Please start ground offensive..
[TextLink:] https://x.com/Hjon66/status/1716247235615195601?s=20/photo/1
[Text:] 🐣 RT @MarioNawfal JUST IN – Senior Member of Hamas:
– It is clear that the occupation has great reluctance to enter into a ground war.
– The occupation realizes that entering the Gaza Strip will not be easy, and we do not rule out any option.
– The resistance confirmed its full readiness for any possible ground intervention by the occupation.
– We are in contact with the concerned parties regarding prisoner exchange operations. – Talking about the prisoners of war among the occupation soldiers and officers is a
separate matter.
– The threats of Netanyahu and his government are worthless.
🧵 RT @WesClarkjr My opinion is that Putin knew the nature and timing of the initial Hamas attack against Israel, which is why he timed the Avdiivka offensive to start within 24 hours of it. Aside from creating refugee flows into Europe to assist his authoritarian allies in their next elections,
📌 https://x.com/WesClarkjr/status/1716179034328207535?s=20
[ThreadReader:] https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1716179034328207535.html
further fracture civil society in the West and redirect munitions flowing into Ukraine to instead go to Israel, I believe he has another goal. He knew the attack would provoke an IDF invasion of Gaza (which Biden has so far headed off) and that Hezbollah would wait until the IDF
got bogged down in Gaza before launching everything they’ve got at Israel (what you’re currently seeing is probing attacks). Putin is hoping that Israel responds to Hezbollah’s full entry into the war with a nuclear weapon directed at either the Bekaa valley or Iran, which he…
will then use as justification to use one against Ukraine. I don’t have any inside source on this, it just seems logical based on what we’ve seen from Russian propaganda since they invaded Ukraine. I think this is also why Biden has worked so hard to prevent a ground war in Gaza.
🐣 RT @mmpadellan Israel has a right to exist.
Palestinians have a right to their own nation.
Humanitarian aid must get through to Palestinians.
Hamas MUST release all of the hostages.
All Palestinians are NOT Hamas.
There is nothing controversial about any of these statements of fact.
💙 KyivPost, Jonathan Sweet and Mark Toth: Vladimir Putin’s Worldwide Distraction Tour https://tinyurl.com/msf86zjs “Many of the crises that exist in the world today can be linked directly back to Russia – cui bono. The solution may really be as simple as removing the cancer – Putin”
// “Putin, faced with a badly faltering ‘special military operation,’ was badly in need of a major distraction for two primary reasons,” write analysts Jonathan Sweet and Mark Toth.
🐣 RT @brett_mcgurk Joint Statement on Israel | The White House 🇺🇸🇨🇦🇫🇷🇩🇪🇮🇹🇬🇧
⋙ WhiteHouse: https://tinyurl.com/3cczu6fh
[Text:] Joint Statement on Israel / October 22, 2023
Today, President Joseph R. Biden, Prime Minister Trudeau of Canada, President Emmanuel Macron of France, Chancellor Olaf Scholz of Germany, Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni of Italy, and Prime Minister Rishi Sunak of the United Kingdom spoke regarding the ongoing conflict between Israel and the terrorist organization Hamas. The leaders reiterated their support for Israel and its right to defend itself against terrorism and called for adherence to international humanitarian law, including the protection of civilians. They welcomed the release of two hostages and called for the immediate release of all remaining hostages. They committed to close coordination to support their nationals in the region, in particular those wishing to leave Gaza.
The leaders welcomed the announcement of the first humanitarian convoys to reach Palestinians in need in Gaza and committed to continue coordinating with partners in the region to ensure sustained and safe access to food, water, medical care, and other assistance required to meet humanitarian needs. The leaders committed to continue close diplomatic coordination, including with key partners in the region, to prevent the conflict from spreading, preserve stability in the Middle East, and work toward a political solution and durable peace.
🧵 RT @MuellerSheWrote THREAD: everyone needs to read this thread and the two articles in it by @emptywheel. Trump claiming Powell wasn’t his lawyer on Truth Social today may have more to do with his pardon of Flynn than any privilege claims. 1/
⋙ 🐣 RT @emptywheel Again, I think people who think they’re cleverly fact-checking Trump about whether Sidney Powell was REALLY his attorney are missing a whole slew of things, both about the indictment and the facts.
⋙⋙ EmptyWheel, Marcy Wheeler: Donald Trump Raises Conflict Concerns about His Mike Flynn Pardon https://tinyurl.com/32xbsvjr
📌 https://x.com/MuellerSheWrote/status/1716214169350144114?s=20
NYT: U.S. Advises Israel to Delay Gaza Invasion, Officials Say https://tinyurl.com/mr2dehhy The Biden administration has suggested that more time is needed for hostage negotiations, the delivery of aid to Palestinians and mapping out ways to avoid more civilian casualties.
🐣 RT @TomJChicago As news comes out about Trump passing classified US secrets to Anthony Pratt, the financial aspect of Trump’s treason is coming to light. Pratt buying $50k worth of Mar-a-Lago tickets for $1 million is one example. Keep in mind, Jack Smith has told the court that he knows what Trump’s motive was and will prove it at trial. Trump’s prison sentence must fit the magnitude of this crime.
⋙ NYT: A President, a Billionaire and Questions About Access and National Security https://tinyurl.com/2rw29ehc
// Anthony Pratt, one of Australia’s wealthiest men, made his way into Donald Trump’s inner circle with money and flattery. What he heard there has become of interest to federal prosecutors.
🐣 RT @ BidensWins This was President Biden’s call sheet today.
– Israel’s Netanyahu
– Pope Francis
– Canada’s Trudeau
– France’s Macron
– Germany’s Scholz
– Italy’s Meloni
– Britain’s Sunak
President Biden is the glue holding the world together. How are we still questioning his stamina?
🔄 Rule of Law in Armed Conflicts (RULAC): International humanitarian law https://tinyurl.com/2m4wmf5j “International humanitarian law, also called the law of armed conflict or the law(s) of war, is the branch of international law that regulates conduct in an armed conflict.”
[TextLink:] https://x.com/Auriandra/status/1716186837360812040?s=20/photo/1
What are the basic principles of international humanitarian law?
International humanitarian law strives to limit the effects of armed conflict and minimize human suffering. International humanitarian law rests on a careful balancing between the foundational principles of humanity and military necessity. The principle of military necessity can be both limiting and permissive. As a limiting principle, military necessity restrains the lawful use of force to what is necessary to achieve a military goal and prohibits violence excessive to achieve this aim. The principle of military necessity operates as permissive principle that allows death and destruction when necessary from a military point of view. Yet, the principle of military necessity cannot be invoked to justify violations of international humanitarian law.
Military necessity is counter-balanced by the principle of humanity. The principle of humanity protects those who are not or no longer actively participating in hostilities and provides for their humane treatment at all times. Furthermore, the principle of humanity protects those who directly participate in hostilities from superfluous injury or unnecessary suffering.
From these two foundational principles flow a series of other basic principles upon which international humanitarian law rests. The principle of distinction requires parties to an armed conflict to distinguish between combatants and civilians and between military and civilian objects. Attacks against lawful military objectives are prohibited if the attack ‘may be expected’ to result in excessive civilian harm under the principle of proportionality.
🐣 RT @RachelBitecofer There are roughly 16 million Jews left in the world.
🌎 https://x.com/RachelBitecofer/status/1716162796940099635?s=20/photo/1
// map ME by degree democratic/autocratic
I say “left in the world” because there would be roughly 32 million Jews, but the Nazis killed so many of them the modern population was cut in half.
Jews make up just 2% of global population and half are surrounded by countries that want to destroy them.
TheConversation (June): Jewish denominations: A brief guide for the perplexed https://tinyurl.com/bdfxp3zz
// 6/16/2023
🐣 RT @POTUS Israel has the right to defend itself. We must make sure they have what they need to protect their people today and always.
At the same time, Prime Minister Netanyahu and I have discussed how Israel must operate by the laws of war. That means protecting civilians in combat as best as they can.
We can’t ignore the humanity of innocent Palestinians who only want to live in peace. That’s why I secured an agreement for the first shipment of humanitarian assistance for Palestinian civilians in Gaza.
And we cannot give up on a two-state solution.
🐣 RT @RpsAgainstTrump Mitt Romney: ¤ “I don’t really have a home in my party … I come from a tradition of, you know, Ronald Reagan, and George Herbert Walker Bush, and George W. Bush, and John McCain. … Those are the people that have shaped our party: anti-Putin, anti-Russia, anti-authoritarians, anti-Kim Jong Un, very strong on foreign policy…I don’t recognize that in the great majority of our party today. And that, for me, is very troubling.”
💽 https://x.com/RpsAgainstTrump/status/1716097588015870209?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @MattGertz According to members of an international team of forensic pathologists examining the bodies of the victims, Hamas terrorists committed unfathomable atrocities on 10/7.
⋙ TheMediaLine: Evidence on Display at Israel’s Forensic Pathology Center Confirms Hamas’ Atrocities https://tinyurl.com/4cvz7ndc
[TextLink:] https://x.com/MattGertz/status/1715848616059756720?s=20/photo/1 -2
🐣 RT @ AccountableGOP .@Liz_Cheney: “What you’re seeing right now among the Republicans in the house is a direct result of the decisions that Kevin McCarthy made to embrace Donald Trump, to embrace the most radical and extreme members of our party…it’s a disgrace, and it’s an embarrassment.”
// on Face the Nation
🐣 RT @apmassaro3 McConnell: “If the Russians are not defeated, they’re going to the NATO countries next.” Correct. Ukraine fights for us all
🐣 RT @rgoodlaw Big news: “The US government has pressed Israel to delay its imminent invasion of Gaza to allow for the release of more Hamas hostages and aid into Gaza.” @cnn’s @MarquardtA also reported on @CNNSOTU
🐣 RT @RonFilipkowski Trump now says he really doesn’t know Sidney Powell and she was Michael Flynn’s lawyer not his.
[TextLink:] https://x.com/RonFilipkowski/status/1716095680219902230?s=20/photo/1
[Text:] 🐣 RT @realDonald Trump * Sidney Powell was one of millions and millions of people who thought, and in ever increasing numbers still think, correctly, that the 2020 Presidential Election was RIGGED & STOLLEN, AND OUR COUNTRY IS BEING ABSOLUTELY DESTROYED BECAUSE OF IT!!! Despite the Fake News reports to the contrary, and without even reaching out to ask the Trump Campaign, MS. POWELL WAS NOT MY ATTORNEY, AND NEVER WAS. In fact, she would have been conflicted. Ms. Powell did a valiant job of representing a very unfairly treated and governmentally abused General Mike Flynn, but to no avail. His prosecution, despite the facts, was ruthless. He was an innocent man, much like many other innocent people who are being persecuted by this now Fascist government of ours, and I was honored to give him a Full Pardon!
🐣 📋 RT @USAmbKyiv Over 1 million tons of grain, crops, iron, and other precious cargo through the Black Sea humanitarian corridor. Russia’s cruelty will not prevent Ukraine from feeding the world and increasing exports. We’re counting 33 ships through so far!
◕ https://x.com/USAmbKyiv/status/1715763292394737990?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @PhillipsPOBrien UK MOD update today with mention of Russian losses, with particular mention of Avdiivka.
⋙ 🐣 📋 RT @DefenceHQ Latest Defence Intelligence update on the situation in Ukraine – 22 October 2023.
[TextLink:] https://x.com/PhillipsPOBrien/status/1716020966310985952?s=20/photo/1
● Recent Russian assaults in Avdiivka have contributed to a 90% increase in Russian casualties recorded by the Ukrainian MoD.
● Since February 2022, Russia has significantly increased its force footprint on the ground in Ukraine by intensifying recruitment using financial incentives and the partial mobilisation conducted in Autumn 2022. This increase of personnel is the major factor behind Russia’s ability to both defend held territory and conduct costly assaults.
● It is likely that Russia has suffered 150,000-190,000 permanent casualties (killed and permanently wounded) since the conflict began, with the total figure including temporarily wounded (recovered and due to return to the battlefield in some capacity] in the region of 240,000-290,000. This does not include Wagner Group or their prisoner battalions who fought in Bakhmut.
⭕ 21 Oct 2023
WaPo: Documents found on fighters reveal Hamas capabilities, bloody plans https://tinyurl.com/y5vm2y2j
🧵 RT @CanadianKobzar FELLAS! STAY AHWILE AND LISTEN! Today we will be discussing the Jewish history of Ukraine! To say this topic is complicated is an understatement. But understanding this integral aspect of Ukrainian history is fundamental to our rich country. 1/25
📌 https://x.com/CanadianKobzar/status/1715720096323088880?s=20
🧵 RT @SamRamani2 Russian Telegram channels reacted strongly to Ukraine’s ATACM strikes ¤ Some of the more interesting reactions, which reflected a shift from panic to false confidence /1
📌 https://x.com/SamRamani2/status/1715831560816022015?s=20
🧵 RT @ @allenanalysis THE FACT THAT The Saudi Crown Prince reportedly claimed to have received CIA intelligence from Jared Kushner, with the Crown Prince identifying specific individuals as “enemies.” With ZERO repercussions, major investigation, or legal recourse is beyond comprehension.
📌 ¤ https://x.com/allenanalysis/status/1715869746590023969?s=20
This alleged exchange took place shortly before a “corruption crackdown” in Saudi Arabia, during which reports emerged of torture and deaths. And we hear almost no legacy media reporting on it.
Simultaneously, the Trump administration approved the transfer of nuclear technology to Saudi Arabia without congressional notification, following the Jamal Khashoggi incident.
This information is based on credible news sources and raises questions about potential connections and motivations behind these actions.
Coincidence or circumstance? It appears highly unlikely. ¤ It suggests a need for further investigation into the circumstances surrounding these events.
🐣 RT @gtconway3d “‘Of course Biden doesn’t trust Netanyahu,’ said Alon Pinkas, Israel’s former consul general in New York. ‘Trust in Netanyahu is actually zero. He deeply mistrusts Netanyahu.’ Pinkas, who has advised several Israeli prime ministers, said while Biden genuinely loves Israel, ‘he is also aware that reckless decisions could adversely affect American interests, which is why Biden and Blinken came to try to prevent the spread of the conflict.’”
⋙ 🐣 RT @NTarnopolsky 💥𝗛𝗼𝘄 𝗕𝗶𝗱𝗲𝗻 𝗕𝗶𝗴𝗳𝗼𝗼𝘁𝗲𝗱 𝗕𝗶𝗯𝗶 https://tinyurl.com/5d9nuzzh
// The American president has captured Israeli hearts. Can he rein in the Israeli government?
🐣 RT @ChrisDJackson Let’s be clear: President Biden and his administration are the only things holding Netanyahu back from absolutely leveling Gaza. ¤ While Biden has rightly stood firm with Israel, he has also called for restraint, reflection, and everyone to abide by the rules of war.
¤ https://x.com/ChrisDJackson/status/1715812812323275109?s=20
.
He has urged the world not to lump all Palestinians with Hamas and for Netanyahu not to make the same mistakes we made after 9/11. He is also working tirelessly to ensure humanitarian aid gets to Gaza quickly.He has done all this while his opponent, Donald Trump, has belittled Israel, praised Hezbollah, and called for a Muslim Ban in the United States.
You got gripes with Biden on this or that? Okay, fine. But all I know is that if the other guy were in the Oval Office right now, things would be much more hateful, chaotic, and unstable.
I for one will take Biden’s approach any day of the week over Trump’s.
🐣 RT @BillKristol Interesting meeting at the FCC earlier this week, where a group us, many once associated with Fox, urged the FCC to order document production from Fox, and then a hearing on our challenge to the unqualified renewal of a Fox affiliate broadcast license.
⭕ 20 Oct 2023
🐣 RT @ AleksandrX13 Citizens of the US… ¤ You may think that events playing out on the planet today – both the war in Ukraine and events in Israel – are something new. ¤ But they’re not.
¤ https://x.com/AleksandrX13/status/1715588029924970679?s=20
These events are actually part of an old, old story – America is actually under siege (though you may not yet realize it), because America is the single greatest threat, and the only real opposition, to Russian plans for world domination.
It’s the old story of the Cold War – only THEN Americans knew their enemy and the threat it represented, and buckled down and got to fighting it, and, in doing this, hurt the ‘bear’ so seriously that it had to go and lick its wounds for a few decades.
The problem is that the bear learned cunning from being so seriously hurt, while Americans have become too confident ‘resting on their laurels’.
So now russia interferes in American politics ‘under the surface’ – encouraging extreme views, and ensuring that American society will remain divided.
And it starts ‘fires’ across the globe, and USES THOSE FIRES to keep Americans further distracted and divided.
—
It’s time to focus your will and determination to defeating the ‘red bear’ once again, people of America.Not because you have to. But because perhaps this is what your nation was born to do – to stand against evil in this age, to set your foot upon it, and to save the future of the world.
To save the future of the world.
You may not have to do it, but the doing of it will forever put your nation into the annals of the great and the good in the histories of the world.
🐣 RT @ImtiazMadmood The land of Israel has been populated by the Jewish people since 2000 BC. Here’s the timeline, in case you didn’t realize that it is their homeland.
¤ ⏳ 🌎 https://x.com/ImtiazMadmood/status/1715410213908476272?s=20/photo/1
[TextLink:] https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1715410213908476272.html/photo/1
1900 BC: Abraham Father of the Jewish Nation.
1900 BC: Isaac, Abraham’s son, rules over Israel.
1850 BC: Jacob, son of Issac, rules over Israel.
1400 BC: Moses leads the people out of Egypt and back to Israel.
1010 BC: King David unites the 12 tribes into one nation.
970 BC: King Solomon, son of David, builds the first temple structure in Jerusalem
930 BC: Israel is divided into two kingdoms, the Kingdom of Israel and the Kingdom of Judah.
722 BC: The Kingdom of Israel is conquered by Assyrians.
605 BC: Kingdom Judah is conquered by the Babylonians.
586 BC: Solomon’s Temple is destroyed by the Babylonians.
539 BC: Persians conquered the Babylonians and took control of Israel.
538 BC: The Jews return to Israel from exile.
520 BC: The Temple is rebuilt.
450 BC: Reforms made by Ezra and Nehemiah.
432 BC: The last group of Jews returned from exile.
333 BC: The Greeks conquered the Persian empire.
323 BC: The Egyptian and Syrian empires take over Israel.
167 BC: Hasmoneans recapture Israel, and the Jews are ruled independently.
70 BC: Romans conquered Israel.
20 BC: King Herod builds the “second” temple
70 AD: Romans destroy the temple.After that, the people were captives of the Romans, Byzantines, Arabs, and Crusaders. Through all of these events, the Jewish people continued to live in Israel.
There were more or less of them, depending on the centuries, but there was never a time when the Jews didn’t live in the land. ¤ They stayed, they built their communities, they raised their families.
In 1948, the UN established the State of Israel, the nation of Jews. Don’t buy the Palestinian lies that they are entitled to the land. ¤ It simply is not true.
🐣 RT @ChrisDJackson Trump is cognitively impaired. Pass it on.
💽 https://x.com/ChrisDJackson/status/1715528896676852003?s=20/photo/1
// Daily Show: Fox hosts talking about Biden but clips of Trump (provided) fit perfectly!
🐣 RT @UKikaski This video of a failed Russian assault in #Avdiivka is probably going to be shown in war colleges in the West as a primer how to defeat the “modern” Russian army in the field.
💽 https://x.com/UKikaski/status/1715319638504985061?s=20/photo/1
What is evident, is that Russia cannot deploy artillery to support its armor and they do not have the trained fighters needed to properly conduct a combined arms battle.
On the part of the AFU, their most valuable assets are the skill and bravery of their fighters and the competency of their commanders. In addition, NATO training, superior NATO artillery with further range than their Russian counterparts and a fanatical focus on counterbattery operations made this possible. ¤ #OSINT #Counteroffensive #UkraineRussiaWar #UkraineWar #Ukraine
🐣 RT @RpsAgainstTrump “I’ve never seen a bigger clown show until now.”
[TextLink:] https://x.com/RpsAgainstTrump/status/1715493912075235712?s=20/photo/1
[Text:] 🐣 RT @AriFleischer I’ve worked for three GOP congressmen and the House GOP campaign arm, the NRCC. I’m sad to say l’ve never seen a bigger clown show until now. What’s the good of a majority if they can’t get their act together? Without unity,
they’re useless. What a waste of a majority.
🐣 RT @ZelenskyyUa I am grateful to @POTUS Joe Biden for sending an urgent budgetary request to the U.S. Congress to support Ukraine.
¤ https://x.com/ZelenskyyUa/status/1715471039197552800?s=20
I thank the U.S. for leading the way in countering terrorism and aggression.
Ukraine has accomplished remarkable gains with critical American assistance over the last 20 months. We have liberated more than half of the newly occupied territories and successfully deterred one of America’s main adversaries.
We are indeed at an inflection point in history. It is critical not only to stop but also to defeat the aggressor.
With strong and lasting support, Ukraine will put an end to Russian aggression and restore peace and security in Europe.
Ukraine will always be grateful to the Biden Administration, both parties in the U.S. Congress, and the American people for their support. We are counting on both parties in Congress to bend the arch of history toward good.
🐣 RT @JakeSherman 122-86 was the final tally. Jordan went down handily.
↥ ↧
🐣 RT @mattgaetz The most popular Republican in Congress was just knifed in an an anonymous vote in a secret closed door meeting in the basement of the Capitol. ¤ This is the Swamp at work.
🐣 RT @Laurie_Garrett Whoa: @seanhannity et al on #Trump — “He’s been real confused all week. His short term memory loss is becoming a real problem.”
“He’s fumbling over his words, he can’t construct a sentence.”
“On top of being a complete cognitive mess, he’s also a complete ignorant fool.” [?]
⋙ 🐣 RT @RpsAgainstTrump WOW. ¤ Even Fox News agrees Trump is not well.
💽 https://x.com/Laurie_Garrett/status/1715428938548199858?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @POTUS We are facing a moment in history where the decisions America makes today will determine the future for decades to come. ¤ That’s why I’m working non-stop to protect our nation’s security. Our investment today will pay dividends tomorrow for generations.
🐣 RT @ZelenskyyUa I thank @POTUS Joe Biden for his powerful address. Together, we will not allow hatred destroy freedom, and we will not let terrorists destroy democracy.
¤ https://x.com/ZelenskyyUa/status/1715261397091688645?s=20
Ukraine is grateful for all the U.S. support and its unfaltering belief that humanism, freedom, independence, and rules-based international order must always triumph.
Our common goal is to protect the free way of life for all of our nations. The world, particularly nations confronting aggression and terrorism, looks to America to lead in preserving our common freedom.
The unwavering bipartisan support for Ukraine in the United States is incredibly encouraging for all of our warriors and for our entire nation. America’s investment in Ukraine’s defense will ensure long-term security for all of Europe and the world.
🧵 RT @shashj Common tactic: “Hamas terrorists who carried out a surprise attack on October 7 were found to be under the influence of Captagon, a synthetic amphetamine-type stimulant that has been clandestinely produced in southern Europe”
📌 https://x.com/shashj/status/1715253954227892512?s=20
⋙ Economist (6/8/2023): How drugs and alcohol have fuelled soldiers for centuries https://tinyurl.com/mskjpf46
// Russians in Ukraine seem to rely on copious amounts of liquor and, in some cases, hard drugs
🐣 RT @AnnaBower BREAKING NEWS: Kenneth Chesebro, alleged architect of the “fake electors” plot, has struck a plea deal with prosecutors in Fulton County, Georgia, per source familiar with the arrangement.
⋙ 🐣 RT @AnnaBower Chesebro is set to plead guilty to at least one felony charge as a part of the deal, the source told @lawfare.
🐣 RT @TamarHallerman BREAKING: Attorney KEN CHESEBRO, who advised the Trump campaign on assembling a slate of Trump electors in swing states like Georgia, has reached a plea deal with Fulton prosecutors, according to a source familiar. (Confirming @AnnaBower) He will receive probation. More to come
🐣 RT @mccaffreyr3 The impact of blatant Hamas disinformation has created a firestorm in the Arab world. There could be a narrow window to hand over the hostages. Unlikely. The tragedy of 7 October continues to unfold.
⋙ 🐣 RT @MarkWarner The Senate Intelligence Committee reviewed intelligence related to the attack on al-Ahli hospital in Gaza. Based on this information, we feel confident that the explosion was the result of a failed rocket launch by militant terrorists and not the result of an Israeli airstrike.
🐣 [This is an example of Russian propaganda:]
⋙ 🐣 RT @MedvedevRussiaE Led by the US, the world is steadily rolling into a deep abyss. The decisions made clearly point not only to irreversible mental deterioration, but also to loss of the remaining shreds of conscience. These decisions, both significant and minor, are glaring symptoms of the epidemic social disease.
¤ https://x.com/MedvedevRussiaE/status/1715365321618419989?s=20
1. Biden has called the money to be spent on other people’s death far away from the US a “smart investment”. It is about getting additional weapons worth tens of billions of dollars for Ukraine and Israel.
2. Kiev regime has decided to ban Ukrainian Orthodox Church thus cutting its Orthodox Christians off the cradle of the mother church.
3. France’s interior minister unhesitatingly condemns a football star for his posts in support of Palestine.These pieces of news are varied but all of them speak of accelerated decay of the very fabric of Western society.
Investing in unwanted people’s death is smart and good. It’s beyond words. It’s beyond good and evil. And it’s not only the old moron’s dementia, but the centuries-old philosophy of all of their state life.
Banning the ancestral church in Malorossiya is dirty politics deeply rooted in cocaine and satanism. That is, zelensky is not just a degenerate without kin and family. He is not just a zombie puppet who has forgotten both his own and general history. He is shaking with lust for power, the clown Frankenstein created for the clients’ amusement, ready not only to surrender his own body to them for carnal pleasures, but also to easily destroy Christianity in the homeland.
And third. Going beyond the trendy ideological buoys is now literally punishable in the West. It is allowed to express condolences to the Israelis, but not to the Palestinians. There should be no sympathy for them. They are all, like, terrorists there, so let them die by the thousands. Children, women, elderly are nothing but expendables.
The result of such statements is clear.
The Intifada will be going on forever.
The church will revive but through the blood and suffering of civil war.
And the quantity of the provided weapons will sooner or later leap into quality. The high-explosive, cumulative, incendiary, and volume-detonating charges will turn into nuclear ones…
🐣 RT @AndrewDesiderio NEWS — White House asks Congress for $100 billion emergency national security funding package
$61.4 billion for Ukraine
$14.3 billion for Israel
$14.45 billion for southern border
$2 billion for Indo-Pacific
$10 billion for humanitarian aid (Israel, Gaza, Ukraine, border)
🐣 RT @MaryLTrump Judge Engoron just threatened Donald with prison for violating his gag order. ¤ Hey, look–he’s pouting harder! 😎
💽 https://x.com/MaryLTrump/status/1715389413033718002?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @MaggieJordanACN Ruling is bad news for trump …. ¤ there are many ways to prove “corrupt intent” in the obstruction statute, including an effort to install the loser of the 2020 election as the winner.
[TextLink:] https://x.com/MaggieJordanACN/status/1715379367549771861?s=20/photo/1 -2
[Text:] Instead, the dissent contends that we must overturn the jury’s verdict in this case because “there is no evidence in the record suggesting Robertson obstructed the election certification proceeding in order to obtain an unlawful benefit for himself or someone else.” Dissenting Op. 33. That is incorrect. Robertson believed that the election was “rigged”; announced that he refused to be “disenfranchised”; and declared that he was “prepared to start” an “open armed [/1]
rebellion.” S.A. 110, 190. That evidence was plainly sufficient to support a finding that Robertson intended to secure the unlawful benefit of installing the loser of the presidential election, Donald J. Trump, as its winner. See Fischer, 64 F.4th at 361 (Walker, J., concurring in part and concurring in the judgment); see also id. at 356 n.5 (reasoning that “the beneficiary of an unlawful benefit need not be the defendant or his friends” and § 1512(c)(2) could apply to a defendant “trying to secure the presidency for Donald Trump”). [/2]
🐣 RT @sgurman Justice might be blind, but the two federal prosecutions of Trump show how differently judges mete it out, coloring the pace & tenor of the high-profile cases months before they come to trial. W/ the best beatmates, @cryanbarber @aviswanatha
🖼 https://x.com/sgurman/status/1715370706827980865?s=20/photo/1
// photos Chutkan and Cannon
🧵 RT @atrupar My video thread on the House’s latest attempt to elect a speaker begins here 👇
💽 https://x.com/atrupar/status/1715368803649851625?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @tedlieu This below argument by a GOP supporter of insurrectionist Jim Jordan will change the minds of exactly zero hold outs. ¤ The inability of Rep. Jim Jordan to acknowledge that there is a very real, sick and violent element in his extreme base is one reason he will never be Speaker.
⋙ 🐣 RT @JakeSherman IN THE MEETING yesterday between JIM JORDAN and hold outs, close Jordan ally WARREN DAVIDSON said it’s not Team Jordan’s fault that holdouts are getting death threats. They are getting the death threats, he said, because they voted against Jordan.
🐣 RT @renato_mariotti That’s one way to get Trump’s attention. When you ignore a judge’s orders, you’re playing with fire.
⋙ 🐣 RT @molcranenewman Judge Engoron just asked Trump’s lawyers why he shouldn’t send him to jail or impose other sanctions in light of an incendiary post he ordered him to delete two weeks ago that remained online last night.
Chris Kise said it was an oversight. Judge will rule later. Story TK.
🧵 RT @MacFarlaneNews NEW: Special Counsel Jack Smith files motion tonight opposing Trump’s “Presidential immunity” effort to get his 2020 election conspiracy case dismissed ¤ (More)
📌 https://x.com/MacFarlaneNews/status/1715148593877655992?s=20
[CourtDoc:] https://tinyurl.com/2wk8czjj 54p
🐣 RT @Maks_NAFO_FELLA 🇺🇦❤️ “When Putin invaded Ukraine, he thought he would take Kyiv and all of Ukraine in a matter of days. Well, over a year later, Putin has failed, and he continues to fail. Kyiv still stands because of the bravery of the Ukrainian people.”, – #Biden
🐣 RT @POTUS There are innocent people all over the world who hope because of our nation, who believe in a better life because of us, and who are desperate to not be forgotten by us. ¤ Time is of the essence – I know we have our divisions at home. ¤ We have to get past them.
📋 TheAtlantic, David Frum: Yes, the U.S. Can Afford to Help Its Allies https://tinyurl.com/55ht7a2w “Ukraine and Israel both offer opportunities for the U.S. to realize valuable security gains without risking a single American soldier”
// In fact, it can’t afford not to.
🐣 RT @apmassaro3 We are the arsenal of democracy. We will arm the heroic peoples defending themselves and the free world in Israel, Ukraine, and Taiwan. And they will win
🐣 RT @Gerashchenko_en “Hamas and Putin represent different threats. But they share this in common: they both want to completely annihilate a neighboring democracy, to completely annihilate it. If we do not stop Putin’s appetite for power and control in Ukraine, he will not limit himself to Ukraine,” – President Biden.
💽 https://x.com/Gerashchenko_en/status/1715269899646337134?s=20/photo/1
⭕ 19 Oct 2023
🐣 RT @IsraelWarRoom #BREAKING: European intelligence agency tells @AFP: The death toll from the Gaza hospital is between 10 and 50, not “hundreds” as Hamas claims.
🐣 RT @ChrisDJackson 🚨 SPEAKER PELOSI PRAISES BIDEN’S SPEECH “In this perilous moment, America is fortunate to have a strong, steady, wise commander-in-chief.”
🐣 RT @JoeBiden We must, without equivocation, denounce antisemitism. ¤ We must also, without equivocation, denounce Islamophobia. ¤ To all of you hurting, I want you to know: I see you. You belong.
🐣 RT @POTUS American leadership is what holds the world together. ¤ Our alliances are what keep us safe. ¤ And our values are what make us a partner that other nations want to work with. ¤ We put all of that at risk if we walk away from Ukraine or turn our back on Israel.
🐣 RT @front_ukrainian ⚡️🇺🇦Ukraine has recaptured more than 50% of the territories that 🇷🇺Russia once occupied – Biden.
// “Putin thought he would take Kyiv and all of Ukraine in a matter of days. More than a year has passed – Kyiv is still standing. We are not sending our army there. They only ask for weapons to drive the occupiers from their land and air defense equipment to protect the cities from destruction.”
🐣 RT @StateDept “Here in America, let us not forget who we are. We reject all forms of hate, whether it’s against Muslims, Jews, or anyone. That’s what great nations do—and we are a great nation.” — @POTUS
🐣 RT @michaeldweiss We are at the precipice of a major war, in which almost anything can happen, but here is a Netanyahu confidant absolutely laying into RT and saying that Israel will now make sure Ukraine “wins” and Russia “will pay the price” for its ties to Iran and Hamas.
⋙ 🐣 RT @Tendar Amir Weitmann, powerful member of Netanyahu’s Likud party in Israel, went live on Russia Today and, oh Boy, tore into Russia’s stance. I was only waiting for him to step through the screen. What an epic statement. ¤ This is exactly what will resonate in Moscow, especially with Putin. ¤ #Israel #Russia #Ukraine
💽 https://x.com/michaeldweiss/status/1715142173849448919?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @RpsAgainstTrump Fox News chief political analyst Brit Hume on President Biden’s speech: ¤ “It may be remembered as one of the best, if not the best, speeches of his presidency.”
💽 https://x.com/RpsAgainstTrump/status/1715169901726335305?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @djrothkopf Biden’s trips to two war zones without the benefit of U.S. military protection set him apart from every other U.S. president. He has led in the face of extraordinary threats as few of our leaders ever have. This excellent speech was an example of that leadership.
NYT: Why House Republicans Can’t Function, According to a House Republican https://tinyurl.com/bdfdn6nw Interview with Rep. Don Bacon of Nebraska
Q: What is your definition of a conservative, and how is it different from what that smaller segment of the Freedom Caucus is about?
Rep Don Bacon: I see conservatism as supporting federalism, keeping power at the local level to the maximum extent possible, peace through strength, the role of the family is the most important institution in our country, being pro-life. You want to keep violent criminals behind bars, don’t let them out early, because that’s how we’re getting the increase in violence. We believe in trying to balance the budget. I think the new brand of so-called conservatism today is more of populism, because it’s not really conservative in my book. It’s 1930s Republicanism, which was more isolationist, didn’t want to get involved in Europe at all. A lot of the things you hear today from the populist wing sound a lot like the Republicans in the 1930s, and they weren’t very popular. We had F.D.R. They didn’t win back then, either.
🧵 RT @atrupar My thread on President Biden’s primetime speech about his trip to Israel and the war in Ukraine begins here
📌 💽 https://x.com/atrupar/status/1715155104033091618?s=20/photo/1
💙 ≣ NYT: Full Transcript: Biden’s Speech on Israel-Hamas and Russia-Ukraine Wars https://tinyurl.com/jzptd4tt
// The president laid out what he characterized as the stakes for democracy as he pleaded with Americans to stand firmly behind Israel and Ukraine.
💙 💽 CNN: Hear President Biden’s full speech to the nation on Israel and Ukraine https://tinyurl.com/mr2csdhh
// In a primetime address, US President Joe Biden directly appealed to Americans for US support in the wars in Israel and Ukraine and announced he would send an aid package to Congress.
🐣 RT @benshapiro Hamas won’t allow civilians to evacuate because they know that if they do, Israel will then bomb the network of terror tunnels they have built beneath civilian areas. Israel MUST take out those tunnels before a ground incursion or risk the lives of thousands of its soldiers.
🐣 RT @SenWhitehouse Today, @SenBooker, @SenBlumenthal, @SenAlexPadilla and I introduced the Supreme Court Biennial Appointments and Term Limits Act to establish 18-year term limits and regularized appointments for justices.
🐣 RT @Kasparov63 The Ukraine escalation myth was refuted long ago. Putin can never admit anything threatens the invincible Russian forces or that everything isn’t going well. Right up to the point he declares victory and leaves Ukraine. So stop delaying that moment.
⋙ 🐣 RT @Kasparov63 The obviousness of this is why I believe Western officials, especially the US, are afraid not of escalation, but of Putin falling and Russia fragmenting, and therefore are scared of a Ukrainian victory that would go a long way toward achieving those worthy goals.
⋙ 🐣 RT @Kasparov63 It’s a profile in cowardice to prefer a status quo of war and terror, with the world menaced by a nuclear-armed mafia boss. Russia is a terror state. Putin is a war criminal. Any chance at change must be seized, and it’s in our grasp now. Let Ukraine win.
🐣 RT @ChuckPfarrer CIRCLE OF LIES: In the last 20 years, Putin has promoted a generation of corrupt and incompetent general officers. UKR intelligence spokesman Andriy Yusov confirms that as RU losses mount, these officers are concealing just how badly Putin’s war is actually going.
⋙ 🐣 RT @KyivPost Putin Is Being Told ‘Everything is Going to Plan’ [YouTube:] https://tinyurl.com/y9nx9pj9
// In an exclusive interview, Ukrainian intelligence spokesperson Andriy Yusov said anyone who told Putin the real situation on the front line would face being sacked – or worse.
🐣 RT @KyivPost 🇺🇸The US will regularly provide Ukraine with long-range #ATACMS missiles, as announced by Foreign Minister Dmytro #Kuleba. ¤ This is a direct result of the agreements reached between Volodymyr #Zelensky and Joe #Biden during their personal meeting in Washington at the end of September. ¤ 🖼: President’s Office
🐣 RT @GlasnostGone On the back of Russia’s daily killing of civilians in #Ukraine, German chancellor Olaf Scholz slapped down Putin’s cynical concerns for civilian casualties in #Israel & Gaza. Said “I am more than outraged when hearing that the Russian president is warning everywhere that there could be victims, civilian victims of military confrontations. It really doesn’t get any more cynical than that.” [SkyNews:] https://tinyurl.com/yxjj69yw
🐣 RT @ djrothkopf In the weeks and months ahead, anti-Semitism and anti-Muslim hate are certain to rise.
¤ https://x.com/djrothkopf/status/1715003986783228066?s=20
Long simmering prejudices seek license to emerge into the open and the war in Gaza will provide it to all those who are looking for it. Righteous indignation from victims of attacks and victims of apartheid alike will intensify public debate.
President Biden rightly warned of committing the errors we made in the wake of 9/11. Governments and all of us as citizens must do what we can to combat the sources of hate we see emerging. But we also must be aware that our own impulses and those of people we respect to demonize other points of view, to deny historical context, to make false calculations about the relative degree of wrongs that have been committed will contribute to the rise in hate speech and hate crimes.
I’ve already seen it. I’ve felt it even. By making the case for protecting innocents one opens oneself up to criticism that one is somehow protecting terrorists–even one condemns the terrorists and calls for them to face justice in the same sentence.
There is precious little tolerance in this moment for deviations from what are seen as unchallengeable positions. Even the use of the “wrong” vocabulary can trigger debate or threats or worse. Absolutist views become litmus tests and all of a sudden we are back in “either you are with us or you are against us” territory. Criticizing governments is conflated with criticizing religious or ethnic groups. Calling for respect for international law is presented as defending others who are in fact the violators of international law.
President Biden was justified to caution us against falling into the same traps as we did 22 years ago. They advance nothing good. They raise the likelihood of errors or even catastrophes.
Perhaps we could begin by recognizing that we are living in an overheated moment (for understandable reasons). This should lead us to special caution. (Just as it should, for example, lead the Israeli army from undertaking any major action without a clear plan for how that action is to end, what the metrics for success are and understanding how the action leads to greater security and lasting peace.)
It will take a great deal of courage in the days ahead to embrace compassion over passion, nuance over “simple truths” that are neither simple nor entirely the truth. All of us must summon that courage or all of us will suffer the consequences of failing to so. Choose decency and humanity even when there appears to be good reason to set them aside, even when those around you do not.
🐣 RT @ danielsgoldman If the media cannot “independently verify” what happened based on indisputable video evidence, a recorded conversation between two terrorists admitting they did it, ballistics, and Hamas lies — it was a parking lot, not a hospital — then nothing can be “independently verified.”
⋙ 🐣 RT @naftalibennett No, CNN, there aren’t “two sides” to the Gaza hospital story. ¤ Go do your goddamn job.
💽 https://x.com/danielsgoldman/status/1714982954718450036?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @ RonFilipkowski One of Sidney Powell’s very first interviews in Nov 2020 after being retained by Trump. Lies, all lies.
⋙ 🐣 RT @RonFilipkowski [8/14] Here was Sidney Powell in Nov 2020, explaining how she was going to “release the kraken” and put everyone in jail with her new evidence of how Hugo Chavez stole the election from Trump. Sidney was just indicted.
💽 https://x.com/RonFilipkowski/status/1715017472540016905?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @BradMossEsq Reminder that Trump tried to make Sidney Powell an emergency Special Counsel in the final weeks of his presidency. She’s now pleading guilty to felonies.
🐣 RT @kyledcheney BREAKING: Sidney POWELL is in Fulton County court right now pleading guilty.
FT: The US economy has grown roughly twice as fast as that of Europe and the UK in the past two decades — a transatlantic gap economists predict will continue to widen in the coming years https://on.ft.com/3Q5nVgJ
◕ https://x.com/FT/status/1714890901405741399?s=20/photo/1 -2
// GDP and Investment
⭕ 18 Oct 2023
🐣 RT @RichardHaass Speech by President Biden from Israel nothing less than masterful, mixing support for Israel with advice, the personal & the policy. So far @potus deserves high marks for undertaking a difficult diplomatic mission that has grown more difficult and for getting the balance right.
🐣 RT @robbystarbuck So after all the drama yesterday it turns out the Gaza hospital wasn’t bombed, the parking lot was, and 500 people didn’t die. Oh and the rocket wasn’t from Israel, it was from a failed rocket that Palestinian terrorists shot at Israel. Absolutely insane
🐣 RT @ProjectLincoln When Republicans tell you they’re going to cut Social Security, Medicaid and Medicare, believe them. It’s why they’re nominating Jim Jordan for Speaker.
💽 https://x.com/ProjectLincoln/status/1714740635692073192?s=20/photo/1
// Rep Cole nominates Jim Jordan for Speaker
🧵 RT @jburnmurdoch Some quick thoughts on why large parts of the mainstream media keep slipping up on Gaza/Israel (and why it was the same at times with Covid):
📌 https://x.com/jburnmurdoch/status/1714648538746118265?s=20
[ThreadReader:] https://twitter.com/jburnmurdoch/status/1714648538746118265
NBCNews: Biden expected to seek $60B for Ukraine and aid for Israel in $100B funding request https://tinyurl.com/43r9y6dt “The Biden administration is expected to formally submit the $100 billion supplemental request Friday, according to the sources.”
// The White House is expected Friday to submit to Congress a supplemental funding request that will also seek money for Taiwan and the U.S.-Mexico border, sources said.
🐣 RT @JayinKyiv Russian troll farms haven’t only been promoting Jim Jordan him as next US House Speaker because he will sow chaos, but because he is absolutely anti-Ukraine and pro-Kremlin. ¤ Jim Jordan is Putin’s boy.
🐣 RT @StateDept The U.S. is providing $100M in humanitarian assistance for the Palestinian people in Gaza and the West Bank. This funding will help support displaced & conflict-affected people with clean water, food, hygiene support, medical care, and other essential needs.
⋙ WhiteHouse: U.S. Announcement of Humanitarian Assistance to the Palestinian People https://tinyurl.com/6vckb8zt
🐣 RT @HerrDr8 OCT 18: OMAHA Update: The four analytical threads (charts below) go together…
#UkrOffensiveZAP2023 #1pageassessukrwar #OBMtriangleArty #Kto7AAdiv #Kto76AADiv #ukrainewar #UkraineRussianWar #Ukraine️
¤ ◕ 🌎 https://x.com/HerrDr8/status/1714646819311882266?s=20/photo/1 -4
Chart upper left is current situation (@ukraine_map) in Omaha (#Robotyne ) sector of Southern (ZAP) front. Similar to a few weeks ago: Russians continue to defend with a Line of Crapola (TD’s, BARs and associated bunk) supplemented by what’s remaining of 7th and 76th AA Div’s (VDV). Hapless 810th Naval Infantry fled (and given participation award by Shoigu…acknowledging their demise). AFU presses forward (smartly…AFU values its troops and uses its advantages – a sharp contrast with disgraced Russian army…see #KtoAvdiivka ).
2nd chart upper right is the arty chart – depicting competing AFU and RUS arty/CB (counter battery) systems. Important point here is that Tokmak and RUS LoCs are continuing to take a hammering.
Bottom two charts background on what Putin, Shoigu and General G have done to the once pride of the Red Army – the VDV (spetsnaz and nav inf also wrecked).
Romanchuk, who was RUS commander in this area, still seriously WIA (KIA? purged? – no idea): #ktoRomanchukQUIZ Unclear who or what in command now. General Yershov? (#KtoYershov ) Hope so.
Summary: AFU’s BH Liddell Hart indirect approach continues its slow, firm, SMART progress: grinding RUS arty, LoCs, ammo sites and HQs. At the right time and place, AFU will push to Tokmak. When? Unknown…prep work continues at a pace dictated by AFU; Ukraine has the initiative. 😀
🐣 RT @benshapiro Evidence Hamas did it:
Live footage of a rocket failing
Contemporaneous Hamas audio
Drone footage
Footage from the site
Evidence Israel did it:
Well, a genocidal Jew-hating terrorist group did say it was the Jews
🐣 RT @MaxBoot Hamas recognizes the importance of the “battle of the narrative.” That’s why its terrorists were equipped with GoPro cameras during their murderous rampage. But it did not score a significant information-warfare victory until Tuesday’s hospital explosion.
⋙ WaPo, Max Boot: Israel was judged guilty of bombing a Gaza hospital before the evidence was in https://tinyurl.com/2nv6npvt “Hamas recognizes the importance of the “‘battle of the narrative.’ That’s why its terrorists were equipped with GoPro cameras during their murderous rampage”
In their compelling new book, “Conflict: The Evolution of Warfare From 1945 to Ukraine,” retired Gen. David Petraeus and historian Andrew Roberts write: “There are currently five widely recognized dominions of warfare — land, sea, air, cyber and space — but it appears that a sixth should be added, namely information, which is more important now than ever before.” Indeed it is, and nothing better illustrates their point than the current Israel-Hamas war — and in particular, the controversy over the explosion at a hospital in the Gaza Strip on Tuesday. …
Hamas recognizes the importance of the “battle of the narrative.” That’s why its terrorists were equipped with GoPro cameras during their murderous rampage through southern Israel on Oct. 7. Some of their footage quickly found its way to social media. But showing terrorists killing innocent civilians is hardly the way to win the world’s sympathy, which is why the Israeli government itself released some captured footage of atrocities.
Hamas did not score a significant information-warfare victory until Tuesday’s explosion at al-Ahli Hospital. The Hamas-controlled Palestinian Health Ministry in Gaza immediately blamed the blast on an Israeli airstrike and claimed that 500 civilians had been killed. This “breaking news” was immediately, and credulously, picked up by Western news media. (BBC alert: “Hundreds of people have been killed in an Israeli strike on a hospital in Gaza, according to Palestinian officials.”) Even U.S. allies such as Turkey and Saudi Arabia stridently denounced the purported Israeli airstrike. The leaders of the Palestinian Authority, Egypt and Jordan canceled a planned meeting with President Biden. Angry protesters marched everywhere from Beirut to Baghdad.
Yet, a few hours after the initial news, a competing version of events emerged: Israeli spokesmen claimed the casualties were caused not by an Israeli bomb but by a Palestinian Islamic Jihad rocket that went astray. Israel even released a purported intercept of two terrorists discussing the terrible accident. Independent open-source intelligence analysts such as Eliot Higgins of Bellingcat and former U.N. war-crimes investigator Marc Garlasco joined in to say their examinations of photos and videos of the blast site did not reveal the kind of crater that an Israeli bomb would have left. While visiting Israel, Biden backed up its claims, saying the U.S. Defense Department had told him that “the other team” was responsible for the blast. The U.S. intelligence community also absolved Israel; and, after reviewing its findings, so did the Senate Intelligence Committee.
The definitive verdict has yet to be rendered, but it seems fair to say that Israel has a strong case: It has presented evidence backed by outside analysts, and Hamas has not. And yet much of the world did not wait for a fuller picture to emerge before rushing to condemn the Jewish state. …
Israel, as a small liberal democracy in need of international support, is sensitive to global opinion in a way that despotic states such as Russia — which deliberately targets civilians in its military operations — are not. …
I am not one of those who takes an “Israel right or wrong” approach. I have not been hesitant to call out Israel for its misdeeds, whether Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s assault on democracy or Israel’s expansion of settlements in the West Bank. …
In sum, I am not suggesting that anyone should uncritically accept whatever Israel says. But that same skepticism should certainly extend to Hamas, a terrorist organization that is not noted for its devotion to either honesty or human decency. The “battle of the narrative” is more important than ever. That makes it all the more imperative that the world — journalists especially — not echo the claims of either side without first checking them out.
🐣 RT @Osinttechnical Possible impact crater at the Ahli Hospital in Gaza, roughly 1×1 meter, maybe 30cm deep.
🖼 https://x.com/Osinttechnical/status/1714587746612740278?s=20/photo/1
⋙ 🐣 RT @Osinttechnical,Location (31.504918, 34.461601)
🌎 https://x.com/Osinttechnical/status/1714587748718243917?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @djrothkopf Joe Biden undertook considerable risks going to Israel–physical, diplomatic, political. But he has been proven time after time as @POTUS to have one trait many of his predecessors have lacked–guts. And it has repeatedly paid off for the U.S..
🐣 RT @cspan After leaving a House Democratic Caucus meeting, Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) said, “it was a triumph for democracy in our country that an insurrectionist was rejected by the Republicans again as their candidate for Speaker.”
🐣 RT @hahussain I went on a major Arab network late last night. The anchor asked this as a matter of fact: Why did #Israel hit #AlAhliHospital in Gaza? I answered:
¤ https://x.com/hahussain/status/1714720546817012207?s=20
// paragraphs added
I haven’t yet seen evidence proving that Israel did it. However, even if it were Israel, Biden tomorrow will double down on America’s support of Israel because the US, UK, Germany, France and Italy have — after October 7 — said in a joint statement that #Hamas is terrorist, Israel should take it out, after which the world would sponsor resumption of peace talks. I said this war was one way for Israel, there was no going back to October 6 (ceasefire with Hamas) because Israel has discovered that a fence is not enough to keep Israelis safe from Hamas’s crazy outbursts that might kill 1,300 Israelis in the future.
An Egyptian guest on the show went bonkers over me not being certain that Israel hit Gaza hospital, questioning my motives and agenda. He then thrashed my argument that Biden would continue to support Israel, said Arab countries cancelling the summit with him in Jordan taught him a lesson, and that tomorrow in Israel he would walk back his support of Israel. If he did not, America risked one large flame engulfing the region. Hezbollah would enter the war, Iran, and also nuclear Russia. The world would explode, and hence after the hospital attack, Biden would backtrack and force Israel to stop the war.
Today, Israel presented evidence that the hospital blast was not an Israeli attack but an errant Palestinian rocket. Using their own ways and sources, half a dozen Western intel agencies came to the same conclusion. Biden visited Israel and reiterated his full support of taking out Hamas, saying even ISIS was more rational than Hamas. Western media, for its part, burnt its fingers when it first endorsed the Palestinian unfounded claim that Israel struck the hospital. Western media later walked back its reporting. Today, even The Washington Muslim Brotherhood Post did not call it an attack, only a blast. The only group on planet earth that is still living in its own lala land and believing an unfounded rumor that it had put out, without offering any evidence (not even pictures of hospital rubble), has been the Arab World, all of it– governments, populations and media. It seems that Arabs think that if we keep on saying it, and shame any Arabic speaker for not supporting our claim, it’ll become true.
It’s been 11 days. My line of argument on Arabic media has been to explain things and not succumb to the wishful thinking that many Arabs are trafficking in. According to wishful thinking, the world would force Israel to call off decimating Hamas, or even better, Israel would just disappear. In reality, Hamas will be decimated, and the Arabs will only come around, half heartedly, because reality will leave them behind. This insistence on living in fairytales, detached from global reality, has cost the Palestinians everything over the past 75 years. Arabs have been crying victim for 75 years hoping that would shame the world, always thinking that global opinion is changing in Arab favor, often citing deranged Western intellectuals or antisemites and perceiving them as an expanding mainstream opinion.
Palestinians deserve better. The faster we in the Arab world come to terms with reality, the shorter Palestinian misery will be. I know that reality might not accord with wishful thinking and emotions, but the cost of living in fantasy world has brought us here. Let’s try reality and see where it takes us. #musings #exhaustion
🐣 RT @djrothkopf Note to whomever is doing the speechwriting for @POTUS but in the last few weeks he has done three, one on democracy and two on Israel, that are not only the best of his career, but among the best of any recent president. They will all be remembered.
🐣 RT @mccaffreyr3 Bomb damage assessment is fairly straightforward for military ordnance. There is zero probability that an IDF 500 lb bomb caused the damage seen in these videos. Zero. Also from video extremely hard to believe this caused hundreds of casualties.
💙 🧵 RT @reuven_cazh Facts, not narratives, determine reality! Share the facts ¤ all the details about the explosion at the hospital in Gaza: 1/15 #Gaza #GazaAttack #hospital #IsraelAttack #TheRealImage
📌 🖼 https://x.com/reuven_cazh/status/1714607251309105314?s=20/photo/1 -n
🐣 RT @nexta_tv ❗The Palestinian Health Ministry said 471 people were killed in the shelling of the al-Ahli Arab hospital in Gaza City ¤ Also Israeli media, citing the Foreign Minister, report that today Israel will present in the UN Security Council concrete evidence of its non-involvement in the attack on the hospital in Gaza.
🐣 RT @michaeldweiss No World War III, after all: “Why supply ATACMS? Let (the US) take back ATACMS and all other weapons. Let (Biden) sit down for pancakes and come to us for a tea party,” Putin told reporters in Beijing.”
🐣 RT @Osinttechnical Honestly a bunch of people are going to have to come to terms with the fact that they fell victim to incredibly weak propaganda that was unintentionally refuted by the source in a convincing manner less than 12 hours later ¤ Oh who am I kidding there’s absolutely no way they will
🐣 RT @front_ukrainian ⚡️The 🇺🇸United States transferred about 20 ATACMS missiles to 🇺🇦Ukraine, – NYT. ¤ The delivery was carried out secretly, because Ukraine wanted to take the 🇷🇺Russians by surprise and prevent them from moving the equipment.
🐣 RT @IDF A failed rocket launch by the Islamic Jihad terrorist organization hit the Al Ahli hospital in Gaza City. ¤ IAF footage from the area around the hospital before and after the failed rocket launch by the Islamic Jihad terrorist organization:
💽 https://x.com/IDF/status/1714513625598021868?s=20/photo/1
🧵RT @Osinttechnical And we now have footage of the (partially) burnt-out parking lot at the Ahli Hospital in Gaza. ¤ Overall damage to the structures in the complex appears to be limited, a clay-tiled awning adjacent to the parking lot is still mostly intact.
📌 🖼 https://x.com/Osinttechnical/status/1714525590873575600?s=20/photo/1
🧵 RT @MalcolmNance ANALYSIS: I wore headphones for @NSAGov for nearly 2 decades. This @IDF Signals Intelligence (SIGINT) is a telephone voice intercept between two individuals. It is the exact conversation (called Hot Copy) any SIGINT team would have been furiously searching for b/c we know senior terrorists MUST be discussing it. But for Israel to release this raw SIGINT shows how serious the damage the explosion has done to its narrative of professionalism.
💙 ⋙ 🐣 RT @DonKlericuzio (Independently verified) ¤ The recording of Hamas militants that proves the Palestinian Islamic Jihad is behind the strike on the Hospital in Gaza👇
📌 🔊 https://x.com/MalcolmNance/status/1714578755203793125?s=20
💙 🐣 RT @IDFIslamic Jihad struck a Hospital in Gaza—the IDF did not. ¤ Listen to the terrorists as they realize this themselves:
🔊 https://x.com/IDF/status/1714548529538953637?s=20
⭕ 17 Oct 2023
🔄 ≣ JustSecurity, Ryan Goodman et al: Expert Guidance: Law of Armed Conflict in the Israel-Hamas War https://tinyurl.com/yvmnax44 “describes the law of armed conflict (LOAC), also known as international humanitarian law, that applies to the ongoing Israel-Hamas war”
// … Michael W Meier and Tess Bridgeman
[TextLink:] https://x.com/Auriandra/status/1715501747722924374?s=20/photo/1
[Text:] Core Principles of International Humanitarian Law:
● The distinction between civilians and combatants
● The prohibition to attack those hors de combat
● The prohibition to inflict unnecessary suffering
● The principle of necessity
● The principle of proportionality
📊 TheHill: Supporting Ukraine is in US interest, most voters say https://tinyurl.com/2b7je9s4 Quinnipiac Poll: 65% say yes, 28% say no
🐣 RT @washingtonpost The United States is sending an amphibious task force of thousands of U.S. sailors and Marines toward Israel, where they will be positioned aboard warships in case the conflict there with Hamas expands.
⋙ WaPo: Pentagon surging thousands of troops toward Israel amid Gaza war https://tinyurl.com/2t3ze7en
// The U.S. is projecting military strength in the Middle East as its diplomats race to prevent the crisis from erupting into a broader conflict
🐣 RT @BryanDawsonUSA “AN EGREGIOUS INTELLIGENCE BREACH” ¤ Court filings in London claim Trump’s classified info leak led to the disappearance of 2 sources in Russia.
¤ https://x.com/BryanDawsonUSA/status/1714489896830689773?s=20
In his witness statement, British Spy Christopher Steele said Trump’s decision to declassify his testimony to Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation back in 2017 as “one of the most egregious breaches of intelligence rules and protocol by the US government in recent times.”
On his last day serving as president, Trump declassified Steele’s evidence. The leak resulted in tragic consequences.Two of the named Russian sources have not been seen or heard of since.
“The publication of this document did serious damage to the U.S. government’s Russian operations and their ability to recruit new Russian sources,” Steele said.
🐣 RT @islamicstrength This was Al-Ahli Baptist Hospital 24 hours before Israel BOMBED it. ¤ Full of families who were sheltering. Children cleaning, gardening, and trying to survive a genocide. ¤ Everyone in this video is most probably dead or severely injured. Full of kids. ¤ The author of the before video, Mohammed Sami has reportedly passed away too. ¤ May Allah grant him and all these pure souls the highest rank in Jannah. Ameen.
💽 https://x.com/islamicstrength/status/1714376950670602549?s=20/photo/1 -2
🐣 RT @IsraelWarRoom We see you stealth-editing your headlines to cover your lies, @nytimes. Maybe don’t take terrorists at their word next time.
🖼 https://x.com/IsraelWarRoom/status/1714412194128171237?s=20/photo/1
// 3 NYT headlines about explosion
🐣 RT @malsaafin The glee, then the backtracking.
[TextLink:] https://x.com/malsaafin/status/1714437017142976792?s=20/photo/1 -2
[Text:] 🐣 RT @HananyaNaftali Earlier today I shared a report that was published on @reuters about the bombing at the hospital in Gaza which falsely stated Israel struck the hospital. I mistakenly shared this information in a since deleted post in which I referenced Hamas’ routine use of hospitals to store weapons caches and conduct terrorist activity. I apologize for this error.
As the IDF does not bomb hospitals, I assumed Israel was targeting one of the Hamas bases in Gaza. ¤ It is known that Hamas is using civilians as human shields, it is a war crime and a crime against humanity. This should be the focus.
🧵 RT @AVindman The theory for placing 2 carrier strike groups & an amphibious ready group with a marine expeditionary unit in the Middle East is it will deter Iran, Hezbollah, & Syria. @POTUS is visiting to support & reassure Israel, influence its’s ground operations, & deter enemies. But… 1/6
📌 https://x.com/AVindman/status/1714225142509813903?s=20
[ThreadReader:] https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1714225142509813903.html
The show of strength & POTUS visit may not be enough of to deter. There’s been an erosion of deterrence. Internal chaos driven but Trumpism, a soft national security policy towards Russia/ insufficient support for Ukraine give our enemies the perception the US won’t act. 2/6
Our enemies have baked in demonstrations as the limits of our actions. The Biden Admin will need to act to make the threat of military force real. There is plenty of Iranian terror infrastructure the U.S. and Israeli can obliterate in a combined operation. 3/6
But it’s unlikely the U.S. will act or will act too late. The pattern from the National Security establishment is pretty clear. They are deterred by fears of escalation and the belief that their actions will be the driver of crisis and further violence. Same as with Ukraine. 4/6
The reality is our enemies see opportunities in our domestic chaos & the slow action of the Admin. For the 20 months of the Ukraine war, they have been calibrated to believe that the US will self-deter. This one consequence of the Afghanistan withdrawal. A fear of action. 5/6
The U.S. will likely need to instantiate its support of Israel. By punishing terror infrastructure, resulting the loss of dozens of U.S. lives, Iran and its Hezbollah proxy would be deterred from sparking a broader regional war. 6/6
BTW. Why isn’t the U.S. taking action to punish the terror networks responsible for killing dozens of Americans?
🐣 RT @officejjsmart 🔥🔥🔥 Jerusalem, Israel 🇮🇱 as Palestinian rioting spreads. ¤ Russia 🇷🇺 & Iran 🇮🇷 gain from this all.
🐣 RT @DaveKelley6 What I’m seeing… Russia, Iran, Turkey and all their satellites… look like they see the attack on Israel as an introduction to WW-III… Putin and others want authoritarian world order… they seem to feel ready to defeat democracies through conflict… they’re staging for it.
🐣 RT @ @TimInHonolulu We should have bombers in the air with strike packages to end Iran as a potential nuclear power. @JakeSullivan46 I warned you about Turkey for years.
⋙ 🐣 RT @D_abdulkader NOW: Baghdad, Iraq—massive crowd heads towards the US embassy. ¤ They’re chanting “America is the greatest devil.”
🐣 RT @officejjsmart “🇮🇱 COMMITTED A WAR CRIME” ¤ The Arab world, at 23:00, waking-up & saying this isn’t ‘a coincidence’:
📌 King of Jordan: Gaza hospital bombing ‘massacre’ & ‘war crime.’
📌 Saudi Foreign Ministry: Gaza bombing is a heinous crime.
📌 Iran, Iraq &Lebanon: Tomorrow day of mourning.
🐣 RT @jconricus Apalled by the double standards in reporting: breaking coverage on @BBCWorld automatically blames Israel for an explosion at a Gaza hospital, based solely on what terrorist Hamas claims! ¤ And when we investigate and refute the claims, evidence must be delivered. I have no issue with being held accountable, but only wish our enemies are held to the same scrutiny. Watch my interview.
🐣 RT @TimInHonolulu Certainly on Erdogan’s orders, Turkey is attacking a @NATO Radar Base in Turkey. Don’t say I didn’t warn you folks @DefenseIntel @NSC_Spox @PentagonPresSec @OfficialDSSNG
⋙ 🐣 RT @BabakTaghvaee1 #BREAKING: Thousands of Angry Turks are going to Kürecik Radar Base in Malatya, #Turkey where tens of #US Military forces are. They want to attack them following to the false claim of their president #Erdogan about #Israel being behind explosion of #Gaza’s Al-Ahli hospital!
🐣 RT @netanyahu The entire world should know: It was barbaric terrorists in Gaza that attacked the hospital in Gaza, and not the IDF. ¤ Those who brutally murdered our children also murder their own children.
🐣 RT @SaffronJivi This video claims to be of the moment Al-Ahli Arab hospital in Gaza City was b0mbed by Hamas own misfired rocket…
💽 https://x.com/SaffronJivi/status/1714379667539669040?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @netanyahu An analysis of IDF operational systems indicates that a barrage of rockets was fired by terrorists in Gaza, passing in close proximity to the Al Ahli hospital in Gaza at the time it was hit. ¤ Intelligence from multiple sources we have in our hands indicates that Islamic Jihad is responsible for the failed rocket launch which hit the hospital in Gaza.
🐣 RT @RonFilipkowski Biden wrapping Ukraine aid in a package with funding for Israel and southern border security is absolute political genius. Amazing how an old and senile president just keeps racking up huge legislative wins while outfoxing his opponents time after time.
🐣 RT @ officejjsmart ⚡️⚡️⚡️ Palestine 🇵🇸 is becoming critically unstable. ¤ “Protests against 🇵🇸 President Mahmoud Abbas erupted in the Palestinian city of Ramallah, Palestine 🇵🇸.” ¤ Protesters shout “down with the president!”
🐣 RT @IDF Following an analysis by the IDF’s operational systems, a barrage of rockets was launched toward Israel, which passed in the vicinity of the hospital, when it was hit. ¤ According to intelligence information from a number of sources we have, Islamic Jihad terrorist organization is responsible for the failed rocket launch that hit the hospital.
🐣 RT @IDF RAW FOOTAGE: A rocket aimed at Israel misfired and exploded at 18:59—the same moment a hospital was hit in Gaza.
💽 https://x.com/IDF/status/1714403025136017784?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @Rail_splitter1 The social media advisor to Netanyahu (and unofficial spokesperson of IDF) Hananya Naftali tweeted that IDF had, in fact, bombed the hospital because there were “terrorists” inside.
[TextLink:] https://x.com/Rail_splitter1/status/1714421692616056903?s=20/photo/1
[Text:] 🐣 RT @HananyaNaftali BREAKING: Israeli Air Force struck a Hamas,terrorist base inside a hospital in Gaza. ¤ A multiple number of terrorists are dead. It’s heartbreaking that Hamas is launching rockets from hospitals, Mosques, schools, and using civilians as human shields. ¤ #Hamas_Is_ISIS
🐣 RT @POTUS I am outraged and deeply saddened by the explosion at the Al Ahli Arab hospital in Gaza, and the terrible loss of life that resulted. Immediately upon hearing this news, I spoke with King Abdullah II of Jordan, and Prime Minister Netanyahu of Israel and have directed my national security team to continue gathering information about what exactly happened. ¤ The United States stands unequivocally for the protection of civilian life during conflict and we mourn the patients, medical staff and other innocents killed or wounded in this tragedy.
🐣 RT @ officejjsmart LEBANON IS OUT OF CONTROL ⚡️⚡️⚡️ “A giant convoy moves towards the 🇺🇸 US Embassy in Beirut, Lebanon 🇱🇧. ¤ This is against the backdrop of two US air groups in the Mediterranean.”
💙 ⋙ 🐣 RT @hoff_lars The situation with the hospital in #Gaza is a pre-planned action to raise the escalation to an even higher level. #russia and #Iran are leading this process. Launching global war
🐣 RT @officejjsmart PRO-PALESTINE 🇵🇸 PROTESTS IN EGYPT 🇪🇬 # Protests against Israel 🇮🇱 & supporting Palestine 🇵🇸 have broken-out in Egypt 🇪🇬.
🐣 RT @ officejjsmart⚡️⚡️⚡️ 🇺🇸 US Embassy in Baghdad, Iraq 🇮🇶 prepares for crowds to try to storm it.
🐣 RT @officejjsmart⚡️⚡️⚡️ Situation now in Jordan 🇯🇴. ¤ Jordan’s King, Abdullah II, has said that the region is on the verge of a dark “abyss” that would plunge into a large war that no country can afford.
🐣 RT @officejjsmart⚡️⚡️⚡️ “The summit with Biden 🇺🇸 in Amman, Jordan 🇯🇴 is cancelled.”- Al Jazeera quoting the Jordanian Foreign Ministry. ¤ It was scheduled for October 18. ¤ Currently, there are riots near the Israeli Embassy in Jordan 🇯🇴.
🐣 RT @officejjsmart PROTESTS AGAINST FRANCE 🇫🇷 ¤ “Tehran. Demonstration in front of the French Embassy. ¤ Biden has already left for Israel.” ¤ The Middle East is unhinged.
🐣 RT @officejjsmart 🇬🇧 BRITISH EMBASSY IN IRAN 🇮🇷 ¤ British Embassy will not be able to keep back such a large crowd for long unless Tehran sends forces to protect it… ¤ Which Tehran is obligated to do under international law.
🐣 RT @officejjsmart ISRAELI CONSULATE OVERRUN ¤ ⚡️⚡️⚡️⚡️ Protesters in Istanbul, Turkey 🇹🇷 overtook the 🇮🇱 Israeli consulate. ¤ This is in NATO’s Turkey. ¤ The situation in the Arab world & Iran tomorrow will be horrific.
🐣 RT @officejjsmart ⚡️⚡️⚡️ In Kurecik, Turkey 🇹🇷: A crowd is trying to break into the 🇺🇸 American military base. ¤ The US has no option other than to use lethal force to protect its NATO military bases, located in a NATO COUNTRY (!!), if Pres. Erdogan will not send more cops & soldiers to protect it.
🐣 RT @ Maks_NAFO_FELLA 💔 “The death toll from the attack on a hospital in the Gaza Strip has risen to 800”, – Al Arabiya ¤ P.S. What do you think?
🐣 AF1 should turn back, perhaps? The Middle East is exploding over one piece of misinformation. But the danger is real.
🐣 RT @officejjsmart ⚡️⚡️⚡️ In Jordan, police are struggling to contain a crowd that is trying to storm the 🇮🇱 Israeli & 🇺🇸 US embassies. ¤ The US & Israel have a right to use lethal force to protect their diplomatic compounds. ¤ But, with such large crowds, it’s time to to start destroying documents.
🐣 RT @ ChuckPfarrer UNFRIENDLY FIRE: @david_lisovtsev posts this footage of the Al Ahli hospital being hit. The explosion is NOT consistent with either a JDAM (2000 lbs) or JDAM-ER (250 lbs explosive). It appears that a malfuntioning rocket fired by Palestinian Islamic Jihad went astray.
⋙ 🐣 RT @david_lisovtsev First clear footage from the Al Ahli tragedy in Gaza, but what do you notice? ¤ this is a surface explosion, almost no soil is thrown up, so it’s not an air bomb. Looks like a failed Hamas rocket that landed there, what a tragedy has Hamas brought to the people of Gaza!
🐣 RT @Acyn Aguilar: A vote today to make the architect of a nationwide abortion ban, a vocal election denier, and an insurrection insider to the speaker of this house would be a terrible message to the country and our allies.
🐣 RT @front_ukrainian ⚡️Our agreements with President Biden are being implemented. They are executed very accurately – “ATACMS” have proven themselves, – Zelenskyi
Thank you to everyone who fights and works for Ukraine! Thanks to everyone who helps! And today special thanks to the United States.
🐣 RT @RepJasonCrow The House is about to vote on Jim Jordan for Speaker.
Let’s see who he is:
1. Never passed a bill in his 16 years in Congress
2. Founder of the extreme right Freedom Caucus
3. Supports national abortion ban without exceptions
4. Supported Trump’s attempt to overturn the election
Republicans: you can choose to govern or destroy. But you can’t choose both.
WaPo: Ukraine used long-range ATACMS to strike Russian depot and aircraft https://tinyurl.com/mr3c9krf “A U.S. official familiar with the version of ATACMS supplied to Ukraine said the range was about 100 miles. Other versions of the weapon an strike targets 190 miles away”
🐣 RT @McFaul We are lucky to have @SecBlinken in this diplomatic job right now.
⋙ 🐣 RT @SecBlinken Today, at our request, the United States and Israel have agreed to develop a plan that will enable humanitarian aid from donor nations and multilateral organizations to reach civilians in Gaza, including the possibility of creating areas to help keep civilians out of harm’s way.
🐣 RT @World_At_War_6 I don’t think Russia can handle Atacms. Even before the US sent them, Russia had difficulty defending itself against Stormshadow and Scalp missiles. ¤ Atacms is a ballistic missile and it moves completely differently….Hard to intercept!
🐣 RT @BillKristol I came to D.C. to work in the Reagan Administration because (to oversimplify) it was pro-Constitution, pro-U.S. global leadership, pro-military, pro-Israel, pro-democratic capitalism, and pro-American dream. And that’s why I now support the Biden Administration and Democrats.
🐣 RT @ChuckPfarrer A CASE OF DEJA VU: The RU helicopter base near the occupied city of Berdyansk was attacked last night by a UKR long range precision strike. @officejjsmart reports that debris collected on site appear to be consistent with the ATACMS missile system.
◕ https://x.com/ChuckPfarrer/status/1714260177107476721?s=20/photo/1
[⋙] 🐣 RT @officejjsmart UKRAINE🇺🇦 HAS ATACAMS?? ¤ 🇷🇺 news reports that debris of ATACMS were Glinda following the 🇺🇦 attack on 🇷🇺-occupied Berdyansk’s airport. ¤ Seems that, finally, Ukraine 🇺🇦 destroy the barbarian-invaders from afar!
🐣 RT @TheRickWilson Sure, Jordan is easily ridiculed, but I’m quite serious when I say that he may well be the cause of the collapse of the American Republic. ¤ He’s proximate to almost every bit of the 2020 election plot and Jaunary 6. ¤ Jordan will burn down the world for Trump.
🐣 RT @front_ukrainian⚡️A 🇷🇺Russian former pilot and now a blogger who has close ties with the Russian Air Force confirmed the night attack on the Russian army airfield where helicopters (Ka-52; Mi-28; Mi-8) were based. He writes that one of the most serious blows was inflicted during the entire war. There were losses in equipment and people. He also writes that the blow was inflicted by ATACMS
🐣 RT @front_ukrainian 🚀ATACMS missile strike zone
🌎 https://x.com/front_ukrainian/status/1714256969265979901?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @front_ukrainian ⚡️Apparently, the 🇺🇦Ukrainian Armed Forces used the MGM-140B ATACMS Block 1A (M39A1) ballistic cluster missile to strike the Berdyansk airfield.
● This missile contains 275-300 M74 submunitions (already found at the impact site) and is capable of hitting targets at a range of up to 300 kilometers.
● The missile is capable of being launched from the M142 HIMARS, M270B and MARS II launchers already in service with the Ukrainian Armed Forces.
🖼 https://x.com/front_ukrainian/status/1714254415979221009?s=20/photo/1
// single zone
🐣 RT @KyivIndependent ⚡️ Ukraine’s special forces say they destroyed 9 Russian helicopters in occupied territories. ¤ Ukrainian overnight strikes on Russian military airfields in occupied Luhansk and Berdiansk destroyed nine helicopters, an air defense system, and an ammunition warehouse, the Special Operations Forces reported on Oct. 17.
⋙ 🐣 RT @KyivIndependent The attacks also hit the airfields’ runways and “special equipment” stored at the premises, the Ukrainian military said, without elaborating on the nature of this equipment. ¤ Dozens of Russian personnel were killed and wounded as a result of the operation, according to the report. “Bodies are still being pulled from the rubble.”
⋙⋙ 🐣 additional range from ATACMS
🌎 https://x.com/Auriandra/status/1714258413595607166?s=20/photo/1
// multi-zone
🐣 RT @OAlexanderDK ATACMS confirmed 👀 ¤ M74 submunition at Berdyansk airfield
🖼 https://x.com/OAlexanderDK/status/1714249964954542201?s=20/photo/1 -2
🐣 RT @RHCJO His Majesty King Abdullah II to host four-way summit in Amman tomorrow with US President Joe Biden, Egypt President Abdel Fattah El Sisi, Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas to discuss dangerous developments in Gaza, its regional impact, & ensuring provision of aid into the Strip
🐣 RT @DefenceU This morning Armed Forces of Ukraine successfully struck russian helicopters and aviation equipment at the temporarily occupied Berdyansk and Luhansk Airfields, – @AFUStratCom reports.
[TextLink:] https://x.com/DefenceU/status/1714211238043910155?s=20/photo/1
[Text:] 17.10.2023 ¤ STRUCK
On the morning of October 17, Armed Forces of Ukraine successfully struck helicopters, ammunition, and equipment of the russian occupiers at the temporarily occupied Berdvansk
and Luhansk Airfields. Glory to the Armed Forces of
Ukraine!
● UAF StratCom
🐣 RT @ PStyle0ne1 A Russian milblogger mentions the use of cluster ammo to target the Berdyansk airfield last night
[TextLink:] https://x.com/PStyle0ne1/status/1714238190125465600?s=20/photo/1
[Text:] [By:] Alex Parker Returns ¤ Upon arrival at the Berdyansk airfield. Cluster munitions were used to carry out the strikes. That is why it was possible to cause such significant damage. Live with it now.
🐣 RT @PStyle0ne1 BREAKING ‼️ A Russian milblogger with strong ties with the Russian Air Force claims that Ukraine used ATACMS for the first time to target airfields in Berdyansk and Luhansk ¤ Serious losses are reported
[TextLink:] https://x.com/PStyle0ne1/status/1714164680103432382?s=20/photo/1
[Text:] 🐣 RT @Fighterbomber It’s not a good morning. The crests attacked our airfield at night, where the Army Aviation was based, with ATA[C]MS missiles. One of the most serious blows of all time in the Northern Military District. If not the most serious. ¤ There are losses in both people and technology. It’s pointless to write about the fact that “we need to draw conclusions so that this doesn’t happen again.” This will happen again as long as the war continues. We must be prepared for this.
🐣 RT @PhillipSmyth But wait. There’s more. Trotting out the old combined threat of the dual shaytan. Think about this narrative for future conflict if/when Iran tries to hit U.S. forces/interests and Israel with their grander Shia militia army (including Leb. Hizballah) & Palestinian proxies.
🐣 RT @dassakaye SL threat against US forces in Iraq/Syria (previously targeted by Iranian-aligned militia forces in Iraq)? Many worrying statements coming out of Tehran over last 24 hrs.
🐣 RT @michaelh992 [Horowitz] Seems #Iran may be gearing up to carry out attacks against the US.
⋙ 🐣 RT @khamenei_ir Our numerous intelligence reports show that the US is formulating the Zionist regime’s current policy, and what is being done is governed by US policymaking. The US must be held responsible for this situation.
🐣 RT @vtchakarova Huge > Ukraine has conducted strikes against targets in southern Ukraine that were previously out of its range, including an airfield in Berdyansk. Massive Russian helicopter/aircraft losses. Possibly the first use of ATACMS. via @nicolange_
⭕ 16 Oct 2023
🐣 RT @MaddowBlog Given Jim Jordan’s key role in Donald Trump’s election subversion scheme, Rachel Maddow points out, “it becomes basically an open question as to whether a House under Jordan’s leadership would ever certify the election results of an election in which Donald Trump ran but lost.”
WaPo, Philip Bump: Despite Fox News’s pre-midterm obsession, violent crime was down in 2022 https://tinyurl.com/u8cf4xm8 Violent crime is down significantly since the 1990s. There was an increase in homicides in 2020, when Trump was president
◕ https://x.com/Auriandra/status/1714206500795617767?s=20/photo/1 -2
WaPo: How Hamas’s carefully planned Israel attack devolved into a chaotic rampage https://tinyurl.com/9hmrew73 “It was, by both Palestinian and Israeli accounts, a staggering and unexpected Hamas victory and an indictment of Israel’s vaunted military and intelligence services”
🐣 RT @KyivPost US President #Biden will visit #Israel on Wednesday, CNN reported. ¤ The White House spokesperson, Jean-Pierre, said that after that, Biden will head to Jordan, where he will meet with King Abdullah, the President of Egypt, and the President of the Palestinian Authority. ¤ 🖼 : AFP
🐣 RT @MaddowBlog Given Jim Jordan’s key role in Donald Trump’s election subversion scheme, Rachel Maddow points out, “it becomes basically an open question as to whether a House under Jordan’s leadership would ever certify the election results of an election in which Donald Trump ran but lost.”
🐣 RT @Acyn AOC: We will see if individuals like Mike Lawler or Marc Molinaro who represent New Yorkers… will actually vote to install a man who voted to overturn the election and who supports a national abortion ban to be Speaker…
🐣 RT @alexplitsas This letter from the Israeli Defense Forces Chief of Staff to Israeli troops has a very Eisenhower pre D-Day tone and feel to it, making it clear that the war and the most difficult parts of it have yet to begin
⋙ 🐣 RT @IDF A meaningful letter from the IDF Chief of the General Staff, LTG Herzi Halevi, to fellow soldiers, commanders and reservists:
[TextLink:] https://x.com/alexplitsas/status/1714124776397009118?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @MEMRIReports Hamas Political Bureau Member Osama Hamdan: We Oppose Just One Thing – the Existence of Israel; We Are Willing to Help the Israelis Go Back to Where They Came from #Hamas #Israel #Palestinians
💽 https://x.com/MEMRIReports/status/1713904050914132046?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @djrothkopf Nothing that the January 6 rioters did in or to the Capitol would debase the institution more than electing Jim Jordan speaker. In fact, make no mistake, elevating Jordan is literally continuing the coup attempt by putting one of its leaders in charge of a house of Congress.
TheBulwark, Jill Lawrence: Jim Jordan: An Absurd and Dangerous Choice for House Speaker https://tinyurl.com/3rkw8ahd “Here are nine of the countless reasons he can’t be trusted with U.S. democracy”
🧵 RT @rparloff I’m at E. Barrett Prettyman US Courthouse this morning. Plan is to live-tweet for @lawfare the 10:00am hearing in USA v Trump (DC) over govt’s request to impose gag order on Trump. Key language of order govt seeks is below. ¤ /1
📌 https://x.com/rparloff/status/1713883146742063381?s=20
[ThreadReader:] https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1713883146742063381?refresh=1697473528
[…] [Judge:] i am going to grant in part & deny in part motion to restrict out of court statements.
defendant has sought to represent every statement …
/70
… as part & parcel of his argument that Administration is prosecuting an opponent protected by 1st amendment.
but there is right to restrict language that threatens administration of justice.
won’t impose limit on statements about DC … will consider that in jury selecti
/71
won’t restrict statements on Biden Adm or DOJ.
i will however prohibit all parties from making or reposting statements public targeting Special Counsel, his staff; my staff; court personnel. statements targeting family of these people also prohibited as well.
/72
can’t call prosecutors ‘deranged’ or ‘thugs’
can’t villify or incite violence against public officials.
also going to [bar] statements about witnesses or substance of expected testimony. … there is real risk witnesses may be intimidated … other witnesses may be
/73
… reluctant to go forward.
trump can assert his belief that this prosecution is politically motivated. but can’t launch smear campaign against participants in this case … no other criminal def can do that. he can’t either.
🐣 RT @SpencerGuard 600 days. 600 days Ukraine has fought for their survival. 600 days Russia have violated the UN Charter and every Law of War I know of committing war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide. Kidnapping thousands of children, raping, murdering, mutilating civilians and POWs.
⋙ 🐣 RT @ZelenskyyUa 600 days of defiance against Russia’s full-scale aggression.
🖼 https://x.com/ZelenskyyUa/status/1713865692938670586?s=20/photo/1 -4
Freedom is gained by a will that does not give up. Freedom founded on unity always prevails. The goal is to not waste time. Not lose unity. Not let doubts undermine our resolve.
Every day, we must add to Ukraine’s strength. Every day, we must destroy the occupier. ¤ Every day, we must make every effort to ensure that Ukraine’s future belongs solely to Ukrainians.
I thank everyone who is fighting and working for Ukraine’s freedom. May the memory of everyone who gave their lives to preserve our nation be eternal and blessed.
We will undoubtedly prevail. 🇺🇦🇺🇦🇺🇦
🐣 RT @BillKristol “The Kremlin may not have fully adopted the position of Dugin, that Russia should side with Iran and ditch Israel as a refuge for “traitors and accomplices of our mortal enemy, the West…” [But it is] now tilted strongly toward the anti-Israel side.”
⋙ TheBulwark, Cathy Young: Russia Tilts Toward Hamas https://tinyurl.com/585ecdxz
// Whatever its connection to the attack, Vladimir Putin’s regime sees benefits in the war
🐣 RT @BillKristol “Russia’s de facto choice of solidarity with Iran and Hamas solidifies its membership in the global totalitarian alliance in conflict with liberal civilization—a conflict that manifests itself in Ukraine and Israel alike.” [Bulwark:] https://tinyurl.com/585ecdxz
🐣 RT @MiddleEastEye In an interview with Sky News, the Israeli ambassador to the UK, Tzipi Hotovely, said that there is no humanitarian crisis in Gaza, and said “would you expect your government to think about those Nazis committing those crimes?”
💽 https://x.com/MiddleEastEye/status/1713896826707861765?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @ProjectLincoln “We must now agree that Biden’s reelection represents the continuation of the American experiment. We’re ready to get to work.” ¤ Read more from @Reedgalen @TheRickWilson @stuartPStevens @JoeTrippi
🐣 RT @GlasnostGone “We cannot allow #Ukraine to lose the war…” The US treasury secretary, Janet Yellen, said support for Ukraine remained a “top priority” for the US & Europe. Said Biden administration would fight to ensure a bipartisan majority in congress enacted “robust” & uninterrupted assistance for the country. [Guardian:] https://tinyurl.com/ym4jm6fw
WaPo, David Ignatius: A war that must be waged with an eye toward what comes after https://tinyurl.com/3jyw6zm8 “Netanyahu must be wise, as Roosevelt was, to wage war in a way that allows for a stable peace after his adversary’s defeat”
A paradox of war is that it can open the way, after tragic suffering, to the kind of fundamental realignment that can bring a durable peace. That was apparent to President Franklin D. Roosevelt at his January 1943 meeting in Casablanca to plan strategy for a conflict whose savage bloodletting was only beginning.
Roosevelt told British Prime Minister Winston Churchill that to eliminate the power of their adversaries, the Allies must seek their unconditional surrender. “It does not mean the destruction of the population of Germany, Italy or Japan,” Roosevelt said, “but it does mean the destruction of [their] philosophies … based on conquest and subjugation.”
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is at a similar moment as Israeli tanks roll toward Gaza. He has demanded, in effect, the unconditional surrender of Hamas and the end of its terrorist control of the crowded enclave. “We will crush and destroy it,” he told Israelis Wednesday night. He seeks to make it impossible for Hamas to carry out such horrors again.
But Netanyahu must be wise, as Roosevelt was, to wage war in a way that allows for a stable peace after his adversary’s defeat. If he waits until the conflict is over to think about “the day after,” it might be too late. And if he conducts a war that punishes Palestinian civilians, rather than Hamas, he might lose global support and undermine his mission.
Netanyahu has one wild card that, if he plays it well, could reorder the Middle East. That’s the growing willingness of Saudi Arabia, the dominant Arab power, to form an open partnership with Israel — so long as Israel seeks a stable and lasting peace with the Palestinians.
… The United States has so far managed the difficult trick of keeping faith with both Israel, whose pain President Biden seemed to share viscerally in his televised remarks this week, and with key Arab allies. Secretary of State Antony Blinken has been shuttling through the region this week to meet top officials in Israel, Jordan, Qatar, Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, the UAE and Egypt.
In Israel on Thursday, Blinken offered a shorthand of his vision of the Middle East, post-conflict: “A region that comes together, integrated, normalized relations among its countries, people working in common purpose to common benefit. More peaceful, more stable.” …
As Israel pursues the destruction of Hamas, the coming days will bring more shattering scenes of violence and suffering. Many Arabs would like to see Hamas vanquished, too, but they hope Netanyahu will be wise in how he uses force — with an eye, always, on what will follow.
🐣 RT @armyinformcomua 600 days of war.
600 days of courage, resilience and resolve.
600 days of a war that has lasted for more than 9 years.
Ukraine remains steadfast.
Ukraine will win.
🐣 RT @dansenor Tortured them first…raped them…mutilated and burned them. This was even worse than what we have come to define as terrorism. This invasion was conducted by a death cult.
⋙ 🐣 RT @EylonALevy Evidence is emerging that Hamas not only massacred Israeli civilians in the kibbutzim—it tortured them before their deaths. ¤ Recovery teams say of the 280 bodies in Kfar Aza and Be’eri, 80% had been tortured. ¤ This is why we will destroy Hamas.
🐣 RT @StateDept Hamas’ brutal and violent terrorist attacks have compounded and perpetuated the suffering of the Palestinian people at every step of this crisis. As we stand with the people and government of Israel, we also stand with Palestinian civilians who are in harm’s way because of Hamas.
🐣 RT @SecBlinken Over the past few days, I’ve traveled to Israel, Jordan, Bahrain, Qatar, UAE, Saudi Arabia, and Egypt. What I’ve heard from every partner is a shared view to prevent the conflict from spreading, to safeguard innocent lives, and to get assistance to those in Gaza who need it.
🐣 RT @bctallis #Poland’s election 🇵🇱 means it’s going to be interesting (difficult)
for #Germany in many ways 🇩🇪
– the overtly hostile tone from PL will stop. But demands on 🇺🇦,defence, Russia & assertion of leadership won’t change & Berlin won’t be able to dismiss Warsaw as easily as with PiS
⋙ 🐣 RT @bctallis A liberal Poland can be a massive force in Europe – and for a better Europe.
⭕ 15 Oct 2023
🐣 RT @alexplitsas If you only listen to or watch one thing today, it should be this👇
💽 https://x.com/alexplitsas/status/1713565476582785057?s=20/photo/1
// CNN: Jake Tapper on State of the Union
🐣 RT @GlasnostGone After 600 days of trying to conquer #Ukraine, Putin’s admitted Russia still can’t reach its much hyped military objectives. Putin has repeatedly said they’d capture the entire eastern Donbas & southern regions – but on Sunday made the admission Russian forces are reduced to conducting an “active defence.” So from Kyiv in 3 days, to Putin’s Kyiv pipedreams.
⋙ SkyNews: Putin could be trying to ‘temper expectations’ of Russian advances https://tinyurl.com/56jubdvs “The Russian president said Moscow’s forces were conducting an ‘active defence’ in the Avdiivka, Kupiansk and Zaporizhzhia directions on Sunday”
// The Institute for the Study of War (ISW) said his characterisation “may be an attempt to temper expectations of significant Russian advances”.
🐣 RT @ ProudElephantUS 🚨JUST IN: Here are the 6 Republicans that have said they are considering working with the Democrats to elect a Democrat Speaker if Jim Jordan is the nominee.
1. Mike Rogers (AL)
2. Ann Wagner (MO)
3. Don Bacon (NE)
4. Vern Buchanan (FL)
5. Carlos Gimenez (FL)
6. Mario Diaz Balart (FL)
🐣 RT [ts] @realDonaldTrump Tomorrow is a big day for Democracy.
[TextLink:] https://truthsocial.com/@realDonaldTrump/111242571403804808
[Text:] A Leaking, Crooked and Deranged Prosecutor, Jack Smith, who has a terrible record of failure, is asking a highly partisan Obama appointed Judge, Tanya Chutkan, who should recuse herself based on the horrible things she has said, to silence me, through the use of a powerful GAG ORDER, making it impossible for me to criticize those who are doing the silencing, namely Crooked Joe Biden, and his corrupt and weaponized DOJ & FBI. They want to take away my First Amendment rights, and my ability to both campaign and defend myself. In other words, they want to cheat and interfere in the 2024 Presidential Election. Nothing like this has ever happened in our Country before. It is strictly Banana Republic kind of “stuff.” These political Hacks and Thugs are destroying our Country. Let’s see what happens on Monday in Judge Chutkan’s courtroom. Will America survive, or not? I’ll be campaigning in the Great State of Iowa, where I am leading by 50 Points!!!
🐣 RT @McFaul Looks like @SecBlinken diplomacy is achieving results — opening of Raffa on the Gaza-Egyptian border, possibly new international aid coming into Gaza, water in southern Gaza being turned on. Bravo.
🐣 RT @60Minutes President Biden says Hamas must be eliminated, but he supports Palestinian statehood. This has been the U.S. policy for decades. https://cbsn.ws/3ZTSZ7v
💽 https://x.com/60Minutes/status/1713694704955445452?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @BidensWins President Biden just dropped the hammer. Biden said in his 60 Minutes interview that Hamas must be eliminated. President Biden also made clear this war must be waged within the rules of war. President Biden’s leadership is crucial during these difficult times.
🐣 RT @NewsHour Polish opposition leader Donald Tusk declared the beginning of a new era for his country after opposition parties appeared to have won enough votes in Sunday’s parliamentary election to oust the governing nationalist conservative party.
⋙ PBS: Polish opposition leader declares victory after ruling conservatives predicted to lose majority https://tinyurl.com/2hy3xsx9
🐣 RT @Reuters Polish election turnout likely highest since fall of communism -electoral commission http://reut.rs/3S0SeHQ
🐣 RT @TarasKuzio Putin had to kick Netanyahu in the balls for him to realise that, although an ideological ally as a populist nationalist, Putin will never be a trusted partner. Netanyahu needs to re-focus Israeli security towards an alliance with Ukraine vs Russia-Iran
🐣 RT @djrothkopf While the human toll of the Hamas terrorist attacks and the conflict they triggered is of vastly greater consequence than politics, it matters that this crisis is likely to be the undoing of Bibi, Bibi-ism and the Bibi-ists. Good riddance. My latest.
⋙ DailyBeast: The War’s Just Started, But Benjamin Netanyahu Has Already Lost https://tinyurl.com/3hfns76f
// No matter what happens following Israel’s siege of Gaza, the Israeli prime minister’s political ambitions are likely damaged beyond repair.
… One is that it is highly unlikely the Iranian-funded terror group will survive this war. Another is that Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is also almost certain to be brought down and many of his highest priorities dashed due to the widespread perception among the Israeli public that it was Netanyahu’s leadership failures that put the public at risk of the attack, an assault that resulted in the greatest single day loss of Israeli lives in that country’s history. …
A Dialog Center poll indicated that nearly nine in ten Israelis characterized the terror attack as a consequence of a failure of the Netanyahu government. In the same poll, 56 percent of Israelis think Netanyahu should step down at the end of the war. ¤ A big victory in the war in Gaza, a moment of sudden and unexpected competence for the Netanyahu government, could conceivably revive the prime minister’s chances to survive. But experts think that is unlikely.
The next several weeks are fraught with risks. Gaza is densely populated and concerns about potential civilian casualties are very high. The Biden team has repeatedly urged that the Israelis be careful to observe international law and reduce the risks to the innocent population of Gaza. National security advisor Jake Sullivan said, “The many, many Palestinians who have had nothing to do with the brutal terrorist organization Hamas—the vast majority of the population of Gaza—they deserve dignity. They deserve safety and security.” …
🐣 RT @BradMossEsq .@TheRickWilson I still call dibs on the best room at GITMO
⋙ 🐣 RT @JoshPower80 Woman says Space Force has been working secretly with Trump to expose the traitors. Says they watermarked all the ballots and have 500k indictments ready to go, Space Force is about to release the evidence and declare martial law and have tribunals.
😜 💽 https://x.com/BradMossEsq/status/1713662306129785156?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @alexplitsas Israel’s Ambassador to the U.S. disavowed concerns that the Palestinians would be permanently displaced from Gaza ¤ “We have no desire to occupy or reoccupy Gaza. We have no desire to rule over the lives of more than two million Palestinians,” Herzog said”
🚫 🐣 📋 Only about 15-16 million Jews worldwide, acc to the ADL head
// on MSNBC; LMT $450
🐣 RT @Gerashchenko_en We are witnessing an upsurge of violence and wars, a rollback of democracy and humanism.
¤ https://x.com/Gerashchenko_en/status/1713262590263013712?s=20
The Kremlin regime is either directly or indirectly related to this. ¤ It is in Moscow’s interests to make Ukraine disappear from media space. And so it is happening. Ukraine is no longer on the front pages, and it is no longer written about in general.
A terrible war continues in Ukraine, but people have gotten “used to it” and are getting “tired” of it. And this suits Putin just fine.
“Axis of Evil” has been created: it is Iran, North Korea, and Russia. They act in a coordinated manner, challenging the “West”.
Will civilization have enough strength and reason to preserve itself and democracy as well, to protect its values and resist evil? ¤ Russia’s war against Ukraine is part of this confrontation. ¤ Ukraine continues our battle. I believe and know that we will not be left alone in this struggle. Evil must be punished.
Thank you to everyone who reads and shares news about Ukraine in this terrible and difficult time.
🐣 RT @atrupar “We are ready, willing, and able to enter into a bipartisan governing coalition” — Hakeem Jeffries on Meet the Press says there have been “informal conversations” about a bipartisan solution to House Republican chaos
💽 https://x.com/atrupar/status/1713565661975179505?s=20/photo/1
⋙ 🐣 RT @atrupar Jeffries indicates that as a condition of entering into a bipartisan coalition, House Democrats want to change the rules so “votes are taken on bills that have substantial Democratic support & substantial Republican support, so that extremists aren’t able to dictate the agenda.”
🐣 RT @atrupar “We are ready, willing, and able to enter into a bipartisan governing coalition” — Hakeem Jeffries on Meet the Press says there have been “informal conversations” about a bipartisan solution to House Republican chaos
💽 https://x.com/atrupar/status/1713565661975179505?s=20/photo/1
⋙ 🐣 RT @atrupar Jeffries indicates that as a condition of entering into a bipartisan coalition, House Democrats want to change the rules so “votes are taken on bills that have substantial Democratic support & substantial Republican support, so that extremists aren’t able to dictate the agenda.”
🐣 RT @krassenstein BREAKING: For the first time since Biden was Elected president in 2020, Israeli prime minister Bibi Netanyahu has invited the US president to visit Israel as part of a “solidarity visit”.
💽 [TextLink:] https://x.com/krassenstein/status/1713636570245345533?s=20/photo/1
Prime Minister Netanyahu spoke with Biden for the fifth time since the outbreak of the war in the Gaza Strip and asked him to come to Israel this coming week.
Also according to sources, the White House is considering also inviting Netanyahu to the White House.
The terrorists are seeking to divide the world, but ultimately terrorism brings more people together than it pushes art.
🐣 RT @front_ukrainian ❗️The video reportedly shows the first use of the 🇮🇱IDF’s Iron Beam laser missile defense system to intercept Hamas missiles flying from the Gaza Strip. ¤ According to known data, the Iron Beam is capable of intercepting missiles at a range of up to 7 km. The main advantage of the system is the cheap cost of a shot and virtually unlimited ammunition.
🐣 RT @tomiahonen I TOLD you ¤ There IS genuine attempt for a ‘shared power’ compromise of some kind, with Democrat caucus & a few Republicans. Here is Mike Rogers, Republican Congressman from Alabama, who is attempting to find a compromise with DEMs ¤ I cannot promise it works out. But worth trying
⋙ 🐣 RT @RonFilipkowski If Mike Rogers makes a deal with Democrats that leads to a moderate, bi-partisan Speaker, I hereby pledge to never make fun of the spectacularly coiffed ensemble that rests atop his head. And that, for me, is a major concession. Country first.
🐣 RT @alexplitsas This is a significant deescalatory statement from Iran and good news if true
⋙ 🐣 RT @AlArabiya_Eng #Iran’s armed forces will not engage Israel provided it does “not dare to attack Iran, its interests, nationals,” Iran’s #UN mission says.
[prior threats: https://tinyurl.com/5axrrvjs%5D
🐣 RT @SimonWDC Love, love this from @POTUS…..
⋙ 🐣 RT @HerbieZiskend46 QUESTION: “Are the wars in Israel and Ukraine more than the United States can take on at the same time?”
POTUS: “We’re the United States of America for God’s sake! The most powerful nation in the history of the world!” 1/
💽 [60Minutes:] https://x.com/HerbieZiskend46/status/1713571176381890586?s=20/photo/1
⋙⋙ 🐣 RT @HerbieZiskend46 “We can take care of both of these and still maintain our overall international defense. We have the capacity to do this, and we have an obligation to. We are the essential nation.” 2/
NBCNews (Oct 10): Biden urges Israeli leader to minimize civilian casualties in war with Hamas https://tinyurl.com/5cy5fj6f
ICRC: What are the Laws of War? https://youtu.be/HwpzzAefx9M?si=fm2VpE0jB90nZoc4
ICRC: Online training on the Law of Armed Conflict https://tinyurl.com/9j54c29d
🐣 RT @SkyNews BREAKING: Decision to re-open water supply in south Gaza.
The Israeli energy minister said the decision was agreed between the country’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and US President Joe Biden.
Israel-Hamas war latest ➡️ https://trib.al/31DUUmq
💙 TheHill, Mark Toth and Jonathan Sweet: Hamas’s march to Armageddon https://tinyurl.com/2p8cpu9t “Iran and Hamas pried Pandora’s Box wide open on Oct. 7 by unleashing a heinous wave of rocket attacks and assaults on Israeli cities and villages”
⋙ See under Entire Articles: Armageddon 10/15/23
Iran and Hamas pried Pandora’s Box wide open on Oct. 7 by unleashing a heinous wave of rocket attacks and assaults on Israeli cities and villages. This was likely done with Russian President Vladimir Putin’s tacit approval, if not direction and planning. What had been chiefly a localized threat to Jerusalem – Hamas in Gaza, Hezbollah in Lebanon and Syrian and Iranian troops along the Golan Heights – is now an existential threat to the state of Israel on a regional and global scale.
Hamas’s goal, stated in its founding covenant, is the destruction of Israel, and its inexorable pursuit of an Israeli Armageddon must now be taken at face value by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his national unity government. Especially after the reign of terror Mohammed Deif, Hamas’s military commander, unleashed in Kfar Aza, Sderot and at a music festival on a scale that the Jewish people had not witnessed since the end of the Holocaust.
Israel cannot risk waiting to eradicate Hamas. Not after NBC News reportedly obtained documents marked “top secret” in Arabic outlining “plans to target elementary schools and a youth center in the Israeli kibbutz of Kfar Sa’ad.” Not after images of slain Israeli children have spread across mainstream and social media. And not as Tehran nears enriching sufficient highly enriched uranium to begin producing nuclear weapons.
Jerusalem has stated that it will take out Hamas, like ISIS was taken out. In time, Iran will also likely face Israel’s retribution. Netanyahu and his government cannot allow Deif or Ali Khamenei, Iran’s supreme leader, to allegorically-speaking reach the gardens of Armageddon — and potentially deploy nuclear or bioweapons later against the Jewish state.
For now, however, forcibly retaking Gaza is the Israel Defense Force’s (IDF) likely primary objective.
It will not be easy. ¤ Hamas has predicated its self-defense on a suicide pact that is has enforced on Palestinians living in the Gaza Strip. By Deif’s design, no Palestinian civilians are safe from Hamas. Men, women and children will be willingly sacrificed as human shields in the looming street-to-street and tunnel-to-tunnel battles with the IDF — as evidenced by Hamas’s rejection of Israel’s evacuation order of upwards of 1.1 million Palestinians living in Gaza City.
United Nations Secretary General António Guterres was quick to object to the order, and in a New York Times op-ed urged Israel to “reconsider,” while reminding the IDF that “international humanitarian law — including the Geneva Conventions — must be respected and upheld.” Israel is not relenting and has begun a series of localized ground raids inside the Gaza Strip.
Israel is losing the information war. It is imperative it does what Hamas callously refuses to do and immediately implement measures to minimize Palestinian suffering and loss of life. It must create safe corridors, temporary refugee camps and provide for medical and other forms of humanitarian aid to displaced Gazans. Jerusalem must also continue to diplomatically engage regional and global partners in addressing the deepening humanitarian crisis that Deif and Hamas have caused.
The IDF faces a daunting fight in Gaza. Hamas’s forces (alongside those of the Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ), Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine, Palestinian Mujahideen Movement and Popular Resistance Committees) are well trained and equipped. Israel’s elite air force special operations team, known as the Shaldag Unit, found that out, suffering “heavy casualties” combatting Palestinian terrorists who had killed more than 100 Israelis at Kibbutz Be’eri.
The IDF learned from its bloody and costly encounter with Hezbollah during the Israel Lebanon War in 2006 and Operation Protective Edge in 2014, the IDF’s 50-day incursion into Gaza. In 2006, fighting in and around Bint Jubayl turned hand-to-hand in street-to-street fighting. Lt. Gen. Herzi Halevi, Israel’s chief of the General Staff, knows what the country is up against in Hamas and its “ruthless terrorists,” and has likely factored in military lessons and stratagems learned from the ongoing war in Ukraine.
Netanyahu and his government’s stated goal is to “wipe Hamas from earth,” and the Israeli prime minister has personally avowed that “Every Hamas member is a dead man.” To achieve both, Israel will have to be innovative in how it proceeds with its ground incursion into the Gaza Strip. Late Saturday night, IDF Rear Adm. Daniel Hagari said during a nationwide telecast that Israel will “broadly attack Gaza City very soon.”
Any ground assault into the Gaza Strip will likely be slow and deliberate. Hamas has prepared for this scenario for years. Hardened underground bunkers and tunnels afford subterrain movement, and recently destroyed buildings provide excellent dismounted fighting positions and cover for the defenders.
IDF forces will likely partition the Gaza Strip into manageable objectives, with assault forces mutually supporting one another to seize and secure each objective — similar to the military tactics employed by the U.S. Army in Fallujah, Iraq. Tanks in an urban environment are vulnerable, as such they will likely be used to support dismounted infantry as they clear buildings.
The cost in manpower will be high as forces must remain behind in secured areas to ensure Hamas militants cannot infiltrate and attack IDF rear areas through their extensive tunnel networks. Israel’s present troop level mobilization of 360,000 may not be sufficient to conduct a ground operation in Gaza while defending threats from Lebanon, the West Bank and other regional actors, including Iran.
The urban fight will be different this go-around. With the introduction of unmanned aerial vehicles and mechanized ground robots, exposure to hostile fire can be mitigated. Reconnaissance drones can identify Hamas battle positions and activity, deliver and direct fire upon them and provide overwatch as IDF soldiers secure buildings. Communications, from the strategic to the tactical, is imperative.
But Hamas is not alone in this fight, nor in its desire to bring about a symbolic Armageddon-like end to Israel. Unrest is swelling in the Palestinian Authority-controlled West Bank. Hezbollah is active in armed clashes along the Lebanese-Israeli border. And Tzachi Hanegbi, Netanyahu’s national security adviser, has warned Hassan Nasrallah, the head of Hezbollah, to stay out of the war, lest it result in the “destruction” of Lebanon.
Iran and its fast-growing nuclear threat loom to the east as well. If confronted with losing its Hamas-Hezbollah deterrence – especially in terms of protecting its nuclear weapons program – Tehran could opt to militarily strike Israel directly or indirectly via Syria, or both. As the Voice of America reported last Thursday, “Foreign Affairs Minister Hossein Amirabdollahian warned that Tehran’s allies in the region could take action against Israel.”
Meanwhile, regional tensions are intensifying. Amirabdollahian met with Hamas political leader Ismail Haniyeh in Qatar on Saturday. And, according to reports, the U.S. dispatched the “USS Eisenhower carrier strike group to join [the] USS Ford” in the Mediterranean.
Israel views any ending to itself as a modern Jewish state to be the equivalent of Armageddon, an unacceptable end-state. Consequently, Jerusalem is now existentially regarding Hamas’s multi-domain sea, land and air assault on Israel and its civilians as a march to Armageddon that must be stopped at all costs.
🐣 RT @Gerashchenko_en Every new day of the Russian-Ukrainian war leads to the globalization of war.
¤ https://x.com/Gerashchenko_en/status/1713449323474702606?s=20
From the very beginning of the full-scale war in Ukraine, Putin declared global demands and claims for the re-division of the geopolitical architecture of the world.
Yesterday, Hamas thanked Putin as an ally and a true leader who understands their aspirations and called on Putin to mediate negotiations with Israel. Putin, being an ally of Iran that gives the Russian Federation drones to attack Ukraine, is interested in supporting Iran, and accordingly is interested in the actions of Hamas.
Putin is extremely interested in destabilizing the Middle East. He is also interested in destabilizing the South Caucasus.
All this distracts and will divert political, diplomatic, financial and military resources from the situation in Ukraine and will give Putin more opportunities for a protracted war and terror.
⭕ 14 Oct 2023
🐣 RT @yaelbt What an insane country: The IDF spokesperson on tv pleading with Palestinians from northern Gaza to leave before we take action, while Hamas is telling them to stay so they can be used as human shield and die as martyrs. And Egypt refuses to open her border with Gaza. ¤ Tell me again how much you care about Palestinians.
🧵 RT @OmarSShakir Israeli authorities are signaling their intent to commit mass atrocities. They must be stopped. A thread 1/10 […]
📌 https://x.com/OmarSShakir/status/1713379891901567403?s=20
⋙ 🐣 RT @OmarSShakir History teaches us that, when there are clear calls to commit large-scale atrocities by party capable of doing so & actions taken consistent with those words, they need to be taken seriously & stopped. That’s where we are today in Israel & Palestine. A descent into darkness 9/10
⋙ 🐣 RT @OmarSShakir The only way out is through respect for int’l law, protection of human rights & accountability for grave crimes. It is critical for world leaders to call for defense of the rules-based int’l order & prevent mass atrocities before it’s too late. 10/10
🐣 RT @yashar The leader of Hamas is living in luxury in Qatar under the protection of the Qatari Royal Family. ¤ A US military base is a quick drive away…I know that the Qataris see this as a strategic move so they can communicate with Hamas leaders and control them but it’s outrageous.
🧵 RT @alexplitsas Iran told Israel through the UN today that it doesn’t want an escalation but if the operation in Gaza continues, it’ll have to get involved. Iran knows the ground operation is going to happen so it could be setting a red line knowing it will be crossed and use it as justification
📌 https://x.com/alexplitsas/status/1713369515822620763?s=20
[ThreadReader:] https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1713369515822620763.html
⋙ Also, Israel has been striking airport in Syria is a known transit point for arms from Iran to Hezbollah. It is likely Iran was going to fly in weapons and Israel caught wind. That says they are at least preparing for conflict and most likely through a proxy like Hezbollah.
⋙ Iran has now issued a public red line knowing the ground incursion is going to happen. If they don’t act on it then they will have no credibility. They fired ballistic missiles at U.S. bases after Solemani was killed. They are not afraid to strike. Doesn’t mean they will.
⋙ Implication — Two carrier groups (another set sail from Norfolk this morning), F-35s, F-22s, and F-15s flown into the region, plus two British warships and public and private warnings to stay out of it from the U.S. tells me the U.S. would take action to defend, if it happens.
🐣 RT @yashar BREAKING ¤ The Islamic Republic’s Foreign Minister Hossein Amir-Abdollahian met with Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh in Qatar tonight. ¤ This was first reported by media outlets controlled by the Supreme Leader of the Islamic Republic.
💽 https://x.com/yashar/status/1713301769907011601?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @mhmck The Russian terrorist state must be utterly destroyed. This requires forcing the final dissolution of the Moscow empire by force of arms. ¤ This the task to which this moment in history calls us. It is not for Ukrainians alone but for all people who aspire to ethical life.
💙 🐣 RT @MeidasTouch Take a moment and listen to President Biden speak out against hate
💽 https://x.com/MeidasTouch/status/1713357416572780633?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @officejjsmart Tel Aviv, Israel 🇮🇱 withstands more attacks by Hamas terrorists who are backed by the Regimes of Putin 🇷🇺, Khameini 🇮🇷, & Assad 🇸🇾.
🐣 RT @EuromaidanPress Opinion: The US support of Ukraine and Israel is essential to global stability, deterring conflicts, safeguarding American interests, and avoiding costly military involvement.
⋙ TheHill, Earle Mack: Supporting Israel and Ukraine promotes stability across the globe https://tinyurl.com/bddk7c2p
🐣 RT @ Malinowski ¤ Hamas wants to kill as many Israeli civilians as possible. ¤ Hamas also wants Israel to kill as many Palestinian civilians as possible. ¤ This is always the terrorists’ strategy. Target them; defeat them; and do not give them what they want.
⋙ 🐣 RT @therecount Sec. of State Antony Blinken in Qatar: “Efforts to get humanitarian aid into Gaza are complicated by the fact that Hamas continues to use innocent civilians as human shields and is reportedly blocking roads to prevent Palestinians from moving to southern Gaza, out of harm’s way.”
💽 https://x.com/Malinowski/status/1713365720887640268?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @ IAPonomarenko For those not very well informed, Putin did exterminate a dozen Ukrainian cities and towns (including yours truly’s hometown), did cut millions of Ukrainians off electricity, water supplies, and heating in the dead of winter, and did deny Ukraine’s very right to exist as a nation. ¤ You can now safely call him a Nazi. ¤ Next series of delusional tweets from shameless advocates of Russia and HAMAS, please.
🐣 RT @IDF An important message for the world to hear from the IDF International Spokesperson, Lt. Col. Richard Hecht.
💽 https://x.com/IDF/status/1713374444612378647?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @MiddleEastEye Thousands of demonstrators took part in pro-Palestine rallies in different cities across the United Kingdom on Saturday, demanding that Israel cease its bombing campaign and the siege of the Gaza Strip as it readies for a potential ground invasion of the Palestinian enclave
🐣 RT @RepSwalwell If you are a MAGA GOP member who has sided with Russia over Ukraine — from Kevin McCarthy to MTG — let’s be clear: you are also now on Team Hamas.
⋙ 🐣 RT @nexta_tv Hamas thanked Putin for his statement in support of Palestine ¤ “We in the Islamic Resistance Movement appreciate Russian President Vladimir Putin’s stance on the ongoing Zionist aggression against our people and his rejection of the siege of Gaza, the halting of humanitarian aid and the attack on civilians there,” the terrorists said.
🐣 RT @HawaiiDelilah Terrorist leader in lavish home in Doha, Qatar tells Palestinians in Gaza to martyr themselves for his cause (which, btw, is not about freeing Palestine, but about murdering Jews).
⋙ 🐣 RT @HenMazzig As Israel calling on Palestinian civilians to evacuate from Gaza city, Hamas cheif Haniyeh said in televised speech just now: “no to displacement from Gaza, and no to displacement from Gaza to Egypt.” ¤ Haniyeh is currently at the Four Seasons hotel in Doha, paid for by Qatar
🐣 RT @BarakRavid BREAKING: President Biden spoke to Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas. This was their 1st call since the Gaza war started (and I think the 1st since May 2021). Abbas told Biden that humanitarian corridors must be urgently opened in Gaza to provide fuel, medicine and food
🐣 RT @AVindman Other countries thought themselves completely indispensable allies while behaving like our enemies. For instance Pakistan learned it was dispensable after supporting the Taliban. Hamas’s attack on Isreal is a wake-up call for the U.S. Qatar is playing with fire.
⋙ 🐣 RT @yaakovkatz How Qatar is allowed to provide sanctuary for Hamas leaders like Haniyeh is ridiculous. This is a country that hosted the World Cup last year and continues to host the world’s most violent terrorists. CENTCOM has a base in Qatar. It has elite troops stationed there. They should go capture Haniyeh tonight and extradite him to Israel or the US to stand trial
⋙⋙ 🐣 RT @AlirezaNader The Islamic Republic in #Iran’s foreign minister met with HAMAS leader Ismail Haniyeh in Qatar tonight. Will the Biden admin hold any of these men accountable, or will it continue its “engagement” with them?
🐣 RT @JoeTruzman Iranian Foreign Minister Hossein Amirabdollahian met with Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh in Doha, Qatar today.
Axios: Iran warns Israel through UN against ground offensive in Gaza https://tinyurl.com/35pfxcpv
🐣 RT @john_sipher “Russia, Iran, Hezbollah and Hamas are trying to erode the international system. If Hamas succeeds, it will encourage others — Hezbollah, the Houthis — to flex their muscles as well.”
⋙ WaPo, Fareed Zakaria: The best response to Hamas would be to keep the Saudi deal alive https://tinyurl.com/bdhufw56 ‘Hamas is hoping for a massive Israeli overreaction that produces thousands of civilian casualties and results in collapse of the deal between Israel and Saudi Arabia’
Defeating Hamas is a daunting challenge. That terrorist group is hoping for a massive Israeli overreaction that produces thousands of civilian casualties and bogs down Israeli troops. Hamas is also hoping for the collapse of any possible deal with Saudi Arabia.
This is the fifth war between Israel and Hamas in Gaza over the last 15 years. Israel controls air, land and sea access to the strip. Israeli intelligence is supposed to have an extensive network of informants in Gaza. So what happened? We will need time to reach a full assessment, but it does appear the Netanyahu government was so focused on judicial overhaul at home and a Saudi deal abroad that it ignored the possibility of an upheaval in Gaza — despite allegedly receiving a warning from Egypt.
Hebrew University professor Dmitry Shumsky writes more provocatively that, for years, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu “developed and advanced a destructive, warped political doctrine that held that strengthening Hamas at the expense of the Palestinian Authority would be good for Israel.” This approach divided the Palestinians, undermined the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank, and made it easy for Netanyahu to claim there was no path to a Palestinian state.
Shumsky cites a Jerusalem Post report that at a Likud party meeting in 2019, Netanyahu made clear that he supported the money the Qatari government was sending to Hamas. That way, the prime minister is reported to have said, Israel would foil the establishment of a Palestinian state. …
… The [Iraq] war upset the delicate balance between Iran and the Arabs, and Shiites and Sunnis. When the United States toppled Saddam Hussein’s Sunni-dominated government in Baghdad, Iran gained unprecedented influence in Iraq (which is majority Shiite.) Then began the U.S. retreat from the Middle East, which left a vacuum into which many players entered — Iran, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Russia and Israel — each trying to promote its own interests. …
We are seeing a global contest between the forces of order and disorder. Russia, Iran, Hezbollah and Hamas are trying to erode the international system. If Hamas succeeds, it will encourage others — Hezbollah, the Houthis — to flex their muscles as well.
Defeating Hamas is a daunting challenge. That terrorist group is hoping for a massive Israeli overreaction that produces thousands of civilian casualties and bogs down Israeli troops. Hamas is also hoping for the collapse of any possible deal with Saudi Arabia. The more brutal Israel’s response, the more likely it is the deal will collapse. Israel’s goal should be to respond to Hamas and deal with the Palestinian issue in a way that still allows for the resumption of negotiations on Saudi normalization. That is the strategic prize. The establishment of normal relations between Israel and Saudi Arabia would be the severest setback for Hamas, Hezbollah and Iran.
One lesson is clear: The United States cannot walk away from the Middle East entirely. It can forswear military interventions, and it can recognize the centrality of Asia, but it needs to remain politically and diplomatically active in the region. U.S. engagement is a stabilizing force in the world. For those unconvinced, look at the emerging post-American Middle East.
🐣 RT @ChrisMurphyCT Accountability for Hamas can be achieved without unnecessary harm to civilians. As the U.S. assists Israel in its response to the terrorist attacks, our mutual focus should be on minimizing harm to innocent people, especially children, inside Gaza.
🐣 RT @haaretzcom LIVE UPDATES:
● Turkish FM says Egypt coordinating with Israel to get aid to Gaza
● U.S. encourages its citizens in Gaza to move closer to Egypt’s Rafah crossing
● U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken lands in Abu Dhabi after stop in Saudi Arabia
🐣 RT @VandenbergCo Nationals from 42 countries are among the dead and missing from Hamas’ brutal attack in Israel
◕ https://x.com/VandenbergCo/status/1713198577671913709?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @NickKristof My new column asks: What does destroying Gaza solve? Killing civilians doesn’t typically end extremism, but feeds it. Israel has the tactical edge, but what’s the strategy? How will a slaughter in Gaza help Israel live in harmony with its neighbors?
⋙ 🐣 once again, the US calls for restraint and adherence to the “rules of war”, while Israel hardliners ignore ¤ Hamas provoked this however, knowing what the response would be ¤ Who benefits: Iran and Russia
🐣 RT @POTUS The U.S. is working with the governments of Israel, Egypt, Jordan — and with the UN — to surge support to ease the humanitarian consequences of Hamas’s attack, create conditions needed to resume the flow of assistance, and advocate for the upholding of the law of war.
🐣 RT @Podolyak_M The Russian Federation is the undisputed sponsor of today’s global Chaos.
¤ https://x.com/Podolyak_M/status/1713137806057308293?s=20
The Russian Federation is openly investing in the destruction of international law, in regional escalations, wars and coups, in the domination of ultra-right and Nazi movements, in terrorist attacks in many regions, in the rejection of traditional negotiating rules. The Russian Federation is extremely interested in the growth of conflict and mutual hatred, in the growing influence of hate propaganda. The Russian Federation discredits international institutions by blocking their reforms and nullifying the possibility to actively engage in the conflict settlement. Russia is interested in building a kind of “New World”, where the unconditional “right of the strong”, “shocking violence”, mass taking of civilian hostages, destruction of territorial integrity of many countries will dominate.
Want to bring some stability, predictability, and treaty-ability back to the world? Work on addressing the root cause, not just the consequences. Work on Russia’s strategic defeat… Otherwise, there will be much more chaos…
🐣 RT @BillKristol The House in crisis. ¤ The best solution: Speaker Jeffries. Five Republicans support Jeffries for speaker, House is run for the next year by moderate Dems who are checked by a Republican majority who can still defeat rules and legislation.
⭕ 13 Oct 2023
🐣 RT @TheAtlantic “There’s a difference between a dysfunctional party and a party that has decayed into a mindless countercultural movement, and that rail switch was thrown in November 2016,” @RadioFreeTom writes:
⋙ TheAtlantic, Tom Nichols: The Source of America’s Political Chaos https://tinyurl.com/ewvhw497
// The election of 2016 is still poisoning our politics.
🐣 RT @rich_goldberg “Some people familiar with the operation said that a tight circle of leaders from Iran, Hezbollah & Hamas helped plan the attack starting over a year ago, trained militants and had advanced knowledge of it.” ¤ NYT sources: IRGC & Iranian leadership sources.
⋙ NYT: Hamas Attack on Israel Brings New Scrutiny of Group’s Ties to Iran https://tinyurl.com/345hmfbz
// Officials from Iran and Hezbollah helped plan the attack, people familiar with the operation said, but the U.S. and its allies have not found evidence directly linking Tehran.
🐣 RT @Acyn Doocy: What worries you about a potential Israeli ground invasion?
Biden: Death
💽 https://x.com/Acyn/status/1712929021103636894?s=20/photo/1
NBCNews: Top secret’ Hamas documents show that terrorists intentionally targeted elementary schools and a youth center https://tinyurl.com/f4hbm3aw
// Maps and documents recovered from the bodies of Hamas attackers reveal a coordinated plan to target children and take hostages inside an Israeli village near Gaza.
🐣 RT @_waleedshahid BIDEN, just now striking a vastly different tone than the Israeli President Herzog: “We can’t lose sight of the fact that the overwhelming majority of Palestinians had nothing to do with Hamas.”
💽 https://x.com/_waleedshahid/status/1712917496972394560?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @KuldkeppMart The West just doesn’t get Russia’s total disregard for human life, including that of their own soldiers. Putin would happily let a million Russians be murdered, if it only meant Ukraine would use up all of its ammunition and be left defenceless.
⋙ 🐣 RT @ IhateTrenches I’ve seen a lot of shit these last 18 months. ¤ But the sheer stupidity of RU actions in Avdiivka, Pisky area is astounding.
I’ve never seen such lack of disregard for soldiers. Running straight line human waves. Bodies stacked ontop of each other in fields, armor running over the deceased to get through.
The RU losses have to be extremely high. As in the thousands already and only from 3-4 days of fighting. And it’s not just mobiks, it’s vdv, dpr, & contract units. Just being thrown to slaughter in hopes Ukrainian positions run out of ammunition
🐣 RT @nytimesworld Israel’s military did not back away from the evacuation plan on Friday but softened its stance, suggesting there was no deadline, after initially saying that people should leave northern Gaza within 24 hours.
🐣 RT @MeidasTouch Pro-Hamas accounts are now using Trump’s anti-Israel and pro-Hezbollah/Hamas statements for their propaganda. https://tinyurl.com/yfw96f5m
🐣 RT @wartranslated Ukrainian Special Forces compromised the Russian supply of fuel and ammo in the Zaporizhzhia frontline this morning.
“This morning, a unit of the SSO “Rukh Oporu” carried out a successful operation in temporarily occupied Melitopol. ¤ Thanks to the sabotage actions of our soldiers at 07:30 in the morning, the railway track was blown up.
As a result of the explosion, the railway track and the train that delivered ammunition and fuel for the Russian army were damaged. ¤ Additional information regarding enemy losses is currently being established.” https://t.me/ukr_sof/783
🐣 RT @ArmedMaidan Russia’s Avdiivka offensive has resulted in its “worst battlefield defeat in nine months”: Korshak
¤ https://x.com/ArmedMaidan/status/1712841808886038673?s=20
A hail of Ukrainian drones and shells met formations of up to 40 armoured units sent through open fields
Russia “likely suffered its worst combat losses since mid-February, and by some measures suffered one of Moscow’s worst battlefield defeats of the war thus far” https://kyivpost.com/post/22706
Russian losses Oct 10-12*:
➡ 2,840 troops killed
➡ 102 tanks
➡ 183 armoured vehicles➡ Approximately 6,800 additional Russian troops were likely wounded – based on a 2.4 wounded-to-killed ratio (derived from several dozen datapoints on Russian losses)
* These figures are from Ukraine’s daily reports on Russian war losses on all axes, but the bulk are from the Tavriya (south) sector (which includes Avdiivka), as reported by the Tavriya command
Here’s why those numbers are very likely correct
🚨Almost 300,000 Russian war deaths
Sr NATO official confirms to Ukrainian Pravda that Ukraine's figures for Russian war deaths (284K so far) are accurate
"We're getting close to a figure of around 300,000 Russian soldiers and mercenaries who have died"https://t.co/fOeINSuUIU
— 🇺🇦Ukraine Resists Russian Genocide… Yeah Again (@ArmedMaidan) October 11, 2023
#Ukraine #UkraineRussiaWar #Avdiivka
WaPo Editorial: Biden rises to the occasion on Israel and Hamas. Trump sinks to a new low https://tinyurl.com/ycczpbz9
🐣 RT @JayinKyiv Insane. ¤ Thousands trying to get into Israel to wage Jihad from both Lebanon and Jordan. ¤ Russian disinfo factories are pushing hard on both Tiktok and Twitter, supporting Hamas.
💽 https://x.com/JayinKyiv/status/1712753679860666459?s=20/photo/1 -3
🐣 RT @RpsAgainstTrump Liz Cheney: ¤ “If Republicans nominate Jordan to be Speaker, they will be abandoning the Constitution. They’ll lose the House majority and they’ll deserve to.”
🐣 RT @KyivIndependent ⚡ Media: Marine drone struck Russian ships near Crimea. ¤ Experimental “Sea Baby” marine drones were used in the recent attacks on Russia’s Black Sea Fleet patrol ship Pavel Derzhavin and cruise missile carrier Buyan, an unnamed source told Hromadske. ¤ The unnamed source told Hromadske that Ukraine’s Security Service (SBU) worked together with the navy to pull off the attacks.
TheAtlantic, Hussein Ibish: Israel Is Walking Into a Trap https://tinyurl.com/3pmkrtwb “Outrageous overreach by terrorists typically aims to provoke overreach. Washington and other friends of Israel who are now seized with sympathy should immediately caution Israel not to make this blunder”
// Storming into Gaza will fulfill Hamas’s wish.
Haaretz, Andriy Yermak: This Is Why Ukraine Stands With Israel https://tinyurl.com/ytj8tfy9 “For decades, Moscow has formed a coalition of autocratic regimes, fringe movements and terrorist organizations which poses an ever-increasing threat to humanity”
// The terrible terrorist attack on Israel resonated with Ukrainians. Rockets, torture and murder, the abduction of children – we know this script too well. But the similarity of our tragedies is not accidental
[…] Thousands of rockets flying at peaceful cities. Torture and execution of peaceful people, looting, execution of prisoners and abduction of children – we know this script too well. Cruelty has no excuses. Terrorism has no nationality. Barbarism knows no borders. And that is why today Bucha in Ukraine mourns Re’im in Israel.
But all of us must understand: the similarity of their tragedies is not accidental.
They are parts of the same plan, elements of an asymmetric war waged against the free world by the “axis of evil.” Since this term was introduced by President George W. Bush, it has undergone a series of transformations. The main one was the emergence of a new leader – Putin’s Russia. Restoring the status of a superpower has become a real symbol of the Kremlin. He is fixated on revenge for the Cold War, and he repeatedly refers to its practices.
In the modern world, in a world built on partnership and consensus of interests, Russia does not have competitive advantages. The only chance for them is to create a situation where the difference between peace and war becomes illusionary.
For decades, Moscow has formed a coalition of autocratic regimes, fringe movements and terrorist organizations which poses an ever-increasing threat to humanity.
In the modern world, civilization exists only as the antithesis of barbarism. Civilization cannot be built on hatred. But it is hatred and contempt for life that cements the alliance of Russia, Iran, North Korea and their numerous proxies. Hate is the product that they seek to promote in all world markets. It seems incredible, but in the era of globalization, the main threat to humanity is an alliance of death cults that assert their right to sacrifice. However, they prefer to call it the “protection of national interests” and the “struggle against the West.”
Neither Russia nor its allies are in a position to offer the world a positive agenda. That is why they repeatedly resort to racketeer tactics: supporting violence, intimidation and blackmail, and then naming the price of its solution. The capitulation in the Crimean War of the nineteenth century did not prevent Emperor Alexander II from later instructing the cadets: “Russia is not a trading or agricultural state, but a military one, and its vocation is to be the awe of the world.” A century and a half later, Vladimir Putin and his associates want the same thing. And again, and again, they bet on terror.
From Eastern Europe to the Middle East and Latin America, from the Caucasus to the Sahel, the same scenario plays out, often with the same performers. The bloody trail of PMC Wagner, also known as the Wagner Group, stretched from Syria to Ukraine and Africa. Its mercenaries taught Hamas fighters to drop bombs from drones. Hacker groups linked to Russia hacked the websites of Israeli state institutions, and the Russian GRU transported weapons captured in Ukraine to Palestine.
The futility of Israel’s balancing act over Russia’s aggressive invasion of Ukraine became obvious this week when Putin claimed the Hamas attacks on Israel were a result of failure to “take the core interests of the Palestinian people into account.” Trying to poke the bear never works when dealing with self-righteous imperial ambitions. …
Robert Jackson, the U.S. Supreme Court Justice who was the leading American prosecutor at the Nuremberg war crimes trials, built the charges against the Nazis on the idea of a state created for war. For reasons beyond Jackson’s control, the concept was not developed at the time. But now it is relevant again. Confrontation is the raison d’être of both the current Russian regime and its minions. …
🐣 RT @KyivIndependent ⚡ Media: Marine drone struck Russian ships near Crimea. ¤ Experimental “Sea Baby” marine drones were used in the recent attacks on Russia’s Black Sea Fleet patrol ship Pavel Derzhavin and cruise missile carrier Buyan, an unnamed source told Hromadske. ¤ The unnamed source told Hromadske that Ukraine’s Security Service (SBU) worked together with the navy to pull off the attacks.
🐣 RT @mhmck Ukrainian defenders killed over a thousand Russian invaders yesterday. ¤ The Russians are conducting “meat wave” infantry assaults in the Battle of Avdiyivka, with no regard their own casualties.
🐣 RT @JayinKyiv Just an awe inspiring amount of Russian armor being destroyed near Avdiivka. ¤ Can you believe Russians allow this to be done to them, all to serve this Gargoyle Midget Czar? ¤ Incredible.
💽 https://x.com/JayinKyiv/status/1712741302595457441?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @AmericaPlsAwake He’s full of hatred for Obama for humiliating him. That probably explains a lot of this. 🐮🐮
⋙ 🐣 RT @ProjectLincoln Trump thinks Obama is still President, and it’s not the first time either. We’ve all watched Trump’s mental decline for years. It’s time for Fox News to tell the truth: he’s too old to run for President.
💽 https://x.com/ProjectLincoln/status/1712521647746400573?s=20/photo/1
⭕ 12 Oct 2023
🐣 RT @SecBlinken I am in Israel during this incredibly difficult moment for this nation and for the entire world. As Secretary of State, as a Jew, as a husband and a father, I understand on a personal level the harrowing echoes Hamas’s massacres carry.
💽 https://x.com/SecBlinken/status/1712602105049977196?s=20/photo/1
WhiteHouse[.]gov: Notice on the Continuation of the National Emergency With Respect to the Situation in and in Relation to Syria https://tinyurl.com/42wbdxjv
The situation in and in relation to Syria, and in particular the actions by the Government of Turkey to conduct a military offensive into northeast Syria, undermines the campaign to defeat the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, or ISIS, endangers civilians, and further threatens to undermine the peace, security, and stability in the region, and continues to pose an unusual and extraordinary threat to the national security and foreign policy of the United States.
WaPo, Greg Sargent: The GOP’s ‘southern strategy’ mastermind just died. Here’s his legacy. https://tinyurl.com/3s6mm7zh “Phillips advised Republicans to exploit the racial anxieties of White voters, linking them directly to issues such as crime, federal spending and voting rights.”
“The whole secret of politics is knowing who hates who.” ¤ That insight was the brainchild of Kevin Phillips, the longtime political analyst who passed away this week at 82 years old. Phillips’s 1969 book, “The Emerging Republican Majority,” provided the blueprint for the “southern strategy” that the Republican Party adopted for decades to win over White voters who were alienated by the Democratic Party’s embrace of civil rights in the 1960s.
Phillips advised Republicans to exploit the racial anxieties of White voters, linking them directly to issues such as crime, federal spending and voting rights. The strategy, beginning with Richard M. Nixon’s landslide victory in the 1972 presidential race, helped produce GOP majorities for decades. …
Phillips argued that the Republican Party needed to change the way it conducted politics to reach out to disaffected White southerners. For Nixon, that was “law and order,” something Ronald Reagan used to great effect along with stories about “welfare queens.” George H.W. Bush’s campaign ran the “Willie Horton” ad, which played up fears of Black criminality.
Trump picked up this rhetoric. He launched his campaign on the ideas of Mexican migrant and Muslim criminality — that all these minority populations needed to be under much stricter surveillance.
The strategy that Phillips helped popularize worked just as well with some northern White voters as it did with southern White voters. It helped solidify the Republican Party’s base as almost exclusively White even as the nation has grown more diverse. …
Corey Robin, political theorist and author of “The Reactionary Mind”: Phillips understood that the old Republican Party establishment could not begin to take on the New Deal and Great Society until it developed a mass popular base. He saw that the White working class — not just in the South, but in the North — was growing disaffected with the New Deal on economic and racist grounds, and that Republicans could turn that dissatisfaction into governing majorities.
Beginning in 1972 with the reelection of Nixon, Republicans built this majority in the spirit of what Phillips imagined. George W. Bush, the last Republican president to get a popular majority, was the last spasm of that vision. The irony is that, under Phillips, the idea was to expand the Republican Party into a permanent governing majority.
But once the White working class diminished, the electoral return of that resentment dramatically dwindled. As a result, instead of relying on robust electoral majorities, the Republican Party, to win power, relies on the electoral college and the malapportioned Senate. Phillips’s blueprint made the heyday of Republican power — and ultimately unmade it.
TheHill, Jonathan Sweet and Mark Toth: Putin’s fingerprints are all over the Hamas attack https://tinyurl.com/ffrw6d6k “A Russian defeat in Ukraine would likely bring an end to the Putin regime, and the cancer it propagates throughout the world — including Hamas”
🐣 RT @RaduHossu Short summary of the night (13.10.2023 01.55 Ro/UA time):
¤ 🖼 https://x.com/RaduHossu/status/1712603920302739698?s=20/photo/1
// Caption: “We are very lucky that they are so f*cking stupid.”
1. #Avdiivka, because everyone asks me about this sector and are scared. From the visually confirmed losses, the Russians lost in 48 hours like this (thank you @AndrewPerpetua for your analysis):
– 15 x tanks (we have enough for everyone: T-90M, T-80V, T-80VM, T-72, T-72B, T-72B3M, T-62M) We were still missing T-55 and we had them all on the list since WWII.
– 30 x APC/IFV (and here we have everything: MT-LB, MT-LBT, BMP-1, BMP-2, BMP-3, BMD-2, BTR and others)
– 14 x artillery and MSLR (all for all of us here too: D-20, D-30, 2S5 Giatsint, Giatsint-B, 2S7 Pion (!!!), Msta-B, Msta-S, Grad MSLR)
– Russian human losses amount to almost 1000.
– The Russian southern attack was a total failure. From the north they advanced in some areas 200 meters or in others 300 meters.
– The losses are even higher higher than at the shameful Vuhledar – Russian Winter Offensive and even higher than the losses of last summer’s laughing stunt with the crossing over Siversky Donets, when the Russians lost an entire BTG (Battalion Tactical Group), the formula used then for naming battle groups (they have since changed tactics and organization).
Personal opinion: for those who don’t know where Avdiivka is, look it up on maps. It’s a suburb of Donetsk, the capital of Donetsk Oblast. This town of about 32,000 inhabitants before the war, has been under constant attack since: (WARNING!) 2014! It is truly a fortress. Since 24 February it has been constantly bombed, and now (meaning at the time of writing) the town with 3,000 inhabitants in it is being bombed with phosphorus bombs.
It is absolutely incredible and almost unimaginable how the Russians put zero value on their troops, attacking totally disorganized and senselessly in an attempt to encircle the fortress town on the edge of Donetsk. The disregard for the lives of those men in every single armoured vehicle, the hundreds of infantrymen simply pulverised by Ukrainian artillery shows me that those who run the Russian Army not only don’t care, but indicate to me that they have a sense of contempt for the lives of those they lead.
As I wrote in yesterday’s analysis, one of the reasons for the slowdown of the Ukrainian counter-offensive in the Orihiv-Tokmak area is precisely the valuing of soldiers’ lives. The Ukrainians understand better, at least that is what they have shown us for years, that life is the most important and they sacrifice the “war show” for the global audience.
2. Bakhmut:
For those who haven’t heard yet, the legendary 92nd Kholodnyi Yar Brigade is back in the Bakhmut Theater of Operations. Alongside the legendary Separate Assault Brigade Azov 3. In the south, the AFU is advancing towards Opytne and into Kurdyumivka.
Personal Opinion: seeing that 93 has entered and is not rotating Assault Azov 3 indicates to me that the Russians will have a very hard time holding the southern flank. Harder and harder.
I’m also leaving a picture of a Ukrainian soldier (for those who don’t know) interviewed in the trenches last year, expounding his opinion of the Russian Army in general.
Any retweet, like and comment is apreciated! ¤ Slava Ukraini!
WSJ Editorial: Donald Trump’s Israeli War Insight https://tinyurl.com/y5yrtkk9 “Trump can’t help himself from making everything about himself. That’s the same way he handled the Covid crisis, and it’s what voters would get in a second Trump term in a much more dangerous world”
// He attacks Netanyahu in a crisis because of old personal grudges.
The front-runner for the GOP presidential nomination for some reason used the words “smart” and “Hezbollah” in the same sentence on Wednesday night. Whatever Donald Trump meant to convey, Republicans might look at the sparks going up around the world as they decide whether to sign up for four more years of this strategic insight.
Two nights ago I read all of Biden’s security people, can you imagine, national defense people,” Mr. Trump said Wednesday night in West Palm Beach. “And they said ‘Gee, I hope Hezbollah doesn’t attack from the north. Because that’s the most vulnerable spot.’ And I said, wait a minute, you know Hezbollah is very smart. They’re all very smart. The press doesn’t like when they say, you know. I said that President Xi of China, 1.4 billion people, he controls it with an iron fist. I said he’s a very smart man. They killed me the next day. I said he was smart. What am I gonna say?”
We’ll leave it to Trump partisans to explain that soliloquy, and the speech included some hardy perennials about rigged elections and this one about Vladimir Putin: “I got along with him very good. You know, I actually got along with the tough guys the best.”
Perhaps Mr. Trump’s most revealing comments were about Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, an ally he is supposed to be friendly with. In his rambling, Mr. Trump brought up that the Israeli leader declined to participate in the 2020 U.S. operation to kill Iranian general Qasem Soleimani. “I’ll never forget that Bibi Netanyahu let us down.”
Mr. Netanyahu is the political leader of America’s closest friend in the Middle East, which is staring down the worst security crisis in 50 years. At least 27 Americans are dead and more are missing. But Mr. Trump can’t separate this from his personal grievances.
He’s also mad because Mr. Netanyahu publicly acknowledged that President Biden won the 2020 election, as if a foreign leader could say anything else. “He was very early—like earlier than most. I haven’t spoken to him since. F— him,” he told a writer for Axios.
But Mr. Trump can’t help himself from making everything about himself. That’s the same way he handled the Covid crisis, and it’s what voters would get in a second Trump term in a much more dangerous world.
🐣 RT @MeidasTouch Here’s a compilation of Trump from last night calling Hezbollah “very smart,” praising Chinese President Xi, attacking Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu, attacking Israel, and calling the Israeli Defense Minister a “jerk.”
💽 https://x.com/MeidasTouch/status/1712497490673692716?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @AccountableGOP Rep. Troy Nehls on the GOP’s inability to elect a Speaker: “One of the members said in there, ‘You know I don’t think the Lord Jesus himself could get 217.’”
💽 https://x.com/AccountableGOP/status/1712584488490762703?s=20/photo/1
🐣 📋 RT @POTUS This morning’s report shows core inflation fell to its lowest level in two years – down 60% from its peak as unemployment stays below 4%. ¤ Our plan is delivering, but the job’s not done. I’ll continue fighting to lower costs and grow our economy from the middle out and bottom up.
🐣 RT @ProjectLincoln “It just proves our adversaries right that democracy doesn’t work” – Rep. Michael McCaul ¤ Wrong. Democracy works, Republicans don’t.
⋙ 🐣 RT @cspan Rep. Michael McCaul (R-TX) on electing a House speaker: “It’s a dangerous game that we’re playing. It just proves our adversaries right that democracy doesn’t work. Our adversaries are watching us.”
💽 https://x.com/ProjectLincoln/status/1712516917183889512?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @BidenHQ Trump once again confuses who is currently President, forcing Kilmeade to correct him
💽 https://x.com/BidenHQ/status/1712518509211590760?s=20/photo/1
NYT: U.S. and Qatar Deny Iran Access to $6 Billion From Prisoner Deal https://tinyurl.com/yfhkf64w
// The move comes after harsh criticism that the Biden administration had given Iran a vast sum that freed up other funds for Tehran to provide support to Hamas.
🐣 RT @MaxBoot Netanyahu denies getting the warning from Egypt, but he can’t deny hearing from his own intelligence chiefs. Nor can Netanyahu deny that he spent years propping up Hamas so as to lessen any pressure on Israel to compromise with the Palestinians. He must go.
⋙ WaPo, Max Boot: Israel doesn’t need an inquiry to decide: Netanyahu must go https://tinyurl.com/ajtphm44
Tyrants and terrorists often underestimate the fighting capacity of liberal democracies, mistaking the pursuit of commerce for a lack of martial virtues and political divisions for lack of unity. Napoleon derided England as a “nation of shopkeepers” before losing to the Duke of Wellington at Waterloo. Hitler thought the United States was “a decayed country,” “half Judaized and half Negrified,” before U.S. bombers reduced his cities to rubble and U.S. armies defeated his legions on D-Day and at the Battle of the Bulge. Osama bin Laden thought America was a “weak horse” before SEAL Team Six finished him off. So, too, Hamas has now made a grave miscalculation with its horrific and barbaric assault on Israel, which resulted in the worst one-day loss of life for the Jewish people since the Holocaust. Hezbollah will be making a similar mistake if it enters the war now.
This summer, as tens of thousands of Israelis protested Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s judicial overhaul bill and some Israeli reservists vowed they would refuse to serve if it passed, Israeli intelligence warned the prime minister that “the enemy perceives the summer of 2023 as a historic weak point for Israel.” The success of Saturday’s assault simply confirmed to Hamas that Israel is weaker than it looks. “We were surprised by this great collapse,” an exiled Hamas leader told the Associated Press. “We were planning to make some gains and take prisoners to exchange them. This army was a paper tiger.”
In truth, Hamas has poked a sleeping tiger. Now, the Hamas terrorists are likely to learn what other authoritarian aggressors have learned before them: that liberal democracies can be extremely ferocious and supremely effective at war-fighting when roused from their peacetime slumber. As Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower wrote at the beginning of World War II: “Hitler should beware of the fury of an aroused democracy.” …
… I would not bet against Israel at a moment such as this. It still has the best armed forces in the Middle East, and now they have a renewed sense of purpose that was missing in recent months when the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) were called upon to protect extremist settlers in the West Bank from the consequences of their own folly. The Israeli nation, so divided just days ago, has come together with the formation of a unity government between Netanyahu and opposition leader Benny Gantz.
The real danger now is not that Israel will fail to rise to the moment; the danger is that, like the United States after 9/11, it might overshoot the mark and become embroiled in a quagmire in Gaza or in a wider war. Democracies — especially small democracies such as Israel that depend on international support — need to display wisdom and restraint, as well as resolution, in their war-fighting.
Democracies not only have an impressive capacity to come together in the face of attacks, as the United States showed after Pearl Harbor and after 9/11, but also a commendable capacity to exercise self-scrutiny and correct a wayward course of action. Vladimir Putin has suffered one military setback after another in Ukraine, but he cannot replace his top military commanders — Gen. Valery Gerasimov and Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu — without implicitly admitting his own mistakes. And for a tyrant like Putin, that is unthinkable. …
The awful events of last weekend have exposed Netanyahu’s sham. Far from keeping the nation safe, he divided it and gave Israel’s enemies the impression that it was weak. He disregarded warnings from his own intelligence chiefs — and reportedly, more recently, from Egyptian intelligence about “something big” brewing in Gaza. Netanyahu denies getting the warning from Egypt, but he can’t deny hearing from his own intelligence chiefs. Nor can Netanyahu deny that he spent years propping up Hamas so as to lessen any pressure on Israel to compromise with the Palestinians.
It’s good that Netanyahu has formed a unity coalition, but it would be even better if he were replaced as prime minister. Moshe Ya’alon, a former defense minister and IDF chief of staff who served in the government under Netanyahu, wrote that the prime minister must resign now: “Every day he remains wreaks damage on the state.”
Ya’alon is right. But whether Netanyahu leaves now or later, it is hard to imagine him surviving this catastrophe. Democracies not only mobilize free people in their self-defense but also hold their own leaders to account. Those are their hidden strengths in the battle against barbarism and despotism.
WaPo: Steve Scalise drops speaker bid as House devolves into further turmoil https://tinyurl.com/mvm3xs75 “House Republicans’ failure to coalesce around a speaker has not only exposed their deep ideological divisions, but also their inability to govern as the majority party”
// A faction of House Republicans ousted Kevin McCarthy as speaker last week, and the House has been at a standstill since
🐣 RT @wartranslated Budanov: Russia provided Iran and Hamas with satellite intelligence, infantry weapons trophied in Ukraine. This is a section from latest interview with http://pravda.com.ua ¤ [Interview:] [Ru]: https://pravda.com.ua/articles/2023/10/12/7423740/index.amp
¤ 💽 https://x.com/wartranslated/status/1712384141608550899?s=20/photo/1
– Is there a Russian trace in this story?
– Budanov: Yes. First of all, we clearly know that trophy weapons from Ukraine were still transferred by the Russians to the Hamas group. It is mostly infantry weapons.
There is some information that something was going to Hezbollah, but we don’t know for sure at this point.
Everyone could see the video on social media – a completely, let’s say, natural for our region and completely unnatural for the Middle East tactic, when FPV drones were used against armored vehicles.
This is the know-how of our war after all. No one other than people who passed through our theater of war could do such a thing. Since we were not there, it means that it was the Russians.
Two more interesting facts. First: a little more than a week before the start of these actions, the Russian station “Sputnik” began to officially speak in Arabic on the territory of Lebanon. This is broadcast in an absolutely propagandist style with clear Russian narratives.
Second: on September 24, a Russian spacecraft capable of conducting radio-electronic reconnaissance and intercepting satellite signals was moved to Israel’s geostationary orbit.
Let me remind you that in the period from September 22 to 24, there was an official visit of the Russian military delegation to Iran. We know that there were several, shall we say, wishes from the Iranian side. One of them concerned the expansion of intelligence capabilities.
It is now clear what intelligence information the Russians began to provide to all interested parties. I emphasize that it is not Iran alone, but all interested parties.
– Israel is currently conducting an operation in the Gaza Strip and can take it under full control. Under such conditions, how will Lebanon, Iran, Egypt behave?
– Budanov: The most difficult question. What we believe will happen is a more or less rapid entry of the Israel Defense Forces into the Gaza Strip, the restoration of order and, as they usually do, an equally rapid withdrawal.
But the Hezbollah organization, which is mostly based in Lebanon, and certain parts of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps from Iran have directly stated that if the Israeli Armed Forces begin to enter the Gaza Strip, they will start their ground operations from the north and northeast. It is meant from the territory of Lebanon and the territory of Syria.
A lot of disparate units are moving across the territory of Syria closer to the border with Israel. Hezbollah is all mobilized now, everyone is also pulling up to the border.
A few days ago, there was a visit of senior representatives of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps to Hezbollah in Lebanon. It is quite clear that their units will also participate in this.”
🐣 RT @KyivIndependent ⚡️Biden plans to bundle Ukraine, Taiwan, and border funding in Israel aid package. ¤ Combining the funding requests is a strategy the administration hopes will win more support in Congress, where aid to Ukraine has become a contentious issue.
🐣 RT @Charles_Lister NEW – #Israel just conducted simultaneous air strikes on #Damascus & #Aleppo International Airports, presumably targeting incoming #Iran weaponry intended for delivery to #Hezbollah or proxies there in #Syria. ¤ Optics & timing (particularly from #Tehran) no coincidence.
WaPo: Trump faults Netanyahu, calls Hezbollah ‘very smart’ amid Israel war https://tinyurl.com/4pwbtt2j “Trump’s comments reflected his long-established pattern of slighting U.S. allies while complimenting adversaries”
// DeSantis condemns Trump’s remark as ‘absurd’
🐣 RT @MFA_Ukraine “This war is about so much more than #Ukraine. There is still time to avoid the worst-case scenario. A difficult but feasible path. It’s called a Ukrainian victory” — 🇺🇦 Minister @DmytroKuleba during an online address at the 🇩🇪 Zentrum Liberale Moderne ¤ ➡️ http://bit.ly/3RVh3VG
🐣 RT @DefenceU For a first time 🇺🇦 sits at the table with @NATO member countries as an equal partner, not a guest. The historic NATO-Ukraine Council at the ministerial level. ¤ We have a clear signal – Ukraine will be a part of NATO and the members of the alliance will help us as long as necessary. ¤ Thank for your support!
⭕ 11 Oct 2023
🐣 RT @Beltrew I just wanted to clarify that I did not tweet 40 babies had been beheaded. I tweeted that foreign media had been told women and children had been decapitated but we had not been shown bodies – which was my response to reports which had gone viral about the 40 babies. I realised the way my tweet was written was too short to explain the full context, so deleted it. My headline of my story references that toddlers were killed.
🖼 https://x.com/Beltrew/status/1712023042560291083?s=20/photo/1
Haaretz, Dmitry Shumsky: Why Did Netanyahu Want to Strengthen Hamas? https://tinyurl.com/5ex64mf9 To scuttle the two-state solution, “between 2012 and 2018 Netanyahu gave Qatar approval to transfer … about a billion dollars to Gaza, at least half of which reached Hamas”
… [S]ince he took office as prime minister a second time in 2009, that same Netanyahu developed and advanced a destructive, warped political doctrine that held that strengthening Hamas at the expense of the Palestinian Authority would be good for Israel.
The purpose of the doctrine was to perpetuate the rift between Hamas in Gaza and the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank. That would preserve the diplomatic paralysis and forever remove the “danger” of negotiations with the Palestinians over the partition of Israel into two states – on the argument that the Palestinian Authority doesn’t represent all the Palestinians.
This is solidlydocumented. Between 2012 and 2018, Netanyahu gave Qatar approval to transfer a cumulative sum of about a billion dollars to Gaza, at least half of which reached Hamas, including its military wing. According to the Jerusalem Post, in a private meeting with members of his Likud party on March 11, 2019, Netanyahu explained the reckless step as follows: The money transfer is part of the strategy to divide the Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank. Anyone who opposes the establishment of a Palestinian state needs to support the transfer of the money from Qatar to Hamas. In that way, we will foil the establishment of a Palestinian state (as reported in former cabinet member Haim Ramon’s Hebrew-language book “Neged Haruach”, p. 417).
In an interview with the Ynet news website on May 5, 2019, Netanyahu associate Gershon Hacohen, a major general in reserves, said, “We need to tell the truth. Netanyahu’s strategy is to prevent the option of two states, so he is turning Hamas into his closest partner. Openly Hamas is an enemy. Covertly, it’s an ally.”
In a tweet on May 20, 2019, Channel 13 quoted Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak saying: “Netanyahu isn’t interested in the two-state solution. Rather, he wants to separate Gaza from the West Bank, as he told me at the end of 2010.” Mubarak said that during an interview with the Kuwaiti daily Al-Anba.
It’s worth dwelling on the horrifying significance of these remarks. An Israeli prime minister himself knowingly and calculatingly cultivated one of Israel’s most bitter and fanatic foes, an enemy whose declared aim is to destroy the country. And he did it to prevent the horror scenario from his standpoint of a return to Israeli-Palestinian negotiations. …
… [T]he person bearing the fundamental responsibility for the killing of more than a thousand Israelis by Hamas is Benjamin Netanyahu.…
Thanks to the funneling of millions of Qatari dollars to Gaza, with Netanyuhu’s repeated approval as part of a deliberate and malicious policy aimed at nothing other than burying the two-state solution, Hamas acquired inordinate military capabilities within a relatively short time. And that resulted in the current situation, which as I write, has taken the lives of about 1,000 Israelis. …
🐣 RT @ProjectLincoln Leadership vs lunacy. The choice is clear.
💽 https://x.com/ProjectLincoln/status/1712327647072489518?s=20/photo/1
NYT, Yuval Noah Harari: The Hamas horror is also a lesson on the price of populism https://tinyurl.com/2nhjyyzf .Netanyahu “has repeatedly preferred his personal interests over the national interest and has built his career on dividing the nation against itself”
🐣 RT @Osinttechnical No other way to describe this, Biden is furious.
💽 https://x.com/Osinttechnical/status/1712229613936460083?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @Kasparov63 Terror states Iran and Russia have “bundled” to declare war on the modern world order. China is more cautious, but will not shy from violence to secure its dictatorship if Xi believes he can get away with it. Connecting them this way is just admitting reality. It’s one war.
⋙ 🐣 RT @KyivIndependent ⚡️Biden plans to bundle Ukraine, Taiwan, and border funding in Israel aid package. ¤ Combining the funding requests is a strategy the administration hopes will win more support in Congress, where aid to Ukraine has become a contentious issue
🐣 RT @freedombird101 The West should have done this and pushed this over the past several years before the war. At this point they (Western Nations) don’t want NATO to intervene which would poke the Russian bear. That’s a real problem here that no one wants an escalation even though Russia escalates
⋙ 🐣 RT @Maks_NAFO_FELLA 👀 “All members of the alliance agreed that Ukraine will become a member of NATO”, – Stoltenberg. ¤ P.S. Only one question: When? 😔
CNN: Special counsel probe into Biden’s handling of classified documents appears to be nearing end https://tinyurl.com/yjsurvc6
🐣 RT @ ODalton46 .@tomfriedman: @POTUS “put the western alliance together around Ukraine. He’s putting an alliance together now on Israel… No one had to write that speech for him. I can’t think of a single Democrat let alone a Republican who could give that speech, that way, at this time.”
💽 https://x.com/ODalton46/status/1712133946178216052?s=20/photo/1
i’m 🐣 RT @MalcolmNance HAMAS Official spells out the battle tactics, operational security and hostage exchange strategy. The @MemriArabic translations are very accurate. He seems very proud of the massacre and will be for as long as he lives, which I suspect is NOT VERY LONG.
⋙ 🐣 RT @highbrow_nobrow Senior Hamas Official Ali Baraka:
1. Hamas been secretly planning the invasion for two years.
2. Russia sympathizes with Hamas
3. Russia benefits from the U.S. being embroiled in this war.
💽 https://x.com/highbrow_nobrow/status/1712128604048392327?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @SonofHas Yiiiikes ¤ Trump praises Hezbollah as “very smart” for attacking Israel in the North
💽 https://x.com/SonofHas/status/1712271543173046639?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @DanaBashCNN The Israeli government now confirms that babies and toddlers were found decapitated in a small Israeli community near the Gaza strip. @Hadas_Gold reports on the incomprehensible brutality of this attack.
[CNN link] 💽 https://x.com/DanaBashCNN/status/1712197520393142506?s=20/photo/1
💙 🧵 RT @TimInHonolulu I’m guessing that Joe Biden made Netanyahu an offer he couldn’t refuse. By now our folks will have looked at all the things that were missed the first time and likely see Netanyahu was talking to Moscow before the attack.
📌 https://x.com/TimInHonolulu/status/1712121994219839635?s=20
[ThreadReader:] https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1712121994219839635.html
[Also:] https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1712240131158290704.html
[Also 10/9:] https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1711501900498255937.html
[Also 10/9:] https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1711411257486815281.html
I think Putin finally burned him in a desperate attempt to slow the collapse of his Ukraine operation by diverting our attention. With Qatar and Turkey fronting HAMAS, and Iran preparing to move Hezbollah down from Lebanon with Iran’s militia gangs threatening our forces along the Euphrates, Putin thinks this is his big moment.
But once again, he misjudge @JoeBiden. With the Gerald Ford on station and likely supplied long-term via Suda, we can move our forces out of Turkey for good and set up air cover for the SDF who are the largest military force in Syria. Then we need to close the door on the
Euphrates to stop any Iranian movement towards the west. Begin disclosing the evidence on Erdogan and his family’s affiliation with #ISIS. We have to make it clear to Turkey’s ruling elite and military that they will be listed for their #HAMAS/ISIS affiliations if they don’t
rein-in Erdogan’s ambition of establishing himself as the Ottoman/ISIS Pasha. One thing about Turkey, it’s political cycles always end in a coup and they’re long overdue.
Assad will attack or facilitate the attacks on Israel. It’s finally time for him to go. With all of Northern Syria rid of Turkish terrorists, HTS may be able to fit SDF umbrella while Assadists fall back on Damascus to await the new Constitution and the safety and security
of a Syrian democratic federalist system. And then Hezbollah will be surrounded and unable to be supplied or armed and slowly eliminated as a threat.
ICRC: 10 things the rules of war do https://tinyurl.com/2p82k3ka
[TextLink:] https://x.com/Auriandra/status/1712259397932425250?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @ProjectLincoln History has taught us in times of crisis, major world powers need a leader who stands firm on the side of humanity and freedom for all. President Biden delivered and history will remember him for it.
💽 https://x.com/ProjectLincoln/status/1712219019573330096?s=20/photo/1.
🐣 RT @AccountableGOP Rep. Ken Buck[R]: “We continue to perpetuate a lie about the 2020 election…we talk about the January 6th events as an unguided tour of the Capitol…we are pretending that the people who assaulted police officers and destroyed federal government property are political prisoners.”
🐣 RT @allenanalysis PAY ATTENTION, The revelation that Netanyahu received intelligence on the Hamas movement and an impending attack but did not act raises significant questions.
Some wonder if he allowed the attack to happen to justify annexing Gaza, potentially at the expense of thousands of Israeli and Palestinian lives, including some Americans.
The ongoing discussion about warnings from the head of Egyptian intelligence regarding increased military activity in the Gaza Strip on October 5-6 has sparked controversy and questions. The Israeli authorities initially called these warnings “untrue” and “false,” while Cairo countered with claims of a transcript of the conversation.
Subsequent reports suggest that Israel did indeed receive information from Egypt regarding military preparations near the Israeli border in Gaza. However, Israeli intelligence sought confirmation from U.S. intelligence agencies, reportedly perceiving Hamas’ increased military activity as a routine occurrence rather than an imminent threat.
This situation raises questions about why Israeli intelligence relied on U.S. analysis and did not draw its conclusions from the escalating activities of Hamas.
In response to the uncertain situation, Israeli authorities have urged citizens to prepare for the possibility of spending several days in bomb shelters, advising them to stock up on essentials like water, food, hygiene products, and communication equipment.
This preparedness reflects concerns that further missile attacks may be launched in response to Israel’s operations in the Palestinian territories. ¤ The motivations behind his inaction are a matter of concern and scrutiny.
🐣 RT @BillKristol “Trump has demanded Republicans defend his every lie, every violated norm, every crime. Now battered Republicans are incapable or unwilling to carry out their responsibilities…They cannot be counted on to serve their country or come to the aid of allies.” ⋙ TheBulwark: As Crises Mount, Republicans Depart from Reality https://tinyurl.com/bdhsw57u
// Once the “party of ideas,” the GOP is now feckless, fractured, and lacking a shared vision.
🐣 RT @QuoteDigging “Everyone must understand that the Republican Party has absolutely nothing to offer Americans. No policy to enrich our lives, no healthcare, no economic, no social, no security policies to help move our country forward. Therefore all they can do is complain and tell lies.”
🐣 RT @MuellerSheWrote Get this: republicans can’t expel an indicted felon because they ousted their Speaker, and no one has enough votes to win except maybe the guy who failed to report sexual assault that was endorsed by a different rapist with 91 felony counts.
🐣 RT @fedtanyl HOLY SHIT. Hamas only planned to this to be a small-scale attack with a few hostages, but because of Netanyahu’s staggering incompetence, they were able to unleash the carnage we’ve seen. And now *Hamas* is terrified that they did too much damage and are about to get obliterated.
[TextLink:] https://x.com/fedtanyl/status/1712003238411592136?s=20/photo/1
[Text:] Hamas is also stunned. ¤ “Their success surprised them, too,” a diplomatic source in the region told Al- Monitor on condition of anonymity. “They hoped to kill some Israelis, embarrass the IDF and return to Gaza with two or three kidnapped Israelis. Instead, they roamed inside Israel for more than a day, killing over a thousand Israelis and getting stuck with something like 200 abductees,” the source said.
“They are very worried. With two abductees, they could have negotiated with Israel for permission to build a seaport and freedom for hundreds of prisoners held in Israeli jails. With more than 100 abductees, they will face the entire Israeli army inside Gaza. That’s the tragedy of their success,” the diplomatic source added.
⭕ 10 Oct 2023
NYMag, Jonathan Chait: Your Moral Equation Must Have Human Beings on Both Sides https://tinyurl.com/4hjhfj6j “I personally consider defenses of terrorism more barbaric than cold indifference about collateral damage.… I insist only that they are both evil.”
// Ignoring universal humanity is the path to murder.
🐣 RT @MeidasTouch This was powerful. This was President Biden at his best. This is what leadership looks like.
💽 https://x.com/MeidasTouch/status/1711872775013700010?s=20/photo/1
⋙ MeidasTouch: Biden Gives Powerful Speech On Atrocities in Israel https://tinyurl.com/4u4ftv39
// “Our hearts may be broken but our resolve is clear.”
🐣 RT @AntiToxicPeople During testimony today at Trump’s fraud trial in NY, it was mentioned how Forbes Mag. was the first to uncover Trump’s brazen lying and fraud involving saying his apartment in Trump Tower was 30,000 sq. ft vs. its actual 10,000 sq. ft. size. ¤ Here is his bizarre rant just now:
[TextLink:] https://x.com/AntiToxicPeople/status/1711918615367418182?s=20/photo/1
[Text:] 🐣 RT @realDonaldTrump I hereby demand a full apology from the failing Forbes Magazine, and their third rate psycho writer, Dan Alexander, for the many false and libelous articles they have written about me, and for the cooperation they have given to the Racist and Incompetent A.G. of New York State, Peekaboo James. You see, Forbes is owned by the Communist Chinese Government, and China will do anything to stop MAGA. Forbes, a Globalist “Rag,” is a propaganda play against TRUMP. MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!
🐣 RT @ProjectLincoln Powerless, subservient, and impotent. That’s the role Trump has forced the Republican Party into. Regardless of the outcome in this week’s Speaker vote, they will still accelerate the chaos of Trump and do his bidding.
💽 https://x.com/ProjectLincoln/status/1711947228779327580?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @ArmedMaidan “We really have witnessed a major event in military history… The Russian navy has suffered a significant, strategic defeat of historical proportions”
¤ 💽 https://x.com/ArmedMaidan/status/1711828864425472478?s=20/photo/1
Ukraine’s destruction of Russian drydocks in Sevastopol effectively “shut down” the Black Sea fleet and forced Russia to move it out of Crimea, the Kyiv Post’s Stefan Korshak says
“Having to fight a naval war with ships that can’t have serious damage repaired, because your navy has no dry docks, will shut down most navies. We have absolutely seen that happen with [Russia’s Black Sea fleet]…
“It won’t end the war tomorrow but the Russian fleet getting kicked out of Sevastopol will affect the course of the war directly and will affect security in the Black Sea basin for decades at least”
Footage: Ukraine’s Sept. 13 strike on Russian drydocks in Sevastopol that also destroyed the enemy warship Minsk and submarine Rostov-on-Don https://tinyurl.com/ytpy8m3e
#Ukraine #UkraineRussiaWar️️ #UkraineWillWin
🐣 RT @bidonkules Had a visceral reaction to this. I’m shaking at the sheer brutality. Ripping babies out of pregnant women’s bellies with the umbilical cord still attached? Mortified.
💽 [CNN:] https://x.com/bidonkules/status/1711946374122455466?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @djrothkopf President Biden is leading and governing at a time of great challenges in the world while the Republicans are AWOL, competing for the title of who can be America’s least effective legislator…or the most dangerous.
⋙ 🐣 RT @RadioFreeTom The Republicans have created a complete crapstorm in Washington – and in their own party – at a time when the world needs American to be sane, resolute, and unified.
⋙⋙ TheAtlantic, Tom Nichols: The World Needs a Unified and Resolute America https://tinyurl.com/zchy32a8 “President Biden’s foreign-policy leadership … has been admirable and successful. But he cannot, and should not, do it alone. The world needs America—and that means all of us.”
// But the Republicans can’t even stop fighting with one another.
Two years ago, I wrote my first newsletter for The Atlantic, in which I worried that the United States was “no longer a serious country.”
“Of course, we’re still a powerful country … But when it comes to seriousness—the invaluable discipline and maturity that allows us to discern matters that should transcend self-interest, to set aside churlish ego and emotionalism, and to act with prudence and self-restraint—we’re a weak, impoverished backwater.”
When I wrote those words, the world was emerging from a pandemic, but many Americans were still refusing vaccines; Congress was bickering over infrastructure; Russia was occupying Crimea. Joe Biden had been elected president, but as I said at the time, “one president can’t sober up an entire nation.” I was, to say the least, pessimistic about the American future.
Today, the situation is even more dire. The Russians continue an all-out war of conquest in the middle of Europe, a conflict that could engulf the planet if the cowards in the Kremlin remain mired in their imperial delusions. Thousands are dying in Armenia and Sudan. And now Israel is at war, after suffering its worst surprise attack since the Yom Kippur War 50 years ago and with more Israeli citizens killed in a single day than ever in its history.
And yet much of America, and especially the remnants of the Republican Party (a party whose leaders during the Cold War defined themselves as the responsible stewards of U.S. foreign policy), remains in the grip of childish, even inane, politics. The international community in this difficult time needs a United States that is sane, tough, and principled; worthy of the title of leader of the free world; and determined, in the words of President John F. Kennedy, to “pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe, in order to assure the survival and the success of liberty.”
Instead of Kennedy’s inspiring vision, America has the ignorant and incoherent Donald Trump as an apparent lock to capture the eventual GOP presidential nomination, the House of Representatives without a speaker, and a public that cannot find Ukraine or Iran on a map.
“I look at the world and all the threats that are out there,” Representative Michael McCaul of Texas, chair of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, said on Sunday. “And what kind of message are we sending to our adversaries when we can’t govern? When we’re dysfunctional? When we don’t even have a speaker of the House?” …
The idea that someone as ridiculous as Jim Jordan could be in contention to lead the House should make every American pause and wonder how the United States has come to such a moment. Jordan is among Donald Trump’s most loyal supporters—Trump has already endorsed him for the speaker’s job—and one of the most cynical and huckstering members of Congress from either party. Jordan, on many issues (and especially when backing Trump’s preposterous claims about presidential power), is merely an annoying, gish-galloping gadfly. ¤ But on the central issue of American democracy, he is much more dangerous. … [Election denial] …
Scalise, the current majority leader, is as close to a “normal” candidate as the Republicans can produce, and he is likely in the lead for the job. That’s the good news. The bad news is that “normal” in this context means that Scalise is just another mainstream GOP figure calling for defunding “87,000 new IRS agents,” establishing “a committee on the weaponization of the federal government against citizens,” and holding “woke prosecutors accountable.”
Meanwhile, the United States has been unable to send ambassadors to several nations, in part because of irresponsible holds placed by irresponsible senators. Senator J. D. Vance of Ohio, like Tuberville, appears to have held up posts over “wokeness,” while Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky has blocked appointments over his unhinged insistence on seeing what he thinks are nefarious U.S. government documents regarding the coronavirus’s origins. …
President Biden’s foreign-policy leadership, especially with a Russian war so close to NATO’s borders, has been admirable and successful. But he cannot, and should not, do it alone. The world needs America—and that means all of us.
🐣 RT @bfry1981 Israel would never do this. Another example of Biden’s involvement paying off. It’s always a given during Israeli invasions that civilians can’t get out and are made to suffer. Biden could upend this.
⋙ 🐣 RT @michaeldweiss “The Biden administration is now coordinating with other countries on a plan that would offer safe passage out of Gaza for civilians who risk getting caught in the crossfire in the densely populated coastal enclave, administration officials said.”
🐣 RT @Acyn Biden: When congress returns, we are going to ask them to take urgent action to fund the national security requirements of our critical partners. This is not about party or politics. This is about the security of our world, security of the United States of America.
💽 https://x.com/Acyn/status/1711812030569591107?s=20/photo/1
💙 💽 C-SPAN: Biden’s Speech on Attack on Israel https://tinyurl.com/62wp9rdc
≣ [Transcript:] https://tinyurl.com/2xb3c3we
🐣 RT @GOP4Ukraine Ukraine and Israel are both pro-American democracies fighting terroristic enemies, so America doesn’t have to. ¤ They both deserve our support.
⋙ NBCNews: The White House and lawmakers weigh linking Ukraine and Israel aid https://tinyurl.com/bdfdd32s
// The strategy could help secure additional Ukraine funding despite some Republican opposition, said a White House official and two lawmakers.
🐣 RT @ChuckPfarre NO, AND THEN YES: Brian Allen @allenanalysis reports that after firmly denying it had advance warnings about Hamas, Benjamin Netanyahu’s office has admitted that it did receive pre-attack information from the Egyptian Mukhabarat.
⋙ 🐣 RT @allenanalysis Israeli media reports now confirm that the government did receive clear warnings from Egyptian intelligence about the imminent attack that occurred on October 7.
¤ https://x.com/allenanalysis/status/1711849301842760034?s=20
Initially, the Prime Minister’s office issued a flat denial after the first report, but then they reversed their stance and admitted to receiving these warnings.
As the conflict between Hamas militants and Israel enters its third day, reports indicate that Israeli intelligence agencies may have been caught off guard.
Egyptian intelligence officials reportedly warned Israel about a significant threat, but Israeli security agencies were said to have misinterpreted the situation.
An Egyptian intelligence official stated that Israeli officials were primarily focused on the West Bank and underestimated the threat from Gaza.
The Israeli administration under Benjamin Netanyahu had been preoccupied with addressing violence in the West Bank, often linked to tensions with Jewish settlers.
This revelation raises questions about the government’s initial response to the warnings and how they handled the situation
🐣 RT @MuellerSheWrote BREAKING: George Santos has been charged with conspiracy in a SUPERSEDING INDICTMENT. He now faces 23 felony counts.
[TextLink:] https://x.com/MuellerSheWrote/status/1711860993880686610?s=20/photo/1
💙 TheAtlantic, Anne Applebaum: There Are No Rules https://tinyurl.com/39ebr7ce
// States and quasi-states are using extreme, uninhibited violence against civilian populations.
The “rules-based world order” is a system of norms and values that describe how the world ought to work, not how it actually works. This aspirational order is rooted in the idealistic aftermath of the Second World War, when it was transcribed into a series of documents: the United Nations Charter, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the UN Genocide Convention, and the Geneva Conventions on the laws of war, among others. In the more than seven decades since they were written, these documents have frequently been ignored. The UN Genocide Convention did not prevent genocide in Rwanda. The Geneva Conventions did not stop the Vietnamese from torturing American prisoners of war, did not prevent Americans at Abu Ghraib from torturing Iraqi prisoners of war, and do not prevent Russians from torturing Ukrainian prisoners of war today. Signatories of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights include known violators of human rights, among them China, Cuba, Iran, and Venezuela. The UN Commission on Human Rights deteriorated into parody long ago.
Nevertheless, these documents have influenced real behavior in the real world. Soviet dissidents used to embarrass their government by pointing to human-rights language in treaties the Kremlin had signed and did not respect. Even when fighting brutal or colonial wars, countries that had signed treaties on the laws of war either tried to abide by them—avoiding civilian casualties, for example—or at least felt remorseful when they failed to do so. Americans who mistreated Iraqi prisoners of war were court-martialed, convicted, and sentenced to time in military prisons. The British still agonize over the past behavior of their soldiers in Northern Ireland, and the French over theirs in Algeria.
The Russian invasion of Ukraine and Hamas’s surprise attack on Israeli civilians are both blatant rejections of that rules-based world order, and they herald something new. Both aggressors have deployed a sophisticated, militarized, modern form of terrorism, and they do not feel apologetic or embarrassed about this at all. Terrorists, by definition, are not fighting conventional wars and do not obey the laws of war. Instead, they deliberately create fear and chaos among civilian populations. Although terrorist tactics are usually associated with small revolutionary movements or clandestine groups, terrorism is now simply part of the way Russia fights wars. Although a sovereign state and a permanent member of the UN Security Council, Russia first began deliberately hitting civilian targets in Syria in 2015, including power stations, water plants, and above all hospitals and medical facilities, 25 of which were hit in a single month in 2019. These attacks were unquestionably war crimes, and those who chose the targets knew they were war crimes. Some of the hospitals had shared their coordinates with the UN to avoid being hit. Instead, Russian and Syrian government forces may have used that information to find them.
🐣 RT @JRubinBlogger A speech of amazing moral clarity. I don’t know that any president has spoken more eloquently about evil and the trauma of the Jewish people. At the same time he spoke with PM about law of war. Key. He distinguished between Hamas and Palestinians. Perhaps his best speech ever
🐣 RT @NTarnopolsky 💥Joe Biden comes through for Israelis in a way Benjamin Netanyahu has completely failed to do: he is crying with them. You’d think his heartbreak is greater than Netanyahu’s. It may be. “Atrocities. Sickening. We’re with Israel.”
⋙ 🐣 RT @krassenstein BREAKING: Biden is speaking about Hamas’ attacks on Israel: ¤ President Biden’s words are incredibly powerful, calling the attacks terrorism and comparing Hamas to ISIS.
💽 https://x.com/NTarnopolsky/status/1711812663133511982?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @HerrDr8 Yes…Iran, Russia, HAMAS on the same team #CheatsheetHAMASoct7OP
◕ https://x.com/HerrDr8/status/1711637631518322747?s=20/photo/1
🚫 🐣 RT @Rail_splitter1 Hear this but suspend judgement for now. Wagner sources have approached mil bloggers to reveal that allegedly Wagner was contracted by Russia’s MOD to train Hamas fighters earlier this year. The story goes that Prigozhin was against it but had no choice. Shoigu’s deputy Yevkurov is supposed to have traveled to bases in Africa, where Hamas was allegedly trained.
[TextLink:] [Ru] https://x.com/Rail_splitter1/status/1711658851282600135?s=20/photo/1 -3
⭕ 9 Oct 2023
🐣 RT @JayinKyiv Arguably the most influential journalist in Israel, Amit Segal states that we are now engaged in a historic war between “Iran-Russia Axis of Evil” and “West-Ukraine axis” and that Israel must “take action to officially and definitively to help Ukraine”. “It is both right and wise
🐣 RT @KyivIndependent ⚡️WSJ: US senators support $50-100 billion aid package for Ukraine. ¤ Senators from both sides have spoken in favor of a “one-and-done” Ukraine aid package, which could be passed before the expiration of the current spending bill on November 17. [link]
🐣 RT @Jerusalem_Post Foreign citizens killed/missing in Israel:
🇺🇸 USA – 9 dead
🇨🇦 Canada – 1 dead, 2 missing
🇬🇧 Great Britain – more than 10 dead or missing
🇫🇷 France – one dead, several missing
🇹🇭 Thailand – 12 dead, 11 missing
🇳🇵 Nepal – 10 dead
🇩🇪 Germany – number of unconfirmed/missing deaths
🇷🇺 Russia – 1 dead
🇰🇭 Cambodia – one dead
🇨🇳 China – number of deaths/casualties not confirmed
🇧🇷 Brazil – 3 injured
🇵🇾 Paraguay – 2 dead/missing
🇺🇦 Ukraine – 2 dead
🇲🇽 Mexico – 2 kidnapped
🇮🇪 Ireland – 1 injured
🇹🇿 Tanzania – 2 injured
🐣 RT @LTGHRMcMaster The United States and other nations need to join Israel in the response just as our allies did after 9-11. That response should be swift and devastating to the Iranian terrorist network and the source of this unadulterated evil.
🐣 RT @netanyahu Israel is at war.
[TextLink:] https://x.com/netanyahu/status/1711465610507341996?s=20/photo/1
We didn’t want this war. ¤ It was forced upon us in the most brutal and savage way. ¤ But though Israel didn’t start this war, Israel will finish it.
Once, the Jewish people were stateless. ¤ Once, the Jewish people were defenseless. ¤ No longer.
Hamas will understand that by attacking us, they have made a mistake of historic proportions. We will exact a price that will be remembered by them and Israel’s other enemies for decades to come.
The savage attacks that Hamas perpetrated against innocent Israelis are mindboggling: slaughtering families in their homes, massacring hundreds of young people at an outdoor festival, kidnapping scores of women, children and elderly, even Holocaust survivors.
Hamas terrorists bound, burned and executed children. ¤ They are savages. ¤ Hamas is ISIS.
And just as the forces of civilization united to defeat ISIS, the forces of civilization must support Israel in defeating Hamas.
I want to thank President Biden for his unequivocal support. ¤ I want to thank leaders across the world who are standing with Israel today. ¤ I want to thank the people and Congress of the United States of America.
In fighting Hamas, Israel is not only fighting for its own people. ¤ It is fighting for every country that stands against barbarism.
Israel will win this war, and when Israel wins, the entire civilized world wins.
🐣 RT @danielsgoldman Hamas is a terrorist organization solely focused on eradicating Israel. ¤ Hamas executed one of the worst terror attacks in history. ¤ Like Al Qaeda and ISIS, Hamas must be eliminated. ¤ Israel deserves to be secure and Palestinians deserve leadership that wants peace, not genocide.
🐣 RT @clearing_fog Russia has transferred Western-made weapons captured in Ukraine to the extremist organization Hamas … in an effort to discredit Kyiv… ¤ Moscow plans to falsely accuse the Ukrainian military of selling weaponry … to Hamas, according to HUR.
⋙ KyivIndependent: Military intelligence: Russia gives Hamas weapons captured in Ukraine to discredit Kyiv https://tinyurl.com/2nf9r7wz
🐣 RT @simonerzim Israeli gov failures led to this catastrophe. ¤ Now Israel’s top propagandists are asking the public to turn a blind eye to crimes against humanity in Gaza at unimaginable scales. It is blood curdling. ¤ Massacres do not justify other massacres. They only create more bloodshed.
🐣 RT @jeremybob1 GAZA WAR BREAKING: The IDF will eliminate Hamas’ military capabilities over the course of the ongoing war between Israel and Gaza in a way which will prevent a recurrence of the invasion from Gaza for another 50 years, a senior diplomatic source said on Monday. 1/4 [other tweets missing]
🐣 RT @ReutersIran Iran is complicit but there is no direct evidence tying it to attacks in Israel, White House’s Kirby says
ChuckPfarrer (Spaces): Russia developed super-smallpox, hemorrhagic, Marburg virus biological weapons; (he wrote appendix to report on proliferation)
🐣 RT @kyledcheney CONFIRMED: Joe BIDEN sat for an interview yesterday and today with special counsel Robert HUR about his handling of classified records found in his home and post-VP office.
[TextLink:] https://x.com/kyledcheney/status/1711531525492088921?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @djrothkopf I could not agree more with @AlonPinkas here. Unflinchingly, he describes an essential truth: Netanyahu must go now, not after the Gaza war.
⋙ Haaretz, Alon Pinkas: Netanyahu Must Go Now, Not After the Gaza War https://tinyurl.com/3pycdhyf
// There is a clear and present danger that all his wartime decisions against Hamas will be polluted by personal, legal and petty political considerations. He has been a poor prime minister from Lebanon to China
🐣 RT @kyledcheney CONFIRMED: Joe BIDEN sat for an interview yesterday and today with special counsel Robert HUR about his handling of classified records found in his home and post-VP office.
[TextLink:] https://x.com/kyledcheney/status/1711531525492088921?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @rulesbasedworld Netanyahu’s Hebrew message on next steps translated into English
[TextLink:] https://x.com/rulesbasedworld/status/1711529224173994273?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @djrothkopf I could not agree more with @AlonPinkas here. Unflinchingly, he describes an essential truth: Netanyahu must go now, not after the Gaza war.
⋙ Haaretz, Alon Pinkas: Netanyahu Must Go Now, Not After the Gaza War https://tinyurl.com/3pycdhyf
// There is a clear and present danger that all his wartime decisions against Hamas will be polluted by personal, legal and petty political considerations. He has been a poor prime minister from Lebanon to China
💙 Map of Russia’s expansion: https://tinyurl.com/48hwfycv “Under a series of aggressive rulers (including Ivan the Terrible, Peter the Great, & Catherine the Great), Russia expanded institutionally & territorially from the duchy of Moscow”
🌎 https://x.com/Auriandra/status/1711530908182847818?s=20/photo/1
Map of Russia’s expansion, 1462-1796. Although continuing to expand territorially until 1683, the Ottoman Empire found conquest of adjacent lands much more difficult after the mid-C16 than before. One reason for this was internal weakness. A second reason was that Ottoman troops began facing those of rival gunpowder empires, such as Austria & Russia, who were equipped with a second generation of gunpowder technology. Still using first-generation weapons, the Ottomans were falling behind in the early modern ‘arms race.’ Under a series of aggressive rulers (including Ivan the Terrible, Peter the Great, & Catherine the Great), Russia expanded institutionally & territorially from the duchy of Moscow to a great empire stretching from the Baltic to central Asia. By the C17, Russia’s expansion on its southern borders was coming at the expense of the Ottoman Empire.
WhiteHouse: Joint Statement on Israel https://tinyurl.com/2mszjnbk “Today, the leaders of France, Germany, Italy, the United Kingdom and the United States of America released the following joint statement following their call”
Today, we — President Macron of France, Chancellor Scholz of Germany, Prime Minister Meloni of Italy, Prime Minister Sunak of the United Kingdom, and President Biden of the United States — express our steadfast and united support to the State of Israel, and our unequivocal condemnation of Hamas and its appalling acts of terrorism.
We make clear that the terrorist actions of Hamas have no justification, no legitimacy, and must be universally condemned. There is never any justification for terrorism. In recent days, the world has watched in horror as Hamas terrorists massacred families in their homes, slaughtered over 200 young people enjoying a music festival, and kidnapped elderly women, children, and entire families, who are now being held as hostages.
Our countries will support Israel in its efforts to defend itself and its people against such atrocities. We further emphasize that this is not a moment for any party hostile to Israel to exploit these attacks to seek advantage.
All of us recognize the legitimate aspirations of the Palestinian people, and support equal measures of justice and freedom for Israelis and Palestinians alike. But make no mistake: Hamas does not represent those aspirations, and it offers nothing for the Palestinian people other than more terror and bloodshed.
Over the coming days, we will remain united and coordinated, together as allies, and as common friends of Israel, to ensure Israel is able to defend itself, and to ultimately set the conditions for a peaceful and integrated Middle East region.
🐣 RT @SpencerGuard We are in the air campaign of the operation into Gaza. The @IDF has a target list of Hamas terrorist military sites, Hamas wants the international community to think bombing is indiscriminate against civilian sites with no warning, neither is true.
⋙ 🐣 RT @IDF Between Saturday and Monday morning, over 1,200 targets were hit by Israeli aircraft across the Gaza Strip, including weapons storage and manufacturing sites, command and control centers, rocket launchers and more. ¤ Today we doubled that number.
💽 https://x.com/SpencerGuard/status/1711430069825175660?s=20/photo/1
🧵 RT @davidfrum In the aftermath of the most horrific mass murder and mass rape of Jews since the Nazi Holocaust, many are volunteering to provide “context” for antisemitic atrocity. (Thread)
📌 https://x.com/davidfrum/status/1711361889840595409?s=20
[ThreadReader:] https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1711361889840595409.html
💙 ⋙ We all seek insight. But be on guard: there is “context” that adds understanding and “context” that subtracts. There is “context” that explains and “context” that excuses. There is a “context” powered by expertise and “context” that functions as propaganda for terrorism.
⋙ So many ideologies and cultures have found ways to justify the murder of Jews.
“Jews spread the plague.”
“Jews serve the landlords.”
“Jews invented capitalism.”
“Jews invented communism.”
“Jews stabbed our army in the back.”
“Jews are settlers and colonialists.”⋙ From the point of view of those justifying the killing, rape, and plunder of Jews, each of these excuses looked or looks excitingly new. From the point of view of the Jews being killed, raped, and plundered – your fresh-out-of-grad-school ideology is just the same old, same old.
⋙ Antisemites have *always* believed that Jews were aliens and settlers who should not be allowed to live where they do live.
Antisemites have *always* believed that Jews were vastly powerful and that murdering Jews was therefore necessary self-defense. ¤ Same old, same old.
⋙ Since Karl Marx himself, many would-be revolutionaries have repurposed ancient anti-Jewish hatred as up-to-the-minute progressivism. ¤ Same old, same old.
🐣 RT @ianbremmer israel: the gold standard for intelligence. what happened? ¤ distractions from internal instability + focus on west bank = far fewer troops on the ground in the south
💽 https://x.com/ianbremmer/status/1711418122937180677?s=20/photo/1
⋙ .🐣 RT @JRubinBlogger try: insane ideologues with no national security experience in top cabinet posts
🐣 RT @KerryKennedyRFK Bobby might share the same name as our father, but he does not share the same values, vision or judgment. Today’s announcement is deeply saddening for us. We denounce his candidacy and believe it to be perilous for our country. @roryekennedy @joekennedy @KKT_Kennedy
[TextLink:] https://x.com/KerryKennedyRFK/status/1711419719683559659?s=20/photo/1
[Text:] STATEMENT ON ROBERT F. KENNEDY JR.’S ANNOUNCEMENT TODAY
The decision of our brother Bobby to run as a third party candidate against Joe Biden is dangerous to our country. Bobby might share the same name as our father, but he does not share the same values, vision or judgment. Today’s announcement is deeply saddening for us. We denounce his candidacy and believe it to be perilous for our country.
Rory Kennedy
Kerry Kennedy Hon. Joseph P Kennedy I
Kathleen Kennedy Townsend
🧵 RT @AndrewDesiderio NEW [thread] Top admin officials told senators to prepare their constituents for a long war in Israel & the Gaza Strip, indicating that U.S. support — both tangible & political — will be necessary in the coming weeks ¤ Admin looking to establish domestic political expectations (1/5)
📌 https://x.com/AndrewDesiderio/status/1711360916082553304?s=20
⋙ The officials, Acting Deputy SecState Victoria Nuland & Acting Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Sasha Baker, suggested an imminent funding package isn’t necessary ¤ BUT they said new security assistance for Israel should be included in Ukraine-focused supplemental (2/5)
⋙ Specifically, the officials added, Israel will need precision-guided missiles as well as replenishments for the Iron Dome missile defense system. (3/5)
⋙ On the call, SASC Chair Reed brought up Tuberville holds & wanted to know impact it’s having operationally in region ¤ Others on call said the case should be made to Tuberville & to GOP senators more broadly that there’s a national-security imperative for him to back off (4/5)
⋙ State Dept vacancies were also brought up — positions like U.S. amb to Egypt & State Dept counterterrorism coordinator. ¤ SFRC Chair Cardin & Ranking Member Risch told senators they’re making progress on un-sticking these noms & hope to confirm them in the coming weeks. (5/5)
WSJ: Congressional Showdown: Can Lawmakers Boost Ukraine Aid by $50 Billion—or Even More? https://tinyurl.com/aaazcyaz “Some senators from both parties say a yearlong package is the best way to overcome House upheaval and signal support to Kyiv”
🐣 RT @ChuckPfarrer THE ENEMY WITHIN: Ukraine’s State Security Service (SBU) has apprehended a 29 year-old Odessa resident working for RU intelligence (GRU). Posing as a volunteer rescuer, he provided targeting data and battle damage assessments to Russian forces. https://kyivpost.com/post/22520
NewYorker, Susan Glasser: Jake Sullivan’s Trial by Combat https://tinyurl.com/ys366rdx “The biggest drag on the speed of responding to Ukrainian requests has been the President, not Lloyd Austin, not Tony, not Jake—not the Administration, but the President”
// Inside the White House’s battle to keep Ukraine in the fight.
🐣 RT @MacFarlaneNews Special Counsel Jack Smith files argument opposing Donald Trump’s request to delay his May 2024 trial in the classified documents case ¤ Smith: “Government has provided the defendants extensive, prompt, and well-organized unclassified discovery…”
[CourtDoc:] https://tinyurl.com/27fhw5ju 13p
🐣 RT @SpencerGuard Just for clarity, the Gaza Strip nor Gaza City is [not] “the most densely populated city/area on the earth.” At its most dense it is approx 9,000+ residents per square kms. That doesn’t put the city in even the top 25. Baghdad has approx 9,700 per square km. Still highly dense but.
🌎 https://x.com/SpencerGuard/status/1711403936064926114?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @MaryLTrump This fucking maniac likely gave Putin (who gave Iran, who gave Hamas) Israel’s national security secrets… ¤ Plus, he divulged highly classified information about our nuclear subs to an Australian cardboard guy. ¤ Why is he still allowed to roam free?
🐣 RT @AntiToxicPeople My god. He is a dangerously insane lying maniac.
[TextLink:] https://x.com/AntiToxicPeople/status/1711403455540346970?s=20/photo/1 ,
[Text:] 🐣 RT @realDonald Trump The same people that raided Israel are pouring into our once beautiful USA, through our TOTALLY OPEN SOUTHERN BORDER, at Record Numbers. Are they planning an attack within our Country? Crooked Joe Biden and his BOSS, Barack Hussein Obama, did this to US!
🐣 RT @region776 Lebanese Hezbollah released a video showing demonstration of strength to addressed to Israel.
💽 https://x.com/region776/status/1711304696692875504?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @MalcolmNance MY OFFICIAL RULING: #NAFOFELLAS I’ve heard infighting asking should #NAFO support #Israel or just #Ukraine. (…)
¤ https://x.com/MalcolmNance/status/1711331801703084038?s=20
As one of the original fellas, one of the first to wear the NAFO patch into combat in UKR & first to reveal the NAFO fella on Russian state TV, I see Israel is being targeted by Russia, Iran & terrorists & their influencers & hackers. They are ALL enemies of Ukraine. We have Israeli Intl Legionnaires who had to leave Ukraine yesterday to go home & fight.
I say we must ALL fight alongside them in the Xitter info war space. ¤ The Russia-Iran-HAMAS axis needs a fucking world class Bonking. #NAFO must step up! I declare #NAFOarticle5 against all who oppose Ukraine AND Israel. #SlavaUkraini #SlavaIsraeliyu
🐣 RT @officejjsmart RUSSIA 🇷🇺 IS ATTACKING ISRAEL 🇮🇱
Two senior European intelligence officers, who work on cybersecurity matters related to Russia, told Kyiv Post: ¤ The hackers attacking 🇮🇱 are the 🇷🇺 government. ¤ 🇷🇺 is at war with 🇮🇱
My latest article for @KyivPost
⋙ KyivPost: Kremlin-Linked Hacker Group Launches Cyber-Attack Against Israel https://tinyurl.com/mpp35hse
// Two senior European intelligence officers claimed in comments to Kyiv Post that Killnet works on behalf of the Russian government.
🐣 RT @highamian I don’t know why it’s hard for people to hold two thoughts in mind at the same time: 1.) Jews in Europe and North America are infinitely less safe today and need stronger protection; 2.) That is not a justification for long-term foreign policy that enables/sustains occupation.
⋙ 🐣 RT @highamian You need to listen to your Jewish friends, families, and community members who are shouting today that they are frightened. You need to take that seriously. That doesn’t have to mean you don’t also care about people suffering in Gaza?? If anything, they are inextricably linked.
🐣 RT @highamian A reminder for everyone out there: it’s not an “opinion” to say that the Israeli government is announcing the intent to commit war crimes. It’s not “pro-Palestine” or “anti-Israel”. The law of armed conflict is crystal clear on the illegality of collective punishment.
⋙ 🐣 RT @tomdannenbaum Gallant is ordering a massive war crime (ICC 8(2)(b)(xxv)) & very likely a crime against humanity (ICC 7(1)(b), 7(2)(b) [extermination] / 7(1)(k) [inhumane acts]). Presence of combatants w/in a civ. population does not affect its civ. character (AP I 50(3)). ICC has jurisdiction.
⋙⋙ 🐣 RT @MahaGaza Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant: “I have ordered a complete siege on the Gaza Strip. There will be no electricity, no food, no fuel, everything is closed. We are fighting human animals and we act accordingly.”
⋙ 🐣 RT @highamian The law is also crystal clear on the illegality of hostage-taking and targeting civilians, and I have already tweeted condemning Hamas for that. It’s not one-sided or prejudiced to comment on events as they develop.
🚫 🐣 RT @ianbremmer “i ordered a full siege on the gaza strip. no power, no food, no gas, everything is closed.” – israel defense minister yoav gallant ¤ population of gaza: 2.2 million
🐣 RT @ChristopherJM A long thread from Ukraine’s Zelensky, who is unequivocal in Kyiv’s support for Israel and drawing attention to Iran’s role in both wars.
🔄 ⋙ 🧵 RT @ZelenskyyUa We live in times when evil is trying to open a chasm between all of us and our common desire for peace. This chasm is growing every day, deepened by terror. The only thing that can guarantee peace and serenity to all nations is rules and international law.
📌 https://x.com/ZelenskyyUa/status/1711302805464445022?s=20
[ThreadReader:] https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1711302805464445022.html
We see who in the world is trying to replace the power of international law with the horror of blood and disasters. We see whose deliberate investments in terror are destroying the lives of various people around the world, from Belarus to Mali. We see. And we must act together!
No one can forget what terrorists did in Israel. Thousands of missiles against peaceful cities. Shot civilian cars. Men, women, and children. No one was spared. Streets in blood. Hostages. The terrorists themselves shared the footage of their atrocities and were proud of them.
Israeli journalists who have been here in Ukraine, in Bucha, are now saying that they saw the same evil where Russia came. The same evil. And the only difference is that there is a terrorist organization that attacked Israel, and here is a terrorist state that attacked Ukraine.
The first dangerous thing is the shocking joy of Russian state-backed propagandists. They call children who are being held hostage by terrorists in Gaza “trophies”. Such a word. Just as Russia has captured thousands of Ukrainian children during its aggression against Ukraine.
And the second dangerous thing is the backing of what is going on… Iran can’t say it has nothing to do with what is going on in Ukraine if it sells “Shaheds” to Russia. Iran can’t say it has nothing to do with what is going on in Israel if its officials claim the support of it.
How far can such evil go? No further than we allow it to. Our unity must and can stop evil. Our desire for peace, not their desire for blood, should determine how the world lives. Our rules-based international order, and not their attempts to make death a rule.
Terrorist leaders ask, “What are the rules on which the international order is based?” As if they don’t understand. These rules are simple. Do not rape women. Do not kill. Do not consider children as trophies. Do not fill cities and villages with blood. Do not open fire at civilian cars. Do not hit peaceful cities with missiles and drones. And one more rule: under any circumstances, we must bring all terrorists and all those who help them to justice. Isn’t the power of the world enough to stop evil? I am sure it is.
Everyone who values life and peace needs to be as active as possible. This is not the time to withdraw from the international arena or isolate due to internal disputes. This is not the time to remain silent or pretend that terror on one continent does not affect global affairs.
Europe should be active. The US should be active. China. India. Arab states should feel how much can collapse if they allow terrorists to achieve their goals. Türkiye. Brazil and all of Latin America. Japan. Australia. Canada. African countries. Central Asian countries. Korea. Pakistan. Indonesia. The Caribbean. The Pacific states. Everyone should be active in the defense of life and international law! We must not give terror a single chance.
If there are real global sanctions for any sponsorship of terror, terror will lose. If the world unites whenever someone takes women hostage and kidnaps the children of another nation, terror will have no allies.
If the one attacked by terrorists receives all the weapons it needs to protect its people, international law will be the only force that will determine how the world lives. And the world will live in peace. This is our common goal.
I urge states and parliaments to be even more active for the sake of global unity. Let everyone who sponsors terror feel the power of our wrath. And let everyone who needs help defending themselves against terror feel the power of our solidarity.
Everyone can help prevent the chasm between the world and peace from widening. We must all be able to promise our children that we will pass on to them a world ruled not by blood shed by evil but by freedom guaranteed by law.
🐣 RT @YousefMunayyer Israel tightens its collective punishment of 2 million Palestinians in Gaza who the Israeli Defense Minister just called “beast people”. This is prelude to genocide.
⋙ 🐣 RT @crispiandjb Israel says imposing total blockade on Gaza. No food, no fuel, no electricity. “We are battling beast people and we are conducting ourselves accordingly,” Israel defence minister says – @Reuter @DanWilliams
🧵 RT @glcarlstrom Quick [thread] on this @WSJ piece, which reports claims from Hamas and Hizballah that Iran “helped plan Hamas’s Saturday surprise attack on Israel and gave the green light.” Those claims are being used to support a narrative that is thus far unsubstantiated.
⋙⋙ WSJ: Iran Helped Plot Attack on Israel Over Several Weeks https://tinyurl.com/wb9u665n
// The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps gave the final go-ahead last Monday in Beirut
📌 https://x.com/glcarlstrom/status/1711260656450609617?s=20/photo/1
[ThreadReader:] https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1711260656450609617.html
Let’s state from the outset: of course there was some Iranian role in this attack. Iran finances Hamas and Islamic Jihad, smuggles weapons to Gaza and provides technical help for building rockets and drones. To say Iran was not involved *at all* is just propaganda.
That said, Iran and its proxies are keen to promote another bit of propaganda. They call it “unity of the arenas”: the idea that an array of militant groups, in Gaza, the West Bank, Lebanon and Syria, will coordinate to fight Israel.
Unity can be a bit elusive on the ground. Even Hamas and Islamic Jihad, the two main groups in Gaza, do not always work well together. Hizballah has a different constituency and a different set of considerations. But the narrative of a united front serves their interests.
Turning to the WSJ piece. Every Israeli I’ve spoken to over the past 48 hours believes this attack was planned over many months. The WSJ’s sources say Iranian officers attended meetings for several weeks. In other words, the planning almost certainly predates their involvement.
The WSJ’s sources also claim that Hossein Amir-Abdollahian “attended at least two of the meetings”. It strains credibility a bit to think that Iran’s FM, an apparatchik and the target of much surveillance, would be brought in to plan a highly secret military operation.
This stuff might seem academic. But there is a narrative taking hold: the WSJ piece proves Iran ordered and planned the attack. It doesn’t prove that or even really assert that. Nor does other credible reporting. And perhaps we should be cautious about taking Hamas at face value.
There was almost certainly some coordination within the “resistance axis”. Hamas would not have launched an attack of this magnitude without alerting its partners. But coordination is not the same thing as Iran giving Hamas an order to go launch a mass attack on Israel.
And to emphasize this again: just because Hamas and Hizballah claim something does not make it true. Remarkable how the same people who say “Iran’s regime lies all the time” (which it does!) are willing to accept claims from Iran and its allies when they fit the right narrative.
⭕ 8 Oct 2023
TheGuardian, Peter Pomerantsev: Murderous Putin is sure of his own impunity. He could not be more wrong https://tinyurl.com/3dmd849k “The Russian dictator believes himself to be above international law but there are many ways to make him pay for his war crimes”
🧵 RT @cwjones89 As the extent of the massacre at the Music Festival of Peace becomes apparent, lots of analysts seem to have trouble understanding the decision by Hamas to embrace ISIS-style tactics. ¤ I think there’s a very clear brutal calculus going on here.
📌 https://x.com/cwjones89/status/1711093453516358123?s=20
[ThreadReader:] https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1711093453516358123.html
⋙ 🐣 RT @cwjones89 [10/7] Today I woke up to a picture of a street in Ashkelon that I used to walk down regularly on the front page of CNN, aflame and littered with burned-out cars. ¤ I’ve been stunned. As a sense-making exercise for myself, here’s a brief 🧵with some thoughts on what this means: https://x.com/cwjones89/status/1710859792443678927?s=20
From Anwar Sadat up to the present, Israeli-Arab decisions towards normalization has always been a triangular calculation recognizing the unlikelihood of military victory over Israel versus the economic benefits of peace with Israel and improved relations with the USA.
Against the slow tide of normalization that began in 1979 and continues to the present, groups like Hamas and Hezbollah have always argued “no, armed struggle can still work, just give us a chance.”
But winning is the only thing that makes this argument convincing. ¤ Tension arises because projecting victimhood – the most successful Palestinian diplomatic strategy – requires *not* winning.
Hamas had to choose one route or the other, and chose to go full ISIS.
But how is slaughtering hundreds of civilians winning? Because in simple terms of raw power, they’ve done something Israel was powerless to stop. They’ve hurt Israel. That’s what matters. ¤ This is the “resistance” that many are euphemistically posting about today.Will it provoke a massive Israeli response? Certainly. Will it undermine Palestinian diplomatic standing in the West. Yes. Does this matter? Not as long as Hamas’ government in Gaza survives.
Netanyahu’s goal was to manage the Gaza conflict at a sustainable level indefinitely. That’s now been exposed as impossible.
I see many comments calling this a suicide mission by Hamas. ¤ This is based on the assumption that Hamas will inevitably lose if the IDF embarks on a full invasion of Gaza.
That is not an assumption that should be made. ¤ Hezbollah fought the IDF to a draw in 2006. ¤ Hamas has been steadily increasing its military capabilities, gaining experience from every war. ¤ They have had over a decade and a half to prepare the ground.
New tech such as drones and ATGMs heavily favor the defender. ¤ A conventional battlefield victory by Hamas inside Gaza is entirely possible. ¤ I don’t think the Hamas leadership would have launched yesterday’s attack if they thought otherwise. ¤ END
🧵 RT @shadihamid 1. It should be possible to do things simultaneously. We can condemn Hamas’ assault and its heinous acts against Israeli civilians while also not forgetting Israel has been a perpetrator of an often brutal occupation against the Palestinian people.
📌 https://x.com/shadihamid/status/1711076483400130967?s=20
[ThreadReader:] https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1711076483400130967.html
2. Yes, it’s fair to describe what happened in Israel as its 9/11. But what that analogy tells us is that Israel should *not* replicate the mistakes, the zeal for war, the civil rights abuses, and utter destruction that the US exacted in the Middle East in its response.
3. I get that people are angry but I don’t get people who go on Twitter right after a tragedy and talk about the Palestinians as animals, as lacking basic morality, without any knowledge of anything about a conflict they couldn’t be bothered to care about until now.
4. This goes without saying so what’s the point of saying it? This is why I didn’t issue condemnations of terror attacks committed by Muslims when it was the fashionable thing to do. No one should doubt I’m against terrorism. It’s on them if they doubt it.
5. [Respondinb] This is absolutely right. Where we are now reflects “a massive political and moral failure by the US, EU, and wider international community.”
6. The United States is not an innocent bystander. The Biden administration has allowed this conflict to fester, ignoring Palestinians and what was happening in Gaza in the name of a quixotic Trumpian effort to broker a peace deal between Israeli and Saudi Arabia.
7. This is a big part of the problem.
⋙ 🐣 RT @naderalihashemi It’s only possible to do this if you believe that Israelis *and* Palestinians are human beings entitled to the same basic human rights & national rights. ¤ Clearly, most of our elected officials (and much of the US foreign policy establishment) do NOT believe this to be true.
🐣 RT @davidfrum If there are Americans among the hostages, Hamas has just got itself into an even bigger war than the one it planned for.
⋙ 🐣 RT @davidfrum And given the sexual violence visited upon the women Hamas captured, it’s going to be difficult for Hamas to release US and other international hostages, lest they tell the world what they suffered from Hamas men.
🐣 RT @AmbJohnBolton Hamas has now admitted that its barbaric attacks on Israel were supported by Iran. Almost certainly, that means Iran directed as well as aided Hamas.
It is long past time for the Biden Administration to stand up to the mullahs in Tehran.
This is one of history’s best cases for regime change.
🐣 RT @general_ben Agree with @NTenzer The Russia-Iran has opened a second front: Russia supporting Iran’s efforts to prevent a closer Israeli-Saudi relationship and Iran distracting Western attention and resources away from Ukraine. Defeat Russia and reduce their economic link to Iran.
⋙ 🐣 RT @NTenzer Hamas terrorist attacks on the Israeli people are exploited by Moscow to divert attention from its daily crimes of genocide & against humanity in Ukraine.
We must keep our attention alert on all fronts, and speed up our arms deliveries to Kyiv.
Same strategy of terror everywhere. [link]
NYT: Hamas Attack Raises Questions Over an Israeli Intelligence Failure https://tinyurl.com/yszefp6f “A key question American intelligence agencies were wrestling with over the weekend was the involvement of Iran in supplying Hamas and encouraging or even planning the attack”
// American and Israeli officials said none of Israel’s intelligence services had specific warning that Hamas was preparing a sophisticated assault.
🐣 RT @nannburke Statement from @RepRashida Tlaib
[TextLink:] https://x.com/nannburke/status/1711063866459685286?s=20/photo/1
[Text:] Tlaib Statement on Ongoing Violence in Israel and Palestine
DETROIT Today, Representative Rashida Tlaib (MI-12) released the following statement:“I grieve the Palestinian and Israeli lives lost yesterday, today, and every day. I am determined as ever to fight for a just future where everyone can live in peace, without fear and with true freedom, equal rights, and human dignity. The path to that future must include lifting the blockade, ending the occupation, and dismantling the apartheid system that creates the suffocating, dehumanizing conditions that can lead to resistance. The failure to recognize the violent reality of living under siege, occupation, and apartheid makes no one safer. No person, no child anywhere should have to suffer or live in fear of violence. We cannot ignore the humanity in each other. As long as our country provides billions in unconditional funding to support the apartheid government, this heartbreaking cycle of violence
will continue.”
🐣 RT @DeanObeidallah WOW. Haaretz which is the NY Times of Israel says Netanyahu bears responsibility for the war because he “completely failed to identify the dangers he was consciously leading Israel into when establishing a government of annexation and dispossession”
⋙ Haaretz Editorial: Netanyahu Bears Responsibility for This Israel-Gaza War https https://tinyurl.com/4y8jrv6r Netanyahu is to blame “for the enfeeblement of top army and intelligence officers, who were perceived as political opponents”
The disaster that befell Israel on the holiday of Simchat Torah is the clear responsibility of one person: Benjamin Netanyahu. The prime minister, who has prided himself on his vast political experience and irreplaceable wisdom in security matters, completely failed to identify the dangers he was consciously leading Israel into when establishing a government of annexation and dispossession, when appointing Bezalel Smotrich and Itamar Ben-Gvir to key positions, while embracing a foreign policy that openly ignored the existence and rights of Palestinians.
Netanyahu will certainly try to evade his responsibility and cast the blame on the heads of the army, Military Intelligence and the Shin Bet security service who, like their predecessors on the eve of the Yom Kippur War, saw a low probability of war with their preparations for a Hamas attack proving flawed.
However, the military and intelligence failure does not absolve Netanyahu of his overall responsibility for the crisis, as he is the ultimate arbiter of Israeli foreign and security affairs. Netanyahu is no novice in this role, like Ehud Olmert was in the Second Lebanon War. Nor is he ignorant in military matters, as Golda Meir in 1973 and Menachem Begin in 1982 claimed to be.
Netanyahu also shaped the policy embraced by the short-lived “government of change” led by Naftali Bennett and Yair Lapid: a multidimensional effort to crush the Palestinian national movement in both its wings, in Gaza and the West Bank, at a price that would seem acceptable to the Israeli public.
In the past, Netanyahu marketed himself as a cautious leader who eschewed wars and multiple casualties on Israel’s side. After his victory in the last election, he replaced this caution with the policy of a “fully-right government,” with overt steps taken to annex the West Bank, to carry out ethnic cleansing in parts of the Oslo-defined Area C, including the Hebron Hills and the Jordan Valley.
This also included a massive expansion of settlements and bolstering of the Jewish presence on Temple Mount, near the Al-Aqsa Mosque, as well as boasts of an impending peace deal with the Saudis in which the Palestinians would get nothing, with open talk of a “second Nakba” in his governing coalition. As expected, signs of an outbreak of hostilities began in the West Bank, where Palestinians started feeling the heavier hand of the Israeli occupier. Hamas exploited the opportunity in order to launch its surprise attack on Saturday.
Above all, the danger looming over Israel in recent years has been fully realized. A prime minister indicted in three corruption cases cannot look after state affairs, as national interests will necessarily be subordinate to extricating him from a possible conviction and jail time.
This was the reason for establishing this horrific coalition and the judicial coup advanced by Netanyahu, and for the enfeeblement of top army and intelligence officers, who were perceived as political opponents. The price was paid by the victims of the invasion in the Western Negev.
🐣 RT @ MalcolmNance CAUTION: @spencerguard ¤ True, the IDF can “enter” Gaza. but at what price? Are they planning to come out alive, meeting tangible military objectives and doing it without insanely massive civ/mil casualties? That’s a different animal. If the IDF simply is being baited to exact “mighty vengeance”, they may eventually win the urban battle but the victory will have a severe price. Israel must look to 2nd Battle of Fallujah as a model for gaza vs imagining turning it into Grozny, Mariupol or Mosul. ¤ Underestimating a cornered HAMAS in urban terrain is dangerous. Very, very dangerous.
¤ https://x.com/MalcolmNance/status/1711096184272519168?s=20
⋙⋙ 🐣 RT @SpencerGuard As a student/scholar of urban warfare I strongly disagree with anyone that says the IDF cannot enter Gaza. The IDF (targeting, engineers, armor, infantry) is uniquely designed to enter highly contested urban terrain, unlike any military in the world
⋙ 🐣 RT @SpencerGuard For sure there is caution, risk, the entire Israel military will be involved, not just the IDF. I know we agree the objectives must be clear. 2nd Fallujah a good example of joint operations but different scale, mission, + Israel doesn’t have 6 months to plan/prepare like US did.
⋙⋙ 🐣 RT @ MalcolmNance I KNOW, right?! So let’s hope it’s not going to devolve into 1st Fallujah. Also, Beware of the wolves in the north! They’re watching.
⋙⋙⋙ 🐣 RT @SpencerGuard I know! Right. We agree. But I don’t see an option of not going into Gaza (will be extremely costly on all sides) to retrieve hostages and destroy Hamas capability. We agree it needs to be a carefully planned joint op to include special guys. Have to evacuate civilians too.
⋙⋙⋙⋙ 🐣 RT @MalcolmNance OK let’s talk hostages. A massive ground operation will be very unlikely to find many alive except by accident. Hopefully, they could even be smuggling them out to Sinai via hostage transport cells. I spent a good part of a decade trying to find 76 Western hostages in Lebanon & time is not on the IDF side here. This ain’t Entebbe. So no SOF is fast roping into Gaza. HAMAS has enough SAMs and AAA and the likelihood of baited SOF traps using a turned informant’s compromised iphone is VERY high. […]
⋙ 🐣 exactly; treat them as political hostages and bargain or exchange for prisoners ¤ Jared is credited with the Abraham Accords, but from the outset IGNORED the Palestinians; Biden picked up the AA but except for lame talk about a 2-state solution, has done nothing to work toward it
🐣 RT @IrnaEnglish #Iran president urges Muslim governments to stand with #Palestine https://en.irna.ir/news/85251953/
🐣 RT @60Minutes [Milley:] “If Ukraine loses and Putin wins, I think you would be certainly increasing, if not doubling, your defense budget in the years ahead. And you will increase the probability of a great power war…it would be a very dangerous situation.”
WaPo: Biden administration scrambles to deter wider Mideast conflict https://tinyurl.com/yc3xwnh7 “Hezbollah, the Iran-backed militant group and Lebanon’s largest political party, has a history of attacking Israel when Jerusalem is engaged in hostilities with Hamas”
// As Israel prepares a ground offensive in Gaza, the White House sends military aid and moves to prevent regional destabilization
🐣 RT @SecBlinken Spoke today with Emirati Foreign Minister @ABZayed to discuss the terrorist attacks on Israel. I reiterated Israel’s right to self defense and highlighted our unwavering focus on halting the attacks by Hamas and securing the release of all hostages.
🐣 RT @Joyce_Karam UPDATE: #Israel Amasses 100,000 troops on Gaza border
• Ground Offensive Imminent
• Goal to ‘end’ Hamas threat + its control of Gaza
• Israel confirms large number of hostages taken
⋙ 🐣 RT @Joyce_Karam We are close to entering the ground offensive, first for Israel in Gaza since 2021 but on much larger scale.
Since 2021, Hamas has grown more capable militarily and politically in Gaza. ¤ Expect an atrocious, cruel, long war in a space that houses 2 million people…
💙 🐣 RT @AliVelshi Friends, as the sun gets set to rise on the Holy Land & I cross into Israel, my head is in the story, but my heart is with the beleaguered and long-suffering people of Israel, Palestine and Gaza, who yearn for & deserve lives of peace. If you pray, pray for for all of them
🐣 RT @60Minutes Pres. Trump recently said his behavior was “so egregious that in times gone by, the punishment would have been death.” ¤ Milley says there was nothing inappropriate or treasonous about the calls, which he says were authorized and coordinated. https://cbsn.ws/3PV2PSa
🐣 RT @ NoahCRothman Hamas has said Iran facilitated the attack. Hezbollah sources confirm that on the record. WSJ reports Syrian sources have also confirmed. They have a detailed report on IRGC operational control over the attack following weeks of prep in Beirut. What evidence does the admin lack?
⋙ 🐣 RT @jimsciutto New: US has yet to find a smoking gun linking Iran directly to planning and executing attack on Israel this weekend, US officials told CNN. However, there’s no denying Iran’s history of aiding Hamas. As one said, “Of course Iran is in the picture.”
🐣 RT @RpsAgainstTrump Rep. Michael McCaul, the Republican Chairman of the Foreign Affairs Committee refuted Trump’s talking point that the the $6 billion that President Biden freed for humanitarian aid had anything to do with Hamas’s attack on Israel: ¤ “I don’t think it played a part in this event.”
🐣 RT @SimoneKanter .@RepDanGoldman, his wife, and three youngest children were in Israel for a family Bar Mitzvah when Hamas attacked on Saturday. ¤ The Congressman and his family sheltered from Hamas rocket fire until early Sunday morning, when they were able to safely depart for New York.
[TextLink:] https://x.com/SimoneKanter/status/1711094443003044269?s=20/photo/1
[Text:] STATEMENT ON THE DEPARTURE OF CONGRESSMAN DAN GOLDMAN AND HIS
FAMILY FROM ISRAEL
New York, NY – Simone Kanter, spokesperson for Congressman Dan Goldman (NY- 10), today issued the following statement on the safe departure of Congressman Goldman and his family from Israel on Sunday morning. “Congressman Goldman, his wife, and three youngest children were in Israel for a family Bar Mitzvah when Hamas brutally attacked Israel on Shabbat and Simchat Torah, one of the holiest Jewish holidays. Congressman Goldman and his family sheltered from Hamas rocket fire in their hotel’s interior stairwell until early Sunday morning, when they were able to safely depart for New York. “Congressman Goldman is grateful for the assistance of the State Department and Israeli authorities, and he hopes all Americans can come together to support Israel’s right to defend herself from terrorism and war crimes.”
🐣 RT @DeanObeidallah WOW. Haaretz which is the NY Times of Israel says Netanyahu bears responsibility for the war because he “completely failed to identify the dangers he was consciously leading Israel into when establishing a government of annexation and dispossession”
🐣 RT @djrothkopf Almost certainly Iran had a hand in the attack on Israel. If that can be proved, Israel will be compelled to hit Iran. Hard. That decision and its aftermath will be critical to regional stability and a big challenge for the Biden admin.
🐣 RT @ AOstovar This isn’t a surprise. But what it tells us is that Iran *wants* credit. In the crude terms of war, this is the regime’s most effective action against Israel. The IRGC wants the “win”. But this also severely escalates the Iran-Israeli conflict. Israel will no doubt respond
⋙ 🐣 RT @WSJ Breaking: Iran helped plan Hamas’s attack on Israel and gave the green light for the assault at a meeting last Monday https://on.wsj.com/46AJThW
⋙⋙ WSJ: Iran Helped Plot Attack on Israel Over Several Weeks https://tinyurl.com/3kx2e8p8
// The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps gave the final go-ahead last Monday in Beirut
🧵RT @P_Kallioniemi In today’s #vatniksoup, I’ll introduce a South African-American(!) businessman and social media figure, Elon Musk (@elonmusk). He’s best-known for being the wealthiest man in the world, running Tesla Inc., SpaceX & Twitter, and for parroting Kremlin’s propaganda narratives. ¤ 1/24
📌 https://x.com/P_Kallioniemi/status/1674360288445964288?s=20
🐣 RT @lukeharding1968 My latest dispatch from #Odesa with @dansabbagh on Ukraine’s unexpected progress in the Black Sea. Russia’s fleet has left Sevastopol, a new “grain corridor” is working, and Kyiv has been striking occupied Crimea with drones and storm shadows.
🐣 RT @anders_aslund A new axis of evil has arisen: Russia-Iran-North Korea. Their latest project is Hamas’s attack on Israel. ¤ The best & most just way to defeat them is to give Ukraine all the arms it needs to defeat Russia. The US & Germany need to step up & Israel had better finally choose side.
🐣 RT @anno1540 ‼ The Kremlin will use the Hamas attack on Israel to promote narratives about the reduction of US and Western support and attention to Ukraine, – ISW. ¤ Analysts note that the Kremlin has already used and will probably continue to use Hamas attacks on Israel to promote information operations aimed at reducing US and Western support and attention to Ukraine. ¤ Source: [Telegram]
⭕ 7 Oct 2023
💙 🐣 RT @ NTarnopolsky 💥The Israeli army warned Netanyahu for months that his push for government overhaul put Israel at great risk of a multi-front attack. He dismissed their warnings by accusing the military of “joining the left-wing protesters” against him. His ministers said army could go to hell.
⋙ 🐣 RT @Beltrew Israel is famed for being the birthplace of world’s most powerful surveillance software. It has eyes & a blockade on Gaza, that is only 42km long. In Gaza the one constant is the Israeli observation drones in the sky. But no one saw this coming. Analysis:
⋙⋙ TheIndependent [UK]: Surprise Palestinian attack is most significant military challenge to Israel in 50 years https://tinyurl.com/27ubz8yy
// Today’s attack, launched almost 50 years to the day of the 1973 Yom Kippur War, is different, writes Bel Trew. And the consequences will be huge
⋙ 🐣 RT @cheryljune correct. This outcome was pre-ordained by Netanyahu’s personal corruption and megalomania — what a catastrophe. And let’s not forget Netanyahu’s big friendship with Putin at the expense of Ukraine. No mystery here.
⋙ 🐣 RT @CopernicusSees I find it virtually impossible that the government didn’t see this attack coming… It’s always the same with Bibi – make life in Gaza and the West Bank unbearable; foster settler violence; etc. All to inspire attacks that can serve as pretext for massacres of civilians.
🧵 RT @TheStudyofWar NEW: The #Kremlin is already and will likely continue to exploit the #Hamas attacks in #Israel to advance several information operations intended to reduce US and Western support and attention to #Ukraine. ¤ Oct. 7 campaign assessment: http://isw.pub/UkrWar100723
📌 [TextLink:] https://x.com/TheStudyofWar/status/1710814975294341473?s=20/photo/1
[Text:] The Kremlin is already and will likely continue to exploit the Hamas attacks in Israel to advance several information operations intended to reduce US and Western support and attention to Ukraine. The Kremlin amplified several information operations following Hamas attacks in Israel on October 7, primarily blaming the West for neglecting conflicts in the Middle East in favor of supporting Ukraine and claiming the international community will cease to pay attention to Ukraine by portraying attention to the Middle East or alternatively Ukraine as a zero-sum comparison. Deputy Chairman of the Russian Security Council Dmitry Medvedev claimed the United States and its allies should have been “busy with” working on “Palestinian-Israeli settlement” rather than “interfering” with Russia and providing Ukraine with military aid.[1] The Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MA) accused the West of blocking efforts by a necessary “quartet” of Russia, the US, the European Union, and the United Nations, leading to an escalation in violence, implicitly blaming the West for the current fighting. [2] Prominent Russian propagandist Sergei Mardan directly stated that Russia will benefit from the escalation as the world “will take its mind off Ukraine for a while and get busy once again putting out the eternal fire in the Middle East.” 3] These Kremlin narratives target Western audiences to drive a wedge in military support for Ukraine, seek to demoralize Ukrainian society by claiming Ukraine will lose international support, and intend to reassure Russian domestic audiences that the international society will ignore Ukraine’s war effort.
🐣 RT @realDonaldTrump [ts]
[TextLink:] https://truthsocial.com/@realDonaldTrump/111194535245915079
[Text:] I built 561 Miles of Border Wall between the United States and Mexico, as per the highest specifications of Brandon Judd and the U.S. Border Patrol, with the great Tom Homan consulting. This was more than the 400 Miles that I said I was going to build, and despite the false promises of the Broken Old Crow, Mitch McConnell, and RINO Paul RINO. Crazy Nancy & Cryin’ Chuck Schumer (a friend of Judge Engoron?) fought me all the way. What a group? But I got the Wall built anyway, and more was coming, until Crooked Joe, instead of installing it, sold it for pennies on the dollar (Did he know the buyer?). Now, after 15,000,000 people, many from prisons and mental institutions, have invaded our Country, this corrupt & incompetent president wants to put up a small, below spec, 20 mile Wall. Has he apologized to me yet?
🐣 RT @MaxBoot This is the way I put it in my @PostOpinions column: Hamas did not attack because of the miserable conditions in Gaza. Its leaders are motivated by religious & nationalist fanaticism. But the terrible conditions do make it easy to recruit fighters. https://wapo.st/3rAqEqe
⋙ 🐣 RT @yarotrof Yes, life in Gaza has been terrible and Palestinians have suffered under occupation. No, it doesn’t make it right to go rape and kill Israeli women and kidnap and parade their orphaned children in Gaza. I don’t know why but somehow lots of people don’t seem to understand that.
⋙⋙ 🐣 RT @AaronBBrown Hamas attacked at this moment, to try to stop normalization with Saudi Arabia, and it will be on hold while this war is prosecuted, but they can only delay the inevitable.
🐣 RT @AndrewDesiderio McConnell compares Hamas attacks on Israel to Russia’s assault on Ukraine, noting both Hamas/Russia are backed by Iran ¤ “Failure to support friends under attack – in Kyiv or Tel Aviv – will only embolden the world’s largest state sponsor of terrorism & fellow authoritarians…”
[TextLink:] https://x.com/AndrewDesiderio/status/1710672365472846050?s=20/photo/1
[Text:] LOUISVILLE, KY – U.S. Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) released the following statement regarding today’s terrorist war against Israel:
“Today’s terrorist violence against Israel is a reminder of the evil that motivates Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, and their patrons in Tehran.
“The United States and the civilized world must stand in solidarity as a fellow democracy defends its sovereignty and its citizens and must unequivocally condemn these vicious attacks against civilian populations. Terror on Israeli soil is only the sharpest edge of a concerted terrorist effort that threatens the United States, our partners in the Middle East, and free societies across the world.
“The terrorists responsible for this ongoing war against Israel were trained and equipped by Iran, the same terror state providing lethal drones to Russia to attack Ukraine. There must be consequences for those who conduct or support such terror.
“Failure to support friends under attack – in Kyiv or Tel Aviv – will only embolden the world’s largest state sponsor of terrorism and fellow authoritarians who watch closely for a weakening of American leadership and Western solidarity.”
🐣 RT @SecBlinken I spoke with Palestinian Authority President Abbas to discuss the terrorist attacks against Israel. I urged that all leaders in the region must condemn these appalling acts of terrorism.
🐣 RT @DavidAFrench An excellent statement.
⋙ 🐣 RT @ZelenskyyUa Today, the entire world saw horrifying videos from Israel. Terrorists humiliate women and men, detain even the elderly, and show no mercy.
¤ https://x.com/ZelenskyyUa/status/1710723464414282183?s=20
In the face of such a terrorist strike, everyone who values life must stand in solidarity.
We in Ukraine have a special feeling about what has happened. Thousands of rockets in the Israeli sky… People killed just on the streets… Civilian cars shot through… Detainees being humiliated…
Our position is crystal clear: anyone who causes terror and death anywhere on the planet must be held accountable.
Today’s terrorist attack on Israel was well-planned, and the entire world knows which sponsors of terrorism could have endorsed and enabled its organization.
Israel has the full right to defend itself against terror. As any other state. And it’s critical that the whole world responds to terror in a unified and principled manner.
🐣 RT @AntiToxicPeople VERY VERY VERY STABLE GENIUS UPDATE
[TextLink:] https://x.com/AntiToxicPeople/status/1710744178811154576?s=20/photo/1
[Text:] 🐣 RT @realDonaldTrump The Corrupt A.G.’s Fake Trial in New York should be immediately ended. The highly political Judge is being CONNED by the Racist A.G. He made up his mind before learning the facts. My Net Worth is substantially MORE than what is listed on my Financial Statements, and there is a 100% DISCLAIMER CLAUSE on each document. THEREFORE, THERE IS NO FRAUD! Also, the banks are big, strong, and well represented by the best and most prestigious law firms in the Country. There were NO DEFAULTS – ALL LOANS WERE PAID IN FULL, EARLY, OR CURRENT. They made their maximum, and are “thrilled.” Letitia “Peekaboo” James is a total Wack Job, as MURDERS AND VIOLENT CRIME HIT RECORD HIGHS IN NEW YORK. PEOPLE, BUSINESSES, & TAX REVENUES ARE FLEEING NEW YORK AS OUR POLITICALLY BIASED & INCOMPETENT ATTORNEY GENERAL SITS IN COURT ALL DAY & SEES WHAT A GREAT, & HIGHLY LIQUID, COMPANY I BUILT, WITH SOME OF THE MOST FABULOUS ASSETS ANYWHERE IN THE WORLD. END THIS ELECTION INTERFERENCE WITCH HUNT, NOW!!!
‼️ 🐣 RT @ELINTNews #BREAKING: Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu announces “Citizens of Israel, we are at war”
⭕ 6 Oct 2023
🐣 RT @danielsgoldman Source of Jim Jordan’s @weaponization subcommittee’s theory of social media “censorship” is actually an antisemitic white supremacist who supports the Great Replacement Theory. ¤ Clear purpose is to intimidate social media co’s to allow hate and misinformation to spread online.
⋙ 🐣 RT @BrandyZadrozny EXCLUSIVE @MikeBenzCyber, former State Dept official & rising voice in the “anti-censorship” movement seems to have a past as“Frame Game,” a popular alt-right YouTuber who frequented white supremacist podcasts and blamed Jews for “white genocide.”
⋙⋙ NBCNews: Michael Benz, a conservative crusader against online censorship, appears to have a secret history as an alt-right persona https://tinyurl.com/ye27bu78
// Frame Game, the pseudonym of an alt-right internet personality, hid his face while pushing racist conspiracy theories. Inadvertent slips revealed details about his identity.
🐣 RT @WarintheFuture A very useful contribution to our observations on the #Ukraine war. This will remain a tough campaign for a while to come, and Ukraine requires our ongoing support. Thanks @Tatarigami_UA
⋙ 🐣 RT @Tatarigami_UA Recently, I’ve tried to refrain from making negative statements about the overall situation. However, over the past two months, I’ve come across a continuous stream of statements that I find not only incorrect but also potentially harmful.
¤ https://x.com/Tatarigami_UA/status/1710382234803290154?s=20
One of the most recent trends I’ve observed is the assertion that the russians lack reserves and are running out of troops. This information is not only inaccurate but also lacks substantiated data on the location and availability of russian reserves. ¤ In the past, I made a similar comment when regiments from the 76th division started moving southward.
Unfortunately, I continue to witness the deployment of additional units and reserves across various parts of the frontline. While I harbor doubts about their potential for an offensive, they appear to be deployed in the areas where Ukrainian forces might breach defenses. Their purpose seems to be slowing down Ukrainian troops and severely limiting their ability to exploit any breakthroughs.
Ultimately, russian forces may not need to advance at this moment but aim to minimize Ukrainian gains from this counter-offensive. They aim to undermine both political and military support for Ukraine.
The enemy remains formidable and capable, despite all their shortcomings. They still possess significant anti-tank capabilities, the ability to deploy remote minefields, employ loitering munitions, maintain artillery and counter-battery capabilities, and continue fortifying their defenses. When individuals push the narrative that the russians are on the verge of collapse and have exhausted their reserves, it fosters unrealistic expectations and diverts attention from the necessity for long-term planning and vision. It can lead to an overemphasis on short-term optimism and hinder the recognition of mistakes, the need for change, or an increase in support.
To an observer, it may seem that advances can continue endlessly. However, this situation underscores the fact that Ukraine does not possess an unlimited supply of ammunition, much of which was provided by South Korea through the US. Furthermore, Ukraine does not have an inexhaustible pool of personnel in the already deployed brigades along the front lines.
Maintaining a healthy optimism is absolutely necessary as our troops make further progress. It’s true that russian troops have suffered severe degradation, and counter-battery fire degraded their artillery capabilities. Their captured soldiers have testified about a lack of discipline and a diminishing will to fight. However, this optimism shouldn’t transform into delusional hopefulness.
Earlier this spring, I cautioned against setting unrealistic expectations and the belief that russian defenses would collapse within weeks or days, leading to celebrations in liberated Crimea. I emphasized that a counter-offensive alone would not win this war and that we needed to plan for the long term. I hope that now, my message will resonate more strongly. …
~~~~~
⋙ 🐣 RT @Tatarigami_UA They have shortages in some equipment while increasing others (like drones). They can likely sustain this war at the current intensity for another year or two by refurbishing their stocks and receiving support from allies. They’re counting on reduced Western support for Ukraine⋙ 🐣 RT @Tatarigami_UA You’re correct, and that’s why I’m reaching out to the audience to emphasize the need for a long-term plan. We must avoid falling into this trap, as it aligns with russian anticipations of weakened support, so they have time to rearm and resume offensives in the future
💙 🔊 ≣ TheGoodInUs, Deep Dives: Mary Trump Interviews Jonathan Greenberg, former Forbes 400 journalist, about Donald Trump https://tinyurl.com/38mzvnka //➔ this interview will make news
🖼 https://x.com/Auriandra/status/1710453545881813278?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @Acyn Biden: I’m sick and tired of Republicans in the House saying they want to cut the deficit when all they really want to do is cut taxes for the wealthy.
🐣 RT @jurgen_nauditt Czech President Pavel to MEPs: “If Ukraine fails, so will we” ¤ In his address, he called on “everyone to continue to support Ukraine by all means possible.” ¤ Recalling that the territory of Czechoslovakia was handed over to Hitler in the hope of pacifying him and avoiding war, he strongly opposed offering concessions to putin and called for “a settlement that will provide the necessary conditions for Ukraine’s continued existence in lasting peace and prosperity.”
🐣 RT @Maks_NAFO_FELLA 👀👀👀👀👀👀👀👀
🇺🇸🇵🇱 “The US offers Poland to hand over part of its existing Patriot systems to Ukraine in exchange for Washington to supply Warsaw with Israeli-made Iron Dome anti-missile defense systems”, — Politico
🐣 RT @frankrunyeon MORE: Seeking to halt trial, Trump argues: ¤ Justice Engoron “clearly does not comprehend the scope of the chaos its decision has wrought,” saying terminating his business licenses… makes it “impossible” to operate his businesses and threatens termination of 100s of employees.
[TextLink:] https://x.com/frankrunyeon/status/1710304838293057714?s=20/photo/1 -2
🐣 RT @GlasnostGone Thanks to #Ukraine, Russia’s dominance over the Black Sea is waning. Its fleet driven out of occupied #Crimea & Novorossiysk port too close to Crimea, 🇷🇺 wants to build a naval base in 🇷🇺 occupied region of Abkhazia, Georgia – but it has no natural harbour
🌎 https://x.com/GlasnostGone/status/1710393768497533421?s=20/photo/1
⋙ BBC: Abkhazia: Russia to build naval base in Georgian separatist region, says local leader https://tinyurl.com/4ps2frax
🐣 RT @tribelaw Exactly. And there’s no excuse for letting the $ Billions in Russian Central Bank assets sit frozen and unused in the US when @POTUS has clear legal authority TODAY under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act to transfer every bit of that money to help Ukraine
💙 ⋙ 🐣 RT @danielsgoldman We are not supporting Ukraine simply because we like the country. ¤ This is the first real test of authoritarianism vs democracy since World War II. ¤ Democracy must win for the sake of our own national security and global democracy. ¤ That is why we must support Ukraine.
WaPo: Hakeem Jeffries: A bipartisan coalition is the way forward for the House https://tinyurl.com/t3ra8v62 “… Republicans are reliant on Democratic support to do the basic work of governing. A small band of extremists should not be capable of obstructing that cooperation”
🐣 RT @hugolowell New: Trump is endorsing Jim Jordan for House Speaker on Truth Social
🐣 RT @lindyli The CIA saw a huge spike in the murder and capture of agents AT THE SAME TIME that Trump was harboring stolen docs on CIA assets ¤ CIA sounded a global alarm over this in 2021 ¤ Trump didn’t just share intel with Mar-a-Lago guests ¤ He’s been selling us out to our enemies all along [hmm]
🐣 RT @mccaffreyr3 The US submarine force (both attack and missile boats) are the most capable machines on the face of the earth. Every aspect of the submarine technology is highly classified. The nuke payloads are extremely sensitive info. Trump has imperiled our security.
⋙ 🐣 RT @RadioFreeTom The man is an ongoing menace to US national security.
⋙⋙ 🐣 RT @kylegriffin1 Breaking ABC: Months after leaving office, Trump allegedly discussed potentially sensitive information about U.S. nuclear submarines with a member of Mar-a-Lago — an Australian billionaire who then allegedly shared the information with scores of others.
🐣 RT @DevanaUkraine We will have more air defense – there are clear agreements. Our soldiers will have more artillery. There will be more long-range weapons. And there will definitely be more justice, – Zelenskyi in the evening address. ¤ The president also reacted to the terrorist attack on the village of Groza in the Kharkiv region: “today, a little more than 300 people lived in this village, Russia killed 51. This is a brutal genocidal aggression of Russia.”
⭕ 5 Oct 2023
🐣 RT @atrupar your father did what? [Hannity on his father hitting him with a belt]
💽 https://x.com/atrupar/status/1710105427189358676?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @MeriQueenOfCats It’s fascism. You can map the words and behaviour to Paxton’s pretty comprehensive definition. [Anatomy of Fascism]
[TextLink:] https://x.com/MeriQueenOfCats/status/1710094805324403101?s=20/photo/1
💙 [Text:] “Fascism may be defined as a form of political behavior marked by obsessive preoccupation with community decline, humiliation, or victim-hood and by compensatory cults of unity, energy, and purity, in which a mass-based party of committed nationalist militants, working in uneasy but effective collaboration with traditional elites, abandons democratic liberties and pursues with redemptive violence and without ethical or legal restraints goals of internal cleansing and external expansion.”
🐣 RT @TomJChicago BREAKING- Judge Engoron in Trump’s NY fraud case has hit Trump and the brats w/ a devastating order that will expose them. Check out section 6. They have to disclose third party co-owners, equity partners and lenders for ALL of their businesses including the 500 LLCs. This will expose his true lack of ownership of Trump Org.
[TextLink:] https://x.com/TomJChicago/status/1709965388782444823?s=20/photo/1
[Text:] ORDERED that for each of the Section 130 Entities, defendants shall provide the Monitor with advance notice of
(1) Any application for a new business certificate (including, but not limited to, “doing business as” or “assumed name” certificates) in any jurisdiction;
(2) The creation of a new entity to hold or acquire the assets of a Section 130 Entity:
(3) Any anticipated transfer of assets or liabilities to any other entity;
(4) Any anticipated distribution from a Section 130 Entity;
(5) Any assignment of rights from a Section 130 Entity;
(6) Any disclosures to third parties regarding the transfer or cancellation of the business certificates including, but not limited to, correspondence to the Section 130 Entitities’ lenders, banks, finance companies, leasing agents, insurance companies. buyers, equity partners / co-owners, or taxing authorities;
Any modifications to existing contracts or obligations with any counterparty [etc]
🐣 RT @DevanaUkraine We will have more air defense – there are clear agreements. Our soldiers will have more artillery. There will be more long-range weapons. And there will definitely be more justice, – Zelenskyi in the evening address. ¤ The president also reacted to the terrorist attack on the village of Groza in the Kharkiv region: “today, a little more than 300 people lived in this village, Russia killed 51. This is a brutal genocidal aggression of Russia.”
🐣 RT @ChrisDJackson 🚨 According to a new book by Franklin Foer, Joe Biden isn’t just the president of the United States, he is the West’s father figure, whom foreign leaders call for advice and look to for assurance.
Foer writes: “It was his calming presence and his strategic clarity that helped lead the alliance to such an aggressive stance, which stymied authoritarianism on its front lines. He was a man for his age.”
Yes, folks, President Biden is old. But he is also WISE and DECENT. Our allies see that and they value it.
Retweet if you are proud to have a president with the wisdom to not only lead our nation, but the free world. I know I sure am. 🇺🇸
🐣 📋 RT @SophiePerrin18 Fellas–Informative Article ¤ There’s still $5.4 billion in the Presidential Drawdown funds and $1.6 billion left to replenish US military stocks sent to Ukraine. ¤ Biden mentioned another unidentified source of funds he may be able to tap. 1/
⋙ 📊 VOA: Biden to Argue for Continued Funding for Ukraine https://tinyurl.com/48ysazpm
// Chicago Council poll
… “We can support Ukraine in the next tranche that we need,” [Biden] said. “And there is another means by which we may be able to find funding for that. But I’m not going to do that now.”
The Pentagon warned that without action from Congress, funding could run out in a matter of months, with only $5.4 billion remaining under the Presidential Drawdown Authority funds and $1.6 billion left of the $25.9 billion provided by Congress to replenish U.S. military stocks that have been flowing to Ukraine. …
Since the war began, the Biden administration and Congress have directed more than $75 billion in assistance to Ukraine, which includes humanitarian, financial and military support, according to the Kiel Institute for the World Economy, a German policy institute. …
As anxiety over U.S. commitment grows among Europeans, Biden convened a call this week with more than a dozen allies and partners to assure them he is committed to military assistance to Ukraine for as long as it takes, according to the White House.
🧵 RT @MuellerSheWrote BREAKING: Judge Engoron has issued an ORDER that Trump, Junior, Eric, Weisselberg, and McConney can’t move a DIME or open a business without reporting it to the monitor (Barbara Jones – she was the special master in the Rudy and Cohen cases). 1/
📌 [TextLink:] https://x.com/MuellerSheWrote/status/1709948170971783240?s=20/photo/1
⋙ They also have 7 days to provide a list of every business they own and any third party who has any ownership or partnership with any of their business (this would include those 500+ shell companies Trump owns AND anyone who has a stake in any of them.) 2/
⋙ They also have until October 26 to provide the court with potential receivers who will probably be responsible for liquidating all the businesses. Finally, none of them can create any NEW businesses without reporting them to the monitor. 3/
⋙ The judge says that Tish James can help the monitor by sharing state records of any such entities or third party owners of any other company owned by any of the plaintiffs. I assume this would include “Trump Org II” created to hide assets last year. Lol. 4/
⋙⋙ BI [India] Oct 2022: Donald Trump has incorporated ‘Trump Organization II’ in apparent dodge of NY fraud case, officials say https://tinyurl.com/3c3nyj9c
… With his business empire, the Trump Organization, in civil and criminal jeopardy in New York, Donald Trump has come up with an apparent solution that has angered state officials: He has formed the Trump Organization II.
The new company was registered with the New York Department of State on September 21, public records show — the very day that the state attorney general, Letitia James, filed a 220-page fraud lawsuit against Trump, his family, and the original Trump Organization, the umbrella company for the former president’s real-estate and golf-resort holdings.
On Thursday, James’ office fought back against the move, filing court papers that ask a Manhattan judge to bar Trump from moving assets from the Trump Organization into the new entity to protect them them from some $250 million in potential penalties.
The filing seeks “to immediately stop Donald Trump and the Trump Organization from continuing financial fraud,” the attorney general said in a press release.
The court papers ask the judge, New York Supreme Court Justice Arthur Engoron, to immediately appoint an independent monitor to oversee the Trump Organization. […]
⋙ Here’s the full order. END/ https://tinyurl.com/mpjds49k
🐣 RT @ProjectLincoln You know it’s bad when even Fox News admits that No Labels is a “shadow operation on behalf of Republicans” #NoLabelsElectsTrump
💽 https://x.com/ProjectLincoln/status/1710105090105704945?s=20/photo/1
🧵 RT @MacFarlaneNews FLASH: Trump files motion to dismiss his 2020 election conspiracy criminal case. He argues “Presidential immunity” ¤ “….To ensure the President may serve unhesitatingly, without fear that his political opponents may one day prosecute him for decisions they dislike…”
📌 https://x.com/MacFarlaneNews/status/1710000759218016627?s=20
[ThreadReader:] https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1710000759218016627.html
🐣 RT @McFaulCongressman @RepMcCaul has introduced H.R.4175 – REPO for Ukrainians Act, a smart idea to transfer Russian assets frozen in the US to Ukraine. Democrats should endorse this idea & add it to new legislation for additional Ukrainian aid — a bipartisan win-win for all.
⋙ 🐣 RT @StandByUkraine Is that the $300 billion worth of frozen russian central bank assets? Also, they need to extend Lend Lease to 2024 fiscal year (if they haven’t already) and start using it.
⋙⋙ Politico: Why Biden hasn’t loaned weapons to Ukraine https://tinyurl.com/rzjd3bht
The Biden administration has yet to use its Lend-Lease authorities to send weapons to Ukraine, senior administration officials and lawmakers told NatSec Daily.
The U.S. under President JOE BIDEN has committed nearly $35 billion in security assistance for Kyiv since Russia’s invasion, all of it coming from drawdowns of U.S. military stocks or future weapons production. But Congress also gave Biden Lend-Lease authority last year, allowing the U.S. to cut through bureaucratic red tape and gift weapons to Ukraine with the expectation of reimbursement down the line. …
“We are prioritizing security assistance that they would not have to pay us back for,” a senior administration official said on the condition of anonymity to detail sensitive internal discussions. However, the official added that the administration is “certainly open to using it in the future.” The focus right now is on “other existing authorities that Congress has authorized.” …
Whatever the rationale, some lawmakers aren’t satisfied that the Lend-Lease option remains unused. “As our defense stockpiles dwindle, it’s absurd for the Biden administration to sit on its hands and ignore the Lend-Lease authority from Congress,” Sen. JOHN CORNYN (R-Texas), who led the effort to pass the legislation, told NatSec Daily. Using Lend-Lease is “a much better plan than continuing to give them away for free.” …
🐣 RT @Cirincione The #s of warheads on US subs and our ASW capabilities are among our most highly classified secrets. I held Top Secret/SCI clearances in government but never saw this info. Trump giving them to a foreign national – even an ally – it is a major breach.
⋙ ABCNews: Trump allegedly discussed US nuclear subs with foreign national after leaving White House: Sources https://tinyurl.com/2s4ymmjc
// Trump allegedly discussed the information with an Australian billionaire.
🐣 RT @spectatorindex BREAKING: The 🇺🇸 SEC has launched an investigation into Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter/X.
¤ https://x.com/spectatorindex/status/1710022047882166282?s=20
🐣 RT @Maks_NAFO_FELLA 👀 “The US will be able to bypass restrictions and allocate funds to support Ukraine through the State Department’s grant program. The Biden administration is currently studying various options for circumventing the restrictions”, – Politico
🐣 RT @TristanSnell No, there is no “presidential immunity” for a criminal conspiracy. ¤ See, e.g., United States v. Nixon, 418 U.S. 683 (1974).
🐣 RT @MuellerSheWrote BREAKING: Trump has filed a motion to dismiss the charges brought by Jack Smith in DC arguing presidential immunity – stating that he’s being charged for actions that are “at the heart of his official responsibilities” as president. He will lose. I look forward to DoJ response.
[TextLink:] https://x.com/MuellerSheWrote/status/1709999024332558604?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @BradMossEsq Lindell is broke, basically. He did it to himself
💽 https://x.com/BradMossEsq/status/1710027608820232650?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @ MarkHertling “… a week left to live.” ¤ Hey members of Congress who don’t support Ukraine, this would be your contributions to an war criminal’s objectives.
⋙ 🐣 RT @IAPonomarenko Vladimir Putin, Oct. 5, 2023: “…if Western defense supplies are terminated tomorrow, Ukraine will have a week left to live as it runs out of ammunition.” ¤ Any more questions regarding Russia’s intentions and negotiability on Ukraine?
💽 https://x.com/MarkHertling/status/1710019838133903866?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @general_ben “The Battle of the Black Sea” is a terrific way to frame this…UAF are using a wide range of capabilities in multiple domains to keep pressure on the Russian General Staff, forcing them to react, and creating an untenable situation for the Black Sea Fleet in Crimea.
⋙ 🐣 RT @Biz_Ukraine_Mag Ukraine is winning the Battle of the Black Sea: months of air strikes have forced the Russian fleet to retreat from Crimea and enabled Ukraine to break the blockade of the country’s southern ports, writes Peter Dickinson. Not bad for a country without a navy!
🐣 RT @USAmbKyiv As President Biden said: ¤ “It is overwhelmingly in the interest of the United States of America that Ukraine succeed.”
🐣 RT @PattyMurray Today, I got an update from Pentagon officials on Ukraine’s air defenses & it’s clear: we need to stick by our Ukrainian allies. There are overwhelming bipartisan majorities to continue our support for Ukraine & I’m focused on putting together a package to do just that.
🐣 RT @GlasnostGone Every country involved in Russian sanctions should be doing this NOW. Putin’s useful political idiots in America & the fake “peace” brigade are hindering arms for #Ukraine. So use the hundreds of billions of Russia’s assets to buy & send weapons to 🇺🇦. But for fuck sake do it NOW
⋙ 🐣 RT @AndriyYermak The USA and the EU are working on legal procedures to transfer $300 billion of frozen Russian assets to Ukraine. ¤ It is a very positive signal. Those who kill, destroy, violate international law and the UN Charter must face consequences. This is a matter of justice.
🐣 RT @st_batory “When the ruSSian infantry hears the Bradley IFV, they run away” CBS News went on the frontlines to see how US taxpayers money is well spent and what Ukrainians had to say about American weapons. A few comments by General Ben Hodges as well.
💽 https://x.com/st_batory/status/1709858681368494442?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @general_ben Well, it appears the UKR multi-domain counteroffensive is actually going well. Use of long-range precision strike weapons is making Crimea untenable. ¤ Russia has withdrawn the bulk of its Black Sea Fleet from its main base in occupied Crimea via @WSJ
⋙ WSJ: Russia Withdraws Black Sea Fleet Vessels From Crimea Base After Ukrainian Attacks https://tinyurl.com/9czukexj
// Pullout represents painful setback for the Kremlin, which seized Crimea in 2014
🐣 RT @GlasnostGone Putin thinks he’ll lose #Crimea. It’s claimed Russia plans to build a Black Sea naval base in occupied Georgian region of Abkhazia – Ochamchira area. Abkhazia has no natural harbours, but with 🇷🇺 only having 1 port in the Black Sea, it’s getting desperate. https://theguardian.com/world/live/202
🌎 https://x.com/GlasnostGone/status/1709830629355876820?s=20/photo/1 -2
🧵 RT @ChrisO_wiki 1/ Russia’s Federal Penitentiary Service (FSIN) will receive a huge infusion of funding to build a network of nearly 30 new penal institutions in the occupied areas of Ukraine. They’re likely intended to enable the imprisonment of thousands of those living under occupation.
📌 ◕ https://x.com/ChrisO_wiki/status/1709828904414851105?s=20/photo/1
🧵 RT @Val_Voshchevska As a Ukrainian, I am expected to ask the world for help, to prove I am worthy of saving. To travel high and low in the hope of receiving aid. But not too intensely. Because then I am told I look desperate. I am told “don’t ask for too much, don’t look too needy.” A [thread]
📌 https://x.com/Val_Voshchevska/status/1709510932081115329?s=20
[ThreadReader:] https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1709510932081115329.html
.
I am required to speak out boldly for my country. For the horrors it experiences & experienced for centuries. But not too boldly. Not about ordinary Russians, Russian culture or Russian colonialism. Otherwise I risk making foreigners, who I depend on for survival, uncomfortable.
I am expected to want peace. To want to stop war. The everyday suffering. But also to give up my land & the people that live on it. To give up my country & negotiate with a state that has been eradicating my people for centuries. And that will keep doing it, until we are gone.
Presenting a facade of being brave is imperative for me. To look strong & resilient. To constantly keep the world enthralled with my story. But I can’t look too resilient. Otherwise I stop looking like a victim. I stop fitting into the mould of what foreigners expect me to be.
I am expected to share spaces with Russian dissidents. To celebrate their courage. To portray a common front against the enemy. And yet the pain this brings me is deemed irrational. I am presented with the “brotherly nations” narrative. The narrative that was used to invade us.
I have to think two steps ahead every time I say or do something publicly. How will my words be perceived and what effect will they have on the survival of my country? I am expected to be considerate to all those around me. Disregarding whether they support my country or not.
In a world where narratives and perceptions shape destinies, Ukrainians—and all other people who have experienced wars before and after us—stand resolute. All we want is to unconditionally be allowed to exist. ¤ So let us exist.
*Bonus point is you recognise what and who this is inspired by
🐣 RT @KyivIndependent ⚡️ Czech president: Europe must reduce defense reliance on US. ¤ European countries should reduce reliance on the U.S. and develop their own defense capabilities, Czech President Petr Pavel said on Oct. 3, Politico reported.
🖼 https://x.com/KyivIndependent/status/1709466779515285969?s=20/photo/1
// Michal Cizek/AFP via Getty Images
🧵 RT @GicAriana Ukrainians are not supposed to be personal shields for NATO and the EU. The policy of Ukraine weakening the Russian army for the rest of the world is immoral. The number of Ukrainians killed and injured cannot justify this slow approach or chipping away at Russia’s military. ¤ 1/5
📌 https://x.com/GicAriana/status/1709812364860682260?s=20
[ThreadReader:] https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1709812364860682260.html
It also ignores that Russia forcibly mobilizes UKRAINIANS from Russia-occupied Ukraine, and that the burgeoning anti-western Axis of Evil is happily providing Russia with weapons to kill Ukrainians and destroy Ukraine. ¤ 2/5
It ignores that the population of the Russian Federation is far greater than Ukraine’s. There are far more Russians who can die in the war than Ukrainians before it is felt by the nation in any meaningful way. ¤ 3/5
It ignores that Russia has forcibly deported hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian children whose Ukrainian identities they are erasing, brainwashing them to be Ukrainian-hating Russians who will be old enough to fight against Ukraine in the RU Army sooner than they realize. ¤ 4/5
It ignores that it means years of war for Ukraine. The slow and steady approach to weakening the Russian army is the slow and steady approach to destroying Ukraine. And it does not achieve the necessary goal of DEFEATING Russia. ¤ 5/5
💙 TheAtlantic, Anne Applebaum: Poland’s Election Is Neither Free nor Fair https://tinyurl.com/6m469a4h Poland “offers a lesson to other democracies, including the U.S., about the high price they will pay if they elect autocratic leaders who openly seek to capture the state”
// The Law and Justice party captured the Polish state. Can democracy survive?
🐣 RT @carlbildt This is insane by any reasonable standards, but with people like this appointed to official positions by 🇷🇺 it has to be taken seriously. And precautions taken.
⋙ 🐣 RT @den_kazansky The head of the Russian occupation administration of Zaporizhia, Yevgeny Balitsky, said that Russia’s goal is to occupy not only Ukraine, but also the Baltic countries, Poland and Finland. Because these states are “the historical lands of Russia”.
💽 [tr] https://x.com/carlbildt/status/1709796193612480864?s=20/photo/1
⭕ 4 Oct 2023
🐣 RT @ProjectLincoln The fact that MAGA House Republicans are even entertaining the notion that someone who has been indicted for 91 felony counts be their Speaker perfectly encapsulates what the GOP stands for today: criminality, hypocrisy, and chaos.
⋙ TheGuardian: Republican congressman to nominate Trump for House speaker https://tinyurl.com/bdep6n2u
// Troy Nehls, from Texas, calls Trump ‘the greatest president of my lifetime’ and says he will nominate him to replace Kevin McCarthy
🐣 RT @JuliaDavisNews For anyone who is researching this topic or would like to enlighten others, here is one of my playlists, featuring Russian propagandists, government officials and combatants promoting war crimes and genocidal ideas. This is only a partial compilation.
⋙ https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLLWQyEN3YRo7bpdyPlWscpvx2O8qSu0T1&si=94U8R7ii2wqwzFGA
🐣 RT @ pravda_eng 🇺🇸 🇺🇦 @JoeBiden: Situation in Congress worries me, but assistance to Ukraine will continue
⋙ PravdaUA: Biden: Situation in Congress worries me, but assistance to Ukraine will continue https://tinyurl.com/3b3j7npr “‘We can support Ukraine in the next tranche … and there’s another means by which we’ll be able to fund funding,’ he said, without specifying what he means”
🐣 RT @ splendid_pete The recent Hungarian Nobel laureate allocates the financial reward to aid the victims of the Ukrainian war.
¤ 🖼 https://x.com/splendid_pete/status/1709511750574317977?s=20/photo/1
Ferenc Krausz, a researcher of Hungarian origin, received this year’s Nobel Prize in Physics, shared with two fellow scientists.
The Science 4 People Association, founded by him a year and a half ago, represents a collaboration among figures in the scientific community to assist those affected by the Ukraine conflict. The monetary award will be dedicated to this cause.
As mentioned in the interview, Ferenc Krausz has recently earmarked a portion of his prize winnings for this Ukrainian initiative, and this will remain the same with the Nobel Prize as well. ❤️
🐣 RT @McFaul If we disarm Ukraine, Putin will not stop killing Ukrainians. The idea that disarmament = peace is just pure fantasy. Instead, the war will get bigger and go longer. Putin will be even more emboldened to expand his war aims if his enemy is weaker.
FT, Mohamed el-Erian: The US may no longer avoid a recession https://tinyurl.com/3myry3y2
// The economy is likely to weaken as markets internalise the significant likelihood that rates will stay higher for longer
↥ ↧
🐣 “If congressional dysfunction spreads further, and if the Fed continues to drag its feet on changing key underpinnings of its policy formulation, the turn in US economic surprises will not be pleasant for either the domestic economy or the rest of the world.” ~ Mohamed el-Erian
FT, Edward Luce: The return of American isolationism https://tinyurl.com/yck6rahp “An America Firster in the White House could sink Ukraine’s prospects. Trump, as ever, is the Hail Mary that Putin is seeking.”
// Ousting of Kevin McCarthy as Republican speaker is bad news for Ukraine
🐣 RT @ProjectLincoln [@TheRickWilson]ICYMI: What did you think was going to happen, Kevin? This is what happens when your party is completely untethered from principle, policy, reality, ideology, anything else.
💽 https://x.com/ProjectLincoln/status/1709720053166580055?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @7Veritas4 Chaos caucus requirements of the new Speaker:
1. Defund the DOJ investigations against Trump.
2. Defund Ukraine and help Russia win the war.
3. Impeach Garland and Mayorkas for political theater. ¤ Let’s rumble.
🐣 RT @maria_drutska “I spoke with Zelensky. And everything he’s asked for, we worked out.” – Biden about ATACMS for Ukraine. ¤ Biden will soon make a “major speech” regarding Ukraine🇺🇦 and the need for further support from the US🇺🇸
🐣 RT @RonFilipkowski Trump trashes his former Chief of Staff John Kelly after Kelly confirmed that Trump called military vets, POWs and wounded soldiers “suckers and losers” along with other derogatory comments. Maybe now Kelly will go on camera.
[TextLink:] https://x.com/RonFilipkowski/status/1709717514224013777?s=20/photo/1 -2
[Text:] 🐣 RT @realDonaldTrump John Kelly, by far the dumbest of my Military people, just picked up the theme of the Radical Left’s lying about Gold Star Families and Soldiers, in his hatred of me. He was incapable of doing a good job, it was too much for him, and I couldn’t stand the guy, so I fired him like a “dog.” He had no heart or respect for people, so I hit him hard -Made no difference to me. He’s already on record defending me all over the place. Nobody loves the Military like I do! Now he finally speaks back by making up fake stories, or confirming the made up stories of the Dems and Radical Left.
[Text:] 🐣 RT @ @realDonaldTrump . He’s a Lowlife with a very small brain and very big mouth. Interestingly, before firing him, his wife, who suffered a lot, told me he rould never speak badly about “President Trump.” Wrong! Did he totally lie about another Lowlife, Congresswoman Frederica Wilson? Let them fight that one out Themselves. Numerous people are angry nd upset because they know they will never be in a new Trump Administration, but only for one reason, they’re not nearly good enough. Kelly would be among those at the top of the list!
🐣 RT @EuromaidanPress No, @elonmusk. Ukraine aid is the ultimate investment! https://tinyurl.com/43ws5svh
◕ https://x.com/EuromaidanPress/status/1709603828390039864?s=20/photo/1
// Myth vs Fact
🐣 RT @docsue_swank Republicans have blocked legislation on immigration for 40+ years. We should not forever increase power of executive to allow Congress to never do the work that is its duty. Reagan is rolling over in his grave. Why is Bush not forwarding some of good ideas he had before 9/11?
[TextLink:] https://x.com/docsue_swank/status/1709695192721195163?s=20/photo/1
⋙ 🐣 RT @4HumanUnity .@tedcruz, Here is the Verdict:
1. Alejandro Mayorkas- Calling the situation at the southern border a “national disgrace”? What have you done to help the situation at the border? Stop peddling narratives without the full picture. This impeachment call? It reeks of partisan motives. And this notion that Mayorkas “lied”? Where’s your concrete evidence? Stop using the impeachment process as a political prop.
Our asylum laws need an overhaul, but Republicans refuse to collaborate on comprehensive reform.
You exploit fear about the border while benefiting from undocumented labor. The “open border” attack on Biden is false, he’s deployed record border security resources and cooperation with Mexico.
Contrary to claims that Biden’s indifferent to border issues, the facts show:
1. More resources for border security than any prior administration, with 23,000+ agents deployed.
2. Enhanced measures to reduce illegal crossings while expediting legal migration.
3. Nearly $25 billion earmarked for CBP and ICE in Biden’s budget.
4. Cooperation with Mexican President López Obrador on border and migration.
5. Targeted efforts to address root causes of migration in Central America.
So, the narrative that Democrats and Biden don’t care about the border is false. They’re committed, even if policy disagreements exist.
It’s high time the do-nothing Republicans collaborate on comprehensive immigration reform.
2. Merrick Garland- Your claim of “absolute lawlessness and politicization” is a gross distortion. Some Republicans might shout for impeachment, but where’s the actual crime? Let’s be clear: the bar for impeachment is “high crimes and misdemeanors,” not mere disagreements. And public opinion? Divided, not in your favor.
Before crying impeachment, ensure your arguments stand up to scrutiny. We need constructive discourse, not divisive tactics. Stick to the facts, and DO SOMETHING! #Immigration
[Text:] HERE’S WHY WE DON’T HAVE IMMIGATION REFORM:
1. In 2013 Democrats passed a bi-partisan immigration
reform bill in the Senate.
2. House Republicans REFUSED to allow the bill to even
be debated.
3. Obama asked Republicans to propose THEIR OWN
immigration bill.
4. Republicans REFUSED.
5. Then Republicans demanded that Obama do
something about illegal immigration!
6. So Obama used his executive authority to enact some
immigration reforms.
7. Republicans were outraged and called Obama a
tyrant for doing exactly what they asked him to do.
REPUBLICANS DON’T REALLY WANT IMMIGRATION REFORM; THEY WANT A PROBLEM THEY CAN BLAME DEMOCRATS FOR AND SCARE YOU WITH!!!
🐣 RT @7Veritas4 He doesn’t have to be there but yet he is. ¤ Not just for the free media coverage. ¤ He spent decades creating an artificial image of success. ¤ It terrifies him to watch it get exposed and wither away.
[TextLink:] https://x.com/7Veritas4/status/1709570178659373315?s=20/photo/1
[Text:] 🐣 RT @realDonald Trump Just arrived at the Witch Hunt Trial taking place in the very badly failing (so sadly!) State of New York, where people and companies are fleeing by the thousands. Corrupt Attorney General, Letitia James, is a big reason for this. Statute 63(12) is meant to be used for Consumer Fraud. It has never been used before on a “case” such as this, especially since I did absolutely nothing wrong. I borrowed money, paid it back, in full, and got sued, years later, with a trial RIGHT IN THE MIDDLE OF MY CAMPAIGN. I am not even entitled, under any circumstances, to a JURY. This Witch Hunt cannot be allowed to continue. It is Election Interference and the start of Communism right here in America!
🐣 RT @randymot4 We had a peace agreement. Anyone think Putin would honor a new piece of paper? Seriously?
[TextLink:] https://x.com/randymot4/status/1709545043483054401?s=20/photo/1
[Text:] Budapest Memorandum – signed 1994 by Russia: In exchange for giving up its nuclear arsenal, Ukraine received binding security assurances to respect its independence and sovereignty which guaranteed its existing borders. China and France extended similar assurances to Ukraine. It was understood, if a violation, there would be a response incumbent on the US and the UK.
🐣 RT @TheRickWilson Stop asking if 1930s Germany can happen here. ¤ It’s happening here.
🐣 🖼 RT @vtchakarova Russia will increase its military budget by 70% to $107 billion (6% of GDP) in 2024. The nearly 70% increase is staggering. In 2023, defense spending on a war budget was €63 billion – or 3.9% of GDP. In 2021, spending was equivalent to 2.7% of GDP. And what is Europe’s plan?
🐣 RT @ChrisFlaherty8 New essay on ‘The Basis of Ukrainian Strategy: Is Everyone, Except Ukrainian Forces, Looking at the Wrong Set of Numbers?’
[TextLink:] https://x.com/ChrisFlaherty8/status/1709486593906823540?s=20/photo/1 -4
🐣 RT @harrylitman Dems reasons for not bailing McCarthy out:
1.voted to overturn election results after Jan. 6;
2.reneged on debt limit deal he had brokered with Biden to placate the rebels;
3.friendly relationship w/ Trump;
4 opened a Biden impeachment inquiry w/ no evidence of wrongdoing
⋙ [See Comments] https://x.com/harrylitman/status/1709436644133323060?s=20
⋙ 🐣 5. brought Trump back to life by pilgrimage to Mar-a-Lago
⭕ 3 Oct 2023
Reuters: Elon Musk’s X is a black hole of value https://tinyurl.com/y8fh6ftm “[A] group of seven banks, led by Morgan Stanley…provided $12.5 billion in debt financing to fund Musk’s $44 billion acquisition of X, then known as Twitter, in 2022” ~ It may now be worth about $8 billion
TheAtlantic, Peter Wehner: Kevin McCarthy Got What He Deserved https://tinyurl.com/3hvmnsnv “The House is now without a speaker, and more chaos is sure to follow. The GOP still holds the House majority, but it is a deeply riven and dysfunctional party.”
// The House speaker surrendered every principle, and in the end, it still wasn’t enough to save him.
🐣 RT @cwebbonline Gaslighting or idiots?
TRUMP 🤡 – As you know, we’re not entitled to a jury, which is unusual in the United States of America.
ALINA HABBA “legal spokeswoman” 😂 – There’s a misconception in the press… that we have this great option to have a box checked for a jury. No, we didn’t have that. That’s not how this works.
💽[TextLink:] https://x.com/cwebbonline/status/1709165080368320958?s=20/photo/1
// document with “Trial without jury” checked
★ 🐣 RT @EricTopol The @NobelPrize to @kkariko and @WeissmanLab wasn’t just about how mRNA could be delivered, which led to Covid vaccines and *>20 million lives saved in 2021 alone*, but also a delivery platform for other vaccines vs pathogens, cancer, gene therapy and more
⋙ 🐣 RT @EricTopol >20 million lives saved last year from Covid vaccines and more every single day, yet people say they don’t work. They leak (vs infections and spread), but they sure as hell work to prevent deaths
https://thelancet.com/retrieve/pii/S1473309922003206
https://economist.com/graphic-detail/2022/07/07/covid-19-vaccines-saved-an-estimated-20m-lives-during-their-first-year
◕ https://x.com/EricTopol/status/1709384397068333249?s=20/photo/1
[TruthSocial:] 🐣 RT @realDonaldTrump Judge Engoron has been given false and grossly misleading information about my Net Worth by a lying and incompetent Attorney General, such as Mar-a-Lago being worth $18,000,000 when in fact the number would be much closer to 1.5 Billion Dollars, like other properties, including two that were recently sold for numbers many times those that were listed in the Financial Statements. The N.Y.S. Attorney General, therefore, committed FRAUD for Political and Election Interference reasons. This case should therefore be dismissed!
[TruthSocial:] 🐣 RT @realDonaldTrump The rarely used Executive Law that the N.Y.A.G. is proceeding under is VERY UNFAIR, and being used against me for that reason. NY Executive Law 63 (12) does not require a victim, traditional elements of fraud are eliminated (the only such law!), the law allows a politically elected partisan prosecutor to convince a politically elected judge, who may be friends, to destroy even a Political Opponent. This law may not be Constitutional and is not FAIR, and that is why terrible A.G. James chose it to use against me!!!
🐣 RT @TristanSnell BIG DEAL – Trump CAN’T be Speaker — because of his indictments. ¤ House Republicans’ own rules require a leader to step aside if indicted for a felony of 2+ years of prison.
[TextLink:] https://x.com/TristanSnell/status/1709419617142047223?s=20/photo/1
[Text:] Rule 26-Temporary Step Aside of a Member of Leadership who is Indicted (a) A member of the Republican Leadership shall step aside if indicted for a felony for which a sentence of two or more years imprisonment may be imposed.
WSJ Editorial: Republicans Cut Off Their Own Heads https://tinyurl.com/yc28w6ct “A band of eight Republicans succeeded in ousting Kevin McCarthy as House Speaker on Tuesday, and we trust they’re happy. They now have the chaos they wanted”
// A gang of eight ousts a Speaker with no plan or replacement in mind.
Politico Mag, John F Harris: The House GOP Is a Failed State https://tinyurl.com/576m4f87 “At the start, Kevin McCarthy’s speakership was effectively an optical illusion. At the end, it was an exercise in self-abasement.”
// Kevin McCarthy’s ouster is dramatic evidence, if redundant, about the state of the modern GOP.
🧵 RT @TimInHonolulu 1. The House Rules can’t change the succession. McHenry is an acting Speaker Pro Tempore he is not the Speaker. The Rules contemplate a prompt action to replace the Speaker not to provide for a temporary Speaker who has access to the Gates Procedures disclosure or any of the
📌 https://x.com/TimInHonolulu/status/1709429223142961211?s=20
[ThreadReader:] https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1709429223142961211.html
2. gang of eight privileges without a vote of the full House. @PatrickMcHenry has already shown himself a petty individual who by recessing the House without a vote exceeded the power of a Speaker Pro Tempore something that was was neither “necessary” nor “appropriate”
3. under Rule 8(b)(3)(A). His actions to cause unnecessary and inappropriate inconvenience to the former Speaker Pelosi while attending to the funeral of a member of the Senate is an affront. His adjournment for part of one legislative day plus three following legislative days
4. violated the Constitution Art. I, 5 and may arguably give rise to recess appointment power. McHenry should be forced to hold a session to vote on the Speaker Pro Tempore and cannot declare himself a de facto Speaker with the power it carries by fiat of a Speaker Pro Tempore.
5. The Minority Leader should demand a parliamentary ruling on the propriety and legality of the Speaker Pro Tempore’s intemperate acts and demand that a vote be taken on who will act as Speaker Pro Tempore as provided for in Rule 8(b)(3)(A). @RepJeffries @SpeakerPelosi
WaPo, Dana Milbank: McCarthy’s gone. Republican dysfunction is here to stay. https://tinyurl.com/57zcxbmz “It’s just a matter of time until Gaetz — and the many others like him — render McCarthy’s successor a failure, too. This is all they know how to do.”
[…] McCarthy’s term began in chaos, with his 15 rounds of balloting. It lurched from crisis to manufactured crisis, with a needless debt ceiling showdown, failed votes and pulled bills on the floor, recriminations and name-calling in Republican caucus meetings, the launch of impeachment proceedings on fabricated charges, and last week’s near-shutdown of the government. Now, it is ending in chaos, with Republicans openly savaging each other on the House floor and all legislative functions ceasing while the majority party tries to pick its next leader. …
Good luck with that. It doesn’t really matter who Republicans choose to replace McCarthy, who announced late Tuesday that he won’t run again. Nobody will succeed in that role because the party itself is ungovernable. …
WaPo: Months of bad blood between McCarthy and Democrats [and MAGA Republicans] helped sink his speakership https://tinyurl.com/ycx8dypa
… Raskin, a manager in Trump’s second impeachment trial, noted that McCarthy, in the aftermath of the Capitol attack, was the first high-ranking leader to call for an independent commission to investigate. ¤ But within weeks of the assault, McCarthy traveled to visit Trump and made amends, then worked against a commission and the eventual House Jan. 6 committee.
When he won the speaker’s race in early January, McCarthy did so only by agreeing to weaken the motion that Gaetz used this week against him, making it far easier for a tiny faction to force chaos.
“This speaker and Republican conference have done everything they can to bring us to this point of chaos, to have an unstable House of Representatives,” Rep. Mark Takano (R-Calif.) told reporters Tuesday.In May, McCarthy clinched a debt-and-budget deal with President Biden that set a framework for federal agency funding for the next two years while also allowing the Treasury Department to continue borrowing. ¤ Within weeks he backed away from that deal when he faced pressure from hard-right Republicans, who contended they had won promises from him that set spending much lower. ¤ Faced with two competing promises, McCarthy went with the GOP lawmakers and ordered the House Appropriations Committee to slash more than $100 billion from the budget.
And in September, after publicly promising to hold a vote to launch impeachment proceedings against Biden, he declared on his own that an “impeachment inquiry” was underway, even though his own rank-and-file cast doubt about allegations against the president.
“Kevin McCarthy hasn’t done anything that would be speaker-trustworthy,” Takano said.
Of course, Republicans who voted to oust him Tuesday said they had the same problem: trust. …His actions the past week summed up his time as speaker, leaving so many people feeling burned by McCarthy. After moving hard to the right on government funding bills, he hit the Saturday deadline to force a government shutdown or pass legislation with Democrats.
He had told conservatives for weeks that he wouldn’t pass legislation with Democrats — only to decide to do just that in a last-minute pivot. Conservatives were infuriated.
McCarthy then publicly clashed with Biden over whether he had made a private pledge for legislation to fund military support for Ukraine, leaving all sides of that debate confused about his position.
And on a Sunday show appearance that was shown to the rank-and-file Democrats on Tuesday, the now ex-speaker blamed the near shutdown of the federal government on Democrats. ¤ “We are not saving Kevin McCarthy,” Jayapal said afterward.
WaPo, Philip Bump: ‘2000 Mules,’ a key piece of election misinformation, has its day in court https://tinyurl.com/2np3dj “D’Souza’s fraud allegations were adapted from a group called True the Vote, which has been in the “election protection” industry for some time”
// A defamation lawsuit against the creators of the conspiracy film alleging voter fraud can proceed, judge rules
When identifying the individuals most responsible for convincing supporters of Donald Trump that the 2020 election was stolen, no one surpasses Trump himself. But one could argue that the second person on the list is filmmaker and right-wing activist Dinesh D’Souza, whose 2022 film, “2000 Mules,” reinvigorated unsubstantiated allegations about voter fraud — and earned him an enormous sum of money in the process.
D’Souza’s fraud allegations were adapted from a group called True the Vote, which has been in the “election protection” industry for some time. The film alleges that cellphone geolocation data allowed True the Vote to identify a ring of people who collected and submitted ballots. The film doesn’t show this data, though, save for one map depicting a purported ballot “mule” near Atlanta. Instead, it relies on publicly available surveillance footage captured at ballot drop boxes, which D’Souza claimed in the movie and in an interview with The Washington Post depicted solely those who’d been identified as “mules” who visited numerous drop boxes.
There is literally no reason to believe any of this. No one has ever been identified as part of such a ring, despite the purported “evidence.” The surveillance footage never actually shows anyone going to more than one drop box to deposit a ballot. In fact, only rarely does it show anyone depositing more than one ballot. The map of a “mule” that it shows was fake, as True the Vote’s Gregg Phillips admitted in an email to The Post. The geolocation data used for True the Vote’s alleged analysis was not sufficiently precise to identify a visit to something as discretely located as a ballot drop box, even if they knew where at a location the boxes were located. True the Vote has declined to share its data publicly or make its alleged whistleblowers known to authorities, triggering state-level condemnation of their work.
All of this still has currency. Despite repeated, robust debunkings of the film’s claims, Trump supporters continue to point to it as valid. Trump himself did so as recently as last month, telling NBC News’s Kristen Welker that “there’s so much proof” of fraud, including “2000 Mules” and “all of the ballot stuffing that’s on tape.” …
At issue is the film’s inclusion of footage showing a man named Mark Andrews depositing multiple ballots into a ballot box. This wasn’t fraud, as a state investigation determined; he was submitting ballots for himself and his family. Andrews claimed that he’d received threats as a result of the claims made in the film and in media appearances. Last year, he sued for defamation. …
… [W]e’ll now move into the discovery phase of the case,” Sara Chimene-Weiss of Protect Democracy said. “We’re confident we’ll soon uncover even more evidence that the Defendants fabricated, without any actual facts or underlying data, their lies about our client as part of their broader campaign to sow doubt and spread falsehoods about voters and the 2020 election.”
The Andrews case may yield a judgment in favor of Andrews, to his benefit. It may also make others wary about citing the movie as a credible presentation of alleged voter fraud in 2020. But it might also go further: demonstrating that there is no connection between the video footage and the purported geolocation data, which the lack of footage of people visiting multiple drop boxes would suggest. ¤ And if there is no geolocation data tied to the video presentation, “2000 Mules” falls apart immediately and completely.
🐣 RT @ProjectLincoln [Rick Wilson:] What did you think was going to happen, Kevin? This is what happens when your party is completely untethered from principle, policy, reality, ideology, anything else.
💽 https://x.com/ProjectLincoln/status/1709372769283256365?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @ maddenifico Judge Engoron had to tell Trump attorney Alina Habba to lower her voice after she yelled at him: https://rb.gy/kh86l
// It began with the clueless and woefully incompetent Habba complaining that Trump wasn’t getting a jury trial. Judge Engoron explained to Habba that it was because she failed to check the proper box or file the proper form to elect to have a jury trial. 😂
‼️🐣 RT @Laurie_Garrett “THE OFFICE OF SPEAKER OF THE HOUSE OF THE UNITED STATES HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES IS HEREBY DECLARED VACANT.”
🐣 RT @KyivIndependent “His aim was not to defend Russia against some non-existent threat but rather to expand Russia’s power, eradicate Ukraine’s statehood, and destroy NATO, goals he still pursues,” write Nataliya Bugayovaand, Frederick W. Kaganand and Kateryna Stepanenko.
💙 ⋙ KyivIndependent/ISW: Weakness is lethal. Why Putin invaded Ukraine and how the war must end https://tinyurl.com/5dj9jcv5
// by Nataliya Bugayova and Frederick W. Kagan and Kateryna Stepanenko
Editor’s Note: This is an analysis by Nataliya Bugayova, Kateryna Stepanenko, and Frederick W. Kagan for the Institute for the Study of War (ISW). This analysis was originally published by the ISW on Oct. 1, 2023, and has been republished by the Kyiv Independent with permission.
Russian President Vladimir Putin didn’t invade Ukraine in 2022 because he feared NATO. He invaded because he believed that NATO was weak, that his efforts to regain control of Ukraine by other means had failed, and that installing a pro-Russian government in Kyiv would be safe and easy. His aim was not to defend Russia against some non-existent threat but rather to expand Russia’s power, eradicate Ukraine’s statehood, and destroy NATO, goals he still pursues. […]
🐣 RT @JoohnChoe Real talk, you’d think an NYT article that says “Russia interferes in U.S. politics!” would be old news, right? ¤ No. Really, look at it yourself. ¤ This is, like, someone providing high-level intel assessments and putting them together into some kinda anonymous press release.
⋙ NYT: Putin’s Next Target: U.S. Support for Ukraine, Officials Say https://tinyurl.com/yckm9rcu
// Russian spy agencies and new technologies could be used to push conspiracy theories, U.S. officials say.
🐣 RT @PaulaChertok 🍿🥤🍿
⋙ 🐣 RT @JakeSherman After talking to a few House Republican lawmakers and aides, i would not be surprised to see someone move to have Gaetz expelled from the House Republican Conference
🐣 RT @RonFilipkowski Chip Roy goes after Gaetz: “You want to come at me and call me a RINO you can kiss my ass! You go around talking your big game and thumping your chest on Twitter. Come in my office and have a debate mother —-!”
🐣 RT @mkraju For the first time in 113 years, the House is voting to oust a speaker. But for the first time in US history, the speaker is set to lose the vote.
🐣 RT @RonFilipkowski BREAKING: Trump deleted his Truth Social post today attacking the Judge’s clerk after he was reportedly brought back to a closed courtroom during the lunch break.
🐣 RT @ChuckPfarrer BAKHMUT SOUTH / 2000 UTC 3 OCT/ UKR forces reported to surround key RU position in an under track culvert near Andriivka. RU milbloggers report heavy losses.
🌎 https://x.com/ChuckPfarrer/status/1709249066255745277?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @SpeakerPelosi The Speaker of the House is chosen by the Majority Party. In this Congress, it is the responsibility of House Republicans to choose a nominee & elect the Speaker on the Floor. At this time there is no justification for a departure from this tradition. ¤ The House will be in order.
🐣 RT @Laurie_Garrett The arrogance is astounding. Not only has #Trump distributed a “courtroom sketch” of yesterday’s hearing in #NYC that has Jesus at his side, but Christ is a white blond guy who looks like a Trump cousin. ¤ Narcissism on full display. @MaryLTrump @djrothkopf
🖼 https://x.com/Laurie_Garrett/status/1709250082732658716?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @RepJeffries My statement on the chaos, dysfunction and extremism of the House Republican Conference.
[TextLink:] https://x.com/RepJeffries/status/1709257084695412922?s=20/photo/1
Earlier today, we convened as a Caucus to discuss the current state of affairs in the House of Representatives. Emerging from the meeting, we are unified in our commitment to put people over politics, continue to build a healthy economy and make life more affordable for everyday Americans.
The House was designed by our nation’s framers to be the closest to the American people and reflect the hopes, dreams and aspirations of those we are privileged to represent. Instead, under the Republican majority, the House has been restructured to empower right-wing extremists, kowtow to their harsh demands and impose a rigid partisan ideology. The Constitution gifted us a government of the people, by the people and for the people. House Republicans have undermined that principle at every turn and unleashed chaos, dysfunction and extremism on hardworking American taxpayers.
First, the House was plunged into unprecedented dysfunction in connection with the leadership election during the first week of January. Instead of partnering with Democrats to break the deadlock, the House Republican Conference adopted an unprecedented package of rules governing this institution designed to detonate bipartisan governance. Right-wing Republicans with an extensive track record of obstructing the people’s business were appointed to the powerful Rules Committee, effectively giving them a veto over bipartisan legislative efforts. Every single House Republican, including those who present themselves as traditional, voted to support the extreme rules practice.
Second. in prior Congresses the Motion to Vacate the Chair could only be brought by the Majority Leader or the Minority Leader, upon direction from members of the bod. Instead of preserving the motion to vacate as an extraordinary vehicle to be used rarely, if ever. House Republicans willingly transformed it into an instrument that coud be deploved ov anv extreme member of their conference at any time. Once again, the House Republican Conference in its entirety empowered the MAGA extremists to paralyze the institution.
Third, from the very beginning of the 118th Congress, House Democrats have made it clear that we wilting common around With our Republican colleaques wherever possible. We have done so repeated v on benar onne American people. A one same times House Democrats have made clear that we will forcefully combat extremism wenever necessarv.
Democrats came together in a bipartisan way to avert a catastrophic Republican-driven default on our debt that would have crashed the economy. Rather than celebrate and affirm this major bipartisan achievement, extreme MAGA Republicans immediately turned against it. House Republicans backed out of the agreement with President Biden that they themselves negotiated just days after its passage hurdling us toward this chaotic moment.
Fourth, the Armed Services Committee this summer worked hard to advance a strongly bipartisan National Defense Authorization Act to the House Floor. The bill emerged from committee by a vote of 58-1. Instead of supporting our military readiness and embracing this bipartisan legislative effort, Republicans hijacked the National Defense Authorization Act and turned the bill into a right-wing wish list full of highly partisan poison pills.
🐣 RT @SteveRattner Washington narrowly avoided a shutdown this weekend, but the budget fight is far from over. ¤ I’ll be on @Morning_Joe in a few to break down where things stand – and what looms ahead. ¤ https://x.com/SteveRattner/status/1709149538475254058?s=20
🐣 RT @SteveRattner America has a debt problem. @Morning_Joe
◕ https://x.com/SteveRattner/status/1709158306512589106?s=20/photo/1🐣 RT @SteveRattner With the continuing resolution passed, McCarthy now wants to return to his 9%-cut appropriations bill that abandons last year’s bipartisan debt ceiling bill, setting up another budget crisis come November. @Morning_Joe
◕ https://x.com/SteveRattner/status/1709157069020962825?s=20/photo/1🐣 RT @SteveRattner Non-defense discretionary (NDD) spending makes up a small and steady share of gov’t spending. Taking defense, entitlements, and taxes off the table leaves little wiggle room for deficit reduction… @Morning_Joe
◕ https://x.com/SteveRattner/status/1709158191869702644?s=20/photo/1🐣 RT @SteveRattner The House GOP’s appropriations bill – which some in the faction say isn’t nearly tough enough – calls for 9% cuts to discretionary spending. ¤ But under the hood, that overall reduction comes with some deep slashes to key programs: @Morning_Joe
◕ https://x.com/SteveRattner/status/1709157969131151662?s=20/photo/1🐣 RT @SteveRattner With the continuing resolution passed, McCarthy now wants to return to his 9%-cut appropriations bill that abandons last year’s bipartisan debt ceiling bill, setting up another budget crisis come November. @Morning_Joe
◕ https://x.com/SteveRattner/status/1709157069020962825?s=20/photo/1🐣 RT @SteveRattner Because it won’t touch entitlements, defense, or taxes (except to cut taxes further), the GOP’s budget savings come from slashing non-defense discretionary spending. ¤ (Regarding the budget, blocking aid to Ukraine really doesn’t make a difference!) @Morning_Joe
◕ https://x.com/SteveRattner/status/1709157708014792736?s=20/photo/1
// Ukraine aid: 0.6%
🐣 RT @randymot4 What would Trump do as President on Ukraine?
He has been ambiguous at best. He is unhinged and focused solely on obtaining the approval of the crowd he is in at the time. By election and being sworn in (if he won -unlikely), he would: (1) 10% chance stop aid; (2) 40% chance keep it up; (3) 40% increase it ands lciam he won the war; (4) make soime very aggressive threta ot Russia of direct US military action. See Wagner destruction in Syria.
Ukraine is making major progress in destruction of the Russian army. There will be major breakthroughs in this year and likely in 30 days. At the point where it is clear they are winning, it will be politically impossible for nay U.S. President to stop aid.
There is a huge disconnect between attitudes about Russia and the war in Ukraine. It can only be explained by realizing that the skeptics do not think Ukraine can win and that the aid is “wasted.” There is virtually no difference among the parties in the US on this issue. See data. Blasting skeptics as supproting Russia may not be the way to win hearts and minds. Explaining to them that Russia is the invader and behaving barbarically and that Ukraine is winning is a better approach in my opinion.
#DefundUkraine = crazy because they are winning and destroying Russia’s army
📊 [Pew Research (Mar):] https://x.com/randymot4/status/1709132805244895492?s=20/photo/1
// “Nearly two-thirds of Americans see Russia as an enemy”: no difference between GOP and Dems
🐣 RT @WarMonitor3 Russian sources are reporting an expected resuming of large offensive operations by Ukrainian forces within the next 2 weeks on several directions of attack on the southern frontline.
🐣 RT @Heroiam_Slava “The Russian Black Sea Fleet has actually been defeated in the Black Sea” ¤ And note that The Russian Black Sea Fleet was defeated by Ukraine that currently has no flotilla, or even a squadron ¤ – the UK Ministry of Defense
⭕ 2 Oct 2023
WaPo, Max Boot: This is what the U.S. is getting by aiding Ukraine https://tinyurl.com/3hk797by “If we were to cut off Ukraine, that would be an unspeakable betrayal not only of the people of Ukraine but also of all of Europe. Stopping Russian aggression is an existential issue” for the entire continent.”
🧵 RT @lauferlaw Wanted to do a quick thread on #TeamTrump ‘s failure to request a jury for his civil trial instituted by @TishJames ¤ In general, it is the plaintiff’s responsibility to file a Note of Issue which tells the Court that the parties are ready for trial. A Note of Issue is 1/
📌 https://x.com/lauferlaw/status/1708912806173532238?s=20
🐣 RT @davidfrum The best answer to the pro-Putin caucus in the House and on this platform is to vote the Ukraine aid now and vote it big. The fascist faction act out so childishly precisely because they feel and fear the potential strength of the pro-democratic majority.
🐣 RT @MuellerSheWrote This Gaetz thing is gonna be fascinating. Dems can trade a no vote on ousting McCarthy for Ukraine aid or even the debt ceiling budget he previously agreed to. Or they could vote with republicans to expel Gaetz based on a house ethics probe. Or both
WaPo, Max Boot: This is what the U.S. is getting by aiding Ukraine https://tinyurl.com/3hk797by “The Russian armed forces have been devastated, thereby reducing the risk to front-line NATO states such as Poland and the Baltic republics that the United States is treaty-bound to protect”
🐣 RT @JillDLawrence The GOP “is saddled with a group of shortsighted appeasers, buttressed by a squad of right-wing cranks, who would doom tens of millions of innocent people to Putin’s butchery just to own the libs.” Painful truths from @RadioFreeTom on Ukraine.
⋙ 📋 TheAtlantic, Tom Nichols: Why the GOP Extremists Oppose Ukraine https://tinyurl.com/msswtdru
// The budget fight was about vice signaling, not spending.
Republicans averted the self-inflicted wound of a government shutdown this weekend. The main casualty of the process was aid for Ukraine, but foreign aid was always a fig leaf—for both GOP dysfunction and the determination of a small group of Republicans to help Russia. …
… Most Americans have no idea how much the United States spends on foreign aid, and they grossly overestimate how much goes to such programs. (Most Americans think it’s about 25 percent of the U.S. budget and want it reduced to about 10 percent. Their wish is already granted: It’s actually about 1 percent.) Worse, so many years after Russia’s first invasion of Ukraine (in Crimea), some two-thirds of Americans still don’t even know where Ukraine is. …
… The majority of the country—not “the left”—is supporting Ukraine because it’s the right thing to do, not because they hate Russia for electing Trump. Rather, it’s the other way around: The MAGA Republicans are opposing Ukraine because they hate Ukraine and its president, Volodymyr Zelensky, for their role in the impeachment drama.
Unlike Vance and his isolationist colleagues, most Americans recognize the immense threat that Russia’s war of conquest poses to our allies, to global peace, and to the security of the United States itself. Republicans once stood at the forefront of opposition to Kremlin aggression—Ronald Reagan’s steadfast opposition to Moscow was one of the reasons I was a young GOP voter in the 1980s—but now the party is saddled with a group of shortsighted appeasers, buttressed by a squad of right-wing cranks, who would doom tens of millions of innocent people to Russian President Vladimir Putin’s butchery just to own the libs.
… These GOP extremists have swallowed the gargantuan lie that Putin is a godly defender of white Christian Europe against the decadent West and its legions of militant drag queens. (They believe this, in part, because they know less than nothing about conditions in Russia or its demography.) …
Some Republican opponents of assistance to Ukraine are merely cynical manipulators who care little about national or international security. Many genuinely admire Putin and hope for Ukraine’s defeat. Others are merely ignorant. But all of them are bound together by the reflexive urge to reject whatever it is that most other Americans accept. As a commenter on social media said to me today, if liberals were opposing aiding the Ukrainian war effort, “the GOP would shut down the government to ensure aid and you’d see Ukrainian flags waving on the back of pickups.”
🐣 RT @StateDeptSpox Support for Ukraine is not simply about Ukraine — it is about the world we want to live in. A world where authoritarians like President Putin can do whatever they want to sovereign countries is far more dangerous for everyone.
💽 https://x.com/StateDeptSpox/status/1708972628185145748?s=20/photo/1
🐣 📋 RT @Heroiam_Slava ⚡️ Pentagon warns Congress it has $5.2 billion left for Ukraine, enough for six more months – WSJ ¤ This amount is about 12% of the total $43.9 billion in security assistance that the United States has provided since Russia’s invasion in February 2022.
🐣 RT @RonFilipkowski Yeah well, impeaching inquiry canceled, Ukraine funding, and BS Weaponization Committee disbanded is a good start to the coalition.
⋙ 🐣 RT @Acyn Goldman says if McCarthy relies on Democrats save his speakership, he’s going to need Democrats to advance past procedural votes which will require a coalition government with Democrats
💽 https://x.com/Acyn/status/1709006659815661748?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @kvistp 🇺🇸 The USA will soon announce a new aid package for Ukraine ¤ White House spokeswoman Karin Jean-Pierre said:
“Here is our message to Putin. A coalition of more than 50 countries was created. Aid was provided to support Ukraine. And we gathered more than 140 countries to condemn Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. This is what the president managed to do. Ukraine is supported by a strong, very strong international coalition. And if Putin thinks he can hold out longer than we do, he’s wrong.
He is wrong.
And that is why we will soon announce another aid package for Ukraine to demonstrate our continued support for the brave people of Ukraine. This is our message”
https://politico.com/news/2023/10/02/ukraine-war-funding-00119496
#UkraineWillWin #USA #Ukraine
🐣 RT @ChuckPfarrer HEADS WILL ROLL: A 434-page document accidentally published on the Moscow City Hall website revealed the addresses of some of Russia’s most secret military facilities– as well as the location of FSB safe houses in Moscow and St. Petersburg.
🐣 RT @AnonOpsSE Russian authorities accidentally revealed the addresses of the country’s secret military buildings, institutions, and spy homes, in Moscow and in St. Petersburg
⋙ Newsweek: Russia Accidentally Reveals Addresses of Putin’s Secret Service https://tinyurl.com/2p89hkx5
🔄 JustSecurity: Master Calendar of Trump Court Dates: Criminal and Civil Cases https://tinyurl.com/23cyzfcp … Continually updated … by Norm Eisen, Ryan Goodman et al
// Tracking the legal and political milestones in former President Trump’s busy 2023-2024 court and campaign calendar.
WaPo: Matt Gaetz files motion to oust Kevin McCarthy as House speaker https://tinyurl.com/bdexje2w “Gaetz and a handful of hard-right Republicans have repeatedly threatened to go after McCarthy’s speakership if he relied on Democratic votes to pass any spending legislation”
🐣 RT @EricColumbus John Kelly, [former] chief of staff to Trump, on his boss. Good God. [CNN:] https://tinyurl.com/2w8tbw3s
[TextLink:] https://x.com/EricColumbus/status/1708966629021786618?s=20/photo/1 -2
[Text:] “What can I add that has not already been said?” Kelly said, when asked if he wanted to weigh in on his former boss in light of recent comments made by other former Trump officials. “A person that thinks those who defend their country in uniform, or are shot down or seriously wounded in combat, or spend years being tortured as POWs are all ‘suckers’ because “there is nothing in it for them. A person that did not want to be seen in the presence of military amputees because ‘it doesn’t look good for me! A person who demonstrated open contempt for a Gold Star family – for all Gold Star families – on TV during the 2016 campaign, and rants that our most precious heroes who gave their lives in America’s defense are ‘losers’ and wouldn’t visit their graves in France.
“A person who is not truthful regarding his position on the protection of unborn life, on women, on minorities, on evangelical Christians, on Jews, on working men and women,” Kelly continued. “A person that has no idea what America stands for and has no idea what America is all about. A person who cavalierly suggests that a selfless warrior who has served his country for 40 years in peacetime and war should lose his life for treason – in expectation
mhar someone wiltake action. a person who admires autocrats and murderous dictators. A person that has nothing but contempt for our democratic institutions, our Constitution, and the “There is nothing more that can be said,” Kelly concluded “God help us”
🐣 RT @BeschlossDC Season Premiere today–“Celebrity Defendant”:
🖼 https://x.com/BeschlossDC/status/1708855988277715309?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @Acyn Trump: This is a judge that should be disbarred. This is a judge that should be out of office. This is a judge that some people say could be charged criminally for what he’s doing. He’s interfering with an election
💽 https://x.com/Acyn/status/1708897731920445803?s=20/photo/1
🧵 RT @Schizointel So Russia has spent $25.6 billion on compensation to families of deceased soldiers and $21 billion on compensation to the wounded. Putin has previously signed a decree earlier in the year ordering the payout of $68,800 to the families of deceased and $41,300 to soldiers that are wounded. Using this we can get a glance at potential Russian casualties assuming zero corruption and money laundering. #Ukraine #Russia #RussiaUkraineWar
📌 ◕ https://x.com/Schizointel/status/1703189730316132631?s=20/photo/1
According to the expenditures by the Russian Government they have conducted payouts to the next of kin for 372,093 soldiers killed in action.
According to expenditures by the Russian government, they have conducted payouts to 508,474 soldiers wounded in action.
According to Russian expenditures, Russian casualties in the past 18 months are as follows.
KIA: 372,093
WIA: 508,474
Total Casualties: 880,567
🐣 RT @HerrDr8 #UkrOffensive2023ZAP #1pageassessukrwar
Agree with @TrentTelenko; that Russia has wrecked their stronger formations (Spetsnaz, VDV, Naval Infantry and Armor) and they are NOT replaceable in short or medium turn. ¤ Sure, Putin will continue to keep the name of the formations…and give them guards status (you do NOT want to be in a formation that Putin awards guard status to…that means his and MoD mismanagement helped destroy it)… and refill with untrained, ill equipped mobiks – who are poorly motivated and led. ¤ Just a sampling of a few of the formerly “elite” formations destroyed by the Putin, Shoigu and General braintrust – with an assist for AFU 😀
🌎 ◕ https://x.com/HerrDr8/status/1708570250118128081?s=20/photo/1 -4
⋙ 🧵 RT @TrentTelenko This Russian behavior in replacing Elite VDV combat manpower was seen in 2014-2015.⬇️ ¤ Unlike the Soviets, who husbanded the Guards formations, and used the trash troops for “myaso” or cannon-fodder human wave attacks, the Putin regime has played the opposite game, with no… … …regard for short, medium or long term consequences. ¤ This pattern of Russian behavior in the Russo-Ukraine war is only a surprise to the DC Ukraine haters that make up the Escalation Management faction.
📌 ◕ https://x.com/TrentTelenko/status/1708555673615598007?s=20
🚫 Politico: Leaked U.S. strategy on Ukraine sees corruption as the real threat https://tinyurl.com/yw9xpcur
// A report obtained by POLITICO details specific plans to reform Ukrainian institutions and warns Western support may hinge on cutting corruption.
🐣 RT @MaxBoot Supporting Ukraine is the right thing to do not only morally but also strategically. It is hard to think of any U.S. foreign policy initiative since the end of the Cold War that has been more successful or more important than U.S. aid to Ukraine.
⋙ WaPo: Ukraine aid is a great investment. Don’t let MAGA Republicans end it. https://tinyurl.com/4n5kv59x
// It is hard to think of any U.S. foreign policy initiative since the end of the Cold War that has been more successful or more important.
🐣 RT @TreasChest We can continue to support Ukraine in the near term, but much of the funding for security assistance has been exhausted,” US State Department Spokesperson Matthew Miller. ¤ According to him, due to the lack of long-term funding, the United States has frozen contract projects to assist Ukraine. ¤ “It is critical that Congress take action,” Miller said.
🐣 RT @7Veritas4 Good morning. ¤ His trial for fraud in NY begins today. ¤ His business licenses have already been cancelled. ¤ What remains is whether his NY properties will be revoked, fines (up to $250M) and a ban from doing any business in NY in the future.
🧵 RT @ @KlasfeldReports Good morning from New York. ¤ Trump is expected to appear in court here today for Day One of his $250M civil fraud trial. We unpack the @NewYorkStateAG’s case with five of her charts released in court papers. ¤ Follow us live in court, ¤ @TheMessenger
📌 https://x.com/KlasfeldReports/status/1708815227939160293?s=20
🧵 RT @JoyceWhiteVance 1/NY AG Letitia James civil case against the Trumps goes to trial today, or at least what’s left of it after NY Judge Engoron granted summary judgment in the AG’s favor on fraud charges last Tuesday, leaving several others charges & the issue of damages to be decided at trial.
📌 https://x.com/JoyceWhiteVance/status/1708783070847840588?s=20
[ThreadReader:] https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1708783070847840588.html
2/The trial is a bench trial—the case will be decided by the judge, not a jury. Judge Engoron is a distinguished jurist who has spent 2 decades on the bench & whose increasing frustration with Trump’s efforts to delay the proceedings was apparent last week.
3/James filed her lawsuit in September of 2022 after three-plus years of investigation was sparked by Michael Cohen’s testimony before Congress that Trump routinely misrepresented his wealth for financial gain.
4/She sued Donald Trump & his 3 adult children, alleging they used fraudulent statements of Trump Org’s financial condition to obtain millions. Senior management officials Allen Weisselberg & Jeffrey McConney as well as some Trump business entities were also named as defendants.
5/Ivanka Trump was dismissed as a defendant in June of 2023. An appellate court ruled claims against her were barred by the statute of limitations, b/c she’d stepped away from the business in 2016. Both Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump remain in the case along with their father.
6/The lawsuit was filed under New York Executive Law 63(12), which gives the Attorney General power to go after repeated fraud and illegality, and prevent companies that engage in persistent fraud from continuing to do business in the state of New York.
7/The lawsuit asks the court to remove Trump & the others from their Trump Org roles, permanently ban them from future corporate leadership roles in New York, & bar Mr. Trump & the Organization from entering into NY real estate acquisitions for 5 years
8/The AG also asked the Judge to force the Trumps to disgorge $250 million in profit the AG says they obtained thru fraud. Last week the judge decided some issues & left others for trial.
WaPo: Ukraine live briefing: With U.S. aid uncertain, Zelensky vows to fight Russia ‘as long as it takes’ https://wapo.st/3LH0zfG
⭕ 1 Oct 2023
TheTelegraph [UK]: Ukraine has won a massive naval victory without having a navy https://tinyurl.com/ybxdzfxp
// Russia’s hold over Sevastopol is slipping, with huge implications for the Black Sea Fleet
🐣 RT @RpsAgainstTrump Liz Cheney SLAMS Putin Republicans: ¤ “Members of the House and Senate who are voting to deny Ukraine assistance on the 85th anniversary of Neville Chamberlain’s 1938 “peace in our time” speech should read some history: Appeasement didn’t work then. It won’t work now.”
WaPo, EJ Dionne: The GOP’s arsonists lost on the shutdown, but they’re not going away https://tinyurl.com/2k2ue8n2 “[l]f McCarthy were willing to share power with Democrats, they ‘might be open to negotiating’ to contain the far right.”
🐣 RT @MikeSington Someone’s worried about going on trial today.
[TextLink:] https://x.com/MikeSington/status/1708758483032527000?s=20/photo/1
[Text:] 🐣 RT @realDonaldTrump Judge Engoron’s Valuation of Mar-a-Lago, the most spectacular property in Palm Beach, Florida, IS FRAUDULENT! He states a value of 18 Million Dollars, knowing full well that it is worth, perhaps, 50 to 100 times that amount. Engoron is working diligently to misrepresent me, and my net worth, which is substantially MORE than is shown on my fully “disclaimed” Financial Statements. I have not even included my most valuable asset – BRAND! He should resign from the “Bench” and be sanctioned by the Courts for his abuse of power, and his intentional and criminal interference with the Presidential Election of 2024, of which I am leading all candidates, both Republican & Democrat, by significant margins. Likewise, Letitia James should resign for purposeful and criminal Election Interference. She is fully aware that Mar-a-Lago, and other assets, are worth much more than what she is claiming. Both of these Democrat Operatives are a disgrace to New York, and to the United States of America!
🐣 RT @Mollyploofkins The fight’s over Donald. The Trump Organization’s a fraud.
[TextLink:] https://x.com/Mollyploofkins/status/1708672620021891263?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @realDonaldTrump I’m going to Court tomorrow morning to fight for my name and reputation against a corrupt and racist Attorney General, Letitia James, who campaigned on “getting Trump,” and a Trump Hating Judge who is unfair, unhinged, and vicious in his PURSUIT of me. He values Mar-a-Lago, in Palm Beach, Florida, at 18 Million Dollars, when it is worth 50 to 100 times that amount. His valuations are FRAUDULENT in pursuit of Election Interference, and worse. THIS WHOLE CASE IS SHAM!!! See you in Court – Monday morning.
🐣 RT @ ChakhoyanAndrew What we had in Europe was precious. ¤ Peace is not inevitable. It’s not “the way things are.” It is a direct consequence of the rules-based order established after WWII.
¤ ◕ ⏳ https://x.com/ChakhoyanAndrew/status/1708511852857057328?s=20/photo/1
// chart of wars in Europe from 1600 to present
Peace used to be an intermission between wars — not the other way around.
russia hasn’t “just invaded 🇺🇦,” it reintroduced the war of conquest — one of four gravest crimes under the Rome Statute of the ICC — back in Europe.
Make no mistake, Ukraine is fighting for all of us. Whatever the costs are of helping 🇺🇦 now, they pale in comparison to the costs of existing in the world where internationally recognized borders are not restored.
PS the graph (below) [above] is notional & shows major wars involving “great powers”
🐣 RT @USAmbKyiv On behalf of the American people, I join millions of Ukrainians today in commemorating Defenders Day. We honor the heroes who have made the ultimate sacrifice, the veterans who have served your country, and those who continue to fight.
💽 https://x.com/USAmbKyiv/status/1708363078306304463?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @RonFilipkowski Trump claims he is leading in the polls with whites, blacks, women, Hispanics, Asians, and Gen Z voters.
💽 https://x.com/RonFilipkowski/status/1708597880586449392?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @AleksandrX13 Something I wrote for you – it turned out quite long, so I made it into a post on my feed, but it was written for you.
⋙ 🐣 RT @AleksandrX13 #NAFO ¤ I want to thank everyone who stands with Ukraine and for freedom. And I’d like to say a few things.
¤ 🖼 https://x.com/AleksandrX13/status/1708672620848099458?s=20/photo/1
[…] And that’s courage – to make a stand, when you don’t know where that stand will lead, but to make the stand anyway, because it’s the right thing to do – because, being human, one must do it, or sacrifice one’s humanity.
And that’s what this war is about, strangely enough. ¤ It’s not really about language, or territory, or religion, or politics – those are just russia’s excuses.
No, this is a war of values. ¤ Freedom against slavery. Democracy against dictatorships. The right to speak against the necessity to remain forever silent.
The ability of free people to feel for those in need, for those oppressed, for the little children in danger… stacked against the ability of the people of a dictatorship or an empire to close their eyes to and turn their backs on suffering.
It’s a war of ideas and values. ¤ And we WILL win it, my brothers and sisters. ¤ Because in a war of ideas, the real strength lies in the ideas themselves.
Keep the faith. ¤ And thank you, every one of you, for being good and wonderful human beings whom I admire, and who inspire me in turn – every single day. ¤ Slava Ukraini! Your humanity give us courage!
⋙⋙ 🐣 “Humanity is outraged in me & with me – We must not dissimulate or forget this indignation, which is one of the most passionate forms of love” ~ George Sand
🖼 https://x.com/Auriandra/status/1708715560932946128?s=20/photo/1
NYT, David French: One Reason the Trump Fever Won’t Break https://tinyurl.com/4c4zw4k6 //➔ It’s hard to argue with “prophesy”
WaPo: House prepares for next hurdle: Efforts to oust McCarthy as speaker https://tinyurl.com/bdh7em5c “‘Every time we all work together, [Gaetz] loses his mind,’ Rep Greg Landsman (D-OH) said in a statement. ‘He doesn’t want the center left and center right to work together’”
// Rep. Matt Gaetz says he is prepared to force repeated votes on removing Kevin McCarthy as House speaker after he worked with Democrats on a stopgap funding measure
🐣📋 RT @TonyHussein4 President Joe Biden’s plan for America:
– Rebuild our infrastructure
– Dominate the world in manufacturing
– Modernize electric grid
– Replace lead pipes
Under Donald Trump, the economy lost 2.9 million jobs, manufacturers went overseas, and the national debt increased by 40%.
◕ https://x.com/TonyHussein4/status/1708603273375088694?s=20/photo/1
// “Under the Biden administration, four thousand auto industry jobs have been added per month – the most by any president in 30 years.”
🐣 RT @ChrisDJackson Why President Biden in 2024? @RonaldKlain said it best: ¤
🖼 https://x.com/ChrisDJackson/status/1708655067467780195?s=20/photo/1
“The president has delivered the largest economic recovery plan since Roosevelt, the largest infrastructure plan since Eisenhower, the most judges confirmed since Kennedy, the second-largest healthcare bill since Johnson, and the largest climate change bill in history.”
Put simply, President Biden has had the best first term of any president in modern history.
Character matters. Experience matters. Results matter. That’s why we support @POTUS @JoeBiden. It’s just that simple. 🇺🇸
🐣 RT @60Minutes “We do not have one rule for Republicans and another rule for Democrats. We don’t have one rule for foes and another for friends,” says Attorney General Merrick Garland. “We have only one rule; and that one rule is that we follow the facts and the law.” https://cbsn.ws/3LIyzIT
💽 https://x.com/60Minutes/status/1708619825004577098?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @MarkHertling For those asking me to post these segments, thanks to @jeffstorobinsky!
⋙ 🐣 RT @jeffstorobinsky 10.1.23 8:15 PM ET True Military Intelligence on Display as CNN’s Jim Acosta @acosta Hosts Lt General Mark Hertling (ret) @MarkHertling (5:08 )
💽 https://x.com/MarkHertling/status/1708641246200185338?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @apmassaro3 Supporting Ukraine is the best national security investment we have ever made
⋙ 🐣 RT @TheWarMonitor And the most successful in decades.
🐣 RT @ChrisMurphyCT Last week the Administration asked to have the Secretary of State, Secretary of Defense, Director of National Intelligence, and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs come and brief the House of Representatives on the urgency of funding Ukraine. ¤ The House refused the briefing.
🧵 RT @MarkHertling Having had the great fortune of spending 16 years in overseas locations during a 38 year military career, I always think of how US current events are seen from the perspective of our allies, partners & foes. A short [thread] on those thoughts. 1/9
📌 https://x.com/MarkHertling/status/1708543882181464491?s=20
[ThreadReader:] https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1708543882181464491.html
🐣 RT @60Minutes The January 6th attack led to one of the largest DOJ investigations ever – more than 1,100 people have been charged. ¤ “This is a fundamental aspect of our democracy. If we can’t ensure that this kind of behavior doesn’t recur, it will occur,” says AG Garland.
⋙ 60Minute: Garland on preventing another January 6 https://cbsn.ws/34D1mLY
// Watch 60 Minutes Sundays on @CBS, or anytime on @paramountplus and
💽 https://x.com/60Minutes/status/1708622616573911060?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @CanadianKobzar As many of you know, I love history. One of my favourite movies of all time is Kingdom of Heaven (directors cut, not that peasant cinematic version). The movie has one line in particular that has always resonated with me.
¤ https://x.com/CanadianKobzar/status/1708643206861037788?s=20
“When you stand before God, you cannot say, ‘But I was told by others to do thus,’ or that ‘virtue was not convenient at the time’. This will not suffice. Remember that.” – King Baldwin.
This war has been a heavy burden on us all. Lives have been lost. Families destroyed. Hope tarnished. It almost seems as though we cannot get through it. What are we to do in times like this? I say to you we must do what we should always do – the right thing.
The right thing is never the easy or convenient thing. It is always the most difficult. Especially when we feel outnumbered or all hope is lost we must keep doing the right thing. Even a small deed is better than staying silent. In many cases you will be hated by others for doing the right thing. But never stray from the virtuous path. For real meaningful victory is never won easily.
Now as the war drags on it is easy to do the “convenient” thing such as staying silent. But this silence, this “convenience” is what leads to evil succeeding. So when we say “we were told to do this” or “virtue was not convenient at the time” – this will not suffice.
NAFO has shown that a collection of good deeds, great or small, can overcome titans. Now more than ever, we must stay on the path. Put aside pettiness, competitiveness, complacence, convenience, pride and silence. Do the right thing. Stand up for what is right, no matter how much the odds are against you. Be brave and upright (from Kingdom of Heaven).
For “what man is a man who does not make the world better” (also from Kingdom of Heaven).
The war against russia isn’t just about Ukrainian freedom. This is the war of our time. This is the war for the soul of democracy. We cannot let it perish. Keep fighting. This will determine the future of our global civilization. Do we fight to keep our democracy, or do we let genocidial tyrants win. I know what my choice is – as the great Ukrainian Kozak Ivan Sirko once said “Slaves do not get into heaven.”
🐣 RT @peterbakernyt .@danbalz sums it up: “There are good weeks and bad weeks and then there is the week that the Republican Party is just concluding, a kaleidoscopic display of self-inflicted wounds by politicians struggling to govern and … loath to confront” Trump
⋙ WaPo, Dan Balz: Squabbles, missteps and failure to govern: The Republican week that was https://tinyurl.com/2h68f9ab “At every turn this past week, when the spotlight was on them, Republicans showed the public their worst”
// Republicans last week offered a kaleidoscopic display of self-inflicted wounds by politicians unwilling to govern responsibly and loath to confront the damage done by Donald Trump.
There are good weeks and bad weeks and then there is the week that the Republican Party is just concluding, a kaleidoscopic display of self-inflicted wounds by politicians struggling to govern and a party still loath to confront the damage done by former president Donald Trump.
At every turn this past week, when the spotlight was on them, Republicans showed the public their worst: marching toward a government shutdown wholly of their own making and then suddenly reversing course in the hope of avoiding one; botching their first hearing in an impeachment inquiry into President Biden that was launched without serious forethought or evidence of criminal wrongdoing; squabbling and shouting by presidential candidates during a nationally televised debate that mostly ignored the elephant not onstage.
Meanwhile, that elephant, Trump, facing 91 felony counts in four indictments, tried to look past his challengers for the Republican nomination. He went to Detroit to focus his attacks on Biden with a speech that was notable for promises of the kind that went largely unfulfilled during his four years in office.
Trump’s speech highlighted the gap between campaigning and governing, but that was even more evident in the Congress throughout the week as House Republicans stumbled toward the midnight Saturday deadline to produce something to keep the government open, while Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) struggled to maintain his grip on the gavel in the face of rebellion from his hard-right colleagues.
This is the face Republicans offered to the public at a time when they are asking voters to give them full control over the executive and legislative branches in next year’s elections. […]
🐣 RT @POTUS I strongly urge the Republicans in Congress not to wait or waste time. ¤ Pass a year-long budget agreement and honor the deal from a few months ago. ¤ We have the strongest economy in the world – ¤ Let’s build on it.
💽 https://x.com/POTUS/status/1708550588626088357?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @ProjectLincoln “Republicans, it’s not a good sign that your big impeachment hearing had zero evidence and your own witnesses said Biden shouldn’t be impeached.”
⋙ USAToday: At impeachment inquiry, GOP decides Biden is guilty without evidence, but Trump should skate? https://tinyurl.com/yc3fax8s
// The House Republicans’ bizarro-world Joe Biden impeachment inquiry Thursday was an evidence-free display of cultish devotion to Donald Trump.
🐣 RT @VOANews President Joe Biden vows the United States will not abandon Ukraine despite aid being dropped from a deal to avoid a government shutdown.
💽 https://x.com/VOANews/status/1708546066730414492?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @TimothyDSnyder Supporting Ukraine is a once-in-a-generation chance to make the world safer. Ending that support is recklessness for which we will suffer in all the conflicts that the Ukrainians are preventing or making less likely. Let us help those who help us.
🐣 RT @newtgingrich Is Gaetz secretly an agent for the Democratic Party? No one else is doing as much to undermine, weaken and cripple the House GOP
⋙ 🐣 Mr Gingrich ~ don’t you recognize your political great- great-grandson?
you spawned this movement; Gaetz is just a modern day version of YOU
🐣 RT @ForeignAffairs “A world without reliable U.S. leadership would be a world of authoritarian predators, with all other countries potential prey. If America is to safeguard its people, its security, and its liberty, it must continue to embrace its global leadership role.”
⋙ ForeignAffairs, Robert Gates: The Dysfunctional Superpower https://tinyurl.com/2p9xusar
// Can a divided America deter China and Russia?
🐣 RT @ rocca_fella_ua He got community noted 🤣
⋙ 🐣 RT @MaxAbrahms • Sep 29 NAFO is an anti-America troll farm. Not only is it a chronic source of disinformation, but its raison d’être appears to be deepening American involvement in the war regardless of the geopolitical …
⋙⋙ [CommunityNote:] The North Atlantic Fella Organization (NAFO, a play on NATO) is an Internet meme and social media movement dedicated to countering Russian propaganda and disinformation about the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine. It has been categorised as a form of information warfare.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NAFO_(group)
https://nafo-ofan.org/ https://www.csis.org/analysis/nafo-and-winning-information-war-lessons-learned-ukraine
🚫 🐣 RT @StandByUkraine If McCarthy survives long enough to bring it to the floor. My biggest worry is that the isolationist populists will seek to replace McCarthy with a compromise candidate who will abide by the Hastert Rule and start tabling Ukrainian security assistance bills b/c a majority of republicans are against it.
◕ https://x.com/StandByUkraine/status/1708522915157647373?s=20/photo/1
// “H R 5692 – Ukraine Security Assistance and Oversight Supplemental Appropriations Act 2024” Yea 311, Nay 117: Dems Yea 210, Nay 0: GOP Yea 101, Nay 117
🐣 RT @StandByUkraine If McCarthy survives long enough to bring it to the floor. My biggest worry is that the isolationist populists will seek to replace McCarthy with a compromise candidate who will abide by the Hastert Rule and start tabling Ukrainian security assistance bills b/c a majority of republicans are against it.
🐣 RT @ PaulaChertok Q: How can you reassure Ukraine & allies?
🔥BIDEN: Look at me. We’re going to get it done. I can’t believe folks who voted to support Ukraine—overwhelming majority in House & Senate–Democrat & Republican—will for pure political reasons let more people die needlessly in🇺🇦
🐣 RT @amyklobuchar There is widespread, bipartisan support in Congress for continuing aid to Ukraine. Ukraine has already taken back half of the territory taken by the Russians – and the world is watching to see what we do. We can’t turn our backs on them now.
🐣 Just emailed Rep and Senators: It is essential that military and humanitarian aid to Ukraine continue unabated. A Supplemental should be passed immediately. Ukraine’s future and America’s reputation are on the line.
🐣 RT @SpencerGuard To the United States Congress: I support Ukraine 100% until victory. And I vote. I’m watching to see which US representatives and senators have a moral backbone and which are cowardly and weak. Slava Ukraini! 🇺🇦
MilitaryTimes: Gen. Milley delivers defense of democracy in farewell address https://tinyurl.com/bdeez8r7 “Army Gen. Mark Milley delivered a full-throated defense of democracy and not-so-subtle swipes at former President Donald Trump”
🐣 RT @amyklobuchar There is widespread, bipartisan support in Congress for continuing aid to Ukraine. Ukraine has already taken back half of the territory taken by the Russians – and the world is watching to see what we do. We can’t turn our backs on them now.
💽 https://x.com/amyklobuchar/status/1708505857355366538?s=20/photo/1
MilitaryTimes: Gen. Milley delivers defense of democracy in farewell address https://tinyurl.com/bdeez8r7 “Army Gen. Mark Milley delivered a full-throated defense of democracy and not-so-subtle swipes at former President Donald Trump”
🐣 RT @ukraine_world After the adoption of the temporary budget bill by the U.S. government, senior Senate leaders issued a statement reaffirming their commitment to #Ukraine.
⋙ 🐣 RT @ukraine_world “We support Ukraine’s efforts to defend its sovereignty against Putin’s brazen aggression, and we join a strong bipartisan majority of our colleagues in this essential work. With the eyes of our partners, allies, and adversaries upon us, we keenly understand the importance of American leadership and are committed to strengthening it from Europe to the Indo-Pacific.”
⭕ 30 Sep 2023
🐣 RT @TimothyDSnyder Supporting Ukraine is a once-in-a-generation chance to make the world safer. Ending that support is recklessness for which we will suffer in all the conflicts that the Ukrainians are preventing or making less likely. Let us help those who help us.
🐣 RT @DefenceU It won’t end with us, unless we’re the ones to end it.
💽 https://x.com/DefenceU/status/1708199131460591626?s=20/photo/1
SenDems: Schumer, McConnell, Murray, Collins, Coons, Graham Joint Statement On The Senate’s Commitment To Supporting Ukraine https://tinyurl.com/28jthwne
[TextLink:] https://x.com/SophiePerrin18/status/1708673899104272864?s=20/photo/1
[Text:] Washington, D.C. – Today, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) released the following joint statement with Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY), Appropriations Committee Chair Patty Murray (D-WA), Appropriations Committee Vice Chair Susan Collins (R-ME), Senate Appropriations Subcommittee on State, Foreign Operations and Related Programs Chair Chris Coons (D-DE), and Subcommittee Ranking Member Lindsey Graham (R-SC) on the Senate’s bipartisan commitment to supporting Ukraine:
“We welcome today’s agreement to avoid a harmful and unnecessary shutdown of the federal government.
“Nevertheless, this agreement leaves a number of urgent priorities outstanding. In the coming weeks, we expect the Senate will work to ensure the U.S. government continues to provide critical and sustained security and economic support for Ukraine.
“We support Ukraine’s efforts to defend its sovereignty against Putin’s brazen aggression, and we join a strong bipartisan majority of our colleagues in this essential work. With the eyes of our partners, allies, and adversaries upon us, we keenly understand the importance of American leadership and are committed to strengthening it from Europe to the Indo-Pacific.”
🐣 RT @saletan Just arrived! The new book from @stuartpstevens, GOP strategist who turned against his party to stop Trump. ¤ The GOP “has become an autocratic movement masquerading as a political party,” he writes. ¤ “I know many of these people … As dangerous as they may seem, they are worse.”
// “The Conspiracy to End America”
🐣 RT @ZaleskiLuke Trump’s willing to treat his fellow citizens like mortal enemies. He is the most divisive character in American history. He’s an effective vehicle for Putin’s aim of destroying the nation. He is dividing and conquering us and his followers have no idea they’re at war with America
🐣 RT @JohnWDean Get smart, folks. Trump means the end of America’s democracy! While he knows not to use those words his actions, proposals and followers tell it all!
⋙ 🐣 RT @tribelaw RFK Jr is a huge threat in 2024. He’s backed by a massive and growing war chest and Cambridge Analytica on steroids. And he’s taking dead aim at the Biden/Harris ticket as a 3rd party spoiler. He could assure a Trump victory and the end of the republic.
WaPo, Dana Milbank: It’s time to end McCarthy’s reign of error https://tinyurl.com/3hd886f8 “It’s not an ideal fix; it merely delays the shutdown threat…, & it doesn’t provide urgently needed funds for Ukraine to hold off Russia’s invasion. But it is, at long last, a nod to sanity”
For eight months, there were no adults working in the House Republican day-care center. ¤ Day after day, the toddlers of the far right threw tantrum after tantrum. But instead of giving the brats in his caucus a timeout, House Speaker Kevin McCarthy tried to quiet them with all the lollipops, ice cream and sugary drinks they could consume.
Finally on Saturday, with just 12 hours to go before the federal government would shut down, McCarthy declared himself a grown-up. ¤ “We’re going to be adults in the room, and we’re going to keep government open while we solve this problem,” he told reporters as he rushed to the floor in a last-ditch attempt to fund the government at current levels for another 45 days.
And if Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.) and the other children try to evict him from the speakership with their threatened motion to vacate the chair? ¤ “You know what? If somebody wants to remove [me] because I want to be the adult in the room, go ahead and try,” McCarthy dared them. “But I think this country’s too important.” …
It’s not an ideal fix; it merely delays the shutdown threat until just before Thanksgiving, and it doesn’t provide urgently needed funds for Ukraine to hold off Russia’s invasion. But it is, at long last, a nod to sanity — especially considering that, a day earlier, House Republicans tried to slash government spending by about 30 percent. And just a few hours earlier Republicans were willing to let the government shut down. …
Immediately after the vote, it was time for some of the 90 Republicans who opposed McCarthy’s “clean CR” to set off alarms. Rep. Andy Biggs (Ariz.) complained that “McCarthy sided with 209 Democrats” on “Biden-Pelosi-Schumer spending,” then asked on social media: “Should he remain Speaker of the House?”
Gaetz already had an answer to that. Immediately after the vote, he stood at a microphone on the House floor, gesturing to be recognized. But the presiding officer, Womack, quickly slammed the gavel to adjourn the House until Monday — postponing McCarthy’s reckoning for at least 48 hours.
Asked whether Democrats would help the speaker keep his job, Jeffries only said, “We’ll cross that bridge when we get to it.” ¤ Maybe McCarthy can strike a deal to remain speaker. But Americans deserve better than the unremitting chaos and crises of his amateurish tenure.
🐣 RT @nolanwpeterson In 1938 Ernest Hemingway reported on the Spanish Civil War, which he saw as a chance for democracies to stop the spread of fascism before it engulfed the world in war. He published an article, ‘Dying, Well or Badly,’ accompanied by pictures of dead soldiers from that war. He wrote:
¤ https://x.com/nolanwpeterson/status/1708294076137685429?s=20
‘If the democratic nations allow Spain to be over-run by the fascists through their refusal to allow the legal Spanish government to buy and import arms to combat a military insurrection and fascist invasion, they will deserve whatever fate that brings them. […] But no matter what excuse the democratic countries may have for their ignorance of the necessity for beating the fascists in Spain, history will label their actions in 1936 and 1937, when they refused to allow Spain to arm herself to fight their enemies, as criminal stupidity.
‘Meantime all day, and all night, it goes on. The resistance of the republican government in Spain against the first combined fascist invasion is the great holding attack to save what we call civilization. If Italy could be beaten in Spain, as Napoleon was beaten there, the Berlin-Rome-Tokyo axis would be broken before it ever had a chance to make the war it threatens. But because it has gone on so long the people who do not have to go hungry, fight and die in it, get quite tired of the whole thing. They do not even want to hear about it. … ‘
🐣 RT @djrothkopf The only winner from this week’s MAGA GOP clusterfuck on the Hill was Vladimir Putin. They made it clear they have no higher priority. My latest.
⋙ DailyBeast: All That Drama and the House GOP’s Only Win Was for the Kremlin https://tinyurl.com/mr2e64pn
// The Putin wing of the GOP made it crystal clear that of all their dangerous priorities, the most important was to strengthen America’s enemies and weaken our allies.
🐣 RT @ProjectLincoln “There’s no question that today’s Republican Party is driven and intimidated by MAGA Republican extremists. Their extreme agenda if carried out would fundamentally alter the institutions of American democracy as we know it.” – @POTUS
💽 https://x.com/ProjectLincoln/status/1708285616121590194?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @ABC In a rare bipartisan statement, Senate leaders and appropriators reaffirmed their commitment to Ukraine following the passage of the stopgap funding measure that averted government shutdown. https://trib.al/L2K0yUy
🐣 RT @POTUS Tonight, Congress voted to keep the government open, preventing an unnecessary crisis that would have inflicted needless pain on millions of hardworking Americans. ¤ This is good news, but I want to be clear: we should never have been in this position in the first place.
[TextLink:] https://x.com/POTUS/status/1708290185505419283?s=20/photo/1
STATEMENT FROM PRESIDENT JOE BIDEN ON PASSAGE OF THE BIPARTISAN BILL TO KEEP THE GOVERNMENT OPEN
SEPTEMBER 30, 2023Tonight, bipartisan majorities in the House and Senate voted to keep the government open, preventing an unnecessary crisis that would have inflicted needless pain on millions of hardworking Americans. This bill ensures that active-duty troops will continue to get paid, travelers will be spared airport delays, millions of women and children will continue to have access to vital nutrition assistance, and so much more. This is good news for the American people.
But I want to be clear: we should never have been in this position in the first place. Just a few months ago, Speaker McCarthy and I reached a budget agreement to avoid precisely this type of manufactured crisis. For weeks, extreme House Republicans tried to walk away from that deal by demanding drastic cuts that would have been devastating for millions of Americans. They failed.
While the Speaker and the overwhelming majority of Congress have been steadfast in their support for Ukraine, there is no new funding in this agreement to continue that support. We cannot under any circumstances allow American support for Ukraine to be interrupted. I fully expect the Speaker will keep his commitment to the people of Ukraine and secure passage of the support needed to help Ukraine at his critical moment.
🐣 RT @POTUS Tonight, Congress voted to keep the government open, preventing an unnecessary crisis that would have inflicted needless pain on millions of hardworking Americans. ¤ This is good news, but I want to be clear: we should never have been in this position in the first place.
[TextLink:] https://x.com/POTUS/status/1708290185505419283?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @DSenFloor PASSED: H.R.5860, The Continuing Resolution ¤ By a vote of 88-9.
🐣 RT @ ChrisDJackson 🚨 President Joe Biden just left Mass at Holy Trinity Catholic Church in Georgetown. According to press reports, President Biden has attended church more while in office than any president in at least 70 years.
Christian Conservatives, however, still overwhelemly support a man who has been married 3 times, cheated on his pregnant wife with a porn star, was found liable for rape and is facing 91 felony counts. ¤ Let that sink in.
🐣 RT @AndrewDesiderio Sen. Bennet speaks: “I objected tonight to proceeding to the Continuing Resolution because it failed to provide additional money for Ukraine. Senate Leadership needed to reaffirm our bipartisan commitment”
[TextLink:] https://x.com/AndrewDesiderio/status/1708295521670971705?s=20/photo/1
[Text:] “Ukraine’s fight is not just for Ukraine. Theirs is a fight for democracy. At the beginning of Vladamir Putin’s lawless invasion, no one would have predicted, how successful the Ukrainian people and their soldiers would be. Their courage, relentlessness, and sacrifice have exposed Putin’s weakness and renewed the world’s faith in democracy.
“As the Ukrainian people continue to give their lives, the United States has an essential and unique role to lead the free world in Ukraine’s defense. The future of democracy is at stake.
“I objected tonight to proceeding to the Continuing Resolution because it failed to provide additional money for Ukraine. Senate Leadership needed to reaffirm our bipartisan commitment to sustain funding for Ukraine. The Senate Leadership has released such a statement, and, as a result, I voted to keep the government open.”
🐣📋 RT @TimothyDSnyder Russia itself claims it has abducted 700,000 Ukrainian children. This is genocide according the 1948 convention.
⋙ 🐣 RT @KyivIndependent Since last February, nearly 20,000 Ukrainian children have been identified as abducted from Russian-occupied territories and sent to other Russian-controlled areas of Ukraine, or to Russia itself. Russia is quite literally abducting Ukraine’s future.
⋙⋙ KyivIndependent: Abducting the future: How Ukrainian parents fight to rescue their children from Russia https://tinyurl.com/2cwn82wz
🐣 RT @TimothyDSnyder Cutting off Ukraine aid makes America unreliable, weakens the cause of democracy, threatens the international legal order, encourages tyrants around the world, and hastens Chinese aggression.
🐣 RT @djrothkopf Your periodic reminder: Trump did collude with Russia. Russia did intervene to help Trump win. Trump did share classified info with Russian officials. Trump did kowtow to Putin, throwing US intel community under the bus at the same time.
¤ https://x.com/djrothkopf/status/1708257573583962186?s=20
Trump was impeached for withholding aid from Ukraine and thereby helping Russia. Contrary to his repeated lies, Trump never lifted a finger to stop Russian aggression in Ukraine which took place ever single minute he was in office. Mueller found many instances that Trump obstructed justice in the Russia investigation. Mueller also concluded as did multiple investigations that Russia intervened to help Trump. Barr suppressed Mueller’s true findings. Durham’s multiyear investigation did not reverse or contradict any of the above conclusions. The Russians did actively support the NRA and multiple GOP political leaders. And now, support for Russia is a central goal of the MAGA wing of the GOP and candidate Trump (and several of those running against him.) The Trump GOP is the Putin GOP. It represents a betrayal of American interests and values and represents a profound threat to US national security and that of our most important allies. Further, the support for Putin sends a clear message to China and Xi Jinping that the U.S. will be divided in its efforts to stop Chinese expansionist efforts should any materialize. This is a shocking and dangerous development that puts America and all our soldiers and citizens have sacrificed for in grave risk
🐣 RT @Faytuks British troops will be deployed in Ukraine for the first time under plans being discussed with military chiefs, UK’s new Defence Secretary has disclosed https://tinyurl.com/2ustbr2u The Telegraph
[TextLink:] https://x.com/Faytuks/status/1708218437724410230?s=20/photo/1
[Text:] British troops will be deployed in Ukraine for the first time under plans being discussed with military chiefs, the new Defence Secretary has disclosed. In an interview with The Telegraph, Grant Shapps said that he had held talks with Army leaders about shifting an official British-led training programme “into Ukraine” rather than relying on UK and other Nato members’ bases. He also called on more British defence firms to set up factories in Ukraine. Following a trip to Kyiv last week, Mr Shapps also revealed that he had talked to Volodymyr Zelensky, the Ukrainian president, about how Britain’s Navy could play a role in defending commercial vessels from Russian attacks in the Black Sea. Both moves would mark a significant escalation in the UK’s involvement in defending Ukraine against Vladimir Putin’s onslaught.
🐣 RT @TheRickWilson The pro Putin caucus in Congress today — all Republicans — told you clearly they side with the murderous Russian dictator, and have frankly endorsed his ongoing war crimes and the murder of Ukrainian civilians with this vote.
🐣 RT @djrothkopf This. Today our enemies were strengthened, our allies weakened and the world was made less safe. Because the Trump MAGA GOP remains in service of the worlds worst war criminal.
⋙ 🐣 RT @clairecmc But we can’t let Putin win, which he has to think he did today. The Pro-Putin extremist wing of the Republican Party needs to be put in their place and the majority of America that believes in democracy and freedom must prevail.
🐣 RT @PaulaChertok .@RepJeffries: To ensure US natl security, we need to address Ukraine’s security & ensure 🇺🇦 ppl can con’t to fight bravely & defeat Putin &🇷🇺aggression. It’s impt to democracy, freedom, truth, NATO. Rs will have opportunity in few days to put nat sec 1st & pro-Putin caucus last.
🐣 RT @AIRobotComic The CR doesn’t include border aid either. A bill including both border aid and Ukraine aide will pass both houses of Congress before Thanksgiving recess. ¤ Remember what Churchill said: America always does the right thing, after exhausting all the alternatives.
🐣 RT @RonFilipkowski Montage of 33 clips of the stupidest, most vile, insane, weirdest, addled dementia-ridden, psychotic statements made by Trump over the past two weeks.
💽 https://x.com/RonFilipkowski/status/1708102400668561890?s=20/photo/1
🐣 3/4 of the House, including half of the GOP, support Ukraine; by pulling border funds from the CR, Dems can now combine both in a Supplemental ¤ otherwise, MAGA could have said Dems shut the govt down over Ukraine ¤ MAGA set a trap; Dems and McCarthy evaded it ¤ But now MAGA will try to remove McCarthy
🐣 3/4 of the House, including half of the GOP, support Ukraine; by pulling border funds from the CR, Dems can now combine both in a Supplemental ¤ otherwise, MAGA could have said Dems shut the govt down over Ukraine ¤ MAGA set a trap; Dems and McCarthy evaded it ¤ But now MAGA will try to remove McCarthy
🐣 RT @BillPascrell Just now 42% of republicans in Congress – nearly half their entire caucus – voted to shut down the government. If this passes the senate today our government will be open because Democrats kept it open.
🐣 RT @Cliff_Sims Here’s what’s going on in the Senate: ¤ They can’t get the votes for a clean CR +$6B for Ukraine, so they’re tacking on a BS immigration amendment to lure conservatives in. ¤ Don’t fall for it. It’s all a ploy to put pressure on Speaker McCarthy from the Left in the House.
🐣 RT @BradMossEsq I’m not a Member of Congress. But if the only sticking point on getting the House and Senate to pass a clean CR over the weekend is Ukraine funding, get a commitment from McCarthy to bring up Ukraine funding next week in a supplemental funding mechanism. ¤ Just my two cents.
🐣 RT @NormOrnstein Kevin McCarthy selling out American national interest to kiss the asses of Matt Gaetz and Company
💙 🐣 RT @theliamnissan Wow, Matt Gaetz told Kevin McCarthy he wouldn’t vote for any proposal that funds Ukraine, so our government is shutting down, and Gaetz only said that because Trump told him to, and Trump only said that because Putin told him to
¤ https://x.com/theliamnissan/status/1708091599450677390?s=20
🐣 RT @Gerashchenko_en Russian Investigative Committee has detected the theft of 80% of funds allocated for the repair of warships. ¤ The Investigative Committee of Russia has opened a criminal case on large-scale fraud against the Novik industrial group engaged in the repair of Russian warships, Russian media report.
¤ https://x.com/Gerashchenko_en/status/1708034039184011298?s=20
According to the investigation, the criminal schemes were coordinated by former MP of the State Duma Alexei Lyashchenko, who headed Novik from the company’s formation in June 2009 until its bankruptcy in September 2016. According to the Kommersant newspaper, Mr. Lyashchenko is now hiding in the UAE because of a criminal case over non-payment of salaries to the company’s employees. Last year, Moscow’s Basmanny Court arrested Lyashchenko in absentia, but after an appeal, a Moscow City Court judge overturned the decision.
Investigators believe the embezzlement was committed between 2014 and 2016, when Novik was engaged in the repair of warships under subcontracts with the Yantar, Sevmash, Northern Design Bureau, Granit, Zvezdochka and 35th ship repair plants. The heads of the plants transferred advances to Lyashchenko in the amount of 40-80% of the contract value, which were allegedly spent on Novik’s risk insurance, but in fact, the insurance companies cashed in the money received and returned it to the alleged embezzlers after deducting interest, the Kommersant writes.
🐣 RT @Maks_NAFO_FELLA 🛡️❤️ “Defense Industries Alliance” ¤ 👀 38 companies from 19 countries: ¤ USA, the United Kingdom, Germany, Sweden, Denmark, the Netherlands, Canada, Bulgaria, Australia, Belgium, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, Czech Republic, North Macedonia, Slovakia, Spain, Croatia and Finland.
🐣 RT @front_ukrainian ⚡️Our state will become one of the key global producers of weapons and defense systems, – Zelenskyi about the Defense Industries Forum ¤ Plus, our manufacturers signed 20 documents with partner companies at the Forum today. Agreements, memoranda… Each such document then becomes a new production or strengthening of existing cooperation.
🐣 RT @McFaul Two days ago, the House voted overwhelmingly to support assistance to Ukraine. 3 to 1! Today, a minority in the House is succeeding in pressuring Speaker McCarthy to reverse this majority vote? Not very democratic. & also bad foreign policy. #MissingReagan.
📊 https://x.com/McFaul/status/1708167122374000759?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @RonFilipkowski Half the Republicans in the Senate, half the Republicans in the House, and all of the Democrats in both support aid to Ukraine. The only ones against are half the Republicans. But this is the Democrats fault.
[TextLink:] https://x.com/RonFilipkowski/status/1708134058234921027?s=20/photo/1
[Text:] 🐣 RT @JDVance1 Last night Democrats blocked a clean, two week government funding bill because it had no money for Ukraine. The Dems are about to shut down the government over Ukraine. I actually can’t believe it, but here we are.
🚫 MAGA Republicans are playing games with lives by holding out Ukraine aid from an agreement to continue funding the government and preventing a government, although a recent vote showed 3/4 of House members support Ukraine
⭕ 29 Sep 2023
Politico: Milley in farewell speech: ‘We don’t take an oath to a wannabe dictator’ https://tinyurl.com/4cscpvca
// The remarks come one week after former President Donald Trump suggested the retiring general should be killed.
🐣 RT @marlene4719 Once again I ask you, is this the petulant, seven year old schoolyard bully you want to represent you on the world’s stage??
[TextLink:] https://x.com/marlene4719/status/1707830213491540266?s=20/photo/1
[Text:] 🐣 RT @realDonaldTrump I hear that Old Crow Mitch McConnell, together with his small band of weak and ineffective RINOS like Mitt Romney and < "Hostess" John Cornyn, are, as usual, trying to cobble together a series of massive concessions for Cryin' Chuck Schumer and the Lunatic Left, in order to "bail out" Crooked Joe Biden, THE WORST & MOST CORRUPT PRESIDENT IN THE HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES. The Old Crow, and his group of ten (plus) COWARDS, have savaged our Country by approving Trillions of Dollars for Green New Deal Insanity, and the Weaponization of our System of "Injustice."Don't do it!!!
🐣 RT @POTUS You, me, and every American who is committed to preserving our democracy must stand up for America’s values embodied in our Declaration of Independence.
💽 https://x.com/POTUS/status/1707926002700026088?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @tomiahonen (yes I told you but) ¤ WOW ¤ Just.. WOW
PENCE is a witness in Jack Smith 2
BILL BARR is a witness in Jack Smith 2
GENERAL MILLEY is a witness in Jack Smith 2
Trump intimidating each of them. Here is Jack Smith monster filing just out, to support Gag Order
⋙ 🐣 RT @big_cases (Automated) New filing: “United States v. TRUMP (Federal/WDC/1/Indictment/01.08/2023)” ¤ Doc #64: Reply in Support
[CourtDoc:] https://tinyurl.com/3ermaez7 22p #CL67656604
🐣 RT @AndrewFeinberg 🚨🚨🚨Wow, outgoing CJS Chair Milley hits Trump at retirement ceremony: “We don’t take an oath to a king, or queen, or a tyrant or a dictator. And we don’t take an oath to a wannabe dictator …we take an oath to the Constitution … and we’re willing to die to protect it”.
💽 https://x.com/AndrewFeinberg/status/1707788800577945927?s=20/photo/1
⭕ 28 Sep 2023
🔄 💙 💽 CSPAN: First Hearing on Biden Impeachment Inquiry https://tinyurl.com/ynmzmujw
The House Oversight and Accountability Committee held its first hearing on an impeachment inquiry into President Biden. Republicans alleged that President Biden and his son, Hunter Biden, profited from corrupt foreign business deals with associates based in Ukraine, China, and Romania. Democrats criticized the impeachment inquiry for being unnecessary and lacking credible evidence, especially amid a looming federal government shutdown. One of the witnesses called by the Republican majority was George Washington University law professor Jonathan Turley, who said that the current evidence presented against the Bidens was not enough to warrant impeachment, but that an inquiry was necessary in order to investigate the facts.
🐣 RT @ByronDonalds [9/28] Matt, tell the people the truth. The DOJ will operate whether the government is shut down or not. Special Counsel’s have always exempted themselves from shutdowns. What’s your plan to get the votes to defund Jack Smith? You’ll need more than tweets and hot takes!!
HuffPo: Ocasio-Cortez Accuses GOP Of Fabricating Image At Impeachment Hearing https://tinyurl.com/3td2urk3
// Republicans claimed to show a screenshot of a text message to Hunter Biden, but the image itself was “fabricated” to change the meaning, Ocasio-Cortez said.
💽 https://x.com/therecount/status/1707444012238467441/photo/1
… Ocasio-Cortez’s allegations came after Republican Rep. Byron Donalds of Florida showed a message that Jim Biden, the president’s brother, sent to Hunter Biden, the president’s son, in 2018. Donalds claimed it indicated that the president benefited from fraud and money laundering committed by Hunter Biden.
The message Donalds showed, pulled from an affidavit regarding Hunter Biden, was presented to look like a screenshot from a phone, and it left out much of Hunter Biden’s original message, fundamentally changing the context of the conversation, Ocasio-Cortez said at the hearing. …
🐣 RT @RNCResearch Election Denier Hakeem Jeffries claims there’s not “a scintilla of evidence that Biden engaged in any wrongdoing because there is no evidence that Biden engaged in any wrongdoing” — aside from bank records, emails, calls, photos, texts, visitor logs, and sworn testimony
💽 https://x.com/RNCResearch/status/1707430744476340669?s=20/photo/1
⋙ 🐣 There’s no there there. ¤ Joe Biden loves his kid. End of story. ¤ The rest is just the Biden/Shokin story turned on its head. If you guys had paid attention during the 1st Trump impeachment instead of reading books and eating, you’d know this.
🐣 RT @Acyn Raskin says he heard directly from Republicans on the House floor that the right-wing believes Kevin McCarthy set up today’s inquiry hearing to fail. ¤ Raskin:They couldn’t believe that such a disaster would just happen by accident
💽 https://x.com/Acyn/status/1707564836572303555?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @RonFilipkowski The ranting continued all day on Bannon’s show. This time Seb Gorka came on to yell that Democrats “owned the Republicans,” turned it into an impeachment of Trump, and said Comer is a moron.
💽 https://x.com/RonFilipkowski/status/1707581253384380767?s=20/photo/1
≣ WhiteHouse: Remarks by President Biden Honoring the Legacy of Senator John McCain and the Work We Must Do Together to Strengthen Our Democracy https://tinyurl.com/bdftfsk6
🐣 RT @MaryLTrump THIS is how it’s done. 🔥
⋙ 🐣 RT @Acyn Omg wow this
💽 https://x.com/MaryLTrump/status/1707598096333459549?s=20/photo/1
// Jasmine Crockett (D-TX) at “impeachment inquiry” ripping into Trump
🐣 RT @RyanShead 🔥 VIDEO OF THE DAY 🔥
Texas Representative Jasmine Crockett was speaking for all Americans in this clip. ¤ If you believe every rumor about Hunter Biden but refuse to acknowledge real evidence against trump, you’re probably who she’s talking about. The Biden impeachment is the real weaponization of our government.#BidenImpeachmentInquiry #BidenImpeachment #BidenHarris2024
💽 https://x.com/RyanShead/status/1707514281359774172?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @WhiteHouse House Republicans have turned their backs on the bipartisan budget deal that two-thirds of them voted for just a few months ago and are marching us toward a shutdown. ¤ It’s time for them to stop playing political games with peoples’ lives and keep the government open.
💽 https://x.com/WhiteHouse/status/1707455185272901873?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @USNATO The United States, together with our Allies and partners around the world, will continue to stand with the brave people of Ukraine as they defend their sovereignty, territorial integrity, and freedom. It’s not only an investment in Ukraine’s future, but in the future of every country that seeks a world governed by basic principles that apply equally to all nations.
💽 https://x.com/USNATO/status/1707398534863991182?s=20/photo/1
// Biden at UN with Zelenskyy’s human reactions
🐣 … History says, don’t hope
On this side of the grave.
But then, once in a lifetime
The longed-for tidal wave
Of justice can rise up,
And hope and history rhyme.
(Seamus Heaney)
WaPo: Biden delivers unusually sharp rebuke of Trump on democracy https://tinyurl.com/4bcbss9j
// In Arizona speech on the importance of democracy, Biden also announces a new library honoring McCain
💙 YouTube: Biden Speech on Democracy (honoring the legacy of John McCain)
💽 https://www.youtube.com/live/H4hQ3k7wPOQ?si=EQOLZA4GTW-J0YJS
🐣 RT @spectatorindex Most dangerous cities in the 🇺🇸 United States
1. Bessemer, Alabama
2. Mobile, Alabama
3. Monroe, Louisiana
4. Saginaw, Michigan
5. Memphis, Tennessee
6. Detroit, Michigan
7. Birmingham, Alabama
8. Pine Bluff, Arkansas
9. Little Rock, Arkansas
10. Alexandria, Louisiana
11. Cleveland, Ohio
12. Kalamazoo, Michigan
13. Milwaukee, Wisconsin
14. Albany, Georgia
15. Gadsden, Alabama
16. Danville, Illinois
17. Lansing, Michigan
18. Baltimore, Maryland
19. Springfield, Missouri
20. Spartanburg, South Carolina
21. Rockford, Illinois
22. Wilmington, Delaware
23. St. Louis, Missouri
24. San Bernardino, California
25. Kansas City, Missouri
(Source: NeighborhoodScout)
⋙ 🐣 15 of 25 cities listed are in Red states
… and where are New York, Chicago and Atlanta, that Trump complains about incessantly?
🐣 RT @OversightDems The FBI Form FD-1023 tipsheet contains the same debunked claims that Rudy Giuliani was peddling. Even Trump’s DOJ dismissed these allegations. ¤ Let’s be clear about Republicans’ Burisma theory: It was a lie when Trump and Giuliani created it in 2018. And it’s still a lie today.
🐣 RT @SecBlinken I couldn’t pass up tonight’s opportunity to combine music and diplomacy. Was a pleasure to launch @StateDept’s new Global Music Diplomacy Initiative.
🎹 https://x.com/McFaul/status/1707507617902563624?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @kamilkazani Defunding Ukraine will have most negative consequences for the U.S. in the context of the almost inevitable military confrontation with China. It will:
1. Embolden Beijing to pursue a more aggressive policy
2. Demoralize the U.S. Allies in Asia
🐣 RT @BidenHQ Fox anchor: I have been following these hearings… I don’t know what was achieved over these last six-plus hours… None of the expert witnesses presented any proof for impeachment
💽 https://x.com/BidenHQ/status/1707491818173018552?s=20/photo/1
🐣 When you have two of four legal WITNESSES saying they shouldn’t have begun an impeachment inquiry because no link to Joe Biden has been established, you’ve got a problem ¤ the 🤡🤡🤡 are running the 🎪
🧵 RT @sumlenny THREAD Let’s start a long thread about how Russian book market prepared Russians for a full-scale war against Ukraine, NATO, the West, and promoted stalinism and nazism, and how this was ignored by the West. Keep seat belts fasten, you will see a lot of nasty things here. 1/52
📌 https://x.com/sumlenny/status/1707407873603428717?s=20
💙🧵 RT @atrupar My thread on the House GOP’s first impeachment hearing begins here. Follow along for notable moments and commentary.
📌 💽 https://x.com/atrupar/status/1707394883118354544?s=20/photo/1
[ThreadReader:] https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1707394883118354544.html
🐣 RT @RonFilipkowski Raskin detailing exactly how Donald Trump orchestrated the imminent government shutdown and the Biden impeachment hearing with House Republicans solely to benefit him.
⋙ 🐣 RT @atrupar Raskin: “Speaker McCarthy’s invertebrate appeasement of the most fanatical elements of his conference now threatens the well-being of every American … the Constitution is irrelevant to them. What counts is what Donald Trump wants.”
💽 https://x.com/RonFilipkowski/status/1707402869463245018?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @RonFilipkowski Raskin detailing exactly how Donald Trump orchestrated the imminent government shutdown and the Biden impeachment hearing with House Republicans solely to benefit him.
💽 https://x.com/RonFilipkowski/status/1707402869463245018?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @ProjectLincoln We’re two days away from a GOP owned government shutdown that will affect families, government workers, our military, and countless others. What’s the GOP focusing on to meet this crisis? They’re moving forward today with a Biden impeachment inquiry despite having zero evidence.
💽 https://x.com/ProjectLincoln/status/1707394731033157835?s=20/photo/1
// Trump: “If they hadn’t done it to me, … perhaps you wouldn’t have had it being done to them”
🐣 RT @BidenHQ New ad just dropped
💽 https://x.com/BidenHQ/status/1707379921604026676?s=20/photo/1
// DeSantis: “Donald Trump … set the stage for the inflation we see today”
🐣 RT @ChuckPfarrer ROBOTYNE-VERBOVE /1310 UTC 28 SEPT/ In the last 36 hours, UKR artillery conducted extensive barrages against RU defensive positions, troop concentrations and Ground Lines of Communication and Supply (GLOCS). Preliminary information indicates that UKR infantry and armor has penetrated RU defensive lines S and W of Verbove.
🌎 https://x.com/ChuckPfarrer/status/1707379696080499190?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @SmartUACat ⚡️🇷🇺 Russians started building new railway lines which will connect Melitopol, Berdyansk, Mariupol & Rostov along the shore of the Sea of Azov. ¤ This is very important news. This will significantly decrease the importance of Volnovakha, Komysh Zorya & Tokmaks.
🌎 https://x.com/SmartUACat/status/1707053104099742135?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @wartranslated A Russian volunteer in the so-called “LPR” describes Russian counterattacks in Bakhmut no other than “Zerg rushes with no progress”. He says men are thrown into the meat grinder just to carve out a few decent looking headlines in the Russian media. Bakhmut and it’s satellites is now a trap for the occupiers.
[TextLink:] https://x.com/wartranslated/status/1706584492809371684?s=20/photo/1 -2
[Text:] Ten days of Zerg rushes of ruins, they call it “Russian troops again counterattacked in the area of Andreevka and Kleshcheevka, no advancement” and progress is obvious. But this is not our progress. The focus from the ruins shifts to the railway and the northern part of Kurdyumovka. And they really have a rockade in their plans. Great fighting… …Oh, by the way… The remnants of the group that we were training, who a few days ago managed to complete the assault mission and cling to the ruins in Andreevka, all stayed there… It was assumed that the VDV will provide support. The VDV could not get through. The guys were unable to withdraw on their own…
PravdaUa: Panic in Crimea will grow – Ukrainian President’s Office https://tinyurl.com/mwfjf4wh “Crimea today is the key to significantly reducing the combat capability of the Russian occupation groups.” ~ Mykhailo Podoliak, Adviser to the Head of the Office of the President
Source: Mykhailo Podoliak, Adviser to the Head of the Office of the President, during the national joint 24/7 newscast; Ukrinform
Quote from Podoliak: “Panic is a complex issue. The Russian Federation is in a lifelong state of panic. That’s why they threaten everyone. To compensate for their panic, they always say that we are going to go somewhere, do something, and so on. And these panic moods will gradually develop in Crimea.”
Details: As Podoliak stated, this means increasing the intensity of the effects on what is happening in Crimea.
The adviser to the head of the President’s Office noted that Russians in Crimea are currently living in fear of attacks, under air-raid warnings, and understand that Crimea is a place of great danger for them and that they no longer have such strong control over the airspace.
He stated that the Russians have no railway connection, for example, through cities such as Melitopol, Berdiansk, etc. to Rostov Oblast. This is why 80% of the supply goes through Crimea. There is a huge infrastructure of Russian storage capabilities there: “Crimea today is the key to significantly reducing the combat capability of the Russian occupation groups.” …
Podoliak said one of the strategic tasks for Ukraine is to cut off the key supply line for the Russians. As the advisor to the head of the President’s Office stated, this means taking control of the Kerch Strait under direct fire and destroying the huge storage infrastructure.
He noted that Russia currently wants to avoid losing the war, but it needs to be aware that it has to lose, and this is the only chance to come up with some rules of the game post-war.
Podoliak also said that historically, Ukraine has already been recorded as one of the greatest countries of the 21st century: “Ukraine has already proved that it can pay the highest price [for its right to exist – ed.]. And today, I think there are few countries that are ready to pay such a price for the right to be themselves”.
🐣 I look at Ukraine 🇺🇦 & I see such courage. Then I look at our 🇺🇸 politics & I see such chaos & cowardice. The idea that Ukraine’s survival might depend in any way on our politics is a travesty. All I can say is Ukraine funding will come through, despite the chaos of our politics.
💙 🖼 https://x.com/Auriandra/status/1707322402445652258?s=20/photo/1
d🐣 RT @ChuckPfarrer ORIKHIV AXIS /0020 UTC 28 SEP/ Sources report that RU units are being shifted in response to UKR pressure on the Robotyne / Verbove axis. UKR forces are prepared to exploit any resulting weakness in Russian defensive lines.
🌎 https://x.com/ChuckPfarrer/status/1707187370523496535?s=20/photo/1
⭕ 27 Sep 2023
DailyBeast, Sam Brody and Matt Fuller (9/27): Why Are Republicans Playing Politics With Ukraine? https://tinyurl.com/3erxt3tn Rep Ken Buck told The Daily Beast. “You and I both know that Tucker Carlson made this an issue.”
// Almost every Republican in Congress supports an $826 billion Pentagon budget. But when it comes to $24 billion to help Ukraine dismantle the Russian army, it’s another story.
[…] Rep. Jake Auchincloss (D-MA) succinctly encapsulated what the U.S. has gotten out of its investment in Ukraine.
“For a small fraction of our annual defense appropriations—for less than Americans spend on soft drinks every year—we have cratered half of Russia’s conventional military capacity, doubled NATO’s border, got our biggest allies to increase their domestic defense spending, strengthened our most important multilateral alliance, sent a message to Xi Jinping that we stand with freedom and democracy the world over,” he said.
“It’s been an unparalleled foreign policy triumph,” Auchincloss added. “But it is incomplete, and we need to see it through.” …
The military aid that the U.S. and other countries sent to Ukraine has been critical in fending off Russia’s advance over that time, even though the Pentagon is only sending weapons, tanks, and other hard assets—not troops.
An August poll from CNN, however, revealed that a majority of Americans—55 percent—oppose more aid to Ukraine. And just as in Congress, there’s a strong partisan divide on the issue: 62 percent of Democrats nationally support more funding for Ukraine, while 71 percent of Republicans are against it.
The issue, many Republicans in Congress agree, shouldn’t be partisan. But these Republicans are also keenly aware of the reality—that it is.
Conservatives are currently leveraging their willingness to shut down the government to try to get spending cuts. A chief sticking point in the negotiations is the $24 billion request from President Joe Biden for Ukraine aid—a military weapons transfer that is vital to fending off Russia and is supported by members of both parties.
The debate is unfolding at a pivotal point in the war. U.S. funding from the last aid package, passed in December 2022, runs out soon, just as Ukraine attempts to regain lost territory in its first major counteroffensive of the conflict.
“The failure to support Ukraine at this critical moment would be potentially tragic,” Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-CT) told The Daily Beast. …
Loudermilk said he has a lot of “very vocal” constituents questioning why the U.S. is handing out aid to Ukraine. But he also said he had just as many voters saying we should support the country. ¤“It’s a real mixed bag,” Loudermilk said.
If you ask lawmakers why it became such a mixed bag, one name comes up often.“You want me to say it on the record? I’ll be glad to,” [Rep Ken] Buck told The Daily Beast. “You and I both know that Tucker Carlson made this an issue.” […]
NVUkraine: Russian forces race to build railway link between Mariupol, Donetsk, and Volnovakha https://tinyurl.com/jt6rpep3 Plans are to link two train lines to create “a direct connection with Russia’s Taganrog and Rostov-on-Don” and reduce dependence on the route through Crimea
[…] If successful, this endeavor would enable the integration of the existing Mariupol-Aslanove-Kalchik-Volnovakha branch line into a direct connection with Russia’s Taganrog and Rostov-on-Don. …
This not only addresses the global issues related to military and civilian logistics in practice, but also reduces dependence on the railway connection via the Crimean Bridge, said Andriushchenko. […]
🐣 RT @anno1540 “We are not losing any American military”: Senator McConnell explained why supporting Ukraine is beneficial for the United States
¤ https://x.com/anno1540/status/1707236891207127306?s=20
U.S. Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell said that continuing to help Ukraine in its fight against a full-scale Russian invasion is in Washington’s favor.
He believes that it is much wiser to stop the aggressor country now, because the next one after Ukraine, if Putin wins, could be a member of NATO. More details [Ru link]
By: Olga Lipych
The American politician said this during the forum “Win the war. Win the peace”, which was organized by the Center for the Analysis of European Politics, ” Voice of America ” reports. McConnell noted that the only people who are ready to stop the Russian dictator now are the Ukrainians, so they need to be helped.
Standing now against Russia, Iran, China and North Korea means being on the right side, the Republican leader emphasized. At the same time, America does not lose any of its soldiers in this war – the Ukrainian people are fighting alone.
The American politician said this during the forum “Win the war. Win the peace”, which was organized by the Center for the Analysis of European Politics, the Voice of America reports. McConnell noted that the only people who are ready to stop the Russian dictator now are the Ukrainians, so they need to be helped.”The Prime Minister of Japan said that if you want to send a message to President Xi (Chinese President Xi Jinping. – Ed.), beat Putin in Ukraine. South Koreans are worried, Filipinos are worried, Australians are worried,” he concluded.
As OBOZREVATEL reported, on September 21, Mitch McConnell welcomed Zelensky in the US Capitol and spoke in defense of aid to Ukraine. He stated that supporting Ukraine is not charity, but investment in American interests.
Standing now against Russia, Iran, China and North Korea means being on the right side, the Republican leader emphasized. At the same time, America does not lose any of its soldiers in this war – the Ukrainian people are fighting alone.
“Ukrainians are showing courage and bravery and I think that’s inspiring to the rest of the world who are electing their leaders, countries that are not ruled by autocrats,” McConnell said.
In addition, as he explained, the transfer of weapons to the Defense Forces of Ukraine for conducting military operations contributes to the development of the industrial base in America and creates jobs for the country’s residents.
When Washington transfers certain weapons to Kyiv, it replaces many of its assets with more modern equipment. ¤
McConnell also added that protecting freedom in Europe promotes peace in the Far East. The war in Ukraine has a great impact on Asia and the future of Taiwan.
“The Prime Minister of Japan said that if you want to send a message to President Xi (Chinese President Xi Jinping. – Ed.), beat Putin in Ukraine. South Koreans are worried, Filipinos are worried, Australians are worried,” he concluded.
As OBOZREVATEL reported, on September 21, Mitch McConnell welcomed Zelensky in the US Capitol and spoke in defense of aid to Ukraine. He stated that supporting Ukraine is not charity, but investment in American interests. [Ru link]
🐣 RT @RpsAgainstTrump This anti-Trump ad from the Biden campaign was just aired on Fox News, moments before the beginning of the debate
💽 https://x.com/RpsAgainstTrump/status/1707197492595462649?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @DCelesteSpencer Judge Chutkan has denied Trump’s motion to recuse. Trump says he’s being prosecuted for you. He’s being prosecuted for his crimes against America. He incited January 6th and it’s about time he’s prosecuted for it. He is not a victim. He clearly incited an Insurrection! Until he faces accountability for his actions #WeThePeople will never just move on. Justice is absolutely necessary! Trump is a Traitor and still a clear and present danger to USA!!! #NeverFORGETJan6th
🖼 https://x.com/DCelesteSpencer/status/1707165158773035385?s=20/photo/1
// awesome J6 graphic
🐣 RT @AmandiOnAir The #GOPDebate tonight was the worst debate of any kind at any level I have ever seen in life.
🐣 RT @TheRickWilson I’ve attended probably 30 primary debates and watched most of them over the last 30 years. ¤ This is the most shambolic trainwreck I’ve ever seen.
// GOP debate
🐣 RT @CraigDMauger It’s unclear how many auto workers attended Trump’s speech.
A person in the crowd with a “union members for Trump” sign acknowledged she wasn’t a union member.
A person with an “auto workers for Trump” sign said he wasn’t an auto worker.
⋙ DetroitNews: Donald Trump: UAW negotiations ‘don’t mean as much as you think’ https://tinyurl.com/3uf6e45k
// Trump argued that regardless of the outcome of the strike, the bigger threat to employees was the shift to electric cars and trucks.:
🔄 See: Wm Lazonick’s seminal: Profits Without Prosperity
https://hbr.org/2014/09/profits-without-prosperity
🐣 RT @djrothkopf This [GOP] debate is the most chaotic and badly done by producers and participants I have ever seen.
🐣 RT @TrentTelenko I have deep doubts on this. ¤ Lip service, yes. ¤ Money for the thousands of gun based SHORAD platforms necessary to obtain sufficient anti-FPV/loitering munition density to cover all the mechanized/aviation logistical supply trains is utterly lacking.
⋙ 🐣 RT @nicholadrummond Within the first 6 months of the war in Ukraine starting, every NATO army decided to acquire some kind of loitering munition and an attritable UAV. 18 months later, there’s a realisation that they actually need to reconfigure the entire army around a range of UAS and counter-UAS capabilities.
🐣 RT @Mpolymer 🔥🔥Insightful and detailed personal writing from Paul Kolbe, one of the true experts from CIA’s operations officer cadre who battled the Russians in the field (key point) for many decades. Must read in
⋙ 🐣 RT @thecipherbrief THE #UKRAINE DIARIES: Former Senior @CIA Officer and Cipher Brief Expert Paul Kolbe starts our series of personal writings by national security experts who joined The Cipher Brief’s recent visit to Kyiv that included meetings with high-level officials: https://buff.ly/3PxslfY
🐣 RT @AmicaAli “This latest blow for Trump puts on record that his mythos of business acumen was largely built on lies.” ¤ It’s all smoke and mirrors. He is as fake as his reality tv show. Yet he managed to rise to the highest office in the land. History will not be kind.
⋙ TheAtlantic, Lora Kelley: A Court Ruling That Targets Trump’s Persona https://tinyurl.com/38kv64yz
// A New York judge’s decision undermines the former president’s image as a “deals guy.”
🐣 RT @MeidasTouch CONFIRMED: Elon Musk has fired the entire Election Integrity Team at X, the unit created to identify threats from foreign and domestic sources manipulating our elections.
⋙ MeidasTouch: BREAKING: Musk Fires Entire ‘Election Integrity Team’ at X https://tinyurl.com/2s47924c
// Here we go.
⋙ 🐣 this is what happens when inequality runs rampant and oligarchs come to prefer oligarchy ¤ this is also why Biden joining a strike is so critical: Trump led the working class away from Dems with fantasies of power and revenge rather than addressing the growing economic chasm
🐣 RT @therecount NBC’s @ryanobles presses Rep. Jason Smith (R-MO), a top Biden impeachment investigator, about his accusations and evidence. ¤ Rep. Smith, unable to provide direct answers, tells Nobles: “Apparently, you’ll never believe us.”
💽 https://x.com/therecount/status/1707143355077939261?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @RepRaskin The escalating nationwide book ban crisis poses a dire threat to our 1st Amendment rights. A strong democracy supports the free exchange of ideas and doesn’t cave to revisionist censors. I’m standing on the side of students, teachers, librarians & freedom.
🐣 RT @SimonWDC There’s really only one path path forward here – McCarthy must acknowledge that he no longer has ideological or political control of the House, that his coalition has crumbled and enter in a power sharing agreement w/Jeffries, pass a CR. ¤ Let’s get on with it.
⋙ 🐣 RT @AndrewJBates46 .@washingtonpost: “Of course, Biden has played no role in bringing Congress to the brink of a shutdown.” ¤ “In fact, McCarthy has sidelined Democrats and refused to take up a bipartisan stopgap funding bill because he’s afraid” of the “hard-right.”
⋙⋙ WaPo: McCarthy’s new shutdown strategy: Shifting the blame https://tinyurl.com/cj323rd9
🐣 RT @SpencerGuard “Ukraine has exposed a major air defense vulnerability in Crimea in general and clearly in Sevastopol,” Spencer said. @Newsweek
⋙ Newsweek: Putin’s failing to protect his elite Black Sea Fleet https://tinyurl.com/yc6psk7f
// Russia’s ability to defend its Black Sea Fleet forces has come into question after recent devastating attacks by Ukraine’s forces.
🐣 RT @tweetforAnna ❗In #Ukraine 🇺🇦, every place that #Russia 🇷🇺 occupied was systematically marked by: executions, castrations, torture, gang-rape, forced nudity & child sexual abuse. Victims range from 𝟭𝟰 𝗺𝗼𝗻𝘁𝗵𝘀 𝘁𝗼 𝟴𝟯 years old.
#StandWithUkraine #RussianArmy
#RussiaisATerroistState
🖼 https://x.com/tweetforAnna/status/1706722190484271591?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @fugazidayz In the preliminary arguments of #Russia in the case of #Ukraine v Russia in The Hague, Russia states that it not about whether they raped, tortured, killed, kidnapped but rather [it is] about the interpretation of The Genocide Convention, Article 9. They have further stated that there
⋙ 🐣 RT @fugazidayz is no dispute between Ukraine and Russia about #Russian use of force, and therefore, the International Court of Justice. has no jurisdiction. Russia states that the dispute doesn’t exist BECAUSE RUSSIA HAS NEVER USED GENOCIDE AS A PRETEXT FOR THEIR INVASION OF UKRAINE. Yet,
⋙ 🐣 RT @fugazidayz #Putin, their MOD, and their state media has pronounced this nonsense over and over again. They have even published an investigative committee analysis of this absurd genocide of Ukraine and placed on their MOD website. Russia continues to play semantics rather than use facts.
🐣 RT @RpsAgainstTrump The chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Milley, responds to Trump’s threats against him: ¤ “I can tell you that this military, this soldier, me, will never turn our back on that Constitution… ¤ I wish those comments hadn’t been made…I’ll take appropriate measures to ensure my safety and the safety of my family.” ¤ (Video: 60 Minutes, CBS)
💽 https://x.com/RpsAgainstTrump/status/1707176598863053160?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @mmpadellan TWEEPS: President Biden often says “Wall Street didn’t build this country, the middle class did, and unions built the middle class.” ¤ Unlike trump, the anti-union LOSER who’s posing with non-union labor today, President Biden actually stands with WORKERS. …
🐣 RT @ProjectLincoln “When Trump…started urging election officials to change election results…by making specific false statements about votes being improperly cast and counted, they left the protection of the First Amendment and became subject to criminal and civil laws.”
⋙ KCStar: Donald Trump can’t hide behind the First Amendment. Free speech isn’t license to lie https://tinyurl.com/68tawf8w
🐣 RT @ProjectLincoln Joe Biden is the only 2024 candidate who will bring decency and a profound respect for democracy to the White House. To vote otherwise is a dangerous mistake.
🐣 RT @ZelenskyyUa Whatever happens in the world, whatever the external circumstances are, we in Ukraine must remember that only our own terms, our own internal attitude toward Ukraine, toward our freedom, and toward our goals define when we will achieve our aim. The main aim. Ukraine’s victory.
💽 [tr] https://x.com/ZelenskyyUa/status/1707131200777736499?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @BarackObama .@POTUS knows the importance of unions. That’s why he joined the UAW picket line yesterday. ¤ Right now, unions across the country continue to stand up and advocate for the rights of working Americans — and they deserve our support. This week’s WGA deal is an example of what’s possible. Keep going.
⋙ 🐣 RT @POTUS Record corporate profits should mean record contracts. ¤ It’s time American autoworkers got a fair deal.
🖼 https://x.com/POTUS/status/1706756785380450421?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @rulajebreal Deutsche Bank privately suspected that Trump was a money-laundering operation for Russia/Putin….but Deutsche Bank employee Justin Kennedy (son of Justice Anthony Kennedy) arranged loans for Trump, regardless his own Bank’s concerns.
⋙⋙ NBCNews (2019): Deutsche Bank employees reportedly flagged suspicious transactions involving Trump and Kushner https://tinyurl.com/4nked6hk
// Tammy McFadden, a former Deutsche Bank employee, said she reviewed transactions that involved Kushner’s company and Russians in the summer of 2016.
// 5/19/2019
⋙ 🐣 RT @oOGrannyOo The reported actions of Deutsche Bank and its employee raise serious concerns about potential financial misconduct and conflicts of interest. It is crucial that these allegations are thoroughly investigated to ensure transparency, accountability, and the integrity of our financial systems..
🐣 RT @glennkirschner2 Judge Tanya Chutkan predictably and appropriately DENIED Trump’s motion to have her recuse herself from presiding over his federal prosecution for his democracy-busting crimes. Details to follow:
[TextLink:] https://x.com/glennkirschner2/status/1707152598367654210?s=20/photo/1
[CourtDoc:] https://tinyurl.com/24pakp2p
🐣 RT @PopularLiberal THE BIG MISTAKE: During his tenure as the United States Secretary of Defense from 2019 to 2020, Mark Esper recounted several concerning incidents involving Donald Trump’s desire to use bombs against Mexico and Iran. ¤ Esper also expressed that some Republicans in power advocated for military intervention in Venezuela, further highlighting his belief that both Trump and his associates are ill-suited for positions of authority within the country. ¤ Instead of governing, they demonstrate a desire to rule, which goes against the principles of this nation, making it an unsuitable environment for their aspirations. #WeAreBlue1 #wtpBLUE
💽 [60Minutes:] https://x.com/PopularLiberal/status/1707079560171323497?s=20/photo/1
🧵 RT @JoohnChoe Remember who you are. ¤ Here are some of NAFO’s major-outlet media mentions, in one place. ¤ Taylor, Adam, “With NAFO, Ukraine turns the trolls on Russia”, Washington Post, Sep 1 2022
📌 https://x.com/JoohnChoe/status/1707092726272184510?s=20
// tags: fellas articles about NAFO articles in MSM
🐣 RT @7Veritas4 We are observing a man whose chaotically constructed world, built entirely on lies and deceit, is burning down before him.
[TextLink:] https://x.com/7Veritas4/status/1707025609652605154?s=20/photo/1
[Text:] 🐣 RT @realDonaldTrump I have a Deranged, Trump Hating Judge, who +RAPOSTADED this FAKE CASE through a NYS Coura at a speed never seen before, refusing to let it go to the Commercial Division, where it belongs, denying me everything, No Trial, No Jury. He made up this crazy “KILL TRUMP” decision, assigning insanely low values to properties, despite overwhelming evidence. AS AN EXAMPLE, HE VALUES THE MOST SPECTACULAR PROPERTY IN PALM BEACH, FLORIDA, MAR-A-LAGO, AT $18,000,000, WHEN IT IS WORTH POSSIBLY 100 TIMES THAT AMOUNT. His anger & hatred is politically motivated & unprecedented by those who watched! My actual Net Worth is MUCH GREATER than the number shown on the Financial Statements, a BIG SURPRISE to him & the Racist A.G., Letitia James, who campaigned for office on a get Trump Platform. While murderers roam the sidewalks of New York, my banks are happy, all loans are current, or paid off in full, sometimes early, with no defaults or problems of any kind. There is also an IRONCLAD DISCLAIMER CLAUSE!
⭕ 26 Sep 2023
🐣 RT @BulwarkOnline “Cassidy Hutchinson found the strength to break out of this prison of the mind. She realized that she could write a different story for herself. That the enemy was not the people telling the truth about her boss. That she was not stuck on a conveyor belt.”
⋙ TheBulwark, Tim Miller (6/24): Cassidy Hutchinson Held Their Manhoods Cheap https://tinyurl.com/43pc73rf
// They all knew. But only the 26-year-old staffer would testify about it under oath.
🐣 RT @LuisMorenolg Wow, Alabama, just wow.
‼️ ⋙ 🐣 RT @davidgura Why did @SenTuberville vote against the next chairman of the Joint Chiefs? ¤ “I heard some things he talked about, about race and things that he wanted to mix into the military,” he told @BloombergTV. “Our military is not an equal opportunity employer.”
🐣 RT @jmholmes_author The whole world will sit back in amazement when they finally realize what the Ukrainians can do. ¤ SLAVA UKRAINI
🐣 RT @DefenceU Things are only going to get worse for the occupiers.
💽 https://x.com/DefenceU/status/1706014594836086945?s=20/photo/1
// major assault; Ru comms
🐣 RT @NOELreports Russian channels report about a heavy ‘escalation’ in the Zaporizhzia region near Verbove and Novoprokopivka. AFU is on the assault. ¤ Yes, something beautiful is coming. Pray for the men and women fighting there, godspeed and return home🙏🇺🇦
🐣 RT @TheStudyofWar New from ISW’s @nataliabugayova: ¤ “Ukrainian forces have adapted. #Ukraine’s military decision-making is sound. Now is not the time for Western doubt but for the West to embrace Ukraine’s way of war & commit to sustaining Ukraine on the battlefield.” More: https://isw.pub/UkrWayofWar
⋙ ISW: It’s Time for the West to Embrace Ukraine’s Way of War, Not Doubt It https://tinyurl.com/4anw9mtj “Ukrainian adaptations to battlefield realities, especially when considering the immense constraints Ukraine is operating under, have been effective”
.
But the Ukrainian forces have done what successful militaries do — they have adapted and are now advancing. Ukraine recognized the realities of Russian defenses much faster than Western policymakers …
Ukraine’s ingenuity is yielding results. Ukraine maintains the battlefield initiative and its forces are advancing in Zaporizhia Oblast and near Bakhmut. Ukraine continues to liberate its territory and people and is slowly but steadily breaking through an incredibly formidable Russian prepared defense — and the Russian forces are unable to stop the advance, which is now moving in two directions.
Additionally, Ukrainian asymmetrical tactics in the Black Sea are preventing Russia’s Black Sea Fleet from operating freely, forcing Russia to reposition naval assets, and increasingly challenging Russian forces in Crimea — all operational developments of strategic significance.[2]
… Ukrainian adaptations to battlefield realities, especially when considering the immense constraints Ukraine is operating under, have been effective. Ukraine’s decision to pivot away from the type of large-scale mechanized breaches that its counteroffensive brigades were trained by NATO to perform, in hindsight, has enabled Ukraine’s progress. […]
🐣 RT @Podolyak_M Today’s #Russia is nothing but an overblown myth, existing in the consciousness of the ruins of the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union.
¤ https://x.com/Podolyak_M/status/1706718473286496718?s=20
It is a mafia state, nurtured by the #West, corrupted by a quarter of a century of untold wealth, power, and all possible earthly pleasures. It is a huge resource country experiencing an existential crisis of its own identity and a dead end of development. And the only reason why #Putin’s elite is hooked on the needle of “geopolitics”, flirting with the traumas of the collapse of the #USSR, is the dreadful boredom of being in power for so long and the unwillingness to look for alternative development projects for the country. Another question is: how did we (the rest of the world) get to this point? And how did today’s war become possible in the first place? The answer to this question will make us reconsider the entire Western policy of the last 20 years. Politics is always determined by people, and the Russian elite is a special kind of people: deeply cowardly by nature (others simply don’t get promoted), but a showing-off public that feeds on one thing only — fear, doubts and indecision of the West. Just as all evil fears the light, so does #Moscow always retreat before any force and decisive repulse. You cannot rewrite the past, but you can draw conclusions today. So stop making a mountain out of a molehill, feeding Putin’s vulnerable ego and prolonging the war. Bullies must be put in their place. In this case, by supplying weapons.
🐣 RT @RonFilipkowski After being put out of business in NY, Eric blames his dad for everything.
[TextLink:] https://x.com/RonFilipkowski/status/1706838400962109942?s=20/photo/1
[Text:] 🐣 RT @EricTrump While everyone can see that this case is egregious, the only thing worse than weaponizing the legal system against a political opponent is unfairly going after their family. Both the Attorney General and the Judge know I had absolutely NOTHING to do with this case. Every single person has testified that my job has always been acquiring, developing and managing properties, not back office functions. The only reason I am collateral damage is because my last name is Trump and I am unwavering in the support of my father, his accomplishments and what he has done for our country, a nation which is rapidly in decline.
🐣 RT @AntiToxicPeople SAD!!!
[TextLink:] https://x.com/AntiToxicPeople/status/1706820387550748984?s=20/photo/1
[Text:] 🐣 RT @realDonaldTrump Today’s Ruling about a Company that has done a magnificent job for New York State fails to acknowledge the fact that Murder and all other forms of Violent Crime have reached record levels in New York State. Can you imagine ruling against me for having done business perfectly, and yet letting people go on a rampage on the sidewalks of New York? This is the Judicial conduct that is forcing thousands of companies to flee New York for other environs, while virtually nobody comes back to the City or State. A very sad Day for the New York State System of Justice!
“Maneuver warfare” is the psychological overtaking of the enemy ~ John Spencer
🐣 RT @RaduHossu I saw @noclador status. I’ve called. I can confirm. ¤ Massive artillery barrage put in by AFU in Orihiv-#Tokmak axis. Meaning in direction of #Novoprokopivka-#Verbove and more south in direction of #Ocheretuvate.
🖼 https://x.com/RaduHossu/status/1706828730088177810?s=20/photo/1
AFU started an apocaliptic (as russian sources call them) use of artilerry. ¤ Bradley, Strikers, Marders and Challengers seem (unconfirmed sources here) to be present there.
What has started tonight will be bloddy. ¤ Godspeed. I’m not too much of a spiritual guy, buy I will pray for the AFU boys. I think you shoud too. ¤ Godspeed! For the Victory! ¤ #SlavaUkraini
🐣 RT @RpsAgainstTrump UAW President Shawn Fain says he won’t meet with Trump tomorrow in Michigan: ¤ “I see no point in meeting with him because I don’t think the man has– has any bit of care about what our workers stand for, what the working class stands for. He serves the billionaire class”
DailyBeast, José Pagliery: Trump Basically Just Lost the New York Bank Fraud Case Before It Even Started https://tinyurl.com/ysnner48
// A judge in the New York Attorney General’s bank fraud case against Trump just deemed the former president and his heirs liable for “persistent and repeated fraud.”
🔄 🧵 RT @susannecraig It seems like a good week to revisit some of the @nytimes notable stories on Donald Trump’s taxes / finances. Our first big article ran in 2016 with the revelation Trump declared a $916 million loss on his 1995 income tax return. Wow. 👀
📌 https://x.com/susannecraig/status/1573387646407266304?s=20
🐣 RT @noclador My sources tell me that #Tokmak direction is becoming increasingly hot by the hour. Ukraine has committed a full set of forces. ¤ The bloodiest phase of the Ukrainian Offensive has begun. ¤ Pray for the brave Ukrainians, who we owe so much!
¤ https://x.com/noclador/status/1706751337721889194?s=20
🐣 RT @sahilkapur The White House endorses the Senate’s bipartisan short-term funding bill, which moved forward on a vote of 77-19 tonight, and tells House Republicans to pass it.
[TextLink:] https://x.com/sahilkapur/status/1706821458750497068?s=20/photo/1
[Text:] FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
September 26, 2023
Statement from Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre on the Senate’s Bipartisan Bill to Prevent an Extreme Republican ShutdownThe Senate’s bipartisan continuing resolution will keep the government open, make a down payment on disaster relief, and is an important show of support for Ukraine. House Republicans should join the Senate in doing their job, stop playing political games with peoples lives, and abide by the bipartisan deal two-thirds of them voted for in May.
🐣 RT @POTUS If the government shuts down, that means members of our U.S. military are going to be on duty, unpaid. ¤ There’s no reason for us to be in this position. ¤ Just a few months ago we reached a bipartisan budget agreement on spending. We shook hands. Now, they’re reneging on the deal.
🐣 RT @AntiToxicPeople Trump’s unhinged, rambling & demented rant about the Judge dismantling Trump Org. & finding he committed fraud endlessly for years is as epic and utterly insane as you’d expect. ¤My fave part, among others, is at the end: “if they can do this to me, they can do it to YOU!” 🤣
[TextLink:] https://x.com/AntiToxicPeople/status/1706811363388272746?s=20/photo/1
[Text:] STATEMENT BY THE 45TH PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
DONALD J. TRUMPThe widespread, radical attack against me, my family, and my supporters has now devolved to new, un-American depths, at the hands of a DERANGED New York State Judge, doing the bidding of a completely biased and corrupt “Prosecutor,” Letitia James, who ran for office based on a “GET TRUMP” platform, before even knowing anything about me. Today’s action is a refutation of my status as the leading Candidate for President of the United States, including with a substantial lead over Joe Biden. It is a terrible reminder that the Radical Left Democrats will stop at nothing in trying to prevent me, and the American people, from winning the 2024 Presidential Election. Regardless of Party, we cannot let this happen in the United States of America! As my lead in the polls over Joe Biden continues to skyrocket, these Corrupt and Highly Political Prosecutors and Judges are getting more and more desperate and dangerous. We are rapidly becoming a Communist Country, and my Civil Rights have been taken away from me. The New York State Attorney General went before a Highly Politicized Democrat Judge, who refused allowing the case to go to the Commercial Division, where it belonged, to simply rule, despite all of the evidence to the contrary, that I committed fraud, which is both ridiculous and untrue. As an example, this Democrat Operative valued Mar-a-Lago, the most spectacular and valuable property in Palm Beach, Florida, to be worth as low as $18 Million, when in actuality, it could be worth almost 100 times that amount. He hated everything about me at a level that I have never seen before, even beyond the hatred of that displayed by Letitia James. There was no trial and no jury for the supposed “wrongdoing” OF FULLY PAYING BACK SOPHISTICATED WALL STREET BANKS IN FULL, WITH INTEREST, WITH NO DEFAULTS, AND WITH NO VICTIMS. These Banks were represented by the largest, most sophisticated Law Firms in the Country. This is Democrat Political Lawfare, and a Witch Hunt at a level never seen before. It is an attempt to badly injure the opposing Party’s Leading, by far, Political Candidate. Nothing like this has ever happened in our Country before. My Civil Rights have been violated, and some Appellate Court, whether Federal or State, must reverse this horrible, un-American decision. If they can do this to me, they can do this to YOU!
🧵 RT @Laurie_Garrett OK, Folks, here’s some details from Justice Arthur Engoron’s NY Supreme Court ruling today in the case against the #Trump family & companies, filed by NY Atty Gen #LetitiaJames […]
📌 https://x.com/Laurie_Garrett/status/1706804039445336307?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @lawofruby NEW: A New York trial court judge has found that Trump, his adult sons, and Allen Weisselberg engaged in a persistent, years-long fraud through “fantasy world” valuations of core Trump assets, including his own residence and various golf courses and office buildings. 1/
[ThreadReader:] https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1706780517721326046.html
His decision not only eliminates the need for trial on that claim, but also orders fairly dramatic relief: the cancellation of New York business certificates for all of the entities named as defendants, “as well as any other entity controlled or beneficially owned by the individual defendants found liable.” 2/
Within 10 days, the parties are required to recommend three individuals who could serve as potential receivers to manage the dissolution of those companies. 3/
And on dissolution, the assets belonging to these LLCs — which include many of the jewels in Trump’s crown—will be dispensed with on the recommendation of the appointed receiver, as approved by the court. What does that mean? 4/
That they could ultimately not only be transferred to entities outside New York but also potentially sold. And whether Trump will be able to maintain ownership after dissolution is unclear. FIN.
Indeed, one possibility is that assets will need be sold to satisfy outstanding debts, including any disgorgement of profits ordered by the judge. Remember: The AG has asked that Trump and his co-defendants hand over “at least $250 million” from their fraudulent scheme. FIN
🐣 RT @TheDemocrats That’s our president 💯
💽 https://x.com/TheDemocrats/status/1706790544964206944?s=20/photo/1
// “Joe being Joe”
🐣 RT @ NormEisen We’ve analyzed FOR YEARS Trump’s risk of being found liable for fraudulent business practices ¤ That included potential quasi-corporate death penalty—well, Judge Engoron just ordered it ¤ We explained 👇
@just_security https://tinyurl.com/umx5ff9a
@BrookingsInst https://tinyurl.com/mr35evra
🐣 RT @ AndrewFeinberg ·NEW: If I am reading this right, Judge Engoron has found that Donald Trump committed fraud and has ordered the cancellation of all of his New York business certificates and the dissolution of the Trump Organization.
🐣 RT @renato_mariotti In addition to finding that Trump committed fraud, the judge canceled the certificates of various Trump businesses, appointed a former judge as an independent monitor of the Trump Organization, and will appoint receivers to manage the canceled LLCs. ¤ This is a pretty big deal.
🐣 RT @MuellerSheWrote BREAKING: NYAG has WON partial summary judgment saying Trump et al ARE LIABLE for violating the law. Trump’s motion is DENIED. NYAG is GRANTED SANCTIONS against Trump’s lawyers. AND 130 certs filed by any Trump entity are CANCELLED.
💙 🐣 RT @nycsouthpaw A New York judge has found Trump, his sons, et al liable for fraud under the state’s Executive Law 63(12) in the case brought by Tish James’s office. He’s also sanctioned Trump’s lawyers.
[CourtDoc:] https://x.com/nycsouthpaw/status/1706770294415745489?s=20/photo/1
[Full CourtDoc:] https://tinyurl.com/4h8fkydk 35p
[Text:] […] ORDERED that plaintiff’s motion for partial summary judgment on its first cause of action is granted in part, to the extent of finding defendants Donald J. Trump, Donald Trump, Jr., Eric Trump, Allen Weisselberg, Jeffrey McConney, the DJT Revocable Trust, the Trump Organization Inc, the Trump Organization LLC, DJT Holdings LLC, DJT Holdings Managing Member LLC, Trump Endeavor 12 LLC, 401 North Wabash Venture LI.C, Trump Old Post Office LLC, 40 Wall Street LLC, and Seven Springs LLC to be liable as a matter of law for persistent violations of Executive Law § 63(12); and it is further
ORDERED that any certificates filed under and by virtue of GBL § 130 by any of the entity defendants or by any other entity controlled or beneficially owned by Donald J. Trump, Donald Trump, Jr., Eric Trump, Allen Weisselberg, and Jeffrey McConney are canceled; and it is further
ORDERED that within 10 days of the date of this order, the parties are directed to recommend the names of no more than three potential independent receivers to manage the dissolution of the canceled LLCs; and it is further
ORDERED that the Hon. Barbara S. Jones (ret.) shall continue to serve as an independentmonitor of the Trump Organization until further Court order; and it is further ¤ ORDERED that the Clerk shall enter judgment accordingly.
🐣 RT @AWeissmann_ The leading Republican candidate has been found liable for sexual assault and fraud, his companies found guilty of fraud, and he’s charged with 91 OTHER felony counts. ¤ That he is not dismissed politically out of hand says much more about us, than about him.
🐣 RT @TimothyDSnyder The 3% of our defense budget that goes to Ukraine is audited on the battlefield, in victory after victory. US defense spending as such has never passed an independent audit. To be sure money is well spent, give more to Ukraine.
🐣 RT @tomiahonen Pop the champagne. This day we have been waiting for, for a long time ¤ Trump loses his New York businesses, Trump Org is ordered to be dissolved as a financial fraud ¤ He loses $250 million dollar civil lawsuit, he is already referred to Manhattan DA and IRS for criminal charges
🐣 RT @diazbriseno GARLAND: ¤ “Two weeks ago, we extradited Ovidio Guzmán López, a leader of the Sinaloa Cartel from 🇲🇽Mexico to the US. He is the son of the infamous ‘El Chapo’ & one of the more than a dozen cartel leaders we have indicted & extradited to the 🇺🇸US” ¤ “He will not be the last”
🐣 RT @POTUS A message from me on the extreme Republican shutdown:
💽 https://x.com/POTUS/status/1706677624230002758?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @business [Bloomberg] As the UAW strike extends into its second week, some investors say they’re willing to forgo coveted share buybacks as the companies face soaring labor costs
⋙ Bloomberg: UAW Fight Against Billions in Buybacks Forces Investor Rethink https://tinyurl.com/2c22eezm
// Among the sticking points highlighted by United Auto Workers on strike are the billions of dollars Detroit’s legacy carmakers have plunged into stock buybacks
🐣 US has the highest inequality of advanced (OECD) countries ~ and does the least to remedy it
◕ https://x.com/Auriandra/status/1706720163226120483?s=20/photo/1
🐣 F Scott Fitzgerald: “The rich are different from you and me.”
Ernest Hemingway: “Yes, they have more money.”
#autostrike
🐣 RT @AP President Joe Biden joined the United Auto Workers on the 12th day of their strike against major carmakers, a demonstration of support for organized labor apparently unparalleled in presidential history.
⋙ AP: Biden visits UAW picket line, tells union to ‘stick with it’ https://tinyurl.com/yfrza9j9
🐣 RT @UAW “Experts in presidential and U.S. labor history say they cannot recall an instance where a sitting president has joined an ongoing strike, even during the tenures of the more pro-union presidents such as Franklin Delano Roosevelt.”#StandUpUAW
⋙ MichiganRadio/AP: Biden is coming to Michigan to join the UAW picket line https://tinyurl.com/ycke9vkr
🧵 RT @ChrisMurphyCT The UAW fight is so important because it strikes at the heart of America’s spiritual crisis. ¤ The hollowing out of workers’ economic power has been devastating for American families. So many people feel not in control of their lives, because they work so hard and get so little.
📌 https://x.com/ChrisMurphyCT/status/1706670080539718131?s=20
⋙ Both parents work. Child care is outsourced to strangers. There’s not enough money coming in to do anything other than pay the bills. No vacations. No college savings. One big medical bill away from insolvency. No breathing room. ¤ It’s an exhausting existence.
⋙ And all the while, these families watch the mega-rich, including the executives at the companies they work for, get richer. They know that the system is rigged against them. And the anxiety and anger that was already there boils over.
⋙ The UAW strike is a rare opportunity to expose this rigged system, where CEO pay grows by 15% a year while the minimum wage has been flat for over a decade. ¤ This is a fight not just for economic justice – but for the spiritual health of our nation.
Politico: Ford halts construction on EV battery plant ripped by GOP over China ties https://tinyurl.com/yya9jsyv
// The pause comes during the second week of a United Auto Workers strike against Ford, GM and Stellantis.
Ford is pausing construction on a planned electric vehicle battery plant in Michigan that Republicans have criticized over the company’s plans to use licensed Chinese battery technology. ¤ The automaker will pause work and limit spending on the facility “until we’re confident about our ability to competitively operate the plant,” Ford spokesperson T.R. Reid said in a statement. “We haven’t made any final decision about the planned investment there.”
Ford announced in February it would open the $3.5 billion plant in Marshall, Mich., by 2026, employing 2,500 workers and becoming the first automaker to manufacture next-gen lithium, iron, phosphate batteries on U.S. soil. ¤ To do that, Ford planned to rely on licensed technology from Contemporary Amperex Technology Co., the world’s largest manufacturer of EV batteries. The Chinese firm has developed some of the most advanced LFP battery technology.
The planned facility quickly drew local and congressional pushback over the use of the technology, amid wider scrutiny of federal dollars flowing to China. The project could be eligible for incentives under the Inflation Reduction Act, which includes tax subsidies for electric vehicles and the domestic production of batteries.
WaPo: Bending to far right, McCarthy pushes steep safety net cuts in shutdown battle https://tinyurl.com/mu2ywxxh So, in order for McCarthy to keep his speakership, cuts of $150B/year taken from infant health, education, medical research & hundreds of other federal programs
// Republican House speaker embraces major spending reductions in trying to win conservative support for funding bill
Rep. Garret Graves (R-La.), a top McCarthy lieutenant, told reporters over the weekend that House leadership’s plans would cut spending on “discretionary” programs — a category that excludes programs like Social Security and Medicare — by roughly 27 percent, excluding the military budget and spending on veterans’ affairs. That appears to translate into taking more than $150 billion per year out of the part of the budget that funds child care, education subsidies, medical research and hundreds of additional federal operations.
⭕ 25 Sep 2023
🐣 RT @ProjectLincoln Trump, the GOP, and the Fox News Russian propaganda machine are all siding with an indicted war criminal guilty of brutal attacks on innocent men, women and children. Putin wants to annihilate democracy, and MAGA leadership is happy to help.
💽 [tr] https://x.com/ProjectLincoln/status/1706171687518056513?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @RpsAgainstTrump A few days after warning that Biden will lead us into “World War Two,” and claiming that he beat Obama in the 2016 election, ¤ Trump now says that Jeb Bush invaded Iraq and Afghanistan. ¤ Trump is not well. Cognitively impaired.
💽 https://x.com/RpsAgainstTrump/status/1706458662544249058?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @MeidasTouch BREAKING: Trump’s lawyers file an absurd opposition to Jack Smith’s proposed gag order, parroting Trump’s baseless conspiracy theories and painting Trump as the victim. It’s disgraceful that any attorney would sign their name onto this.
⋙ MeidasTouch: Trump Files Absurd Opposition to Jack Smith’s Gag Order Request https://tinyurl.com/bdzcwtes
// Trump’s lawyers take gaslighting to new level
🐣 RT @lawofruby NEW: Trump has filed his opposition Jack Smith’s team’s motion for limits on what Trump and his lawyers can say about witnesses and participants in the federal election interference case. And it’s a doozy. 1/
[TextLink:] https://x.com/lawofruby/status/1706507207049630034?s=20/photo/1
[CourtDoc:] https://tinyurl.com/ycxy5v97 35p
⋙ 🐣 RT @lawofruby Trump—despite the Justice Department and White House’s divorcing itself from any involvement in his case—now claims “the Biden Administration” charged him and now “seeks to unconstitutionally silence” him because it is “keenly aware that it is losing that race for 2024.” 2/
⋙ 🐣 RT @lawofruby Literally, they have accused the Biden Administration of filing the motion to distract from Trump’s “commanding lead in the polls” and part of a larger election interference scheme. It’s one thing for Trump himself to say this; it’s stunning to see it from his lawyers. 3/
[…] For hundreds of years, our country has embraced the core value that the “government has no power to restrict expression because of its message, its ideas, its subject matter, or its content,” In re Murphy-Brown, LLC, 907 F.3d 788, 796–97 (4th Cir. 2018) (quoting Ashcroft v. ACLU, 535 U.S. 564, 573 (2002) (internal quotation marks omitted)). This freedom from government censorship is fundamental to our national ethos and “it can hardly be doubted that the constitutional guarantee has its fullest and most urgent application precisely to the conduct of campaigns for political office.” Monitor Patriot Co. v. Roy, 401 U.S. 265, 272 (1971).
Tossing these foundational principles aside, the Biden Administration charged President Trump—the leading contender in the 2024 Presidential Election—for statements he made as president. Now, keenly aware that it is losing that race for 2024, the prosecution seeks to unconstitutionally silence President Trump’s (but not President Biden’s) political speech on pain of contempt. See Citizens United v. Fed. Election Comm’n, 558 U.S. 310, 349 (2010) (“If the First Amendment has any force, it prohibits Congress from fining or jailing citizens, or associations of citizens, for simply engaging in political speech.”).
In support, the prosecution presents nothing but pretexts, claiming that the Court must muzzle President Trump to ensure that: (1) the prosecution, the Court, and witnesses are not “intimidated” by political criticism; and (2) the District of Columbia citizenry (who voted by a margin of around 95% for Biden in the 2020 election) do not magically transform and become biased in President Trump’s favor.
The prosecution does not present one shred of evidence to demonstrate either of these claims—let alone enough to establish, as it must, a “clear and present danger to the administration of justice.” See Landmark Commc’ns, Inc. v. Virginia, 435 U.S. 829, 844-845 (1978). Neither the prosecution nor the Court are reluctant to proceed with this case, and none of the public figures the prosecution references in its Motion have refused to participate, either. Just the opposite, these individuals appear to relish the notoriety they have gained through their proximity to President … […]
🧵 RT @RadioFreeTom I was looking something up in @bterris’s book (which you should read), and I recalled the chapters about Matt Schlapp in there. And I wonder if, in their hearts, all of the people who got on Team Trump – including Trump – wish they could go back to 2016 and lose. /1
📌 https://x.com/RadioFreeTom/status/1706478762659865073?s=20
[ThreadReader:] https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1706478762659865073.html
They could win again, of course. But nothing will be the same – and Trump will likely not bring them back in. He’ll choose new cronies. Trump himself will be in a cold sweat every day (as he is now). Republicans will be chained to a sociopath (as they are now). /2
I can’t help but wonder if so many of the people who talked to Ben would, in the dark of night, admit that their lives would have been better off in every way if Trump had run and lost, and they could have spent four years chasing after Hillary Clinton. /3
And the people that voted for him? Instead of imaginary worries that others look down on them, they know now that others – their neighbors, in many places – now really do look down on them, and for good reason. If Trump had lost, they could have written it all off. /4
Instead, they’ve had to insist they remain loyal to a cult to avoid a cognitive dissonance meltdown. If Trump had lost, they could say “Well, I woulda given him a chance, who knows.” But now, they’re stuck. He screwed them; nothing changed; they know it; they won’t say it. /5
All this because of boredom and listlessness in a society that can’t seem to find meaning in anything but the worship of celebrities and a generic counter-cultural childishness that asserts individuality by opposing whatever most other people think, purely to be shocking. /6
Sad coda: I agree with @DavidAFrench that a real tragedy in all this is watching old people piss away their later years marinating in synthetic rage instead of enjoying their familes.
And all for what? For nothing. For less than nothing. /7x
🐣 RT @johngramlich NEW: 65% of Americans, including nearly half of Republicans, favor doing away with the current Electoral College system so the candidate who wins the popular vote wins the presidency. https://pewrsr.ch/3PQrtnT
◕ https://x.com/johngramlich/status/1706373973028511795?s=20/photo/1
🐣 Al Franken was my senator and I was in mourning when he was forced to resign. ¤ At about the same time, a similar thing happened to Midwest Bard Garrison Keillor. ¤ I felt both were victims of overreach and that Minnesota had forever lost two important voices. @Lawrence
🐣 RT @jzalkin RIP David McCallum ¤ One of the funniest lines in the old NCIS – “I wonder what Ducky looked like when he was younger?” Gibbs: “Like Illya Kuryakin.” #IYKYK
🖼 https://x.com/jzalkin/status/1706445894181122498?s=20/photo/1 -2
⋙ 🐣 I had a real crush on him as Ilya Kuryagin ¤ I even wrote a “script” for The Man From UNCLE when I was in Jr HS
🐣 RT @WalshFreedom Kudos to Cassidy Hutchinson for her courage, but we’re well past the “make or break moment” for the Republican Party. Well past that point.
⋙ 🐣 RT @MSNBC EXCLUSIVE: This next election cycle is “the make or break moment for the Republican Party,” Cassidy Hutchinson tells @Maddow, calling on Republicans to take a stand against Donald Trump now. “I don’t know why they’re so willing to support him.”
💽 https://x.com/WalshFreedom/status/1706491108123898073?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @AntiToxicPeople Cassidy Hutchinson’s bravery & bluntness is quite remarkable when you consider she is 26 & trying to get through to a conman’s cult that is nearly impervious to facts, evidence, reason & logic with what she is saying. She recognizes what a dangerously deranged lunatic Trump is.
🐣 RT @danielsgoldman A quick explainer on Weiss’s authority for my GOP colleagues:
1) Garland promised him whatever authority he NEEDED.
2) If conduct did not have venue in DE, first step was to partner with other US Atty’s.
3) If other US Atty said no, then next step was special counsel.
1/2
⋙ 🐣 RT @danielsgoldman
4) Originally unnecessary bc plea agreement waived venue.
5) Once plea agmt collapsed, then Weiss needed authority to charge in other venues.
6) So he asked for, and received, special counsel authority to do so. ¤ Weiss ALWAYS had authority to charge anywhere he wanted.
2/2
⋙⋙ 🐣 RT @MuellerSheWrote The GOP argument is disingenuous. They claim that b/c Weiss had to get a 515 order or special counsel designation to bring charges, he did not have full authority to do so. That would be like saying that because you need to get food first, you don’t have the authority to eat.
🐣 RT @RpsAgainstTrump Trump’s former Secretary of Defense Mark Esper condemns the corrupt former president for threatening to execute General Mark Milley: ¤ “That statement by the president is horrible. It’s intolerable. It should be condemned by everybody…We owe General Milley and his predecessors a debt of gratitude for what they do… not this type of rhetoric coming from the former president of the US.”
¤ https://x.com/RpsAgainstTrump/status/1706476814808256530?s=20
🐣 What the Mayo Clinic says about hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin
Here’s the link https://tinyurl.com/3u4fwr38 ¤
[TextLink:] https://x.com/Auriandra/status/1706479628699799691?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @BasedMikeLee Someone’s behind the pro-Ukraine troll campaign known as “NAFO.” Who is it? A few possible candidates have been suggested. Which one seems most likely to you? [Grayzone (Ru) link:] https://tinyurl.com/2fuwba47
⋙⋙ 📊 https://x.com/BasedMikeLee/status/1706084359416258789?s=20/photo/1
10.4% Pentagon contractor
43.9% CIA contractor
20.7% Ukraine (using U.S.$)
25.1% Soros
34,337 votes
⋙ 🐣 RT @Cbritinha Jesus Christ Senator, it’s not like it’s a secret. Here’s a documentary explaining it in cartoon form and in under 3 minutes. Perfectly adjusted to your attention span.
💽 https://x.com/Cbritinha/status/1706204986072244659?s=20/photo/1
⋙ 🐣 RT @AdamKinzinger Replying to @BasedMikeLee Grayzone is Wagner’s blog dude
🐣 RT @AWeissmann_ It is a felony for Trump to “receive” a firearm that has travelled in interstate commerce (the latter requirement is almost always satisfied as it just means the gun at some point after manufacture went from one state to another prior to the receipt). 18 USC 922(n).
¤ https://x.com/AWeissmann_/status/1706427389595566519?s=20
⋙ 🐣 RT @AWeissmann_ Trump spokesperson: Trump aids and abets a violation of criminal law while out on bail when he bought a gun — and then retracts and says Trump did not buy a gun. ¤ Time for a grand jury investigation…..how is this not AT LEAST as bad as what Hunter Biden is charged with?
⋙⋙ 🐣 RT @JamesSurowiecki Donald Trump’s campaign spokesman tweeting that his boss just committed a federal crime by buying a gun while under felony indictment.
⋙ 🐣 RT @AWeissmann_ So this photo is proof of the crime: he is in receipt.
⋙⋙ 🐣 RT @mtgreenee President Trump doing a little shopping in South Carolina! ¤ He will protect our great Second Amendment!!
🖼 https://x.com/mtgreenee/status/1706363568944226647?s=20/photo/1
⋙ 🐣 RT @AWeissmann_ “It shall be unlawful for any person who is under indictment for a crime punishable by imprisonment for a term exceeding one year to … receive any firearm or ammunition which has been shipped or transported in interstate or foreign commerce.” 18 USC 922(n)
⋙ 🐣 RT @ AWeissmann_ Glocks are manufactured overseas or in Georgia- so receiving a Glock in South Carolina would mean the “interstate or foreign commerce” requirement was met.
🐣 RT @ BulwarkOnline Even if the Biden corruption allegations are true, they (allegedly) took place during his vice presidency. Impeachment is generally understood to cover acts committed *during* the presidency.
⋙ TheBulwark, Kim Wehle: Kevin McCarthy’s Sham Impeachment https://tinyurl.com/2p89e3ts
// The same Republicans who worked to undermine the legitimate impeachments of Donald Trump are now cooking up a bogus one for Joe Biden.
🐣 RT @ChrisMurphyCT From 1950-1980, as workers produced more, they got paid proportionally more. ¤ Then in 1980, something changed. Workers’ productivity still rose, but the benefit went to CEOs and shareholders, not the workers. ¤ This is what the auto strike is about.
⋙ 🐣 See HRB: Wm Lazonick, “Profits without Prosperity” (2014); he blames it on loosening of regs re: stock buybacks under Reagan https://tinyurl.com/ymekpxt6
🐣 RT @7Veritas4 He’s all in his feels about the NY fraud case today. ¤ He isn’t getting a jury because he demanded a bench trial. ¤ If he’s worth much more than his financial statements, it’s also fraud. ¤ “If they fell for it, it’s on them” is not a defense. ¤ His “great company” has already been found liable for 17 counts of tax fraud. ¤ The courts or the feds will not intercede on his behalf. ¤ The End.
[TextLink:] https://x.com/7Veritas4/status/1706356424048050524?s=20/photo/1 -2
[Text:] 🐣 RT @realDonaldTrump I have been unfairly sued by the Trump Hating Democrat Attorney General of New York State, Letitia James, over the false fact that I inflated my Financial Statements in order to borrow money from Banks, etc. The Judge in the case, Arthur F. Engoron, refused to allow this case to go to the “Commercial Division,” where it belongs, because he is a Trump Hater beyond even A.G. James, who campaigned against me spewing horrible inflammatory statements which are False & Defamatory. I am not even allowed a Jury! The facts of this case are simple. 1) I AM WORTH MUCH MORE THAN THE NUMBERS SHOWN ON MY FINANCIAL STATEMENTS. 2) I DIDN’T EVEN INCLUDE MY MOST VALUABLE ASSET, MY BRAND. 3) THE BANKS WERE PAID BACK IN FULL, SOMETIMES EARLY, THERE WERE NO DEFAULTS, THE BANKS MADE MONEY, WERE REPRESENTED BY THE BEST LAW FIRMS, & WERE VERY “HAPPY.” THERE WERE NO VICTIMS! 4) ON THE FRONT PAGE OF THE FINANCIAL STATEMENTS THERE IS A STRONG “DISCLAIMER CLAUSE” TELLING ALL NOT TO RELY ON THESE.… (continued)
Page 2: FINANCIAL STATEMENTS. THE DISCLAIMER CLAUSE TELLS ANYONE REVIEWING THE DATA, INCLUDING FINANCIAL INSTITUTIONS, TO DO THEIR OWN RESEARCH AND ANALYSIS – IT IS A NON RELIANCE CLAUSE, AND COULD NOT BE MORE CLEAR. ADDITIONALLY TO MY BEING WORTH FAR MORE THAN IS SHOWN IN THE “FULLY DISCLAIMED FINANCIAL STATEMENTS, AGAIN NOT PUTTING DOWN A VALUE FOR MY BIGGEST ASSET, BRAND, THE COMPANY HAS HUNDREDS OF MILLIONS OF DOLLARS IN CASH, AND VERY LITTLE DEBT. It is a great company that has been slandered and maligned by this politically motivated Witch Hunt. It is very unfair, and I call for help from the highest Courts in New York State, or the Federal System, to intercede. THIS IS NOT AMERICA!
🐣 RT @atrupar amazing – during a Fox News interview w/ Brian Kilmeade, former president of Ukraine Petro Poroshenko denounces Victor Shokin, who plays as a leading role in Kilmeade’s conspiracy theories, as a “completely crazy person” & says “there’s something wrong with him” as Kilmeade melts
💽 https://x.com/atrupar/status/1706337323565142473?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @AmbJohnBolton Zelensky calls on Trump to “put up or shut up” about his Ukraine peace plan. ¤ Zelensky is right. ¤ See my article in the Washington Examiner today:
⋙ WashExam, John Bolton: Zelensky rightly asks Trump to present his ‘peace plan’ https://tinyurl.com/bdfxckvd Trump’s affinity for Putin and his likely effort to withdraw … from NATO soon after a second inauguration point all too clearly to a pro-Russian outcome of any Trump involvement”
[…] … The unfortunate reality is that Trump’s affinity for Putin and his likely effort to withdraw the United States from NATO soon after a second inauguration point all too clearly to a pro-Russian outcome of any Trump involvement. Zelensky’s invitation to Trump, therefore, is also a well-timed plea to Americans not to let Trump anywhere near the Oval Office for fear of the damage he will do in a second term.
🐣 RT @glamelegance Is it just me or does he sound more deranged and unstable than usual?
[TextLink:] https://x.com/glamelegance/status/1706324062543212910?s=20/photo/1
[Text:] 🐣 RT @realDonaldTrump Crooked Joe Biden, who is killing the United Autoworkers with his WEAK stance on China and his ridiculous insistence on All Electric Cars, every one of which will be made in China, saw that I was going to Michigan this week (Wednesday!), so the Fascists in the White House just announced he would go there tomorrow. That was the only way to get him out of the basement and off his lazy a… He has been a complete disaster for all Autoworkers in the U.S., so much do that with his warped plan & mind, their won’t be any Autoworkers left in 3 years. He is destroying our Country, and likewise, destroying the United Autoworkers. When he slowly walks to pretend he is a “picket,” REMEMBER, HE WANTS TO TAKE YOUR JOBS AWAY AND GIVE THEM TO CHINA AND OTHER FOREIGN COUNTRIES. TURN YOUR BACK ON THIS CORRUPT AND HIGHLY INCOMPETENT PRESIDENT, BY FAR THE WORST IN THE HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES, AND SHOUT OUT TO YOUR UNION LEADERSHIP TO ENDORSE DONALD J. TRUMP. I WILL KEEP YOUR JOBS AND MAKE YOU RICH!!!
⋙ 🐣 btw there are larger lithium deposits in the Americas than in China, if that’s what he’s talking about
🌎 https://x.com/Auriandra/status/1706344651702104505?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @VABVOX .@SykesCharlie says Biden needs to have a strong declarative message. “Biden can say, ‘Yes, I’m old, but he [Trump] is crazy. They are dangerous and they are going to burn it all down. Yes, I am an old guy, but this guy is deranged and fascist-adjacent.’ That’s the way you address the age issue.” @Morning_Joe
🐣 RT @AngryDemdotcom It bears repeating: if one of your great ideas is that some people shouldn’t vote, then your ideas suck.
⋙ 🐣 RT @NoLieWithBTC Automatic voter registration is wildly popular and common sense. ¤ And Republicans publicly admit that it’s “a disaster” for their election chances. What does that tell you?
[TextLink:] https://x.com/AngryDemdotcom/status/1706321127390269860?s=20/photo/1
[Text:] 🐣 RT @realDonaldTrump Pennsylvania is at it again! The Radical Left Governor, Josh Shapiro, has just announced a switch to Automatic Voter Registration, a disaster for the Election of Republicans, including your favorite President, ME! This is a totally Unconstitutional Act, and must be met harshly by Republican Leadership in Washington and Pennsylvania. Likewise, the RNC, and Ronna McDaniel, j must spend their time working on this, instead of meaningless Debates where I am up by more than 50 points.
🐣 RT @amanpour “We need to be prepared for a long war, for a long haul” in Ukraine, says NATO Secretary-General @jensstoltenberg. “We have to send a clear message to Moscow that President Putin cannot wait us out.”
NYT: First Abrams Tanks Arrive in Ukraine, U.S. Officials Say https://tinyurl.com/wwkxrec2
// An initial batch of tanks arrived months ahead of estimates, and in time to be used in Ukraine’s counteroffensive against Russia, officials said.
🐣 RT @United24media ❗After the strike on the headquarters of the Russian Black Sea Fleet, 34 officers were killed, including the commander of the Russian Black Sea Fleet, Viktor Sokolov, — Special Operations Forces. ¤ Another 105 occupants were wounded. The headquarters building is beyond repair.
🐣 RT @ Heroiam_Slava A drone trap killed the command of a Russian air regiment on Khalino airfield.
¤ https://x.com/Heroiam_Slava/status/1706235739275473286?s=20
The drone exploded as they approached, causing deaths and injuries. The exact number of dead and wounded is still being finalized.
Journalists’ sources in the Defense Ministry’s GUR have reported details of yesterday’s incident at the Kursk airfield. ¤ According to intelligence sources, a Ukrainian drone was suppressed by electronic warfare equipment and landed on the airfield’s runway.
The commander of the air regiment, one of his deputies, pilots and airfield personnel, as well as FSB counterintelligence officers came to inspect it. ¤ The drone exploded as they approached, causing deaths and injuries. The exact number of dead and wounded is still being finalized. [Ru:] https://tinyurl.com/6a976z
🐣 RT @ JamesLLandis Imagine you are China, Iran, North Korea, and every other country that has bought/copies Russian air defense systems, or equipped your military on Russian military hardware from tanks to fighter jets. ¤ Oops
⋙ UkrInform: Russian air defenses unable to deal with Western-made cruise missiles – Air Force spox https://tinyurl.com/33txec2j
// Russian air defense cannot cope with the Ukrainian strikes involving Western-made cruise missiles. — Ukrinform.
WaPo, Ishaan Tharoor: ‘This is not just Putin’s war’: How Finland’s top diplomat sees Ukraine https://tinyurl.com/txdjahv6 ’Aiding Ukraine is not charity. It’s standing up for the European way of life, Western values and of course, sovereignty and territorial integrity’
⭕ 24 Sep 2023
🧵 📊 RT @ MaryLTrump I’m feeling sick… not because of the ABC News poll that shows Donald Trump leading Biden, but because of how we got here: the corporate media refusing to do its fucking job.
📌 https://x.com/MaryLTrump/status/1706110401946304959?s=20/photo/1
It’s 2016 all over again, when they
– Gave Donald free air time, all for ratings.
– Covered up his lies, financial swindling, and failures.
– Ignored Obama’s policy successes in favor of framing the entire election around Donald’s preferred talking point that it was Hillary Clinton who was somehow the crook.So, they got Donald Trump in the White House and the rest of us got 4 years of hell.
As we head into 2024, have they learned anything? No, they absolutely have not:
– Kristin Welker gave Donald 78 minutes of free air time during which he lied unchallenged. ABC just published a pro-Trump poll that even their partners at Washington Post say is an outlier… both raked in ratings and cash for it.
– Interviewers consistently let Donald run them over to cover up his alleged crimes, including a coup!
– Biden’s policy successes were ignored and the upcoming election was framed around Donald’s preferred talking point that it’s Joe Biden who is somehow the crook (don’t even get me started about the absurd narratives about Biden’s age).We MUST NOT let the corporate media let him get away with this again.
Here’s what I’m doing to directly wake up America:
Advocating for truth on cable news…
Writing books on Donald’s egregious behavior, and… Exposing the crimes of Donald and his thugs in my favorite project: my newsletter…👇🧵Help me get the word out before the media’s kid-glove treatment of Donald gets fascism right back into the White House… because corporate media are failing you.
🐣 RT @ TimothyDSnyder The Ukrainian soldiers know the culture they are defending. Both the original and the photograph reward careful viewing.
⋙ 🐣 RT @Gerashchenko_en Soldiers of the 112th Territorial Defense Brigade and French photographer Émeric Lhuisset recreated the painting “Reply of the Zaporozhian Cossacks” by Ukrainian artist Illia Repin. ¤ 📸📷 – emericlhuisset / Instagram
🖼 🖼 https://x.com/TimothyDSnyder/status/1706035771591795148?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @ lindyli So let me get this straight ¤ Washington Post is slamming General Milley—who was a bulwark of democracy during Trump’s reign of chaos—as “polarizing” ¤ But have NOTHING to say about how Trump is now calling for the summary EXECUTION of the same General?! ¤ You gotta be kidding me 🤦🏻♀️
⋙ 🐣 RT @lindyli The Washington Post is desecrating the legacy of a man who dared to stand up to Trump ¤ Such courage was never a given ¤ The generals and commanders under Bush’s regime of incompetence all toed the line ¤ General Milley deserves all of our respect
⋙⋙ 🐣 RT @MarkJacob16 The Washington Post calls Gen. Milley “polarizing” because he tried to prevent Trump and his fascist gang from endangering our national security. What a bunch of both-sides bullshit.
⋙⋙⋙ WaPo: Gen. Mark Milley, polarizing Joint Chiefs chairman, exits center stage https://tinyurl.com/3rvd5rn5 Ret. Admiral Mike Mullen said Milley “‘had more of a challenge’ than most and is likely to ‘come out somewhere close to heroic’ for his actions during the presidential transition”
// Admirers say he helped save American democracy. Critics contend he dragged the military deeper into the country’s toxic political fray.
⋙⋙⋙⋙ 🐣 RT @jeffstorobinsky 9.24.23 7:40 PM ET True Military Intelligence on Full Display as Jim Acosta @acosta hosts Lt General Mark Hertling (ret) @MarkHertling who speaks about the hatred and threats against General Mark Milley by a sitting congressman from his government account. A MUST Watch. Full Segment ( 5:30 )
💽 https://x.com/jeffstorobinsky/status/1706093632795660626?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @60Minutes Retired American Lt. General Ben Hodges, a former commander of the U.S. Army in Europe, says Russia is an existential threat to U.S. and Europe. https://cbsn.ws/3RtrY8N
💽 ⋙ 60Minutes: “This war is about so much more than just Ukraine.”
Watch 60 Minutes Sundays on @CBS, or anytime on @paramountplus and https://cbsn.ws/34D1mLY
⋙⋙ 🐣 RT @CommodoreNelson An excellent report today by @60Minutes specifically on the US’s support for Ukraine. Main points:
1. The Ukrainians have decimated the Russian Army with no US soldiers on the ground and no US military deaths.
2. The threat of Russia to Europe as a whole was underestimated, and now is much reduced.
3. The amount the US has spent funding this is a fraction of what it would have cost for the US to do this directly to the Russian Army.
4. Ukrainian corruption of weaponry is non-existent (listen to the CBS report yourself to believe this.)
So don’t believe the anti-Ukraine trolls. @NCGOP @NCDem @votevets @emilyslist
https://cbsnews.com/news/us-aid-ukraine-60-minutes-transcript/ via @60Minutes
🐣 RT @RpsAgainstTrump Republican presidential candidate Chris Christie BLASTS Donald Trump: ¤ “He said he’ll balance the budget in 4 years. He added $7 trillion, the worst record of any president in American history.”
💽 https://x.com/RpsAgainstTrump/status/1705978347464053156?s=20/photo/1
// NBC Meet the Press
🐣 RT @margbrennan In some villages, all the women were raped; it takes courage to admit you’re a victim – some of the powerful remarks made by Olena Zelenskaa, Ukraine’s First Lady during our interview for @FaceTheNation. @ZelenskaUA makes an appeal to common humanity.
💽 ⋙ CBSNews: First lady of Ukraine Olena Zelenska on “Face the Nation with Margaret Brennan” | extended interview https://tinyurl.com/3yra6vcv
// Watch the extended version of Margaret Brennan’s interview with Olena Zelenska, the first lady of Ukraine, that aired on Sept. 24, 2023, on “Face the Nation with Margaret Brennan.”
🐣 RT @djrothkopf Trump this weekend indicated military leaders who opposed his policies should be put to death and media that presented views he did not like are traitors and will be prosecuted. He is a monster, an aspiring dictator, the greatest threat America faces.
🐣 RT @PhillipsPOBrien This is rather a fascinating meditation by @Podolyak_M in that he goes and describes Ukrainian war strategy and contrasts it to the analysts looking for drama and story telling (Russian Shock and Awe kind of stuff). Ukraine is playing the longer game with the counteroffensive..
💙 ⋙ 🐣 RT @Podolyak_M The problem with most military analytics is that it reflects the internal emotional state of its authors and follows the serial logic of media drama. […]
¤ https://x.com/Podolyak_M/status/1705938135866028428?s=20
Such analysts, like politicians, parasitize on collective emotional states in order to actualize themselves in the information space and achieve political points in the form of likes and shares. It doesn’t matter what exactly is written, the main thing is whether the mood was read, whether we hit a nerve. But in the end, the public, spoiled by the content, begins to demand the same from the Ukrainian Armed Forces: “Entertain us, or we won’t love you anymore! The season is too long and boring, Goliath could have been defeated three episodes ago”.
But war does not follow the laws of storytelling, and the success of offensive operations is not always measured by the number of square meters liberated. War is more like a mathematical equation on a blackboard with many variables and unknowns. Therefore, one must be able to read events correctly, without regard to emotional interpretations. And while there are no questions to the viewers, some politicians in democratic countries need to make up their minds: are you about bragging or are you about results? Are you about 100 likes or are you about history books? And history can be merciless to situational opportunists.
Today’s actions by the Ukrainian army to grind down Russian units in the south and demilitarize #Crimea’s rear logistics (including with the use of long-range missiles) have a cumulative effect. And when the peak is reached, everyone will feel that the lock has been broken, the Russian defense has crumbled. First of all, they will feel the change in the tone of the leading media.
Until then, it is worth remembering that the key to victory is the will, fortitude, determination, and focus on results. This implies immunity to emotional influences and fluctuations in public sentiment.
🐣 📋 RT @EuromaidanPR Did you know, that by US giving Ukraine 5% of the US military budget, Ukraine destroyed 50% of the russian military? ¤ Now you know this is the most efficient US military expenditures ever!
🐣 RT @warrensbuffet2 The atacms cluster version appears to basically annihilate 1km2, russian losses are going to go through the roof even if only 200 are sent imo
🔄 RealContextNews, Brian Frydenborg: TRUMP-RUSSIA SAGA: Overview https://tinyurl.com/mr2783rc
// updated index; The biggest scandal in American history.
🐣 RT @DavidMDrucker Trump is wrong on a particular point: The prez doesn’t get blamed per se — the party/politician that instigates the shutdown gets blamed. Voters generally deem shutdowns illegitimate political combat. Trump as POTUS was blamed for a shutdown because he instigated it. =>
⋙ 🐣 RT @sahilkapur Donald Trump’s new instruction to congressional Republicans on government funding: “UNLESS YOU GET EVERYTHING, SHUT IT DOWN!” ¤ (Worth remembering, Trump forced a 35-day shutdown over wall money as president but ultimately caved and reopened gov’t after getting nothing.)
[TextLink:] https://x.com/sahilkapur/status/1706120365523570927?s=20/photo/1
[Text:] 🐣 RT @realDonaldTrump Post The Republicans lost big on Debt Ceiling, got NOTHING, and now are worried that they will be BLAMED for the Budget Shutdown. Wrong!!! Whoever is President will be blamed, in this case, Crooked (as Hell!) Joe Biden! Our Country is being systematically destroyed by the Radical Left Marxists, Fascists and Thugs – THE DEMOCRATS. UNLESS YOU GET EVERY THING, SHUT IT DOWN! Close the Border, stop the Weaponization of “Justice, and End Election Interference – WE MUST HAVE HONEST ELECTIONS. It’s time Republicans learned how to fight! Are you listening Mitch McConnell, the weakest, dumbest, and most conflicted “Leader” in U.S. Senate history? HE’S ALREADY GIVEN THE DEMOCRATS EVERY THING, THEY CAN’T BELIEVE HOW LUCKY THEY GOT. WE NEED NEW, & REAL, REPUBLICAN LEADERSHIP IN THE UNITED STATES SENATE, NOT A CLONE OF MITCH, & WE NEED IT NOW!!!
🧵 RT @TimothyDSnyder [Jan 25] In April 2016, I broke the story of Trump and Putin, using Russian open sources. Afterwards, I heard vague intimations that something was awry in the FBI in New York, specifically counter-intelligence and cyber. We now have a suggestion as to why. 0/20
📌 https://x.com/TimothyDSnyder/status/1618309363084718080?s=20
[ThreadReader:] https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1618309363084718080.htmln
🐣 RT @KateGoesTech Hitting Odesa’s city landmark as a response to the extermination of the 🇷🇺 Black Sea Fleet HQ ¤ This is how impotence looks like
🖼 💽 https://x.com/KateGoesTech/status/1706084206642618704?s=20/photo/1 -2
🐣 RT @Bencjacobs In which Arizona Congressman Paul Gosar advocates for the execution of Mark Milley in his weekly taxpayer funded newsletter
[TextLink:] https://x.com/Bencjacobs/status/1705975692482003366?s=20/photo/1
[Text:] After the riot was in full swing, the Chief’s request for National Guard was finall approved. But even after approval was given, General Milley, the homosexual-promoting-BLM-activist Chairman of the military joint chiefs, delayed. Of course, we now know that the deviant Milley was coordinating with Nancy Pelosi to hurt President Trump, and treasonously working behind Trump’s back. In a better society, quislings like the strange sodomy-promoting General Milley would be hung. He had one boss: President Trump, and instead he was secretly meeting with Pelosi and coordinating with her to hurt Trump. That is. when he wasn’t also secretly coordinating and sharing intelligence with the Chinese military. How this traitor remains in office is a question we need answered.
⋙ 🐣 RT @Bencjacobs Gosar defends the Russian invasion of Ukraine as well
[TextLink:] https://x.com/Bencjacobs/status/1705977000932872627?s=20/photo/1
[Text:] Russia tried diplomacy to avoid war only to be rebuked by the U.S. and lied to about the 2014 Minsk accords. Former German Chancellor Angela Merkel admitted that the Minsk Accords were not about peace but to fool Russia into complacency and give time for Ukraine to arm itself and prepare its army for war. Which it did. And from 2014 to 2022 Ukrainian militia killed 14,000 Russian civilians in the Donbass Region. Anyone who claims Russia invaded Ukraine “unprovoked” is either ignorant or lying. Any country with an ounce of self-respect would use force to stop the killings. Russia went to the U.N. twice seeking peace. It was rebuffed.
⋙⋙ 🐣 RT @M_Skrzynecki “14000 civilians killed” is straight out of russian propaganda. That was the total number of deaths in the war, most of them combatants. And of course that includes people killed by russia and its proxies.
⋙ 🐣 RT @Bencjacobs Later in the newsletter, Gosar also cites a LaRouche thinktank as evidence for his opposition to U.S. support for Ukraine
🐣 RT @mccaffreyr3 Trump. Really starting to see similarities to Germany in the 30’s. The reassuring reality is that the US has extremely strong institutions of integrity. The judicial system will protect the Constitution. The Armed Forces and law enforcement are lawful.
🐣 RT @RonFilipkowski Trump says that Comcast and NBC are enemies of the people, should be investigated for treason, and suggests as president he will remove them from public airwaves. ¤ (They will probably cover this one)
[TextLink:] https://x.com/RonFilipkowski/status/1706096635854336013?s=20/photo/1
[Text:] 🐣 RT @realDonaldTrump They are almost all dishonest and corrupt, but Comcast, with its one-side and vicious coverage by NBC NEWS, and in particular MSNBC, often and correctly referred to as MSDNC (Democrat National Committee!), should be investigated for its “Country Threatening Treason.” Their endless coverage of the now fully debunked SCAM known as Russia, Russia, Russia, and much else, is one big Campaign Contribution to the Radical Left Democrat Party. I say up front, openly, and proudly, that when I WIN the Presidency of the United States, they and others of the LameStream Media will be thoroughly scrutinized for their knowingly dishonest and corrupt coverage of people, things, and events. Why should NBC, or any other of the corrupt & dishonest media companies, be entitled to use the very valuable Airwaves of the USA, FREE? They are a true threat to Democracy and are, in fact, THE ENEMY OF THE PEOPLE! The Fake News Media should pay a big price for what they fave done to our once great Country!
🐣 RT @POTUS Right now, we face a moment where basic principles like sovereignty, territorial integrity, and universal human rights are being tested. ¤ We must stand up — we owe it to ourselves, to each other, and to generations to come.
💽 https://x.com/POTUS/status/1706096231108280560?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @ 🐣 RT @DevanaUkraine Zelensky’s evening address:
¤ https://x.com/DevanaUkraine/status/1706008454706446437?s=20
🔹Defense packages. From the USA, it is artillery, required shells, missiles for “highmars”, missiles for air defense, additional air defense systems, tactical vehicles and some other types of weapons that will make themselves known on the battlefield.
🔹From Canada, we have a decision on long-term defense support. The amount is half a billion US dollars. In particular, these are “medevaks”. They agreed on production and supply.
🔹There is a historic decision by America on the joint production of weapons and defense systems, including air defense.
🐣 RT @StateDept The United States, together with our allies and partners around the world, will continue to stand with the brave people of Ukraine as they defend their sovereignty and territorial integrity and their freedom.
💽 https://x.com/StateDept/status/1705998028077732235?s=20/photo/1
// Biden statement
🐣 RT @DanielMillerEsq Most Americans don’t know anything about authoritarianism. About war. About economic collapse. Not to worry though. If Trump wins in 2024, they’ll get a lesson in all three. ¤ WATCH THIS VIDEO.
💽 https://x.com/DanielMillerEsq/status/1705961833817911424?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @peterbakernyt Meadows burned so many documents in his White House fireplace in the final days of the Trump presidency that his wife complained to Cassidy Hutchinson about how expensive it had become to dry-clean the “bonfire” aroma from his suits. @DraperRobert
⋙ NYT: Cassidy Hutchinson Reappears. She Has More Trump Stories to Tell. https://tinyurl.com/4khnbdn7
// “I would like not to be a hermit,” the former White House aide says upon the publication of a memoir about her journey down a political rabbit hole.
⭕ 23 Sep 2023
🐣 RT @stavridisj New ad makes strong case for military aid to Ukraine. It is economical – just 5% of our defense budget helped destroy 50% of Putin’s army — and geopolitically sensible. It weakens China and NK as well. And no US boots on the ground! Both US political parties should take note.
💽 https://x.com/stavridisj/status/1705665241030291651?s=20/photo/1
⋙ 🐣 RT @BillKristol This ad will air on the Sunday shows tomorrow in DC. @GOP4Ukraine
🐣 RT @MilitaryLabb A lot of pro-Ukraine people seem kinda disappointed that instead of the single warhead and 300km range ATACMS missiles that were going to destroy the Kerch Bridge, Ukraine will likely be provided the cluster warhead variant, reportedly with a reduced range of 140km. This is what it looks on the map (by @AndrewPerpetua).
🌎 https://x.com/MilitaryLabb/status/1705593611746721823?s=20/photo/1
The smaller circles represent the current range the Ukrainian HIMARS are capable of striking Russian targets on the southern front (around 80km). ¤ The 140km range does seem to be enough to cover the entire supply routes on the southern front, the ones coming from the east (Mariupol-Volnovakha segment) as well as the one coming from Crimea.
On top of that, if these missiles are anything as accurate and as effective at penetrating the Russian air defense as HIMARS currently is, it means that the Russian airfields in the south are in big trouble. ¤ Think of all the Ka-52 and all aircraft operating from there, they will be in big trouble if Ukrainians are just as capable of striking deep as they are doing right now with counter-battery fire in Tokmak front.
Also it is likely that the Russian long-range air defense will fall further back. ¤ So far the S-300/S-400 systems have been mostly deployed just a little further away from the 80km range Ukrainian HIMARS have.
Now as you can see on the map the usage of ATACMS could potentially create a weak spot on the Russian air defense just north of Crimea. This will surely make it easier for Storm Shadows, SCALP-EG and Taurus missiles (which are very likely coming as well) to continue to strike military facilities in Crimea and possibly even allow such missiles to strike & destroy the “dream target” itself…the Crimean Bridge.
Of course, success is not guaranteed, even K. Budanov himself stated that it will take at least several hundreds of such missiles to have a significant impact in this war, but this post is just to show that these missiles can do much more than some people think, especially in combination with other western missiles and the F-16s which are expected to arrive next year, we will certainly see way more strikes against Russian targets in Crimea. ¤ Even with the current limited resources the Ukrainians still have managed to cause a lot of damage so they will surely do a lot better once they get these new big toys. ¤ #UkraineRussianWar #Ukraine️ #ATACMSforUkraine #Atacams
⋙ 🐣 RT @MilitaryLabb some people reported cluster version having only 140km rang idk, on my last video I reported about the 300km range so it is kinda confusing and contradicting news thrown around.
⋙⋙ 🐣 RT @ukraine_map They have a 300km range, they have not many of the 165km ones remaining, a lot less than the Block IA 300km ones
⋙⋙⋙ 🐣 RT @MilitaryLabb interesting, thanks for the info. still the 300km range would just be an overkill imo. even the shorter range version will be more than enough and will be likely used on airfields and air defenses,radars etc as I mentioned. a lot of people were disappointed that Ukraine can’t really destroy the Kerch bridge with these but they will be very helpful and useful anyways.
WashingtonPress: MILITARY LEADERS: Trump is the most dangerous man on earth https://tinyurl.com/4tzhvp3p
// The military leaders who worked with Trump when he was president agree that it would be dangerous to re-elect such a “flawed person.”
🐣 RT @splendid_pete [Ru source:] “We have learned new tragic details about the strike on the Black Sea Fleet headquarters in Sevastopol.
¤ https://x.com/splendid_pete/status/1705683943368888652?s=20/photo/1
According to two of our reliable military sources, the strike on the Black Sea Fleet HQ in Sevastopol on Friday, September 22, had much more serious consequences than previously reported.
Firstly, as a result of the strike, at least 34 people died, more than half of them officers. The exact number of casualties has not been determined yet, as only fragments of bodies remain from many; their identification is underway. We will not mention any names of the victims of this tragedy out of respect for their memory. Official authorities will name them.
Secondly, two missiles struck the headquarters. Unfortunately, our air defense failed to repel this strike. This ineffective defense of the Sevastopol sky was due to the fact that the enemy had “harmed” the Crimean air defense system in general and Sevastopol’s in particular. Among other things, the enemy had previously managed to hit several of our S-400 systems and a few other air defense systems.
The central authorities promised to strengthen the defense of Sevastopol and the whole of Crimea against air strikes. According to our source in the Sevastopol government, this will happen “no later than a month from now.”
Thirdly, there is a problem with bomb shelters in Sevastopol – they can’t be set up in a week as planned. The authorities have urged city residents to seek basements in apartment buildings and set them up as shelters on their own. If basement doors are locked, Sevastopol residents can and even should demand that the utilities open them.
For residents of private houses, the authorities advise taking shelter behind two or three walls after an air raid signal or if they hear explosions. The air raid announcement system in Sevastopol may still malfunction.” ¤ Source: [Telegram]
🐣 RT @ProjectLincoln Rupert Murdoch’s legacy is forever one of division and destruction. No one has done more to divide our nation than the Murdoch family and FOX News.
⋙ 🐣 RT @ProjectLincoln [Mar 1] .@RupertMurdoch knew. @TuckerCarlson knew. @SeanHannity knew. @IngrahamAngle knew. @FoxNews knew. #DropFox
💽 https://x.com/ProjectLincoln/status/1705567768915955964?s=20/photo/1
↥ ↧
🐣 RT @ ChrisJustice01 So true!! And that’s just the election. FOX caused mass death with COVID lies. Still no Justice. #FoxIsNotNews
⋙ 🐣 RT @ChrisJustice01 [Mar 1] 🦠COVID 2020 #FoxLies #FoxLied #FoxLiedPeopleDied
💽 https://x.com/ChrisJustice01/status/1705596563311956359?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @ProjectLincoln Rupert Murdoch’s legacy is forever one of division and destruction. No one has done more to divide our nation than the Murdoch family and FOX News.
⋙ 🐣 RT @ProjectLincoln [Mar 1] .@RupertMurdoch knew. @TuckerCarlson knew. @SeanHannity knew. @IngrahamAngle knew. @FoxNews knew. #DropFox
💽 https://x.com/ProjectLincoln/status/1705567768915955964?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @ AntiToxicPeople The latest ALL CAPS TOTALLY UNHINGED RANT. ¤ The mark of a Very Stable Genius.
[TextLink:] https://x.com/AntiToxicPeople/status/1705749136451211396?s=20/photo/1
[Text:] @realDonaldTrump THE DEMOCRATS ARE TRYING TO STEAL PENNSYLVANIA AGAIN BY DOING THE “AUTOMATIC VOTER REGISTRATION” SCAM. THEY NEVER STOP! OBAMA AND HIS RADICAL LEFT THUGS ARE PUSHING THIS, AND THE DEMOCRATS, INCLUDING THE NEW LIBERAL GOVERNOR, ARE THRILLED. IF REPUBLICAN “LEADERSHIP, INCLUDING THE DISASTER WE HAVE IN THE SENATE. MITCH MCCONNELL. TOGETHER WITH KEVIN M, & THE RNC (FINALLY!), DON’T TAKE ACTION NOW, WE HAVE TO THROW EVERYBODY OUT & GET PEOPLE WHO CAN STOP THE SCAMS, CHEATING, & RIGGING – & WIN! THE PENNSYLVANIA REPUBLICAN PARTY MUST ENERGIZE, GET TOUGH, & STOP THIS SCAM – OUR COUNTRY IS AT STAKE!!!
🐣 RT @OccupyDemocrats BREAKING: Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman is asked directly to his face about the corrupt $2 billion “investment” that Saudi Arabia pumped into Jared Kushner’s firm after Trump left office — and his response is an absolute disaster.
¤ https://x.com/OccupyDemocrats/status/1704954955462070287?s=20
The prince sat down for an interview with Fox News host Bret Baier asked him directly about the money, which was clearly payback for the huge favors Kushner did for the Saudis while he was in the White House.
Not only did the Trump administration give massive weapons deals to Saudi Arabia, they ignored the kingdom’s brutal murder and dismemberment of journalist Jamal Khashoggi.
“In the Trump administration, you had a really close relationship with the president’s senior advisor and son-in-law Jared Kushner,” said Baier. “After he left, Saudi fund made reportedly a two billion dollar investment in Jared’s new fund he was launching and managing.”
“Do you think that sends the wrong message even if there wasn’t a tit for tat, an ‘I’ll give you this and you get that’?” asked Baier.
“We look to opportunities and investment,” said bin Salman. “We have a lot of investment around the globe with a lot of peoples and with economic opportunity.”
“So if Trump becomes president again you’ll leave the two billion with Jared Kushner?” asked Baier.
“It’s a commitment that PIF [Public Investment Fund, the sovereign wealth fund of Saudi Arabia] have and when PIF have commitment with any investor around the globe, they keep it,” said the prince.
In other words, if Donald Trump wins reelection the Saudis will be able to directly exploit the massive sum of money they gave to his son-in-law to influence American foreign policy — even more than the already have.
“Would it affect your decisions with a new Trump administration with that sitting there?” asked Baier.
“Well… Saudi Arabia is so big so I’m quite sure mostly any person around the world directly or indirectly you have something to do with Saudi Arabia,” said bin Salman.
“So if that can affect President Trump’s decision if he becomes a president that mean it can affect every president in the world and every person in the world’s decision because directly or indirectly they have some sort of interest or something to do with Saudi Arabia,” the prince added.
In other words, Saudi economic corruption is a powerful global force that affects more than just Donald Trump and Jared Kushner.
Crucially, bin Salman did NOT deny the fact that he influences both men.
A vote for Donald Trump is a vote to give Saudi Arabia total control over the U.S. government and its military.
x
Please retweet and ❤️ if you demand a full investigation into Jared Kushner — and consider joining the growing exodus to Tribel, a “woke” new Twitter competitor that is exploding in popularity because it banned Trump for life and because Elon Musk banned Tribel’s Twitter account — but he forgot to ban this link to download the new Tribel app: http://tribel.app.link/okwPIHYCIqb
🐣 RT @Maks_NAFO_FELLA Wait… Whaaaaaaaat? 😳😳😳 ¤ “… we support the territorial integrity of Ukraine”, – Lavrov
[TextLink:] https://x.com/Maks_NAFO_FELLA/status/1705669897412296706?s=20/photo/1
[Text:] ⚡️ A sharp change in the rhetoric of the Russian Foreign Ministry at the UN
“Of course, back in 1991, we recognized the sovereignty of Ukraine on the basis of the Declaration of Independence, which Ukraine accepted when leaving the Soviet Union. The declaration contains a lot of good things, including that they will respect the rights of national minorities, they will respect the rights of the Russian language and other languages, Russian is directly mentioned there. Then all this was included in the constitution of Ukraine”.
“But in the Declaration of Independence it was one of the main points for us that Ukraine would be a non- aligned country and would not enter into any military alliances. In that wording, under those conditions, we support the territorial integrity of Ukraine,” Lavrov said.
🐣 RT @IuliiaMendel Authoritarians […] seek power in order to hide the problems, steal money, arrange favors for their friends, and manipulate the political system so that they can’t ever lose power. That’s what Putin did, and that’s what Orbán does too. Carlson is simply the American face, and the English-speaking voice, of that confidence trick – Anne Applebaum
🐣 RT @anneapplebaum Useful thread
⋙ 🧵 RT @neil_abrams The problem, @stephenWalt, is not that people condemn you; it’s that you *do not listen* to them and just continue repeating the same lines. ¤ You’ve already made your “moral case for pursuing peace.” What you haven’t made is your moral case for occupation. ¤ Time to do it.
📌 https://x.com/neil_abrams/status/1705623514416333177?s=20
🐣 RT @maxbergmann This represents 60% of GOP House… around 80% of the House would vote for Ukraine funding.
⋙ 🐣 RT @ProudElephantUS JUST IN: 130 House Republicans have announced their support for additional funding for Ukraine. ¤ Is your Representative on this list? 👇 […]
¤ https://x.com/maxbergmann/status/1705722017926811835?s=20
🐣 RT @rozzthomas Spot on by Peter Dickinson. “NATO is a threat to Russian foreign policy because it prevents Russia from bullying its neighbors. In other words, NATO enlargement is no more or less provocative than a burglar alarm is to a thief.”
⋙ AtlanticCouncil, Peter Dickinson: Russia’s invasion of Ukraine was never about NATO https://tinyurl.com/3hkfyehb
// Putin’s relaxed response to the NATO accession of Finland and Sweden proves that he knows NATO enlargement poses no security threat to Russia
🐣 RT @DenisDanilovL We finally got a hearing in the U.S. Congress. Many thanks to everyone who helped. ¤ Hopefully our friends who are involved in the process will stump Guterres and force him to recognize that russia is illegally taking the USSR’s place in the #UN. ¤ To increase the pressure on Guterres, please sign the international petition 👉 https://change.org/p/kick-russia-out-of-the-un #unrussiaUN #UkrainerussiaWar
🐣 RT @KyivIndependent It was difficult for audiences to watch this documentary, but the feedback was positive. ¤ You can watch “Bullet Holes,” our war crimes unit’s investigative documentary about Russia’s systemic murder of Ukrainian children, here:
💽 https://youtube.com/watch?v=E-coT5t70Tg 📽️: @DMokryk
🧵 RT @TreasChest On the day of the autumnal equinox, “Azov” traditionally celebrated the Day of the Dead. ¤ At this mystical event, all Azov residents who died for the freedom of the Motherland are remembered 💔 Channel24
📌 🖼 https://x.com/TreasChest/status/1705681156258099506?s=20/photo/1 -4
📊 WSJ Poll: Americans Don’t Want Another Impeachment Fight https://tinyurl.com/446vjvft 52% oppose impeaching Biden, 41% favor it
// Voters say partisan battles are distracting lawmakers from fixing the country’s problems
🐣 RT @gtconway3d This is a *really* good question
⋙ 🐣 RT @kyledcheney One question I have about Trump’s overnight attack on Milley: Is he on the government’s witness list for Trump’s DC trial? He was a key Jan. 6 committee witness who said Trump privately admitted losing the election.
[TextLink:] https://x.com/kyledcheney/status/1705551286127509951?s=20/photo/1
[Text:] 🐣 RT @realDonald Trump Mark Milley, who led perhaps the most embarrassing moment in American history with his grossly incompetent implementation of the withdrawal from Afghanistan, costing many lives, leaving behind hundreds of American citizens, and handing over BILLIONS of dollars of the finest military equipment ever made, will be leaving the military next week. This will be a time for all citizens of the USA to celebrate! This guy turned out to be a Woke train wreck who, if the Fake News reporting is correct, was actually dealing with China to give them a heads up on the thinking of the President of the United States. This is an act so egregious that, in times gone by, the punishment would have been DEATH! A war between China and the United States could have been the result of this treasonous act. To be continued!!!
⋙⋙ 🐣 In the documents case, Trump tries to convince guests that it was not his idea to draw up contingency plans to attack Iran; he waves a classified doc around: he’s likely trying to blame Milley
🐣 RT @TheStudyofWar NEW: #Ukrainian forces carried out drone and cruise missile strikes on occupied #Crimea and significantly damaged the Russian Black Sea Fleet (BSF) Command headquarters in #Sevastopol on Sept. 22, drawing heavy attention in the Russian information space. https://isw.pub/UkrWar092223
🌎 https://x.com/TheStudyofWar/status/1705386503776636931?s=20/photo/1
// “Ukrainian Strikes against Russian Targets in Crimea June 22, 2023 to September 22, 2023”
🐣 RT @ChuckPfarrer LONG DISTANCE: BBC reports that the US plans to give Ukraine advanced ATACS missiles. US officials familiar with the issue say Ukraine will get ATACMS with strike range(s) of up to 190 miles (300km). The news comes as UKR demonstrates continuing successes striking RU naval targets in occupied Crimea. https://tinyurl.com/5fmy546r
◕ https://x.com/ChuckPfarrer/status/1705571598961398190?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @MFA_Ukraine The Peace Formula proposed by #Ukrainian President
@ZelenskyyUa is the only way to restore just and long-lasting peace for #Ukraine 🇺🇦 ¤ Learn more about Zelenskyy’s 10-Point Peace Plan 🔽
⋙≣ UkraineUa: Zelenskyy’s peace plan: 10 essential points https://tinyurl.com/29buzbmt
🐣 RT @anno1540 “Everyone runs and hangs himself”: racists do not want to be “cannon fodder” ¤ Mobs from regiment 1442 complain about the situation at the front. They say that almost all the infantry were killed, so they sent everyone to attack. ¤ No one is given leave, which is why the occupiers have mental problems – some commit suicide because there is a deadly assault ahead and barrage detachments behind.
💽 https://x.com/anno1540/status/1705532952321368307?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @ UkraineINtoucH ⚡🇺🇦💪Attacks on the #CrimeanBridge will continue regularly. We’ll finish. It is the matter of time. What will #putin do? He’ll be upset again. What can he do? — #Budanov ¤ #Ukraine #UkraineWar #Ukrainian #RussiaisATerroistState #Rusia
🐣 RT @anno1540 The USA has appointed a supervisor over the funds allocated to Ukraine, – the official website of the American Government ¤ Inspector General of the Pentagon, Robert Storch, was appointed to this position. It will start working on October 18, 2023. ¤ Storch will work with the US State Department and USAID watchdogs to oversee about $113 billion in aid that has flowed to Ukraine since the start of the full-scale Russian invasion.
⭕ 22 Sep 2023
TheDrive: Exclusive Interview With Ukraine’s Spy Boss From His D.C. Hotel Room https://tinyurl.com/3ucum966
// Lt. Gen. Kyrylo Budanov opens up about the ongoing counteroffensive, attacks inside Russia, warnings about Abrams tank usage and much more.
NYT: First Batch of Biden Emails Undercuts G.O.P. Claims https://tinyurl.com/3n6vfpzn
// House Republicans have suggested that President Biden used an email alias to abuse his office and cover it up, but an initial tranche of the messages reveals banal content and personal information.
🐣 RT @ IuliiaMendel My great-grandfather was a very rich man. He owned a lot of land and, most importantly, a windmill, which was crucial for flour production.
🖼 https://x.com/IuliiaMendel/status/1705406808171429968?s=20/photo/1 -2
When the Communists fought for power, he convinced people to accept this new politics, so that Ukraine would be part of the USSR and not part of the Russian Empire. He considered this his contribution to the collapse of the Russian Empire.
Years later, the Bolsheviks confiscated his land and property and declared him an enemy of the people, the worst accusation one could expect at the time. He, a father of four, was sent to concentration camp.
I don’t know how long he stayed there, but he survived and came back broken. He returned to see that his eldest daughter Zina had been taken by the Nazis to Berlin to work. My grandmother, her sister, has been looking for Zina all her life. She asked me to find out something about her. But I didn’t have that opportunity. I don’t know if Zina made it to Berlin, if she is alive, and if she died, then how.
His youngest son Lev froze to death after the Nazis took away his sheets in the winter and he was left lying on the metal.
My grandfather taught me German when I was a child, which boiled down to two phrases:
Hände hoch und gute Nacht.Even after that, my grandmother kept saying all her life that the Russians were worse than the Germans.
Controversial statement, but understandable. She recalled with horror the artificial famine organized by Stalin in Ukraine in the early 1930s. People ate dogs, even their own children, or simply died of starvation in the streets.
She was 5. Her name was Lyubov, which means Love. And she had a friend of the same age and with the same name. Perhaps this is how girls were named in the hope of a different life.
Because of the severe famine, people sent small children to steal ears of grain at night so that they would not be noticed. That’s how many people in their village survived. One night, a rumor spread through the village that there was a Chekist raid, so it was dangerous to go to the field. My great-grandmother did not let my grandmother go that night. And her friend was sent to the field, apparently they had no food at all. There was shooting at night. The girl was brought home wounded in the morning. My grandmother never saw her friend named Love again.
When my mother wanted to go to university, she was rejected. Because she was the granddaughter of an enemy of the people. She sat down on the stairs at the entrance to the university and sat there as a protest against this attitude. One professor asked her why she was sitting there. She replied that she would sit on the stairs until she was allowed to study.
Then my grandmother received a call from the KGB. My grandmother was shaking when she was telling me this story. And she had to go to the city to meet the KGB. She was afraid for herself and even more so for her rebellious daughter.
But it was 1980s, and the KGB knew that the USSR would soon collapse. They had a serious conversation with my grandmother and told her that new times were coming, and gave my mother permission to study.
That’s how my mother became a doctor. At the university, she met my father, who was from the same village, but they hadn’t crossed paths before they met at the university.
I was born when my mother was in her last year of studies. So she took me to my grandmother’s house, where I grew up for the first years of my life. My parents were unable to register me in Zaporizhzhia, where I was born and where they studied. Therefore, I was registered in the city of Henichesk, Kherson region, where my parents stopped to show me to my father’s relatives.
I was not born and have never lived in Henichesk, but that’s what my passport and Wikipedia say. When I became the press secretary of the President, every newspaper in Henichesk proudly wrote about me. Although none of these people had ever seen me.
My grandmother used to say that there is nothing worse than war. I am glad that she does not see what Ukraine is going through now.
There was so much pain in my family, so many transgenerational traumas that they are still a burden.
I have a large tattoo of ears of wheat on a Ukrainian embroidery on my back. Bread has always been important to my family. And I understand why my grandmother disliked the Russians so much.
But Ukrainians have always fought. And we deserve to finally start building a future where meritocracy and equality will prevail, where there will be opportunities and security. Building a career in my country is much more difficult than in Western countries. But so many windows have been opened, so many connections made and so much sacrificed. Ukraine has to become a country of success, and democracy has to win. I #StandForUkraine to keep the memory of my family alive, to correct their mistakes, to heal their suffering, and to create the future.
This is my Granny and me 6 months old in our house that you see now on the second photo. R.I.P. […]
Now, after writing this, I have a feeling that the story of my people is not told at all. Have you seen many stories about Soviet concentration camps? Holodomor is just being recognized around the world as a fact of genocide. But this is the history that explains Russian mindset and the reason for the attack: Kill the freedom and human dignity to establish the rule of power
🐣 📋 RT @ officejjsmart It is in America’s interest to defeat our adversaries. ¤ For 3/10 of 1% of the US budget we have destroyed 50% of the Russian military. ¤ Those who wish to protect Russia 🇷🇺 are enemies of US interests 🇺🇸.
🐣 RT @InfoAgeStrategy Trump’s former National Security Advisor asks a legitimate question about the scale of our aid to #Ukraine. “I mean, like, 30 tanks? How about 300 tanks?” ¤ We need to properly support Ukraine with what they need, in the quantity necessary, and when they need it. This Administration’s approach to backing Ukraine utterly mystifies me.
⋙ 🐣 RT @GOP4Ukraine Former Trump National Security Advisor Lt. Gen. H. R. McMaster on the trickle of American aid to Ukraine: ¤ “I mean, like, 30 tanks? How about 300 tanks! I think it’s silly the way these capabilities are being dribbled in.”
💽 https://x.com/InfoAgeStrategy/status/1705236151966073331?s=20/photo/1
🐣 📋 RT @NMAsiaPac Updated to 21 September 2023
– US military assistance to Ukraine $46.6 billion = $29.5 billion annualised
– US defence budget $864 billion
– US government spending $6,500 billion
So,
– 3.4% of US Defence Budget
– 0.4% of US Government spending
– 24c per American/day
◕ https://x.com/NMAsiaPac/status/1705368852581003590?s=20/photo/1
// GDP Ukraine ✛ NATO = $32.4Tr vs Ru $1.8Tr
🧵 RT @ZelenskyyUa In my today’s address to the Parliament of Canada I emphasized that what Russian occupiers are doing to Ukraine is genocide. And when we want to win, when we call on the world to support us, it’s not just about an ordinary conflict. It’s about saving lives of millions of people.
📌 💽 https://x.com/ZelenskyyUa/status/1705307468929146993?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @ AdinOfCrimea It’s called a law. ¤ Your elected congress representatives both Rep & Dem enacted law that provides the mechanism & guidelines for the Pentagon chief to define which elements of activity & operations are deemed essential to maintain military readiness and protect life & property.
⋙ 🐣 RT @nicksortor 🚨 JUST IN: The Pentagon has decided to EXEMPT Ukraine operations from a potential government shutdown if lawmakers fail to reach a deal by the end of the month. ¤ This means tens of billions will continue flowing into Ukraine regardless. ¤ Why is that even legal?
🐣 RT @ @kvistp
👀🔥 “We are Kyivan Rus’, and it was our ancestors who burned Moscow at one time,” – Budanov
🖼 https://x.com/kvistp/status/1705206966316834820?s=20/photo/1
The head of the Main Intelligence Directorate stated that during the occupation, the main tool for terrorists is the substitution of reality, which begins with changing history: “They say that there is no history, it is incorrect, that these are historically Russian lands, that there are no such peoples there.”
Budanov emphasized that it is important for us to return to our history during the war.
“We are Kyivan Rus’. It all went from there. It was our ancestors who burned Moscow in their time. Rus’ in those days came to Constantinople. We need to return our history, and it is glorious,” Budanov emphasized.
🇺🇦 Ukraine Now telegram 💙💛 #Ukraine
🐣 RT @ KenDilanianNBC The indictment of a powerful Democrat by the Biden Justice Department is an inconvenient fact for those who make a living calling the DoJ a partisan hit squad.
🐣 RT @TimInHonolulu On the NYAG vs Trump hearing, I looked at the prayer in the complaint and if she gets anything near this and Trump doesn’t get a stay, I think the chances that Trump puts his “empire” in Chapter 11 are fairly high. He won’t be able to operate and with loans maturing he toast.
[TextLink:] https://x.com/TimInHonolulu/status/1705272256795115818?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @ @jurgen_nauditt 👍Crimea, the situation is as follows.
Explosions were heard:
– Sevastopol.
– Krasnogvardiysk.
– Bakhchisarai.
– Simferopol.
– Rozdolne.
– Sakas.
The headquarters of the Black Sea Fleet of the russian Federation was destroyed.
Fire in the area of the military unit.
After the Katsaps lost several S-400 systems and over-the-horizon detection radars, Crimea simply remained defenseless against our missiles.
👇👇👇👇👇
🖼 https://x.com/jurgen_nauditt/status/1705178693302161680?s=20/photo/1
// Budanov over hq building
‼️ 🐣 RT @ Maks_NAFO_FELLA OMG 👀👀👀
⚡ “The commander of the Russian fleet was killed. A missile hit his office. Information needs confirmation”, – Crimean Wind
🐣 RT @ 🐣 RT @McFaul If true, excellent news! ¤ Biden tells Zelenskyy that U.S. will send Ukraine ATACMS long-range missiles for the first time [link] via @nbcnews
⋙ NBCNews: Biden tells Zelenskyy that U.S. will send Ukraine ATACMS long-range missiles https://tinyurl.com/4h2thnmt
// Some in Washington had resisted supplying the weapons system, known as “attack-ems,” out of fear that it would widen the war with Russia.
🖼 https://x.com/McFaul/status/1705259979794747695?s=20/photo/1
[…] Defense officials have said the U.S. does not have a large stockpile of excess ATACMS, which have a bigger payload than traditional artillery, to provide to Ukraine. Also, some in Washington have resisted supplying the weapon, known colloquially as “attack-ems,” out of fear that it would widen the war with Russia.
The congressional official said there was still a debate about the type of missile that would be sent and how many would be delivered to Ukraine. They added that countries in Eastern Europe had already given Ukraine large portions of their weapons stockpiles. ¤ NBC News has approached Russia’s defense ministry for comment.
Since Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022, the Biden administration has shifted its stance on which weapons it is ready to provide to Ukraine’s military.
The White House initially withheld approval for requests for Stinger anti-aircraft missiles, Howitzer artillery pieces, anti-ship missiles and HIMARS systems, but later gave the green light to them being shipped.
🐣 RT @tribelaw Here’s the full report explaining why and how @POTUS and the G7 can make Putin pay $335 billion to start rebuilding Ukraine 🇺🇦 even before his illegal war of aggression ends. The executive summary is an easy 8 pages. The other 181 pages provide the details https://tinyurl.com/yxnm5caa
🐣 RT @front_ukrainian ‼️ Biden informed Zelensky that the 🇺🇸US will send a small number of long-range ATACMS missiles to 🇺🇦Ukraine, — NBC News.
🧵 RT @Mylovanov Breaking: Russian social media report a successful and devastating attack on the Russian Black Sea FleetHeadquarters in Sevastopol ¤ What is known? 1/
📌 https://x.com/Mylovanov/status/1705234745976668390?s=20
🐣 RT @WarMonitor3 Ukrainian loitering munitions successfully hit in a long range strike the Black Sea Headquarters of Russian forces in Sevastopol Crimea 🐣 RT @WarMonitor3 Ukrainian loitering munitions successfully hit in a long range strike the Black Sea Headquarters of Russian forces in Sevastopol Crimea
⭕ 21 Sep 2023
Politico: Pentagon exempts Ukraine operations from potential government shutdown https://tinyurl.com/yabx3bwm
// The decision means that training on American tactics and equipment can move forward uninterrupted if lawmakers don’t reach a funding deal by the end of the month.
🐣 RT @NOELreports A confirmation that Ukraine has managed to get heavy equipment such as Strykers (with what looks to be mine trawlers up front) and M113’s behind the anti tank ditches and dragontsteeth west of Verbove. The AFU is laying the foundation for a broader attack towards the settlement.
🧵 RT @ allenanalysis THE FACT THAT the Saudi Crown Prince claimed to have received CIA intelligence from Jared Kushner, which he used to identify specific individuals as “enemies.”
📌 🖼 https://x.com/allenanalysis/status/1704859430498574386?s=20/photo/1 -2
And, there is barely any coverage or congressional inquiry into what happened is abhorrent. Hunter Biden has been indicted and everyone is saying he peddled his father’s position for business favors. Okay, did Jared not peddle his father-in-law’s position in the White House?
This occurred before a “corruption crackdown” in Saudi Arabia, raising concerns about subsequent reports of torture and deaths.
Additionally, the Trump administration approved nuclear technology transfer to Saudi Arabia without congressional notification following the Jamal Khashoggi incident. These allegations, reported by credible sources, prompt questions about potential connections and motivations.
What are your thoughts on these events, and do you believe further investigation is needed to understand their implications?
🐣 RT @ Heroiam_Slava 🇺🇸 The United States announced a new package of military assistance to Ukraine worth $325 million. ¤ The package includes:
● AIM-9M missiles for air defense systems;
● Additional ammunition for HIMARS;
● AN/TWQ-1 Avenger self-propelled air defense systems;
● .50-caliber machine guns to combat drones;
● Artillery shells of 105 mm caliber;
● Artillery shells of 155 mm caliber, including DPICM (cluster);
● TOW ANTI-TANK MISSILES;
● Javelin and AT-4 ATGMs;
● More than 3 million rounds of ammunition;
● 59 light tactical vehicles;
● Explosive munitions for clearing obstacles;
● Spare parts, maintenance and other field equipment.
👆 It should be noted that part of this package is the MDA, previously allocated under the PDA (Presidential Drawdown Authority) procedure, which is residual after the reassessment of the assistance provided. The reassessment process took place in June. The package also includes new items of aid, also allocated under the PDA program.
❗PDA (Presidential Drawdown Authority) program – “write-off” of MTE from the US Army warehouses for the fastest possible transfer to Ukraine. https://tinyurl.com/3fy2225r
// Defense budget
🐣 RT @KyivIndependent ⚡ Zelensky: Ukraine to produce weapons together with US.
In his evening address on Sept. 21, President Volodymyr Zelensky announced that there is a “long-term agreement” between the U.S. and Ukraine to produce weapons.
🐣 RT @mccaffreyr3 MSNBC. NICOLLE WALLACE. 21 Sept 23. Gen Mark Milley is the most consequential JCS Chairman since WWII. Trump was and is a danger to our democracy and unfit to be the Constitutional Commander-in-Chief of the US Armed Forces. Danger ahead.
💽 https://x.com/mccaffreyr3/status/1705057316339601587?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @ZelenskyyUa Today in the US National Archives, Olena @ZelenskaUA and I addressed American officials, businesses, and the public. We expressed our gratitude to the U.S. and all Americans who support Ukraine at the call of their hearts. We called for unity in fighting for our shared freedom.
🖼 https://x.com/ZelenskyyUa/status/1704995409704243393?s=20/photo/1
⋙ 🐣 RT @ZelenskaUA Volodymyr @ZelenskyyUa and I have never made such addresses before. But never before has our country had such reasons to be grateful. Throughout Ukraine’s long history, Ukrainians did not stop fighting for freedom – this is in the character of our men and women. Equally.
🐣 RT @ZelenskyyUa Among the documents I saw today at the National Archives was Abraham Lincoln’s telegram to General Grant. An inspiring document. “Hold on with a bulldog grip, and chew and choke as much as possible,” – President Lincoln’s words reflect the courage and faith that helped America.
🐣 RT @ZelenskyyUa President Lincoln’s words reflect exactly how Ukrainians fight. In our victorious battles for Kyiv, Kharkiv, and Snake Island in the Black Sea. In our battle for Bakhmut, where our soldiers are pressing forward, no matter what. In our fight for every inch of Ukrainian land.
🐣 RT @ZelenskyyUa Every day of this war, Ukrainian soldiers hold on with the grip of a bulldog. They chew and choke the Russian occupiers as much as possible. Never before has the Russian dictatorship met such strong resistance. And never again will Russia manage to destroy any other nation.
🐣 RT @ZelenskyyUa Putin’s list of nations to destroy was long. Just recently. If Ukraine fell, half of Europe would again risk falling into Moscow’s sphere of influence. But American investment in Ukrainian security and the global protection of freedom is working. One hundred percent. Every cent.
🐣 RT @ZelenskyyUa Now Putin’s list of goals is different. Instead of dictating terms to America, Europe and the whole free world, Putin is forced to humiliate himself by personally entertaining a delegation from Pyongyang and trying to find favour with Tehran. This is his clear weakness.
🐣 RT @ZelenskyyUa Ukraine pays the highest price for defending freedom and global security. Every day, Russia continues its terror with missiles and Iranian drones. But every day, our unity stays strong. You support us. And we know we shall not fall. Our freedom keeps the snatch of a bulldog.
🐣 RT @ZelenskyyUa We are confident that other nations will not have to throw their armies into this battle, because Ukraine is capable of ending this war with a victory that will become our common victory. Today, it is not the evil empire, but the lack of unity that can bring freedom to its knees.
🐣 RT @ZelenskaUA I made my first official visit to the U.S. a year ago and spoke in the U.S. Congress. At that time, my husband could not leave Ukraine for a foreign visit, while the fate of Ukraine was yet to be decided. Never before has the First Lady of another country addressed the Congress.
🐣 RT @ZelenskaUA I saw the tears of senators and congressmen. This proved better than words—we value life equally. It’s equally important for us that life wins. The stories of Ukrainian children killed by Russian missiles, which I told the U.S. Congress, are not out there somewhere. They’re here.
🐣 RT @ZelenskaUA I returned home with your support and with weapons, such as air defense, that protect our people—adults and children. Such was our path to the “Patriots” in Ukraine. And thousands of lives have now been saved. This is so important—when Congress hears, when America hears!
🐣 RT @ZelenskyyUa There isn’t a single person here who doesn’t care for freedom. There isn’t a single Ukrainian who is not grateful. To those who help us—not because you have to, but because your heart tells you to. This is humanity. This is what makes us Ukraine. This is what makes you America.
🐣 RT @ZelenskyyUa Today, we’re here together with Olena to express gratitude to Americans who have done and are doing extraordinary things at the call of their hearts. American hearts beat just like Ukrainian hearts. I want you all to know that America has saved millions of Ukrainian lives.
🐣 RT @ZelenskyyUa When I spoke with President Biden early on February 24, 2022, the world didn’t believe in Ukraine. But I assured him that we will not give up. And he affirmed that America will be with us as long as it takes. The U.S. Congress has confirmed this. Ukraine will always be grateful.
🐣 RT @TheStudyofWar NEW: #Ukrainian armored vehicles are operating beyond the final line of the #Russian defensive layer that Ukrainian forces in western #Zaporizhia Oblast are currently penetrating, although ISW is not yet prepared to assess that Ukrainian forces have broken fully through this Russian defensive layer. https://isw.pub/UkrWar092123
🌎 https://x.com/TheStudyofWar/status/1705035277851414703?s=20/photo/1 -3
🐣 RT @Gerashchenko_en Member of the Russian ruling party Evgeny Fedorov has prepared a bill for the State Duma, proposing to restore the Russian Empire within the borders of the former USSR.
🌎 https://x.com/Gerashchenko_en/status/1704884196567577041?s=20/photo/1
He reasoned his proposal by saying that, allegedly, various conflicts are always taking place on the territory of independent countries, formerly occupied republics.
Therefore, it would be “logical” to bring them back under Moscow’s control, even if Russia has to go to war with each of these countries.
Fedorov stated that the republics left the USSR illegally, and therefore, Russia allegedly has the right to take them back. The current invasion of Ukraine is the beginning of such a return, he believes.
Who/what could be the prime reason for causing conflicts in the post-Soviet states, one has to wonder?
🐣 RT @ZelenskyyUa This was a very important visit to Washington, D.C. ¤ New military aid package. Long-term agreement on joint defense production. This historic step will create new industrial base and jobs for both of our nations.
¤ https://x.com/ZelenskyyUa/status/1705043154011906391?s=20
My day began on Capitol Hill with candid and extensive discussions. Both chambers and parties. I sensed trust, which fosters unity. Members of Congress asked direct questions and received candid responses. Transparency is our top priority in our relations with the U.S.
I also had important defense talks at the Pentagon.
I thank President Joe Biden, both parties and chambers of US Congress, and the entire American people for their unwavering support.
NYT, Paul Krugman: Why Kevin McCarthy Can’t Do His Job https://tinyurl.com/bd8hydp9 “[E]ven a superb leader would probably be unable to transcend the dynamics of a party that has been extremist for a generation but has now gone beyond extremism to nihilism”
🐣 RT @Morning_Joe “If we allow Putin to get away with it, then it is open season for any would-be aggressor anywhere in the world.” ¤ @SecBlinken on the consequences of not countering Russian aggression and the importance of continued support for Ukraine https://on.msnbc.com/3RwHCjJ
🐣 RT @7Veritas4 In case you missed it, here is the proposed gag order.
[TextLink:] https://x.com/7Veritas4/status/1704977504807624730?s=20/photo/1
[CourtDoc:] https://tinyurl.com/y8wx9pc4 2p
WaPo Editorial: Biden has done a lot for Ukraine. But not enough. https://tinyurl.com/yc4yf6r4 “Mr. Biden should stop dawdling and provide Kyiv with ATACMS.”
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky is expected this week in Washington, where he will meet with President Biden and members of Congress. That in itself is a sort of miracle.
It’s worth remembering that few military experts thought Ukraine would hold out as a fully sovereign, Western-leaning, democratic country for more than a few days or weeks against Russian President Vladimir Putin’s full-scale invasion almost 19 months ago. Few would have taken bets on Mr. Zelensky’s survival, either.
And virtually no one predicted that Ukraine would not only stand fast but also, within months, push Russian forces back from key territory they had captured, let alone launch a counteroffensive that has put what was once regarded as the world’s second-most-powerful army on the back foot.
Those developments are a tribute to two things: First, Kyiv’s iron-willed determination to remain free of the Kremlin’s yoke. Second, the West’s — above all, Mr. Biden’s — determination to provide Ukrainians with the wherewithal to fight. And fight they have.
Still, the West, and specifically the United States, has not done enough to help Kyiv achieve anything that could be defined as victory. Despite Ukraine’s battlefield achievements, there is every indication that the war, which has killed or wounded nearly a half-million troops, will not end anytime soon.
Mr. Putin, having retooled Russian industry for a war of attrition, is playing for time in the evident hope that Donald Trump will retake the White House and slash U.S. aid to Ukraine. Mr. Zelensky, having reinvented himself as one of modern history’s most inspirational wartime leaders, has rallied his countrymen with the call to push the invaders out of the nearly 20 percent of the country they occupy.
… It is impossible to say whether Ukrainian forces would have been more successful had they received all the weapons Mr. Zelensky and his top generals have pleaded for — or had gotten them earlier. There is no denying that U.S. arms shipments to Ukraine have been substantial. It is equally true that the Biden administration has repeatedly dragged its feet.
It is by now a well-established pattern that the White House has balked at Ukrainian requests for advanced weapons, only to grant them months later. It has done so with M1 Abrams battle tanks, F-16 fighter jets, HIMARS rocket launchers, air defense missiles and other arms. Even now, months after Mr. Biden approved F-16 training for Ukrainian pilots, it will be months before those aircraft are deployed to support Kyiv’s forces.
Mr. Biden is reportedly now considering whether to approve the delivery to Ukraine of U.S.-made long-range missiles known as ATACMS, a weapon Mr. Zelensky has requested for months. The White House and Pentagon have resisted granting the request, variously saying that the United States has too few ATACMS in its arsenal or that they are not a particularly effective weapon or that the Ukrainians do not need them. …
There is no single weapon system that would provide the Ukrainians with game-changing firepower. Over time, however, the Ukrainians have proved adept at using most of the weapons they have been given. Mr. Biden should stop dawdling and provide Kyiv with ATACMS. …
[W]hile Mr. Biden has delivered speeches on Ukraine on his travels to Lithuania and Kyiv, he has yet to give a major address about the war from the Oval Office, directed at the American people. He can make the case forcefully for intensified U.S. support, including by explaining his policy’s deterrent effect on Chinese ambitions in East Asia. It should be a message with bipartisan appeal — that the best way to dissuade China from invading Taiwan is to succeed in thwarting Russia in Ukraine.
Mr. Biden’s leadership on the war has been critical to Ukraine’s survival. Now he needs to press ahead toward forcing Moscow to sue for peace.
🐣 RT @SteveRattner “If not for the Bush tax cuts and their extensions—as well as the Trump tax cuts—revenues would be on track to keep pace with spending indefinitely, and the debt ratio… would be declining,” a new @amprog report finds.
◕ https://x.com/SteveRattner/status/1640723102278483970?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @Mylovanov President Biden meets President Zelensky. ¤ President Biden: I made it clear that no nation can be truly secure in the world if, in fact, we don’t stand up and defend the freedom of Ukraine in the face of this Russian brutality and aggression. ¤
We support a just and lasting peace, one that respects Ukrainian sovereignty and its territorial integrity. ¤ [We are formalizing] long term commitment to Ukraine security
🐣 RT @ZelenskyyUa I met with US House Speaker @SpeakerMcCarthy, House Democratic Leader @RepJeffries, and US House Representatives.
¤ https://x.com/ZelenskyyUa/status/1704932293297438917?s=20
Ukraine is sincerely grateful to the House, both parties, and the entire American people for all the support. ¤ We have accomplished much together to safeguard democracy, freedom, and dignity—values shared by both of our nations.
The Ukrainian people have suffered immensely as a result of Russian war crimes, but we have liberated more than half of the occupied territory from Russian invaders, and we can clearly see that victory is getting closer.
During our meeting, we discussed the battlefield situation and priority defense needs, including air defense. ¤ I emphasized that a Ukrainian victory will ensure that neither Russia nor any other dictatorship destabilizes the free world again. To win, we must all stand together and work together.
🐣 RT @LucasFoxNews Top GOP Armed Services Senator blasts White House for not sending 190-mile-range ballistic missiles to Ukraine:
¤ https://x.com/LucasFoxNews/status/1704932475430903872?s=20
“Does the Biden administration want Ukraine to win, or not?” [Sen. Roger] Wicker said. “Every delay in supplying Ukraine with the tools it needs to secure victory has cost unnecessary lives and prolonged the war. Instead of leading from the front, the President held back for months after Britain and France provided deep-strike missiles. This is yet another example of the dangerous drip-drip-drip approach by the Biden administration, which has failed to give Ukraine a bigger advantage.
“I also call on the Biden administration to send Congress a supplemental request immediately to increase industrial production on the ATACMS and Precision Strike Missile lines. The President must understand that only through sufficient Ukrainian military capacity and capability will this war come to a successful conclusion.”
🐣 RT @ ZelenskyyUa I met with U.S. Senate Majority Leader @SenSchumer,U.S. Senate Republican Leader @LeaderMcConnell, and U.S. Senators.
🖼 https://x.com/ZelenskyyUa/status/1704937443881824261?s=20/photo/1
I am grateful to the U.S. Senate for helping our warriors free Ukrainian land of Russian invaders. Support for Ukraine means strengthening NATO’s eastern flank.
We discussed the battlefield situation and priority defense needs, such as air defense. ¤ I hope that the U.S. Congress will continue to take important decisions to provide financial assistance to Ukraine. Oversight, transparency, and accountability for all the aid is absolutely important and imperative.
We also discussed the Peace Formula, global coalition in its support, and Ukraine’s post-war recovery.
🐣 RT @ZelenskaUA Our visit to Washington DC with @ZelenskyyUa begun with honoring the memory of those who died in 9/11 terrorist attack. We understand what terror is and share the pain with all affected. Only together can we truly defeat this insidious evil. Ukraine with USA. USA with Ukraine🇺🇦🇺🇸
🖼 https://x.com/ZelenskaUA/status/1704934418048073906?s=20/photo/1 -4
🐣 RT @JaredEMoskowitz Donald Trump: House Republicans Stand back and Stand by
[TextLink:] https://x.com/JaredEMoskowitz/status/1704879959787880718?s=20/photo/1
[Text:] 🐣 RT @realDonaldTrump A very important deadline is approaching at the end of the month. Republicans in Congress can and must defund all aspects of Crooked Joe Biden’s weaponized Government that refuses to close the Border, and treats half the Country as Enemies of the State. This is also the last chance to defund these political prosecutions against me and other Patriots. They failed on the debt limit, but they must not fail now. Use the power of the purse and defend the Country!
🐣 RT @atrupar Zelensky makes brief remarks at the Capitol flanked by Schumer and McConnell
💽 https://x.com/atrupar/status/1704878561012613293?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @JeffreyGoldberg Former Trump chief of staff John Kelly: “Mark Milley had to contain the impulses of people who wanted to use the United States military in very dangerous ways… The president couldn’t fathom people who served their nation honorably.” From this piece:
⋙ TheAtlantic: The Patriot https://tinyurl.com/bdcu6yts
// How General Mark Milley protected the Constitution from Donald Trump
⭕ 20 Sep 2023
Nasdaq: America Produces Enough Oil to Meet Its Needs, So Why Do We Import Crude? https://tinyurl.com/5awwtdtr
// 3/8/2022; oil prices
You see, the U.S. does produce enough oil to meet its own needs, but it is the wrong type of oil. ¤ Crude is graded according to two main metrics, weight and sweetness. The weight of oil defines how easy it is to refine, or break down into its usable component parts, such as gasoline, jet fuel and diesel. Light crude is the easiest to handle, heavy is the most difficult, with intermediate obviously somewhere in between. The sweetness refers to the sulfur content of unrefined oil. The sweeter it is, the less sulfur it contains.
Most of the oil produced in the U.S. fields in Texas, Oklahoma, and elsewhere is light and sweet, compared to what comes from the Middle East and Russia. The problem is that for many years, imported oil met most of the U.S.’s energy needs, so a large percentage of the refining capacity here is geared towards dealing with oil that is heavier and less sweet than the kind produced here.
EuromaidanPress: Ukraine’s Parliament approves immediate asset declaration disclosure https://tinyurl.com/2zvpc3wx
// Ukraine’s Verkhovna Rada has passed an amended law restoring immediate full electronic declaration of officials’ assets, whereas earlier it was planned to defer it for one year.
🐣 RT @votevets That’s 3 down, and we’re glad Tuberville is softening up, and Senator Schumer got some promotions moving, but there’s hundreds and hundreds more to go. We aren’t quitting. Our ads and more will keep running until @SenTuberville stops blocking promotions.
🧵 RT @atrupar Catching up on Merrick Garland’s testimony to the House Judiciary Committee. Will post some notable moments from the questioning in this thread.
📌 💽 https://x.com/atrupar/status/1704518069047927135?s=20/photo/1
[ThreadReader:] https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1704518069047927135.html
🐣 RT @atrupar Wow. I’ve never seen Garland this mad. ¤ “The idea that someone with my family background would discriminate against any religion is so outrageous, so absurd!” he says to Rep. Jeff Van Drew
💽 https://x.com/atrupar/status/1704535396942528842?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @HillaryClinton What is Bidenomics, anyway? It’s what @SecYellen calls modern-day supply-side economics–put simply, investing in people. #CGI2023
💽 https://x.com/HillaryClinton/status/1704627004195172374?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @ProjectLincoln The difference between a leader and a clown. The difference is stark.
💽 https://x.com/ProjectLincoln/status/1704329537725550846?s=20/photo/1
// Biden and Trump address UN General assemble; Trump’s is met with laughter
🐣 RT @ClintonGlobal “We all become global citizens when we’re dedicated to the people.”—First Lady Olena @ZelenskaUA, recipient of the #CGI2023 Clinton Global Citizen Award 🇺🇦
PravdaUa: Zelenskyy proposes UN reform to overcome Russia’s veto https://tinyurl.com/4y43f2wm “Zelenskyy proposed giving the UN General Assembly a real opportunity to override vetoes, provided that two-thirds of the votes reflect the will of the [members]”
President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, during his speech to the UN Security Council on Wednesday, presented proposals for reforming the UN, primarily to prevent situations where permanent members of the Security Council can block any decisions. Source: European Pravda
Details: Zelenskyy stressed that the work of the UN is currently paralysed precisely because Russia, as the aggressor state, is blocking any decisions, as it has a veto as a permanent member of the Security Council.
Quote: “The veto in the hands of the aggressor is what has driven the UN into a dead end.” “The use of the veto is what needs to be reformed, and it could be a key reform. One that restores the power of the UN Charter.”
As a first step towards reforming the UN, Zelenskyy proposed giving the UN General Assembly a real opportunity to override vetoes, provided that two-thirds of the votes reflect the will of the nations from Asia, Africa, Europe, both Americas and the Pacific.
The second step towards UN reform, he said, was to expand the permanent membership of the Security Council to include states from Africa, Asia, Latin America and the Pacific. Among European countries, he mentioned Germany.
The third step in the reform of the Organisation, the president named the creation of a system of preventing aggression through preventive sanctions, which should be automatically submitted to the UN Security Council “when any member of the General Assembly declares a threat of aggression”.
🐣 RT @JayinKyiv While Lavrov is at the UN whining that Ukraine is fighting back, 8 of Russia’s strategic bomber aircraft have just taken off, loaded with missiles that will target our cities at about 2am tonight.
⋙ 🐣 RT @JayinKyiv Lavrov complains to the UN that his invading Russians keep getting killed while murdering people in Ukraine. ¤ “The Kiev regime does not hide its position on the extermination of Russians, and Western countries support this.”
🐣 RT @MuellerSheWrote BREAKING: the federal prosecutor who resigned from the Durham probe confirms she quit because of the politicization of that investigation by Barr and Durham.
⋙ AP: Former federal prosecutor who resigned from Trump-Russia probe says she left over concerns with Barr https://tinyurl.com/5n7zfe97
A former federal prosecutor who helped investigate the origins of the Trump-Russia probe said Wednesday she left the team because of concerns with then-Attorney General William Barr’s public comments about the case and because she strongly disagreed with a draft of an interim report he considered releasing before the election.
“I simply couldn’t be part of it. So I resigned,” Nora Dannehy told Connecticut state legislators during her confirmation hearing as a nominee to the state Supreme Court. It marked the first time Dannehy has spoken publicly about her sudden resignation from the probe overseen by former special counsel John Durham.
WaPo: Zelensky urges U.N. Security Council to broaden membership, eliminate Russian veto https://wapo.st/3RryAEu
🐣 RT @ ianbremmer ending ukraine war isn’t just a europe/west issue ¤ also a global south issue causing huge hardship for the world’s poorest & hungriest https://gzeromedia.com/quick-take/ @gzeromedia
🐣 RT @StateDept Today @SecBlinken outlined Russia’s multiple violations of @UNSecurity Council resolutions and the UN Charter. “Russia is committing war crimes and crimes against humanity in Ukraine on an almost daily basis.” #UNGA78
💽 https://x.com/StateDept/status/1704593775513739348?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @EuromaidanPress Vasily Nebenzya, Permanent Representative of Russia to the United Nations, interrupted the UN Security Council chairman four times in an attempt to disrupt Zelenskyy’s speech ¤ Nebenzya insisted the UN Security Council members should have spoken first, and only then Zelenskyy. The Albanian Prime Minister Edi Rama, who was chairing the meeting, replied that other UN participants had agreed to the order of the hearings in advance. ¤ “You stop the war, and President Zelenskyy will not speak at all,” the Albanian Prime Minister told Nebenzya.
🖼 UNIAN https://x.com/EuromaidanPress/status/1704576515935961580?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @GallupNews Reports of undocumented migrant surges continue to make headlines in the U.S. In 2022, Gallup asked those who want to leave their country permanently where they would like to go — if they could. Seventeen percent of potential migrants worldwide named the U.S. as their desired next home. https://on.gallup.com/3ZmJeyt
📋 https://x.com/GallupNews/status/1704566505751363733?s=20/photo/1
// US 17%, Canada 9%, Germany 5%, France Spain & Austral 4% each, UK & Saudi 3% each
🐣 RT @BarackObama Today @POTUS and @VP announced the American Climate Corps — an initiative to train young people for careers that help tackle climate change. ¤ This is an important step forward, and wouldn’t be possible without the organizing efforts of young people across the country.
🐣 RT @AccountableGOP AG Merrick Garland: “Our job is to uphold the rule of law. That means we apply the same laws to everyone…We will not be intimidated. We will do our jobs free from outside influence, and we will not back down from defending our democracy.”
🐣 RT @BillPascrell Reminder: Every government shutdown in the last 30 years has occurred when Republicans controlled the House
[TextLink:] https://x.com/BillPascrell/status/1704531129317920807?s=20/photo/1
🔆 This❗️⋙ 🐣 RT @WhiteHouse Big News: The Biden-Harris Administration is launching the American Climate Corps – mobilizing more than 20,000 young Americans to work on the frontlines of conservation, clean energy and climate resilience. ¤ Learn more at http://whitehouse.gov/ClimateCorps.
🐣 RT @neal_katyal And so it begins.
⋙ 🐣 RT @CNNPolitics Pro-Donald Trump lawyer Lin Wood is a “witness for the state” in the Georgia election subversion case, Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis revealed https://tinyurl.com/y66jkr3t
🐣 RT @ZelenskyyUa 574 days of pain, losses, and struggle have already passed since the start of the full-scale aggression launched by the state, which, for some reason, is still present here among the permanent UNSC members.
🐣 RT @RepAdamSchiff Nobody told the Attorney General to indict Trump. Especially not President Biden. ¤ The decision was left up to the Special Counsel. And the grand jury found more than enough evidence to indict. ¤ Regardless of the lies Trump continues to peddle.
💽 https://x.com/RepAdamSchiff/status/1704547750728155166?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @front_ukrainian ❗️All military formations of the Russian Federation must be withdrawn from Ukraine, including the Black Sea Fleet or those leaky troughs that will remain from it during the war, Zelenskyi.
💽 https://x.com/front_ukrainian/status/1704531961341997227?s=20/photo/1
● There should also be the withdrawal of all mercenaries and quasi-military formations of Russia from the entire sovereign territory of Ukraine within our internationally recognized borders of 1991.
● There should also be a full return to Ukraine of control over our entire state border and exclusive economic zone in the Black and Azov Seas, as well as in the Kerch Strait. Only the fulfillment of these two points will result in a fair, reliable and complete cessation of hostilities.
● If for this it is necessary to carry out the reform of the UN institutions, then we should not be afraid of the reform. We are ready to work together with UN members participating in the Peace Formula on relevant draft resolutions and amendments to the UN Charter.
🐣 RT @ PaulaChertok Good for Garland. “So outrageous, so absurd” defines the Republican Party well. ¤ Worth noting: Propagandists aim to enrage people w/ their attacks. Manipulating emotions is key to blocking critical thinking. So rubes accept lies/propaganda & enemies can be smeared as emotional.
⋙ 🐣 RT @atrupar Wow. I’ve never seen Garland this mad. ¤ “The idea that someone with my family background would discriminate against any religion is so outrageous, so absurd!” he says to Rep. Jeff Van Drew
💽 https://x.com/PaulaChertok/status/1704542318462910929?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @ PaulaChertok Good for Garland. “So outrageous, so absurd” defines the Republican Party well. ¤ Worth noting: Propagandists aim to enrage people w/ their attacks. Manipulating emotions is key to blocking critical thinking. So rubes accept lies/propaganda & enemies can be smeared as emotional.
⋙ 🐣 RT @atrupar Wow. I’ve never seen Garland this mad. ¤ “The idea that someone with my family background would discriminate against any religion is so outrageous, so absurd!” he says to Rep. Jeff Van Drew
🐣 RT @SteveRattner Democrats keep overperforming in special elections. ¤ 25 of 31 contested special elections this year have swung towards the Dems.
◕ https://x.com/SteveRattner/status/1704537759623393407?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @pravda_eng Zelenskyy spoke at the UN Security Council. The main points:
● The President called for reforming the UN in order to give the General Assembly a real opportunity to overcome the veto;
● “The veto should not serve as a weapon for those obsessed with hatred and war,” Zelenskyy said;
● Says that the UN is at an impasse regarding Russian aggression, and humanity no longer trusts the UN when it comes to protecting the sovereign borders of nations
● @ZelenskyyUa calls for the introduction of a system of prevention of aggression through early response;
● Russia should completely withdraw its troops, including the Black Sea Fleet of the Russian Federation “or those leaky troughs that will remain from it during the war”;
● Ukraine should have effective control over our entire state border and exclusive economic zone in the Black and Azov seas;
● Reminded that this (top 2 points) is the “Ukrainian peace formula” and it is written literally from the principles of the UN Charter and the resolutions adopted by the General Assembly.
● Zelenskyy’s speech did not end with a hammer blow to Nebenza’s head, like Russian representative expected
🐣 House Judiciary Hearing MAGAts: 🤡 🤡 🤡 🤡 🤡 🤡 🤡
🐣 RT @SenSchumer BIG NEWS: Thanks to the hard work of youth activists across the country, President Biden just announced he’s creating an American Climate Corps. ¤ I’ve pushed hard for this. ¤ A new climate corps will help create pathways to good-paying green jobs!
🐣 RT @JoeBiden This is MAGAnomics.
[TextLink:] https://x.com/JoeBiden/status/1704517317034406322?s=20/photo/1
[Text:] MAGAnomics (noun) ¤ An economic agenda that calls for three things: cutting taxes even more for the wealthy and big corporations; cutting Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid; and raising costs for families by gutting investments in the middle class.
🐣 RT @KyivPost Volodymyr #Zelensky said that people no longer rely on the UN when it comes to protecting the sovereign borders of states. ¤ “Ukrainian soldiers are now doing with their blood what the UN Security Council should be doing with its votes: stopping aggression and upholding the principles of the UN Charter,” he added.
🐣 RT @Mylovanov Zelensky at the UN Security Council facing Russia. ¤ The purpose of the Council is to give diplomacy a chance to work. But Russia has turned it into a platform to amplify its propaganda. ¤ This is Zelenskiy take: “574 days of pain, losses, and struggle have already passed since the start of the full-scale aggression launched by the state, which, for some reason, is still present here among the permanent UNSC members.”
🐣 RT @BillKristol I very much hope Team Biden is right that two core issues—abortion rights and fear of Trump—would mean a Biden victory over Trump next year. I’ll just add an obvious point: Those two issues would help any Democratic nominee in 2024 against Trump.
🐣 RT @KyivIndependent This video, shared by President Volodymyr Zelensky on his Telegram channel, shows his meetings with world leaders at the United Nations headquarters in New-York on Sept. 19.
💽 https://x.com/KyivIndependent/status/1704467860544708728?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @USAmbKyiv “We will continue to stand with the brave people of Ukraine as they defend their sovereignty and territorial integrity and their freedom.” Important speech from @POTUS
⋙ 🐣 RT @POTUS Russia believes the world will grow weary and allow it to brutalize Ukraine. ¤ But, if we abandon the UN Charter’s principles to appease Russia, can any nation feel confident that they’re protected? ¤ No. ¤ We must stand up to aggression today to deter would-be aggressors tomorrow.
CNN: Zelensky urges Trump to share Ukraine peace plan but says he won’t give territory to Russia https://tinyurl.com/54s2vhp3 Zelensky: “So (if) the idea is how to take the part of our territory and to give Putin, that is not the peace formula.”
🐣 RT @front_ukrainian ⚡️Negotiations with the 🇺🇸USA regarding the supply of long-range Atacms to 🇺🇦Ukraine are “on the finish line”. If the missiles are not provided, it will lead to losses on the battlefield in Ukraine. This was stated by the President of Ukraine Volodymyr Zelenskyi in an interview with CNN. ¤ “We are at the finish line, I am sure of that,” Zelenskyy said.
🔲 C-SPAN: Attorney General Testifies on Justice Dept. Oversight (9am)
// Attorney General Merrick Garland testifies on oversight of the Justice Department before the House Judiciary Committee.
⭕ 19 Sep 2023
🐣 RT @MSNBC “Russia is pushing the world to the final war,” Ukrainian President Zelenskyy tells the UN General Assembly. “Ukraine is doing everything to ensure that after Russian aggression, no one in the world will dare to attack any nation.”
💽 https://x.com/MSNBC/status/1704220112734036152?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @PaulaChertok 🔥”Each decade Russia starts a new war”—#Zelensky #UNGA ¤ “The aim of the present war against Ukraine is to turn our land, our people, our lives, our resources into a weapon against you—the international rules-based order.” ¤ For this Russia weaponizes food, energy and CHILDREN
⋙⋙ 🐣 RT @cspan Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky spoke at the UN General Assembly saying Russian attacks on Ukraine were “clearly a genocide” and called on U.N. member nations to call out Russia’s attacks on Ukraine, saying other nations would be next.
💽 https://x.com/PaulaChertok/status/1704211368390365247?s=20/photo/1
⋙ 🐣 RT @PaulaChertok Zelensky: Terrorists grps abduct children to pressure their families & societies. But never before has mass kidnapping & deportation become govt policy…100,000s CHILDREN… Deported to Russia… Taught to hate Ukraine. All ties w/ their families broken. This is clearly a genocide.
🐣 RT @SenSchumer WATCH: I’m standing with @AOC, @SunriseMvmt, and more to call on President Biden to create a new Civilian Climate Corps through executive action to create pathways to middle-class, union jobs and reinvigorate our sense of shared purpose in the fight against climate change.
🐣 RT @NBCNews Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell warns that government shutdowns have “always been a loser for Republicans politically” as Congress faces a Sept. 30 deadline to fund the government.
⋙ NBCNews: McConnell warns that shutdowns have ‘always been a loser for Republicans’ https://tinyurl.com/2996r522
// The Senate Republican leader said he supports House Speaker Kevin McCarthy “because he’s trying to avoid a government
🐣 RT @ProjectLincoln Our new ad is about a President who led the most successful economic comeback in the world. It’s about a compassionate leader who made America respected on the world stage again. It’s a story about the work President Biden has done for our country, and everyone should see it.
💽 https://x.com/ProjectLincoln/status/1704254038059938073?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @JakeSullivan46 We launched the Partnership for Atlantic Cooperation with 32 countries across 4 continents. It is the first time so many Atlantic countries have come together to work on shared priorities like science & technology, ocean economy, & climate change.
🐣 RT @Gerashchenko_en “Each decade Russia starts a new war. Parts of Moldova and Georgia remain occupied. Russia turned Syria into ruins. And if not Russia, the chemical weapons would have never been used there, in Syria. ¤ Russia has almost swallowed Belarus. It is obviously threatening Kazakhstan and other Baltic states. And the goal of the present war against Ukraine is to turn our lands, our people, our lives, our resources into a weapon against you.” – President Zelensky at the UN General Assembly.
💽 https://x.com/Gerashchenko_en/status/1704211657293967392?s=20/photo/1
🧵 RT @Mylovanov Zelensky speech at the UN in short 1. The most important message was directed to Global South nations with war experience. Zelensky said that we have a genuine chance to end this aggression on the terms of the country attacked and fully reclaim its land and sovereignty. 1/
📌 https://x.com/Mylovanov/status/1704244966334017750?s=20
[ThreadReader:] https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1704244966334017750.html
2. He cautioned against backroom deals with Russia. Zelensky suggested asking Prigozhin about what happens when you rely on Putin’s promises ¤ 3.Zelensky softly criticized the UN for being unable to maintains security in the world 2/
4. Zelensky reminded people that Ukraine surrendered its nuclear arsenal to Russia at the request of the West. But that it is Russia who should have been disarmed—terrorists shouldn’t have nukes.3/
5. Zelensky highlighted Russia’s tactic of weaponizing food shortages by targeting Ukrainian ports, impacting global food prices from Africa to Southeast Asia. 4/
He thanked nations that backed Ukraine’s grain initiatives, urging ongoing support to counteract Russia’s attempts to destabilize food markets, pointed out that Ukraine has launched an export corridor defying Russian threats. 5/
But he also talked about wavering among some European allies: “And it is alarming to see how … some of our friends in Europe, play out solidarity in a political theater – making a thriller from the grain. … but in fact they are helping set the stage to a Moscow actor.” 6/
6. Zelensky warned that Russia is escalating its weaponization of energy, now including nuclear energy. He talked of Russia’s actions with Ukraine’s Zaporizhzhia power plant, raising concerns about the lack of global security measures to counter such radiation threats. 7/
7. Russia has been kidnapping and deporting tens of thousands of Ukrainian children, a crime for which an ICC warrant has been issued for Putin. He warned that these children are being taught to hate Ukraine, severing family ties, and said this amounts to genocide.8/
8. Zelensky warned that Russia’s weaponization of hatred isn’t limited to Ukraine, citing its actions in Moldova, Georgia, and Syria, and threats to Belarus, Kazakhstan, and the Baltic states. 9/
He cautioned that if Russia’s aggression succeeds, it will undermine the international rules-based order. Zelensky: “Many seats in the General Assembly Hall may become empty if Russia succeeds with its treachery and aggression” 10X
🐣 RT @KyivIndependent President Volodymyr Zelensky said in his speech at the U.N. General Assembly on Sept. 19 that Russia’s war against Ukraine poses a threat to global security as the Kremlin weaponizes energy and food against nations across the world.
⋙ KyivIndependent: Zelensky at UN: Russia’s aggression poses threat beyond Ukraine https://tinyurl.com/5y6f96w7
WaPo: Zelensky opens U.S. visit with a warning: ‘evil cannot be trusted’ https://tinyurl.com/4ab334v4
// The Ukrainian leader, with appearances at the U.N. and in Washington, aims to solidify support as portions of the world — and some in Congress — seek to move on
🐣 RT @maria_avdv Ukraine gave up its third largest nuclear arsenal. The world then decided Russia should become a keeper of such power. Yet history shows it was Russia who deserved nuclear disarmament the most, back in the 1990s. And Russia deserves it now: terrorists have no right to hold nuclear weapons. No right! But truly not the nukes are the scariest now. While nukes remain in place, the mass destruction is gaining its momentum. The aggressor is weaponizing many other thing and those things are used not only against our country, but against all of yours as well. ¤ Powerful speech of President Zelensky at the UN General Assembly
💽 https://x.com/maria_avdv/status/1704204043373994081?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @Gerashchenko_en “No nation wants this war to end more than Ukraine… But Russia alone, Russia alone bears responsibility for this war. Russia alone has the power to end this war immediately. And as Russia alone, it stands in the way of peace, because Russia’s price for peace is Ukraine’s capitulation, Ukraine’s territory and Ukraine’s children.” – President Biden at UN General Assembly. ¤ Nebenzya’s behavior in the beginning of the video is telling.
💽 https://x.com/Gerashchenko_en/status/1704185846482530327?s=20/photo/1
💙 🐣 RT @ProjectLincoln Now more than ever, a leader like President Biden is needed. Governing for all of America and putting country first, his dignity and diplomacy are healing our nation. We know it and the numbers prove it: President Biden is good for our country.
💽 https://x.com/ProjectLincoln/status/1704118146813325533?s=20/photo/1
⭕ 18 Sep 2023
WaPo, Max Boot: The Ukraine war is revolutionizing military technology. Whoever masters it wins. https://tinyurl.com/54whhakf
// drones, Starlink
🐣 RT @DianeBernaerts Is trump asking for the death penalty if he’s not acquitted???
⋙ 🐣 RT @GaryD01 Looks like freedom is not going to happen.
[TextLink:] https://x.com/DianeBernaerts/status/1703876170100388277?s=20/photo/1
[Text:] 🐣 RT @realDonaldTrump “Give me Freedom or give me Death”
DOD (Feb): Defense Officials: U.S. Ensures Accountability of Systems Supplied to Ukraine https://tinyurl.com/ycy7rsr2 “Defense Department IG Robert P. Storch testified that within the past year, the DOD Office of Inspector General completed five Ukraine-related oversight projects.”
🐣 RT @tribelaw This thread by the great @judgeluttig leaves no doubt that the President is indeed covered by the Disqualification Clause, something the Constitution’s text, history, and common sense all make clear.
⋙🧵 RT @judgeluttig There is simply no basis in constitutional interpretation, reason, or logic for concluding from the constitutional fact that the president nominates and appoints “Officers of the United States” under Article II, Section 2, Clause 2, that the president is not [] “an officer of the United States” for purposes of the Disqualification Clause of Section 3 of the Fourteenth Amendment. Such is constitutional non sequitur. Under the Constitution, the president holds the “Office of the President of the United States.” […]
📌 https://x.com/judgeluttig/status/1703840471485718773?s=20
[ThreadReader:] https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1703840471485718773.html
WaPo Editorial: How to wage the financial war against Russia’s economy https://tinyurl.com/u4htmzju
NewRepublic: Frozen: DeSantis’s Biggest Donor Ices Him Out Over Disney Idiocy https://tinyurl.com/yr8nupwh
// Ron DeSantis has failed to secure the support of his biggest billionaire donor thanks to his feud with Disney.
Hedge fund CEO Ken Griffin told CNBC, in an interview that will air Monday night, that he is disappointed with all of the Republican candidates and has not decided which one he will back. Griffin highlighted DeSantis in particular.
“I don’t know his strategy,” Griffin said. “It’s not clear to me what voter base he is intending to appeal to.”
Griffin was DeSantis’s biggest donor during the 2022 election, giving $5 million to his gubernatorial reelection campaign. Griffin also repeatedly said he would “love” to see DeSantis run for president in 2024. ¤ But now he’s suddenly changed his mind.
One of Griffin’s biggest issues is DeSantis’s battle with Disney. “The ongoing battle with Disney, I think, is pointless,” Griffin said. “It doesn’t reflect well on the ethos of Florida.”
DeSantis has been locked in a bizarre and increasingly ridiculous battle with Disney for more than a year. When the company’s then chairman condemned DeSantis’s “Don’t Say Gay” law last year, DeSantis retaliated by stripping the park of its autonomous governing powers and installing a leadership board of his own allies.
Disney sued DeSantis in April, alleging that he weaponized the government against the company’s free speech rights—and the lawsuit cites extensively from DeSantis’s own memoir. The two parties continue to engage in weird legal tit for tats.
WaPo: Former DOJ attorney acted under Trump’s direction, his lawyer says https://tinyurl.com/2jvd7ywa
// Jeffrey Clark did not appear at the hearing, where he is seeking to move his Fulton County election interference case on the grounds that he was acting in his federal capacity
🐣 RT @ukraine_world “We are protecting the values of the whole world. And it is Ukrainians who pay the highest price. We are really fighting for our freedom, we are dying. We are not fiction, we are not a book. We are really fighting a nuclear power that threatens to destroy the world”, Zelenskyy.
🐣 RT @FBI Russian International Money Launderer Arrested for Illicitly Procuring Large Quantities of U.S.-Manufactured Dual-Use Military Grade Microelectronics for Russian Elites
[TextLink:] https://x.com/FBI/status/1703884164661977578?s=20/photo/1
[Text:] Today’s charges demonstrate the FBI’s ability to leverage its international presence and partnerships to stop the illegal transfer of dual-use technology to Russia. As alleged in the charges, Marchenko and his co-conspirators engaged in an elaborate, fraudulent scheme to smuggle military-grade technology with the potential to harm U.S. national security. The FBI and our partners will never waver in our commitment to keep Americans safe.
🐣 RT @BradMossEsq Trump can argue about how the PRA insulates him from the Espionage Act until the end of time. It’s the obstruction that will bring him down.
[TextLink:] https://x.com/BradMossEsq/status/1703872547639423000?s=20/photo/1
⋙ 🐣 RT @jonkarl This is big — Trump secretary Molly Michael told federal investigators that Trump wrote her notes – to-do lists! – on the back of documents marked classified, using the documents as if they were scrap paper, according to sources familiar with her statements. https://tinyurl.com/59p29d22
💙 🐣 RT @United24media 💬 President Zelenskyy was asked whether Ukraine could give up a portion of its territory in exchange for peace.
💽 https://x.com/United24media/status/1703884094633869711?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @ZelenskaUA Arrived in New York together with @ZelenskyyUa to participate in the 78th session of @UN General Assembly. It will be about restoring trust and global solidarity. And 🇺🇦 has a lot to say about this. So important meetings are ahead. Solidarity — our main weapon against aggression.
🖼 https://x.com/ZelenskaUA/status/1703874485336551866?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @ MuellerSheWrote 🚨🚨BREAKING: From ABC, when Trump heard the FBI. wanted to interview his aide Molly Michael, he said to her “YOU DON’T KNOW ANYTHING ABOUT THE BOXES.” ¤ That is witness tampering/suborning perjury/obstruction of justice. 1/
⋙ ABCNews: Trump wrote to-do lists for assistant on White House documents marked classified: Sources https://tinyurl.com/59p29d22
// Molly Michael told investigators about the documents, according to sources.
🐣 📋 RT @SteveRattner [9/12/2023] The US produced more energy in 2022 than any year on record. ¤ If Biden is waging a “war on domestic energy,” he’s not trying very hard.
◕ https://x.com/SteveRattner/status/1701709126126948667?s=20/photo/1
⋙ 🐣 RT @LeaderMcConnell The Biden Administration’s war on domestic energy developments hurts working families and drives up fuel costs across the country. America should be leading in energy innovation, not relying on hostile foreign regimes to keep our engines running.
🐣 RT @PoliticsVerse_ BREAKING: A judge today has set hearing for October 30th, aiming for ruling by Thanksgiving to REMOVE Trump from the ballot in Colorado for 2024.
MilwaukeeJS, Norm Eisen: Wisconsin impeachment threat has no merit in law. That won’t stop Robin Vos from trying. https://tinyurl.com/2352mjmk The WI GOP wants to impeach a new judge who might rule against the very gerrymandered map which gives them their majority
// The problem for Robin Vos is that the impeachment threat is unjustified by any reasonable standard
The ultimate goal of impeachment is insidious: The most extreme gerrymandered Republican state legislature in the nation would unconstitutionally impeach a state supreme court justice, for the express purpose of preventing her from voting on a case that may undo the extreme gerrymander that keeps those same legislators in office. If this effort succeeds, there would be nothing left of an independent judiciary in Wisconsin: whenever the legislature didn’t like how a judge ruled, it could simply remove him or her with a simple majority vote in the Assembly. It would be farcical if it were not so frightening.
🐣 RT @RonFilipkowski So Trump confesses to jury tampering. Good for Jack Smith and Judge Chutkan to know.
[TextLink:] https://x.com/RonFilipkowski/status/1703818969965006860?s=20/photo/1
[Text:] @realDonald Trump Yes, it is true that my intervention through TRUTH SOCIAL saved Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton from going down at the hands of Democrats and some Republicans, headed by PAUL RINO (Ryan), Karl Rove, and others, almost all of whom came
back to reason when confronted with the facts. Ken has been a great A.G., and now he can go back to work for the wonderful people of Texas. It was my honor to have helped correct this
injustice!
⋙ 🐣 RT @RonFilipkowski I think this is a good place to put this.
⋙⋙ 🐣 RT @RonFilipkowski [6/5/2021] Texas AG Ken Paxton said yesterday that if he hadn’t been successful with lawsuits to block mail-in ballots, Trump definitely would have lost the election in Texas.
💽 https://x.com/RonFilipkowski/status/1703821830425915854?s=20/photo/1
🧵 RT @MattGertz John Solomon inadvertently detonated the House impeachment case. Last month, he published a State Dept. briefing memo which irrefutably proves that it was U.S. policy to seek Viktor Shokin’s removal at the time Biden was pushing for it as VP.
📌 [TextLink:] https://x.com/MattGertz/status/1703790566998225314?s=20/photo/1
⋙ MMFA: John Solomon inadvertently detonated the House impeachment case https://tinyurl.com/43p26t96 “The memos show that Biden, in seeking Shokin’s firing, was acting consistent with U.S. policy rather than freelancing to help his son”
⋙ The right has claimed for years that when Biden told Ukraine’s leaders in December 2015 that the U.S. would not release $1 billion in loan guarantees unless they fired Shokin, the country’s prosecutor general, he was acting to benefit Hunter by halting his purported Burisma probe
⋙ Contemporaneous reports and testimony have long showed that this is wrong: Biden was carrying out U.S. policy, Shokin had been widely faulted by Western governments for failing to prosecute corruption, and his Burisma probe had stalled.
⋙ But the document Solomon published — a briefing memo prepared for Biden for the trip — confirms this. It shows Biden was prepped to urge Ukraine’s leaders that reform required “removal of Prosecutor General Shokin, who is widely regarded as an obstacle to fighting corruption.”
⋙ The tick-tock of how Biden came to use the particular strategy of leveraging the loan guarantee is interesting but fundamentally irrelevant: The memos show that Biden, in seeking Shokin’s firing, was acting consistent with U.S. policy rather than freelancing to help his son.
🐣 RT @SarahAshtonLV After being swamped with Russian lies, a sitting US Senator questioned my role in Ukraine. ¤ Below is my response. ¤ First though, I asked for the expedited delivery of ATACMS from the United States. ¤ Watch below:
💽 https://x.com/SarahAshtonLV/status/1703774307837432124?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @nexta_tv #China has stopped supplying drones to the #Russian Federation ¤ It is prohibited to import drones weighing 4 kg or more or with a maximum takeoff weight of 7 kg with a flight duration of more than 30 minutes from China to Russia from September 1. Also under the ban are UAVs capable of “carrying cargo with the function of dropping or with the possibility of securing such a device.” ¤ In addition, China has restricted the supply of a number of important drone components.
🐣 RT @EmbassyofRussia⚡️ NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg directly admitted Russia’s special military operation was launched due to #NATO aggression.
💬 “President Putin went to war to prevent NATO, more NATO, close to his borders” 👇
💽 https://x.com/EmbassyofRussia/status/1703764228589383922?s=20/photo/1
⋙ 🐣 NATO allows sovereign countries to join it. ¤ That is expansion, not aggression; NATO is a defensive alliance
WaPo: U.S. and Iran trade prisoners, signaling partial thaw in relations https://tinyurl.com/mv6r6xhx
// The deal, which includes a provision to unlock $6 billion in frozen Iranian funds, marks a major breakthrough for the bitter adversaries
⭕ 17 Sep 2023
≣ NBCNews: Full transcript: Read Kristen Welker’s interview with Trump https://tinyurl.com/59ajwr8r
// NBC’s “Meet the Press” moderator Kristen Welker conducted a wide-ranging interview with former President Donald Trump.
🐣 RT @60Minutes 60 Minutes’ Scott Pelley asks Ukrainian President Zelenskyy: “Can you give up any part of Ukraine for peace?” https://cbsn.ws/3RodvuC
⋙ 60Minutes: Zelenskyy on Ukrainian people: “All I can give them is victory” https://tinyurl.com/3yfur2ep
// ≣ Interview transcript; Watch 60 Minutes Sundays on @CBS, or anytime on @paramountplus and https://cbsn.ws/34D1mLY
🐣 RT @60Minutes “They must know if you cut off our power, deprive us of electricity, deprive us of water, deprive us of gasoline, you need to know, we have to right to do it (to you),” says Ukrainian President Zelenskyy. https://cbsn.ws/3EJUCe4
💽 https://x.com/60Minutes/status/1703560346479329596?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @ ChuckPfarrer SOUTH BAKHMUT /1330 UTC 17 SEPT/ Ukrainian forces are now reported to be in control at Klischiivka and Andrivka. Heavy fighting continues at Kurdiumivka. UKR’s operations in the Bakhmut Area of Operations (AO) continue be assessed as fixative and attritional. Fighting N and S of the urban is attriting RU materiel and manpower to no purpose.
Despite Bakhmut’s minor status as a transportation hub, with the intersection of HWYs and a N-S railroad, Russian forces cannot advance on either the H-32 or M-03 HWYs as long as UKR firmly holds the natural bastion of Chasiv War. RU losses in the Bakhmut AO are believed to be in excess of 40,000.
Russia’s continued fixation on the city, and UKR’s adroit use of continued ‘pressure’ attacks have served to divert and fix in place considerable RU military assets that could be used elsewhere.
UKR armed forces spokesperson @SarahAshtonLV,reports today that by contesting Bakhmut, UKR has pinned more than 52 thousand Russian personnel, approximately 274 tanks, a thousand armored vehicles and 150 artillery systems into what is a useless fight over a place of zero strategic or tactical significance.
🌎 https://x.com/ChuckPfarrer/status/1703403531863048204?s=20/photo/1
TheGuardian, Timothy Snyder: Elon Musk likes to think he saved us from Armageddon. He’s just brought it closer https://tinyurl.com/yfxzum9t
// Whatever his new biography says, by giving into Russia’s nuclear blackmail the X boss can only encourage more threats from Putin
… Not the precis of a favourably reviewed work of dystopian fiction but a scenario presented as though it happened, in a biography of Elon Musk and its press campaign. Although neither Musk nor his biographer can get the story straight, it is true that the multibillionaire CEO of X (the platform formerly known as Twitter) refused to extend the coverage of his Starlink satellite communications for the Ukrainian armed forces last autumn.
Musk did so because Russians (sometimes he says Putin) told him that a Ukrainian attack on part of Ukraine’s own territory (the Crimean peninsula, occupied by Russia) would lead to a Russian nuclear response. This was a lie. Ukraine has carried out dozens of operations in Crimea, some of them quite spectacular. It seems absurd to have to write this sentence, but none of them led to nuclear war. The net effect of such operations was de-escalatory, as such attacks reduce Russia’s capability to attack Ukrainian territory. …
After 19 months of war, most observers have understood that Russia’s ceaseless nuclear threats are a psychological operation, an attempt to frighten Ukraine and its allies into surrender. The claim that Musk prevented escalation repackages Russian propaganda, and helps it to find a new audience. It provides a platform to Russian lies meant to demoralise.
In fact, Musk’s actions have increased the chances of nuclear war. There is always some risk, which Russia increased by initiating a major conflict. Ukraine then decreased the probability by ignoring Russian nuclear blackmail. If Ukraine had surrendered, then the lesson for the rest of the world would have been clear: you must have nuclear weapons, either to blackmail or to avoid being blackmailed. The Ukrainians took this decision under stress, since if a weapon were detonated it would be on their territory. Musk, who was in no danger of any kind, chose instead to give in to the nuclear blackmail, thereby encouraging more of it. […]
🐣 RT @anno1540 Russia’s war against Ukraine will not end in the near future. — Stoltenberg called to prepare for a long war ¤ “Most wars last longer than expected when they first started,” the NATO Secretary General said. According to him, if Ukrainians stop fighting, Ukraine will cease to exist.
🐣 RT @NOELreports Minister of Foreign Affairs of Russia, Sergei Lavrov commented on the role of the US in the war. ¤ “No matter what the US says, they are leading this war, they are putting up weapons, ammunition, intelligence, data from satellites. They are waging war against us,” Lavrov said.
🐣 RT @harryjsisson Electing Joe Biden again in 2024 is the single most important thing we must do to save our democracy and preserve America. This is not an exaggeration or hyperbolic, it’s the truth. Let’s defeat fascism and extremism once and for all.
🐣 RT @USAmbKyiv Encouraged to hear last night that two civilian ships have entered a Black Sea port to load nearly 20,000 tons of grain for African and Asian countries — the first ships to arrive since Russia’s cynical withdrawal from the Black Sea Grain Initiative. Russia’s response? Dawn attacks on the Odesa region. While Ukrainian grain feeds the world, Russia wages war on the civilian infrastructure needed to do it.
🐣 📋 RT @GlasnostGone Putin’s imperial folly in #Ukraine is costing a Tsars fortune. Forbes estimates Russia’s spent about $167.3 billion on the war, with $34+ billion in hardware destroyed. Now remember, a third of Russians don’t even have running water in their homes. [Ru link]
🐣 RT @OleksiyDanilov The complete or partial elimination of the russian Black Sea fleet, which is a solvable problem, would significantly accelerate the process of finding a way out of the war in russia. This could be a good demonstration of the russian army’s lack of capabilities to adequately counter Western technologies, which would paint a very distressing scene of further events. ¤ More – in a new op-ed for @ukrpravda_news …
⋙ PravdaUA, Oleksiy Danilov: Strategic inflection point https://tinyurl.com/ff74srkv “Any cessation of the war without russia’s defeat will be considered by authoritarian regimes as a putin victory, and this will signal the beginning of conflicts and wars for territories of various kinds and status”
⭕ 16 Sep 2023
🐣 RT @CAgovernor California is suing Big Oil for lying about climate change. ¤ We’re taking five major oil companies to court for wreaking havoc on our planet and lying to people about the dangers of fossil fuels. ¤ It’s time they pay their fair share.
🐣 RT @TheSWPrincess Stop acting like Biden would do that just because Trump dangled pardons for his co-conspirators. ¤ House Republicans have been investgating President Biden since they took a slight majority in the House, and they haven’t found ANY evidence that Biden did anything wrong.
🖼 https://x.com/TheSWPrincess/status/1703223633009598568?s=20/photo/1
// 🐣 RT @glennkirschner2 Beginning on Oct. 23, we will see the evidence of Trump’s crimes in a televised trial. And the good news is, Trump’s lawyers will not be involved in the trial, so the evidence incriminating Trump will be largely unchallenged – an important development on the justice front.
🐣 RT @djrothkopf The job to be done in 2024 is defeating the likely GOP candidate, Trump. A natural question for those seeking to save our democracy is what is the best ticket to do that. A very compelling case can be made that ticket is Biden-Harris. But more importantly, that is going to be the ticket. That is a certainty. So, we need to put that question behind us. Given the importance of the job to be done, the only thing Dems should be focused on now is how do we ensure Biden-Harris can win. That should be the one and only discussion and focus among Democrats and all who want to preserve our system of government. No other debate is constructive.
🐣 RT @mehdirhasan 77-year-old Trump last night was so confused and incoherent that he suggested Obama was his opponent in 2024, also suggested he beat Obama in 2016, and seemed to think we were on the verge of Word War *2*. ¤ I can only imagine the headlines if 80-year-old Biden had said this.
🐣 RT @MikeSington “We would be in World War II.” Trump has lost it, he’s demonstrating how cognitively impaired he is. Watch him ramble, stumble on his words, blank out, then turn to reading the teleprompter to save himself, reading it intently. And he still misspeaks. (Video: Newsmax)
💽 https://x.com/MikeSington/status/1703031975173627967?s=20/photo/1
📔 Recommendations from: The Tyranny of the Minority: Why American Democracy Reached the Breaking Point (2023) by Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt et al (Harvard)
UPHOLD THE RIGHT TO VOTE.
The right to vote is a core element of any modern definition of democracy. In representative democracies, citizens elect their leaders. Leaders can only be elected democratically if all citizens are able to vote. So if voting is costly or difficult for some citizens-if they have to stand in line for hours or travel long distances to vote elections cannot be fully democratic. In most democracies, this is not an issue. In a democracy, people are supposed to vote. So most democratic societies grant citizens a constitutional (or at least statutory) right to vote. […]Voting in America should be as straightforward as it is in democracies in Europe and elsewhere. This means we should do the following:
1. Pass a constitutional amendment establishing a right to vote for all citizens, which would provide a solid basis to litigate voting restrictions.
2. Establish automatic registration in which all citizens are registered to vote when they turn eighteen. This could be accompanied by the automatic distribution of national voting ID cards to all citizens. The burdens of the registration process should not deter anyone from voting.
3. Expand early voting and easy mail-in voting options for citizens of all states. It should be easy for all Americans to cast ballots.
4. Make Election Day a Sunday or a national holiday, so that work responsibilities do not discourage Americans from voting.
5. Restore voting rights (without additional fines or fees) to all ex-felons who have served their time.
6. Restore national-level voting rights..Court struck down in 2013, we should reinstate federal oversight of election rules and administration. This could apply only in states and localities with a history of voting rights violations, following the VRA model, or to all jurisdictions equally, following the model of the 1890 Lodge bill.
7. Replace the current system of partisan electoral administration with one in which state and local electoral administration is in the hands of professional, nonpartisan officials. This will help ensure fairness in the updating of voter rolls, access to polling places, and the voting and vote-counting processes. Nearly every other established democracy, from France and Germany to Brazil, Costa Rica, Japan, and South Africa, has nonpartisan referees to oversee elections.
ENSURE THAT ELECTION OUTCOMES REFLECT MAJORITY PREFERENCES.
Those who win the most votes should win elections. Nothing in democratic theory justifies allowing losers to win elections. The political philosopher John Stuart Mill wrote that democracy should “give] the powers of government in all cases to the numerical majority.” Unfortunately in U.S. presidential, Senate, and some state legislative elections, this frequently does not occur. Several steps can be taken to ensure that those who win electoral majorities actually govern.8. Abolish the Electoral College and replace it with a national popular vote. No other
presidential democracy permits the loser of the popular vote to win the presidency. Such a constitutional amendment very nearly passed as recently as 1970.9. Reform the Senate so that the number of senators elected per state is more proportional to the population of each state (as in Germany). California and Texas should elect more senators than Vermont and Wyoming. Because Article V of the U.S. Constitution stipulates that “no state, without its Consent, may be deprived of its equal suffrage in the Senate” (a form of liberum veto), we understand the barriers to such a reform are enormous. But because the structure of the Senate so subverts basic democratic principles, and with such great consequence, any list of important democratizing reforms must include it.
10. Replace “first-past-the-post” electoral rules and single- member districts for the House of Representatives and state legislatures with a form of proportional representation in which voters elect multiple representatives from larger electoral districts and parties win seats in proportion to the share of the vote they win. This would require repeal of the 1967 Uniform Congressional District Act, which mandates single-member districts for House elections. By ensuring that the distribution of seats in Congress more accurately reflects the way Americans vote, a proportional representation system would prevent the problem of “manufactured majorities,” in which parties that win fewer votes in an election capture a majority of seats in the legislature. As the political scientist Lee Drutman writes, a proportional representation system “treats all voters equally, regardless of where they live. And it treats all parties the same, regardless of where their voters live.”
11. Eliminate partisan gerrymandering via the creation of independent redistricting commissions such as those used in California, Colorado, and Michigan.
12. Update the Apportionment Act of 1929, which fixed the House of Representatives at 435, and return to the original design of a House that expands in line with population growth. At present, the ratio of voters to representatives in the House is nearly five times higher than that of any European democracy. Expanding the size of Congress would bring representatives closer to the people, and, if the Electoral College and the current Senate structure remain in place, mitigate the small-state bias of the Electoral College.
EMPOWER GOVERNING MAJORITIES.
Finally, Americans must take steps to empower legislative majorities by weakening counter-majoritarian legislative and judicial institutions.13. Abolish the Senate filibuster (a reform that requires neither statutory nor constitutional change), thereby eliminating the ability of partisan minorities to repeatedly and permanently thwart legislative majorities. In no other established democracy is such a minority veto routinely employed.
14. Establish term limits (perhaps twelve or eighteen years) for Supreme Court justices to regularize the Supreme Court appointment process so that every president has the same number of appointments per term. Such a reform would place the United States in the mainstream of all other major democracies in the world. This would also limit the court’s intergenerational counter-majoritarianism.
15. Make it easier to amend the Constitution by eliminating the requirement that three-quarters of state legislatures ratify any proposed amendment. Requiring two-thirds supermajorities in both the House of Representatives and the Senate for a constitutional amendment would bring America in line with most other established democracies, including federal democracies like Germany and India, as well as many U.S. states.
These reforms would have a simple yet powerful effect: they would allow majorities to win power and govern. proposed reforms help stave off minority rule, but they would also eliminate constitutional protectionism, unleashing the competitive dynamics of democracy. Importantly, the reforms would compel the Republicans to build broader coalitions in order to win. In America today, these coalitions would necessarily be more diverse, which would dilute the influence of the most extremist elements in the Republican Party. A more diverse Republican Party capable of winning national majorities fair and square might be bad news in electoral terms for the Democratic Party, but it would be very good news for American democracy.
🧵 RT @With__Ukraine During its assault on Mariupol from Feb to May 2022, the Russian army used “scorched earth” tactics, trying to capture the city at any cost, in particular, by deliberately destroying critical infrastructure and residential buildings.1/
📌 https://x.com/With__Ukraine/status/1703044064508047455?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @ KyivIndependent ⚡️Blinken says it’s up to Ukraine how to use US-provided weapons. ¤ While Washington “does not encourage nor enable” Ukraine to use U.S.-supplied weapon systems outside of the country, it is “fundamentally” Kyiv’s decision how to use those weapons, U.S. State Secretary Antony Blinken said at a press conference.
⋙ 🐣 RT @KyivIndependent “And they (Ukrainians) have to make judgments about what can be most effective in working to regain their full sovereignty, their territorial integrity,” added the official.
⋙⋙ KyivIndependent: Blinken says it’s up to Ukraine how to use US-provided weapons https://tinyurl.com/2s4yw73j
While Washington “does not encourage nor enable” Ukraine to use U.S.-supplied weapon systems outside of the country, it is “fundamentally” Kyiv’s decision how to use those weapons, U.S. State Secretary Antony Blinken said at a press conference.
A journalist asked Blinken about the U.S.’s hesitation to provide Ukraine with long-range Army Tactical Missile Systems (ATACMS) allegedly caused by fears Kyiv would use them to strike Russian soil.
“When it comes to how Ukrainians use these systems, the targeting decisions are theirs. They’re not ours,” the official replied. ¤ “And they (Ukrainians) have to make judgments about what can be most effective in working to regain their full sovereignty, their territorial integrity,” added the official.
Blinken emphasized that the provision of weapon systems is insufficient to ensure Ukraine can deter Russian military aggression. ¤ “Ukrainians have to be able to use them effectively, and sometimes with new, sophisticated systems, that requires training, and of course we’re engaged in that. They need to be able to maintain them… and then to fit into a coherent military program that makes sense in helping Ukraine achieve its objectives,” he explained.
Ukrainian officials have spent months lobbying the U.S. government for ATACMS, which can travel over 300 kilometers. […]
⭕ 15 Sep 2023
✅ WaPo, Glenn Kessler: Inside VP Biden’s linking of a loan to a Ukraine prosecutor’s ouster https://tinyurl.com/2pdtu3tw Biden got Poroshenko to fire Shokin, not to HELP Burisma, but because Shokin’s office had ENABLED corruption, including by Burisma’s president
🐣 RT @emptywheel BREAKING: The House Judiciary Committee is repeating Russian propaganda because he hasn’t been able to find any evidence with which to sully Trump’s opponent. ¤ A SHAMEFUL betrayal of his country.
[TextLink:] https://x.com/emptywheel/status/1702798149570474162?s=20/photo/1
[Text:] 🐣 RT @Jim_Jordan Remember: Burisma executives requested Hunter Biden get “help from D.C.” to address “government pressure.”
Joe Biden then threatened to withhold aide from Ukraine unless Ukrainian Prosecutor General Viktor Shokin was fired,
Who just happened to be investigating Burisma!
⋙ 🐣 Except Shokin WASN’T investigating Burisma. ¤ Joe Biden (representing the US and other Western interests) carried the message that they needed a prosecutor who actually WOULD prosecute corruption. ¤ I can’t believe we’re going through this all again.
🐣 RT @ peterbakernyt It says something about the way things have been going for Biden lately that being targeted for impeachment was not the worst news of a tough week. But Biden and his team have grown accustomed to the gyrations of Washington and want allies to calm down.
⋙ NYT, Peter Baker: Biden’s Tough Week: The President Faces Personal and Political Setbacks https://tinyurl.com/mrksen2z //➔ the usual Schadenfreude disguised as empathy
// In the past seven days, President Biden was targeted for impeachment and his son was indicted. That was just the start.
🐣 RT @kyledcheney Taken together, the filings are an extraordinary assessment by prosecutors that a former US president poses a unique danger to the justice system, spreading “knowing lies” in ways that stoke threats and actual violence — but continuing to do so anyway.
⋙ Politico: Jack Smith seeks gag order on Trump https://tinyurl.com/fnva3du6
// On Friday afternoon, U.S. District Court Judge Tanya Chutkan unsealed filings revealing the government’s week-old request.
🐣 RT @RonFilipkowski Trump, being Trump, decides to respond to Jack Smith’s motion for gag order in a way that perfectly bolsters their argument. His lawyers can stop writing that response they planned to file.
🐣 RT @AntiToxicPeople He seriously belongs locked away in a psych ward. What a limitless, self destructive sociopath maniac. Unbelievable he would post this now, even for him.
[TextLink:] https://x.com/AntiToxicPeople/status/1702810874246037682?s=20/photo/1
[Text:] @realDonaldTrump Biden Prosecutor, Deranged Jack Smith, has asked the Court to limit 45th President, and leading Republican Nominee (by more than 50 points, & beating Dems!) DONALD J. TRUMP’S, PUBLIC STATEMENTS. So, I’m campaigning for President against an incompetent person who has WEAPONIZED the DOJ & FBI to go after his Political Opponent, & I am not allowed to COMMENT? They Leak, Lie, & Sue, & they won’t allow me to SPEAK? How else would I explain that Jack Smith is DERANGED, or Crooked Joe is INCOMPETENT?
WaPo, Ken Buck: My fellow Republicans: One disgraceful impeachment doesn’t deserve another https://tinyurl.com/87cyw2aw “Republicans in the House who are itching for an impeachment are relying on an imagined history” //➔ GOP still stuck on firing of Shokin
WaPo: Justice Department asks court for ‘limited’ restrictions on Trump’s words https://tinyurl.com/mdvsw8hx “The govt compared Trump’s behavior to his attempts to keep control of the White House after the 2020 election, which form the basis of the 4 felony charges he faces in DC”
🐣 RT @JoyceWhiteVance “In service of his criminal conspiracies…the defendant sought to erode public faith in the administration of the election & intimidate individuals who refuted his lies. The defendant is now attempting to do the same thing in this criminal case”
⋙ NBC: Special counsel asks for ‘narrow’ gag order for Trump in election interference case https://tinyurl.com/mrpmdprr
// Jack Smith’s office says Trump’s “disparaging and inflammatory attacks” have spurred threats against witnesses and threaten the court process.
🐣 RT @AWeissmann_ Newly unsealed: the motion by Smith to Chutkan re Trump behavior.
🐣 RT @nycsouthpaw Here it is, and as I read it is a motion for a gag order, though it doesn’t use that term, as well as an attempt to regulate the Trump team’s contact with potential jurors.
💙 [CourtDoc:] https://tinyurl.com/yuczpk4y 19p
[Text:] https://x.com/nycsouthpaw/status/1702787325879570875?s=20/photo/1
[Excerpt:] […] Since the indictment in this case, the defendant has spread disparaging and inflammatory public posts on Truth Social on a near-daily basis regarding the citizens of the District of Columbia, the Court, prosecutors, and prospective witnesses. Like his previous public disinformation campaign regarding the 2020 presidential election, the defendant’s recent extrajudicial statements are intended to undermine public confidence in an institution-the judicial system and to undermine confidence in and intimidate individuals the Court, the jury pool, witnesses, and prosecutors.The defendant has posted repeated, inflammatory attacks on the judicial system, the Court, and the citizens of the District of Columbia who comprise the jury pool in this case. The defendant has made baseless claims cited or inserted below. that the justice system is “rigged against him: that the Court is “a fraud dressed up as a judge in Washinoton D C” […]
🐣 RT @ChuckPfarrer FUNCTIONAL KILL: H.I. Sutton’s @CovertShores provides this excellent cutaway view of a RU Kilo Class submarine. Circled is the location of damage inflicted during UKR’s recent strike on the Sevastopol naval station. Note the precision targeting, which heavily damaged the forward torpedo / missile compartment. ¤ Damage to the pressure hull and the complex mechanisms of the boat’s escape trunk and bow tubes have rendered the submarine Rostov non-mission capable for the foreseeable future. Rostov was one of only four missile-capable Kilo class submarines operational in the Black Sea Flotilla.
◕ https://x.com/ChuckPfarrer/status/1702721798255595990?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @SecureDemocracy On #InternationalDayofDemocracy, @LauraLthornton shares her latest piece on democratic backsliding highlighting the urgency of innovation in response to this global threat.
⋙ SecuringDemocracy, Laura Thornton: Innovation is Needed – and Possible https://tinyurl.com/yvyprf6x
[Report:] https://tinyurl.com/2psb3cdb 14p
[…] Democratic backsliding in old, new, rich, and poor democracies has accelerated, as International IDEA, Freedom House, the Economist Intelligence Unit, and Varieties of Democracy (V-DEM) have all studied. Yet they have been slow to respond to the threat by innovating and evolving. Established democracies, such as the United States, are often even more painfully wedded to centuries-old practices that are not fit for purpose today. It is time for a new wave of democracy, rethinking orthodoxy and experimenting with new approaches, innovating, and taking risks, which, fortunately, is already happening in some places that can serve as examples to inspire others.
Publics in democratic nations worldwide increasingly believe that their governing systems favor elites with financial power through overt corruption or legal influence avenues (e.g., lobbying and political action committees). These publics consequently exhibit rising distrust of government and perceive politicians and political parties, gatekeepers to power, as self-interested and unrepresentative. That most party officials and candidates are old, male, rich, and from a dominant ethnic and religious group compounds the problem. In many countries, candidate selection is determined purely by an individual’s donations to a party, not by a competitive contest of ideas and policy on a level playing field. It is not surprising that citizens are unhappy with their representatives and democracy.
Cultural divisions and polarization on traditional-values issues, such as those relevant to women’s rights, immigration, the LGBTQ+ community, and the role of religion, also challenge democracy. Many see cultural changes as threats to hierarchies of power and gravitate toward the transgressive political leader. Tapping into these cleavages, malign forces internally and externally propose alternative governance models. Right-wing authoritarianism is increasing in many countries, with citizens embracing the view that having a strong leader willing to “fight” is more important than protecting individual rights and democratic principles. Fear—of others, change, and difference—makes the simple solutions that illiberal populists promise alluring. Rising domestic authoritarians also have external support, forming alliances and receiving financing from foreign actors aiming to degrade democracy worldwide […]
🐣 RT @ChuckPfarrer KHERSON THEATER /1400 UTC 15 SEP/ UKR authorities order a mandatory evacuation for families with children from settlements along the Dnipro River. The removal of civilians from the front maybe indicative of UKR’s intent to initiate a wide-based offensive operation in the Dnipro river basin. RU movements are also being monitored to determine if the evacuation is the result of an increased RU threat.
🌎 https://x.com/ChuckPfarrer/status/1702680553521127483?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @apmassaro3 Support for Ukrainian victory is the best national security investment we have ever made
[TextLink:] https://x.com/apmassaro3/status/1702670985957191924?s=20/photo/1
// Hudson Institute: “The Top Myths about US Aid to Ukraine”
🐣 RT @wartranslated Interesting from the Russian general and MP Gurulev who took it to Telegram to say that Ukrainians have changed tactics, that they effectively combat minefields, that their drones are endless, and that the Russian counter-battery fire is still ineffective. ¤ We’ve actually heard these things many times before but it is curious to hear this from a top-level official who decided to share this over 3 months after the start of the CO, indicating that things are worsening.
[TextLink:] https://x.com/wartranslated/status/1702662131785544190?s=20/photo/1 -3
🐣 RT @EmbassyofRussia Former #NATO Supreme Allied Commander Wesley Clark on how the #US planned to militarily “democratize” 7 countries in 5 years.
💽 https://x.com/EmbassyofRussia/status/1702650235011395704?s=20/photo/1
🐣 📋 RT @United24media Is it really expensive to help Ukraine? An American senator shared his thoughts.
💽 https://x.com/United24media/status/1702647094949876025?s=20/photo/1
// Romney: 5% of $850B DOD budget goes to Ukr
🐣 RT @officejjsmart 🔥🔥 In Samara, Russia 🇷🇺, factory involved in 🇷🇺 military production is burning to the ground. ¤ The factory, overcome with shame for its role in committing genocide, has chosen to do what is best for humanity, reducing itself to ashes.
💽 https://x.com/officejjsmart/status/1702629372325200337?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @AccountableGOP Trump on taking classified documents: “I’m allowed to have these documents. I’m allowed to take these documents…When I have them, they become unclassified. People think you have to go through a ritual. You don’t, at least in my opinion.”
🐣 RT @wartranslated This is incredible. The 72nd has been the butt of all jokes for months and now they’re completely destroyed. I’m looking forward to the videos from the 3rd Assault Brigade.
⋙ 🐣 RT @yarotrof Ukraine’s Third Storm Brigade on the Bakhmut front says it has encircled and routed Russia’s 72nd Brigade, killing three batallion commanders and the Russian brigade’s intelligence chief as it retook the village of Andriyivka in a two-day operation.
[TextLink:] Ru: https://x.com/wartranslated/status/1702640974055219376?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @tribelaw “A very large portion of my party really doesn’t believe in the Constitution,” Senator Mitt Romney told McKay Coppins, author of a forthcoming Romney biography. That’s why they’re fine with Trump’s threat to “terminate” the Constitution if that’ll help him seize total power.
⭕ 14 Sep 2023
TheHill, Mark Toth and Jonathan Sweet: Putin’s kingdom of the dead https://tinyurl.com/yk9v498k “It is clear both Zelensky and Putin view the Crimean Peninsula as the ‘decisive terrain’ of the war, control of which will decide who wins the war.”
🐣 RT @TWMCLtd Britain’s Military Intelligence suggests another bonus for #Ukraine from this week’s missile attack on the shipyard in occupied #Crimea. ¤ London reckons the repair station itself may be out of action for “many months” in addition to the ruined ship and submarine. ¤ #RussiansGOHOME
[TextLink:] https://x.com/TWMCLtd/status/1702602989804937454?s=20/photo/1
● In the early hours of 13 September 2023, multiple missiles struckthe Sevmorzavod shipyard within Russia’s Black Sea Fleet (BSF) Sevastopol naval base. The landing ship Minsk and Kilo 636.3 class submarine Rostov-na-Donu were hit while undergoingmaintenance in dry docks.
● Despite the Russian Ministry of Defence downplaying the damage to the vessels, open-source evidence indicates the Minsk has almost certainly been functionally destroyed, while the Rostov has likely suffered catastrophic damage. Any effort to return the submarine to service is likely to take many years and cost hundreds of millions of dollars.
● There is a realistic possibility that the complex task of removing the wreckage from the dry docks will place them out of use for many months. This would present the BSF with a significant challenge in sustaining fleet maintenance. The loss of the Rostov removes one of the BS’s four cruise-missile capable submarines which have played a major role in striking Ukraine and projecting Russian power across the Black Sea and Eastern Mediterranean.
🐣 RT @Victorshi2020 Keep in mind, that it’s nearly midnight for Special Counsel Jack Smith on the East Coast, but he still responded to Trump. Full response below. Very punchy, forceful, and how it should be done. Jack Smith isn’t taking any of Trump’s nonsense.
[CourtDoc:] https://tinyurl.com/mrykd9sj 20p
🐣 RT @washingtonpost Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky’s visit to Washington next week was coordinated with the Biden administration in a joint push to Congress to provide $24 billion in aid, according to a person familiar with the matter.
⋙ WaPo: Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to visit Washington next week https://tinyurl.com/bdpv4dwm
// Zelensky’s visit was coordinated with the Biden administration in a joint push to Congress to provide $24 billion in aid, according to a person
🐣 RT @washingtonpost The Biden administration has asked the Supreme Court to pause a lower court’s order that restricts the White House, FBI and key public health agencies from efforts to “coerce or significantly encourage” social media companies to remove or suppress posts.
⋙ WaPo: Supreme Court asked to pause limits on White House social media requests https://tinyurl.com/4en6a4b2
// The move comes after a lower court found the White House, FBI and key public health officials probably violated the First Amendment
⋙⋙ 🐣 90% of the proposed injunctions were vacated by the court ~ a win for the govt ¤ the remaining injunction was reworded by the court; the govt seeks clarity over degree to which it can compel/encourage social media from spreading misinformation which may put lives at risk
🐣 RT @ProjectLincoln The “concerned about Biden’s age & health” crowd conveniently ignores Trump is only 3 years younger, overweight, doesn’t read, refers to CEOs by their company’s name, “covfefe”, “misplaces” classified docs, & confuses 9/11 with 7-eleven. ¤ If we missed anything, let us know
⋙ 🐣 RT @ProjectLincoln “Person. Woman. Man. Camera. TV.”, misspells his own wife’s name as “Melanie”, mistakes a picture of the woman he sexually abused with his ex-wife, is delirious about his inauguration size, stares DIRECTLY into a solar eclipse, suggests injecting bleach to treat COVID-19.
⋙ 🐣 RT @ProjectLincoln Boards Air Force One with toilet paper stuck to his shoe, refers to Neo-Nazis as “very fine people”, forgets he awarded Dr. Fauci a Presidential commendation, tries to buy Greenland, books the wrong Four Seasons.
⋙ 🐣 RT @ProjectLincoln Turns on every staffer he once promoted to the public, refers to Thailand as “Thighland”, fumbles a national Covid response that led to millions of deaths, says he’d date his daughter, struggles to drink a glass of water.
🐣 RT @ProjectLincoln Being corrupt is bad; being corrupt and senile is even worse. It’s time for Fox News to tell the truth about who the unfit candidate is.
💽 https://x.com/ProjectLincoln/status/1702366606381163001?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @MuellerSheWrote HAHAHAHA give this a listen real quick.
⋙ 🐣 RT @KevinlyFather WOW!
KELLY: But once you get a subpoena you have to turn them over.
TRUMP: I know this. *pauses* I don’t even know that.
🐣 RT @djrothkopf You’ll recall the bit in the Constitution in which it calls for presidents to be impeached for high crimes, misdemeanors or political revenge.
🐣 RT @AccountableGOP Trump suggests Joe Biden is being impeached by Republicans as retribution for his two impeachments: ¤ “I think had they not done it to me…you wouldn’t have it being done to them.”
💽 https://x.com/djrothkopf/status/1702397780981944428?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @RadioFreeTom Serial confessor confesses again
🐣 RT @AccountableGOP Trump on taking classified documents: “I’m allowed to have these documents. I’m allowed to take these documents…When I have them, they become unclassified. People think you have to go through a ritual. You don’t, at least in my opinion.”
💽 https://x.com/AccountableGOP/status/1702384515207897396?s=20/photo/1
WSJ: U.S. Plans to Sanction Scores of Companies, Individuals Accused of Aiding Russia https://tinyurl.com/37539ua3 “The U.S. on Thursday will sanction around 150 foreign companies and individuals allegedly shipping American technology to Russia”
// The action marks an expanding effort to cut off the flow of goods Moscow needs for its war in Ukraine
🐣 RT @ZaleskiLuke The eight stages of Trump’s guilt:
1. “I didn’t do it”
2. “I didn’t do anything wrong”
3. “I didn’t do anything illegal”
4. “The people accusing me are guilty”
5. “The law is illegal”
6. “Prove it!”
7. “What happened didn’t happen”
8. “It’s fine, I did it and I’ll do it again…”
🐣 RT @randymot4 These systems cannot be replaced and any new equipment will be vulnerable to attack coming in on rail or road (by much more available and numerous Ukraine weapons). This is the Crimea strategy discussed for months that will isolate and then destroy every Russian targhet in Crimea over the next few months. Without adequate air defense, we will see more and more bold attacks all over the pennisula. #RussiaLosingBadly
⋙ 🐣 RT @igorsushko 🔥 INCREDIBLE: Ukrainians report that an entire S-400 air defense complex was destroyed in the night strike on Yevpatoriya in occupied Crimea – worth $1.2 billion. ¤ One S-400 system costs $600 million, so it appears 2 such systems were clustered together in the area?
◕ https://x.com/randymot4/status/1702263426477658274?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @WHCommsDir TODAY: @POTUS to challenge MAGAnomics, the Republican economic plan for the country that cuts taxes for the wealthiest and corporations at the expense of working families, explodes the deficit, and cuts essential benefits. What’s at stake:
⋙ CNBC: Biden to starkly contrast his economic plan with GOP ‘MAGAnomics’ as shutdown looms https://tinyurl.com/ycxk9pew
// The economic address comes in the midst of a budget showdown in Congress.
🐣 RT @arestovych – [tr] Such a problem in Sevastopol.
A diesel submarine (carrying Caliber) and one large landing ship (supplying the Crimean group of forces) are unlikely to be restored someday. ¤ I think the dock itself is not suitable for servicing ships for at least months. ¤ Or maybe forever. ¤ And this despite the fact that their queue for maintenance was stretched out for almost a year. ¤ How did Alla Borisovna sing there? – It’s only the beginning? ..)
⋙ 🐣 RT @arestovych
◕ https://x.com/arestovych/status/1701934038766780917?s=20/photo/1
// chart Ru Navy w recent Ukr successes checked off
🐣 RT @Gerashchenko_en “A united Ukrainian sense of humor that…explains a great deal of your successes” – @stephenfry reflects on the power of laughter he observed during his visit to Ukraine. [Photo Credit:] Olena Zelenska
🐣 RT @LukeDCoffey As Congress debates more aid for Ukraine, here is my latest ‘one-pager’ debunking the popular myths:
❌ Blank checks for Ukraine: FALSE
❌ Not enough oversight: FALSE
❌ Ukraine distracts from China: FALSE
❌ Europe doesn’t do enough: FALSE
Get the facts!👉🏻 https://tinyurl.com/52k8vh75
🐣 RT @ @Make_NAFO_FELLA 🇮🇱 “Israel attacked the Syrian port city of Tartus – it is known about 2 dead and 6 wounded soldiers”, — Reuters
👀 One of the strikes was directed at the military base, which was used by Russia!
🐣 RT @nexta_tv Elon Musk was deceived by Russian Ambassador Antonov, convincing him that Russia would launch a nuclear strike on Ukraine in case of an attack on Crimea. ¤ This was reported by Business Insider with reference to Musk’s biographer Walter Isaacson.
¤ https://x.com/nexta_tv/status/1702046641597940201?s=20
On the night of September 13, Ukraine launched a powerful attack on a military facility in Crimea. It was precisely such a strike, according to Musk, that should have provoked a nuclear war. Therefore, he refused to turn on Starlink in the Crimea region.
In the biography, Isaacson describes the following: When Musk learned that Starlink satellites were being used to control drones, he spoke by phone with officials, including the Russian ambassador to the United States, Anatoly Antonov. ¤ Antonov convinced Musk that an attack on Sevastopol would trigger a nuclear strike from Russia, in accordance with the state’s military doctrine.
🐣 RT @WSJ Previously unreported documents show what Exxon said publicly about climate change was very different from how it approached the issue after 2006
⋙ ≣ WSJ: Inside Exxon’s Strategy to Downplay Climate Change https://tinyurl.com/4adr6yx6
// Internal documents show what the oil giant said publicly was very different from how it approached the issue privately
Exxon Mobil issued its first public statement that burning fossil fuels contributes to climate change in 2006, following years of denial. In public forums, the company argued that the risk of serious impact on the environment justified global action.
Yet behind closed doors, Exxon took a very different tack: Its executives strategized over how to diminish concerns about warming temperatures, and they sought to muddle scientific findings that might hurt its oil-and-gas business, according to internal Exxon documents reviewed by The Wall Street Journal and interviews with former executives.
Exxon’s public acceptance in 2006 of the risks posed by climate change was an early act of Rex Tillerson, an Exxon lifer who became CEO that year. Some viewed him as a moderating force who brought Exxon in line with the scientific consensus.
The documents reviewed by the Journal, which haven’t been previously reported, cast Tillerson’s decadelong tenure in a different light. They show that Tillerson, as well as some of Exxon’s board directors and other top executives, sought to cast doubt on the severity of climate change’s impacts. Exxon scientists supported research that questioned the findings of mainstream climate science, even after the company said it would stop funding think tanks and others that promoted climate-change denial.
Exxon is now a defendant in dozens of lawsuits around the U.S. that accuse it and other oil companies of deception over climate change and that aim to collect billions of dollars in damages. Prosecutors and attorneys involved in some of the cases are seeking some of the documents reviewed by the Journal, which were part of a previous investigation by New York’s attorney general but never made public.
One of the lawsuits is from Hawaii’s Maui County, where wildfires killed more than 100 people in August. The lawsuit, filed in 2020, alleged the island faced increased climate-related risks, including more dangerous wildfires, caused by fossil-fuel companies. Some of the lawsuits may go to trial as soon as next year.
A study published earlier this year in the journal Science determined Exxon’s climate modelers had predicted warming temperatures with precision since the 1970s, in line with the scientific consensus. The study was funded, in part, by a grant from the Rockefeller Family Fund.
In the summer of 1988, NASA scientist James Hansen issued what’s now seen as a seminal warning on climate change when he testified before Congress that Earth was warming dangerously and humans were causing it.
Frank Sprow, then Exxon’s head of corporate research, sent a memo to colleagues a few months later articulating what would become a central pillar of Exxon’s strategy. ¤
“If a worldwide consensus emerges that action is needed to mitigate against Greenhouse gas effects, substantial negative impacts on Exxon could occur,” wrote Sprow. “Any additional R&D efforts within Corporate Research on Greenhouse should have two primary purposes: 1. Protect the value of our resources (oil, gas, coal). 2. Preserve Exxon’s business options.” ¤ Sprow’s memo was adopted by Exxon as policy, he said in a recent interview. […]
🐣 RT @KyivPost ⚡️The Security Service of Ukraine and the Navy conducted a unique military special operation near #Yevpatoria in the temporarily occupied #Crimea, resulting in the destruction of Russian anti-aircraft complex #Triumph worth 1.2 billion dollars, Ukrainska Pravda reported.
🐣 RT @front_ukrainian ⚡️Some 🇺🇦Ukrainian media with reference to the Security Service of Ukraine write that tonight the military counter-intelligence of the Security Service of Ukraine and the Navy of Ukraine conducted a unique special operation near Yevpatoria – the “destruction” of the 🇷🇺Russian S-400 “Triumph” air defense system ¤ First, the drones of the Security Service of Ukraine hit the “eyes” of the complex – radars and antennas. And after disabling the radar stations, the Navy units hit the launchers of the S300/400 “Triumph” complex with two “Neptune” cruise missiles.
🖼 https://x.com/front_ukrainian/status/1702228785595084893?s=20/photo/1
⭕ 13 Sep 2023
🐣 RT @officejjsmart LARGE EXPLOSIONS IN 🇷🇺-OCCUPIED CRIMEA ¤ Large explosions in Evpatoria, 🇷🇺-occupied Crimea. ¤ After Ukraine’s 🇺🇦 successful attacks on the 🇷🇺 Black Sea Fleet last night in Crimea, it appears 🇺🇦 is going at it again.
🐣 RT @SenatorRomney The former President believes it’s a win for him that I am retiring but I assure you that I will not be the one spending the remainder of my retirement in jail.
🐣 RT @SenBlumenthal The Saudi’s Public Investment Fund cannot have it both ways: if it wants to engage with the US commercially, it must be subject to US law & oversight. ¤ Today I am issuing a subpoena for documents related to PIF’s takeover of American golf & other US investments.
🐣 RT @SenWhitehouse Dahlia nails it about the “byzantine labyrinth of phony charitable groups, unreported donations, troughs of dark money, and multimillion-dollar campaigns” that has captured the Court.
⋙ Slate, Dahlia Lithwick: Too Many Hats https://tinyurl.com/24zcdux6
// Continued reporting on the Supreme Court and its surrounding boosters has made the problem perfectly clear
🐣 RT @juliaioffe NEW: The DOJ has figured out how to use seized Russian assets for aid to Ukraine. According to Antony Blinken, we’ll be seeing a lot more of frozen oligarch assets used for this. “Those who enabled this war should pay for it,” he said. ¤ My latest. [link]
⋙ Puck: Just Spoke to Blinken… https://tinyurl.com/2p8bzxxe
// A candid conversation with the Secretary of State about the war in Ukraine, the U.S.’s commitment, oligarch asset seizure, the G20, China, and more.
🐣 RT @ProjectLincoln “No Labels founders ‘Nancy Jacobson and Mark Penn have one goal: to punish the Democratic Party that rejected and ejected them… Their…revenge fantasy against Joe Biden…is designed to…ensure Trump returns to the Oval Office.'” – @TheRickWilson
⋙ KCStar: Faux-centrist ‘No Labels’ is just a dark money con job that would give us Trump 2.0 | Opinion https://tinyurl.com/5fruxf5n
// One of its biggest known donors is Clarence Thomas’ patron Harlan Crow, the billionaire who collects Hitler’s table linens and other Nazi niceties.
🐣 RT @ rhonda_harbison I can’t imagine why @SpeakerMcCarthy
⋙ WaPo: Trump embraces Putin’s sympathetic comments to claim political persecution https://tinyurl.com/3u73b8ra
[TextLink:] https://x.com/rhonda_harbison/status/1702050831887966264?s=20/photo/1
[Text:] 🐣 RT @RichardEngel Putin gave Trump what came close to an endorsement for 2024 election. “We surely hear that Mr. Trump says he will resolve all burning issues within several days, including the Ukrainian crisis. We cannot help but feel happy about it.” 🐣 📊 RT @USA_Polling Support For Cannabis Legalization: ¤ Support: 69% ¤ Oppose: 22% – Civiqs –
🐣 RT @SecBlinken I had the chance to speak with @TVietor08 and @brhodes on the inflection point we face. There is intense competition to shape what’s next, and the core of our strategy is reimagining our greatest strategic asset: America’s alliances and partnerships.
🐣 RT @djrothkopf The folks who seem to think the Dems should just find another presidential candidate grossly underestimate how rare it is to have a president as effective as Biden. I’ve seen a lot of candidates in my lifetime. But he is far and away the best at presidenting.
🐣 RT @RiegerReport Walter Isaacson to WaPo: ¤ “[Musk] decided to sell and give total control over a certain amount of Starlink equipment, Starlink services to the U.S. military so that he no longer controls the geofencing. He no longer controls the terms of use.”
🐣 RT @jmart Perhaps most significant part of @danbalz scoop > ¤ [Romney] also said that talk by No Labels of mounting an independent candidacy in 2024 was a mistake and would only help to reelect Trump. He said he has spoken “many times” to Manchin
🐣 RT @JonLemire “A very large portion of my party really doesn’t believe in the Constitution.” [Mitt Romney]
🐣 RT @kylegriffin1 Mitt Romney sent this text to Mitch McConnell on Jan. 2, 2021: ¤ “In case you have not heard this, I just got a call from Angus King, who said that he had spoken with a senior official at the Pentagon who reports that they are seeing very disturbing social media traffic regarding the protests planned on the 6th. There are calls to burn down your home, Mitch; to smuggle guns into DC, and to storm the Capitol. I hope that sufficient security plans are in place, but I am concerned that the instigator—the President—is the one who commands the reinforcements the DC and Capitol police might require.” ¤ McConnell never responded.
⋙ TheAtlantic: What Mitt Romney Saw in the Senate https://tinyurl.com/4trzm8xh “But what struck Romney most about the [historical] map was how thoroughly it was dominated by tyrants of some kind. … America’s experiment in self-rule ‘is fighting against human nature.’”
// In an exclusive excerpt from my forthcoming biography of the senator, Romney: A Reckoning, he reveals what drove him to retire.
[…] “A very large portion of my party,” he told me one day, “really doesn’t believe in the Constitution.” He’d realized this only recently, he said. We were a few months removed from an attempted coup instigated by Republican leaders, and he was wrestling with some difficult questions. Was the authoritarian element of the GOP a product of President Trump, or had it always been there, just waiting to be activated by a sufficiently shameless demagogue? And what role had the members of the mainstream establishment—people like him, the reasonable Republicans—played in allowing the rot on the right to fester? …
Shortly after moving into his Senate office, Romney had hung a large rectangular map on the wall. First printed in 1931 by Rand McNally, the “histomap” attempted to chart the rise and fall of the world’s most powerful civilizations through 4,000 years of human history. When Romney first acquired the map, he saw it as a curiosity. After January 6, he became obsessed with it. He showed the map to visitors, brought it up in conversations and speeches. More than once, he found himself staring at it alone in his office at night. The Egyptian empire had reigned for some 900 years before it was overtaken by the Assyrians. Then the Persians, the Romans, the Mongolians, the Turks—each civilization had its turn, and eventually collapsed in on itself. Maybe the falls were inevitable. But what struck Romney most about the map was how thoroughly it was dominated by tyrants of some kind—pharaohs, emperors, kaisers, kings. “A man gets some people around him and begins to oppress and dominate others,” he said the first time he showed me the map. “It’s a testosterone-related phenomenon, perhaps. I don’t know. But in the history of the world, that’s what happens.” America’s experiment in self-rule “is fighting against human nature.” ¤ “This is a very fragile thing,” he told me. “Authoritarianism is like a gargoyle lurking over the cathedral, ready to pounce.” ¤ For the first time in his life, he wasn’t sure if the cathedral would hold. …
Perhaps Romney’s most surprising discovery upon entering the Senate was that his disgust with Trump was not unique among his Republican colleagues. “Almost without exception,” he told me, “they shared my view of the president.” In public, of course, they played their parts as Trump loyalists, often contorting themselves rhetorically to defend the president’s most indefensible behavior. But in private, they ridiculed his ignorance, rolled their eyes at his antics, and made incisive observations about his warped, toddlerlike psyche. Romney recalled one senior Republican senator frankly admitting, “He has none of the qualities you would want in a president, and all of the qualities you wouldn’t.”
This dissonance soon wore on Romney’s patience. Every time he publicly criticized Trump, it seemed, some Republican senator would smarmily sidle up to him in private and express solidarity. “I sure wish I could do what you do,” they’d say, or “Gosh, I wish I had the constituency you have,” and then they’d look at him expectantly, as if waiting for Romney to convey profound gratitude. This happened so often that he started keeping a tally; at one point, he told his staff that he’d had more than a dozen similar exchanges. He developed a go-to response for such occasions: “There are worse things than losing an election. Take it from somebody who knows.”
One afternoon in March 2019, Trump paid a visit to the Senate Republicans’ weekly caucus lunch. He was in a buoyant mood—two days earlier, the Justice Department had announced that the much-anticipated report from Special Counsel Robert Mueller failed to establish collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia during the 2016 election. As Romney later wrote in his journal, the president was met with a standing ovation fit for a conquering hero, and then launched into some rambling remarks. He talked about the so-called Russia hoax and relitigated the recent midterm elections and swung wildly from one tangent to another. He declared, somewhat implausibly, that the GOP would soon become “the party of health care.” The senators were respectful and attentive. ¤ As soon as Trump left, Romney recalled, the Republican caucus burst into laughter. …
In the fall of 2019, Trump’s efforts to pressure Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky into investigating the Biden family’s business dealings were revealed in the press. Romney called the scheme “wrong and appalling,” and Trump responded with a wrathful series of tweets that culminated with a call to #IMPEACHMITTROMNEY. A few weeks later, Romney read in the press that McConnell had privately urged Trump to stop attacking members of the Senate. Romney thanked McConnell for sticking up for him against Trump.
“It wasn’t for you so much as for him,” McConnell replied. “He’s an idiot. He doesn’t think when he says things. How stupid do you have to be to not realize that you shouldn’t attack your jurors? …
[First Trump Impeachment:] “You’re lucky,” McConnell continued. “You can say the things that we all think. You’re in a position to say things about him that we all agree with but can’t say.” (A spokesperson said that McConnell does not recall this conversation and that he was “fully aligned” with Trump during the impeachment trial.) …
And yet, to at least some of his fellow Republicans, the case against Trump was compelling—even if they’d never say so in public. During a break in the proceedings, after the impeachment managers finished their presentation, Romney walked by McConnell. “They nailed him,” the Senate majority leader said.
Romney, taken aback by McConnell’s candor, responded carefully: “Well, the defense will say that Trump was just investigating corruption by the Bidens.”
“If you believe that,” McConnell replied, “I’ve got a bridge I can sell you.” (McConnell said he does not recall this conversation and it does not match his thinking at the time.) …
He walked onto the Senate floor and read the remarks he’d written at his kitchen table. “As a Senator-juror,” Romney began, “I swore an oath before God to exercise impartial justice. I am profoundly religious. My faith is at the heart of who I am—” His voice broke, and he had to pause as emotion overwhelmed him. “I take an oath before God as enormously consequential.”
Romney acknowledged that his vote wouldn’t change the outcome of the trial—the Republican-led Senate would fall far short of the 67 votes needed to remove the president from office, and he would be the lone Republican to find Trump guilty. Even so, he said, “with my vote, I will tell my children and their children that I did my duty to the best of my ability, believing that my country expected it of me.” ¤ He would never feel comfortable at a Republican caucus lunch again.
[Jan 6th:] Something about the volatility of the moment caused Romney—a walking amalgam of prep-school manners and Mormon niceness and the practiced cool of the private-equity set—to lose his grip, and he finally vented the raw anger he had been trying to contain. He turned to Josh Hawley, who was huddled with some of his right-wing colleagues, and started to yell. Later, Romney would struggle to recall the exact wording of his rebuke. Sometimes he’d remember shouting “You’re the reason this is happening!” Other times, it would be something more terse: “You did this.” At least one reporter in the chamber would recount seeing the senator throw up his hands in a fit of fury as he roared, “This is what you’ve gotten, guys!” Whatever the words, the sentiment was clear: This violence, this crisis, this assault on democracy—this is your fault. …
But to Romney’s astonishment, the architects of the plan still intended to move forward. When Hawley stood to deliver his speech, Romney was positioned just behind the Missourian’s right shoulder, allowing a C‑SPAN camera to capture his withering glare.
What bothered Romney most about Hawley and his cohort was the oily disingenuousness. “They know better!” he told me. “Josh Hawley is one of the smartest people in the Senate, if not the smartest, and Ted Cruz could give him a run for his money.” They were too smart, Romney believed, to actually think that Trump had won the 2020 election. Hawley and Cruz “were making a calculation,” Romney told me, “that put politics above the interests of liberal democracy and the Constitution.”
When it was Romney’s turn to speak, he wasted little time before laying into his colleagues. “What happened here today was an insurrection, incited by the president of the United States,” Romney said. “Those who choose to continue to support his dangerous gambit by objecting to the results of a legitimate, democratic election will forever be seen as being complicit in an unprecedented attack against our democracy.” His voice sharpened when he addressed the patronizing claim that objecting to the certification was a matter of showing respect for voters who believed the election had been stolen. It struck Romney that, for all their alleged populism, Hawley and his allies seemed to take a very dim view of their Republican constituents.
“The best way we can show respect for the voters who are upset is by telling them the truth!” Romney said, his voice rising to a shout. ¤ Before sitting down, he posed a question to his fellow senators—a question that, whether he realized it or not, he’d been wrestling with himself for nearly his entire political career. “Do we weigh our own political fortunes more heavily than we weigh the strength of our republic, the strength of our democracy, and the cause of freedom? What is the weight of personal acclaim compared to the weight of conscience?”
For a blessed moment after January 6, it looked to Romney as if the fever in his party might finally be breaking. GOP leaders condemned the president and denounced the rioters. Trump, who was booted from Twitter and Facebook for fear that he might use the platforms to incite more violence, saw his approval rating plummet. New articles of impeachment were introduced, and McConnell’s office leaked to the press that he was considering a vote to convict. …
But the Republicans’ flirtation with repentance was short-lived. Within months, Fox News was offering a revisionist history of January 6 and recasting the rioters as martyrs and victims of a vengeful, overreaching Justice Department. The House Republican leader, Kevin McCarthy, who’d initially blamed Trump for the riot, paid a visit to Mar-a-Lago to mend his relationship with the ex-president.
Some of the reluctance to hold Trump accountable was a function of the same old perverse political incentives—elected Republicans feared a political backlash from their base. But after January 6, a new, more existential brand of cowardice had emerged. One Republican congressman confided to Romney that he wanted to vote for Trump’s second impeachment, but chose not to out of fear for his family’s safety. … By the time Democrats proposed a bipartisan commission to investigate the events of January 6, the GOP’s 180 was complete. …
“I do wonder, how do you make that decision?” Romney mused to me as Vance was degrading himself on the campaign trail that summer. “How can you go over a line so stark as that—and for what?” Romney wished he could grab Vance by the shoulders and scream: This is not worth it! “It’s not like you’re going to be famous and powerful because you became a United States senator. It’s like, really? You sell yourself so cheap?” The prospect of having Vance in the caucus made Romney uncomfortable. “How do you sit next to him at lunch?” …
But it was hard to dispute that the battle for the GOP’s soul had been lost. And Romney had his own soul to think about. He was all too familiar with the incentive structure in which the party’s leaders were operating. He knew what it would take to keep winning, the things he would have to rationalize.
“You say, ‘Okay, I better get closer to this line, or maybe step a little bit over it. If I don’t, it’s going to be much worse,’ ” he told me. You can always convince yourself that the other party, or the other candidate, is bad enough to justify your own decision to cross that line. “And the problem is that line just keeps on getting moved, and moved, and moved.”
🐣 RT @djrothkopf Quietly, without much fanfare, @SecBlinken is leading a foreign policy effort marked by so many substantial successes that he already ranks among the very best Secretaries of State of the modern era. My latest.
⋙ DailyBeast, David Rothkopf: Antony Blinken and the Many Low-key Successes of the Biden Administration’s Foreign Policy https://tinyurl.com/388es3xd
// The secretary of state laid out a framework for Biden foreign policy—and the hard work still to be done.
Politico: Hunter Biden sues ex-Trump staffer tied to laptop’s dissemination https://tinyurl.com/39ryk9j8
// The suit was filed on Wednesday against Garrett Ziegler.
[…] The younger Biden says in the lawsuit that the data appears to have been manipulated both before and after Ziegler obtained it. Now, years after the Post first reported on its contents, Biden is suing Ziegler under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, as well as California’s Comprehensive Computer Data Access and Fraud Act. Under that law, people can sue others who harm them by accessing their computers or data without their permission, as detailed in jury instructions published by Justia.com. …
Ziegler worked under trade advisor Peter Navarro at the White House during the Trump administration. He drew national media attention, as well as the scrutiny of the congressional committee investigating Jan. 6, for escorting Sidney Powell and Michael Flynn into the White House on Dec. 18, 2020. Powell and Flynn then reportedly urged Trump — unsuccessfully — to use the military to seize voting machines.
In the years since then, Ziegler’s group has published what he calls “128k emails from the Biden Laptop, which is a modern Rosetta Stone of white and blue collar crime under the patina of ‘the Delaware Way.’” This summer, he also published thousands of photos that he says came from Hunter Biden’s laptop.
Kevin Morris, a lawyer for Hunter Biden who has also provided him with financial assistance, has long pushed for the first son to adopt a more aggressive posture, according to a person familiar with the legal strategy. …
🐣 RT @levparnas Kaboom 💥 👇
⋙ 🐣 RT @MuellerSheWrote BREAKING: Hunter Biden alleges in a lawsuit that former trump aide Garrett Ziegler accessed and then manipulated data from Hunter Biden’s iPhone which he claimed were on a laptop obtained from associates of Bannon and Giuliani.
¤ https://x.com/MuellerSheWrote/status/1702005107355959487?s=20
⋙ [CourtDoc:] https://tinyurl.com/45ezjaph 14p
🐣 RT @GlasnostGone Don’t know source, but this satellite image confirms #Ukraine inflicted severe damage to the large 🇷🇺 landing ship “Minsk” (left) & the “Rostov-on-Don cruise missile firing submarine (right). Both are in dry dock in occupied #Crimea & likely to stay there for a long, long time 😊
🖼 🌎 https://x.com/GlasnostGone/status/1702018890128114097?s=20/photo/1 -4
🐣 RT @GloOouD 😍😍😍 I remind you that a country with small fleet destroy one of the most powerful fleets of the Russian Federation in a strategic region.
Do you still need a reason to support Ukraine with money? For your relatively small amount of money, Ukraine destroys your strategic enemy.
💽 https://x.com/GloOouD/status/1702015659935146394?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @SteveRattner “Over the past two years, companies have announced $137 billion in new investments in clean energy and vehicle technology manufacturing, a five-fold increase over the previous two years.” ¤ https://cleaninvestmentmonitor.org
◕ https://x.com/SteveRattner/status/1702014757950177421?s=20/photo/1
◕ https://x.com/SteveRattner/status/1702014836551385578?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @tribelaw “Don’t lose patience. Reconsolidating our democracy is going to take years and maybe decades. There will be wins. There will be losses. The women’s suffrage movement and the Civil Rights Movement show just how hard and long and slow a process this can be.”
⋙ Harvard[.]edu: Scholars warn of danger in an outdated Constitution https://tinyurl.com/3ujkznxu
// In “Tyranny of the Minority,” Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt call for reforms in face of “radicalized” elements in GOP.
🐣 RT @AleksandrX13 Shoigu admits that Russia may not be able to win this conflict.
In the video below, Shoigu starts out by saying that the task of the russian army is to destroy as much of Ukraine’s military as possible. ¤ ‘Will we win?’ the interviewer asks. ¤ Shoigu just shrugs. ¤ The interview has subsequently been pulled from all official channels. ¤ Unfortunately for the russian government, it is now all over the internet.
💽 https://x.com/AleksandrX13/status/1701981575078879700?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @gtconway3d So basically P01135809 says he needs to be allowed to walk so that his friend Vladimir Putin will think better of our country.
⋙ 🐣 RT @OurShallowState Trump is in panic mode. But his aberrant pathology dominates him. He can’t think like a normal person, because he hasn’t been a normal person, possibly ever. Here he is, invoking Putin’s recent condemning of America as an argument in support of him. ¤ He’s astoundingly delusional.
[TextLink:] https://x.com/gtconway3d/status/1702003124376875250?s=20/photo/1
[Text:] @realDonaldTrump It’s all happening, even worse than anyone projected. President Vladimir Putin of Russia is using Crooked Joe Biden’s illegal Banana Republic style treatment of his Political Opponent, who is beating him badly in the Polls, to condemn America and all of the good things it once stood for. The whole World is watching as the USA is being torn apart by dreams of Election Interference!
🐣 RT @POTUS Core inflation has fallen to 2.4% over the last three months – the lowest level in over two years. ¤ But despite the drop, I know families are feeling last month’s increase in gas prices. ¤ That’s why lowering costs for families, from the pump to the pharmacy, remains my priority.
🐣 RT @ChuckPfarrer TARGET SEVASTOPOL: The Russian Kilo-class submarine Rostov-na-Don and the Ropucha-class landing ship Minsk were damaged in a precision strike on the Sevastopol Naval Operating Base. [link] https://tinyurl.com/ez6bck
According to Main Intelligence Directorate (HUR) spokesman Andriy Yusov, two shipyard employees were reportedly killed, and 26 were injured.
The strike is the first known to have damaged a RU submarine, and the second to have damaged a Ropucha-class landing ship (LST, or Landing Ship Tank).
Any damage to the Kilo-class submarine, even superficial, will likely place that platform out of service for the foreseeable future, as repairs to submarines require specific ship yards and technical support. Furthermore, the Kilo will be highly vulnerable when (or if ever) it is towed from Sevastopol to a specialist facility in Russia.
Damage to the Rapucha class LST is being assessed, but is likely to have been extensive and exacerbated by on board fires.
This attack on Sevastopol follows a series of raids and strikes that were designed to degrade RU air defenses and air, sea and land surveillance radars in western Crimea. UKR’s recapture of offshore platforms in the western Black Sea was a precursor operation that degraded RU Electronic Warfare / Early Warning assets protecting the naval operation base at Sevastopol. This strike is a direct result of these missions.
It is assessed that more attacks, some multi-modal, using long range precision strike munitions, air and land launched cruise missiles and remotely operated surface vessels (naval drones) are likely in the the short and near term. x It’s going to be a long autumn in Crimea. [Source: NewVoiceUkraine]
🐣 RT @igorsushko 🚨 Russia’s $300 million Kilo class submarine “Rostov-on-Don” which entered service in 2014 is reportedly one of the casualties of today’s attack on the Black Sea Fleet naval base in occupied Crimea. 👏
🖼 https://x.com/igorsushko/status/1701852397516267632?s=20/photo/1 -2
🐣 RT @general_ben It’s almost like the Ukrainians planned it that way…a SOF raid to destroy radar, then a sophisticated strike on Sevastopol… ¤ This counter-offensive is much more than a ground assault…it’s a multi-domain operation. UKR Gen Staff is running rings around the Russian Gen Staff.
⋙ 🐣 RT @Tendar According to Russian media sources the Ropucha Class Landing Ship “Minsk” and the “Rostov-on-Don”, a Kilo Class submarine, were damaged. They were undergoing repairs in the shipyards of Sevastopol. ¤ The Ukrainian strikes in the past weeks severely degraded Russian air defense capabilities on the occupied peninsula of Crimea. ¤ Source: Telegram/shot_shot #Ukraine
🐣 RT @Gerashchenko_en Last night, Sevastopol Shipbuilding plant in temporarily occupied Crimea was under attack. The videos online show that at least three powerful explosions took place at the plant. ¤ Russian media confirm that two ships undergoing repairs there, were damaged. ¤ Besides, Russian MoD claimed an unmanned boat strike on the Black Sea fleet ships crossing the sea. Allegedly, no damage was caused.
💽 https://x.com/Gerashchenko_en/status/1701829706121625945?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @maria_avdv Strategic Sevastopol shipyard in Crimea is on fire after missile attack on the port. Black Sea Fleet had a rough night as well. At least two ships damaged.
💽 https://x.com/maria_avdv/status/1701818419534872951?s=20/photo/1
// angel cloud
🐣 RT @wartranslated A major incident occurred at the Sevmorzavod shipyard in temporarily occupied Sevastopol last night.
💽 https://x.com/wartranslated/status/1701864069102281055?s=20/photo/1
Witnesses observed a number of violent explosions that continued for some time, followed by a major fire. Russian sources said that a large landing ship Minsk and a submarine “Rostov-na-Donu” had been struck. Meanwhile, the Ukrainian GUR thanked Ukrainian pilots for their great work.
Russian sources claim that the shipyard was attacked with 10 cruise missiles, 7 of which have been intercepted. The rest have obviously found their targets. Some Russians also spoke about unmanned water surface drones that attempted to break through to the shipyard but were intercepted.
🐣 RT @Tendar According to Russian media sources the Ropucha Class Landing Ship “Minsk” and the “Rostov-on-Don”, a Kilo Class submarine, were damaged. They were undergoing repairs in the shipyards of Sevastopol. ¤ The Ukrainian strikes in the past weeks severely degraded Russian air defense capabilities on the occupied peninsula of Crimea. ¤ Source: Telegram/shot_shot ¤ #Ukraine
🖼 https://x.com/Tendar/status/1701849752340488428?s=20/photo/1 -2
⭕ 12 Sep 2023
WaPo,Philip Bump: How a Biden impeachment probe compares to Nixon’s, Clinton’s and Trump’s https://tinyurl.com/4bep3udb “In those four cases, varying degrees of evidence were at hand suggesting misconduct by the sitting president. In the current case, there are merely insinuations”
🐣 RT @MSNBC House Minority Leader Jeffries: “Republicans have launched an illegitimate impeachment inquiry that is a kangaroo court, fishing expedition and conspiracy theater rolled into one… There is not a shred of evidence that President Joe Biden has committed an impeachable offense.”
💽 https://x.com/MSNBC/status/1701759479681818986?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @OAlexanderDK They actually did it! ¤ A dry dock in Sevastopol hit a few hour ago, resulting in a Kilo-Class submarine and Ropucha-Class landing ship going up in flames.
🖼 https://x.com/OAlexanderDK/status/1701815026674176294?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @GovChristie Meet Vladimir Putin. Brutal, mass-murdering, KGB hitman who thinks our system is “rotten.” ¤ Trump thinks Putin is a “genius” – he clearly needs new role models. ¤ Get it straight. Trump is under indictment because of his conduct. He played with fire and is getting burned. And now his best buddy is coming to his defense. ¤ If you are on the same side as Putin, you might want to rethink your position… AP: https://tinyurl.com/ycka3sy4
🐣 RT @RepDanGoldman My statement on Speaker McCarthy’s decision to move forward with an impeachment inquiry into President Biden:
[TextLink:] https://x.com/RepDanGoldman/status/1701720595254190136?s=20/photo/1
[Text:] “Today, Speaker McCarthy once again put the fringe, extremist wing of his party above the American people, above the democratic process, and above the truth. “Over the past nine months, House Republicans have wasted millions of taxpayer dollars and hours of witness testimony on a baseless fishing expedition that has turned up absolutely zero evidence linking President Biden to any wrongdoing.
“Unlike Donald Trump’s refusal to provide Congress with a single document during the Ukraine impeachment inquiry, House Republicans have received extensive cooperation from the Biden Administration, including witness testimony from government officials and tens of thousands of documents, but have not identified any specific problems obtaining cooperation from the Biden Administration. Regardless, the Speaker’s announcement today does not give the House any more authority than it had yesterday, but instead demonstrates yet another abuse of power by House Republicans in their nakedly partisan quest to do the bidding of Donald Trump and distract from his 91 charged felonies.
“Despite a glaring lack of evidence and objections from members of his own party, Speaker McCarthy has once again cowered to the demands of far-right Republicans, who next will demand a government shutdown.
“By opening this sham impeachment inquiry, McCarthy has shown the country where his true loyalties lie – not with the American people, our rule of law, or our democratic institutions but with Marjorie Taylor Greene and the extreme MAGA fringes of the Republican party.”
🧵📌 RT @PhillipsPOBrien Sevastapol shown to be well and truly vulnerable to Ukrainian systems. This looks to be a devastating attack
‼️⋙ 🐣 RT @yarotrof Huge explosions as a result of a presumed Ukrainian attack in Sevastopol, the HQ of the Black Sea Fleet in Crimea. Russian authorities say the Sevmorzavod shipyard has been targeted. Ships based in Sevastopol frequently fire missiles at Ukrainian cities.
📌 🖼 https://x.com/PhillipsPOBrien/status/1701813002482147329?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @ChuckPfarrer THE BOSS IS ALWAYS RIGHT: Speaking in Vladivostok, Putin claimed that in the past 3 months, RU has destroyed 18,543 UKR armored vehicles. Russia’s MoD said earlier UKR has lost a total of 11,773 armored vehicles– so Putin tossed in another 6,770.
⋙ Newsweek: Putin contradicts his own defense ministry to boost Russian military https://tinyurl.com/bdetbwa5
// The Russian leader appeared to not be on the same page as his defense ministry in regards to Ukraine’s equipment losses.
🐣 RT @LeaderMcConnell America’s lethal aid to Ukraine is subject to unprecedented oversight. Extensive transparency and reporting requirements are giving the United States a deeper understanding of how our weapons are being used in Ukraine than in any previous conflict.
🐣 RT @JeffFisch Gotta say this about @JakeSullivan46. He’s tenacious. Perhaps one of the strongest tree huggers I’ve ever met. Ironically, he’s the kind that squeezes the tree so tight, he kills it. #ABCNews @abcnews, seems you were wrong.
⋙ Politico: Biden inches toward decision on long-range missiles as Ukraine ups pressure https://tinyurl.com/5b8yp733
// Kyiv wants an official announcement by next week’s UN General Assembly, but U.S. officials say that’s unlikely.
🐣 RT @RonFilipkowski I don’t think I have ever seen an American give a more disgusting, treasonous, anti-American interview on foreign media than this. He also said he just spoke to Tucker Carlson, who told him he is “going all in” to support Putin with his new twitter show.
💽 https://x.com/RonFilipkowski/status/1700478477244223620?s=20/photo/1
// Soloviev with Alex Jones
⋙ 🐣 RT @TruWordsRSpoken This 2015 picture also paints a VERY clear picture…
🖼 https://x.com/TruWordsRSpoken/status/1700479569449685060?s=20/photo/1
// tags: Moscow photo Putin Michael Flynn photo Jill Stein
🐣 RT @alfranken Looks like House Republicans will finally try to impeach President Biden. Only thing in the way, finding a good reason. Strike that. A reason.
🐣 RT @Morning_Joe Sen. McConnell: “The U.S. isn’t arming Ukraine out of charity. We’re backing a fellow democracy because it’s in our direct interest to do so. This is American leadership, and Republicans should be pressing Biden to show more of it instead of dreaming about American retreat.”
💽 https://x.com/Morning_Joe/status/1701693484581753239?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @JRubinBlogger No surprise. All Trump pulling strings. All about enabling him. Shameful use of impeachment for an in-kind donation. https://politi.co/44Pa3fG via @politico
⋙ Politico: Trump privately discussed Biden impeachment with House GOPers https://tinyurl.com/yp3s3r6s “On Sunday night, Trump had dinner at his golf club in Bedminster, N.J., with Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.), an ally of Trump and McCarthy”
// The former president talked with House GOP Conference Chair Elise Stefanik on Tuesday.
🐣 RT @ProjectLincoln Trump controls MAGA & MAGA controls Kevin McCarthy. They’re all siding with a vicious war criminal guilty of brutal attacks on innocent men, women & children. Putin wants to annihilate democracy by any means necessary, & MAGA leadership is happy to help.
💽 https://x.com/ProjectLincoln/status/1701641891010244857?s=20/photo/1
WaPo: Kevin McCarthy directs House committees to open Biden impeachment inquiry https://tinyurl.com/2p88y75p “Dangling an impeachment inquiry vote was meant to address the demands of some far-right lawmakers, like Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.)”
🐣 RT @JuliaDavisNews After Putin expressed his “concerns” about Trump’s prosecution, Andrey Sidorov, Deputy Dean of world politics at the MSU, explained why he continues to root for Trump, describing him as “the destroyer” that has the potential to dismantle the US.
🐣 RT @RepJerryNadler My statement on the extreme Republican road to impeachment:
[TextLink:] https://x.com/RepJerryNadler/status/1701644395928244466?s=20/photo/1
[Text:] JERRY NADLER CONGRESSMAN
Nadler Statement on the Extreme Republican Road to Impeachment
In 2019, House Democrats moved on impeachment only after developing overwhelming evidence that Donald Trump had attempted to extort the government of Ukraine. In 2021, we needed very little time to determine who was responsible for the attack of January 6. Today’s House Republicans failed to articulate any specific charge against President Biden- because they have no basis whatsoever to launch this so-called inquiry. They have no evidence of misconduct. Their whistleblowers have been discredited time and time again. They have not even begun to approach the high bar of high crimes and misdemeanors. And they have done none of the work necessary to convince the American people that this stunt is a good idea-a political reality that I suspect will set in for them sooner, rather than later.” Let me be very, very clear: President Biden has done nothing wrong, and House Republicans have not found a shred of evidence to suggest otherwise. Speaker McCarthy may get to keep his job for another day, but he has once again caved to the most extreme elements of the Republican party.*
🐣 🤡So McCarthy is directing the same 3 committees that have been investigating Biden FOR MONTHS to keep doing so, but to call it an “impeachment inquiry,” because they don’t have the VOTES do begin an actual Impeachment process 🤡🤡🤡
🤡 This is to fool Trump and MAGA. It also spares GOP Reps who’d vote against Impeachment process from threats by Trump to primary them 🤡🤡🤡
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🐣 RT @ZaleskiLuke There are good presidents and bad ones. Trump was neither. He was an anti-president. An antagonizer in chief. An aggressive force against the people. A man who called other Americans enemies, allowed disease and division to fester, and then attacked the Capitol of his own country
📋 CCJ (Jul 2023): Crime Trends in U.S. Cities: Mid-Year 2023 Update https://tinyurl.com/3d3raw6m Murder/Robbery
// Jan 2018 – Jun 2023
◕ https://x.com/Auriandra/status/1701557474153685493?s=20/photo/1
◕ https://x.com/Auriandra/status/1701557476015878305?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @McFaul Definition of desperation. Begging North Korea for military aid to help with your disastrous war in Ukraine.
⭕ 11 Sep 2023
🐣 RT @ruthbenghiat We will look back on this and wish more people had understood that Biden is our bulwark of democratic freedoms and the alternative is worse than most Americans can imagine.
⋙ 🐣 RT @donmoyn Biden’s age has become such a trope in coverage that even when he undertakes a whirlwind diplomatic tour and a 40 minute press conference, these are the headlines. ¤ Actual demonstration of his fitness is used to raise questions about his fitness. All of this is a choice.
[TextLink:] https://x.com/ruthbenghiat/status/1701261739931677016?s=20/photo/1 -2
🐣📋 RT @WajahatAli 19 foreign terrorists brought down the 2 towers and killed nearly 3,000 people on 9 -11 – 2001. 15 were from Saudi Arabia, 2 from UAE, 1 from Egypt, and 1 from Lebanon. ¤ So, America under the Bush Admin invaded Iraq and Afghanistan. Generations remain scarred and traumatized.
🐣 RT @renato_mariotti Trump’s motion for Judge Chutkan’s recusal is very unlikely to succeed. Among other things, the initial decision will be made by Judge Chutkan herself. ¤ It was poor judgment to make this motion — it strongly suggests that Trump is dictating strategy. Foolish tactical move.
🐣 RT @AntiToxicPeople Deranged. Delusional. Unhinged. Lunatic.
[TextLink:] https://twitter.com/AntiToxicPeople/status/1701405444630274214?s=20/photo/1
[Text:] 🐣 RT @realDonaldTrump Anybody attacked and Indicted by the failed District Attorney of Fulton County (Atlanta), or Deranged Jack Smith, will, I assume, & as I will be doing, show how the Presidential Election of 2020 was Rigged and Stollen, the probable reason for your protestation and/or protest. The evidence in Georgia, and Nationally, is both massive and conclusive. The J6 Unselects even illegally destroyed and deleted all findings, evidence, and proof. That fact alone should be reason to drop all charges against!
🐣 RT @ZoeTillman New: Trump is arguing to disqualify Judge Tanya Chutkan from the election obstruction prosecution in DC, arguing her past “negative” comments about him “unavoidably taint” the case. The bar is high for parties to win recusal motions. More to come.
[CourtDoc:] https://tinyurl.com/4wyzbu9p 25p
[TextLink:] https://twitter.com/ZoeTillman/status/1701337717903175829?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @RadioFreeTom The Covid Study Group (non-partisan, scientists/doctors/policy ppl) used Western Europe as a comparable baseline and estimates the U.S. suffered an extra half *million* deaths, at least. As one member of the group said: “Trump was a comorbidity.”
Salon, Heather Digby Parsons: Trump has his own age problem — and it terrifies him https://tinyurl.com/35p7zrp8 As his niece Mary Trump said, “his talking about the dementia test the way he’s talking about it is failing the dementia test.”
// Donald Trump is desperately searching for a way to reassure himself that he’s not impaired
🐣 RT @InsideWithPsaki “There are very prominent conservative scholars and judges who have said it does apply to former President Trump… I think this will end up at the Supreme Court.” ¤ @AWeissmann_ on the 14th Amendment barring Trump from appearing on the ballot
💽 https://twitter.com/InsideWithPsaki/status/1700938249735217480?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @Havoc_Six Article 5 of the NATO mutual defense clause has been invoked exactly one time – September 13th, 2001.
¤ https://twitter.com/Havoc_Six/status/1701230328159813860?s=20
Germany, Canada, Poland, Belgium, Italy, Turkey, Spain, France, Latvia, Lithuania, Australia, and the United Kingdom (and more than a few non-NATO nations such as Ukraine, Finland, Ireland, Mongolia, etc) – just to name a few – all contributed greatly towards the effort of bringing those responsible to justice.
Though the efforts to help Afghanistan remain a functioning democracy free of Taliban rule failed, the main architects of the attack have all been killed or captured, including Bin Laden.
I wanted to take the opportunity to extend gratitude to those brothers and sisters in arms who served alongside us in Afghanistan today.
🐣 RT @HillaryClinton On one of our worst days, many Americans gave their best: their bravery, their selflessness, and their care for others. Today, let’s honor the memory of those we lost and reaffirm our commitment to what they left behind: our families & communities, our democracy, and our country.
🐣 RT @nexta_tv #NATO will hold its largest exercise since the Cold War ¤ The alliance’s military will practice repelling Russian aggression. ¤ 32 states, over 50 ships and about 41,000 military personnel will participate in the maneuvers. Aviation will carry out from 500 to 700 combat sorties. ¤ The exercises will take place in February and March in Germany, Poland and the Baltic countries.
⭕ 10 Sep 2023
🧵 RT @cwebbonline Just finished watching the Sunday shows and I need to vent. ¤ Folks need to wake TF up! The media is playing us…AGAIN. According to the Sunday shows, Biden is too old, but Trump who’s living in delusion, lies and literally wants to ban the Constitution in order to save his own skin is just fine. Do people not realize what’s at stake here?
📌 https://twitter.com/cwebbonline/status/1700954477250204003?s=20
[ThreadReader:] https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1700954477250204003.html
// many great photos etc
2. Biden and Trump are virtually the same age, but the media isn’t riding Trump’s ass about being old! Biden is 3 years older than he was when we voted for him the last time and only three years older than Trump. ¤ Guess what? Trump isn’t really 6’3” and 215 lbs.
3. Under Trump, we were regularly teased that it was infrastructure week. It never came. But the media kept acting as if it was imminent. ¤ By contrast, Biden managed to get the bipartisan infrastructure act passed. It’s created good paying jobs and money is flowing into the economy. We should’ve been in a recession by now if you listened to economist’s forecasts 2 years ago. But we aren’t and our economy is heading in the right direction — according to realtime facts.
4. Perhaps the news networks can talk about the healthcare plan Trump told us was only 3 weeks away – literally once a month. The “best healthcare ever”, he kept saying. Obviously a lie, but they kept giving him a platform to keep saying it. ¤ Biden has made insulin affordable for millions who were rationing their medication because they couldn’t pay the high cost. He also kept his promise about negotiating lower prices for the most vital prescription drugs for seniors. This takes time, but he’s on it.
5. President Biden has regularly addressed abortion bans and done what he can through executive orders to safeguard access to reproductive healthcare for women. This after we dropped the ball and didn’t fight hard enough to demand Obama the hearing he was denied for his Supreme Court Justice nominee — as was his right as President. ¤ We should have marched on Washington and had sit-ins at Mitch McConnell’s house over that. Let’s not take anything for granted again. There is no precedent. There is no settled law. But I digress.
6. Biden promised student debt relief of $10K. He put forth $20K for Pell grant recipients. When Republicans sued and blocked his forgiveness plan, where was everybody at? I missed the Democratic outraged directed at Republicans over this. Biden paused interest loan payments much longer than he had to and was able to cancel student loan debt for hundreds of thousands of borrowers. ¤ Did you or yours register for SAVE yet? The Biden program that will revise student loan payments to be 5% of individual discretionary income, and affectively making payments $0 for millions of borrowers. ¤ Trump doesn’t give a damn about your loan debt. He cares about tax cuts for billionaires and we have the increased deficit to show for it.
7. Biden has nominated and gotten the most diverse bench of federal judges confirmed in our history, and was able to get Ketanji Brown Jackson, confirmed to United States Supreme Court, our first Black woman Justice — as promised.
8. Under Trump, we were worse off when it came to addressing climate change. We are in deep, after generations of ignoring the climate crisis yet the US withdrew from the Paris Climate Accord agreement under Trump. Under Biden we are back in. ¤ With the bipartisan Infrastructure Law, Inflation Reduction Act, and the Chips Act. We are addressing climate change and creating green energy jobs. A long way to go, but Biden is working on it. And he gives a damn about the planet. Let’s support him on that. Keep pushing for more, but we are better off under Biden vs any Republican.
9. There’s so much more to consider. ¤ Biden is trying to ‘finish the job’. He just put forth a new rule that makes millions more workers eligible for overtime pay. ¤ Think about — Social Security, Medicare, abortion rights, voting rights, the right to privacy etc… ¤ And don’t forget about the threats of violence and civil war coming from the right. I feel safer under Biden. The thought of another 4 years of Trump is terrifying. He will certainly be a more dangerous President than he was before. ¤ Make the right choice in 2024. We may not get another opportunity. ¤ -end-
🐣 RT @runningwaters06 Ukraine appears to be repurposing powerful Russian anti-tank mines and using drones to drop them on Putin’s invasion army ¤ Ukrainians are masters of this kind of thing [link Yahoo:] https://tinyurl.com/57hnahuk
🐣 RT @Azovsouth 👀1/2 [-2/2]
[TextLink:] https://twitter.com/Azovsouth/status/1700966565183627687?s=20/photo/1
[TextLink:] https://twitter.com/Azovsouth/status/1700966584292921750?s=20/photo/1
[Text:] During the retreat of our troops near Postetsk, a tragedy occurred We wrote that our troops retreated a little, and the Ukrainians advanced towards Donetsk and the Donetsk airport. A source in the General Staff told us new details of this troop withdrawal. “Unfortunately, not everyone retreated clearly and harmoniously. Some of the fighters retreated to new positions chaotically and almost in panic. As a result, a tragedy occurred, our soldiers died the fire of their own artillery” our interlocutor said.
[Text:] According to him, a large group of military personnel who were retreating towards the airport was covered by their artillery. “Our people decided that the Ukrainians were going to seize the Donetsk airport, and launched a massive attack. As a result, 27 were killed and 34 were injured. About half of the wounded had their arms or legs torn off. Several pieces of equipment were lost. It’s just terrible,” the source complained. According to him, this is not the first time that Russian military personnel have died at the front from Russian artillery fire. <
🐣 RT @7Veritas4 He’s still glowing over his proudest academic achievement. A passing grade on a test for cognitive dysfunction.
[TextLink:] https://twitter.com/7Veritas4/status/1700985077046620569?s=20/photo/1
[Text:] 🐣 RT @realDonaldTrump In a phony and probably rigged Wall Street Journal poll, coming out of nowhere to softened the mental incompetence blow that is so obvious with Crooked Joe Biden, they ask about my age and mentality. Where did that come from? A few years ago I was the only one to agree to a mental acuity test, & ACED IT. Now that the Globalists at Fox & the WSJ have failed to push their 3rd tier candidate to success, they do this. Well, I hereby challenge Rupert Murdoch & Sons, Biden, WSJ heads, to acuity tests!
⋙ 🐣 RT @7Veritas4 There’s more…yambo demands feats of strength.
[TextLink:] https://twitter.com/7Veritas4/status/1701005871072129289?s=20/photo/1
[Text:] 🐣 RT @realDonaldTrump Page 2: I will name the place and the test, and it will be a tough one. Nobody will come even close to me! We can also throw some physical activity into it. I just won the Senior Club Championship at a big golf club, with many very good players. To do so you need strength, accuracy, touch and, above all, mental toughness. Ask Bret Baier (Fox), a very good golfer. The Wall Street Journal & Fox are damaged goods after their failed DeSanctimonious push & stupid $780,000,000 “settlement.” MORONS!!!
🐣 RT @nolanwpeterson “Russia broke their lives forever.” ¤ In March 2022, I interviewed four Ukrainians who’d managed to escape Russia’s massacre of Mariupol. ¤ Some of their words are below.
¤ https://twitter.com/nolanwpeterson/status/1700876105039679784?s=20
🐣 RT @Tendar Ukrainian forces are cracking the Russian defense lines step by step. They drive a chisel into the lines and then widen the rift by moving into the flanks. This might not look fast, but it is how you break defense networks and it is working. This is, however, not even the most important news.
¤ 🌎 https://twitter.com/Tendar/status/1700943531982876803?s=20/photo/1
More importantly are the Russian troop movements in that sector. The deployment of the Russian 76th Guards Air Assault Division is an admission that the Ukrainian progress has reached such critical state for the Russian invasion army that they are even forced to deploy one of their offensive forces for defense operations. It does not only prove the level of desperation but also diminishes Russian capabilities for offensive operations. Furthermore, the Russian “offensive” at Kupyansk-Kreminna is now completely exposed as what it is: a diversionary attack.
In reference to my post a few days ago, where I again – and repeatedly before – paraphrased the importance of logistics, I can only re-emphasize that the real battle in the South is about logistics and supply lines. Ukrainians not only hammer the frontline but the whole logistical network of the Russian army. The more Russian troops move in, the harder it gets for them to sustain that level of logistical support, a proficiency where they already proved to be weak Additionally, Russians are taking more and more risks by not only bringing more of their troops into Ukrainian artillery range but also exposing other frontline sectors.
The attrition rate of the Russian army units comes on top of that, too. We already have eye-witness accounts of Russian POWs, disclosing profound Russian losses even within their newly deployed formations such as the above mentioned 76th Division (check on @Tatarigami_UA latest posts).
The strategy of the Ukrainian Army might not look spectacular, but it works, when continued to its logical end. It is exactly how an army would operate in order to soften up an entrenched enemy to a point where it is untenable to continue to fight and withdraw. All what is needed is stamina and patience. ¤ #Ukraine #Counteroffensive
🐣 RT @Morning_Joe .@JoeNBC: “We have to fight back with the truth because more than an election is on the line in 2024. American democracy is on the line, and we’ve got to get it right.”
⋙ 💽 MSNBC, MorningJoe: Joe: We have to fight back with the truth; more than an election is on the line in 2024 https://tinyurl.com/3ye7av9a
// The Morning Joe panel discusses the current political climate and what is driving deep political division and what can be done to improve the division.
🐣 RT @ChuckPfarrer AVDIIVKA AXIS /1845 UTC 10 SEPT/ UKR makes gains in heavy frighting north of Donetsk airport. UKR reported in contact in vicinity of Spartak & Opytne.
🌎 https://twitter.com/ChuckPfarrer/status/1700938798454984880?s=20/photo/1
💽 MSNBC, AliVelshi: Laurence Tribe: If Trump doesn’t qualify for insurrection clause, nobody would https://tinyurl.com/2p8t2sjb
American legal scholar Laurence Tribe joins Ali Velshi to discuss the unique strength of a new lawsuit in Colorado seeking to ban Trump from the ballot based on the 14th Amendment, why the case is destined to end up at the Supreme Court, and how the self-executing component of the article works.
“This is more controversial because it isn’t as mechanical,” Tribe explains about the lawsuit. “Clearly we’re going to have to explore in this trial the meaning of insurrection, what it means to be engaged in it… and I think it’s clear to most people that if Trump doesn’t qualify [for that], nobody would.”
On what’s at stake in the 14th Amendment clause, Tribe says, “This was a major protective provision put in there because [the founders] realized that those who take an oath to uphold the constitution and then turncoat against it might not end up being prosecuted for anything,” he explains. “It’s important for the survival of the republic that someone who has shown him or herself to be an insurrectionist against the Constitution not get another chance to try.”
🐣 RT @MSNBC “[The founders] realized that those who take an oath to uphold the Constitution and then turn against it might not end up being prosecuted,” @tribelaw tells @AliVelshi. “It’s important that someone who has shown himself to be an insurrectionist not get another chance to try.”
🐣 RT @HRHMBNSALMAAN As a culmination of what has been worked on during the last period, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, the United States of America, the Republic of India, the United Arab Emirates, and the Republic of France announced The Federal Republic of Germany, the Republic of Italy and the European Union signed a memorandum of understanding regarding the project to establish a new economic corridor linking India, the Middle East and Europe.
¤ https://twitter.com/HRHMBNSALMAAN/status/1700822599134056617?s=20
This memorandum crystallizes the foundations upon which it was built to achieve the Kingdom’s common interests, enhance economic interdependence with its partners from other countries, and reflect positively on the global economy in general. This project will contribute to developing and rehabilitating the infrastructure, which includes railways and port connections to increase the passage of goods. services, enhancing trade exchange between concerned parties, and extending lines and pipelines to transmit electricity and hydrogen to enhance the security of global energy supplies, in addition to cables to transmit data through a highly efficient and reliable cross-border network.
This memorandum will work to enhance economic integration and contribute to providing new and quality job opportunities in order to achieve long-term gains along the new cross-border corridors.The Kingdom’s contribution to this project comes from its strategic geographical location linking East to West, its global leadership role as a reliable source of energy, and the competitive advantages it possesses that make its participation in this project pivotal to its success.The Kingdom affirmed that achieving what it worked on in this memorandum requires continuing the pace of efforts that have been made, and immediately starting to develop the necessary mechanisms for their implementation, according to the time frame that was agreed upon based on what was stated in the memorandum. #G20Bharat #G20Summit
🐣 RT @brent_peabody There have been 23 special elections for State Legislature this year
Dems have overperformed Biden’s vote share by an average of 8%— literally unprecedented for a party in the White House
I have not read a single article in the mainstream media about this
🐣 RT @DSilverbergDC I wrote in June after Saudi and India visits that “Biden’s animating principle is that the United States cannot allow China to control the supply chains undergirding the green transition.” We are seeing this theme in play at G20 with infra announcements
💙 🐣 RT @narendramodi Charting a journey of shared aspirations and dreams, the India-Middle East-Europe Economic Corridor promises to be a beacon of cooperation, innovation, and shared progress. As history unfolds, may this corridor be a testament to human endeavour and unity across continents.
⋙ 🐣 RT @Occupy007 This is significant 🇸🇦 📃 🇺🇲
[link] https://twitter.com/alihmourad/status/1700548973713391711
[TextLink:] https://twitter.com/Occupy007/status/1700581138954342870?s=20/photo/1
[Text:] The governments of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and the United States of America announced that they had signed a memorandum of understanding (MoU) between the two countries on Sep 8, 2023. The bilateral MoU provides a framework for developing a protocol for establishing intercontinental green transit corridors through the Kingdom to connect the continent of Asia with the continent of Europe.
This project aims to facilitate the transit of renewable electricity and clean hydrogen via transmission cables and pipelines as well as constructing rail linkages.. It is also intended to enhance energy security, support efforts for the development of clean energy, promote digital economy through digital connectivity and transmission of data via fiber cables, and promote trade and transport of goods by rail and through ports.
The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia welcomes the role of the United States of America to facilitate and support the negotiations, establishment, and implementation of the green corridors transit protocol with the relevant countries.
Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia
9 September 2023 / 24 Safar 1445
🐣 RT @narendramodi Met President @RTErdogan. We talked about ways to further cement trade and infrastructure linkages between India and Türkiye. @trpresidency
🐣 RT @jonallendc Exclusive: The office Trump doesn’t want you to know about ¤ “Boxes everywhere. A private firm conducted a search. But there is no indication that the FBI ever inspected it for classified or other materials that belong to the U.S. 1/2
¤ https://twitter.com/jonallendc/status/1700819385093390601?s=20
⋙ 🐣 RT @ Aides on political payroll have worked out of the government-leased office. ¤ It is not clear what steps Trump’s taken to ensure no political work is done using federal resources. … 2/2
⋙⋙ NBCNews: Trump’s post-presidential office is hiding in plain sight https://tinyurl.com/47r8k5yj
// For a man who likes his name in lights, his government-funded post-presidential office is as nondescript as they come.
🐣 RT @Saudi_Gazette #VIDEO: In a historic announcement during the #G20 Summit in New Delhi, #Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman unveiled the signing of a memorandum of understanding to establish an economic corridor connecting India with the Middle East and Europe.
🐣 RT @narendramodi At the iconic Rajghat, the G20 family paid homage to Mahatma Gandhi – the beacon of peace, service, compassion and non-violence. ¤ As diverse nations converge, Gandhi Ji’s timeless ideals guide our collective vision for a harmonious, inclusive and prosperous global future.
🖼 https://twitter.com/narendramodi/status/1700737664302145794?s=20/photo/1 -4
🐣 RT @tribelaw The Oath the President must take before “he enter on the Execution of his OFFICE: “I do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will faithfully execute the OFFICE of President of the United States, and will to the best of my ability, preserve, protect . . .”
⋙ 🐣 RT @tribelaw Mike Mukasey’s argument that the President isn’t an “officer” of the United States under the Disqualification Clause is as baseless textually as it is offbase intuitively. It’s unworthy of a former Attorney General, though the Wall Street Journal has apparently bought it.
⋙⋙ 🐣 RT @gtconway3d [9/8] Okay, I’ll bite. ¤ If the precise provision (Art. II, § 1) of the Constitution that creates the presidency explicitly refers to that position as an “Office,” then how can the holder of that Office not be an “officer” of the United States under that very same Constitution? 🤔
[TextLink:] https://twitter.com/tribelaw/status/1700591226351681701?s=20/photo/1
[Text:] ARTICLE. II. SECTION. 1. The executive Power shall be vested in a President of the United States of America. He shall hold his Office during the Term of four Years, and, together with the Vice President, chosen for the same Term, be elected, as follows …
🐣 RT @vonderleyen Today we gather in Raj Ghat, dedicated to the memory of Mahatma Gandhi. ¤ Raj Ghat’s eternal flame burns bright even in the darkest of times. ¤ Symbolising that peace and justice, the values championed by one of India’s greatest leaders, can and must prevail in this world.
💽 https://twitter.com/vonderleyen/status/1700755035926245486?s=20/photo/1
⭕ 9 Sep 2023
WaPo: Jan. 6 shattered her family. Now they’re trying to forgive. https://tinyurl.com/4a8nn2 https://tinyurl.com/4a8nn2 “Guy received 87 months in prison, the most of any Jan. 6 defendant up to that point, … since he took on a ‘self-appointed leadership role’ and had a firearm at the Capitol”
// Peyton Reffitt has watched her family come apart after her father joined the Capitol riot mob. Now she and her family are confronting the perceived betrayals and broken relationships.
// Entire: “Guy received 87 months in prison, the most of any Jan. 6 defendant up to that point. His case was “very different from all others prosecuted to date,” the judge said, since he took on a “self-appointed leadership role” and had a firearm at the Capitol.”
WaPo, Dan Balz: What divides political parties? More than ever, it’s race and ethnicity. https://tinyurl.com/324cmbyk A new report from the American Political Science Associatiom – their first in 70 years – examines political polarization
// A new report examines political polarization. While acknowledging that anti-democratic impulses among Republicans are most worrisome, it suggests that both parties bear some responsibility for stoking division.
⋙ 📔 APSA Report (Jul): More than Red and Blue: Political Parties and American Democracy https://tinyurl.com/4ert2496
📊 ◕ [Report:] https://tinyurl.com/4sxwfcc3 183p
🐣 RT @kvistp The war will not be long-term, – Budanov
“I do not share the opinion that this will be a long war. This is my personal opinion, which is based on an analysis of the data that we have, first of all, on the enemy. But, again, if you are talking about six months, seven months, a year, and you think that this is a long period, then it is quite likely that you will be right,” the head of Ukrainian intelligence noted.
From 🇺🇦 Ukraine Now telegram. #UkraineWillWin #ArmUkraineNow even more!
🐣 RT @MSNBC Jon Meacham: “We don’t really have two functional constitutional parties at the moment. The Republican party has become a vehicle for a personality with authoritarian tendencies and those tendencies took concrete form in the aftermath of the 2020 election.”
💽 https://twitter.com/MSNBC/status/1700608899378737320?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @chantler_jaki Just so we are all clear – SpaceX was 85% funded through NASA awards. Elon has no right to suggest it’s his system to play with as he wishes. 😡
⋙ 🐣 📋 RT @MayoIsSpicyy 85% of SpaceX was funded by the federal government, mostly through Elon’s NASA awards. The remaining 15% of funding is split between Elon Musk and private investors. ¤ Time for the U.S. government to nationalize Starlink and revoke Musk’s security clearance.
🐣 RT @thedailybeast The billionaire’s interference in Ukrainian military operations shows he’s a national security risk. No private citizen should have that much power.
⋙ DailyBeast: The U.S. Government Can’t Allow Elon Musk the Power to Intervene in Wars https://tinyurl.com/3c5ht8nc
// The billionaire’s interference in Ukrainian military operations shows he’s a national security risk. No private citizen should have that much power.
⭕ 8 Sep 2023
WaPo: 5th Circuit finds Biden White House, CDC likely violated First Amendment https://tinyurl.com/2hsenm2n The 5th Circuit covers LA, MS and TX; the ruling overrides a district court injunction, narrowing its scope //➔ But, COVID-19 miniformatiion DID kill people
🌎 https://twitter.com/Auriandra/status/1700428699470872723?s=20/photo/1
// The three judge panel found that contacts with tech companies by officials from the White House, the surgeon general’s office, the CDC and the FBI likely amounted to coercion
// [CourtDoc] https://tinyurl.com/yc2krszn 74p
⋙ 🐣 the ruling was greatly watered down from what the plaintiffs sought, overruling 9 of 10 complaints, leaving in place only a single injunction (rewritten by the 5th Circuit) against coercion and outright intimidation or threats ¤ advice is fine; collaboration is fine
⋙ 🐣 the 5th Circuit vacated 90% of the injunctions the District Court had approved, honing in on arm-twisting (coercion) and threats or implied threats ¤ all-in-all, a win for the govt; if a few overstepped in the panic over COVID-19, it’s understandable
🐣 RT @Acyn I monitored Trump’s speech and posted this video by using @SnapStream. If your organization is interested in capturing, clipping, and covering events live as they happen, you can learn more here: [link]
// Trump’s rally in SD; Acyn just posts, without making a thread
⋙ Trump referencing the jobs reports: We’re probably heading into a great depression.. The only question if it’s going to happen during the remaining months of the Biden administration. If it’s going to happen, let it happen then
⋙ Trump: During Biden’s first 30 months in office just 2.1 million new jobs have been created. Biden makes up these stories like I used to be a fighter pilot. Did you ever see his golf swing? He says he’s a six handicap!!
// Biden has added >13M jobs!⋙ Trump on Jobs Numbers: Now you’re given phony numbers because far fewer people are looking for jobs..
// still down for white males; others even or up⋙ Trump: Crooked Joe only cares about enriching his family, I care about enriching your family
// Untrue, as most other things he said⋙ Trump: I’m the only that ever lost money while being president… I could’ve made a fortune. Oh I could’ve gone to these countries and made deals
⋙ Trump: I have to go see my wife. May I talk to you for a moment? Yes. I’m going to be indicted for no reason whatsoever on Friday. It’s traumatic. I hear a couple of weeks later, I’m gonna be indicted for something else, then for something else…
⋙ Trump: But when they indicted me for nothing, for nothing, for free speech, I said the election was rigged and stolen, which it was, and everybody knows that
⋙ Trump, whose rallies featured people chanting lock her up, reflects on how he believes Biden indicted him: But he actually did this to an opponent. Nobody would ever think it’s possible. It wasn’t really possible even psychologically possible.
⋙ According to this, DeSantis is with the communists. Also: I don’t watch him, he’s gone so low in the polls. I’m not really watching him
⋙ Trump: I said to Kim Jong un, you have the most beautiful shoreline. Think of it. You between China, Russia. And South Korea. Look at the beautiful shore— you could have the most beautiful condos
⋙ Trump: 91 fake and phony charges. 91.. How many charges are they? But we’re going to ask for dismissals of a lot of it. The Republicans in the Senate and in the House cannot let this go on
⋙ Trump: I know numerous people over the years that and many cases, they were literally out of politics in a matter of hours. Some of them literally quit immediately upon getting served with a subpoena. That won’t happen with me.
⋙ Trump: Pro-life Christians and others who Joe Biden is throwing into jail facing 10, 15 and even 20 years in prison for protesting and free speech
⋙ Trump: “I could’ve made a fortune. I could’ve gone to these countries and made deals. My kids said, ‘Dad, can we do something? And I said, ‘No, I’m president. We have a higher standard.”
⋙ Trump calls the overturning of a Roe V. Wade a “positive” but says he it cost Republicans politically. Trump goes to repeat his lie on after birth abortion
⋙ Trump: This is like a military invasion.. I’m calling on congressional Republicans to ban Joe Biden from using a single tax dollar to release a resettled illegal aliens into the United States starting on the government funding deadlinec
// right to seek asylum⋙ Trump calls on Senate Republicans to defund the DOJ and prosecutors investigating him
// can’t be done⋙ Trump: We are a nation that wants to make our army tanks all electric so that despite the fact That they will not be able to go very far either. Few pollutants will be released into the air as we blast our way through enemy territory
🐣 RT @ChrisDJackson So…Trump apparently is finally leaving his basement for the first time in a month for an event in South Dakota tonight. ¤ Here is a video of the crowd (or lack thereof). The event starts in just a few minutes. ¤ Smaller venues. Smaller crowds. Lower energy. Just sad.
💽 https://twitter.com/ChrisDJackson/status/1700303668409757725?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @general_ben If true…and if Germany does the same with Taurus…Ukraine will soon make Crimea untenable for Russian forces, especially Black Sea Fleet. Sevastopol, Saky, Dzankoy all easily within range.
⋙ 🧵 RT @ michaeldweiss Assuming ABC News reporting is accurate re ATACMS, a very wise move by the administration. Here’s a short thread as to why:
📌 https://twitter.com/michaeldweiss/status/1700288770082263176?s=20
[ThreadReader:] https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1700288770082263176.html
It eliminates the last big item on Ukraine’s 16 month-long shopping list — a li[st] HUR provided me in Ukraine in April 2022. This is literally everything the last of what wanted since the early days of the war. (Cluster bombs were even on the list.)
It also calls Russia’s bluff about retaliation, now rendered especially ridiculous in light of successive Ukrainian strikes against strategic Russia targets (including a nuclear bomber) well within Russian territory, all of which led not to World War III.
It puts Russian logistics in Ukraine at greater risk, and further allows Kyiv to target mobile Russian AD: the ATACMS is a particularly useful munition against time-sensitive targets. (An S-300 crew can displace in 15-30 mins; too quick for Storm Shadow or SCALP but not ATACMS.)
Finally, creates much-needed redundancy for Ukraine’s deep-strike capability. The 7th Tactical Aviation Brigade is based at Starokostiantyniv Air Base, in Khmelnytskyi Oblast; this is the brigade that operates the Su-24M boomers that fire Storm Shadows.
Russia has hit the base before. Should it take out some or all the bombers on the tarmac, Ukraine will lose its valuable CM launch platforms. The U.S. cannot send more Su-24M; it can, however, send more HIMARS or M270s, which fire ATACMS. /END.
🐣 RT @RadioFreeTom Man, this WSJ article. “When Twitter’s engineers investigated, they found that one problem was that too many users had blocked Musk, making his tweets less popular. Still, Musk told engineers his posts deserved more attention.”
⋙ WSJ: Inside Musk’s Twitter Transformation: Impulsive Decisions, Favors for Friends https://tinyurl.com/bdftyr9t “Layoffs and resignations diminished the size of its trust and safety team. Musk also dissolved the platform’s trust and safety council, a group of … volunteer organizations”
// Kanye West and Marc Andreessen got owner’s attention after his takeover of the platform now called X
[TextLink:] https://twitter.com/Auriandra/status/1700376075098833407?s=20/photo/1
X has been under pressure from some advertisers and groups who have raised concerns about hateful content. Yaccarino met in June with groups that follow these issues, including the Center for Countering Digital Hate, which has accused the platform of allowing the proliferation of hate speech, according to people familiar with the meeting.
Within weeks, Musk took a different tack, saying on the platform that CCDH “appears to be foreign government interference” and calling its chief executive, Imran Ahmed, a “rat.” X Corp. then sued the group, alleging its research used flawed methodologies to censor viewpoints it disagrees with, and that it improperly accessed data from X’s platform. …
CCDH has defended its research. After the lawsuit was filed, Ahmed said in a written statement: “Musk is trying to ‘shoot the messenger’ who highlights the toxic content on his platform rather than deal with the toxic environment he’s created.”
🐣 RT @7Veritas4 Weekly Justice recap:
● Enrique Tarrio – 22 years
● Alabama court strikes down gerrymandered district maps.
● Peter Navarro – Green Bay swept.
● Ken Paxton impeachment in TX.
● MaL Docs case: Taveras flips
● NY Fraud case: Trump loses appeal to delay. Sanctions pending.
● E. Jean Carroll wins her 2nd defamation suit against the sex pest.
● DC Grand Jury back in session.
● GA RICO: Cheese and Kraken go together on Oct 23rd.
● John Eastman disbarment hearing.
● Fani Willis stuffs Jim Jordan in a locker.
● 14th amendment disqualification vs. Trump filed in Colorado
● Mark Meadows loses appeal to change jurisdiction.
● (Monday was a holiday)
🐣 RT @AWeissmann_ Badge of honor ⬇️
[TextLink:] https://twitter.com/AWeissmann_/status/1700309168283062412?s=20/photo/1
[Text:] 🐣 RT @realDonaldTrump The group suing me in Colorado to ridiculously try and Unconstitutionally keep me off the ballot (I am leading against DeSanctimonious by almost 50 points, and beating Crooked Joe, BIG!), is TRUMP DERANGED “CREW,” composed of many slime balls & groups like Norm Eisen through Brookings or Just Security, Andrew Weissmann, Joyce Vance, et al. They are, perhaps illegally, working with Weissmann acolyte Lisa Monaco at “Injustice.” I have been beating them for years, including Impeachments. MAGA!!!
🐣 RT @KatiePhang BREAKING: Federal judge has DENIED Mark Meadows’ attempt to remove his Fulton County state prosecution to federal court.
[CourtDoc:] https://tinyurl.com/37uzstzt
🐣 RT @SecBlinken Russia continues its attacks on Ukraine’s vital Danube ports, systematically destroying civilian infrastructure to prevent Ukrainian grain from feeding the world. This is Russia’s playbook: strangle Ukrainian grain exports, weaponize food, and make hungry people pay the price.
🐣 RT @Heroiam_Slava ❗️ UN Secretary General secretly offered Russian Foreign Minister a deal to revive grain initiative – Bild
It refers to four points that should lead to the resumption of the grain deal.
● The Secretary General proposes to connect the state-owned Rosselkhozbank to SWIFT;
● Insure Russian ships in the Black and Azov Seas against attacks;
● To unfreeze the assets of Russian fertilizer producers in the EU;
● Ensure access to EU ports for ships transporting fertilizers and food products.
[Bild:] https://tinyurl.com/2ysc5r2z
⋙ 🐣 maybe — after Russia is totally out of Ukraine and all war criminals have been turned over and Ukraine has funds from frozen Ru assets to rebuild its country — as a path forward for Russia ¤ but to renew the grain deal? absurd
🐣 RT @Podolyak_M Who could have imagined that the #UN would turn into the main lobbyists of war criminals? A reminder. By imposing sanctions for violations of international law, Western countries sent a clear message to Russian elites: #Russia with #Putin has no future; Russia after Putin will have a chance. By lobbying for the idea of lifting sanctions on Russia to export stolen grain in the middle of a full-scale war, the @UN leadership wants to prolong the life of Putin’s regime and recognize missile strikes as an effective tool to achieve political goals. An interesting signal to the world of the XXI century. None of these absurd ideas can be realized, especially against the backdrop of missile terror against Ukraine’s port and grain infrastructure. However, this is yet another reminder that Russia’s presence in the UN Security Council is poisoning the organization as a whole.
🖼 https://twitter.com/Podolyak_M/status/1700140769145761879?s=20/photo/1
MSNBC: Read full text of Trump Fulton County special grand jury report https://tinyurl.com/4z86hmyf Several people considered for indictment, who were not: Boris Epshteyn, Michael Flynn, Lindsey Graham, Kelly Loeffler, David Perdue, (others I don’t recognize)
// report embedded; The full report on Georgia election interference was released following an indictment in the case last month.
[CourtDoc:] https://tinyurl.com/ywjz9rfz
🐣 RT @carlquintanilla “US importing more from Mexico than #China for first time since 2003” – B of A desk / Hartnett ¤ #decoupling
◕ https://twitter.com/carlquintanilla/status/1699972087463530894?s=20/photo/1
[Text:] Why? ¤ In 2018, the Trump administration imposed tariffs on Chinese goods, triggering a trade war between the countries. The pandemic accelerated the trend of decreasing the share of Chinese imports in the US due to supply chain disruptions.
Mexico capitalized on this situation, becoming the US’s largest trading partner for the first time. Exports from Mexico to the US in 2022 amounted to $450 billion, which is 50% more than in 2016.
Almost all the increase in trade is attributed to the categories of Transport vehicles, Electrical and electronic equipment, and Machinery.
Factories in the US typically produce intermediate goods, which are then exported to Mexico, where they become part of the assembly process. The finished product is then imported back.
Mexico is one of the main beneficiaries of the discord between the US and China.
⋙ 🐣 RT @bastion_manager
📊 Top U.S. Imports from Mexico 2022 🇺🇸❤️🇲🇽
🚗 Vehicles: $111B
🔧 Machinery: $86B
🔌 Electrical equipment: $79B
⛽ Mineral fuels & oils: $26B
🔬 Optical & medical apparatus: $19B
🛋️ Furniture & lighting: $13B
🍹 Beverages & spirits: $11.60B
❓Unspecified commodities: $10B
🍊 Fruits & nuts: $10.49B
🌽 Vegetables & tubers: $8.92B
🐣 RT @grantstern How nice of the Russian web hosts to support harassment of Fulton County grand jurors and DA Fani Willis. ¤ Naturally, the doxing website is filled with HIDEOUS racist remarks. ¤ Prighozin is gone, but help for Trump from Russia remains.
⋙ 🐣 RT @AnnaBower Here’s an attached affidavit from the Atlanta Chief of Police, who says the website that published “doxed” information about the grand jurors and DA Willis is a Russian company that “has refused to remove doxing information…”
[TextLink:] https://twitter.com/grantstern/status/1699629801709949390?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @ indyli Fani Willis got doxxed by Russia
Alvin Bragg got bomb threats from Russia
2016 election was hacked by Russia
Mar-a-Lago was infiltrated by spies from Russia
Trump is funded by laundered money from Russia
But sure tell us more about how “Russia collusion was just a hoax” 😒
⭕ 7 Sep 2023
🐣 RT @EricTopol An outstanding @ScienceMagazine review of @PeterHotez’s new book THE DEADLY RISE OF ANTI-SCIENCE https://science.org/doi/full/10.1126/science.adi7631 by
@ArthurCaplan “a man whose compassion and dedication to healing are on display throughout the book, describes the personal costs he paid for his efforts..”
[TextLink:] https://twitter.com/EricTopol/status/1699917978631127263?s=20/photo/1
// legible text at Tweet-link
🐣 RT @ AdamSchiff A jury has found Trump ally Peter Navarro guilty on two counts of criminal contempt of Congress for refusing to comply with the January 6th Committee’s subpoena & failing to produce documents. ¤ A good day for justice. And a good precedent for the rule of law.
VOA: Presidential Centers Warn of Fragile State of US Democracy https://tinyurl.com/4yhpp83t “The joint message from presidential centers, foundations and institutes emphasized the need for compassion, tolerance and pluralism while urging Americans to respect democratic institutions”
Concern for U.S. democracy amid deep national polarization has prompted the entities supporting 13 presidential libraries dating back to Herbert Hoover to call for a recommitment to the country’s bedrock principles, including the rule of law and respecting a diversity of beliefs.
The statement released Thursday, the first time the libraries have joined to make such a public declaration, said Americans have a strong interest in supporting democratic movements and human rights around the world because “free societies elsewhere contribute to our own security and prosperity here at home.”
“But that interest,” it said, “is undermined when others see our own house in disarray.”
The joint message from presidential centers, foundations and institutes emphasized the need for compassion, tolerance and pluralism while urging Americans to respect democratic institutions and uphold secure and accessible elections.
The statement noted that “debate and disagreement” are central to democracy but also alluded to the coarsening of dialogue in the public arena during an era when officials and their families are receiving death threats. …
Efforts to suppress or weaken voter turnout are of special interest to the LBJ Foundation, Updegrove said, given that President Lyndon Johnson considered his signing of the Voting Rights Act his “proudest legislative accomplishment.”
The bipartisan statement was signed by the Hoover Presidential Foundation, the Roosevelt Institute, the Truman Library Institute, the John F. Kennedy Library Foundation, the LBJ Foundation, the Richard Nixon Foundation, the Gerald R. Ford Presidential Foundation, the Carter Center, the Ronald Reagan Presidential Foundation and Institute, the George & Barbara Bush Foundation, the Clinton Foundation, the George W. Bush Presidential Center and the Obama Presidential Center. …
The push for the joint statement was spearheaded by Daniel Kramer, executive director of the George W. Bush Institute. Kramer said the former president “did see and signed off on this statement.”
He said the effort was intended to send “a positive message reminding us of who we are and also reminding us that when we are in disarray, when we’re at loggerheads, people overseas are also looking at us and wondering what’s going on.” He also said it was necessary to remind Americans that their democracy cannot be taken for granted. …
Vox: The Republican Party’s plan to rule the state of Wisconsin forever, explained https://tinyurl.com/f5jh599c
// Wisconsin’s legislature is gerrymandered to ensure that Democrats will never win it. Republicans have a plan to keep it that way.
Republicans have effectively had unbreakable control of the Wisconsin state legislature for more than a decade. And now they have a plan that could entrench their rule forever. ¤ The state’s legislature is so aggressively gerrymandered that it is likely impossible for Republicans to lose control of it in an election. In 2018, for example, Democratic state assembly candidates received 54 percent of the popular vote in Wisconsin, but Republicans still won 63 of the assembly’s 99 seats.
There is, however, a light at the end of this tunnel both for small-d democrats and for large-D Democrats in the notoriously contentious swing state. Last April, Justice Janet Protasiewicz won a landslide election victory over a former, very conservative state justice. She took her seat at the beginning of August, giving Democrats a 4-3 majority on the state supreme court. ¤ Litigants challenging the gerrymandered state legislature filed a lawsuit, known as Clarke v. Wisconsin Elections Commission, the very next day.
According to the New York Times, “Republicans in Wisconsin are coalescing around the prospect of impeaching” Protasiewicz. […] [T]he state constitution also provides that “no judicial officer shall exercise [her] office, after [s]he shall have been impeached, until [her] acquittal.” So the state assembly could conceivably impeach Protasiewicz, and then the state senate could delay her trial forever — effectively creating a vacancy on the court that could last for a very long time. […]
WaPo: Musk cut internet to Ukraine’s military as it was attacking Russian fleet https://tinyurl.com/bdff3f9f “Whatever responsible corporate behavior is, that’s not it.” ~ Paul Barrett, deputy director of New York University’s Stern Center for Business and Human Rights
// New details of the previously reported incident underscore how critical SpaceX has become to the U.S. government
🐣 RT @washingtonpost Opinion by Jennifer Rubin: The impeachment scheme of Judge Janet Protasiewicz is indicative of Republicans’ refusal to accept the results of elections. They seem to believe that no Democrat, no matter what voters say, can legitimately exercise power.
⋙ WaPo, Jennifer Rubin: Wisconsin GOP entertains a constitutional crisis. Again. https://tinyurl.com/yb4b8e3p
🐣 RT @AlexThomp New Biden re-elect ad entitled “War Zone” to air on 60 Minutes in battleground states this weekend, per the campaign ¤ Focuses on Biden’s trip to Kyiv.
💽 https://twitter.com/AlexThomp/status/1699795672491495482?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @ @LeaderMcConnell Standing with our allies against Russian aggression isn’t charity. In fact – it’s a direct investment in replenishing America’s arsenal with American weapons built by American workers. Expanding our defense industrial base puts America in a stronger position to out-compete China.
🐣 RT @SecBlinken Russia’s sham elections in occupied areas of Ukraine are illegitimate and an affront to the UN Charter. The United States will never recognize Russia’s claims to any of Ukraine’s sovereign territory. We will support Ukraine for as long as it takes.
💙 WaPo: Georgia prosecutor accuses Jim Jordan of trying to ‘obstruct’ Trump case https://tinyurl.com/ys9vmnwh “Fulton County District Attorney Fani T. Willis accused Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) of ‘an unjustified and illegal intrusion into an open state criminal prosecution’”
⋙ Letters:
⋙⋙ [CourtDoc:] Jordan to Willis (8/24) https://tinyurl.com/34xzrwmr
⋙⋙ [CourtDoc:] Willis to Jordan (9/7) https://tinyurl.com/3z8c8by9
⭕ 6 Sep 2023
🐣 RT @RepGreta Legislative Republicans, in an unprecedented attempt to override the will of voters, are threatening to impeach Justice Protasiewicz before she has the opportunity to hear a single case. Legislative Democrats are united in our opposition to this anti-democratic abuse of power.
[TextLink:] https://twitter.com/RepGreta/status/1699500597043499454?s=20/photo/1
[Letter Text:] Legislative Republicans have threatened to nullity more than a million votes for a duly elected justice in order to hold onto their power and deny Wisconsinites access to reproductive rights.
This is an attront to democracy, and it will not stand. Attempting to change the rules to hold onto power is nothing new for Speaker Vos and legislative Republicans, as we’ve seen through their gerrymandered maps, changes to election law, and lame duck session stripping Governor Evers and Attorney General Josh Kaul of their powers.
However, this impeachment threat demonstrates that we have not yet reached the limit of their willingness to undermine the core values or our redublic. We will do everything in our power to prevent this egregious effort to undermine our democracy.”
🐣 RT @MilesTaylorUSA To this day, I remain astounded by the Republicans I served with in government who STILL won’t condemn Trump. They shared grave concerns, privately. But democracy’s demise apparently isn’t enough for them to speak up.
🐣 RT @nexta_tv US delegation to discuss Putin’s war crimes warrant in The Hague ¤ A high-ranking US congressional delegation will meet with the chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Court in The Hague tomorrow. ¤ According to the head of the delegation, Michael McCaul, Washington is ready to help gather more evidence and intelligence to prove the charges against Putin.
CNN, Marshall Cohen: Watchdog group sues to block Trump from Colorado ballot, citing 14th Amendment’s disqualification clause https://tinyurl.com/ydsft6nt “Many expect the Supreme Court will ultimately weigh in on the matter in some fashion”
🐣 RT @tribelaw This is the strongest of the suits filed to compel sec’s of state to apply the 14th Amendment’s Disqualification Clause to Trump. The 6 plaintiffs clearly have standing under Colorado law and ironclad legal and factual research backs up their complaint:
🐣 RT @CREWcrew This is the big one
⋙ 🔄 CREW: Lawsuit filed to remove Trump from ballot in CO under 14th Amendment https://tinyurl.com/3dx8sxan
[CourtDoc:] pdf https://tinyurl.com/4rcp3w4h 115p
🐣 RT @BNONews U.S. announces another $1 billion in aid for Ukraine, including $300 million for law enforcement and $206 million for humanitarian assistance
[TextLink:] https://twitter.com/BNONews/status/1699535886772220021?s=20/photo/1
// Defense budget
[Text:] Since the beginning of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, the United States has provided $43.2 billion in security assistance, $2.9 billion in humanitarian assistance, and $20.5 billion in budget support through World Bank mechanisms. In Kyiv, Secretary Blinken announced that the United States would also provide:
● An additional drawdown of up to $175 million from DoD stocks that will be provided under drawdowns previously directed for Ukraine. Capabilities in this security assistance includes air defense system components, Guided Multiple Launch Rocket Systems for HIMARS, munitions,
ammunition, and communications systems;
● $100 million in Foreign Military Financing to support longer-term military requirements;
● $90.5 million in humanitarian demining assistance;
● $300 million to support law enforcement efforts to restore and maintain law and order in liberated areas, including cities and towns facing continuous shelling by Russia;
● $206 million in humanitarian assistance to provide critical support including food, water, and
shelter to those in Ukraine and those forced to flee to neighboring countries.
● $5.4 million in forfeited oligarch assets to support veteran reintegration and rehabilitation;
● And, $203 million for support to transparency and accountability of institutions, bolstering key reform efforts related to anti-corruption, rule of law and the justice sector; and to build capacity to investigate and prosecute war crimes committed by Russia. This assistance will also support digitalization of recovery and reconstruction efforts by improving and ensuring the transparent procurement of infrastructure projects; health-governance to support the restoration of lifesaving services to enable economic recovery in Ukraine, strengthening public financial management practices to meet international standards.
🐣 RT @officejjsmart “WHERE WILL YOU BE IN FIVE YEARS?”
💽 https://twitter.com/officejjsmart/status/1699568745855787127?s=20/photo/1
// Zelensky was asked in 2018; vs now
🐣 RT @MikeSington Trump issues another threat.
[TextLink:] https://twitter.com/MikeSington/status/1699514100504785345?s=20/photo/1
[Text:] 🐣 RT @realDonald Trump Right now Republicans in Congress and the Senate have to get tough, and put everything together in one big, neat package, because I will be President in one and a half years, and we will pick the strongest, toughest, and most respected Attorney General, and if guilty, we will put them all in jail where they belong, just as they are trying to do to me based on NOTHING.
🐣 RT @WMO Earth had the hottest three-month period on record, with unprecedented sea surface temperatures and extreme weather.
// World Meteorological Organization
◕ https://twitter.com/WMO/status/1699333387981324517?s=20/photo/1
DOD: Biden Administration Announces Additional Security Assistance for Ukraine https://tinyurl.com/4chku89y “Biden Administration’s forty-sixth tranche of equipment to be provided from DoD inventories for Ukraine since August 2021”
// Defense budget
[TextLink:] https://twitter.com/Auriandra/status/1699578083026616783?s=20/photo/1
The capabilities in this package, valued at up to $175 million, include:
● Equipment to support Ukraine’s air defense systems;
● Additional ammunition for High Mobility Artillery Rocket Systems (HIMARS);
● 155mm and 105mm artillery rounds;
● 81mm mortars systems and rounds;
● 120mm depleted uranium tank ammunition for Abrams tanks;
● Tube-Launched, Optically-Tracked, Wire-Guided (TOW) missiles;
● Javelin and AT-4 anti-armor systems;
● Over 3 million rounds of small arms ammunition;
● Tactical air navigation systems;
● Tactical secure communications systems and support equipment;
● Demolitions munitions for obstacle clearing; and
● Spare parts, maintenance, and other field equipment.
🐣 RT @ekaramurza Vladimir’s @vkaramurza mother—and my admirable mother-in-law—on her son, the man I’m lucky to be sharing my life with.
⋙ Prospect, Elena Gordon: My son, Putin’s prisoner https://tinyurl.com/43emv8cc a moving paean to her son Vladimir Kara-Murza, it includes in-depth biographical and historical details
// Vladimir Kara-Murza has dedicated his life to Russian democracy. Elena Gordon, his mother, explains what made him who he is
On 17th April 2023, the Moscow City Court sentenced my son Vladimir—Volodya as I call him, or Vlad as he was known to schoolfriends in Harrow and university friends in Cambridge—to 25 years in a maximum-security penal colony. This sentence is not a punishment only for him. His three children will grow fatherless into their teenage years and adulthood: the youngest was 10 when his father was arrested, the two girls 13 and 16. His wife has abandoned her normal life and is tirelessly fighting for her husband’s rescue. His 90-year-old grandmother has lost her eyesight and feels grief beyond words. His father, also a prominent Russian journalist, was already dead by the time of his son’s arrest. As for me, I am surviving.
I survive with the help of a single thought. Since my son was arrested on 11th April 2022, my life has been reduced to the pursuit of one obsessive goal: to see my son alive and free. While it is not certain that Vladimir will remain alive for the whole duration of his sentence—in fact, the chances that he will are slim, given his state of health and conditions in a Russian penal colony—it is safe to say that I will not see the end of his draconian imprisonment in my lifetime. That is why I decided to write this short tribute to my son. May it be both my testament and my declaration of love. …
🐣 RT @Kasparov63 A good and brave colleague, friend, and human, and I wish him him and his family every strength. One day soon his persecutors will be on the other side of that glass.
⋙ 🐣 RT @Billbrowder BREAKING: Vladimir Kara-Murza, who was sentenced to 25 years of hard labor for opposing Putin, has been transferred from Moscow to pre-trial detention center-1 in Omsk Siberia. From there he will be sent to a prison camp in the area to serve his sentence. [link Ru]
🐣 RT @mhmck The United Nations can expel the Russian terrorist state. The General Assembly can decertify the so-called Russian Federation because that entity never applied for nor was voted into membership. ¤ If the UN doesn’t expel the Russian terrorists then it should be dissolved.
🐣 RT @anders_aslund Putin has lost all contact with reality. The only place for him is a mental asylum.
⋙ 🐣 RT @Gerashchenko_en Putin is discussing WWII again. He says Nazism was “defeated but not eradicated,” especially in “Ukraine and the Baltic States.” ¤ He is already planning next year’s celebrations of victory in the “Great Patriotic War” – Russia’s version of WWII that concerns only the USSR entering the war.
💽 https://twitter.com/Gerashchenko_en/status/1699078164331319312?s=20/photo/1
🐣📋 RT @MargieVotes President Biden and the Democrats are getting it done.
🖼 https://twitter.com/MargieVotes/status/1699229226023481491?s=20/photo/1
Morgan Stanley is crediting President Joe Biden’s economic policies with driving an unexpected surge in the U.S. economy that is significant. “Biden’s Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act is “driving a boom in large-scale infrastructure,” wrote Ellen Zentner, chief U.S. economist for Morgan Stanley
● The Infrastructure Act,
● The Chips and Science Act
● and Bidenomics – building America’s future.
#FreshResists #DemVoice1
🐣 RT @SamRamani2 BREAKING: Britain warns the Wagner Group is “threatening democracy and freedom around the world” as it labels it a terrorist group
🐣 RT @KyivPost ⚡️”We are seeing significant progress in the Ukrainian #counteroffensive,” US Secretary of State Antony #Blinken said in Kyiv today,” CNN reported.
🖼 https://twitter.com/KyivPost/status/1699377686131495241?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @SteveRattner Increasingly negative feeling about opposing political parties have expanded into increasingly negative feelings about the individual members of those opposing parties, too. @Morning_Joe
◕ https://twitter.com/SteveRattner/status/1699374833287524583?s=20/photo/1
⇈ ⇊ polarization
🐣 RT @SteveRattner It’s an era of bad feelings. ¤ The majority of Democrats and Republicans feel “very negatively” about the opposing political party, with ill sentiment on the rise. @Morning_Joe
◕ https://twitter.com/SteveRattner/status/1699374577149792388?s=20/photo/1
⇈ ⇊
🐣 RT @SteveRattner White Americans have become more divided along fault lines of education, with non-college-educated whites becoming more Republican and college-grads becoming more Democratic. @Morning_Joe
◕ https://twitter.com/SteveRattner/status/1699374347931042004?s=20/photo/1
⇈ ⇊
🐣 RT @SteveRattner Ideological sorting – the disappearance of conservative Democrats and liberal Republicans – has left America’s political parties more homogenous, and more divided. @Morning_Joe
◕ https://twitter.com/SteveRattner/status/1699373763547070618?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @CareyOnCatLady Translated from Ru**ian (of course). MADvedev is enraged at the free world; on 29 August he wrote to cut off relations with Poland, and Ukrainians were pigs and should be extinguished. I thought Ru**ians were pigs? Now I’m confused (haha) ¤ #SlavaUkraini bitches #DrunkenRage
[TextLink:] https://twitter.com/CareyOnCatLady/status/1699357322731041270?s=20/photo/1
[Text:] @MedvedevRussiaE The leaders of Bandera “Ukraine” are increasingly talking about
the need to “bring all Russians to account” (it is clear that by “Russians” they mean the entire population of our country, regardless of nationality). It happened somewhere before, didn’t
it?Bandera Ukraine is supported by almost all the leaders of Western countries. Therefore, Biden, Trudeau, Sunak, Scholz, Macron and Meloni, as well as the leaders of villainous Poland, the animalesque Scandinavian countries, militaristic Japan, marsupials from Australia and New Zealand and other plague- carrying fleas like the Baltic states are direct and obvious accomplices of the Nazis. And they need to be treated in the same way as the leaders of the countries of the Nazi coalition.
And no more indulging in sweet dreams about how we will someday make peace and live as a large polyamorous family with non-binary genders.
MeidasToich: Trump’s Latest Attacks on Special Counsel Jack Smith Might Be Last Straw https://tinyurl.com/bde32u94 “[T]he subject matter of Jack Smith’s under seal filing ostensibly deals with Donald Trump’s threats against the judge (federal judge Tanya Chutkan), [etc]”
// cont: “the prosecutors, witnesses, the judicial system, and the community”
// After Jack Smith filed a motion with the federal judge to address Trump’s threats, Trump responded with more threats
// includes two Trump tweets in full
🐣 RT @TreasChest The Armed Forces keep the Russians on a huge front and do not allow them to concentrate in any one place, they destroy the warehouses and logistics of the Russians, – former director of the CIA David Petraeus.
¤ https://twitter.com/TreasChest/status/1699292135579652515?s=20
The general noted that the offensive was very complex and he had not seen anything like it since World War II.
“It’s difficult, but not hopeless. After all, we know what we’re doing. We’re starting to accumulate progress and then we’re going to have a chain reaction effect. And that’s what we hope to see [in Ukraine],” Petraeus said during a speech at the Kyiv Security Forum .
“They are creating conditions on the battlefield and, when the opportunity arises, they will be able to deliver a decisive blow with reserve forces (…) and cut off Crimea from the south of Ukraine. Ideally, it would be to destroy the Crimean bridge,” the general added.
Petraeus noted that the occupiers have created an extremely complex defense system that is difficult to overcome, but “the Ukrainians are adapting extremely impressively.”
⭕ 5 Sep 2023
ForeignAffairs, Daniel Baer: Putin Races Against the Clock https://tinyurl.com/4mj4rmf7 How the West can apply maximum pressure on Putin to shorten the war
// The Dangers of a Desperate Russia
… One of the striking things about Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky is his apparently intuitive understanding that winning a war is not just a matter of having enough weapons and soldiers and managing supply lines, nor is it only about military strategy and tactics. Zelensky reminds many in the West of Winston Churchill because, just as the British prime minister did during World War II, he understands that war requires the stewardship of the national soul. A wartime leader, especially in an existential war, must be both general and prelate.
This at once secular and spiritual preservation of the nation requires boosting what is commonly understood as morale but also appealing to the deeper elements of common identity and sense of purpose in the face of horror and adversity—the kind of individual and collective belief that, in a quasi-religious fashion, encourages people to take a leap of faith: to believe in the possibility of alleviating their present condition and in their power to do something about it, even if they cannot see a plausible path to a better future.
Zelensky’s careful, courageous efforts to marshal his compatriots’ hearts, bodies, and minds in the face of ruthless aggression have been on display since the outset of the war, from his defiant declaration to concerned American officials who wanted to evacuate him from Kyiv—“I don’t need a ride, I need ammo”—to his deliberate management of the expectations about and the execution of the ongoing Ukrainian counteroffensive. He knew that after a year and a half of war’s human and material depletions, Ukrainians themselves, like their international partners, are now less able to absorb disappointment. …
The West can widen its approach in the coming months in several ways.[1] Western countries should provide expertise and intelligence to Ukrainians that they can use to take out Russian installations inside Russia that are critical to the resupply of the frontlines and to Russian air attacks. Drone attacks or acts of sabotage that target military bases and equipment factories could become more common, further weakening the Russian war effort and making the war more palpable to the Russian people.
The U.S. and key partners should also send a clear message to Putin that [2] if he attacks critical infrastructure such as gas, water, and electricity systems this winter, as he has in the past, they will not only deliver ATACMS short-range ballistic missiles but also remove some of the limitations placed on the weapons systems already provided to Ukraine—restrictions that currently prevent Ukraine from using such arms to attack targets in Russia. Despite the terrible state of the U.S.-Russian relationship, U.S. officials have stressed to their Russian counterparts how Washington has successfully limited the scope of the conflict and avoided escalation, notably by restricting the use of certain weapons now in Ukrainian hands. …
[3] Away from the battlefield, the United States and other partners should begin formally taking Russia’s international reserves, which many countries seized after Putin launched the invasion, and transfer them to a fund to support Ukraine. About $300 billion of Russian sovereign reserves have been frozen since the beginning of the war. Concerns about setting a dangerous international legal precedent—as well as the potential knock-on effects for central banks and the international financial system—have so far prevented the United States and its partners from enacting such transfers. But it is time to overcome the legal objections, with as much care as possible to narrow the precedent established, and to begin creating a Ukraine reconstruction fund with Russian assets. …
… The announcement that a real Ukraine reconstruction fund—which ultimately needs to be hundreds of billions of dollars—is beginning with Russian reserves as seed funding would indicate that Ukraine’s partners are planning for a hopeful future for the beleaguered country and its people. And crucially, such commitment to the defense of Ukraine will speed the clock that Putin now finds himself racing against.
🐣 RT @svdate One of Trump’s own White House lawyers told me that the facts and the law are clear, and that if the question gets to the Supreme Court, they will rule that he is disqualified from holding office. https://tinyurl.com/ahuwmzjk
[TextLink:] https://twitter.com/svdate/status/1699037063574696083?s=20/photo/1
[Text:] 🐣 RT @realDonaldTrump Almost all legal scholars have voiced opinions that the 14th Amendment has no legal basis or standing relative to the upcoming 2024 Presidential Election. Like Election Interference, it is just another “trick” being used by the Radical Left Communists, Marxists, and Fascists, to again steal an Election that their candidate, the WORST, MOST INCOMPETENT, & MOST CORRUPT President in U.S. history, is incapable of winning in a Free and Fair Election. MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!
🐣 RT @mehdirhasan “Biden Regime” lol? The *judge* who sentenced Tarrio is Timothy J. Kelly, a Trump appointee, former counsel to Chuck Grassley, and member of the Federalist Society.
⋙ 🐣 RT @charliekirk11 The Biden Regime just sentenced Enrique Tarrio to 22 years in prison for a riot he was not present at, for plotting to overthrow the government without his followers carrying a single firearm. ¤ You live in a country with political prisoners.
🐣 RT @SamRamani2 BREAKING: Ukrainian intelligence intercepts conversations with Russian soldiers that show severe ammunition shortages and mass casualties in Lyman
🐣 RT @FBI Proud Boys Leader Sentenced to 22 Years in Prison for Seditious Conspiracy and Other Charges Related to U.S. Capitol Breach https://tinyurl.com/32aekvp3
[TextLink:] https://twitter.com/FBI/status/1699211510390632750?s=20/photo/1
[Text:] Today’s sentencing demonstrates that those who attempted to undermine the workings of American democracy will be held criminally accountable. The FBI will always protect those who peacefully exercise their First Amendment rights. But we will never condone the actions of those who break our laws, and we will continue to work with federal prosecutors to ensure those perpetrators are held responsible. ¤ FBI DIRECTOR CHRISTOPHER WRAY
WaPo: Ex-Proud Boys leader Enrique Tarrio sentenced to 22 years for Jan. 6 Capitol attack https://tinyurl.com/28txkvf5
// Convicted of seditious conspiracy, he recruited a group of 200 to march on Capitol, though he wasn’t in D.C. that day
🐣 RT @ybarrap Jack Smith, the special counsel for Trump inquiries, has added two longtime associates of the Justice Department to his team; Raymond Hulser, former chief of the DOJ’s public integrity section, and David Harbach. [many links]
¤ https://twitter.com/ybarrap/status/1698446925115134115?s=20
Each specializes in public corruption and together they will lead the DOJ investigation of congressional members[1][2][4]. Raymond Hulser has been a prosecutor with the Justice Department for more than two decades, starting in the Public Integrity Section of the department’s Criminal Division, which investigates public corruption and other misconduct by government officials. In 2015, he became chief of the section, with Cooney as his deputy[1]. David Harbach conducted cases against former Sen. John Edwards and Virginia Gov. Bob McDonnell[4]. However, the sources do not provide a specific date for when this occurred.
🐣 RT @MSNBC BREAKING: Former Proud Boys chairman Enrique Tarrio sentenced to 22 years in federal prison, the longest Jan. 6 sentence to date.
💽 https://twitter.com/MSNBC/status/1699179022582698154?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @AntiToxicPeople Anyone sane recognizes how much more unhinged & detached from reality Trump has become in the past months, but this latest completely delusionally insane fantasy he keeps repeating over & over is truly among the most crazy and instantly provable lies he has ever told. Its lunacy.
[TextLink:] https://twitter.com/AntiToxicPeople/status/1699178843632730219?s=20/photo/1
[Text:] @realDonaldTrump The highly partisan January 6th Committee of political Hacks and Thugs has been found to have DELETED & DESTROYED all evidence and findings of the recently ended Committee of TRUMP persecution and hatred. This is a highly illegal act to, among other things, protect Crazy Nancy Pelosi for her grossly incompetent, or intentional, actions regarding her weak and inadequate response to security measures taken at the Capitol, for which she was responsible. This evidence is now criminally destroyed!
🐣 RT @ Morning_Joe .@gtconway3d: “Republicans have become anti-American, anti-government, anti-the United States. That’s their shtick now…That’s why they attack the institutions that normally the GOP were very, very supportive of — now, it’s just this nihilistic attack on American institutions.”
💽 https://twitter.com/Morning_Joe/status/1699043096187547656?s=20/photo/1
WaPo: Peter Navarro heads to trial with gutted defense and mounting bills http://tinyurl.com/ysb9ufjx “The scheme that Navarro has described, … dubbed the “Green Bay Sweep,” a football reference to an end run, called for dragging out the process of formally counting electoral votes”
… After right-wing provocateur Stephen K. Bannon was convicted last summer of contempt of Congress, Navarro on Tuesday is set to become the second top official in Trump’s White House to face a criminal trial related to a scheme to undo President Biden’s 2020 victory at the polls. …
Such is the price of defying a congressional subpoena if the flouting leads to an indictment, as it did for Navarro. He is charged with two misdemeanor counts of contempt, each punishable by up to a year behind bars, for refusing to provide testimony and documents to the since disbanded House select committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol. Bannon, convicted of the same offenses in July 2022, was sentenced to four months in prison. He is free pending the outcome of his appeal. …
The scheme that Navarro has described, which he said Bannon dubbed the “Green Bay Sweep,” a football reference to an end run, called for dragging out the process of formally counting electoral votes in a joint session of Congress on Jan. 6, 2021. Trump loyalists in the House and Senate would contest the ballots from six swing states that Biden won. Each challenge would prompt four hours of debate, resulting in a nationally televised, 24-hour spectacle.
The goal was to pressure Vice President Pence, who was presiding over the joint session, to throw up his hands in uncertainty and return the electoral votes to the states.
Eventually, after further arcane maneuvering, according to the plan, the House would wind up choosing the next president — but not with a straight-up vote by all 435 members. Each state delegation would cast a single vote to decide the election. And while Democrats outnumbered Republicans in the chamber, the GOP controlled a majority of delegations. …
🐣 RT @olddog100ua Jewish president picks Muslim defense minister: Ukraine’s diverse leadership debunks Russia’s “Nazi” slurs – Atlantic Council ¤ Russia and Pro-Russian American mouthpieces keep pumping out the same Nazi narrative. It’s now falling on deaf ears.
⋙ AtlanticCouncil: Jewish president picks Muslim defense minister: Ukraine’s diverse leadership debunks Russia’s “Nazi” slurs http://tinyurl.com/2p8hv8yb
⭕ 4 Sep 2023
🐣 RT @gtconway3d And given that P01135809 should also receive a significant and consecutive sentence for entirely unrelated crimes in an entirely unrelated case—his theft and retention of national security documents—it’s beyond question he should spend the rest of his natural life in prison.
⋙ 🐣 RT @Delavegalaw Given the gravity and scope of his crimes, duration of his illegal activity, his abuse of the highest official position in the U.S. and role as organizer, if Trump’s convicted, justice requires that he receive a sentence equal to or greater than those received by lead J6 defs.
⋙⋙ 🐣 RT @DavidJollyFL If the lead J6 defendants today are facing 17 to 30+ years in prison, it’s fair to wrestle with what Donald Trump legally deserves in that range.
⋙ 🐣 RT @Delavegalaw Far from being a reason not to prosecute, that Trump committed so many grave crimes either while president or as ex-president and used his positions to do so — thereby executing an egregious and prolonged abuse of official government position — makes his prosecution imperative.
⋙ 🐣 RT @MuellerSheWrote That’s why Garland is going to appeal the sentences for oath keepers. And probs the proud boys.
⋙⋙ 🐣 RT @MuellerSheWrote Weeks ago garland filed notice he intends to appeal the oath keepers sentences because they’re too short.
🐣 RT @anneapplebaum In essence, the Polish ruling party says that if you vote for the opposition, you won’t be Polish anymore. ¤ This is a level of hysteria and conspiracy theory that we haven’t seen before
🐣 RT @Gerashchenko_en Ukrainian Foreign Affairs Ministry: Russian Shahed drones fell and detonated on the territory of Romania last night during the massive attack on Odesa region.
¤ https://twitter.com/Gerashchenko_en/status/1698616070968332773?s=20
“Russian missile terror is a huge danger not just for Ukrainian security but also for the security of neighboring countries, including NATO member states” – Oleg Nikolenko, Ministry representative.
Ukrainian Foreign Affairs Ministry calls on all partners to speed up providing Ukraine with air defense and anti-missile systems, as well as combat aviation. This will improve the defense of Ukrainian infrastructure and of neighboring countries. ¤ 📷 Oleg Nikolenko/Facebook
⭕ 3 Sep 2023
🐣 RT CREWcrew Trump spread knowingly false claims of a “stolen,” “rigged” election after the states certified his loss and there was no lawful basis to contest the results. ¤ He WAS the cause of January 6th, and that’s why he’s disqualified from office under the 14th Amendment.
🐣 RT @RpsAgainstTrump “A second term of Donald Trump would likely be a last term of American democracy”, says @MilesTaylorUSA, the former chief of staff at the DHS during the Trump administration. (Video: MSNBC
💽 https://twitter.com/RpsAgainstTrump/status/1698536700362830011?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @AntiToxicPeople He belongs in a psych ward.
[TextLink:] https://twitter.com/AntiToxicPeople/status/1698506611550027809?s=20/photo/1
[Text:] 🐣 RT @realDonaldTrump Has anyone checked the background of Fani Willis, who lets Murderers go free to roam the streets of Atlanta and KILL, but wastes time, energy, and money on LETS GET TRUMP, who has done NOTHING wrong. RINO Governor Brian Kemp has lost control of violent crime in Atlanta, and Fulton County as a whole. To walk the streets is a death sentence, it has NEVER been worse, yet he wants to protect this incompetent prosecutor. Number 1 in violence per capita in U.S. Sad days for the Great State of Georgia!
🐣 RT @The Fake Indictments and lawsuits against me, 8 of them, all come out of the Biden Campaign for purposes of Election Interference. This is their new way of Rigging the Election, and it won’t hold up. The Fascists& Marxists are destroying our once great Country but, WE WILL WIN & MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!!
MeidasTouch, Ron Filipkowski: Transcript of Trump Depo[sition] with NY AG Released. My summary. http://tinyurl.com/yux6b9x8
// I read the full transcript of the 7-hour deposition of Trump.
// Trump’s New York Deposition in civil fraud case
… Trump was forced to admit over and over that the value of his assets was inflated, he blamed his accountants or other people and factors for that. But his main defense, which he repeated dozens of times, was what he referred to as a “worthless clause.”
This clause is basically a disclaimer at the beginning of the statements that any entity who receives them should conduct their own assessment of the value of his properties and he was not responsible if the valuations provided by him were incorrect. Essentially, it is his position that this clause gives him immunity from being held liable for any misrepresentations since that disclaimer renders all the numbers in the statement “worthless.”
Another common theme is that Trump always justifies overvaluations of his properties by discussing their potential worth – what he thinks could be done with them to make them more valuable – and he factored in these potential future earnings or projects in his statements of their current value. For example – he would say that the current market value of a property was X, but if he broke it up for condos it would be worth much more.
… Trump said when he valued his properties in these formal statements to lenders and other entities, he didn’t have them appraised or assessed because it would take too long to do that. When asked what method he used, he said that he “would use common sense.” P.100-101.
When he was confronted with a 2022 letter from his accounting firm Mazars that financial institutions could no longer trust the Statements of Financial Condition they prepared from 2011-2020 because the information they received from Trump Org was inaccurate, he said they only did that because the AG “harassed them and they were petrified.” He claimed that he had a conversation with a senior partner and, “He was so scared, he was crying.” […] he included an item for $2.93 billion in his assets for the value of his name.
[Brand.value:] $2.8-$3B
[Addess: Donald J Trump
1100 South Ocean Blvd
Palm Beach. FL 33480
🐣 RT @yasminalombaert The West is now referred to as “the global minority,” assuming Russia and its friends are “the global majority.” ¤ And Russia is not isolated. According to Zakharova, it is the US that has forced Europe to isolate itself from Russia.
“If they want to talk about isolation, let’s talk about it. Let’s talk about the EU’s and the West’s self-isolation from Russia. As a “global minority”, they drew around themselves some sort of a red circle, calling themselves a ‘beautiful garden’ while the ‘rest of the world is a jungle,’ as Josep Borrell said. ¤ That is how they live. They should not call it our country’s isolation but their own isolation. It is also worth clarifying that the EU’s isolation has not been their choice; it was a multi-stage US-forced self-isolation.” Zakharova said.
⋙ 🐣 Russia, for all its braggadocio, is a second rate power rapidly devolving into a third rate power. China is stumbling financially and has an aging population. The US/Canada and Europe provide by far the most humanitarian aid.
◕ https://twitter.com/Auriandra/status/1698536104461209862?s=20/photo/1 -3
// charts: GDP, military, humanitarian by country
🐣 RT @RonFilipkowski Trump is running to keep millions of dollars rolling in, to pardon himself, to get immunity while in office, and get revenge on his enemies.
[TextLink:] https://twitter.com/RonFilipkowski/status/1698488490185421090?s=20/photo/1
[Text:] 🐣 RT @realDonald Trump The Crooked Joe Biden Campaign has thrown so many Indictments and lawsuits against me that Republicans are already thinking about what we are going to do to Biden and the Communists when it’s our turn. They have started a whole new Banana Republic way of thinking about political campaigns. So cheap and dirty, but that’s where America is right now. Be careful what you wish for!
🐣 RT @nexta_tv Ukraine is preparing air defense forces and equipment for possible massive strikes on critical infrastructure facilities in the fall, – Air Force speaker Ignat ¤ According to him, the Russian Armed Forces no longer have the same stockpile of missiles as before, but Russia is increasing production of drones.
“Ukrainians are ready. I think both the energy sector prepared for unfavorable scenarios, and the air defense, certainly. A year ago, we had no Western medium-range weapons at all. Today we have such a variety of air defense means, which is not available anywhere else in the world.”
🐣 RT @AlecStapp Very hard to look at this chart and claim that global development hasn’t been strong over the last few decades
◕ https://twitter.com/AlecStapp/status/1698401280748560489?s=20/photo/1
// people in extreme poverty
🐣 RT @neal_katyal Dear Criminal Defendant Clark: ¤ I am a Hindu. Are you suggesting I do not belong in this country? ¤ You might be better off studying our Founders, the text of our First Amendment, and (albeit for other reasons), the Criminal Code. ¤ I sincerely wish you the best, ¤ Neal
⋙ 🐣 RT @JeffClarkUS Why am I not surprised that Neal Katyal made it a priority to get to a neopagan ritual? ¤ See picture below in lower right. ¤ Pray that these folks come to the light & realize that the only path is through and to our Lord. ¤ We are all fallen and need God, and to repent as a Nation.
🖼 https://twitter.com/JeffClarkUS/status/1698329494119907522?s=20/photo/1 -4
🐣 RT @MCTothSTL Israel couldn’t beat the Arab states in 1948. The American colonies couldn’t beat King George III in 1776. ¤ Yet they did. ¤ Monthly reminder, contrary to Russian military doctrine, mass does not guarantee winning wars. ¤ Capabilities & force multipliers do. Ukraine has both.
⋙ 🐣 RT @LeonRDublin Ukraine can’t win a war against the second largest military in the world. It’s fantasy. Time to start preserving your population and begin negotiations
🐣 RT @victoriaslog “Expert” on Russian state TV cries that Russia doesn’t have enough air defense systems to protect Moscow and important objects because systems were relocated to Belgorod, Bryansk, Kursk regions, and Crimea. ¤ He also said that systems are expensive and take a long time to build. It completely debunks Russia’s claim that it invaded Ukraine to protect itself from NATO. Russia invested in weapons to destroy and kill but didn’t expect to protect anything.
💽 [tr] https://twitter.com/victoriaslog/status/1698266654508032293?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @Flash_news_ua ⚡️Former UK Secretary of Defense Ben Wallace may be involved in a diplomatic scandal from the United States over the supply of helicopters for special forces. ¤ According to The Sunday Times, a few weeks before his resignation, Wallace called for the termination of a multibillion-dollar contract with the United States. Under the terms of the agreement, the UK was to purchase 14 Chinook H-47 helicopters from Boeing. @Flash_news_ua
RFERL: ‘New Approaches Needed’: Zelenskiy To Replace Ukraine’s Defense Minister In Surprise Move https://tinyurl.com/2bunadcc “He has decided to replace wartime Defense Minister Oleksiy Reznikov with Rustem Umerov, a Ukrainian politician of Crimean Tatar origin“
📊 TheAtlantic, Ron Brownstein: Why Biden Just Can’t Shake Trump in the Polls https://tinyurl.com/4ts2a2fh
// The core four dynamics shaping 2024
🐣 RT @EuromaidanPress Russia seeks foreign recruits in Armenia and Kazakhstan for fighting against Ukraine, offering them payments and fast-track citizenship, as per a British intelligence update.
⋙ 🐣 RT @EuromaidanPress British intel: Russia recruits foreign nationals against Ukraine offering payments, fast-track citizenship https://tinyurl.com/zyksnbwh
// Russia seeks foreign recruits in Armenia and Kazakhstan for fighting against Ukraine, offering them payments and fast-track citizenship, according to a British intelligence update.
⭕ 2 Sep 2023
🐣 📊 RT @Biz_Ukraine_Mag 83.5% of Ukrainians believe only the restoration of the country’s internationally recognised 1991 borders would constitute victory in the war against Russia, according to a new survey by the Kyiv International Institute of Sociology
🌎 https://twitter.com/Biz_Ukraine_Mag/status/1698028616028725596?s=20/photo/1
TheAtlantic, Phillips P O’Brien: The U.S. and Europe Are Splitting Over Ukraine https://tinyurl.com/mswhnvfb “[T]the growing sentiment on the American right against supporting Ukraine represents an extraordinary challenge to the future of NATO”
// The GOP’s populist wing would abandon Kyiv—and endanger the world’s most successful military alliance.
🐣 RT @ukraine_map US 🇺🇸 will be sending Ukraine 🇺🇦 AMRAAM Air-to-Air Missiles for F-16s which have a maximum range of 160 to 180km, announced the Spokesman for the Ukrainian Air Force Yuriy Ignat ¤ This would allow Ukraine to intercept Russian Aircraft without being in range of Russian Air Defenses
🌎 https://twitter.com/PStyle0ne1/status/1698226055507542154?s=20/photo/1
TheGuardian: ‘Everything is ahead of us’: Ukraine breaks Russian stronghold’s first line of defence https://tinyurl.com/5n7hkpxn “A vast minefield trapped Ukrainian troops for weeks as infantry sappers slowly cleared an assault route on foot. … But now that barrier has been crossed”
// In an exclusive interview, a leading Ukrainian general says his forces have made a vital breakthrough near Zaporizhzhia
Ukrainian forces have decisively breached Russia’s first defensive line near Zaporizhzhia after weeks of painstaking mine clearance, and expect faster gains as they press the weaker second line, the general leading the southern counteroffensive has said.
Brig Gen Oleksandr Tarnavskiy estimated Russia had devoted 60% of its time and resources into building the first defensive line and only 20% each into the second and third lines because Moscow had not expected Ukrainian forces to get through.
“We are now between the first and second defensive lines,” he said, speaking to the Observer in his first interview since the breakthrough. Ukrainian forces were now pushing out on both sides of the breach and consolidating their hold on territory seized in recent fighting, he said.
“In the centre of the offensive, we are now completing the destruction of enemy units that provide cover for the retreat of Russian troops behind their second defensive line.”
A vast minefield trapped Ukrainian troops for weeks as infantry sappers slowly cleared an assault route on foot. Russian troops behind it “just stood and waited for the Ukrainian army”, picking off vehicles with shells and drones, he said.
But now that barrier has been crossed, Russians have been forced into manoeuvres and Ukrainians are back in their tanks and other armoured vehicles. In a sign that Moscow is feeling the pressure, it has redeployed troops to the area from frontlines inside occupied Ukraine – Kherson to the west and Lyman to the north-east – and also from inside Russia, he said.
“The enemy is pulling up reserves, not only from Ukraine but also from Russia. But sooner or later, the Russians will run out of all the best soldiers. This will give us an impetus to attack more and faster,” Tarnavskiy said. “Everything is ahead of us.” …
KyivPost, Mark Toth & Jonathan Sweet: The Beginning of the End of Putin in Crimea https://www.kyivpost.com/analysis/21174 “As Putin’s ‘red line’ increasingly comes under assault, his only recourse remains targeting civilians and Ukrainian grain. Meanwhile, Ukraine keeps pressing south”
// “As Putin’s ‘red line’ increasingly comes under assault, his only recourse remains targeting civilians and Ukrainian grain. Meanwhile, Ukraine keeps pressing south.”
Taking Tokmak is vital as it would provide Ukraine with a glidepath to the major city of Melitopol and its control of Russia’s land bridge between Crimea and the increasingly war-beleaguered Motherland. It would also put Ukrainian artillery in striking distance of Melitopol itself and the ability to disrupt Russian lines of communication.
Notably, Ukraine is also hitting its stride. Despite the enormous cost in lives – estimated at 70,000 dead and up to 120,000 wounded; not counting civilian casualties – Zelensky and his generals are taking the fight to Russia. Drone strikes on Moscow. Swarm drone attacks on Russian air bases, including Wednesday’s attack on the Pskov airport inside of Russia that destroyed multiple military transport planes.
And Ukraine is manufacturing its own drones and surface vessels to continue launching a steady stream of cross border attacks.
Crimea is the end state. To achieve that, Zelensky and his generals must either isolate the peninsula, force a surrender or reconquer it. ¤ Ukraine is doing just that. Not only in terms of the close fight in Robotyne and Verbove, but in their Multi-Domain Operations (MDO) as well.
As Gen. Ben Hodges, former commanding general of U.S. Army Europe, recently stated: “The [Ukrainian] counteroffensive is more than the ground assault. UAF MDO have the initiative and are gradually making Crimea untenable for Russian Navy, Air Force, air defense.”
The war is by no means close to being over. Hard days lie ahead. But we are seeing the beginning of the end of Putin in Crimea – and eventually all of Ukraine.
Even the Biden Administration has taken notice, as a senior State Department official told reporters on Wednesday, “It’s very important that Ukraine win this war. And by ‘win,’ I mean as President Biden said, Russians leave all of Ukraine.”
🐣 RT @RadioFreeTom Notice, btw, that all of Putin’s various rationalizations for invading Ukraine have now evaporated, and even his goons in the Russian press don’t try to come up with anything beyond pure hate. Russia is at war because The Boss wanted it a war, and no one even bothers with why.
🐣 RT @TreasChest Russia is no longer playing in the global game – they are playing it, said Kirill Budanov, head of the Main Intelligence Directorate of the Ukrainian Defense Ministry
¤ https://twitter.com/TreasChest/status/1698177287663816904?s=20
““This is a big geopolitical game. What is the point of deploying nuclear weapons in Belarus? When the Russians say that this is in opposition to the NATO bloc, then what is the point of putting nuclear weapons on the front line – they will either be destroyed or captured. This is only such a means to raise the stakes in the big geopolitical game: Russia believes that it is still playing it, but it is no longer playing – it is already being played. These are the last attempts,” said Budanov. ¤ 🇺🇦 Ukraine
🐣 RT @Podolyak_M .@elonmusk, the gateways open wide for primitive Russian propagandists and Russian poisonous bots/farms – this is not at all about freedom of speech, anti-establishment, and right-wing conservative discourse. What naivety… This is exclusively about complicity in the destruction of global rules, social de-evolution, encouragement of bloodthirsty appetites with the caricature of the “homo soveticus” empire. Why so openly seek Herostratus fame in the post-information age?
🚫 🐣 RT @michaelpfreeman How’s that bus feel, Walt?
[TextLink:] https://twitter.com/michaelpfreeman/status/1698104031606894831?s=20/photo/1
// seems too obvious; is this fake? //➔ yes, it is fake
[Text:] 🐣 RT @realDonaldTrump Many people are saying the theft of Nuclear and Military Secrets is a very serious crime. That is why as America’s Favorite President, I enforced the USA’s classified document laws very powerfully and very strongly. And that is why, when I asked my LOYAL aide Walt Nauta to pack up my Personal Papers before I left the White House, I am Confident he did not place any Nuclear Secrets in the boxes. As a Navy man, Walt KNEW that would be illegal, and could even get ME in “trouble.” Now Biden’s Radical DOJ alleges that Walt did this, but I DON’T BELIEVE THEM! So let’s just see what Judge Cannon says ¤ Good Luck, Walt! We are behind you all the way!
🐣 RT @TheRickWilson Also for all you DWAC Truth Social investors about to take a bath … may I remind you of the inevitable reality of the rule?
Everything Trump Touches Dies.
Everything.
🐣 RT @mmpadellan Truth Social was around $175/share. ¤ Now it’s at $14 per share. ¤ It might have to close now. ¤ Say it with me, please: EVERYTHING TRUMP TOUCHES DIES. 🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣
🐣 RT @Tendar United 24 Media released a small documentary of Robert “Magyar” Brovdy.
Source and full video: https://tinyurl.com/bdfyy2p4 #Ukraine
💽 https://twitter.com/Tendar/status/1698002449745723614?s=20/photo/1
TheGuardian, Joseph Stiglitz: Salvaging global democratic politics requires far-reaching economic reforms https://tinyurl.com/2tbexjpv “The pervasive feeling that democracy has delivered unfair outcomes has undermined confidence in democracy”
// Resolving economic and political inequality is vital if we want people to reject authoritarianism
🐣 📋 RT @David_Charts Economy much better in 2023 than 2019 pre-pandemic, even adjusted for inflation (real). So was 2022. Under Biden, unemployment lower, job creation faster, % age 25-54 working higher, real wages and net worth higher, stocks way up, uninsured down.
◕ https://twitter.com/David_Charts/status/1698006789986418697?s=20/photo/1
WSJ: Resilient U.S. Economy Defies Expectations https://tinyurl.com/45cw2rh5 “Stocks have rallied this year, buoyed by the prospect that cooling inflation allows growth to slow without requiring a recession—a so-called soft landing”
🐣 RT @DefenceU President @ZelenskyyUa: We only need about 160 F-16s to build a powerful air fleet that will prevent russia from dominating our skies.
🐣 RT @dassen_van There are thus two layers of Russian betrayal of the Budapest Memorandum:
1. Russia violates the obligations of respecting Ukraine’s territory.
2. Russia uses missiles and aircraft that Ukraine handed over to Russia as part of the agreement. It will haunt the world for decades.
⋙ 🐣 RT @Eva_CZ1 “The bombers that are hitting us are exactly the ones that we gave away. I’m not talking about nuclear weapons, with which they are now scaring us,” Budanov said.
The head of intelligence told where a large number of Ukrainian Tu-22 and Tu-95 bombers had gone.
🐣 RT @MavkaSlavka Made in Ukraine: Kyiv’s burgeoning weapons industry is enabling it to project power far beyond the front lines. [link CNN:] https://tinyurl.com/bdzdjenj
⭕ 1 Sep 2023
💙 🐣 RT @Gerashchenko_en Today is the 555th day of the 3-day “special military operation” ¤ Let us remember what Russian propagandists were saying in the first days of the full-scale invasion of Ukraine.
💽 https://twitter.com/Gerashchenko_en/status/1697605723264368803?s=20/photo/1
// 9/1/2023
🐣 RT @tomiahonen PS… Also remember, FBI had Giuliani under federal court-approved wiretap from 2019 onwards, and in 2020 Bill Barr learned of the wiretap, approved that it continues – and FORGOT to tell Trump about it. So EVERY crime the honorable Sir Buttdial di Rudipantzio did, was recorded
⋙ 🐣 RT @piyushmittal New scandal: FBI agent says Rudy Giuliani was co-opted by Russian intelligence to discredit Biden and boost Trump during the 2020 campaign
⋙⋙ MotherJones: A New Rudy Scandal: FBI Agent Says Giuliani Was Co-opted by Russian Intelligence https://tinyurl.com/4yw747mj
// The whistleblower says his probe of Giuliani’s ties to suspected Russian operatives was thwarted.
[…] But another major Giuliani development has drawn less attention: An FBI whistleblower filed a statement asserting that Giuliani “may have been compromised” by Russian intelligence while working as a lawyer and adviser to Trump during the 2020 campaign.
That contention is among a host of explosive assertions from Johnathan Buma, an FBI agent who also says that an investigation involving Giuliani’s activities was stymied within the bureau.
In July, Buma sent the Senate Judiciary Committee a 22-page statement full of eye-popping allegations, and the document leaked and was first reported last month by Insider (after a conservative blogger had posted it online). According to Buma’s account, Giuliani was used as an asset by a Ukrainian oligarch tied to Russian intelligence and other Russian operatives for a disinformation operation that aimed to discredit Joe Biden and boost Trump in the 2020 presidential race. Moreover, Buma says he was the target of retaliation within the bureau for digging into this. …
… As Republicans keep trying to gin up a controversy over the Bidens, Burisma, and other matters, Buma’s statement reinforces the case that this supposed Biden-Ukraine scandal was egged on or orchestrated by Russian intelligence. And it contradicts the narrative pushed by Trump and his defenders that the FBI and Justice Department have been in cahoots with Democrats.
… [A]ccording to Buma and various US intelligence findings, Giuliani apparently was a dupe—a useful idiot—for suspected Russian operatives and propagandists. And the bureau, Buma says, investigated this—until it didn’t. …
In his statement, Buma says that the FBI assessed Fuks to be a “co-opted asset” of Russian intelligence services, meaning a person who Russian intelligence used to advance its goals. Buma’s complaint does not name a specific Russian intelligence agency, but a person who spoke to agents involved in this investigation says that the FBI believes Fuks worked for the FSB, the successor to KGB. All this raises the possibility that Giuliani, a former Republican presidential candidate who became a close adviser to Trump, received a large payment directly from a Russian asset.
Buma alleges that Fuks has carried out various tasks for Russian spies, including laundering money for them. Fuks also reportedly paid locals to spray-paint swastikas around Kharkiv in the weeks before Russia’s invasion. Buma says Fuks did so to bolster Vladmir Putin’s claim that the invasion aimed to achieve the “de-Nazification of Ukraine.”
Fuks denies these claims. “Mr. Fuks has never cooperated with Russian intelligence,” his spokesperson says. …
Giuliani has previously asserted that his work for Fuks ended before he joined Trump’s legal team in April 2018. And Fuks’ spokesperson also says that Fuks’ dealings with Giuliani finished in 2018. But Buma suggests that Fuks may have maintained an indirect connection to Giuliani by hiring in 2019 Andriy Telizhenko, a former low-level Ukrainian diplomatic official, to mount a public relations effort for him in the United States. Buma says that a source told him that Fuks retained Telizhenko to help him “establish contacts with US politicians.” Telizhenko went on to work with Giuliani, feeding him information on the Bidens. …
Giuliani’s efforts in Ukraine placed him in contact with several Ukrainians since sanctioned for allegedly assisting Russian disinformation efforts. The most prominent was Andriy Derkach, the son of a former KGB officer and then a Ukrainian legislator, who supplied Giuliani with unsubstantiated information about the Bidens’ supposed activities in Ukraine. After making a trip to Ukraine in the summer of 2020, Giuliani told the Washington Post that he kept in touch with Derkach and called him “very helpful.”
Trump’s Treasury Department sanctioned Derkach in 2020, calling him an “active Russian agent for over a decade.” In March 2021, a declassified report issued by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence said that Putin in 2020 signed off on a Russian intelligence effort to use proxies to feed prominent US individuals “influence narratives” aimed at hurting Biden’s campaign and helping Trump. The report cited Derkach, asserting that Putin “had purview” over his activities. Though the report did not name him, Giuliani was obviously one of the Americans the ODNI believed had been manipulated by the Russians. Last year, federal prosecutors hit Derkach with criminal charges for his alleged attempts to evade sanctions. …
Giuliani has admitted to meeting Ukrainians subsequently cited by the US government as Russian operatives. But he has defended his actions by arguing he had to deal with questionable people to seek information on what he has referred to as alleged Biden crimes. (No evidence has surfaced to prove Biden acted improperly in Ukraine to help his son.)
Buma reveals in his statement that he also probed whether Russian operatives or assets were involved in a 2020 Giuliani effort to make a film about Hunter Biden’s business activities in Ukraine and elsewhere. […] The brothers also claim that Yale and Dickson told them the movie would be “more profitable than Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11.” Giuliani, Dickson, and Yale also said, according to the Mungers’ lawsuit, that they possessed “smoking guns” revealing Joe Biden was corrupt. ¤ Giuliani and his colleagues possessed no such material. The Mungers allege that Dickson and Yale stole their investment. In a text message to Mother Jones, Yale insisted that the lawsuit is “total hogwash.” …
Buma’s disclosures spell new trouble for Giuliani. They further implicate him in a covert Russian operation to tilt the 2020 election toward Trump. They also raise the possibility that Giuliani was protected by FBI officials. (After the 2016 election, the Justice Department investigated whether Giuliani had improper contacts with FBI agents during that race regarding the bureau’s investigation of Hillary Clinton, and it found no evidence Giuliani had been leaked information.) Buma’s statement offers an investigative roadmap for inquiries that could soil Giuliani’s already tarnished reputation. But the down-and-out Giuliani may get lucky: With all the controversy and scandal swirling about him, there just may not be much room in the Giuliani coverage for the allegation that he was a puppet for Putin.
WaPo: Back in class, Russian students get a lesson from Professor Putin https://tinyurl.com/d8y6px56 “Russian forces have destroyed Ukrainian books and schools, … imposed Russia’s curriculum and required people to get Russian passports to access social benefits”
DailyBeast, Jake Lahut: Ron DeSantis Is Afraid of Questions From a 15-Year-Old https://tinyurl.com/yvcframs “Mitchell had a blunt assessment of the fiasco over DeSantis’ treatment of him. ‘Really stupid,’ he said, ‘in a small state like New Hampshire’”
[T]he teenager’s story distills some key reasons why DeSantis’ presidential bid is struggling: a candidate with clear difficulty making personal connections, a team obsessed with managing every detail on the campaign trail, and a pervasive anxiety over the idea of alienating Trump voters.
Combined together, those factors may ensure DeSantis gets nowhere near the White House in 2024. In New Hampshire, they’ve already pushed a precocious and passionate teenager to consider quitting politics altogether.
“I may be older now and know I can handle this a lot more, but if they had done that to me a few years back, I don’t know if I could have handled that,” Mitchell said. “It’s unfortunate, because I just want to ask my question.”
WaPo: Proud Boys leader gets 18 years, matching longest Jan. 6 punishment to date https://tinyurl.com/4a2we94m
// Ethan Nordean led a group to the Capitol. Dominic Pezzola, who smashed a Capitol window, received a 10-year term.
🐣 📋 RT @JStein_WaPo Biden touting Ws at WH today:
– Fastest wage growth for low-wage workers in 2 decades
– Job satisfaction at 36-yr high
– Record lows in unemployment for Blacks, Hispanics, veterans, workers w/o HS diplomas
– Lowest unemployment in 70 yrs for women
– Prime age employment at high
🐣 RT @NBCNews Proud Boy Ethan Nordean was sentenced to 18 years in federal prison for his role in the Capitol riot, tying the head of the Oath Keepers for the longest sentence in a Jan. 6 case so far.
⋙ NBCNews: Proud Boy ties record for the longest Jan. 6 sentence in seditious conspiracy case https://tinyurl.com/yc3j4bsv
// Ethan Nordean said he now thinks Jan. 6 was “a complete and utter tragedy.”
🐣 📋 RT @Brad_Setser Interesting to me how clearly the China shock era shows up in this graph of investment in US manufacturing facilities (the down turn starts with the fall in investment following the .com crash, but it is quite persistent through the broader 02-06 recovery.)
◕ https://twitter.com/Brad_Setser/status/1697649937192825304?s=20/photo/1
// shows impact of Inflation Reduction Act and Chips & Science Act
🐣 📋 RT @JosephPolitano With Canadian GDP released today (+0%), we finally have GDP data across all G7 members through Q2. ¤ Here’s how Real GDP has changed, Compared to just before the pandemic:
US +6.6%
Canada +3.9%
Italy +1.3%
France +1.2%
Japan +0.6%
Germany +0.5%
UK -0.5%
◕ https://twitter.com/JosephPolitano/status/1697591537503191459?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @ anno1540 The head of the Main Directorate of Intelligence gave an interview to journalist Natalia Moseichuk. The main thing is :
¤ https://twitter.com/anno1540/status/1697578449362092199?s=20/photo/1
➡️ The Russian Federation is preparing for revenge . She will need 10 years to recover in the military aspect. We will definitely have at least 10 years to prepare for this.
➡️ In Moscow several times they “prepared certain operations” regarding the assassination of the President of Ukraine . Several times very seriously. Preparatory measures were carefully planned. As a result, you can see that the Ukrainian services work quite effectively, since this did not happen.
➡️ Transferring the war to the territory of Russia is a great idea . But we do not work according to the same methods as Russia, so it is wrong to compare. The war must be transferred to another territory, which is clearly for us the Russian Federation and its other territories, where their influence is located – in order to stretch them and bind them. The wider the operations, the better.
➡️ Ukraine should interfere in the political processes of Russia . Our task is to strengthen the influence of GUR on everything that happens in the offices where decisions are made.
➡️ China will not dare to supply Russia with weapons , but it supplies drones and chips as dual-purpose goods.
➡️ Nuclear bombs for Su-27M aircraft were brought to Belarus .
➡️ There will be no nuclear strike, even when we enter Crimea .
➡️ The Russian “PVK Wagner” in Belarus will arrange provocations on the western border , but without weapons. For Ukraine, the threat from that side is minimal.
➡️ In Putin’s circle of those who advocate war, there are only a few left . He removed the “smart generals” – Serhiy Surovikin, Andriy Yudin. Agents in the Russian Federation say that Putin and his entourage are called “the club of those who are over 70”. These people do not keep up with changing events because of their age.
🐣 RT @Maks_NAFO_FELLA 🇺🇦🇺🇸 “We will not only help Ukraine rebuild its economy, but also reimagine it by creating new industries, trade routes and supply chains linked to Europe and other markets around the world” – Blinken
🐣 RT @JosephPolitano Another new record high for US manufacturing construction spending! ¤ Total investment just crossed a $200B annualized rate, with more than 50% coming from computer, electronic, and electrical manufacturing investments in the wake of the CHIPS Act
◕ https://twitter.com/JosephPolitano/status/1697719510076112924?s=20/photo/1
🧵 RT @MavkaSlavka OTD 1st September 1941, Hitler had officially administered the Reichskommissariat Ukraine, signalling that the territory was now occupied by Nazi forces.
📌 🌎 https://twitter.com/MavkaSlavka/status/1697498227111756245?s=20/photo/1
⋙ 🐣 RT @MavkaSlavka Initially, some Ukrainians welcomed the German forces, believing they would help liberate the country from the Soviet regime responsible for Stalin’s Holodomor — the man-made famine that killed an estimated 4-6 million in 1932 and 33. They were soon disabused of such notions.
🖼 https://twitter.com/MavkaSlavka/status/1697498228730847641?s=20/photo/1 -2⋙ 🐣 RT @MavkaSlavka The Nazis believed that ethnic Slavs were racially inferior, and Generalplan Ost was a blueprint for genocide and ethnic cleansing on a devastating scale.
🖼 https://twitter.com/MavkaSlavka/status/1697498230387564636?s=20/photo/1⋙ 🐣 RT @MavkaSlavka It is estimated that between 0.9-1.6 million Jews & between 3-4 million Ukrainians were killed during the occupation; others estimate that 5.2 million Ukrainians of all ethnic groups, more than 12% of the population, died due to crimes against humanity, disease and famine.
🖼 https://twitter.com/MavkaSlavka/status/1697498232086315061?s=20/photo/1 -4⋙ 🐣 RT @MavkaSlavka “We are a master race, which must remember that the lowliest German worker is, racially and biologically, a thousand times more valuable than the population here,” stated Reichskommissar Erich Koch in 1943.
🖼 https://twitter.com/MavkaSlavka/status/1697498233776583104?s=20/photo/1
🔄 🐣 RT @CREWcrew More and more people are talking about the 14th Amendment, and how exactly it might legally and automatically bar Donald Trump from holding office again. ¤ We answer those questions and more in our comprehensive report: Disqualified.
⋙ CREW: The case for Donald Trump’s disqualification under the 14th Amendment https://tinyurl.com/3mz248as
// 7/18/2023
📔 Report: [pdf] https://tinyurl.com/2s3sfyzt 90p
🐣 RT @nexta_tv The first 10 Abrams tanks will be brought to #Ukraine in mid-September ¤ The #Ukrainian military has successfully completed training. ¤ The tanks are now in #Germany. They will be delivered to Ukraine after the final repair is completed.
⋙ 🐣 RT @World_At_War_6 Leopard tanks are significantly easier to maintain. The maintenance on an Abrams tank is extreme and we’ll see if Ukraine can handle it. I think the US sent the Abrams so that other countries like Germany would send their Leopard tanks. Also Leopard tanks are more widely available in Europe.
⭕ 31 Aug 2023
◕ NYT: The Key Players in Trump’s Plot to Upend the Election, Mapped https://tinyurl.com/4w8uekjx
💽 NBCNews: Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp dismisses GOP calls for special session to impeach DA Fani Willis https://tinyurl.com/2p8fkpxw
// “Up to this point, I have not seen any evidence that DA Willis’ actions, or lack thereof, warrant action by the prosecuting attorney oversight commission,” Kemp said.
🐣 RT @SenWhitehouse Add this victory to the honest courtrooms Honor Roll of Carroll v. Trump, Dominion v. Fox, Sandy Hook moms v. InfoWars, and the Montana kids climate case. ¤ Bullying and lying are powerful weapons, until they face the scrutiny of an honest courtroom.
⋙ WaPo: Judge rules Giuliani defamed Georgia election workers, orders sanctions https://tinyurl.com/5evdpfnv
🐣 RT @Maks_NAFO_FELLA 🇺🇦 “The war may end in 2023”, – Zelensky
However, this requires certain conditions: ●
● advancement of Ukraine at the front and pressure on Russia;
● completely broken spirit of Russians;
● the world will remain on Ukraine’s side.
🐣 RT @JayinKyiv Even BERNIE SANDERS, who has opposed EVERY WAR of the past 50 years is ready to turn these Russians into hamburger.
💽 https://twitter.com/JayinKyiv/status/1697291171989528765?s=20/photo/1
⋙ 🐣 RT @darrenwebb66 I have a 5 min video of Bernie. This is from the start of the illegal invasion. Can only post 2.20 min
💽 https://twitter.com/darrenwebb66/status/1697320894643781805?s=20/photo/1
🧵 RT @RadioFreeTom I wrote a whole book on why democracies become illiberal, but something about America after Trump’s indictment really strikes me. Yes, MAGA world is about resentment and ignorance and displaced anger and all that. But it’s also a time that seems to me incredibly…juvenile. /1
📌 https://twitter.com/RadioFreeTom/status/1697452173024461106?s=20
[ThreadReader:] https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1697452173024461106.html
Trump hawking t-shirts with his mug shot is like some hair band selling posters of their guy getting busted for drugs or waggling his junk onstage or something. It’s beyond unserious. It’s child-like, the political version of Oppositional Defiance Disorder. And yet it’ll sell. /2
In the book, I argue that peace and affluence have been a big part of America’s slide: Life’s good and people don’t grasp that ghastly decisions can have disastrous effects – including on *them*. Because other adults make sure the nation functions even when the voters go nuts. /3
But maybe peace and affluence, in addition to making people bored out of their skulls, also prevents them developing into adults who make democracy possble. This is the world, as I wrote in the book, in which Huxley wins, not Orwell. (I am stealing Neil Postman’s point here.) /4
I suppose you could call all this *decadence*, but it’s not even gloriously decadent in that grandiose, Weimar, “Cabaret” kind of decadence. It’s just people putting on costumes and hats and being violent and then crying in front of judges when it all goes horribly wrong. /5
Childishness doesn’t make voters less dangerous to democracy. But even if Trump is defeated (again), this is a serious level of social dysfunction. You can’t sustain a superpower when nearly half of its citizens are mired in eternal petulant childhood. /6
And millions of our oldest citizens, people my age – Trump’s most reliable voting bloc – who should be our wisest among us, are the ones most like angry, irrational toddlers (much like Trump himself). This is incomprehensible to me, especially as I get older. /7
In another weird role-switch, these right-wingers are now like the dilettantish countercultural activists of the 60s: well-off would-be revolutionaries who really have no idea what they’re doing and merely want to act on ill-defined, self-actualizing, self-centered emotion. /8
Adults, however, know that there were people who came before us, and people who will come after us, and that “the moment” is not supreme. We have a civic inheritance, a trust, to hold and to protect, and then to pass on. This used to be central to the American idea. No longer./9
All we can do is hope that the generations coming up can learn to embrace civic adulthood. I’m (mildly) optimistic – if we get past these next few elections. But how weird that so many adults now worship – and emulate – a choleric 77 year old toddler./10x
🐣 RT @GlasnostGone #Ukraine’s got a powerful, domestically produced, long-range drone. AQ-400 Scythe has 700+km range with a big payload of 40+ kilos. Today president Zelensky said a domestically produced drone had hit a target 700km away, so it was likely a Scythe. [link] ◕ https://twitter.com/GlasnostGone/status/1697320062028235080?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @kromark Finally, a high resolution satellite imagery of the destroyed Il-76s in Pskov, without clouds. So, I assume, 2 lost, 2 damaged (but very likely lost too if the fuselage is penetrated by fire). Videos show tanks were full, and the planes were in active use.
⋙ 🐣 RT @MT_Anderson 🇷🇺PSKOV AIR BASE🇷🇺 True carnage revealed. Special thanks to @umbraspace for the SAR imagery from Pskov combined with Optical imagery from @planet. Imagery from the morning of the 30 August showed the damage on 2x Il-76 but cloud cover obstructed the rest.
🖼 https://twitter.com/kromark/status/1697331075951866294?s=20/photo/1 -3
🐣 RT @RpsAgainstTrump It will never cease to amaze me how so many people want to see this narcissistic pathological liar buffoon back in the WH.
[TextLink:] https://twitter.com/RpsAgainstTrump/status/1697470240601383146?s=20/photo/1
[Text:] 🐣 RT @realDonaldTrump RINO John Roberts of FoxNews just put failed political candidate Chris Christie, and terminated A.G., lethargic Bill Barr, on to talk about your favorite President, ME! What does he expect from these two losers, one who I refused to give a job, the other who I fired because he was petrified of the Radical Left and what they would do to him. Anyway, my polls are even higher since the so-called Debate. Republicans should unite against the Fascist Lunatics who are destroying our Country!
🐣 RT @joncoopertweets 🚨BREAKING: Joseph Biggs, a onetime lieutenant in the Proud Boys, was sentenced today to 17 years in prison on seditious conspiracy charges for plotting with pro-Trump insurrectionists to attack the Capitol and disrupt the peaceful transfer of presidential power on Jan. 6, 2021. It’s the second longest penalty so far in more than 1,100 criminal cases stemming from the Capitol attack.
🐣 RT @BeschlossDC “In a remarkable press conference, Gov. Brian Kemp squashed the idea of a special legislative session to oust Fulton County DA Fani Willis — and warned fellow Republicans of the risks in trying to use government powers to punish her,” reports @bluestein
🐣 RT @ ifindkarma “History is not gonna ask: How did America get to the point where they indicted a former president? History instead is going to ask: How did America get to the point where such a person could be elected to the presidency?” @Maddow ¤ #VoteBlueToSaveDemocracy
💽 https://twitter.com/ifindkarma/status/1691512960643141632?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @michaeldweiss Going to war with a country with a long, storied history of being a defense manufacturing giant may yet prove, in hindsight, to have been a mistake.
⋙ 🐣 RT @Maks_NAFO_FELLA 😏🦅🇺🇦 “About 5-6 models of drones with a flight range of more than 1000 kilometers are being developed in Ukraine”, – The New York Times
😅 RT @ProjectLincoln e·lec·tile dys·func·tion (noun): the inability of a presidential candidate to generate excitement, support, and/or attention for their candidacy and campaign.
💽 https://twitter.com/ProjectLincoln/status/1697406414808129677?s=20/photo/1
// Ron DeSantis
🔄 NYT: The Key Players in Trump’s Plot to Upend the Election, Mapped https://tinyurl.com/4w8uekjx
// multimedia, interactive
🐣 RT @wartranslated Girkin strikes back⚡️announces presidential candidacy!
Girkin published a manifesto on his Telegram channel comparing himself to the current president, who is “too kind, too trusting, too athletic and sporty”, and offers himself to the people! ¤ Seriously though, looks like Girkin and his wife gave up on hoping for “justice” and decided to troll their way out of the situation. Girkin remains in custody despite the appeal.
Source: https://t.me/strelkovii/6317
[TextLink:] https://twitter.com/wartranslated/status/1697153525019467967?s=20/photo/1
[Text:] MY NOMINATION AS A CANDIDATE FOR PRESIDENT OF THE RF
My advantages in comparison with the current president in the conditions of the SMO:
1. The President refuses to lead military operations and considers himself incompetent in military affairs. I consider myself more competent in military affairs than the current president, and certainly than the current minister of defense, therefore I could fulfill the duties of the supreme commander in chief as required by the Constitution of the Russian Federation.
2. Our president is an extremely trusting person; for 8 years he was dragged by the nose, together and separately by: Obama, Trump, Macron, Merkel, Poroshenko and Zelensky. In Minsk and during the Normandy format, in Istanbul and many other places. For my part, I can note: since 2014, I have never called dear and respected partners those people who dragged the current president by the nose; on the contrary, I have never trusted them a penny.
3. The current president is too kind. When the SMO began a year and a half ago, he was able to quickly make sure that he was being led by the nose not only by respected Western and Kyiv partners, but also by the heads of our law enforcement agencies, intelligence agencies and the military-industrial complex. It turned out that neither the country, nor the army, nor the industry of Russia are ready for war, and the so-called Ukraine is not at all a straw man in military terms. Nevertheless, all the heads of these structures (as well as others, for example, the Central Bank) remained in their places and continue to amaze us with their incompetence. ¤ I’m not all that kind which I can prove in practice.
4. Our president has a lot of friends, billionaires and other businessmen, to whom he cannot (due to the above-mentioned kindness and generosity of soul) refuse anything. As a result, the export of capital from the Russian Federation continues, military production is growing much more slowly than the capital of the president’s friends is growing. I don’t have a single friend who is even a millionaire, I have a hard time making friends who are entrepreneurs, in general I have few friends and mostly they are all poor people. Accordingly, I will not have to give in to the wishes of my friends to the detriment of the Russian economy.
5. Vladimir Vladimirovich is a highly moral person, always true to his word and firmly fulfills the promises given to those who brought him to power at the end of the dashing “nineties” I didn’t promise anything to anyone and therefore I can ignore all the personal guarantees of all the presidents of the Russian Federation from 1991 to the present, if I think that this is useful for the people and the state.
6. I am not as athletic and healthy as Vladimir Vladimirovich was at my age, so I will not be able to bother you, dear voters, for more than 20 years purely physically, even if I suddenly have a desire to mess with you after the military period has been overcome the crisis and its most severe consequences.
🐣 RT @Igor_from_Kyiv_ The fight continues 🇺🇦⚔️ ¤ And no matter how hard it is. ¤ We are on our own land. We are protecting our people. We protect our loved ones and home from the invasion of the russian horde of terrorists. We will never allow russian fascists to break us and take away our freedom.
💽 https://twitter.com/Igor_from_Kyiv_/status/1697105383251226745?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @RadioFreeTom It was only some 35 years ago that the North Koreans were asking the Soviets for weapons. Putin now has to go with a tin cup to a starving hermit kingdom to get weapons for a war nobody wanted but him. Greatest Russian leader since Peter and all that.
⋙ 🐣 RT @myhlee New U.S. intelligence shows North Korea and Russia are “actively advancing” high-level talks for additional weapons and other materials to assist Moscow’s brutal war in Ukraine, the Biden administration disclosed on Wednesday.
⋙⋙ Politico: North Korea and Russia meet over arms deal, U.S. intel reveals https://tinyurl.com/mpwjxd3d
// The White House says Vladimir Putin and Kim Jong-Un exchanged letters about working together.
🐣 RT @GlasnostGone A summary of Russia’s shambolic inability to stop Ukrainian drones. And Russia admitting it can’t protect its airfields – so it’s reduced to playing hide and seek, by moving planes to other airfields in the hope #Ukraine wont find them.
🐣 RT @DefenceHQ Latest Defence Intelligence update on the situation in Ukraine
– 31 August 2023 … 🇺🇦 #StandWithUkraine 🇺🇦
[TextLink:] https://twitter.com/DefenceHQ/status/1697117712776913027?s=20/photo/1
● Overnight on the 29/30 August 2023, Russia experienced up to five separate strikes by one-way attack uncrewed aerial vehicles (OWA-UAVs) – the largest attack on Russia since the start of the conflict. Explosions were recorded in Moscow, Bryansk, and Ryazan, as well as at Pskov airbase close to the Estonian border. The attack on Pskov likely damaged several Russian military transport aircraft. During August 2023 Russia experienced 25 separate drone attacks, almost certainly carried out by OWA-UAVs.
● Many of these UAVs have reached their targets, which likely means that Russian air defence is having difficulty detecting and destroying them. Russia is likely rethinking its air defence posture in the area between Ukraine and Moscow to better deal with these attacks.
● Previous strikes against Russian military airbases have led to the dispersal of Russian aircraft to locations across Russia. However, the recent strikes against Soltsy and Pskov have demonstrated that the UAVs have significant reach, making further dispersal more challenging. It is likely that Russia will have to consider the addition of further air defence systems to airfields that it considers to be at risk from UAV attacks.
⭕ 30 Aug 2023
PublicNotice, Liz Dye: Is Judge Cannon preparing to kneecap Trump’s Florida documents case? https://tinyurl.com/4v279tnu
It was fundamentally dishonest of Judge Cannon to imply that prosecutors did something underhanded here, when they told her exactly what they were doing two whole months ago. They were investigating Taveras’s perjurious testimony to the grand jury in DC. And the only appropriate venue to investigate that crime was in DC where it occurred, as Woodward and Cannon have both known all along.
Faced with this glaring set of conflicts, Woodward responded that Taveras had told the truth, and, even if he had perjured himself, “he has other recourse besides reaching a plea bargain with the Government. Namely, he can go to trial with the presumption of innocence and fight the charges as against him.”
This is, quite frankly, NUTS. If an attorney finds out that his client has lied before a tribunal, he has an ethical responsibility to correct the record. Advising his client to stick with the lie is simply not acceptable. And so the government moved for a conflicts hearing in DC and, as noted above, informed Judge Cannon contemporaneously.
Chief Judge James Boasberg, who leads the US District Court in DC and has been on the bench since Judge Cannon was an undergrad, was so alarmed that he appointed a federal public defender to assist Taveras. Approximately five minutes after Taveras got a lawyer who wasn’t being paid by Trump, he changed his story and incriminated Trump, Nauta, and De Oliveira.
Special Counsel Jack Smith has now called Judge Cannon’s bluff by making the grand jury documents public. She will almost certainly schedule the Garcia hearing after Woodward files his reply. But she can’t un-tip her hand here — we already saw her try to kneecap prosecutors for doing their jobs. And there’s still the possibility that she’ll take Woodward up on his suggestion to exclude Taveras’s testimony entirely.
That would be completely crazy and would likely get reversed by the 11th Circuit. But considering what happened last year in Judge Cannon’s courtroom, it can’t be ruled out.
🐣 RT @RpsAgainstTrump Decency matters. ¤ While Donald Trump refused to wish Senator McConnell well, President Biden once again showed compassion to Mitch McConnel, a Republican leader: ¤ “Mitch is a friend, as you know…I know people don’t believe that’s the case… I’m going to try and get in touch with him later this afternoon.”
💽 https://twitter.com/RpsAgainstTrump/status/1696986941483286606?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @general_ben “Where is the call for Ukraine to negotiate coming from? It comes from those focused on a desire to stabilize relations with Russia, no matter what. That denigrates the Ukrainian people and the freedom they are fighting for.”
⋙ CEPA, Kurt Volker: Ukraine’s Valley Forge Moment https://tinyurl.com/syxzak86 “[D]efeatism fundamentally underestimates the moral case, the utter resolve of people defending their lives and freedom, and the stakes that all free people have in their success”
// There is good reason for optimism about Ukraine’s fight for freedom.
… No doubt there were plenty of naysayers and armchair generals at the time who simply assumed the Americans would be defeated by overwhelming force and the superior resources of the British Empire. But Americans refused to give up. In the end, Britain’s resounding defeat resulted from long supply lines, American willpower, and foreign help.
This year, Ukraine’s muted independence celebrations took place amid a growing chorus of commentary in the West arguing that Ukraine’s counteroffensive is failing, that Ukraine has made poor tactical and strategic decisions, that the West itself cannot continue to support Ukraine militarily and financially at the same level it has done to date, and that Ukraine cannot possibly recover all of its lost territory and must begin to negotiate with Russia. ¤ Ukrainians are told to face reality and, in essence, to give up.
Would these same commentators have given the same advice to George Washington in 1777? Perhaps. And they would have been just as wrong. Such defeatism fundamentally underestimates the moral case, the utter resolve of people defending their lives and freedom, and the stakes that all free people have in their success.
Ukrainians are no more inclined to give up than Americans were in 1777-1778. So where is the call for Ukraine to negotiate coming from? It comes from those focused on a desire to stabilize relations with Russia, no matter what. That denigrates both the Ukrainian people and the cause of freedom they are fighting for. …
Anyone who expected Ukraine’s counter-offensive to make rapid and substantial territorial gains had their expectations in the wrong place. Unlike the Russians, the Ukrainians care about protecting the lives of their soldiers and are proceeding in a careful, methodical, and patient manner. Of course, it might go faster if they already had M1A1 Abrams tanks, F-16 aircraft, and ATACMs long-range artillery in their inventory, but those articles have not yet arrived on the battlefield due to the West’s own slow decision-making. And yet, Ukraine is advancing. …
Anyone who bet against George Washington in 1777-1778 would have lost. Anyone who bets against Ukraine in 2023-2024 should be prepared for the same outcome.
🐣 RT @gtconway3d Pro legal tip: ¤ If you’ve been indicted for doing something, don’t talk about that something on TV.
⋙ 🐣 RT @Acyn Not sure this Eastman interview is great for umm Eastman
💽 https://twitter.com/gtconway3d/status/1697065171661844755?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @maria_drutska According to preliminary data from russian public sources, 5 aircraft were damaged in Pskov as a result of a nighttime UAV attack ¤ In addition to the four IL-76s reported earlier, a Tu-22 (a model not specified) was also damaged. A fueling complex was also destroyed by a drone attack. ¤ Furthermore, hits were recorded at the Cherekhinsky military base. No information is currently available about the consequences. ¤ UAV strikes were carried out in the Moscow, Oryol, Bryansk (three times), Ryazan, Kaluga, & Pskov regions. In addition, Sevastopol and its bay were attacked by naval drones.
💽 https://twitter.com/maria_drutska/status/1696764452308242642?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @francis_scarr The Russian Defence Ministry ignored the Pskov strikes in its update this morning ¤ But Vladimir Solovyov can’t contain his anger: ¤ “What is happening?!… If we can’t cope with drones, how are we going to cope with F-16s?!”
💽 [tr] https://twitter.com/francis_scarr/status/1696791286433427934?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @MichaelArt123 Andrew Weissman @AWeissmann_ Fani WILLIS is asking the judge in the Trump racketeering case to fast-track all 19 of the defenants ¤ Smart move and amps pressure up on all. Shows she is ready to go.
🐣 RT @GregDelawie #Trump uses words like “communist” and “socialist” without any idea of what they mean. He only knows they are thought of as bad. In truth, it is ridiculous to use them for the U.S. @steadystatevets
⋙ 🐣 RT @RpsAgainstTrump Another deranged, unhinged, delusional rant by a rattled Trump:
“Russia, Russia, Russia.
Ukraine, Ukraine, Ukraine…
Our country is going communist, far beyond socialist.” 🤡
Why would anyone want to give this lunatic access to the nuclear code?
💽 https://twitter.com/RpsAgainstTrump/status/1697051567860466037?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @AntiToxicPeople Of all the posts that he didn’t write, he didn’t write this one the most. ¤ It expresses normal human feeling, empathy & isn’t replete w/ wrongly capitalized words, run on rants, all caps & bad punctuation. He posted this after posting *another* 15-20 deranged video clips today.
[TextLink:] https://twitter.com/AntiToxicPeople/status/1696978145017254057?s=20/photo/1
TheAtlantic, Peter Sagal: The End Will Come for the Cult of MAGA https://tinyurl.com/2zbd2eyc
// The next generation isn’t buying it.
🐣 RT @StateDept Russia is forcibly taking Ukrainian children to Russia, putting them in re-education camps, and isolating them from their families. The world has a moral duty to hold Russian leaders accountable. #TakenFromUkraine
💽 https://twitter.com/StateDept/status/1696983630659375152?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @StateDept Russia is forcibly taking Ukrainian children to Russia, putting them in re-education camps, and isolating them from their families. The world has a moral duty to hold Russian leaders accountable. #TakenFromUkraine
🐣 RT @MBielieskov Either US gives Ukraine SRBM ATACMS and has at least some say in their employment or Ukraine will continue to hone indigenous strategic strike capabilities and employ them the way we deem proper. Meaning of escalation management changes – to have a say US needs to adjust.
🐣 RT @HannahPThomas BREAKING NEWS: Sen. Mitch McConnell appearing to have another scary episode in the media gaggle in Covington today. Aides had to step in to help him out and repeat questions. He was eventually lead away. We’ll have the full video on @WLWT
💽 https://twitter.com/DrRadchenko/status/1696954385702572139?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @washingtonpost A judge ruled that Peter Navarro, a Trump White House adviser charged with criminal contempt of Congress, cannot argue to a jury that he was barred by executive privilege from providing testimony and documents to the House committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol. https://wapo.st/3YUZZR8
⋙ WaPo: Judge says Peter Navarro can’t use privilege as defense in contempt case https://tinyurl.com/34xej99c
🐣 RT @GallupNews Hurricane Idalia is making landfall in Florida, highlighting another extreme weather event in the U.S. ¤ A third of Americans have been personally affected by an extreme event in the past two years, with 45% of Americans in the South saying they have been affected by extreme weather, most often by hurricanes. https://on.gallup.com/3KY5Pvm
◕ https://twitter.com/GallupNews/status/1696959595179077975?s=20/photo/1
// Midwest 21%, South 45%; Overall 33%
⋙ 🐣 the Midwest subsidizes the South’s climate denialism
🐣 RT @ProjectLincoln Mugshots, meltdowns, and lies… they’re spiraling again.
💽 https://twitter.com/ProjectLincoln/status/1696945880988004511?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @Gerashchenko_en Attention, Baltic states! ¤ Russian propagandist Solovyev wants to “wipe” you “off the map.” He thinks the Baltic States might be involved in the drone attack on Pskov airfield – or not, he doesn’t really care, a war on NATO must be declared.
💽 [tr] https://twitter.com/Gerashchenko_en/status/1696894647878979932?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @ResoluteSquare
Fact: No Labels is funded by Harlan Crowe.
Fact: Trump and @NoLabelsOrg’s co-chair have the same campaign manager
Fact: No Labels is getting on the ballot in states Biden narrowly won.
Fact: No Labels = Trump back in the WH. Anyone who says otherwise is naive or lying to you.
WSJ: Rudy Giuliani Is Found Liable for Defaming Georgia Poll Workers https://tinyurl.com/r2bbknm8
// Federal judge blasts former Trump lawyer, citing ‘willful discovery misconduct’
Rudy Giuliani has been found liable for defaming two Georgia election workers, setting the stage for a jury trial to determine how much money the former Trump lawyer must pay for spreading conspiracy theories about them fabricating ballots.
In an unusual ruling issued Wednesday, a federal judge in Washington entered a default judgment against Giuliani in the civil defamation case brought by Shaye Moss and Ruby Freeman. ¤ In her ruling, U.S. District Judge Beryl Howell said Giuliani, a former mayor of New York City and U.S. attorney, had flouted his obligations to turn over evidence in the case, issuing the judgment against him for “willful discovery misconduct.”
“Giuliani has given only lip service to compliance with his discovery obligations,” the judge wrote, adding: “[J]ust as taking shortcuts to win an election carries risk—even potential criminal liability—bypassing the discovery process carries serious sanctions.” …
🐣 RT @AWeissmann_ Huge win for Freeman and Moss and defeat for Rudy, but I wonder what discovery he is hiding? I suspect it is pretty bad- ie criminally damning- for him to risk this result which is financially ruinous and predicated on his discovery violations.
🐣 RT @ petestrzok scofflaw ¤ noun ¤ scoff· law ˈskäf-ˌlȯ ˈskȯf-: a contemptuous law violator
$132,856.50 of sanctions – along with a default judgment against Giuliani for liaibility for defaming Ruby Freeman and Shaye Moss. ¤ Trial for damages between Nov 2023 and Feb 2024.
⋙ 🐣 RT @ rachelweinerwp Howell: “Donning a cloak of victimization may play well on a public stage to certain audiences, but in a court of law this performance has served only to subvert the normal process of discovery in a straight-forward defamation case” https://tinyurl.com/yjxt62nh
🐣 RT @AntiToxicPeople 🚨BREAKING: Federal Judge Beryl Howell enters *DEFAULT JUDGEMENT* AND putative sanctions against Rudy Giuliani for defamation & other claims in civil suit brought by Georgia election workers Shaye Moss and Ruby Freeman who were endlessly attacked by Giuliani with insane lies.
🐣 RT @AccountableGOP Chris Christie: “The minimum bar we should have for someone to be running for President of the United States is that they’re not indicted or convicted of felonies.”
💽 https://twitter.com/AccountableGOP/status/1696559086047842409?s=20/photo/1
WaPo: Putin struggles with falling ruble, rising prices as sanctions bite https://tinyurl.com/4ett8uuc ‘A 20 percent drop in the value of the ruble between early June and mid-August and the government’s pouring of funds into Russia’s defense industry are bringing Russia’s war home’
Rapidly rising prices caused by a 20 percent drop in the value of the ruble between early June and mid-August and the government’s pouring of funds into Russia’s defense industry are bringing Russia’s war — and the impact of sanctions — home to many Russians for the first time, economists say. …
Russia’s Central Bank forecasts inflation will reach up to 6.5 percent by the end of 2023. But economists say the rapid ruble devaluation could fuel a further surge in prices over the next 3 to 6 months and the inflation rate could reach double digits by the end of the year, even after the Central Bank made an emergency hike this month to its key interest rate, now at 12 percent, to try to counter that.
… Russia’s largest market research agency, Romir, found that 19 percent of respondents had begun cutting back on purchases of basic goods such as toothpaste, washing powder and food in July, compared to 16 percent the month before.
The ruble’s loss of more than a third of its value since November last year to a large degree is a result of sanctions imposed on Russia’s energy exports at the end of 2022, when the European Union banned most Russian oil imports and the G-7 group of nations imposed a price cap on Russian crude sales elsewhere, decreeing its oil could be sold for no more than $60 per barrel.
Even though Russian oil traders have sunk into the shadows, deploying phantom fleets seeking to sidestep the curbs, the measures, combined with a sharp reduction in Russian gas exports to Europe, have deprived the Russian budget of a key source of revenue, with income from energy exports falling 47 percent the first half of 2023, compared to the same time the previous year.
… The government has doubled its defense spending target for 2023 to more than $100 billion, pumping in more than $60 billion in budget funds into the defense industry in the first half of 2023, according to government figures disclosed this month by Reuters, to feed its war machine. …
it is also creating a huge imbalance in the Russian economy, exacerbating inflation as defense enterprises work round-the-clock and worsening labor shortages caused in part by the mobilization of conscripts to the front in Ukraine and by the hundreds of thousands of Russians fleeing abroad since the start of the war.
A survey conducted by the Gaidar Institute in Moscow found that 42 percent of enterprises surveyed complained of a lack of workers in July. In a sign of increasing desperation, Putin last week decreed that restrictions on employing teenagers as young as 14 should be lifted, to cope with the labor shortages, according to a list of presidential orders published on the Kremlin’s website.
… Mark Sobel, who served as deputy assistant secretary for international monetary and financial policy at the Treasury Department and is now a senior adviser at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a D.C.-based think tank, said, “But the impact of Western actions against Russia has been crippling, and will be long-lasting.” …
⭕ 29 Aug 2023
🐣 RT @AntiToxicPeople 50 years ago today, 8/29/73 ¤ Nixon vows to defy Judge Sirica’s order to turn over a number of tapes, just 6 weeks after the taping system was revealed in shocking public testimony. Nixon knows how incriminating they are & fights for 11 months & loses at SCOTUS & soon resigns.
[TextLink:] https://twitter.com/AntiToxicPeople/status/1696714370175447550?s=20/photo/1
// front page NYTimes
🐣 RT @ @JensWalter12 My find today about Ukrainians vs Russians. New York Post 1919:
[TextLink:] https://twitter.com/JensWalter12/status/1696536922401984533?s=20/photo/1
[Text:] In contrast to the mystical, religious, pacifistic, patient, submissive, rather indolent Great Russian the Ukrainian is a hard-headed, industrious realist and a stubborn fighter. History explains the difference: from the earliest times the Muscovite has never known freedom, whereas the Ukrainian is proud of his tradition inherited from the free soldier republic of the Zaporoghi Cossacks.
⋘ and ⋙
… “It is suspected by the allies that we will soon Join with Russia,” sald Premier Ostapincho in a talk with the Associated Press correspondent at Proskurov. “This we will never do.” he continued. “We have got sense enough to understand that the Russlans, including the Tolstoys and all others, are fools. Nothing good politically ever came out of Russia or ever will. The Bolsheviki are fools too, whereas we are more European. Speaking along similar lines, War Minister Schapovol, with whom the correspondent traveled for some time, said: “Nobody knows anything about us nor seems to care. Please tell the people that we are just like other people who live in the west. Tell the Americans that in them lle our hopes to found a new, prosperous and free nation.” Colonel Stefanie, who hanged several bolsheviki at Tarnapol, toid the Assoctated Press correspondent that he had fought in the Ukraine for years and was willing to flght for the rest of his life to obtain independence for his country. …
WaPo: He pleaded for F-16s for Ukraine but died in a crash before he could fly one https://tinyurl.com/6h2wvuaf “Pilshchikov was the pilot who tried to explain to the world that the old Soviet-era jets ‘are like flying coffins.’” He was scheduled to begin training on the F-16s.
🐣 RT @ @MuellerSheWrote Like I said.
⋙ 🐣 RT @ryanjreilly Special counsel Jack Smith’s office is funded out of a “permanent, indefinite appropriation for independent counsels,” so they’re essentially good to go even if the government shuts down. ¤ From @sahilkapur: [NBC:] https://tinyurl.com/yc7efnrz
🐣 RT @RussianEmbassy 🇷🇺🇺🇳 Russia’s position at #UNGA78: ¤ It is pivotal to prevent a small group of Western countries from taking control of UN. ¤ It is unacceptable to introduce, in addition to #UNSC sanctions, further unilateral coercive measures. [link]
⋙ 🐣 Russia stands in violation of the UN Charter and the Declaration of Human Rights ¤ It does not deserve a permanent seat on the UNSC. It has no legal claim to a seat, which was granted to the USSR, not to Russia
🧵 RT @ Gerashchenko_en The largest drone attack on the russian territory. The damages include: the premises of one of the GRU (The Main Directorate of the General Staff of the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation) brigades, military cargo planes in Pskov as well as the largest enterprise manufacturing microelectronics for Iskanders in Bryansk.
📌 💽 [tr] https://twitter.com/Gerashchenko_en/status/1696692621454799024?s=20/photo/1
What we know:
● Pskov. At about 11:40 p.m. (Moscow time) on Aug. 29, a series of explosions was heard in the area of Pskov airport. Reports say the airfield was attacked by 20 drones. Russian media says the shots could be heared in the course of the night – single and bursts.The anti-terrorist plan Edelweiss was put into action in the city. The law enforcement units are operating in the high alert mode carrying assault weapons.
The Pskov international airport is the joint purpose airfield. It’s under jurisdiction of the Ministry of Defense. It hosts the 334th air force regiment. ¤ TASS reports the strike damaged 4 cargo IL-76. Two of them caught fire. After the strike 3 to 5 cargo planes were “moved” from the airfield. ¤ According to the satellite images IL-76 aircrafts were parked one close to another and without the shelters. Therefore, the damages in equipment might be higher. ¤ The governor of the Pskov region claims no casualties as the result of the attacks. The airport is shut down till Thursday.
Also, according to the info from Pskovskaya Gubernia resource, the 64044 military base is on fire. It’s home to the 2nd brigade of the GRU special forces. ¤ The distance between Ukraine and Pskov is 700 km across Belarus.
● Bryansk was also under the drone attack. The governor reports 3 drones being shot down, no casualties.
There are reports of fire started at the Kremniy EL enterprise. It is the largest manufacturer of microelectronics in russia. 94% of its products in 2017 went to satisfy the needs of the Ministry of Defense. ¤ The plant supplies Almaz-Antey, the Airspace equipment, Sozvezdie and Vega manufacturers. It produces parts for Pantsyr anti-aircraft systems and for Iskander missile complexes.● Other regions:
The Kover [Carpet] plan was put in motion in Moscow city, in Tula and Ryazan regions. In Oryol region, 2 UAVs were shot down, according to the governor. Also, the Ministry of Defense was reported shooting down one drone in Kaluga region. ¤ Overall, the Ministry of Defense has reported it halted the attacks everywhere, but kept silence about the assault on Pskov.
🐣 RT @DefenceU Today, loved ones, combat brothers and sisters, and Kyivans bid farewell to a legendary pilot of the 40th Tactical Aviation Brigade, Major (posthumously) Andrii Pilshchykov. He was among those who helped Ukraine survive the first terrible days of the invasion. He made significant strides in ensuring that F-16s join the defense of Ukraine’s skies. Unfortunately, he didn’t live to see the fulfillment of his dream.
Rest in peace, Juice. You started this journey; your brothers and sisters will finish it. Ukraine will be free. Ukraine will join NATO. Ukraine’s skies will be safeguarded by the most modern jets. Photo: Efrem Lukatsky
🖼 https://twitter.com/DefenceU/status/1696579562769965253?s=20/photo/1
// died in helicopter collision
🐣 RT @ZelenskyyUa May the memory of all our warriors be blessed! ¤ Words are never enough to express what we feel. And let the tears that will be shed today, let the silence that will sound louder than any words, let our respect, which is absolutely sincere, tell everyone what we really feel and how grateful we are to all our defenders, whose lives became the life of Ukraine. ¤ Glory to Ukraine!
💽 https://twitter.com/ZelenskyyUa/status/1696473369946857982?s=20/photo/1
// Zelensky lays wreath for felled top aviator
🐣 RT @GlasnostGone Russia’s sprawling military airfield at Pskov has the usual mix of unprotected bays for planes and ammo storage facilities. And for added spice, they though it best to build a giant fuel storage facility right next to the airfield 🤪.
🖼 https://twitter.com/GlasnostGone/status/1696643421480366390?s=20/photo/1 -4
🐣 RT @ChuckPfarrer DRONE STRIKE: Gunfire, explosions and secondaries are tearing through the dual use airfield in Pskov, Russia. The Russian base is located more than 20 miles from the Estonian frontier.
🌎 https://twitter.com/ChuckPfarrer/status/1696639761211953400?s=20/photo/1
⋙ 🐣 RT @ChuckPfarrer DEVELOPING: First reports indicate that the attack was conducted by UAVs on the Russian air base base at Kresty. The base is home to the VDV’s 76th Air Assault Division and the 334th military transport regiment of the Russian airspace forces.
🐣 RT @Gerashchenko_en Russian media report that terrorist Girkin-Strelkov will remain under arrest. Earlier, his lawyers asked to allow him to stay under house arrest. ¤ “I do not consider myself guilty. I intend to stand up for my honest name and defend it in court. And I don’t intend to hide” – Girkin-Strelkov said in court. ¤ He is charged with extremist appeals.
🐣 RT @ChuckPfarrer NO BAIL: In custody in the Lefortovo prison in Moscow, RU gadfly (and Hague indicted terrorist) Igor Girkin has been refused bail. He was arrested on 21 JUL- charged with ‘extremism’ during a Kremlin crackdown against the pro-war opposition in Russia. https://tinyurl.com/4e4xw58f
🖼 https://twitter.com/ChuckPfarrer/status/1696551895064604915?s=20/photo/1
// photo with reflection of photographers
🐣 RT @MikeSington The nightmare scenario. Rachel Maddow warns that if Trump wins, it means he’s “probably president for life”.
🖼 https://twitter.com/MikeSington/status/1696496403357524198?s=20/photo/1
// fake TIME cover Trump as king
🐣 RT @7Veritas4 They’re threatening to defund the DOJ, FBI, IRS…any agency that dares to hold them accountable. ¤ They’re threatening to halt all appropriations and shut down the government…all to appease a desperate criminal. ¤ It will not work. ¤ The bell of Justice has been rung. ¤ Its call answered. ¤ There’s no stopping it now.
🐣 RT @wartranslated Explosions in Pskov (videos 1 and 2) and Bryansk (3) and Orel Oblasts (4), Russia, with reports of unidentified UAV sightings in other regions. This appears to be a well-orchestrated drone raid on Russia. ¤ In Pskov, four IL-76 planes were reportedly hit in an airfield. All flights from and into the airport have been cancelled. Additionally, reports of a military unit in the city being hit were published. ¤ Pskov is a city far from Ukraine, near the border with Estonia.
🐣 RT @anders_aslund My article today in the New Statesman: “Russian currency crash is a blow to Putin’s credibility ¤ Sanctions have cut off the financing the president needs to increase military spending.”
⋙ NewStatesman: Russian currency crash is a blow to Putin’s credibility https://tinyurl.com/472nvujm
// Sanctions have cut off the financing the president needs to increase military spending.
🐣 RT @JoeBiden Medicare can now negotiate lower costs for these prescription drugs thanks to my Inflation Reduction Act:
—Eliquis
—Jardiance
—Xarelto
—Januvia
—Farxiga
—Entresto
—Enbrel
—Imbruvica
—Stelara
—Fiasp
Every single Republican in Congress voted against this.
🐣 RT @AntiToxicPeople Fucking lunatic.
[TextLink:] https://twitter.com/AntiToxicPeople/status/1696610686405857448?s=20/photo/1
[Text:] 🐣 RT @realDonaldTrump Please realize that all of these Indictments and Lawsuits against me are conceived and run by Radical Left Democrats, the same lunatics that are destroying our Country. The Indictments and Litigation are highly partisan Election Interference! Now we are in a partially corrupt “System of Justice,” filled up with Marxists, Fascists, Communists, and Radical Left Democrats, but also with Great American Patriots who see what is happening to our Country, and won’t allow it to continue. WE WILL WIN!
GiffordsLawCenter(5/23/2022): How America’s Gun Laws Fuel Armed Hate https://tinyurl.com/4vhp6ut4 “[T]he FBI has elevated ‘racially motivated violent extremism’ to be a top level priority threat, singling out white supremacy”
◕ https://twitter.com/Auriandra/status/1696570710393581820?s=20/photo/1
// 5/23/2022
FBI: FBI Releases Updated 2020 Hate Crime Statistics https://tinyurl.com/ymahf87e
// 10/25/2021; race/ethnicity 61.8%, sexual orientation 20%, religion 13.3%, gender identity 2.7%, disability 1,4%, gender 0.7%
// 8,052 incidents, 11,126 victims
◕ https://twitter.com/Auriandra/status/1696566257955336551?s=20/photo/1
● Of the 7,750 hate crime offenses classified as crimes against persons in 2020, 53.1% were for intimidation, 27.9% were for simple assault, and 17.9% were for aggravated assault. Twenty-two (22) murders and 21 rapes were reported as hate crimes. The remaining 32 hate crime offenses were reported in the category of other.
● Of the 3,147 hate crime offenses classified as crimes against property, most (74.1%) were acts of destruction/damage/vandalism. Robbery, burglary, larceny-theft, motor vehicle theft, arson, and other offenses accounted for the remaining 25.9% of crimes against property.
● Two hundred thirty-two (232) additional offenses were classified as crimes against society. This crime category represents society’s prohibition against engaging in certain types of activity such as gambling, prostitution, and drug violations. These are typically victimless crimes in which property is not the object.
⭕ 28 Aug 2023
🐣 RT @TreasChest Selfless, courageous, indomitable. War takes the best.
💽 https://twitter.com/TreasChest/status/1696383778623562120?s=20/photo/1
Today, on the Day of Remembrance of the Defenders of Ukraine, who died in the struggle for the independence, sovereignty and territorial integrity of Ukraine, we bow our heads to all the Heroes who defended and defend our freedom. We light memorial candles, remembering all the fallen Defenders of Ukraine.
Thanks to each and every one, thanks to whom our country survived and continues to worthily defend a free future in an independent state. ¤ For every selected centimeter, for every step that brings our Victory closer.
We must always remember the extremely high price with which we obtain a peaceful sky, the courage of our Heroes, who every day since 2014 do everything for the sake of the existence of Ukraine and our future generations. ¤ Glory to heroes!
🐣 RT @POTUS This morning, I spoke with Governor DeSantis to inform him that we’ve approved the Emergency Declaration for Florida as they prepare for Hurricane Idalia, and FEMA has pre-deployed personnel and assets. ¤ Florida has my full support as they prepare for Idalia and its aftermath.
⋙ 🐣 NBC (2021): Probe confirms Trump officials blocked Puerto Rico from receiving Hurricane Maria aid https://tinyurl.com/5fuhd58y The federal government had allocated nearly $69B to help the island recover from Maria in 2017; but when Biden took over, only $19B had been paid
// The Trump administration also obstructed an investigation looking into why it was depriving the U.S. territory of congressionally approved funds, the report found.
It all started after 2018 when OMB began requiring HUD to send grant notices for disaster funds through an interagency review process for approval, making it hard for HUD to publish the notices needed to unlock funding in a timely manner. Investigators found that OMB had never before required such a review process for a notice allocating recovery funds.
Former HUD Deputy Secretary Brian Montgomery told investigators about a phone call he had with then-OMB Director Russell Vought in which Montgomery told Vought the actions from his office were equivalent to holding disaster-relief funds “hostage,” according to the report.
The federal government has allocated nearly $69 billion to help the island recover from Maria as well as other disasters that have hit the island over the past few years. But most of the money, specifically funds for housing and infrastructure relief, hasn’t made its way to communities on the island. Puerto Rico has received $19 billion, according to the Office of Recovery, Reconstruction and Resiliency. …
Seven months after the probe was launched, two top HUD officials admitted to knowingly missing the congressionally mandated deadline to issue a notice that would have unlocked billions in federal recovery funds to Puerto Rico. Carson later defended his agency’s actions by echoing Trump talking points — citing concerns about corruption, fiscal irregularities and “Puerto Rico’s capacity to manage these funds.” …
Throughout his term, Trump repeatedly opposed disaster funding for Puerto Rico while disputing and failing to acknowledge Maria’s death toll. Trump had also told top White House officials “that he did not want a single dollar going to Puerto Rico,” the Washington Post reported in 2019. “Instead, he wanted more of the money to go to Texas and Florida.”
Under Trump, Congress had approved a total of $20 billion in HUD funds for Puerto Rico’s post-hurricane reconstruction, a historic amount. But the agency stalled the release of the aid in 2019 and imposed additional restrictions and requirements last year on how Puerto Rico could gain access to the funds, citing corruption and financial mismanagement concerns. Panabaker:
The latest probe comes two days after President Joe Biden’s administration removed Trump-era restrictions unique to Puerto Rico limiting its ability to access recovery funds through HUD. The agency also unlocked access to $8.2 billion in Community Development Block Grant Mitigation funds to help the island build resiliency against future disasters. The aid was approved by Congress in 2018.
🐣 RT @renato_mariotti For years, Trump exploited norms and courtesies, showcasing the gaps and holes in our system. ¤ Now, two black women in positions of authority — DA Willis and Judge Chutkan — have put an end to that. They’re drawing hard lines and forcing Trump’s hand. ¤ He must be furious.
🐣 RT @ @ProjectLincoln “From the very beginning, the Trump campaign was a criminal enterprise.” @StuartPStevens on @MSNBC discusses the criminality of Trump and his associates is no accident, he assembled a team of them from the start to do his bidding.
💽 https://twitter.com/ProjectLincoln/status/1696251585444098445?s=20/photo/1
🐣 FBI: Hate Crime Statistics: Bias Motivations (2020) https://tinyurl.com/ymahf87e
◕ https://twitter.com/Auriandra/status/1696378941152354557?s=20/photo/1
WaPo: Mark Meadows, former Trump chief of staff, testifies in Georgia https://tinyurl.com/msevpnmk “On several occasions Meadows claimed to have no knowledge of the Trump campaign’s efforts to contest the election results” 🙈🙉🙊
🐣 RT @JoyceWhiteVance Trump is the lone defendant in a 4 count indictment case. He will have over 6 months from the date if indictment to prepare for trial. Theatrics aside, there are no substantive reasons his team can’t be ready
🐣 RT @rgoodlaw 1/ Pence’s Chief of Staff @marctshort masterfully dissects what’s wrong with WH Chief of Staff Mark Meadows’ defenses.👇
If official capacity, “why was he circumventing” WH Counsel’s advice, why wasn’t Cipollone or DOJ involved, instead recruited outsiders wanted to listen to…
⋙ 🐣 RT @atrupar Here’s Marc Short on CNN debunking Mark Meadows’s defense in the Georgia case and then debunking Trumpworld’s defense of the Raffensperger call
💽 https://twitter.com/rgoodlaw/status/1696293169762054597?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @BarackObama Sixty years ago, the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom showed us what’s possible when ordinary people come together to push for change. Now it’s up to all of us to protect and build on that progress, and create a better future for generations to come.
💽 https://twitter.com/BarackObama/status/1696207336660959291?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @ Gerashchenko_en An interesting post on the Telegram channel of “Z-blogger” Pozdnyakov:
“God, don’t you leave us 🙏🙏🙏
Pray to God you are alive and healthy 🙏”
What is going on?
🖼 https://twitter.com/Gerashchenko_en/status/1696071567292117414?s=20/photo/1
// photo of Putin
🐣 RT @7Veritas4 Category 5 meltdowns on Truth Social. ¤ Climate change is real.
[TextLink:] https://twitter.com/7Veritas4/status/1696244092731093061?s=20/photo/1 -2
🐣 RT @realDonaldTrump Deranged Jack Smith & his team of Thugs, who were caught going to the White House just prior to Indicting the 45th President of the United States (an absolute No No!), have been working on this Witch Hunt for almost 3 years, but decided to bring it smack in the middle of Crooked Joe Biden’s Political Opponent’s campaign against him. Election Interference! Today a biased, Trump Hating Judge gave me only a two month extension, just what our corrupt government wanted, SUPER-TUESDAY. i WILL APPEAL!
🐣 RT @realDonaldTrump Page 2: How do you have an Indictment that is based almost entirely on the findings of the January 6th Unselect Committee of Marxists, Fascists, and Political Hacks, when these same lowlifes, who have been caught lying for years about Russia, Russia, Russia, Ukraine, Ukraine, Ukraine, FISA, the Fake Dossier, & much more, purposely & Illegally DESTROYED & DELETED all of the Evidence, Findings, & Proof of the January 6th Committee? When will Deranged Jack Smith Criminally Charge the Committee?
WaPo, Jennifer Rubin: Eastman’s defense is shattered in state bar proceeding https://tinyurl.com/2uyuz9pk
John Eastman, the lawyer allegedly at the center of the unprecedented and outrageous scheme to overthrow the 2020 election, faces criminal prosecution in Georgia and has been identified as an unindicted co-conspirator in special counsel Jack Smith’s federal case. And Eastman must defend a bar complaint in California that threatens to revoke his law license.
At a critical hearing last week in the California bar proceedings, designated legal expert Matthew A. Seligman submitted a 91-page report, which I have obtained from the state bar, that strips away any “colorable,” or legally plausible, defense that Eastman was acting in good faith in rendering advice to the now four-times-indicted former president Donald Trump. …
In his report, Seligman addressed whether “the legal positions advanced by Dr. John Eastman in relation to the counting of electoral votes for the 2020 presidential election” were reasonable. Specifically, he assessed whether — as Eastman, Chesebro and others posited — Mike Pence, as vice president, had “unilateral authority to resolve disputes about electoral votes or to take other unilateral actions with respect to the electoral count” or could “delay the electoral count for a state legislature to take action with respect to a state’s electoral votes and whether a state legislature may lawfully appoint electors after the electoral count commences.”
Seligman reviewed the 12th Amendment, the Electoral Count Act of 1887 and “centuries-long practice by Congress” to find that the Eastman positions were so devoid of support that “no reasonable attorney exercising appropriate diligence in the circumstances would adopt them.” In essence, Seligman strips away the pretense that Eastman (and, by extension, Chesebro) engaged in routine legal work.
Seligman’s report echoes the finding of U.S. District Court Judge David O. Carter, who, in a matter concerning Eastman’s claim of attorney-client privilege to protect documents from the Jan. 6 House select committee, found that it “more likely than not” that Eastman and Trump had engaged in criminal activity.
… “The historical record conclusively demonstrates that the President of the Senate holds no unilateral power to take any substantive action with respect to the electoral count,” Seligman wrote. “In particular, the President of the Senate holds no unilateral power to reject electoral votes, to resolve disputes about the counting of electoral votes, or to delay the counting of electoral votes.” He concludes, “Dr. Eastman’s decision to advance those unfounded legal positions as part of an attempt to reverse the lawful result of a presidential election violates fundamental precepts of American democracy.”
Seligman’s damning report might well determine the outcome of Eastman’s bar proceedings. However, the implications of the report extend well beyond Eastman’s law license. For example:
● If Eastman engaged in a bad-faith scheme to overthrow the election, then he (and presumably other co-defendant lawyers) lacked any colorable defense under federal law and therefore cannot remove their case to federal court.
● If Eastman engaged in a bad-faith scheme to overthrow the election, none of his or other lawyers’ conversations are protected under the ambit of the First Amendment any more than a memo explaining how to break into a bank would be.
● If Eastman engaged in a bad-faith scheme to block the certification of the election, then one could conclude he and others in the alleged “criminal enterprise” had the requisite criminal intent for state charges including a state racketeering charge. …
📋 ⏳ 🐣 RT @MacFarlaneNews Deadlines ordered today by Judge Tonya Chutkan in Trump DC case:
Oct 9- pretrial motions due
Dec 4- prosecutors provide notice of evidence
Dec 11- info about expert witnesses
Dec 18- exhibit lists
Jan 15- jury instructions
Feb 19 – witness lists
March 4 – TRIAL
🐣 RT @ReardonReports NEW: Fulton County will release the ENTIRE special grand jury report on alleged 2020 post-election interference on Friday, September 8th at 10am. ¤ This will give us more insight into how and why charges were brought against the 19 people – including Trump – charged this month.
🐣 RT @RussianEmbassy MFA Spox #Zakharova: Now, we are witnessing Westerners and their Kiev underlings using a new trick. They are actively promoting Zelensky’s so-called peace formula which in reality has nothing to do with peace and contains only a set of ultimatums unacceptable to Russia.
⋙ 🐣 it’s called J-U-S-T-I-C-E
[TextLink:] https://twitter.com/Auriandra/status/1696284508771807671?s=20/photo/1
// tags: Ukraine’s peace plan
[Text:] So, here are the proposals of Ukraine:
1. Radiation and nuclear safety.
2. Food security.
3. Energy security.
4. Release of all prisoners and deported persons.
5. Implementation of the UN Charter and restoration of Ukraine’s territorial integrity and the world order.
6. Withdrawal of Russian troops and cessation of hostilities.
7. Restoration of justice.
8. Countering ecocide.
9. Preventing escalation.
10. Confirmation of the end of the war.
🐣 RT @TheRickWilson Facts are stubborn things.
⋙ 🐣 RT @peterbakernyt Republicans claim Biden “has shut down energy production in America.” In fact, US oil production is set to reach an all-time high of 12.8 million barrels a day this year and 13.1 million in 2024, higher than under Trump or any prior president. @bjlefebvre
⋙ Politico: The U.S. is pumping oil faster than ever. Republicans don’t care. https://tinyurl.com/4vr8wet7
// GOP presidential candidates are blaming pump prices on President Joe Biden’s clean energy policies, even though the U.S. is churning out record amounts of oil.
🐣 RT @AccountableGOP NEW AD running on Fox News in Atlanta, Milwaukee, and Phoenix. ¤ The rule of law still matters.
💽 https://twitter.com/AccountableGOP/status/1696155994114363424?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @Victorshi2020 Just want to take this moment to thank Judge Chutkan for always showing us how Justice is done. Today, she saw right through Donald Trump’s delay tactic & demanded a speedy trial date for March 4, 2024. This is how our legal system is supposed to work. Thank you, Judge Chutkan.
🖼 https://twitter.com/Victorshi2020/status/1696188854967894492?s=20/photo/1
CREW: Legal experts across the ideological spectrum agree: The 14th Amendment disqualifies Trump from holding office https://tinyurl.com/3cs5bfsr
// from Tweet: “The real question they’re asking is whether Americans will enforce it.”
🐣 RT @MSNBC “They do not want the American public to see this trial. They are scared — like vampires — of sunlight.”@neal_katyal and Andrew Weissmann join @jrpsaki to discuss Mark Meadows’ federal court request, Trump’s change of legal representation, and more. http://on.msnbc.com/47NSi3d
💽 https://twitter.com/MSNBC/status/1696232603404186041?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @GlasnostGone “Except for human resources, Putin has no more resources: there’s no economy, there’s no military-industrial complex, military reserves have already been exhausted.” Said #Ukraine’s laid-backed Chief of the Defence Intelligence Major General Kyrylo Budanov [link]
🐣 RT @murraywaas John Eastman and Ken Chesboro face a difficult choice: Go to trial with Donald Trump who is attempting to scapegoat them to get off the hook himself. Or go to trial alongside Sidney Powell, and lose complete control of the proceedings to her.
⋙ 🐣 RT @harrylitman Sidney Powell joins Chesebro in a speedy trial demand, which is her right and so can’t see any result other than her joining the 9/23 trial. I can think of someone who is very chagrined at that development: Ken Chesebro.
🐣 📋 Let’s be honest. These things are true:
1. Backs kill mainly Blacks and Whites kill mainly Whites (UCR)
2. Blacks account for a higher % of homicides than their representation in the country
3. More Blacks (%) fear crime than Whites do (Pew)
4. Police kill more than 2X more Blacks than their representation in the community
◕ https://twitter.com/Auriandra/status/1696146716410392870?s=20/photo/1
// tags: 2019 UCR 2019 Uniform Crime Report https://tinyurl.com/4v9nd2ce
⋙ 🐣 Here is the chart on police killings: https://tinyurl.com/26fk6byk
◕ https://twitter.com/Auriandra/status/1696148003654922454?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @ GlasnostGone Because more and more Russians know his invasion isn’t going well, Putin’s ordered a drive to boost production of films glorifying Moscow’s war in #Ukraine. Russia can’t win on the battlefield, so it’s trying to win the cinema. [TheGuardian:] https://tinyurl.com/3ce9k5pr
The Russian authorities have announced a drive to boost production of films glorifying Moscow’s war in Ukraine, AP reports. ¤ Vladimir Putin has ordered the culture ministry to ensure theatres screen documentaries about the “special military operation”, as the Kremlin calls its invasion of Ukraine.
The ministry has also reportedly prioritised certain themes when allocating state funding for films. ¤ These include “heroism and selflessness of Russian warriors” in Ukraine and “battling modern manifestations of the Nazi and fascist ideology” – a false accusation Putin makes about Kyiv’s leaders. 🐣 RT @The rift between Democrats and Republicans could potentially cause a civil war – the former Russian president ¤ Details: zu https://on.rt.com/cgzv
[Text:] “’America is currently in a state of internal strife. America is conflicting with itself’ Dmitry Medvedev, former Russian President”
⋙ 🐣 that’s how freedom of speech works
only in dictatorship is no disagreement, dissent or opposition allowed ~ no creativity, ingenuity, insight or progress
a great battle is being fought over whether God gave man ‘too much freedom’ (Dostoyevski) or will ‘the Darkness drop again’?(Yeats)
🐣 RT @mfa_russia FM #Lavrov’s answer to a question:
❓Today we see that dozens of countries are interested in joining (#BRICS). What does this indicate?
💬 FM Lavrov: It shows that they (West & MSM) work using their tongues, while we work using our heads & actions.
🔗 https://is.gd/5A1jb4
⋙ 🐣 You are working hard to project the illusion of progress even though your president can’t leave Russia w/o fear of arrest ¤ Russia is a sadly transforming BRICS into a club of rogue states incapable understanding the light of the Enlightenment & the UN Declaration of Human Rights
[TextLink:] https://twitter.com/Auriandra/status/1696123065963335683?s=20/photo/1
⭕ 27 Aug 2023
TheGuardian: Twenty years of ruthlessness: how Russia has silenced Putin’s opponents https://tinyurl.com/2p9w2fts
// From poisonings to shootings to falls from windows and now possibly plane crashes, Kremlin has been accused of numerous lethal attacks
🐣 RT @RpsAgainstTrump Deranged psychopath Trump is ranting and raving on Truth Social: “These lowlifes Impeached me TWICE (I WON!), and Indicted me FOUR TIMES” ¤ While demanding Republicans in Congress to immediately impeach President Biden or “fade into OBLIVION”
[TextLink:] https://twitter.com/RpsAgainstTrump/status/1695994894848778510?s=20/photo/1
[Text:] 🐣 RT @realDonald Trump The Republicans in Congress, though well meaning, keep talking about an Impeachment “Inquiry” on Crooked Joe Biden. Look, the guy got bribed, he paid people off, and he wouldn’t give One Billion Dollars to Ukraine unless they “got rid of the Prosecutor.” Biden is a Stone Cold Crook-You don’t need a long INQUIRY to prove it, it’s already proven. These lowlifes Impeached me TWICE (I WON!), and Indicted me FOUR TIMES – For NOTHING! Either IMPEACH the BUM, or fade into OBLIVION. THEY DID IT TO US!
🧵 RT @GicAriana Russia will pose a military threat to Ukraine until it is entirely defeated. Even if all of Ukrainian territory is liberated, as long as Moscow can lob missiles at Ukraine (from Russia, Belarus, the Black &Caspian Seas), it will. The only thing to stop this is crushing RU defeat.
📌 https://twitter.com/GicAriana/status/1696001509769519165?s=20
⋙ […] Iran, China, and North Korea do not regard Ukraine as their foe. Their partnerships and support for Moscow are not because they share the Kremlin’s goal of destroying Ukraine, but because they have a common goal of creating an anti-Western world order. …
⋙ Moscow intends to – and will – strike when ready, not when mythically “provoked” by Ukrainian defence, or by robust Western military support for Ukraine. The biggest escalation risk is not by trying to defeat Russia, but by not fully defeating it.
⋙ As long as Russia remains a rogue outlaw state which is captured by a revanchist mafia regime professing the totalitarian ideology of russism, it will continue to pursue aggression as its fundamental policy.
🐣 RT @TimothyDSnyder Why is it news when two American officials call reporters to anonymously share opinions about the war in Ukraine, but not news when Ukraine raids Crimea, destroys an important Russian air-defense system, induces a Russian pilot to defect, and takes back territory?
🐣 RT @TimInHonolulu The Jan 6 Committee transcripts evidenced that Gingrich was an early advocate of overturning the elections via a state elector strategy. When these folks pop up it’s often because they’re feeling the heat.
⋙ 🐣 RT @Acyn Gingrich says the real corruption is with Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama before expressing his hope that House Republicans will subpoena all the financial records of the Clinton Foundation.
💽 https://twitter.com/TimInHonolulu/status/1695983763661189488?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @AWeissmann_ Not a great statement to make just prior to DC Judge anticipated ruling tomorrow on DC trial date.
🐣 RT @gtconway3d She really did. Wow.
⋙⋙ 🐣 RT @MuellerSheWrote She just destroyed his “we need years to prep for trial” argument hahaha
⋙⋙⋙ 🐣 RT @atrupar lol Trump’s legal defense is going to be a dumpster fire inside a clown car on a derailing train
💽 https://twitter.com/MuellerSheWrote/status/1695985648895664534?s=20/photo/1
⋙ 🐣 RT @BradMossEsq Only the best lawyers
🐣 📋 RT @KatyaYushchenko 24,000 Russians chose to surrender since the beginning of the program “I Want to Live”
🐣 RT @christogrozev Am working on an investigation into Russia’s state-subsidized troll factory’s unending, pathetic interference attempts ahead of the US 2020 elections. Here’s a teaser.
⋙ 🐣 … RT @christogrozev As part of the recruitment of new fake Americans, Prigozhin’s state-funded Troll Farm asks job applicants to write an essay describing their would-be-American life. ¤ I have to share this gem with you.
[TextLink:] https://twitter.com/christogrozev/status/1287667463942025216?s=20/photo/1
[Text:] Life of a typical American.
Hello, my name is Bill and I’m a typical American man. I’m 22 years old. I live with my parents. My brother is a harmful teenager and a bunch of problems. We live in a suburb of Baltimore. Father has earned his house, so I have no problems with housing. I have a catzilla, an old Ford and a girlfriend.
Every day I wake up at ten in the morning and do not know what I would do all day. I was fired from my job and now sit on my ass. My brother is still in school and plays in high school basketball team. He is the best b-ball player I’ve ever seen, but he is a real shithead.
I want to earn quick buck doing nothing. My parents try to resend that I learn, but I am stupid and do not want to do that. My pop has a small shop and sometimes I help him. Most mornings I go to the gym. My friends and I are huge bodybuilders really, and I want to be like them. After the gym I go to work or do any nonsense. I call in the evening to my girlfriend and we go to friends. I love to eat and drink a couple of beers. Those faggots make bbq with a slogan Bring Your Own Booze and this where I am not that comfy since I am always low on cash.
After a beer I usually tune my pow on my Jennifer and she knows exactly what I want. Jenny works as a waitress at a roadside diner, and dreams of singing in the musical. I always laugh at her because mouth is too big. Jenny is very sweet, but silly. Maybe someday I’ll marry her and we will have a bunch of kids, dogs, and money.
My best friend John hits on Jennifer sometimes. He’s a nice fellow, only he is fancy pants. His parents have a lot of money. Why he is friends with me I do not know. Sometimes I take a ride in his mustang to solve questions with his enemies. This type of friendship suits both. Only let go off my Jenny!
🐣 RT @DemocraticDaisy
[Text:] “We are conditioned to treat stories like Jared Kushner scoring a $2 BILLION gift from the Saudis as pay for play. That’s NOT what this is. This is evidence of payments for ESPIONAGE. Kushner served in the West Wing and had access to the United States’ MOST sensitive secrets. This is corruption on such a GARGANTUAN scale.” – STEVE SCHMIDT, Former Republican Strategist
🐣 RT @yasminalombaert President Volodymyr Zelensky believes that Ukraine’s victory in the war with Russia will lead to the restoration of the territorial integrity of Georgia and Moldova, as well as to democratic changes in Belarus.
¤ https://twitter.com/yasminalombaert/status/1695902197479887161?s=20
He expressed this opinion in an interview shown on the air of the Ukrainian telethon to journalist Natalia Moseychuk.
Asked what kind of victory he imagines, Zelensky said that it should exclude the possibility of a repeat of the war. ¤ He insists on restoring the territorial integrity of the country within its 1991 borders.
According to Zelensky, if the Ukrainian army reaches the administrative border with Crimea, then it will be possible, as he put it, “to politically finish the demilitarization of Russia on the territory of the peninsula.”
At the same time, Zelensky was skeptical about the possibility of transferring hostilities to Russian territory. “There is a big risk that we will be left alone,” he said, referring to the demands of Western partners not to strike Russian territory with Western weapons.
He stressed that the country is ready to fight “for a long time” if necessary in order to minimize losses, like Israel. ¤ Zelensky expressed the opinion that Ukraine could become a European leader in the field of military technology.
Zelensky also called for corruption to be equated with high treason during martial law. He stressed that he does not call for the execution of corrupt officials, but seeks to ensure that they are behind bars.
🧵 RT @noclador The Ukrainian strategy is working. ¤ The russians keep moving troops to the center of the Southern Front. Thus they thin out their lines everywhere else. This is opening gaps in the russian front, which the Ukrainians will exploit, when they feel the time is right.1/7
📌 https://twitter.com/noclador/status/1695830955884183900?s=20
⭕ 26 Aug 2023
🐣 RT @TimothyDSnyder Because Russia has destroyed hundreds of thousands of tons of Ukrainian grain, people throughout Africa and Asia will be priced out of grain markets and starve. In this sense, and from the beginning, Russia’s war in Ukraine was a war against the world.
DailyBeast, Tony Ho Tran: Are We Watching the End of Russia’s Space Ambitions? https://tinyurl.com/bdzzj6ek “Roscosmos [is] now now well-behind the competition when it comes to space dominance despite what Putin might want to project otherwise”
// Tony Ho Tran:
Things have not been going well for Moscow’s return to the moon—and space in general.
DailyBeast, Shan Wu: Trump Can and Should Be Disqualified From Running for President Under the 14th Amendment https://tinyurl.com/5d6w64yu “At the end of that violent day, Trump … told them: ‘We love you. You’re very special.’ Sounds a lot like aid and comfort to me”
// The Disqualification Clause was written for people like the ex-president, who gave aid and comfort to enemies of the country.
[…] Here’s what the Disqualification Clause says:
“No person shall be a Senator or Representative in Congress, or elector of President and Vice-President, or hold any office, civil or military, under the United States, or under any State, who, having previously taken an oath, as a member of Congress, or as an officer of the United States, or as a member of any State legislature, or as an executive or judicial officer of any State, to support the Constitution of the United States, shall have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same, or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof. But Congress may by a vote of two-thirds of each House, remove such disability.”
The plain language of this obviously encompasses Trump’s actions to illegally overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election. These actions include but are not limited to asking the Georgia Secretary of State to find additional votes for him, conspiring to put forth slates of unelected “fake” electors for the electoral college, and his call for “wild” protests on Jan. 6 that led to the attack on the Capitol.
But while these actions have resulted in Trump being charged criminally both by the U.S. Justice Department and the State of Georgia, his disqualification does not depend upon him being convicted in either of those cases.
As pointed out by the constitutional scholar Professor Laurence Tribe and former conservative federal judge Michael Luttig in their article in The Atlantic: “the disqualification clause operates independently of any such criminal proceedings and, indeed, also independently of impeachment proceedings and of congressional legislation” and was “designed to operate directly and immediately upon those who betray their oaths to the Constitution, whether by taking up arms to overturn our government by waging war on our government and by attempting to overturn a presidential election through a bloodless coup.”
Tribe and Luttig are hardly outliers in their view. A forthcoming law review article written by Federalist Society conservative law professors—William Baude of the University of Chicago and Michael Stokes Paulsen of the University of St. Thomas—not only agrees that the disqualification is self-enforcing but also makes the case that numerous others who supported Trump’s efforts also may be disqualified.
Baude and Paulsen note that this could include people like former National Security Advisor General Michael Flynn (who proposed a plan to seize voting machines), the “fake electors,” Jeffrey Clark of the Justice Department, and “at least one member of Congress” (that would be Rep. Scott Perry (R-PA)) who had supported Clark’s plans—and even lobbied for removal of senior DOJ officials who opposed Clark’s scheme. […]
At the end of that violent day [Jan 6], Trump made his statement to those who had sought to disrupt the election process. He told them: “We love you. You’re very special.” Sounds a lot like aid and comfort to me.
🐣 RT @CREWcrew Remember that Trump didn’t get arrested for saying the election was stolen. ¤ He got arrested for trying to steal the election.
NYT, Lydia DePillis: What China’s Economic Woes May Mean for the U.S. https://tinyurl.com/mr3n7uj7 Fears that “an export-based Chinese recovery will run up against a world that is reluctant to become ever more dependent on China for manufactures”
// The fallout is probably limited — and there may be some upside for American interests.
🐣 RT @tassagency_en More than 20 countries have joined the declaration of the Group of Seven on long-term security guarantees for Kiev, President of Ukraine Vladimir Zelensky said: https://vk.cc/cqsmnx
🐣 RT @newrepublic Former VP Mike Pence and former White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows now join 18 other former Trump administration officials who have said they knew of no standing declassification order.
⋙ NewRepublic (8/22): Mike Pence and Mark Meadows Just Ruined Trump’s Defense in Classified Docs Case https://tinyurl.com/4jrejpwp
// The former president appears to be caught in a huge lie.
🐣 2018 murders by race of victim/perpetrator
◕ https://twitter.com/Auriandra/status/1695613577011335433?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @PeaceLover07405 We really should do more to remember:
1. How russia initiated WWII with Hitler & the Nazis as allies.
2. How russia raped, robed & murdered their way across Europe.
2. How American lend-lease enabled russia to defend itself from 1941-1945 & is the ONLY reason russia survived.
[TextLink:] https://twitter.com/PeaceLover07405/status/1651557094703726592?s=20/photo/1
// “RUSSIA ENTERS WAR: INVADES POLAND ¤ Soviet Formally Joins Forces With Nazis”
🐣 RT @ACEurasia #UkraineAlert | “Ukraine’s sense of national identity has only strengthened since the onset of Russia’s current full-scale invasion,” writes @MKSapuppo. ¤ “Evidence of this rebirth can be seen in villages, towns, and cities across Ukraine.” ¤ Read more ⤵️
⋙ AtlanticCouncil, Mercedes Sapuppo (8/23): Putin’s Russia is trapped in genocidal denial over Ukrainian independence https://tinyurl.com/933m4v57
In February 2022, Vladimir Putin set out to extinguish Ukrainian statehood and erase Ukrainian identity. In doing so, he was pursuing a genocidal agenda that has deep roots in Russian imperial history. However, the Russian invasion has backfired disastrously for the Kremlin, greatly strengthening Ukrainian national identity while poisoning bilateral ties and shattering historic links that had once bound the two countries closely together. Russians may still be in denial over Ukrainian identity, but sooner or later they will have to face up to the reality of living next door to a strong and independent Ukraine.
🐣 RT @ACEurasia #UkraineAlert | “Ukraine’s sense of national identity has only strengthened since the onset of Russia’s current full-scale invasion,” writes @MKSapuppo. ¤ “Evidence of this rebirth can be seen in villages, towns, and cities across Ukraine.” ¤ Read more ⤵️
⋙ AtlanticCouncil, Mercedes Sapuppo: Putin’s Russia is trapped in genocidal denial over Ukrainian independence https://tinyurl.com/933m4v57
🐣 RT @CREWcrew Donald Trump chose his three Supreme Court picks, Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett, from a list drawn up by Leonard Leo. ¤ Now, the DC attorney general is investigating Leo’s dark money network.
⋙ Politico: D.C. Attorney General is probing Leonard Leo’s network https://tinyurl.com/muapawnf
// The Federalist Society co-chair and ex-Trump judicial adviser has utilized nonprofit groups to collect more than $1 billion for conservative causes.
🐣 RT @HillaryIsComing “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice.” —Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
🖼 https://twitter.com/HillaryIsComing/status/1695316684960301462?s=20/photo/1
// tags: mug shots of the 19 defendents in Georgia defendents
🐣 RT @AntiToxicPeople SAD!
[TextLink:] https://twitter.com/AntiToxicPeople/status/1695307792826204208?s=20/photo/1
[Text:] 🐣 RT @realDonald Trump America is becoming a Banana Republic. That’s what happens when you Indict and Prosecute your Political Opponent. These are DARK DAYS in the life of America!
🐣 RT @AntiToxicPeople The man belongs in a mental hospital for the incurably insane. How does 35% of America think this is a remotely sane person, much less someone they deeply admire?
[TextLink:] https://twitter.com/AntiToxicPeople/status/1695312378483945823?s=20/photo/1
[Text:] 🐣 RT @realDonaldTrump The Security Tapes from Mar-a-Lago that evil and sinister prosecutor, Deranged Jack Smith, “leaked” or otherwise stated were deleted or altered were, in fact, NOT deleted or altered. It was a Fake Story put out by the government THUGS. Those tapes were openly handed over, without protest or litigation, and then the “Deranged One” makes me look as bad as possible. The whole case is FAKE because I come under the Presidential Records Act. Biden or Pence did not!
⭕ 25 Aug 2023
SpectrumNews (8/25): Can you legally use Trump’s mugshot on merchandise? http://tinyurl.com/2hajtm65 in most places, no; but Fulton county would have to sue
📋 Elektrek: In a new milestone, renewables generated 25% of US power in the first half of 2023 https://tinyurl.com/224hw3r6 CREW: Legal experts across the ideological spectrum agree: The 14th Amendment disqualifies Trump from holding office https://tinyurl.com/3cs5bfsr “Enforcing the 14th Amendment to disqualify Trump is not a partisan issue, and abiding by the Constitution shouldn’t be one”
🐣 RT @Billbrowder Garry’s right. To understand Putin you need to be a criminologist not a Kremlinologist.
⋙ 🐣 RT @Kasparov63 🎯 As I wrote 16 years ago, if you want to understand Putin’s regime, don’t read history books, read Mario Puzo. Mafia, violence, symbols, loyalty and betrayal. This is the murderous thug some fools still talk about negotiating with.
⋙⋙ 🐣 RT @DmitryOpines For those slow to learn, Putin just demonstrated his approach to negotiations:
– When in a position of weakness, offer a deal;
– When a deal is struck, rebuild your strength;
– When you are again strong – spectacularly and performatively renege on the deal to send a message.
🐣 📊 RT @NavigatorSurvey 🚨 NEW POLL: By a two-to-one margin, most Americans continue to believe Donald Trump has committed a crime (net +32; 62% committed a crime – 30% did not commit a crime), including independents by 49 points (67% committed a crime – 18% did not).
◕ https://twitter.com/NavigatorSurvey/status/1695059710922064084?s=20/photo/1
💙 🐣 RT @POTUS I came to office determined to change the economic direction of this country and to move from trickle-down economics to my middle out, bottom up vision: Bidenomics.
💽 https://twitter.com/POTUS/status/1695183311939727497?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @RpsAgainstTrump More bad news for Trump. Three Trump codefendants say they became false electors at Trump’s ‘direction’
Politico reports that the 3 Georgia Republicans who were Trump’s fake electors say that they took the steps they did because Trump and his lawyers urged them to do so. ¤ The 3 claimed in a court filing that they should be “immune from state prosecution because they believed they were carrying out a federal function with the blessing of the incumbent president.” ¤ The walls are closing in on Trump.
🐣 RT @newrepublic The Republicans’ “Biden corruption” timeline is sloppy work done by a party on a political vendetta.
⋙ ✅ NewRepublic: We Fact-Checked Republicans’ “Biden Corruption” Timeline. And It’s Bad. https://tinyurl.com/z7cyu2tf “An analysis by The New Republic found at least 19 mistakes or misleading details. … And nowhere does the timeline show actual wrongdoing by the president”
// The timeline is the entire basis of Republicans’ claims against Joe Biden. But a closer look reveals it’s riddled with errors.
Republicans are moving to impeach Joe Biden, after months of accusing the president and his son Hunter Biden of corruption. But they have yet to produce any actual evidence of their claims, and the latest attempt to make their case is no better. Instead, it simply shows their desperation to discredit the president.
The House Oversight Committee has spearheaded the probe into the Bidens. Last month, the committee published a timeline going back as far as 2013 that supposedly shows the extent of the Bidens’ influence peddling overseas. But if you look closely, the timeline is riddled with errors. An analysis by The New Republic found at least 19 mistakes or misleading details—from mixed-up dates to messages and meetings that never happened. And nowhere does the timeline show actual wrongdoing by the president.
[…] The timeline is sloppy work done by a party on a political vendetta. Republicans have already admitted multiple times that they have no proof of wrongdoing by the president. They have said they don’t know whether the information on which their accusations are based is even legitimate. They have also admitted they don’t really care.
WaPo: Before Prigozhin plane crash, Russia was preparing for life after Wagner https://tinyurl.com/yj8cny6v “Prigozhin styled himself as the group’s irreplaceable leader, at the center of an intricate web of mercenaries, mining companies, … and disinformation operatives”
With Wagner boss Yevgeniy Prigozhin and two of the group’s other key leaders presumed dead, a power vacuum has opened, leaving the Kremlin, internal Wagner factions and outside paramilitary forces to jockey for control of a lucrative but opaque global empire.
Prigozhin styled himself as the group’s irreplaceable leader, at the center of an intricate web of mercenaries, mining companies, political consultants and disinformation operatives. He also built ties with African governments, allowing Wagner to serve Moscow’s interests across the continent, often at gunpoint.
“There are some competent people who would love to go in and graft his budgets, but there is no figure similar to Prigozhin, one that has an enormous stream of money, or similar working efficiency and enthusiasm,” said Denis Korotkov, a veteran Russian journalist who has reported on Wagner for the last decade.
Yet one high-ranking Wagner insider, Andrei Troshev, has emerged as a potential contender to step in and run what’s left of the group. A former lieutenant colonel in Russia’s ministry of internal affairs, Troshev is believed to have been the main liaison between Prigozhin and the Defense Ministry during the war in Ukraine. And he is one of the few public figures within Wagner who was not listed on the passenger manifest of the plane that went down northwest of Moscow on Wednesday.
Wagner-linked Telegram channels and military bloggers said in recent weeks that Troshev had been ousted from the group, alleging that he betrayed Prigozhin after the June rebellion and was eager to strike a deal with the Defense Ministry. Sergei Shoigu, Russia’s defense minister, has long fought to take control of the paramilitary force, and his feud with Prigozhin helped precipitate Wagner’s short-lived march on Moscow. …
Putin had previously hinted that he would be happy to see Troshev take over. On June 29, five days after the rebellion, Putin gathered dozens of Wagner leaders and top commanders, including Prigozhin, at the Kremlin to discuss their future “combat application.” …
Wagner is Russia’s most well-known private military company, but it is hardly the only one. Similar companies have sprouted with the backing of Russian oligarchs, giving Putin an array of proxy forces to do his bidding while affording him plausible deniability. For at least five years, these companies have been recruiting from veterans associations, security teams at state enterprises, fight clubs and local gyms.
In the days leading up to Wednesday’s mysterious plane crash, at least two paramilitary groups — both controlled by, or linked to, the Defense Ministry and Putin loyalists — had begun hiring people for operations in Africa, a sign that the Kremlin was planning to absorb Prigozhin’s security contracts in the region.
NYT: A Crisis of Confidence Is Gripping China’s Economy https://tinyurl.com/yc5parbj “Unlike past crises that were international in nature, a convergence of long-simmering domestic problems is confronting China — some a result of policy changes carried out by Mr. Xi’s government”
// China’s economy, which once seemed unstoppable, is plagued by a series of problems, and a growing lack of faith in the future is verging on despair.
[…] [T]he economy is now plagued by a series of crises. A real estate crisis born from years of overbuilding and excessive borrowing is running alongside a larger debt crisis, while young people are struggling with record joblessness. And amid the drip feed of bad economic news, a new crisis is emerging: a crisis of confidence.
growing lack of faith in the future of the Chinese economy is verging on despair. Consumers are holding back on spending. Businesses are reluctant to invest and create jobs. And would-be entrepreneurs are not starting new businesses. …
Unlike past crises that were international in nature, a convergence of long-simmering domestic problems is confronting China — some a result of policy changes carried out by Mr. Xi’s government.
… Local governments and businesses are saddled with more debt and less leeway to borrow heavily and spend liberally. And after decades of infrastructure investments, there isn’t as much need for another airport or bridge — the types of big projects that would spur the economy.
China’s policymakers are also handcuffed because they introduced many of the measures that precipitated the economic problems. The “zero Covid” lockdowns brought the economy to a standstill. The real estate market is reeling from the government’s measures from three years ago to curb heavy borrowing by developers, while crackdowns on the fast-growing technology industry prompted many tech firms to scale back their ambitions and the size of their work forces.
Confronted with dwindling confidence, the government has fallen back on a familiar pattern and stopped announcing troubling economic data. …
🧵📌 RT @DAlperovitch Great WSJ story on Prigozhin’s last days ¤ Something that’s been bothering me since yesterday—why kill Prigozhin now. Putin doesn’t rush into things and often waits years to kill ‘traitors’ ¤ The answer— it was not about the mutiny. It was about business, as it always is in Russia
📌 https://twitter.com/DAlperovitch/status/1694918321043288352?s=20/photo/1
⋙⋙ WSJ: The Last Days of Wagner’s Prigozhin https://tinyurl.com/2uremwvr
// On the run, the paramilitary chief crisscrossed his global business empire, desperate to show he was still in control; ‘I need more gold’
⋙ Putin had personally told Touadera, the Central African Republic president, that the time had come to distance himself from Prigozhin. When Touadera visited St. Petersburg last month, he abstained from taking a selfie with the Russian warlord
⋙ Since June, the Kremlin had been trying to assert control over that shadowy web of murky arrangements. The Defense Ministry had been dispatching delegations to inform foreign governments that they would henceforth do business directly with the Russian state
⋙ Prigozhin’s mutiny had left Haftar, the Libyan warlord who had paid Wagner for securing its oil wells and territory, and his close circle nervous about Wagner’s presence in Libya ¤ “They felt that if they do it in Russia, they can do it in Benghazi”
⋙ Prigozhin’s death “doesn’t change anything,” a Nigerian intelligence official said. “Russia is still there. When the Wagner leader is gone, they are still active in Africa…Maybe now the Kremlin’s hands will be more strengthened.”
⋙ “I need more gold,” Prigozhin said, according to a Sudanese official familiar with the conversation.
⋙ P.S. I’ve said previously how a lot of things in modern Russia can be explained simply by understanding that the Kremlin is effectively a mafia enterprise ¤ July mutiny was ‘razborki’ (gangland warfare) between Prigozhin and Shoigu ¤ Prigozhin’s death is ‘naezd’ (business takeover)
🐣 RT @general_ben Excellent analysis by Dr Kagan and General Petraeus. ¤ The Pentagon talks a lot about multi-domain operations. UAF are actually doing it. The ground assault is only one part of the counter-offensive. ¤ Ukraine’s counteroffensive might yet surprise critics
⋙ WaPo, David Petraeus and Frederick W. Kagan: Ukraine’s counteroffensive might yet surprise critics https://tinyurl.com/5bs2ayuk
🐣 RT @MichaelWarbur17 Alan Shore (the mighty JAMES SPADER) takes on ‘big oil’ and ‘big politics’ in his stunning & inimitable style.
BOSTON LEGAL(2004) ¤ Brilliant TV.
💽 https://twitter.com/MichaelWarbur17/status/1695103476815012283?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @RonFilipkowski Translation: The only chance I have of keeping my ass out of prison is to drag these cases out and win the election. That is the main reason I’m running (plus the gobs of cash that keep rolling in). So vote to save my ass!
[TextLink:] https://twitter.com/RonFilipkowski/status/1695224944978771968?s=20/photo/1
[Text:] 🐣 RT @realDonaldTrump With TIME, people forget! All of these Indictments and Lawsuits against me were started by Crooked Joe Biden and his Radical Left Fascists. It is their weapon of choice in the upcoming 2024 Presidential Election. They feel, for a fact, that Republican leadership isn’t tough enough to stop them, or do anything about their abuse and fraud. But I’ll stop them, because we have No Choice – If we don’t WIN, WE WILL HAVE A COUNTRY NO LONGER!!!
DailyBeast, General Wesley Clark (ret.): Prigozhin’s Death Must Alert the West to Putin’s True Nature https://tinyurl.com/3hxk5482
// The Prigozhin affair should underscore the nature of Putin and warn the West that we must avoid wishful thinking and take him ever more seriously.
🐣 RT @RpsAgainstTrump The WSJ Editorial Board RIPS Vivek Ramaswamy over his pro-Putin position: ¤ “The naivete here is remarkable for a man who wants to be Commander in Chief…His venture into foreign policy may be bold but it’s also glib and reckless. It will not help him get to the White House.”
🐣 RT @GovChristie If you’re scared to tell the truth because you’re going to be booed, then you have no business being President of the United States. ¤ The Presidency is a tough job and requires a leader who doesn’t just follow the polls but changes them.
⋙ 🐣 I’m very grateful you are taking this position and speaking out. More leaders who are needed who put the Constitution and rule of law over their party or careers. ¤ Thank you
🧵 RT @LindseyGrahamSC Just returned from a very successful and important visit to Ukraine with Senators Blumenthal and Warren. Eighteen months after the invasion, Ukraine is on the offense recapturing land that was illegally seized by Russia, NATO has increased in size, the Russian economy is in decline, the Russian military is being decimated, and Putin is facing an international arrest warrant for war crimes involving children.
📌 https://twitter.com/LindseyGrahamSC/status/1695134825001206271?s=20
It is imperative that America continues to support Ukraine’s military. Specifically, the need for long range artillery – ATACMS – is urgent. America should also take over the F-16 transfer program to speed things up.
In spite of slow deliveries of de-mining equipment and other essential weapons, Ukraine is making steady progress on multiple fronts in their counteroffensive.
No American troops have been requested or needed, and not one American soldier has been lost in this endeavor. With continued support from the U.S. & our allies, the Russian invasion will crumble, which would be a tremendous gain for freedom and a decisive defeat for aggression.
From an American point of view, this is great return on investment. ¤ I hope Republicans and Democrats will continue to see the wisdom of supporting Ukraine’s military.
🐣 RT @NewVoiceUkraine The Ukrainian military has broken through Russia’s first line of defense near Tokmak, in Zaporizhzhya Oblast – a welcome sign of success on the southern front in its ongoing counteroffensive.
⋙ NVU: Ukraine breaks through Russia’s first line of defense near Tokmak — CBS https://tinyurl.com/2s3z7zxy
// The Ukrainian Armed Forces have broken through a minefield and have succeeded in their offensive on Tokmak, Zaporizhzhya Oblast, CBS News reported on Aug. 18, citing U.S. officials.
🐣 RT @ChrisFlaherty8 Deep artillery strikes on Tokmak destroy command, logistics & supporting linkages. Deny Russian forward forces defensive/offensive/resistance power. Allows Ukrainian forces to leaver-off chunks of Russian front line causing losses, forcing withdrawal, or surrender. APR’23 model:
[TextLink:] ◕ https://twitter.com/ChrisFlaherty8/status/1694851653193924888?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @Alfaiomi 🇺🇦🙏Without the words. Thanks for your support ❤️
#Tokmak #F-16 #Robotyne #Ukraine #Prigozhin
🖼 https://twitter.com/Alfaiomi/status/1695150321272504415?s=20/photo/1
CNN: Newly declassified US intel claims Russia is laundering propaganda through unwitting Westerners https://tinyurl.com/yc47zuvj
… US intelligence agencies believe that the Russian Federal Security Service (FSB) is attempting to influence public policy and public opinion in the West by directing Russian civilians to build relationships with influential US and Western individuals and then disseminate narratives that support Kremlin objectives, obscuring the FSB’s role through layers of ostensibly independent actors.
“These influence operations are designed to be deliberately small scale, the overall goal being US [and] Western persons presenting these ideas, seemingly organic,” a US official authorized to discuss the material told CNN. “The co-optee influence operations are built primarily on personal relationships … they build trust with them and then they can leverage that to covertly push the FSB’s agenda.” …
🐣 RT @AVindman My hot take on the murder of Prigozhin. His murder and the suppression of hardliners may speed the way for peace negotiations. Also, the next challenger to Putin has learned that if you come for the King you best not miss.
⋙ DailyBeast, Alexander Vindman: Prigozhin’s Death Could Speed Peace in Ukraine https://tinyurl.com/38hfdrf5
// Prigozhin’s death weakens the nationalist wing pushing for a more aggressive war—and may ease pressure on Putin for a continued, expanded conflict.
💙 🐣 RT @petestrzok Dear Fulton County, so look. All I want to do is this. I just want to find 290 lbs, which is 75 more than we have.
🖼 https://twitter.com/petestrzok/status/1695039928537596225?s=20/photo/1 -2
// mug shot, Trump looking fat; they let him self-report his weight and height; tweet is play on his call to Raffensberger asking him to find 11,780 votes
⭕ 24 Aug 2023
✅ CNN, Daniel Dale (8/24): Fact check: Contrary to Trump’s claims, Atlanta murder is down sharply this year and nowhere near a record https://tinyurl.com/nherjubb
🐣 RT @PaulaChertok Trump’s whiny propaganda is false & disingenuous. The issue isn’t challenging the election—which he did 60+ times—and lost. He refused to admit he lost, and conspired to undo his loss thru fraud, coercion & violence. No one’s done that. And he won’t again after he’s convicted.
⋙ 🐣 RT @cspan Former President Trump remarks after Fulton County Jail booking: “If you challenge an election, you should be able to challenge an election. I thought the election was a rigged election, a stolen election and I should have every right to do that.”
💽 https://twitter.com/cspan/status/1694871700968817018?s=20/photo/1
NYT: House Republicans Begin Investigating Willis as Trump Is Booked https://tinyurl.com/2p8n55ac
// The launch of an inquiry into Fani Willis, the Fulton County, Ga., district attorney, was the latest example of how the former president’s allies in Congress are using their majority to try to protect him.
🐣 RT @realDonaldTrump http://DONALDJTRUMP.COM
🖼 [TextLink:] https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/1694886846050771321?s=20/photo/1
x
[Text:] MUG SHOT – AUGUST 24, 2023 ¤ ELECTION INTERFERENCE ¤ NEVER SURRENDER! ¤ DONALDITRUMP.COM
WaPo: Trump mug shot released after booking in Fulton County Jail https://tinyurl.com/5n7zz79f
⋙ 🐣 RT @AntiToxicPeople 🚨HERE is the REAL mugshot, just released.
🖼 https://twitter.com/AntiToxicPeople/status/1694872478160756958?s=20/photo/1
🔄🧵 RT @politicsusa46 In order to introduce you to the Avalanche Project, we are hosting a Spaces. Shari, Brian and I, will be on hand to answer any questions you might have and share with you our vision for 2024 and beyond. ¤ #DemsAct #DemVoice1 #wtpBLUE #ONEV1 #FAM46
📌 https://twitter.com/politicsusa46/status/1694818580800397463?s=20
// “Introducing Avalanche. Smarter more effective messaging for 2024.Wed, Aug 30 at 6:00 PM”
⋙ 🐣 RT @politicsusa46 So what is Avalanche? Part One
¤ https://twitter.com/politicsusa46/status/1694814744480256329?s=20
It is NOT a replacement for X or Instagram or Facebook etc. We believe that for messaging to be efficient and effective, the focus should be on the message NOT the platform.
Avalanche is a critical content resource that allows you to create a message and with one button press, send it to multiple social media platforms simultaneously. ¤ No copying and pasting, no downloading images and videos. Just press send.
Avalanche is not a message template system. Even though it does provide a library of tested fact checked messages to act as inspiration, or as a base for your own message. YOU are in the driving seat. If you prefer, you can just create a message from scratch as you would here and use the content library to add graphics etc.
The big benefit comes when you want to write about a policy issue. Let’s say for example gun control. You can select Gun Control from the policy drop down and Avalanche will provide a list of associated tested messages. At the same time, it will serve you up a set of high quality graphics, memes and videos to choose from, in order to add impact to your message. It will also provide a list of associated hashtags you can use.
Once your message is ready to send, one button click will send it to all your social media accounts. If you prefer, you can schedule the message to post at a date and time of your choosing. If you don’t have time to finish it, you can save it as a draft and come back to it later.
Once your message has been sent, you will see it on your social media feed as normal, but in the background, Avalanche will be monitoring the performance of your post on the various platforms, recording reach and impressions, along with other key analytics.
You’ll have full access to all sent messages and you can favorite them in a fully searchable library, allowing you to modify them for reuse later.
MESSAGING SMARTER MAKES SENSE. ¤ #DemsAct #DemVoice1 #wtpBLUE #ONEV1 #FAM46
⋙ 🐣 RT @ politicsusa46 A V A L A N C H E – Part 2
This project represents over a year of meticulous, carefully considered and focused work. Its sole purpose is to help Joe Biden win 4 more years.
¤ https://twitter.com/politicsusa46/status/1694829942175879278?s=20
It has been designed with 3 key user groups in mind:
🔹Digital Activists
🔹Candidates
🔹Advocacy GroupsIt provides a single workspace to create and store messages to support Joe Biden in the most consequential election in modern US History. ¤ It will act as a resource hub for content, messaging and campaigning for the 2024 cycle and beyond.
Avalanche takes the frustration out of juggling multiple social media platforms, by allowing you to focus on the message, while the App takes care of distributing it.
In Part One we talked about creating a message. This is just scratching the surface. Once created, Avalanche can work it’s magic to help you refine it.
Deep AI integration allows you to rephrase your message. This includes the ability to target voter demographics such as GenZ, millennials and boomers, but much more than that, it can get more granular to target conservatives, independents, business owners etc. You can also factor in message tone.
We’ve combined a variety of large language models to work hand in hand behind the scenes, to fine tune your messages. ¤ In addition, we have incorporated a highly efficient translation model. This delivers from formal to conversational translations in all key demographic languages, including Mandarin.
There is no more inclusive solution than Avalanche to help you reach Hispanic, Filipino and Vietnamese voters to name but three.
MESSAGING SMARTER MAKES SENSE ¤ #DemsAct #DemVoice1 #wtpBLUE #ONEV1 #FAM46
🐣 RT @ officejjsmart ⚡️⚡️⚡️ “The Armed Forces of Ukraine are on the verge of breaking through the front during the counteroffensive,”
– General Zaluzny 🇺🇦
🐣 RT @AntiToxicPeople My god he is a fucking lunatic. ¤ 231 million views/biggest video ever! 🤣THAT IS HOW MANY PEOPLE SCROLLED BY THE TWEET THAT HAD THE VIDEO EMBEDDED. I get a million “views” on tweets sometimes, its a totally meaningless stat. ¤ Its all been a game but now its not so funny to him.
[TextLink:] https://twitter.com/AntiToxicPeople/status/1694781906980852128?s=20/photo/1
[Text:] 🐣 RT @realDonaldTrump 231,000,000 Views, and still counting. The Biggest Video on Social Media, EVER, more than double the Super Bowl! But please excuse me, I have to start getting ready to head down to Atlanta, Georgia, where Murder and other Violent Crimes have reached levels never seen before, to get ARRESTED by a Radical Left, Lowlife District Attorney, Fan Willis, for A PERFECT PHONE CALL, and having the audacity to challenge a RIGGED & STOLLEN ELECTION. THE EVIDENCE IS IRREFUTABLE! ARREST TIME: 7:30 P.M.
🐣 RT @7Veritas4 On the day of his arrest, he [Trump] has unleashed his favorite chihuahua.s [Gym] Jordan launches an investigation of Fani Willis, hoping to uncover coordination with the DOJ. ¤ Ps: It’s still a crime to interfere in an active criminal investigation.
[TextLink:] https://twitter.com/7Veritas4/status/1694735633070055558?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @JoyceWhiteVance Ken Chesebro, the Trump co-defendant who asked for a speedy trial, thought he was calling Willis’ bluff on her readiness to go to trial. He was not. Willis is not here to play.
[CourtDoc:] https://twitter.com/JoyceWhiteVance/status/1694756230940561816?s=20/photo/1
[Text:] STATE’S MOTION TO SPECIALLY SET TRIAL
COMES NOW, the State of Georgia, through Fulton County District Attorney Fani T.
Willis, and respectfully requests that this Court specially set the trial in this case to commence
for all 19 defendants on October 23, 2023.On August 14, 2023, the Fulton County Grand Jury returned a true bill of indictment against Defendant Kenneth John Chesebro, among others, for various non-capital felonies. The
term of court in which this Indictment was returned was the July-August, 2023 term of the
Superior Court of Fulton County, Atlanta Judicial Circuit. See O.C.G.A. § 15-6-3(3). Defendant
Kenneth John Chesebro filed on August 23, 2023 a “DEMAND FOR SPEEDY TRIAL.”
🐣 RT @HerrDr8 #UkrOffensive2023ZAP #Robotyne #1PageAssessUKRWar Quick update on Omaha Sector: Southern Front. Map right from Ukraine Control Map as usual. Continuing progress in the sector. It will likely come down to how the 56th AA, 108th AA and 810 NAV INF hold up.
🖼 📋 🌎 https://twitter.com/HerrDr8/status/1694726009990602980?s=20/photo/1 -4
🐣 RT @KyivPost 💬Ukraine’s Intelligence Chief Kyrylo #Budanov vowed that individual strikes in #Crimea will not be the end of the matter, as there will be a ground operation and the recovery of our territories. ¤ “This special operation is vital, first of all, to make people believe. We need them to remember and believe that victory is just around the corner. And their liberation is not far off either,” Budanov said, Interfax-Ukraine reports.
🐣 RT @NickFondacaro MacCallum asks DeSantis to speak more about his plan to take on the Mexican drug cartels and if that includes “sending U.S. Special forces over the border, into Mexico.”He says he would authorize that action “on day one.”
💽 https://twitter.com/NickFondacaro/status/1694543216584864066?s=20/photo/1
😅 RT @MarkHamill May The Fourth Arrest Be With Him
🖼 https://twitter.com/MarkHamill/status/1694702288169025658?s=20/photo/1-4
🐣 RT @RpsAgainstTrump Former conservative federal judge @judgeluttig:
[TextLink:] https://twitter.com/RpsAgainstTrump/status/1694120162830520741?s=20/photo/1
“If there’s one thing that I could tell the country today, it would be that the effort to overturn the 2020 presidential election was not and is not politics…These were grave crimes against the United States of America… Perhaps almost as grave as would have been treason…
This is not political…I’ve not changed my conservative political views one bit in 50 years.” (Video: MSNBC)
⭕ 23 Aug 2023
TheAtlantic, Anne Applebaum: Prigozhin’s Death Heralds Even More Spectacular Violence https://tinyurl.com/yckxw8cz “Putin’s rule has always been maintained by a heady combination of opportunism, bribery, and the facade of Russian nationalism, propped up by the subtle threat of violence”
// What will others in the Russian president’s circle do now?
Vladimir Putin’s Russia has long been a land of mysterious deaths. In 1998, soon after he had been appointed head of the security services, Galina Starovoitova, a parliamentarian who believed in bringing democracy to Russia, was gunned down in the stairwell of her apartment building in St. Petersburg. In 2006, Anna Politkovskaya, a journalist who had learned too much about the Chechen wars that Putin used to propel himself to power, met the same fate in the stairwell of her apartment building in Moscow. In 2015, Boris Nemtsov, an outspoken critic of Putin’s presidency, was killed by an assassin only steps away from the Kremlin. Other critics barely survived. In 2020, Alexei Navalny, organizer of the only truly national anti-Putin political movement, fell critically ill on a flight from Tomsk to Moscow after being poisoned.
All of these victims were Putin’s formal opponents, people who spoke or wrote in opposition to the kleptocracy he built. Since Putin launched his full-scale invasion of Ukraine, a different class of victims—members of the Russian business elite who were perhaps insufficiently loyal or insufficiently keen on the war—have also begun to die in strange circumstances. In the year and a half that has passed since February 2022, two gas-industry executives were found dead with suicide notes. Three Russian executives were killed, alongside their wives and children, in what appeared to be murder-suicides. The body of the owner of a resort in Sochi was discovered at the bottom of a cliff. Another executive was found floating in a pool in St. Petersburg. Others have fallen out of windows or down staircases in Moscow, India, the French Riviera, and Washington, D.C.
Still, even on the very long list of people who have been shot, hanged, poisoned, or subjected to lethal accidents because they somehow got in Putin’s way, Yevgeny Prigozhin stands out. Prigozhin’s private plane mysteriously fell from the sky this afternoon, following an explosion of what seems to be either a bomb or a rocket. Russian authorities reported that Prigozhin was on the passenger list, although Western intelligence agencies could not immediately confirm he had boarded the plane. Either way, someone took down the plane, and that someone could only have acted on Putin’s orders, or at least in anticipation of such orders (Will no one rid me of this turbulent mercenary?). But Prigozhin wasn’t an opponent of Putin; he helped create Putin. He wasn’t a critic of Putin’s kleptocracy; he built the Wagner mercenary group, which supported African and Middle Eastern dictators and exploited diamond mines on behalf of Moscow too. He also ran the Internet Research Agency, the organization that used hacking, leaking, and social media to help elect Donald Trump.
Prigozhin was no opponent of the current war either. His men, and the convicts they recruited, fought the long, bitter battle of Bakhmut, achieving the only significant Russian victory in Ukraine so far this year. Thousands of Russian soldiers, maybe tens of thousands, died in that struggle, thanks to military tactics so wasteful of human life that they are described by the Russians themselves as the “meat grinder.” Along the way, Prigozhin did begin to have some doubts about how the war was being fought, and maybe about the true motives of some of those leading the battle. As a result, he dared to challenge the Russian army leadership, and thus the Russian president, in a bizarre and largely unopposed march into the military headquarters of the city of Rostov-on-Don, and then nearly all the way to Moscow, exactly 60 days ago.
… Putin’s rule has always been maintained by a heady combination of opportunism, bribery, and the facade of Russian nationalism, propped up by the subtle threat of violence. In the aftermath of Prigozhin’s rebellion, Putin needs something more spectacular: theatrical, public violence; violence of the kind that brings down a plane soon after takeoff in the middle of a sunny day; violence designed to terrify anyone who secretly wished for Prigozhin’s victory.
… There is no mutual trust among Russia’s elite, no true shared ideology beyond self-interest, and no wonder: Prigozhin’s safety, and the safety of his mercenaries, was supposed to be guaranteed by Aleksandr Lukashenko, the dictator of Belarus. That promise, like most of Putin’s promises, turned out to be empty. Everyone who is still part of the inner circle already hires bodyguards and, if they can, sends their family abroad. Those who can afford it already have private armies. Anyone associated with Prigozhin now has new reasons to fear for their safety too. One general close to Prigozhin was relieved of his command today. He had not been seen in public for many weeks. Prigozhin’s deputy, Dmitry Utkin, died today on the plane along with him.
But many others in Moscow knew Prigozhin, worked with Prigozhin, and benefited from Prigozhin’s businesses, military and criminal. Will they wait passively for violence to consume them? Will they escape—there were reports earlier this week that Wagner troops were already leaving their newly built camps in Belarus—or will they try to strike first? “Grey Zone,” a Telegram channel associated with the Wagner Group, has already made this threat explicit: “The assassination of Prigozhin will have catastrophic consequences,” one posting today declared. “The people who gave the order do not understand the mood in the army and morale at all. Let this be a lesson to all. You always have to go to the end.”
By “the end” the author means Moscow. Prigozhin didn’t go to Moscow. Maybe somebody else now will.
🐣 RT @AccountableGOP Chris Christie: “Someone has to stop normalizing this conduct. Whether or not you believe the criminal charges are right or wrong, the conduct is beneath the office of President of the United States.”
💽 https://twitter.com/AccountableGOP/status/1694530609677308193?s=20/photo/1
NYT, Frank Bruni: At the Republican Debate, an Infuriating Display of Moral Cowardice https://tinyurl.com/5n83xdjz “Like their ethically rotten party, they’re hostage to a serially indicted huckster and seem to be waiting for some twist of fate or act of magic to make it all better”
WaPo, Karen Tumulty: The GOP debate introduced voters to 8 hapless contenders — and an absent lead https://tinyurl.com/yc3aht6n “Nikki Haley probably had the best night. She not[ed] that [Trump] piled $8Tr onto the federal debt, adding, ‘Our kids are never going to forgive us for that’”
🧵 RT @Victorshi2020 WOW. Joe Biden’s first presidential campaign ad just aired on Fox News, moments before the debate is set to start. Joe Biden is making his way into the debate whether Fox & Republicans like it or not. This is exactly how you do it. Genius.
📌 💽 https://twitter.com/Victorshi2020/status/1694510881671922023?s=20/photo/1
⋙ 🐣 RT @Victorshi2020 Take a moment and watch it for yourself. This ad captures the amazing economic policies of this administration. It’s exactly the type of message that will resonate with Fox viewers and it’s absolutely amazing seeing it played on Fox. H/t to the entire Biden team.
⋙ 🐣 RT @Victorshi2020 Also! I’ll be covering and watching the debate live so you don’t have to. It’s going to be an absolute sh*tshow and I’ll be watching to see if any of them actually speak to young voters. My guess: they won’t. But I’ll keep you guys posted. Let’s see how much of a circus this is.
🐣 RT @christogrozev The list of killed passengers, now published, includes not only Prigozhin and Utkin/Wagner, but also Valery Chekalov, the feared head of security for Prigozhin who, among other duties over the years, surveilled, harassed and attacked journalists who dared investigate his boss.
🐣 RT @JoeBiden What she said.
[Text:] and Donald Trump added $8 trillion to our debt [Nikki Haley]
🐣 RT @TheRickWilson Angry, depressingly negative, and weak. This debate is a grubby, pessimistic proof that the GOP is out of ideas, energy, and hope.
🐣 RT @AntiToxicPeople *VERY* Stable Genius update
[TextLink:] https://twitter.com/AntiToxicPeople/status/1694482999042318813?s=20/photo/1
[Text:] 🐣 RT @realDonaldTrump THE INDICTMENTS AGAINST ME SHOULD BE VIEWED AS A CAMPAIGN CONTRIBUTION TO CROOKED JOE BIDEN AND HIS RADICAL LEFT THUGS. THIS WILL BE THEIR UPDATED FORM OF CHEATING & ELECTION INTERFERENCE. REMEMBER, THESE ARE BIDEN INDICTMENTS, PURE & SIMPLE!
[Text:] 🐣 RT @realDonaldTrump The greatest Mayor in the history of New York City was just ARRESTED in Atlanta, Georgia, because he fought for Election Integrity. THE ELECTION WAS RIGGED & STOLLEN. HOW SAD FOR OUR COUNTRY. MAGA!
😅 RT @nexta_tv Are you also waiting for an hour-long video that starts with, “I’m Yevgeny Prigozhin and if you’re watching this video, it means I’m already dead, now I’m going to tell you how it all happened”?
🖼 https://twitter.com/nexta_tv/status/1694471210803839395?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @DogginTrump Why is shouty McShouterson fucking shouting? ¤ They can hear your crap all the way down in hell, you fucking troll
⋙ 🐣 RT @RonFilipkowski Perfectly normal stuff here from Ron DeLunatic.
💽 https://twitter.com/RonFilipkowski/status/1694523275517231249?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @AccountableGOP Tucker Carlson: “Do you think we’re moving towards civil war?” ¤ Donald Trump: “You know, Jan. 6 was a very interesting day because they didn’t report it properly…People in that crowd said it was the most beautiful day they’ve ever experienced.”
💽 https://twitter.com/AccountableGOP/status/1694520585995579660?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @RBReich On the eve of turning himself in for charges related to his election lies, Trump was still lying about the election.
💽 https://twitter.com/RBReich/status/1694572830308847739?s=20/photo/1
// tags: Tucker interviews Trump interview
🐣 RT @AntiToxicPeople Attacking a witness and his potential testimony. A REAL STORY!
[TextLink:] https://twitter.com/AntiToxicPeople/status/1694553139146563990?s=20/photo/1
[Text:] 🐣 RT @realDonaldTrump I never asked Mike Pence to put me above the Constitution. Who would say such a thing? A FAKE STORY!
🐣 RT @jimsciutto “Taking down a business jet is also a message to Russia’s elites, who rely heavily on private aviation to get around the country. If Putin is willing to reach out and kill Prigozhin in broad daylight over Russia, no one is safe.” – @RadioFreeTom
⋙ TheAtlantic, Tom Nichols: A Very Public Execution in Russia https://tinyurl.com/4z9adnx5
// A jet plunging out of the sky sends an unmistakable message.
🐣 RT @RonFilipkowski This person is seriously ill.
[TextLink:] https://twitter.com/RonFilipkowski/status/1694308167134388425?s=20/photo/1
[Text:] 🐣 RT @realDonaldTrump NOBODY HAS EVER FOUGHT FOR ELECTION INTEGRITY LIKE PRESIDENT DONALD J. TRUMP. FOR DOING SO, I WILL PROUDLY BE ARRESTED TOMORROW AFTERNOON IN GEORGIA. GOD BLESS THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA!!!
🐣 RT @djrothkopf Not having Trump at tonight’s debate is as it should be. Because he is not actually eligible to be president. And because if he were, he can’t actually win a general election. Because outside the toxic bubble of the far right he is a terrible, terrible, really awful candidate.
🐣 RT @JoyceWhiteVance Prosecutors bent over backwards to treat Judge Cannon’s inexplicable & wrongheaded ruling seriously & in detail. That’s because they know where this is headed—their briefs will ultimately be read by a 3-judge 11th Circuit panel. They brought their A game & did it just right.
⋙ 🐣 RT @AWeissmann_ The Jack Smith filing yesterday in FLA was legally & factually strong of course– and remarkably respectful, which must have been a challenge cause Cannon was so completely off base. The brief could have started with “Here, on earth, the law is….”
⋙⋙ 🧵 RT @rparloff Govt’s filing yesterday in USA v Trump (MAL) is devastating. It was responding to Judge Cannon’s inquiry—acting on her own—suggesting there was something abusive about govt’s continued use of DC grand jury after M-a-L indictment was handed down. … /1
📌 https://twitter.com/rparloff/status/1694270181567078607?s=20
[ThreadReader:] https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1694270181567078607.html
[CourtDoc:] https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/23924434-129-usa-reply 10p
🐣 RT @AntiToxicPeople This man is a completely delusional, unhinged & deranged lunatic who still can’t spell.
[TextLink:] https://twitter.com/AntiToxicPeople/status/1694346354393559481?s=20/photo/1
[Text:] @realDonaldTrump For the first time in three years, brave American Patriots will be able, in Court, to show how the Presidential Election of 2020 was RIGGED & STOLLEN. For those RINOS, Radical Left Democrats, Communists, Marxists, Fascists, & others who say, “Don’t Look Back, Look Forward,” they either do not want to reveal the answers because they “got away with murder” or are FOOLS & COWARDS because we now know the answers to all of the Fraud, Irregularities, & Cheating, & WE CANNOT LET IT HAPPEN AGAIN!
🐣 RT @BillKristol There is much that is repulsive about today’s “conservatism.” But to me the willingness—nay, eagerness—to betray Ukraine could be the most repulsive feature. In its hatred for free men and women fighting bravely against brutal aggression, it betrays its descent into semi-fascism.
⭕ 22 Aug 2023
Just Security, Jeffrey Sonnenfield: The Character to Lead: Republicans’ Fork in the Road Between Trump and the Constitution’s Eligibility Requirements for President https://tinyurl.com/2zxndem2 “We heard from the legal scholars, now let’s hear from the political leaders”
NYT: To Trump, Foreign Business Is Scandalous, Unless It’s His Own https://tinyurl.com/2aav3u7b “No hard evidence has emerged that Mr. Biden, while vice president, personally participated in or profited from the business deals or used his office to benefit his son’s partners”
// Donald J. Trump has berated Joseph R. Biden Jr. for his son’s overseas deal making, despite plenty of overseas deal making by the Trump family.
[…] No hard evidence has emerged that Mr. Biden, while vice president, personally participated in or profited from the business deals or used his office to benefit his son’s partners.
But Mr. Biden’s statements distancing himself from his son’s activities have been undercut by testimony indicating that Hunter put his father on speakerphone with international business associates; the future president talked about casual things like the weather, not business, according to testimony, but it seemed intended to impress Hunter’s associates.
All of which would typically generate scrutiny in Washington, where relatives of presidents have long taken advantage of their positions to make money. Access and celebrity are coins of the realm in the nation’s capital, and a relative who frequents Camp David, enjoys a good seat at a state dinner or rides Air Force One can get phone calls returned. This tradition has turned off many Americans, and even Democrats privately voice discomfort at Hunter Biden’s activities.
“If he traded on his father’s influence, he should be held accountable for that,” Representative Jim Himes, Democrat of Connecticut, said on MSNBC recently. “And I’m emphasizing this because you never, ever heard a Republican say the same thing about Donald Trump or his family.”
Republicans investigating the Bidens say they made more than $20 million from foreign sources in China, Ukraine and elsewhere, but a Washington Post analysis of congressional memos indicated that most of the money went to business associates, with $7 million going to the Bidens themselves, mainly Hunter. ¤ “What both Hunter and Jared have in common is that they are the well-educated sons of prominent people, and that their familial ties certainly helped them in business,” said Don Fox, a former general counsel of the U.S. Office of Government Ethics. “That is where the similarities end.” …
While Mr. Trump in last week’s video described Mr. Biden as a puppet of the Chinese, falsely claiming that “China has paid him a fortune,” his own family has had significant financial ties to Beijing. Beyond the trademarks, Forbes calculated that a Trump business during his presidency collected at least $5.4 million in rent from the state-controlled Industrial and Commercial Bank of China.
Mr. Kushner’s family negotiated with Chinese and Qatari entities to rescue its debt-saddled Manhattan tower at 666 Fifth Avenue, eventually brokering a $1.1 billion lease deal with an American company whose investors included Qatar’s sovereign wealth fund.
🐣 RT @CREWcrew Let’s talk 14th Amendment:
-Section 3 bars insurrectionists from office who previously swore an oath to support the Constitution
-Trump is therefore disqualified, and we will be taking action to enforce this soon
-We’re the only group to successfully do so in over 150 years
🐣 RT @harrylitman New filing from Jack Smith reveals that Taveras changed his false account only after getting a new lawyer – a public defender from DC. de Oliveira and Nauta made the other choice now, and are now in huge jeopardy, especially with Taveras’s testimony. This is how cases are made.
// Yuscil Taveras = Employee #4
🐣 RT @Sky_Lee_1 Judge Luttig: “Today, there is no Republican Party.Very few of Republicans in general have spoken a single word against Jan 6 and the former president’s role in that .It’s, in my view, a testament to how lost the R Party is at this point in our history.” [@DeadlineWH]
💽 https://twitter.com/Sky_Lee_1/status/1694103503386394727?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @clearing_fog “D.C. Attorney General Brian Schwalb is investigating … Leonard Leo and his network of nonprofit groups, according to a person with direct knowledge” ¤ Potentially into whether Leo has been “using charities for personal enrichment.”
⋙ Politico: D.C. Attorney General is probing Leonard Leo’s network https://tinyurl.com/muapawnf
// The Federalist Society co-chair and ex-Trump judicial adviser has utilized nonprofit groups to collect more than $1 billion for conservative causes.
… Best known as Donald Trump’s White House “court whisperer,” Leo played a behind-the-scenes role in the nominations of all three of the former president’s Supreme Court justices and promoted them through his multi-billion-dollar network of nonprofits. Trump chose his three Supreme Court picks, Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett, from a list drawn up by Leo. More recently, Leo was the beneficiary of a $1.6 billion contribution, believed to be the biggest political donation in U.S. history.
He is also the co-chair of the Federalist Society, the academic arm of the conservative legal movement, for which he worked in various capacities for decades while building his donor base. …
😅 RT @NatalkaKyiv Apparently (unbeknownst to Western experts) Russia made it to the top five largest economies in the world. ¤ Next year, Russia will become #1 world economy closely followed by North Korea. ¤ #Russia #Putin #RussianPropaganda
💽 [tr] https://twitter.com/WarOsintFELLA/status/1694130942250479681?s=20/photo/1
⋙ 🐣 2022; find Russia
🌎 https://twitter.com/Auriandra/status/1694133127814185396?s=20/photo/1
// GDP by country 2022 est.
🐣 RT @DeadlineWH “It cannot be stressed enough that this is not about differences about policies, about who should be on the Supreme Court or how they should rule. This is about fundamental democracy in our country” – @AWeissmann_ w/ @NicolleDWallace
💽 https://twitter.com/DeadlineWH/status/1694103348050342276?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @stavridisj This would directly lead to a global trade war. We tried this approach — big tariffs on foreign goods — in the 1930s. It led to the global depression and the rise of fascism in response and thus to the Second World War. Bad idea.
⋙ WaPo: Trump vows massive new tariffs if elected, risking global economic war https://tinyurl.com/2vvpec3y
// Former president floats 10 percent tax on all foreign imports and calls for ‘ring around the collar’ of U.S. economy
⭕ 21 Aug 2023
✅ CNN, Daniel Dale: Fact check: Trump makes new false claim to support old false claim that he won Georgia in 2020 https://tinyurl.com/mvf3cfcm
Facts First: Trump lost Georgia fair and square in 2020, by 11,779 votes, and his claim that he won South Carolina and Alabama in record landslides is not even close to true. Numerous previous candidates have earned far larger margins of victory in South Carolina and Alabama than Trump did in 2020. Even Trump himself won each state by a larger margin in 2016 than he did in 2020 – a fact that contravenes his insinuation that his 2020 failure in Georgia was mysteriously at odds with a better-than-ever performance elsewhere in the region.
The decline in Trump’s Georgia margin between 2016 and 2020 (about 5.4 percentage points) was larger than his declines in South Carolina (about 2.6 points) and Alabama (about 2.3 points), both of which he won big in both elections, but that does not suggest that anything nefarious happened in Georgia. States are simply different. Adjacent states often have social, economic and political differences that can lead to divergences in their voting habits.
🐣 RT @Kasparov63 I’ll repeat, as I’ve been saying it for years. Putin’s all-out invasion of Ukraine in 2022 was not *despite* concessions on Crimea & Eastern Ukraine. It was *because* of those concessions. Don’t let candidates blather about concessions for peace. It’s a lie the Kremlin loves.
🐣 RT @atrupar Trump muses about fleeing to Russia
[TextLink:] https://twitter.com/atrupar/status/1693804958477353340?s=20/photo/1
[Text:] 🐣 RT @realDonald Trump The failed District Attorney of Fulton County (Atlanta), Fani Willis, insisted on a $200,000 Bond from me. I assume, therefore, that she thought I was a “flight” risk – I’d fly far away, maybe to Russia, Russia, Russia, share a gold domed suite with Vladimir, never to be seen or heard from again. Would I be able to take my very “understated” airplane with the gold TRUMP affixed for all to see. Probably not, l’d be much better off flying commercial – I’m sure nobody would recognize me!
🐣 RT @ArbiterofCool “GIANT MURDER WAVE” – like when he purposely ignored COVID and it ravaged America? Let’s arrest trump for that while we’re at it…
[TextLink:] https://twitter.com/ArbiterofCool/status/1693668705463325132?s=20/photo/1
[Text:] 🐣 RT @realDonaldTrump Governor Kemp of Georgia is fighting hard against the Impeachment of the crooked, incompetent, & highly partisan D.A. of Fulton County, Fani Willis, who has allowed Murder and other Violent Crime to MASSIVELY ESCALATE. Crime in Atlanta is WORST IN NATION. She should be impeached for many reasons, not just the Witch Hunt (I did nothing wrong!). Willis should focus on out of control Murder, not “I will get TRUMP” over a Perfect Phone Call. Georgia does not deserve this GIANT MURDER WAVE!
⋙ 🐣 MedTakeout (July 24): Atlanta Murder Rate Down 35% Since Young Thug & The YSL & YFN Crews Got Locked Up! https://tinyurl.com/4k4pwfpk “The city of Atlanta is safer now than it was in many years … thanks to the work of the current District Attorney Fani T. Willis.”
🐣 RT @petestrzok Arrested for the fourth time. ¤ Don Quattro Clinko?
[TextLink:] https://twitter.com/petestrzok/status/1693779808650457377?s=20/photo/1
[Text:] 🐣 RT @realDonaldTrump Can you believe it? I’ll be going to Atlanta, Georgia, on Thursday to be ARRESTED by a Radical Left District Attorney, Fani Willis, who is overseeing one of the greatest Murder and Violent Crime DISASTERS in American History. In my case, the trip to Atlanta is not for “Murder,” but for making a PERFECT PHONE CALL! She campaigned, and is continuing to campaign, and raise money on, this WITCH HUNT. This is in strict coordination with Crooked Joe Biden’s DOJ. It is all about ELECTION INTERFERENCE!
⋙ 🐣 Murders in Atlanta are down by a third:
CouncCrimJustice (July): Crime Trends in U.S. Cities: Mid-Year 2023 Update July 2023 https://tinyurl.com/3d3raw6m
◕ https://twitter.com/Auriandra/status/1693785175803523098?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @FBIWFO Minnesota Woman Pleads Guilty to Felony Charge for Actions During January 6 U.S. Capitol Breach https://ow.ly/BGxz50PBq37 @FBIMinneapolis @USAO_DC
// “Victoria Charity White, 41, of Rochester, Minnesota, pleaded guilty in the District of Columbia to one count of civil disorder and aiding and abetting. U.S. District Judge John D. Bates scheduled White to be sentenced on Nov. 20, 2023.”
🐣 RT @MuellerSheWrote BREAKING: Jack Smith filed a motion early this morning to get permission to file a response to trump’s April, 2026 trail date request in the DC coup case. Judge Chutkan IMMEDIATELY granted it and gave Jack until tomorrow to file. He filed it TODAY, and it’s a SCORCHER. 1/
📌 https://twitter.com/MuellerSheWrote/status/1693730089266287064?s=20
[CourtDoc:] https://tinyurl.com/ydxw6cfm
PravdaUA/Medusa: New cult: Stalin will be shown not as a tyrant, but as a “defender” in new Russian textbooks https://tinyurl.com/36vf9b7r
🐣 RT @TWMCLtd Prigozhin reappeared on camera tonight. ¤ It’s been a while since he was last seen – greeting African dignitaries in St Petersburg. ¤ Now the #Wagner leader is in Africa, where the company has many operations and takes away natural resources.
🖼 https://twitter.com/TWMCLtd/status/1693744528983818381?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @marceelias How long until Trump violates one of these conditions of his bail?
[TextLink:] https://twitter.com/marceelias/status/1693730658298769410?s=20/photo/1
[Text:] (4) The Defendant shall perform no act to intimidate any person known to him or her to be a codefendant or witness in this case or to otherwise obstruct the administration of justice. Id. This shall include, but is not limited to, the following:
a. The Defendant shall make no direct or indirect threat of any nature against any codefendant;
b. The Defendant shall make no direct or indirect threat of any nature against any witness including, but not limited to, the individuals designated in the Indictmentas an unindicated co-conspirators Individual 1 through Individual 30;
c. The Defendant shall make no direct or indirect threat of any nature against any victim;
d. The Defendant shall make no direct or indirect threat of any nature against the community or to any property in the community;
e. The above shall include, but are not limited to, posts on social media or reposts of posts made by another individual on social media;
🐣 RT @ Some of the most telling passages from the Ronan Farrow expose on Elon Musk imply he wants nothing good for anyone unless he can take credit, gets off on risk and destroying things, has a grandiose ideology and a dangerous grip on world leaders. SUPER.
⋙ NewYorker, Ronan Farrow: Elon Musk’s Shadow Rule https://tinyurl.com/ywuk2zbv
// How the U.S. government came to rely on the tech billionaire—and is now struggling to rein him in.
[TextLink:] https://twitter.com/girlsreallyrule/status/1693680840113315881?s=20/photo/1 -4
[p4] In 2018, the Times reported that members of the Tesla board had grown concerned about Musk’s use of the prescription sleep aid Ambien, which can cause hallucinations. The Wall Street Journal reported earlier this year that he uses ketamine, which has gained popularity both as a depression treatment and as a party drug, and several people familiar with his habits have confirmed this. Musk, who smoked pot on Joe Rogan’s podcast, prompting a NASA safety review of SpaceX, has, perhaps understandably, declined to comment on the reporting that he uses ketamine, but he has not disputed it. “Zombifying people with SSRIs for sure happens way too much,” he tweeted, referring to selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors, another category of depression treatment. “From what I’ve seen with friends, ketamine taken occasionally is a better option.” Associates suggested that Musk’s use has escalated in recent years, and that the drug, alongside his isolation and his increasingly embattled relationship with the press, might contribute to his tendency to make chaotic and impulsive statements and decisions. Amit Anand, a leading ketamine researcher, told me that it can contribute to unpredictable behavior. “A little bit of ketamine has an effect similar to alcohol. It can cause disinhibition, where you do and say things you otherwise would not,” he said. “At higher doses, it has another effect, which is dissociation: you feel detached from your body and surroundings.” He added, “You can feel grandiose and like you have special powers or special talents. People do impulsive things, they could do inadvisable things at work. The impact depends on the kind of work. For a librarian, it’s less risk. If you’re a pilot, It can cause big problems.
🐣 RT @nexta_tv Trump has agreed that he will be released on $200.000 bail after appearing in court in the Georgia election meddling case.
🖼 https://twitter.com/nexta_tv/status/1693727326356262984?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @SykesCharlie The Russian autocrat stroked, fondled, and caressed Trump’s ego to the point where the former president thinks that Putin is somehow in awe of him. ¤ The lapdog imagines that he is the alpha.
⋙ TheBulwark: “I Was the Apple of His Eye” https://tinyurl.com/4xnndk99
// A cult by the numbers
⋙ 🐣 RT @BKAY1224 Psychologically speaking. DT experienced his father Fred as an unfeeling autocrat who didn’t love/value him & sent him away unwillingly to military school due to discipline problems. Thus, Mr. P is a father figure (with traits like his father) through which DT can finally resolve, at least vicariously via Putin, his inner child’s need for Fred’s love & affection. Putin senses that & is using it.
WaPo, Henry Paulson: Mounting economic pain brings a test for China: Can it change course? https://tinyurl.com/bdf56art “It would be wrong to describe a crisis in the Chinese economy as an opportunity. But it certainly poses a test of two wildly different economic and political systems”
🐣 RT @tribelaw “The regime Trump is trying to establish ‘always comes down in the end to what happens to small, inconvenient people’ like Georgia election worker Ruby Freeman. People like Freeman ‘are lied about, criminalized, terrorized, threatened and smeared.’”
⋙ TheHill: Trump’s threats are not empty — and they pose a danger to us all https://tinyurl.com/59rte93h
🐣 RT @AntiToxicPeople Terrified psychopath.
[TextLink:] https://twitter.com/AntiToxicPeople/status/1693631098499002793?s=20/photo/1
[Text:] 🐣 RT @realDonaldTrump Governor Kemp of Georgia is fighting hard against the Impeachment of the crooked, incompetent, & highly partisan D.A. of Fulton County, Fani Willis, who has allowed Murder and other Violent Crime to MASSIVELY ESCALATE. Crime in Atlanta is WORST IN NATION. She should be impeached for many reasons, not just the Witch Hunt (I did nothing wrong!). Willis should focus on out of control Murder, not “I will get TRUMP” over a Perfect Phone Call. Georgia does not deserve this GIANT MURDER WAVE!
🐣 RT @neal_katyal The discussion with Trump referenced here is a further nail in Trump’s claim he legitimately thought he won the election on and before January 6. And it looks like there are several witnesses to it.
⋙ 🐣 RT @weareoversight We obtained records showing a senior DOJ official’s handwritten notes on an email rejecting Trump loyalist Jeffrey Clark’s scheme to falsely tell state officials that DOJ was investigating “significant concerns” that could change 2020 election results. https://tinyurl.com/mb3j59ss
[TextLink:] https://twitter.com/weareoversight/status/1693269656688013359?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @neal_katyal The only reason you are crowing about immunity is because you know you broke the law and need it. ¤ You don’t need a law degree to know this, as anyone who has seen Lethal Weapon 2 gets. ¤ And the immunity claim is preposterous. It would allow Biden to throw out the vote next November and install himself for a second term.
🐣 RT @JoyceWhiteVance In your dreams
[TextLink:] https://twitter.com/JoyceWhiteVance/status/1693477398136684754?s=20/photo/1
[Text:] 🐣 RT @realDonaldTrump David Rivkin, a highly respected Constitutional law scholar, just clearly stated that I have “Constitutionally- based immunity” and “absolute immunity!”
⭕ 20 Aug 2023
🐣 I added it up I found that in the seven states, Trump tried to steal the votes of 13,245,705 Biden voters. A Black woman got 6 years in prison for casting an illegal vote. A White man got 30 days probation for voting for his dead mother. What will Trump get?
📋 https://twitter.com/Auriandra/status/1693479022787805322?s=20/photo/1
Biden Margin
1,672,143 0.3% Arizona
2,473,633 0.2% Georgia
2,804,040 2.8% Michigan
703,486 2.4% Nevada
501,614 10.8% New Mexico
3,459,923 1.2% Pennsylvania
1,630,866 0.6% Wisconsin
13,245,705
TheGuardian: A white man got probation for voting fraud. A Black woman faced six years in prison for an error https://tinyurl.com/bdn2tntt
// 3/3/2022; In several prominent cases, Black people got harsher sentences for unintentional voting errors than whites who committed fraud
🐣 RT @GovChristie I believe in an America that’s going to be greater tomorrow than yesterday. ¤ But this won’t happen unless we stop electing leaders who are either incompetent or too narcissistic to get it done.
💽 https://twitter.com/GovChristie/status/1693291564255047924?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @judgeluttig The Fourteenth Amendment itself, in Section 3, answers the question whether disqualification is “anti-democratic,” declaring that it is not. Rather, it is the conduct that gives rise to disqualification that is anti-democratic, per the command of the Constitution.
🐣 RT @RpsAgainstTrump Weak coward Donald confirm he won’t show up for the debate .
[TextLink:] https://twitter.com/RpsAgainstTrump/status/1693384220851237365?s=20/photo/1
[Text:] 🐣 RT @realDonaldTrump New CBS POLL, just out, has me leading the field by “legendary” numbers. TRUMP 62%, 46 Points above DeSanctimonious (who is crashing like an ailing bird!), Ramaswamy 7%, Pence 5%, Scott 3%,Haley 2%, Sloppy Chris Christie 2%, “Aida” Hutchinson 1%. The public knows who I am & what a successful Presidency I had, with Energy Independence, Strong Borders & Military, Biggest EVER Tax & Regulation Cuts, No Inflation, Strongest Economy in History, & much more. I WILL THEREFORE NOT BE DOING THE DEBATES!
🐣 📋 RT @ @spectatorindex 🇺🇸 United States annual inflation
July, 2022: 9.1%
July, 2023: 3.2%
🐣 📊 RT @MikeSington Shocking new poll (CBS News): Trump supporters trust information coming from Trump, more than their own friends and family.
71% believe what Trump tells them is true.
63% consider information from their own family to be true.
Just more evidence of a cult.
🐣 RT @RpsAgainstTrump Former conservative federal judge Michael Luttig says Donald Trump should be barred from the presidency under Section 3 of the 14th Amendment:
¤ https://twitter.com/RpsAgainstTrump/status/1693294638218588355?s=20/photo/1
h
“The people who wrote the 14th Amendment were not fools. They realized that if those people who tried to overturn the country, who tried to get rid of our peaceful transitions of power, are again put in power, that would be the end of the nation, the end of democracy.”
WaPo, Marc Thiessen: Former Polish president Walesa tells youths to reject socialism https://tinyurl.com/vzja5xdw “Of the giants who brought down the Iron Curtain — among them Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher, John Paul II, Vaclav Havel — only Walesa is still with us”
GDANSK, Poland — In January 1989, as a college student, I came here to march with Solidarity, the movement that helped bring about the peaceful collapse of Soviet communism. Now, more than three decades later, I have brought my children to Gdansk to learn about communism and meet the man who successfully fought it: Lech Walesa. …
Of the giants who brought down the Iron Curtain — among them Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher, John Paul II, Vaclav Havel — only Walesa is still with us. At 79, he still looks as vigorous as the young electrician who led a workers’ uprising against the “dictatorship of the proletariat” […]
… [H]e said, speaking through an interpreter. “There are beautiful sentences talking about equality, about justice. … But as soon as you start putting that system into practice, all sorts of serious disasters come about. But young people quite often don’t know it. We have experience [with socialism], so we really know something about it. So, I strongly recommend rejecting it.”
But, he continued, “you have to understand why [young people] are looking to the past. They’re going to the past because there are no clear answers, ideas for the future.” As a result, he said, “populist demagogues are leading the world, because it’s easier. But those who potentially have better solutions than demagogues and populists have to wake up.”
What does he, as the president who forced Russian troops to leave Polish soil, think as he watches Russian troops attack Ukraine? “I know very well how it might be looking if Poland had not succeeded in joining NATO in time. Then definitely Russia would be invading Poland, not Ukraine,” he said. “I’m doing my best to help Ukraine now because, in a way, they are fighting instead of us.”
Walesa greatly admires Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. “Both Zelensky and me, we are not politicians; we are practical people, and that’s why we tend to succeed,” he said. But Walesa worries what will come next for the comedian-turned-statesman. “Up until now, Zelensky is doing great,” he said, “but the real problem starts at the moment when you have to turn toward peaceful solutions. Whether he will be able to find that peaceful solution. As a practical man, I see many dangers in that stage of development. But I wish him all the best.”
The West’s strategy for challenging Russian imperialism is insufficient, Walesa said. “Of course, as long as they are shooting at us, we have to use tanks at the moment. But much more effort should be concentrated on the propaganda war,” he said. “Solidarity gave an example of how we should be fighting. We were not even using a bow and arrow, let alone tanks, and we destroyed the Soviet Union. We have to fight in a political way, with propaganda, like Solidarity — radio stations, televisions, press. We should reach every single Russian on Earth, and we should convince them … ‘Your country should not be giving so much power to a dictator like [Vladimir] Putin. … We are not against you as Russians. You are perishing in the fight, and we are perishing in the fight, and there’s no point in this.’ ”
Asked about his central role in communism’s collapse, he was humble. “Up to the moment of the election of Pope John Paul II, I was organizing people to fight the communists. Over 20 years, I was able to organize just 10 people. And among those 10 … I had two [secret police] agents. But when … John Paul II became the pope, out of the blue I had 10 million people.” When the pope came to Poland in 1979, Walesa said, even members of the secret police attended the pope’s Masses and gatherings with the Polish people. “We knew many of them, we were looking at them. We learned that they were not real communists; they were radishes — red on the outside and white inside. So, we stopped being afraid of them.”
“Without the pope,” he said, “communism would have lasted much longer. … The Holy Father actually [sped] up the process of the collapse of communism … [and] played an important role in making that last moment of communism bloodless and nonviolent.”
How does Walesa want to be remembered? “I don’t care so much about it, I have done the best I could, whatever was possible for me to do,” he said. “I gave all I could, and I was doing it in an honest and simple way without any manipulation.”
He then turned to my children, ages 17, 20 and 21: “That’s why I really care that your generation succeeds, because only your success will somehow guarantee my success, the success of Solidarity. … If you succeed, people will praise me. If you don’t succeed, they might curse me! So, my heritage, in a way, depends on your success.” Walesa and Solidarity gave my children and their generation the gift of a world growing in freedom, prosperity and peace; now it is in their hands to seize or squander that inheritance.
🐣 RT @ kylegriffin1 NEW: Contradicting Trump, Mark Meadows has told Jack Smith’s investigators he could not recall Trump ever declassifying broad sets of classified materials — nor was he aware of any “standing order” authorizing the automatic declassification of materials.
⋙ ABCNews: Meadows told special counsel he could not recall Trump ever declassifying Mar-a-Lago docs: Sources https://tinyurl.com/3z9ks293
// Mark Meadows has told investigators he could not recall President Trump ever ordering the declassification of broad sets of materials before leaving office.
🐣 RT @IuliiaMendel Geopolitical dialog: USA: We were the first to prepare Ukraine. We were the first to shout to the world. We did not expect Ukraine to stand, but we will stand with Ukraine. No all of us think so and it’s quite expensive, and no NATO for Ukraine yet not to irritate Russia. Perhaps we don’t trust Ukraine to the end which we have the right to do. But we definitely stand for democracy and for the victory of Ukrainians.
¤ https://twitter.com/IuliiaMendel/status/1693253319425245386?s=20/photo/1
EU: We stand with Ukraine as Ukraine belongs to Europe and will definitely be the part of us. Not too fast though, Kyiv yet needs to prove its commitment and belonging to us, but we are definitely very optimistic. Many of us are tired of the Russian war and its consequences, but we will definitely be with our thoughts and hearts with Ukraine. Reformed and democratic.
Great Britain: Russians are terrible! Here is more tanks and training for the Ukrainian army. Don’t tell us about war any more and think about peace. But we will stand with Ukraine as long as needed.
Turkey: Let me agree with all of you.
China: What is my benefit?
India: Stand with Ukraine as long as it needs to keep Russia begging.
Africa: We just need food!
Russia: We are empire, time does not matter. Let’s make peace and recognize stolen territories and children as ours. Ukraine does not have the right to exist, but we need some rest to recharge. So stop the war and forget about Ukraine. BTW, we pay well for lifting sanctions!
Ukraine: We stand. We have lost many, especially children. We are tired, we don’t have how to earn. We want to join the EU and NATO. But we stand. Some of us are leaving of course, some will never return. From the frontlines and from the West. But we stand.
🐣 RT @BBCBreaking Unmanned Russian spacecraft crashes into the moon after spinning into uncontrolled orbit, officials say
⋙ BBC: Russia’s Luna-25 spacecraft crashes into moon https://tinyurl.com/2enxjnvp
// The unmanned craft was due to make a soft landing on the moon’s south pole.
⭕ 19 Aug 2023
Politico: In talks with prosecutors, Hunter Biden’s lawyers vowed to put the president on the stand https://tinyurl.com/548aeysz
// A behind-the-scenes look at how a plea deal for the president’s son nearly came together before it fell apart.
🐣 RT @HerrDr8 #UkrOffensive2023ZAP #Robotyne #1PageAssessUKRWar AUG 20 update of Omaha Sector: Southern (ZAP) Front . Wanted to add terrain and trench lines to my usual op map’s of various sector on the Southern Front. Found a great piece of work by @Inkvisiit (tweet below).
🌎 https://twitter.com/HerrDr8/status/1693163319429898439?s=20/photo/1 -2
Terrain is everything of course in operational campaigns. RUS trenches follow terrain line (they are not total knuckleheads).
Romanchuk’s ( #KtoRomanchukQuiz ) Line of Crapola in this sector depends upon 3 formerly decent (effectiveness) units that have been wrecked during the war: 810 Nav Inf , 108 VDV and 22 Spetsnaz (Putin & co love wrecking their formerly decent units for some reason: see #KtoSpetsnazWreckedbyPutin
Three BIG prizes in this sector: Robotyne, Solodka Balka {SB} and Tokmak (the grand salami). Liberating Robotyne (reported AUG 19/20) is a good day for the good guys…sets up SB…which is the key to cracking Tokmak.
🐣 RT @BigBlueWaveUSA I’m noticing a lot of people have forgotten this – or never knew it. Robert Mueller was right. Hillary Clinton was right. Putin was deep into the FBI and helping Trump in 2016 and the entire Republican Party is OK with that. Facts matter. #TrumpRussia
[TextLink:] https://twitter.com/BigBlueWaveUSA/status/1692926436972085334?s=20/photo/1
[Text:] 🐣 RT @KaivanShroff Just to be clear, when the New York Times reported that the FBI saw “no link between Trump and Russia” – a week before the 2016 election – the FBI agent who was just arrested over ties to Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska was heading up the investigation. ¤ Just an absolute scandal.
🐣 RT @AntiToxicPeople Poor Liddle’ guy is gonna give himself a stroke.
[TextLink:] https://twitter.com/AntiToxicPeople/status/1693061246428254274?s=20/photo/1
[Text:] @realDonaldTrump How nice, a really beautiful reunion! Three people that I indisputably got Elected, two Governors and a V.P., Brian Kemp of Georgia, Mike Pence of Indiana, & Ron DeSanctimonious of Florida, just met, most likely to talk about the “weather” or perhaps to discuss how they can stop the Weaponization of Georgia Law, working with the DOJ and others, against their absolutely, all time favorite President, ME. All three have been just wonderful, so loyal and nice. It’s great to have friends like this!
🐣 RT @kangaroos991 HE was a ‘B’ grade actor and an ‘F’ grade President! Who agrees? 🙋♂️
[Text:] https://twitter.com/kangaroos991/status/1693064067538436520?s=20/photo/1
// Meme text: “Stock buybacks, which raise the value of shares, were illegal until Ronald Reagan made them legal in 1982. That’s when working wages stopped rising. REAGANOMICS: It’s made the rich richer, the poor poorer, and destroyed the middle class.”
↥ ↧
🐣 RT @kangaroos991 HE was a ‘B’ grade actor and an ‘F’ grade President! Who agrees? 🙋♂️
[TextLink:] https://twitter.com/kangaroos991/status/1693063489705968019?s=20/photo/1
[Text:] From 1947 to 1979 the income of the bottom fifth of Americans rose by 122%.
From the introduction of Reaganomics in 1979 to 2009 the income of the top 1% rose by 270% while the other 99% ‘s income remained stagnant.
🔄 📋 ◕ Security[.]org: Which U.S. Cities Are the Most Dangerous? https://tinyurl.com/2hpp8d94
// 12/20/2022; tags: city crime rates by city crime statistics most dangerous cities
// Chicago, Atlanta, NYC don’t appear in top 25: stats/100K
🐣 RT @Kasparov63 Such blatant, vile garbage always means either the presence of Russian money or the absence of any morality. But they also often travel together.
⋙ 🐣 RT @Acosta During my interview with Ramaswamy, he reiterated his position that he would allow Putin to keep parts of Ukraine, block Ukraine from joining NATO and even visit Putin in Moscow. The GOP contender added: “Our goal should not be for Putin to lose.”
💽 https://twitter.com/Acosta/status/1692516740737958343?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @acnewsitics It sounds very fair to me, what about you guys?
[TextLink:] https://twitter.com/acnewsitics/status/1693006651975188818?s=20/photo/1
[Text:] @realDonaldTrump Just think of it! They (Crooked Joe Biden and his Thugs!) Indict me, and their whole campaign is that “Trump is Indicted.” Does that sound fair to anyone? Am I allowed to do such a horrible and unconstitutional thing if, and when, I win the Presidency? We are entering really dangerous territory!!!
⋙ 🐣 On the contrary, Biden is running on Bidenomics, Infrastructure, Climate, Democracy and International Alliances, as well as rights for Women and Minorities ¤ He doesn’t even comment on issues involving individual court cases, unless they involve a policy change
🐣 RT @Porter_Anderson,Media: @judgeluttig with @tribelaw (their joint piece in @TheAtlantic on this is here: https://bit.ly/45aVbt4): “What Professor Tribe and I have concluded is that Section 3” of the 14th Amendment “is what is called ‘self-executed,’ which means that the qualification automatically arises from the ‘condition precedent’ — in this instance, the insurrection or rebellion against the Constitution that occurred on #January6th. … Every officer of the United States and of the 50 states who is charged with qualifying candidates for the ballot in 2024 is obligated under the Constitution, himself or herself, as of this moment, to determine whether Trump qualifies for the ballot.”
🐣 RT @AntiToxicPeople He is so deranged and wants his cult members to get violent but they aren’t falling for it this time.
[TextLink:] https://twitter.com/AntiToxicPeople/status/1693004051170898233?s=20/photo/1
[Text:] 🐣 RT @realDonaldTrump Just think of it! They (Crooked Joe Biden and his Thugs!) Indict me, and their whole campaign is that “Trump is Indicted.” Does that sound fair to anvone? Am I allowed to do such a horrible and unconstitutional + thinPostand when, I win the Presidency? We are entering really dangerous territory!!!’
[Text:] 🐣 RT @ @realDonaldTrump Why should Crooked Joe Biden be able to force me into the time and expense of trials, especially before the Election, on bogus claims pushed by his chief political supporter, The Department of Injustice? What a horrible precedent this sets for future Presidential campaigns. It is all about Election Interference, and MUST BE STOPPED!
WaPo: As Ukraine flies through artillery rounds, U.S. races to keep up https://tinyurl.com/5dwmexxc “Russia’s invasion of Ukraine laid bare a NATO-wide munitions crunch, highlighting important vulnerabilities in fighting the war of the present”
// Washington has sent Kyiv millions of munitions, but restocking the arsenal and building new production lines remains a problem
🐣 RT @RonFilipkowski MAGA is fuming after Desantis’s latest interview, where he said they were “listless vessels who are supposed to follow whatever comes down the pike on Truth Social every morning.” Trump demands he apologize.
⋙ MeidasTouch: MAGA: Hillary Was Better to Us Than Desantis! https://tinyurl.com/5d3572r4
// Desantis calls Trump supporters “listless vessels.”
🐣 RT @randymot4 This illustrates that the Russians had moved everything on the front. There is no real defense in depth, but a retrograde under fire. A lineal defense is in a world of hurt when it starts breaking. Journalists and POGs have been wrong more than they have been right. Eventually Russian units above the breaches will be encircled and taken out by artillery fire until they flee or surrender. There are no Russian units off the line to rush up to seal the breaches. #RussiaLosingBadly
🌎 https://twitter.com/randymot4/status/1692891120588521700?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @spectatorindex US officials estimates of war toll, according to the New York Times.
🇷🇺 Russia
120,000 troops killed
170,000 to 180,000 injured
🇺🇦 Ukraine
70,000 troops killed
100,000 to 120,000 injured
🐣 RT @AWeissmann_ This could not be more important and timely; and shd be a wake up call to the remaining rational Rs to nominate someone who actually can be President, and return to normalcy. Make America Normal Again
⋙ 🐣 RT @MSNBC “As of this moment, under the professor’s reading of Section 3 and of my reading and Professor Tribe’s, the former president is disqualified from holding the office of the presidency in 2024,” @judgeluttig tells @AliVelshi. http://on.msnbc.com/3qElgSh
🐣 RT @MuKappa History will not end when the current Russian regime falls. It might get superficially better. It could get a lot worse. Russorealism is still not mainstream. I expect a repeat of 1991.
🐣 RT @AymannJames “Never forget that Ronald Reagan tripled the national debt from $738 billion to $2.1 trillion!
Dropped the income tax rate on the top 1% from 70% to 28%!
Sold 500 missiles to Iran!
Let 90,000 Americans die of AIDS!
And set into motion the end of mental institutions – creating a massive homelessness crisis that continues to this day!”
Thanks for the meme!
[meme:] https://twitter.com/AymannJames/status/1692683482055442685?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @patriottakes Trump says he won Georgia in 2016 because he won “nearby Alabama and South Carolina.”
[TextLink:] https://twitter.com/patriottakes/status/1692903690896572908?s=20/photo/1
[Text:] 🐣 RT @realDonaldTrump I easily won the Great State of Georgia in 2016, did a fantastic job, as President, for Georgia and the entire USA, received 10 Million more votes than I got, nationwide, in 2016, got by far the most votes in history for a sitting President, but shockingly, “LOST” Georgia. All this despite winning nearby Alabama and South Carolina in Record Setting Landslides. Why did Georgia officials agree to, and sign, the one sided Consent Decree? Does anybody really believe I lost Georgia? I DON’T!
TheAtlantic, J Michael Luttig and Laurence H Tribe: The Constitution Prohibits Trump From Ever Being President Again https://tinyurl.com/22urp56d Two conservative legal scholars have written a paper on Section 3 of the 14th Amendment that is persuasive and immediately actionable
// 8/19/2023 The only question is whether American citizens today can uphold that commitment.
⋙ See under Entire Articles: Tribe Luttig 8-19-2023
As students of the United States Constitution for many decades—one of us as a U.S. Court of Appeals judge, the other as a professor of constitutional law, and both as constitutional advocates, scholars, and practitioners—we long ago came to the conclusion that the Fourteenth Amendment, the amendment ratified in 1868 that represents our nation’s second founding and a new birth of freedom, contains within it a protection against the dissolution of the republic by a treasonous president.
This protection, embodied in the amendment’s often-overlooked Section 3, automatically excludes from future office and position of power in the United States government—and also from any equivalent office and position of power in the sovereign states and their subdivisions—any person who has taken an oath to support and defend our Constitution and thereafter rebels against that sacred charter, either through overt insurrection or by giving aid or comfort to the Constitution’s enemies.
The historically unprecedented federal and state indictments of former President Donald Trump have prompted many to ask whether his conviction pursuant to any or all of these indictments would be either necessary or sufficient to deny him the office of the presidency in 2024.
… The disqualification clause operates independently of any such criminal proceedings and, indeed, also independently of impeachment proceedings and of congressional legislation. The clause was designed to operate directly and immediately upon those who betray their oaths to the Constitution …
The former president’s efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential election, and the resulting attack on the U.S. Capitol, place him squarely within the ambit of the disqualification clause, and he is therefore ineligible to serve as president ever again. The most pressing constitutional question facing our country at this moment, then, is whether we will abide by this clear command of the Fourteenth Amendment’s disqualification clause.
We were immensely gratified to see that a richly researched article soon to be published in an academic journal has recently come to the same conclusion that we had and is attracting well-deserved attention outside a small circle of scholars—including Jeffrey Sonnenfeld and Anjani Jain of the Yale School of Management, whose encouragement inspired us to write this piece. The evidence laid out by the legal scholars William Baude and Michael Stokes Paulsen in “The Sweep and Force of Section Three,” available as a preprint, is momentous. Sooner or later, it will influence, if not determine, the course of American constitutional history—and American history itself. [ Link: https://tinyurl.com/2rccwnc4 ]
Written with precision and thoroughness, the article makes the compelling case that the relevance of Section 3 did not lapse with the passing of the generation of Confederate rebels, whose treasonous designs for the country inspired the provision; that the provision was not and could not have been repealed by the Amnesty Act of 1872 or by subsequent legislative enactments; and that Section 3 has not been relegated by any judicial precedent to a mere source of potential legislative authority, but continues to this day by its own force to automatically render ineligible for future public office all “former office holders who then participate in insurrection or rebellion,” as Baude and Paulsen put it.
Among the profound conclusions that follow are that all officials who ever swore to support the Constitution—as every officer, state or federal, in every branch of government, must—and who thereafter either “engaged in insurrection or rebellion” against the Constitution or gave “aid and comfort to the enemies” of that Constitution (and not just of the United States as a sovereign nation) are automatically disqualified from holding future office and must therefore be barred from election to any office. […]
🐣 RT @front_ukrainian ⚡️A truck and 21 tons of hexane: Head of the Security Service of 🇺🇦Ukraine Malyuk told how the Crimean bridge was blown up for the first time in October last year
🖼 https://twitter.com/front_ukrainian/status/1692795445951467586?s=20/photo/1
In order to inconspicuously transport 21 tons of hexane to the bridge, the employees of the Security Service of Ukraine wrapped the explosives with packing film. Rolls of such film, according to the legend of the special operation, were to be officially transported by a truck.
The Security Service even released unique photos of the preparations for the detonation of the Crimean Bridge. As Vasyl Malyuk told in an interview with the magazine “NV”, employees of the Security Service of Ukraine specially selected such a thickness of the film that the scanners at the checkpoints would not notice the explosives.
In addition, the Security Service of Ukraine “bypassed” special jammers on the Crimean Bridge, which confuse GPS coordinates. So on October 8, 2022, a load of “film” flew into the air in the middle of the bridge. ¤ “We went through the seven circles of hell, used so many Russians in the dark!” – says the Head of the Security Service of Ukraine.
🐣 RT @MarkHertling This is exactly right. And I also believe Putin believed Trump had so divided NATO and the US, and that Europe was so dependent on Nord Stream, that he still gambled on his invasion being unopposed by the west. And he was very wrong.
⋙ 🐣 RT @davidfrum A perverse truth here. Helping Trump into the US presidency was Putin’s supreme accomplishment as dictator. A Trump 2nd term would have wrecked NATO from within. With no one to help it, Ukraine would have been easy pickings for Putin.
🐣 RT @ZaleskiLuke Do you see how efficiently trump uses the US supporting its allies and standing up to Putin as a wedge to campaign against Biden? Do you see how closely aligned trump and Putin’s interests are? And how they have been since putin helped trump take power?
🐣 RT @gtconway3d “I was the apple of his eye.”
— Kremlin asset D. J. Trump, on his “relationship” with V. V. Putin
⋙ 🐣 RT @justinbaragona Trump says Putin “would have never gone into Ukraine” if he was still president, citing “my relationship with him” and because “I was the apple of his eye.”
💽 https://twitter.com/gtconway3d/status/1692807017314816402?s=20/photo/1
⭕ 18 Aug 2023
🐣 RT @gtconway3d “I was the apple of his eye.”
— Kremlin asset D. J. Trump, on his “relationship” with V. V. Putin
⋙ 🐣 RT @justinbaragona Trump says Putin “would have never gone into Ukraine” if he was still president, citing “my relationship with him” and because “I was the apple of his eye.”
💽 https://twitter.com/gtconway3d/status/1692807017314816402?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @ifindkarma ♪ Down in Palm Beach at the home of this klepto, hidden there under his padded commodes, just within reach of his diapers and pepto: Our national secrets and nuclear codes. ¤ @RandyRainbow ¤ #GrandOldPotty #HollywoodWalkOfSHAME #DonaldInTheJohnWithBoxes🌈
🎹 https://twitter.com/ifindkarma/status/1672306426432327682?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @harryjsisson The modern Republican party is truly an embarrassment to this country. Their ENTIRE platform is trying to make up the most egregious lies about President Biden while trying to distract from Trump who has 91 felony charges and is facing over 700 years in prison.
¤ https://twitter.com/harryjsisson/status/1692550404221911372?s=20
That’s all Republicans do. They don’t propose policy to help anybody. They don’t have any solutions to the issues. They don’t care about the people. Instead, Republicans try to score political points.
Democrats don’t have to lie. We don’t have to make stuff up. We can run on our policy and win. That’s something Republicans cannot and will not do.
The 2024 presidential election will be a battle between Democrats trying to get things done for the American people and Republicans trying to lie their way into power.
The choice is clear. Vote for Biden and Democrats all the way down the ballot and reject the Republican Party’s conspiracies.
🐣 RT @AntiToxicPeople Crazier by the minute. He is terrified.
[TextLink:] https://twitter.com/AntiToxicPeople/status/1692659708321038388?s=20/photo/1
[Text:] 🐣 RT @realDonaldTrump Why should I have to defend myself from bogus Indictments and numerous other lawsuits all of which have been brought and coordinated by the person that I’m running against, and leading in the polls, Crooked Joe Biden. This is an unprecedented situation that cannot be addressed individualy, but only as a whole. These SEVEN cases are all about ELECTION INTERFERENCE – A very unfair situation that should be addressed by the United States Supreme Court, or other Presidents will do the same thing!!!
🐣 RT @DevanaUkraine How Zelensky became the president ¤ Did you know that Zelenskyi became the president thanks to Vakarchuk – the leader of the rock band “Ocean Elzy”? :)
¤ https://twitter.com/DevanaUkraine/status/1692650483121357182?s=20
🐣 RT @Sky_Lee_1 Adding this is felt deeply across the country, I haven’t spoken to anyone that supports criminal charges. ¤ By a 56-point margin, Americans oppose criminally prosecuting patients who receive an abortion, including 58% of whom are strongly opposed (73% oppose – 17% support).
◕ https://twitter.com/Sky_Lee_1/status/1692581295627337759?s=20/photo/1
⋙ 🐣 RT @WHCommsDir,Navigator: Two in three Americans believe that if Republicans win control of government, they will pass a nationwide abortion ban – a deeply unpopular policy
◕ https://twitter.com/Sky_Lee_1/status/1692581295627337759?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @CBSNews “Dead bodies on the rocks on the beach, bodies in the car…pets, cats, dogs, just all burnt right in the middle of the road”: This is what Maui’s historic town of Lahaina was like as a deadly wildfire raged through. https://cbsn.ws/45QGyLF
💽 https://twitter.com/CBSNews/status/1692574576910168081?s=20/photo/1
🐣 📋 RT @ Mylovanov NYTimes estimates the total killed and wounded in
Ukraine war at 500K
Russia: 300K, with 120K dead
Ukraine: 200K, with 70K dead 1/
¤ https://twitter.com/Mylovanov/status/1692564841179840828?s=20
⋙ 🐣 RT @Mylovanov Ukraine has 500K active troops
Russia has 1300K
Russian population is 144M against Ukrainian population of 36M, which is 4:1
Ukraine compensates in commitment and motivation, but is it enough?
And what needs to be done so that it is enough?
Weapons and support
🐣 RT @atrupar I think we’ve somewhat memory-holed the extent to which this country was in BAD shape when Trump left office. Unemployment over 6%, 80k dying a month from covid, democracy on the ropes. Viewed in that context, Biden has done an amazing job. He has a really strong record to run on
TheHill: The Constitution bars Trump from holding public office ever again https://tinyurl.com/y4f4sdcu Two conservative law professors argue Trump is ineligible based on the Section Three of the 14th Amendment which forbids insurrectionists from holding office
[L]aw professors William Baude of the University of Chicago and Michael Stokes Paulsen of the University of St. Thomas — both members of the conservative Federalist Society — argued in a law review article that Trump is already constitutionally forbidden from serving in public office because of Section Three of the 14th Amendment.
🔄 🐣 RT @Liz_Cheney No surprise Trump doesn’t want you to see the J6 Committee evidence. Here’s the GPO website with transcripts, documents, exhibits & our meticulously sourced 800+ page final report. Also links to our hearings. Might be a good time to watch those again.
📔 💽 ⋙ GovInfo[.]gov: Select January 6th Committee Final Report and Supporting Materials Collection https://tinyurl.com/4v8y7ty6
🐣 RT @Igor_from_Kyiv_ Freedom 🇺🇦 ¤ We are fighting for the future of our children. For the sake of freedom, life, good. ¤ russians die for the bloody ambitions of their power, the fascist ideology of the “russian world”, for the sake of money, for the sake of the past, not the future.
💽 https://twitter.com/Igor_from_Kyiv_/status/1692451241261932787?s=20/photo/1
WaPo: Russia recruited operatives online to target weapons crossing Poland https://tinyurl.com/mr2z8dys “Polish authorities now believe that … the foiled operation posed the most serious Russian threat on NATO soil since Moscow launched its invasion of Ukraine last year”
// Russian spy agencies built a network of amateurs for operations including sabotage, assassination and arson — plots disrupted by Polish authorities
[…] The tasks were menial — posting fliers or hanging signs in public spaces — and the pay meager. But for a handful of refugees from eastern Ukraine, the promise of quick cash was too good to pass up. …
Within weeks, recruits were tasked with scouting Polish seaports, placing cameras along railways and hiding tracking devices in military cargo, according to Polish investigators. Then, in March, came startling new orders to derail trains carrying weapons to Ukraine.
Polish authorities now believe that the mysterious employer was Russia’s military intelligence agency, the GRU, and that the foiled operation posed the most serious Russian threat on NATO soil since Moscow launched its invasion of Ukraine last year.
Russia’s objective was to disrupt a weapons pipeline through Poland that accounts for more than 80 percent of the military hardware delivered to Ukraine, a massive flow that has altered the course of the war and that Russia has seemed helpless to interdict, according to Polish and Western security officials.
⭕ 17 Aug 2023
🐣 RT @NBCNews BREAKING: Federal prosecutors are seeking sentences ranging from 27 to 33 years in federal prison in the cases of four Proud Boys found guilty of seditious conspiracy for their actions during the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol.
⋙ NBCNews: Prosecutors seek 27 to 33 years in prison for Proud Boys guilty of seditious conspiracy https://tinyurl.com/yh3f6mtc
// Enrique Tarrio, Joseph Biggs, Ethan Nordean and Zachary Rehl were all convicted of seditious conspiracy in May after a monthslong trial that began in January
MMFA: Right-wing media escalate violent rhetoric around civil war and tyranny following Trump’s fourth indictment https://tinyurl.com/4r65zv4m
// Newt Gingrich: “I think we are drifting toward the greatest constitutional crisis since the 1850s and the rise of secession and the Civil War”
🐣 RT @alfranken All Trump has to do is a convince a jury that he believed he won: IE, he believed that 61 judges, his campaign team, his DOJ, the WH counsel, and every other credible advisor was wrong, and instead believed Sydney Powell was right. And that he should be President. #TrumpIndictment
🚫 WaPo: U.S. intelligence says Ukraine will fail to meet offensive’s key goal https://tinyurl.com/2p9ac7ze
// Thwarted by minefields, Ukrainian forces won’t reach the southeastern city of Melitopol, a vital Russian transit hub, according to a U.S. intelligence assessment
🐣 RT @ResisterSis20 Arizona Attorney General, Kris Mayes confirms that Trump is under investigation for attempting to overturn the 2020 election results in her state. Mentioned five times in the #Georgia Indictments, Arizona may also seek RICO charges. ¤ #FreshStrong
⋙ Fox20Phoenix: Will Arizona be the next state to indict former president Donald Trump? https://tinyurl.com/5fnwpfdz
🐣 RT @7Veritas4 “I’m terrified of Chris Christie”
[TextLink:] https://twitter.com/7Veritas4/status/1692341077171138791?s=20/photo/1
[Text:] @realDonaldTrump Many people are asking whether or not I will be doing the DEBATES? ALL AMERICANS have been clamoring for a President of extremely High Intelligence. As everyone is aware, my Poll numbers, over a “wonderful” field of Republican candidates, are extraordinary. In fact, I am leading the runner up, whoever that may now be, by more than 50 Points. Reagan didn’t do it, and neither did others. People know my Record, one of the
BEST EVER, so why would I Debate? I’M YOUR MAN. MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!
🧵 RT @MysteRayOfSun Falsely claiming voter fraud was a long term plan.
📌 https://twitter.com/MysteRayOfSun/status/1691662364477939910?s=20
[ThreadReader:] https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1691662364477939910.html
🐣 RT @7Veritas4 Translation: My lawyers told me if I held a presser and prattled on about a magical report, they’d all quit and testify against me…like most of my other lawyers.
🐣 RT @AntiToxicPeople Hahahahahahaha
SAD! WEAK!
[TextLink:] https://twitter.com/AntiToxicPeople/status/1692328768843739168?s=20/photo/1
[Text:] 🐣 RT @ @realDonald Trump Rather than releasing the Report on the Rigged & Stolen Georgia 2020 Presidential Election on Monday, my lawyers would prefer putting this, I believe, Irrefutable & Overwhelming evidence of Election Fraud & Irregularities in formal Legal Filings as we fight to dismiss this disgraceful Indictment by a publicity & campaign finance seeking D.A., who sadly presides over a record breaking Murder & Violent Crime area, Atlanta. Therefore, the News Conference is no longer necessary!
🐣 RT @MeidasTouch DIGGING A DEEPER HOLE— ¤ Trump just made new threats against all the prosecutors investigating him as well as President Biden, reposting a message saying that he could indict them all on RICO charges the moment if he gets back into office.
[TextLink:] https://tinyurl.com/twnd4vpr
[Text:] 🐣 RT @realDonaldTrump [RT]
🐣 RT @paulsperry. Abusing RICO enforcement could backfire on Dems: A 2nd Trump admin/ GOP admin could charge Willis, Bragg, Smith, Garland + Biden w/ conspiring to sideline Trump w/ vexatious prosecutions and other overt acts of racketeering. All their comms would be subject to subpoenas/warrants
9:32 PM • Aug 15, 2023 • 96.6K
🐣 RT @lauferlaw Stupid.
⋙ 🐣 RT @ kylegriffin1 Reuters: TRUMP’S LAYWERS PROPOSE APRIL 2026 START DATE FOR HIS 2020 ELECTION TRIAL -COURT FILING
🐣 RT @NateB_Panic Covid caused the biggest worldwide drop in life expectancy in modern history. When people say we overreacted to covid, I’d like to know where they wanted these lines to end up
◕ https://twitter.com/NateB_Panic/status/1692118489853497503?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @ChuckPfarrer KHERSON AXIS /1715 UTC 17 AUG/ Updated information on Forward Edge of the Battle Area (FEBA) Indicates UKR defense lines conform to N Bank of Konka River. Cross river-resupply efforts continue.
🌎 https://twitter.com/ChuckPfarrer/status/1692221188506857651?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @TheBeatWithAri Roger Stone responds to The Beat’s report.
[TextLink:] https://twitter.com/TheBeatWithAri/status/1692302328999612622?s=20/photo/1
[Text:] “Sorry but I believe state legislatures have the authority 2 certify duly elected electors 2 the Electoral College in a fully public process based on the election of Jefferson in 1800 & the ultimate seating of JFK’s electors in Hawaii in ’60, No I never “plotted” the seating of “fake” electors.” -Roger Stone
⋙ 🐣 SCOTUS just ruled they don’t (mostly)
NPR (6/27): Supreme Court rejects Independent State Legislature theory, but leaves door ajar https://tinyurl.com/twjs3j8e
🐣 📊 RT @kylegriffin1 Quinnipiac poll:
Americans 54-42% think Trump should be prosecuted on criminal charges for the federal election interference case.
That includes 57% independents.
🐣 📊 RT @WHCommsDir Navigator: Two in three Americans believe that if Republicans win control of government, they will pass a nationwide abortion ban – a deeply unpopular policy
◕ https://twitter.com/WHCommsDir/status/1692287212254048530?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @CREWcrew You know how Trump announced he would release “A Large, Complex, Detailed but Irrefutable REPORT on the Presidential Election Fraud which took place in Georgia” at a press conference on Monday? ¤ Turns out his lawyers don’t want him to keep lying about 2020.
⋙ ABCNews: Trump’s legal advisers urge him to cancel press conference to refute Georgia allegations: Sources https://tinyurl.com/mr3r5e8k
// Trump’s promised press conference to refute the allegations in the indictment handed up by the Fulton County DA’s Office is now in
🐣 RT @Acyn Barr: The federal cases are legitimate. At the end of the day, the core of this, he engaged in (in the case of the documents) outrageous behavior that anybody would be prosecuted. I don’t know of any Attorney General who could walk away from it
💽 https://twitter.com/Acyn/status/1692269574371017010?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @Acyn Barr: During this time, he was being told by lawyers in the white house if he kept doing this, he would spend the rest of his life tangling with the criminal justice process. That’s exactly what has happened. He shouldn’t be surprised and no one else should be surprised.
💽 https://twitter.com/Acyn/status/1692269880685306299?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @NOELreports NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg assured that the Alliance’s role is to support Ukraine. He assured that “NATO will support Ukraine until it wins the war against Russian aggression.” ¤ He also rejected the previous words of his colleague Jenssen about territorial concessions to Ukraine in exchange for membership in NATO. [link Reuters]
🐣 RT @jaketapper Some very specific media criticism from the former president today:
[TextLink:] https://twitter.com/jaketapper/status/1692167432834609598?s=20/photo/1
[Text:] 🐣 RT @realDonald Trump Why doesn’t Fox and Friends show all of the Polls where I am beating Biden, by a lot. They just won’t do it! Also, they purposely show the absolutely worst pictures of me, especially the big “orange” one with my chin pulled way back. They think they are getting away with something, they’re not. Just like 2016 all over again…And then they want me to debate!
🐣 RT @AWeissmann_ What we have here ⬇️ is a conflict between Trump press strategy and his legal strategy. He wants to publicly lie but his lawyers are telling him it will kill him in court.
⋙ 🐣 RT @ABC BREAKING: Former Pres. Trump’s promised press conference to refute the allegations in the indictment handed up by the Fulton County DA’s Office is now very much in doubt, multiple sources familiar with the matter tell @ABC News.
🐣 RT @wartranslated Interesting, a bit long, post here from Russian Colonel Shuvalov discussing the effect of the Ukrainian cluster munitions and how the equivalents are not nearly as good if exist at all, showing how Shoygu’s threats are empty.(source: https://t.me/shouvalov/45)[
TextLink:] https://twitter.com/wartranslated/status/1692075250308022555?s=20/photo/1
⭕ 16 Aug 2023
🐣 📋 RT @AtlantaFed On August 16, the #GDPNow model nowcast of real GDP growth in Q3 2023 is 5.8%. https://bit.ly/32EYojR #ATLFedResearch
Download our EconomyNow app or go to our website for the latest GDPNow nowcast. https://bit.ly/2TPeYLT
🐣 📋 RT @AtlantaFed #InflationProject: #BIE August survey says firms anticipate 2.5% inflation during the coming year. https://atlfed.org/3DYRKK1
🐣 RT @ @tribelaw @judgeluttig and I both reached this conclusion two years ago, based in my case on decades of study of the 14th Amendment’s Disqualification Clause and its application to events that the Jan 6 special committee unearthed coupled with indisputable matters of public record
⋙ 🐣 RT @judgeluttig The former president is foreclosed from again holding the Office of the President because of his attempt to overturn the 2020 presidential election and the January 6 insurrection on the United States Capitol, which he incited and/or assisted, aided or comforted.
🐣 RT @RBReich Trump’s schedule keeps getting busier.
[TextLink:] https://twitter.com/RBReich/status/1691925618814746941?s=20/photo/1
This week- arraignment in GA
Next week- 1st GOP debate
Oct. 2- NY civil fraud trial
Jan. 2- Possible Jan 6 trial start
Jan. 15- E. Jean Carroll defamation trial & Iowa caucuses
Jan. 29- Pyramid scheme fraud trial
March 4- Possible GA trial start
March 5- Super Tuesday
March 25- NY hush money trial
May 20- Mar-a-Lago trial
🐣 RT @petestrzok “‘These jurors have signed their death warrant by falsely indicting President Trump,’ read one post on a pro-Trump forum in response to a post including the names of jurors, which was viewed by NBC News.” ¤ Law enforcement now has to devote resources to track down these threats.
[TextLink:] https://twitter.com/petestrzok/status/1691927801358856635?s=20/photo/1
[Text:] Yesterday – after Trump posted on his social media website that authorities were going “after those that fought to find the RIGGERS!” – Advance Democracy noted that Trump supporters were “using the term ‘rigger’ in lieu of a racial slur” in posts online. The Fulton County Sheriff’s Office, which is handling the surrender of Trump and his co-defendants over the course of the next 10 days, declined to comment.
🐣 RT @ryanjreilly In extremely unsurprising news, a racist Donald Trump fan has been charged with threatening Judge Chutkan.
[TextLink:] https://twitter.com/ryanjreilly/status/1691946570936140135?s=20/photo/1
[Text:] “Hey you stupid slave,” she allegedly said before referring to Chutkan using the n- word. “You are in our sights, we want to kill you… If Trump doesn’t get elected in 2024, we are coming to kill you, so tread lightly, b—h.” ¤ “You will be targeted personally, publicly, your family, all of it.”
🐣 RT @AWeissmann_ Prompt prosecution of those who threaten violence against any judge, juror, prosecutor or legislator who seek to uphold the rule of law in holding Trump and his conspirators to account needs to be done. ASAP
🐣 RT @AWeissmann_ Note the date. He was doing this while out on bail from his conviction in the Mueller probe.
⋙ 🐣 RT @TheBeatWithAri EXCLUSIVE VIDEO: Trump adviser and ally Roger Stone is seen pushing a plot to overthrow the 2020 Election.
💽 https://twitter.com/TheBeatWithAri/status/1691935482836377816?s=20/photo/1
💙 🐣 RT @Acyn Melber: We’re now going to play for you so you may listen to this new exclusive video.. Stone works with an associate to dictate his plans and arguments for how they had a plan as early as early November
💽 https://twitter.com/Acyn/status/1691935453182562492?s=20/photo/1
// lays out fake electors plot on Nov 5, 2020; sent to Friends of Stone (FOS), included Ali Alexander, Stewart Rhodes, Enrique Tario, but no mention of WH staff
// Rhodes and Tario we’re convicted of seditious conspiracy
🐣 RT @BillKristol “While most Republicans — 74% — say they would support him in November 2024, 53% of Americans say they would definitely not support him if he is the nominee. Another 11% say they would probably not support him in November 2024.”
⋙ 📊 AP: Trump enjoys strong support among Republicans. The general election could be a different story https://tinyurl.com/4y4wxhw8
📊 AP: Americans are divided along party lines over Trump’s actions in election cases, AP-NORC poll shows https://tinyurl.com/23cjhdpy Overall Trump is 35 %Fav vs 62% UnFav; but 60% of GOP want him to run
🐣 RT @ABC NEW: Fulton County DA Fani Willis has proposed a March 4 start date for the trial of former Pres. Trump and 18 others on charges related to efforts to overturn the 2020 election results in Georgia. The date is just one day before Super Tuesday. [link]
🐣 📊 RT @MikeSington Stunning new poll (AP)…stunning for Trump that is. He may be popular with MAGA Republicans, but a whopping 64% of Americans say they will not support Trump for president in 2024.
🐣 RT @ BlogUkraine #539dayofwar ⚡Russia’s ‘General Armageddon’ removed from military leadership, under house arrest, – POLITICO
💬 Sergei Surovikin can’t leave his apartment and has been told to stay silent until he’s forgotten, local media says, – writes POLITICO [ https://tinyurl.com/25n4s6jx ]
#UkraineWar #UkraineRussiaWar
🖼 https://twitter.com/BlogUkraine/status/1691809429895700535?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @HerrDr8 #1wayTrainRideRUS #1PageAssessUKRWar AUG 16 update of Rip’s favorite chart; those taking a one way train ride in Russia. Col Gen Zhydko dies from a BIG plate of failure (quite fatal when working for a fascist dictator…cause, big man ain’t taking the blame ever), Surovikin arrested post #PrigMutinyPalooza finally fired and Putin’s purge tantrum continues. ¤ More one way train rides in offing as Russian’s line on southern front begins to wobble badly.
◕ https://twitter.com/HerrDr8/status/1691873200341172376?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @RpsAgainstTrump UNHINGED.
[TextLink:] https://twitter.com/RpsAgainstTrump/status/1691850790321750417?s=20/photo/1
[Text:] 🐣 RT @realDonald Trump WOULD SOMEONE PLEASE TELL THE FULTON COUNTY GRAND JURY THAT I DID NOT TAMPER WITH THE ELECTION. THE PEOPLE THAT TAMPERED WITH IT WERE THE ONES THAT RIGGED IT, AND SADLY, PHONEY FANI WILLIS, WHO HAS SHOCKINGLY ALLOWED ATLANTA TO BECOME ONE OF THE MOST DANGEROUS CITIES ANYWHERE IN THE WORLD, HAS NO INTEREST IN SEEING THE MASSIVE AMOUNT OF EVIDENCE AVAILABLE, OR FINDING OUT WHO THESE PEOPLE THAT COMMITTED THIS CRIME ARE. SHE ONLY WANTS TO “GET TRUMP.” I WOULD BE HAPPY TO SHOW THIS INFO TO THE G.J.
🐣 RT @AntiToxicPeople NYT 50 years ago today 8/16/1973 ¤ Nixon tells America to move on from Watergate and that he was not involved in the coverup, while he desperately tries to keep the tapes from the WG Committee & the public. VP Agnew is told dozens of people that he extorted have told the DOJ.
🖼 https://twitter.com/AntiToxicPeople/status/1691854769093230850?s=20/photo/1
// NYT front page
🐣 RT @EmbassyofRussia 🇷🇺 Foreign Minister Sergey #Lavrov: ¤ The very possibility of the dominance of one country or even a group of states is disappearing into oblivion. ¤ 👉 https://is.gd/rWxv7q
⋙ 🐣 Alliances are not sadomasochistic relationships. They do not involve dominance of one state over another, but rather coming together for MUTUAL DEFENSE of shared interest and values. ¤ Only Russia cannot recognize this because POWER is the ONLY basis of their attempts to dominate
🌎 https://twitter.com/Auriandra/status/1691779298963677361?s=20/photo/1
// map: “why people hate Russia”: counties invaded
🐣 RT @mfa_russia 💬 FM Sergey #Lavrov: In order to save their geopolitical project to “contain Russia” & to split the Russian world, the US, NATO & the EU are flooding Ukraine with increasing amounts of weapons, thus stoking the conflict & provoking unchecked spread of weapons around the world.
⋙ 🐣 The US has always supplied arms to defeat the enemies of freedom and democracy, even before NATO and the EU. In fact, without arms provided to the Allies, Hitler would have succeeded. In WW2, the “US Arsenal of Democracy” supplied both the UK and the USSR
🐣 RT @gregolear Here’s one from the vault, back before Elmo throttled engagement. (My feelings on the subject have not changed.) ¤ #DamnatioMemoriae
[TextLink:] https://twitter.com/gregolear/status/1691607164463280631?s=20/photo/1
[Text:] 🐣 RT @gregolear When he is gone, Trump deserves what the Romans gave to imperial traitors: damnatio memoriae. Nothing named after him, no presidential library, none of the perquisites given to past office-holders. Just shame and silence. 🐣 RT @MFA_Ukraine President @ZelenskyyUa’s Peace Formula is the only comprehensive framework for just & sustainable peace in 🇺🇦 ¤ The Formula is essential not only for ending the war in #Ukraine but can also serve as a basis for resolving conflicts worldwide.
🖼 https://twitter.com/MFA_Ukraine/status/1691768677018763553?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @wartranslated This is amazing. Not only the [Kerch] bridge was unsecured to be attacked by two drones from two directions, Ukrainians also had access to the cameras on the bridge.
💽 https://twitter.com/wartranslated/status/1691723437050380571?s=20/photo/1
// CNN video, SBU source
⭕ 15 Aug 2023
🐣 RT @EmbassyofRussia 🇷🇺 Foreign Minister Sergey #Lavrov: ¤ The very possibility of the dominance of one country or even a group of states is disappearing into oblivion. ¤ 👉 https://is.gd/rWxv7q
⋙ 🐣 Alliances are not sadomasochistic relationships. They do not involve dominance of one state over another, but rather coming together for MUTUAL DEFENSE of shared interest and values. ¤ Only Russia cannot recognize this because POWER is the ONLY basis of their attempts to dominate
🌎 https://twitter.com/Auriandra/status/1691779298963677361?s=20/photo/1
// map: “why people hate Russia”: counties invaded
🐣 RT @mfa_russia 💬 FM Sergey #Lavrov: In order to save their geopolitical project to “contain Russia” & to split the Russian world, the US, NATO & the EU are flooding Ukraine with increasing amounts of weapons, thus stoking the conflict & provoking unchecked spread of weapons around the world.
⋙ 🐣 The US has always supplied arms to defeat the enemies of freedom and democracy, even before NATO and the EU. In fact, without arms provided to the Allies, Hitler would have succeeded. In WW2, the “US Arsenal of Democracy” supplied both the UK and the USSR
🐣 RT @gregolear Here’s one from the vault, back before Elmo throttled engagement. (My feelings on the subject have not changed.) ¤ #DamnatioMemoriae
[TextLink:] https://twitter.com/gregolear/status/1691607164463280631?s=20/photo/1
[Text:] 🐣 RT @gregolear When he is gone, Trump deserves what the Romans gave to imperial traitors: damnatio memoriae. Nothing named after him, no presidential library, none of the perquisites given to past office-holders. Just shame and silence.
🐣 RT @RonFilipkowski He’s really losing it on Truth Social today. It’s beginning to sink in that his story doesn’t have a happy ending.
[TextLink:] https://twitter.com/RonFilipkowski/status/1691616683213873574?s=20/photo/1
[Text:] 🐣 RT @realDonaldTrump These monsters, all controlled and coordinated by the DOJ and Radical Left Lunatics, are Criminalizing Political Speech, a total SHUTDOWN OF DEMOCRACY!
🐣 RT @BrianKempGA The 2020 election in Georgia was not stolen. ¤ For nearly three years now, anyone with evidence of fraud has failed to come forward – under oath – and prove anything in a court of law. Our elections in Georgia are secure, accessible, and fair and will continue to be as long as I am governor. ¤ The future of our country is at stake in 2024 and that must be our focus.
[TextLink:] https://twitter.com/BrianKempGA/status/1691483026356678660?s=20/photo/1
// [att]: Trump “iirefutalble” post
🐣 RT @RpsAgainstTrump Former Trump WH lawyer Ty Cobb on Trump promising to release a “large complex, detailed, but irrefutable report on the presidential election fraud”: ¤ “There’s a good chance that whatever document he produces ends up as evidence against him. It could even end up as the basis for an obstruction count against the author because it’s likely to be fiction and solely for the purpose of contaminating the jury pool.”
🐣 RT @MuellerSheWrote Important! If Meadows (or anyone) successfully moves the GA case to federal court, it’s still Fani Willis’ office that prosecutes, it’s still tried under GA a state laws, and a conviction still can’t be pardoned by a president.
⋙ 🐣 RT @allinwithchris What would happen if Mark Meadows moved the Georgia case to federal court? ¤ “It doesn’t mean that the charges are any different or that the prosecutorial team is any different,” says @AnnaBower, “Trump or any other future president will still not be able to pardon [Meadows.]”
💽 https://twitter.com/MuellerSheWrote/status/1691638077410992413?s=20/photo/1
TheAtlantic, Tom Nichols: It’s Not Just Trump https://tinyurl.com/54dyw97n “The Georgia case is an important window into the actions of Trump’s enablers and courtiers, the mediocre people around [him] who were determined to gain the respect and station to which they felt entitled”
// The former president’s dangerous minions in Georgia
Former President Donald Trump now faces his fourth round of felony indictments, this time in Georgia, where prosecutors allege in a racketeering charge that he led an effort to overturn the will of the state’s voters in the 2020 election. Not much more can be said about Trump himself: We can note only so many times that he is an emotionally disordered man, beset by feral insecurities, whose actions have, in the words of the retired federal judge J. Michael Luttig, “corroded and corrupted American democracy.” So let’s leave him aside and turn to his accused co-conspirators in Georgia (at least five of whom appear to be mentioned in Special Counsel Jack Smith’s indictment accusing Trump of a conspiracy to overturn the results of the 2020 election, although Smith has not yet charged them).
The indictments in Georgia depict an alleged racket that looks much like a multilevel-marketing scheme, in which the principals (Trump, his lawyer Rudy Giuliani, and his former chief of staff Mark Meadows) have something they want to sell (in this case, an election lie). They go out and recruit a gullible and ambitious sales force to spread the word (relying on loyalists such as the lawyers Sidney Powell and Jenna Ellis), who then pull in another group of sellers (state legislators, election officials, state party officials, and others). Go down far enough and you’ll find the marks who were willing to serve as fake electors. In the end, they’re all tied to a sham product that is going to cost them their reputation and perhaps even their freedom.
But we should not be distracted by the inanity of the alleged plot. The Georgia case is an important window into the actions of Trump’s enablers and courtiers, the mediocre people around the former president who were determined to gain the respect and station to which they felt entitled, regardless of their actual talent. …
🐣 RT @7Veritas4 Or…hear me out…have all the trials before the election so the American people know whether they’re voting for an innocent man or a criminal.
[TextLink:] https://twitter.com/7Veritas4/status/1691561664615788546?s=20/photo/1
[Text:] 🐣 RT @realDonaldTrump All of these Biden Administration bogus trials and cases, including the locals, should be brought after the 2024 Presidential Election. What they have done is already Election Interference, but if the trials are held before the Election, then it would be Interference on a scale never seen in our Country before.
🐣 RT @AntiToxicPeople Unhinged 🤪
[TextLink:] https://twitter.com/AntiToxicPeople/status/1691582340391428550?s=20/photo/1
[Text:] 🐣 RT @realDonaldTrump These monsters, all controlled and coordinated by the DOJ and Radical Left Lunatics, are Criminalizing Political Speech, a total SHUTDOWN OF DEMOCRACY!
🐣 RT @ MeidasTouch Alina Habba says she has super secret information that will exonerate Trump. She plans to release the Kraken next week.
⋙ MeidasTouch: Habba: Trump Isn’t Worried About Georgia Indictment Because We Have Inside Information https://tinyurl.com/yc22jeb5
// Re-release the Kraken, again!
🐣 RT @AWeissmann_ As anticipated in GA case: Meadows seeks to move Fulton County election case to federal court – ABC News
⋙ ABCNews: Mark Meadows seeks to move Fulton County election case to federal court https://tinyurl.com/mv83377z
// The former chief of staff was indicted with Trump and 17 others on Monday.
⋙ 🐣 RT @susanmathai This Mark Meadows?
[TextLink:] https://twitter.com/susanmathai/status/1691566682781966677?s=20/photo/1
[Text:] 🐣 RT @MarkMeadows [1/2/2020] We’re now at well over 100 House members and a dozen Senators ready to stand up for election integrity and object to certification. ¤ It’s time to fight back.
🐣 RT @AntiToxicPeople VERY (EXTREMELY) STABLE GENIUS UPDATE:
A++ for projection 👍🏻👍🏻
[TextLink:] https://twitter.com/AntiToxicPeople/status/1691576409385529532?s=20/photo/1
[Text:]🐣 RT @realDonaldTrump CROOKED JOE BIDEN IS TOTALLY CONTROLLED BY CHINA, UKRAINE, & VARIOUS OTHER COUNTRIES. THEY KNOW EVERYTHING ABOUT HIM – ALL OF HIS MISDEEDS. HE IS A COMPROMISED PRESIDENT WHO IS LEADING OUR COUNTRY TO HELL. HE IS A MANCHURIAN CANDIDATE!
WaPo: In Georgia and federal indictments, two vastly different approaches https://tinyurl.com/ycxy4ptt “Willis’s sprawling case will allow (Fulton County) prosecutors to tell the jury a story of a broad conspiracy to reverse election results in multiple states and build a forceful narrative”
// Fani Willis’s sprawling case allows prosecutors to target Trump’s broad scheme. But legal experts and critics say both the scope and specificity could be a problem.
🐣 RT @mfa_russia FM Sergey #Lavrov: The US & its NATO satellites are trying to tell other countries which allies to choose or avoid. ¤ Westerners demonstrate blatant intolerance towards dissent, seeking to usurp the prerogative to shape the global agenda. ¤ 🔗 https://t.me/MFARussia/17025
⋙ 🐣 Russia doesn’t make alliances: it invades some countries and destabilizes others ¤ Russia’s style is from the Age of Conquest, not the Age of Enlightenment. Russia is corrupt and it is doomed. ¤ Russia needs to follow other colonizers onto the garbage heap of history
🐣 RT @AntiToxicPeople Now **THIS** is some incredible projection. Amazing.
[TextLink:] https://twitter.com/AntiToxicPeople/status/1691547762574479361?s=20/photo/1
[Text:] 🐣 RT @reaDonaldTrump I believe we have a compromised president. He was bribed, and now he’s being blackmailed. He’s a Manchurian Candidate. That’s why Crooked Joe is letting other countries walk all over the United States… [link to Rumble]
WaPo, Phillip Bump (Dec 2020): This might be the most embarrassing document created by a White House staffer https://tinyurl.com/ybwae8mr
// 12/18/2020
⋙ TPM .(Dec 2020): Peter Navarro Puts Out ‘Immaculate Deception’ Report Rehashing Debunked Trump Complaints https://tinyurl.com/46575kmf
// 12/17/2020
🐣 Think Trump is planning to resurface this? that @pbump called “most embarrassing document created by a White House staffer”?
🔄 📔 ⋙⋙ BannonsWarRoom (Dec 2020): THE IMMACULATE DECEPTION: Six Key Dimensions of Election Irregularities https://tinyurl.com/mr3e2d42
// 12/14/2020; “The Navarro Report”; 36p
NYT: Former F.B.I. Spy Hunter Pleads Guilty to Aiding Russian Oligarch https://tinyurl.com/mr3ecxwc
// Charles McGonigal, once the bureau’s chief of counterintelligence in New York, still faces separate federal charges out of Washington.
🐣 RT @stuartpstevens Here’s the thing. I helped elect Republican governors or Senators in half the country. Not one would have done what Trump did. But by remaining silent or supporting Trump, they became part of a conspiracy to end democracy. They failed America & that will be their legacy.
WaPo: Trump’s indictment tells the story of Republicans who defied him https://tinyurl.com/v3rcwwj3 “But here’s the real reality check: Kemp, after everything Trump put him through, says he will ‘almost certainly’ vote for whoever wins the GOP nomination. ¤ Even if it’s Trump.”
🐣 RT @anneapplebaum This is evidence that Russian propaganda has spread deeper and further in France and Germany than is widely understood. Read the whole thread:
⋙ 🧵 RT @leonidvolkov OK, folks, now I have to ask for your full attention, please. It will be a long thread, but I’m 100% sure it is very important and you’ll learn a lot about the war, about Russia, Ukraine and Europe, about Putin and his plans. 1/14
📌 https://twitter.com/leonidvolkov/status/1691490561604071425?s=20
DailyBeast, David Rothkopf: Trump Must Go to Jail if Convicted https://tinyurl.com/5n7rtz82 “[F]earing an organized political backlash to Trump’s facing his just desserts is the type of politicization about which we should be most concerned”
// When Nixon escaped punishment for his crimes, the people got the message that the president is above the law. We can’t make the same mistake again.
WaPo, Amber Phillips: Trump is indicted in Georgia on charges of racketeering. What it means, what happens next https://tinyurl.com/57yu6duf
// What’s the maximum sentence if he’s convicted? Will he pose for a mug shot?
TheBulwark, Charlie Sykes: “A Criminal Enterprise” https://tinyurl.com/2a35fkt6 “Donald Trump’s lengthy legal resume now includes an additional 13 felony counts in Georgia, including RICO charges that are usually associated with mob bosses.”
// Trump gets the mob boss treatment.
🐣 RT @robertjdenault How convenient that Trump came upon a new irrefutable report proving his innocence not 12 hours after the 41-count RICO prosecution was made public! What are the odds!
[TextLink:] https://twitter.com/robertjdenault/status/1691446633396097024?s=20/photo/1
[Text:] 🐣 RT @realDonald Trump A Large, Complex, Detailed but Irrefutable REPORT on the Presidential Election Fraud which took place in Georgia is almost complete & will be presented by me at a major News Conference at 11:00 A.M. on Monday of next week in Bedminster, New Jersey. Based on the results of this CONCLUSIVE Report, all charges should be dropped against me & others – There will be a complete EXONERATION! They never went after those that Rigged the Election. They only went after those that fought to find the RIGGERS!
🐣 RT @SteveRattner Jared Kushner spent much of his White House tenure cozying up to MBS & Saudi Arabia. ¤ Six months after leaving Washington, his private equity firm landed $2 billion in investments from the Saudi sovereign wealth fund. ¤ @Morning_Joe
◕ https://twitter.com/SteveRattner/status/1691043464111071232?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @TheWeek Nixon counsel John Dean calls the new Georgia case against Trump “much bigger than Watergate,” predicts Mark Meadows and other Trump codefendants will flip: https://bit.ly/3QCvDk8
🐣 RT @ananavarro Trump has lied, schemed and cheated his whole life.
But Rudy Rudy Giuliani’s transformation…
He was once Associate Attorney General.
He was once US Attorney for SDNY.
He was once “America’s Mayor”.He is now a pervy indicted [c]o-conspirator with melting hair.
🐣 RT @kangaroos991 The ‘scales’ of justice have caught up with him! 🤣🤣🤣
[TextLink:] https://twitter.com/kangaroos991/status/1691337152163090432?s=20/photo/1
[Text:] THE SHERIFF IN FULTON COUNTY, GEORGIA SAYS HE WILL POST TRUMP’S MUGSHOT, HEIGHT AND WEIGHT. MAN – THAT IS JUST GONNA KILL HIM.
OCCUPY DEMOCRATS
AP (May): Georgia enacts law letting panel punish, oust prosecutors https://tinyurl.com/4et4x5ms “Georgia Democrats strenuously opposed the measure, saying the Republican legislative majority was seeking another way to impose its will on Democratic voters at the local level”
// 5/5/2023
[…] Crucially, the Georgia law mandates that a prosecutor must consider every case for which probable cause exists and can’t exclude categories of cases from prosecution.
Experts have said that considering every case individually is unrealistic, because prosecutors turn down many more cases than they charge. However, it’s unclear if the new law will change prosecutors’ behavior or just lead them to avoid talking publicly about charging decisions.
The eight-member commission will include six current or former prosecutors and two other lawyers. It will oversee DAs and solicitors general — elected prosecutors who handle lower-level crimes in some counties.
Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis has also decried the measure, calling it a racist attack after voters elected 14 nonwhite DAs in the state. Some have viewed the law as Republican retribution against Willis, who is considering criminal charges against former President Donald Trump over interference in Georgia’s 2020 election. Willis declined further comment Friday.
The law was born from frustrations involving a white Republican prosecutor in suburban Atlanta who was indicted for bribery related to sexual harassment claims. He lingered in office until he pleaded guilty to unprofessional conduct and resigned in 2022.
🐣 RT @ AntiToxicPeople First deranged attack on Willis post indictment. Lets see how this works out at his arraignment. He misdirects with the accidental draft filing that any DA in America would have prepared pre-GJ vote. ¤ He still can’t spell the word indicted because he is an illiterate imbecile.
[TextLink:] https://twitter.com/AntiToxicPeople/status/1691323471387824128?s=20/photo/1
[Text:] 🐣 RT @realDonaldTrump So, the Witch Hunt continues! 19 people Indicated tonight, including the former President of the United States, me, by an out of control and very corrupt District Attorney who campaigned and raised money on, “I will get Trump.” And what about those Indictment Documents put out today, long before the Grand Jury even voted, and then quickly withdrawn? Sounds Rigged to me! Why didn’t they Indict 2.5 years ago? Because they wanted to do it right in the middle of my political campaign. Witch Hunt!
⭕ 14 Aug 2023
✅ FactCheck[.]org (8/14): Republicans Oversell Archer’s Testimony About Hunter and Joe Biden https://tinyurl.com/ywx3awwb Hunter’s business partner “Archer said he had no knowledge that Hunter Biden ever influenced his father to change any policies to further his son’s businesses”
💙 Politico, Jonathan Martin: McConnell in Winter: Inside the GOP Leader’s Attempt to Thwart Trump https://tinyurl.com/3xnyhy5r
// The Kentucky Republican is doing all he can to bolster Ukraine, preserve NATO and help his party maintain its Reaganite roots.
🐣 RT @KatiePhang Note: the Trump Fulton County case has been assigned to Superior Court Judge Scott McAfee. ¤ He was just appointed to the bench by Gov. Brian Kemp & began January 2023. ¤ Former legal experience for 9 years: Assistant US Attorney and Assistant District Attorney.
🐣 RT @AccountableGOP Asa Hutchinson: “Over a year ago, I said Donald Trump’s actions disqualified him from ever serving as President again. Those words are more true today than ever before.”
[TextLink:] https://twitter.com/AccountableGOP/status/1691299922086121472?s=20/photo/1
[Text:] FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
August 14, 2023
GOV. ASA HUTCHINSON’S STATEMENT ON DONALD TRUMP’S 4TH INDICTMENT
This is another day of challenge for our democracyDES MOINES, Iowa – The Asa for America campaign released the following statement this evening in regard to the fourth indictment of Donald Trump. This statement can be attributed to
Governor Asa Hutchinson:“This is another day of challenge for our democracy with the indictment handed down by the grand jury in Georgia. As a former federal prosecutor, I have personally pursued racketeering charges in federal court against terrorist organizations, and I understand the difficulty of a multi- defendant indictment and how slow the case will proceed in state court. Regardless of the specifics of the Georgia indictment, I expect the voters will make the ultimate decision on the future of our democracy. Over a year ago, I said that Donald Trump’s actions disqualified him from ever serving as President again. Those words are more true today than ever before. I will have additional comments after I review the details of the indictment,”
– Gov. Asa Hutchinson, the 46th Governor of Arkansas and a current Republican candidate for President
🐣 RT @cspan WATCH: Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis on indictment of former President Trump
💽 https://twitter.com/cspan/status/1691299495428882432?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @VaughnHillyard Statement from Rudy Giuliani tonight after his indictment in Georgia:
[TextLink:] https://twitter.com/VaughnHillyard/status/1691310299419115521?s=20/photo/1
[Text:] “This is an affront to American Democracy and does permanent, irrevocable harm to our justice system. ¤ It’s just the next chapter in a book of lies with the purpose of framing President Donald Trump and anyone willing to take on the ruling regime. ¤ They lied about Russian collusion, they lied about Joe Biden’s foreign bribery scheme, and they lied about Hunter Biden’s laptop hard drive proving 30 years of criminal activity. ¤ The real criminals here are the people who have brought this case forward both directly and indirectly.” ¤ – Rudy Giuliani
🐣 RT @BradMossEsq It won’t be 19 by the time it gets to trial. ¤ Watch for the plea deals.
⋙ 🐣 RT @grantstern Fani Willis intends to try all 19 Trump racketeering defendants together.
🐣 RT @gtconway3d 91 counts. ¤ That’s it. That’s the tweet.
🐣 RT @TheRickWilson When I worked for him, he constantly bragged about using it. It was his pride and joy.
⋙ 🐣 RT @chrislhayes Rudolph Giuliani catching a RICO charge. What a world.
⋙⋙ 🐣 RT @richsignorelli Can confirm.
⋙⋙ 🐣 RT @ChaseOdell7 Supreme irony…
[TextLink:] https://twitter.com/ChaseOdell7/status/1691295954907897856?s=20/photo/1
[Text:] 1986 Breaking News: Giuliani crushes the Mob Armed with the new RICO tools, future New York mayor Rudy Giuliani, then a federal prosecutor, masterminded the indictment of 11 Mafia leaders, including the heads of New York’s five dominant crime families.
📔 NYT: Read The Trump Georgia Indictment [CourtDoc:] https://tinyurl.com/443udk89
🐣 RT @CREWcrew Wow, what an opening to the Georgia Trump indictment
[TextLink:] https://twitter.com/CREWcrew/status/1691286999330676736?s=20/photo/1
[Text:] INTRODUCTION ¤ Defendant Donald John Trump lost the United States presidential election held on November 3, 2020. One of the states he lost was Georgia. Trump and the other Defendants charged in this Indictment refused to accept that Trump lost, and they knowingly and willfully joined a conspiracy to unlawfully change the outcome of the election in favor of Trump. That conspiracy contained a common plan and purpose to commit two or more acts of racketeering activity in Fulton County, Georgia, elsewhere in the State of Georgia, and in other states.
🐣 RT @TristanSnell BREAKING: Fulton County drops HUGE 41 count indictment on Trump along with Rudy Giuliani, Mark Meadows, Jeffrey Clark, Sidney Powell, John Eastman, Jenna Ellis, 19 defendants in all — on racketeering (RICO) and conspiracy to overturn the 2020 Georgia election results.
🐣 RT @SollenbergerRC JUST IN: Mark Meadows charged in Georgia. Here are the defendants
[TextLink:] https://twitter.com/SollenbergerRC/status/1691282456031207424?s=20/photo/1
[TextLink:] https://twitter.com/AndrewFeinberg/status/1691282835531767808?s=20/photo/1 -2
🐣 RT @cspan Statement from Trump Campaign
[TextLink:] https://twitter.com/cspan/status/1691275754179317760?s=20/photo/1 -2
[Text:] Like Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg, Deranged Jack Smith, and New York AG Letitia James, Fulton County, GA’s radical Democrat District Attorney Fani Willis is a rabid partisan who is campaigning and fundraising on a platform of prosecuting President Trump through these bogus indictments. Ripping a page from Crooked Joe Biden’s playbook, Willis has strategically stalled her investigation to try and maximally interfere with the 2024 presidential race and damage the dominant Trump campaign. All of these corrupt Democrat attempts will fail.
Combined with the intentionally slow-walked investigations by the Biden-Smith goon sauads and the false charges in New York. the timing of this latest coordinated strike by a biased prosecutor in an overwhelmingly Democrat jurisdiction not only betrays the trust of the American people, but also exposes true motivation driving their fabricated accusations
They could have brought this two and half years ago, yet they chose to do this for election interterence reasons in the middle of President Trump’s successtul campaign. He is not only leading all Republicans by a lot but he is leading against Joe Biden in almost every poll. President Trump represents the greatest threat to these Democrats’ political futures (and the greatest hope for America).
The legal double-standard set against President Trump must end. Under the Crooked Biden Cartel, there are no rules for Democrats, while Republicans face criminal charges for exercising their First Amendment rights.
These activities by Democrat leaders constitute a grave threat to American democracy and are direct attempts to deprive the American people of their rightful choice to cast their vote for President. Call it election interference or election manipulation-it is a dangerous effort by the ruling class to suppress the choice of the people. It is un- American and wrong.
They are taking away President Trump’s First Amendment right to free speech, and the right to challenge a rigged and stolen election that the Democrats do all the time. The ones who should be prosecuted are the ones who created the corruption. President Trump will never give up and will never stop fighting for you, as we all work to Make America Great Again in 2024.
🐣 RT @MuellerSheWrote HAHAHAHA
⋙ 🐣 RT @justinbaragona Is Sean Hannity really bringing on Paul Manafort to defend Trump over his RICO charges? Yes, yes he is.
🖼 https://twitter.com/justinbaragona/status/1691274277801086976?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @AntiToxicPeople The thing I am looking for tonight is if Mark Meadows is a defendant or not. If he isn’t a defendant, it will almost 100% confirm he is a cooperating witness in both GA & for Jack Smith.
🐣 RT @NewsHour J. Michael Luttig is a retired federal judge and one of the nation’s leading conservative legal minds. He told Judy Woodruff that Trump and his Republican allies and supporters have declared war on American democracy.
⋙ PBS: Conservative retired judge says Trump ‘corroded and corrupted American democracy’ https://tinyurl.com/2p8cbppp
🐣 RT @BidensWins MSNBC had the perfect guest on when the Trump indictments were dropped.
🖼 https://twitter.com/BidensWins/status/1691268383000408064?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @TheRickWilson Look, I don t know which booker got Hillary on the air at @msnbc tonight, but…
💽 https://twitter.com/TheRickWilson/status/1691268410192097280?s=20/photo/1
// “toast”
🐣 RT @neal_katyal The Georgia Indictments say there were zero “no bills.” That means that the Grand Jury decided to indict in all cases that the DA (the prosecutor) sought. This is very very bad news for Trump, and likely others in his circle.
🐣 RT @AaronParnas Hillary Clinton gets the last laugh.
💽 https://twitter.com/AaronParnas/status/1691263652362346496?s=20/photo/1
// on Rachel @Maddow @TRMS
🐣 RT @girlsreallyrule Note: The State of Georgia has a mandatory minimum sentence for all RICO convictions and the governor does not have pardon power. ¤ Let’s DO THIS.
🧵📌 RT @davidfrum 45 men have served as president. Some great leaders, others mediocre. Only one sought by violence to overthrow the Constitution. That one now stands multiply indicted for his crimes. Some flinch from this truth. Others deny it. It’s a lot to face. But anything else is a lie.
¤ https://twitter.com/davidfrum/status/1691246529552556033?s=20
⋙ With his grease paint and compulsive lying, Trump in many ways cuts a comical figure. But he really was president, and he really did try to mount a coup. His name belongs with Benedict Arnold, Tokyo Rose, Julius Rosenberg in the annals of shame. He’s a joke. His crime was not.
⋙ Trump fluked into the presidency. Most Americans never wanted him. Some say he himself never wanted the job. Fluke or not, unwanted or not, he swore the most solemn oath any American can swear. He shamelessly betrayed that holy promise for the most selfish and corrupt motives.
⋙ The framers of the Constitution dreaded that their work might be overturned by some American Cromwell. Instead, every hero from Washington to Eisenhower honored their legacy. The coup was instead attempted by a squalid, bungling fool. That’s our good luck, not his excuse.
🐣 RT @TheRickWilson Fun night…
💽 https://twitter.com/TheRickWilson/status/1691254751541809152?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @rgoodlaw P.S.A. 10 indictments does not necessarily mean only 10 individuals charged.
⋙ 🐣 RT @ ReporterBlayne BIG FLAG: a Fulton County grand jury has returned 10 indictments. ¤ @CharlieGileNBC snapped this photo at the clerk’s office. ¤ We are awaiting names and details.
[TextLink:] https://twitter.com/ReporterBlayne/status/1691254200422764544?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @petestrzok “Trump continues to seek special treatment that no other criminal defendant would receive” ¤ DOJ shows clear case Trump should not have a SCIF at MAL or any other residence. ¤ We’ll soon see if Judge Cannon agrees – and watch DOJ’s appeal if she does not.
[TextLink:] https://twitter.com/petestrzok/status/1691225146692980736?s=20/photo/1
[CourtDoc:] https://tinyurl.com/4mb3w7te 12p
🐣 RT @DeanObeidallah 10 indictments!!!!
🐣 RT @AntiToxicPeople BREAKING: GEORGIA COURT HAS BEEN CALLED TO ORDER. JUDGE ENTERING COURTROOM
🐣 RT @tribelaw I’m fairly certain Trump and at least a dozen others will be indicted by Georgia by 10 pm ET tonight August 14. It’ll be a sprawling RICO case.
🐣 RT @AWeissmann_ In a recent episode of “Prosecuting Donald Trump”, Judge Luttig joins Andrew Weissmann and Mary McCord to discuss why he thinks the Mar-a-Lago documents case and the 1/6 case can and should be scheduled before the 2024 election. Click here to listen https://link.chtbl.com/kKDwm9Yw.
🐣 RT @rgoodlaw We figured out who will likely be charged (in addition to Trump) and the specific conduct charged – based on the apparent Fulton County docket entry.👇
Key is Meadows, Giuliani, Chesebro – which would likely bolster Jack Smith’s case by squeezing them.
⋙ JustSecurity: Deciphering the Trump Indictment from the Apparent Fulton County Docket Entry https://tinyurl.com/2xthj7ex
// based on earlier released charges list; since called “fake” re: @Sky_Lee_1
🐣 RT @OmarRiverosays BREAKING: Legal experts sound the alarm, demand that Trump be IMMEDIATELY thrown in jail, and kept there without bail until his trial, as soon as he gets indicted in Georgia’s Fulton County by District Attorney Fani Willis.
¤ https://twitter.com/OmarRiverosays/status/1691200683683250176?s=20
But it gets WAY worse for Trump…
The experts say that Trump’s new post on TruthSocial makes it clear that he is ALREADY intimidating witnesses — which means that the judge who takes on the case will likely “presume” that Trump cannot be allowed to roam free until his trial begins.
In the TruthSocial post, Trump wrote, “I’m reading reports that failed former Lt. Governor of Georgia, Geoff Duncan, will be testifying before the Fulton County Grand Jury. He shouldn’t.”
But it gets worse for Trump…
The experts cite a Georgia law that states that courts shall only release people on bail if they find that the defendant “poses no significant risk of intimidating witnesses or otherwise obstructing the administration of justice.”
The experts declared, “Trump’s statement will be seen as especially egregious by the courts because he explicitly is saying the witness should defy a grand jury subpoena.”
To make matters worse for Trump, the experts say that Trump’s attack against Duncan “may also violate the conditions of release in the federal January 6th case” that is being overseen by Judge Chutkan in D.C.
Mediaite: BREAKING: Georgia Judge Rules Cameras Will Be Allowed in Courtroom if Trump Indicted https://tinyurl.com/8sd5a68n
🐣 RT @Sky_Lee_1 Statement from Fulton County Clerk. Indictment document being passed around was a fake. ¤ Also to note you can’t have a mistrial during a grand jury, that’s not how it works. ¤ Attention all @HouseGOP @SenateGOP trying to spin this ⬇️
[TextLink:] https://twitter.com/Sky_Lee_1/status/1691196381866635264?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @MuellerSheWrote The Fulton County Courthouse did NOT close at 5 PM. The doors remain open and the grand jury is still in session.
🐣 RT @Acyn Weissmann: let me give you the exact words because this is the provision that the court has to find to release someone on bail in Georgia which is that the defendant poses no risk of intimidating witnesses, or otherwise obstructing the administration of justice.
💽 https://twitter.com/Acyn/status/1691181825324937216?s=20/photo/1
// @MSNBC, @DeadlineWH
🐣 RT @letsgohawksgpg Take Cover!!! Grandpa has finished lunch & is yelling again …..
[TextLink:] https://twitter.com/letsgohawksgpg/status/1691164174020169728?s=20/photo/1
[Text:] 🐣 RT @realDonaldTrump I just hope Republicans, and the people of our now failing Nation, see what is happening to our Democracy and Freedom. A sitting President has INDICTED, in many different forms and locals, his political opponent, who is substantially leading him in the Polls. NOTHING LIKE THIS HAS EVER HAPPENED BEFORE. OUR COUNTRY CAN NEVER LET THIS STAND!
🐣 RT @AntiToxicPeople 👀👀👀👀👀
⋙ 🐣 RT @AnthonyMKreis It’s happening today. Get ready.
// Kreis bio: “Law prof & political scientist @GeorgiaStateLaw | Constitutional law, American Political Development, U.S. Supreme Court, civil rights, law of democracy 🏳️🌈”
🧵 RT @rgoodlaw
On left: Former President Trump intimidates a witness in Georgia case.
On right: Georgia law stating that to release a person on bail, the judge will have to find the defendant “poses no significant risk of intimidating witnesses.”
Note: That is a presumption against release.
📌 [TextLink:] https://twitter.com/rgoodlaw/status/1691109568817045504?s=20/photo/1 -2
// two exhibits
[ThreadReader:] https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1691109568817045504.html
⋙ 🐣 RT @rgoodlaw 2. As @AWeissmann_ has pointed out, Trump’s statement against Duncan may also violate the conditions of release in federal January 6th case before Judge Chutkan. The effort to overturn the Georgia election results is a core subset of that case and associated witnesses. […]
[TextLink:] https://twitter.com/rgoodlaw/status/1691113203521220608?s=20/photo/1
// statement of penalties and sanctions for not abiding by conditions for bail, signed by djt
TO THE DEFENDANT: YOU ARE ADVISED OF THE FOLLOWING PENALTIES AND SANCTIONS:
Violating any of the foregoing conditions of release may result in the immediate issuance of a warrant for your arrest, a revocation of your release, an order of detention, a forfeiture of any bond, and a prosecution for contempt of court and could result in imprisonment, a fine, or both.
While on release, if you commit a federal felony offense the punishment is an additional prison term of not more than ten years and for a federal misdemeanor offense the punishment is an additional prison term of not more than one year. This sentence will be
consecutive (i.e., in addition to) to any other sentence you receive.It is a crime punishable by up to ten years in prison, and a $250,000 fine, or both, to: obstruct a criminal investigation; tamper with a witness, victim, or informant; retaliate or attempt to retaliate against a witness, victim, or informant; or intimidate or attempt to intimidate a witness, victim, juror, informant, or officer of the court. The penalties for tampering, retaliation, or intimidation are significantly more serious if they involve a killing or attempted killing.
If, after release, you knowingly fail to appear as the conditions of release require, or to surrender to serve a sentence, you may be prosecuted for failing to appear or surrender and additional punishment may be imposed. If you are convicted of;
(1) an offense punishable by death, life imprisonment, or imprisonment for a term of fifteen years or more – you will be fined not more than $250,000 or imprisoned for not more than 10 years, or both;
(2) an offense punishable by imprisonment for a term of five years or more, but less than fifteen years – you will be fined not more than $250,000 or imprisoned for not more than five years, or both;
(3) any other felony – you will be fined not more than $250,000 or imprisoned not more than two years, or both;
(4) a misdemeanor – you will be fined not more than $100,000 or imprisoned not more than one year, or both. A term of imprisonment imposed for failure to appear or surrender will be consecutive to any other sentence you receive. In addition, a failure to appear or surrender may result in the forfeiture of any bond posted.Acknowledgment of the Defendant
I acknowledge that I am the defendant in this case and that I am aware of the conditions of release. I promise to obey all conditions of release, to appear as directed, and surrender to serve thy sentence imposed. I am aware of the penalties and sanctions set forth above.
🚫🐣 RT @ AntiToxicPeople 🚨🚨🚨BREAKING: Court document accidentally posted early & then deleted shows Trump charges will include
“Violation Of The Georgia RICO Act,”
“Solicitation Of Violation Of Oath By Public Officer,”
“Conspiracy To Commit False Statements & Writings” &
“Conspiracy To Commit Forgery”
// punct added
🚫⋙🐣 RT @AntiToxicPeople 🚨🚨🚨🚨🚨HERE IS THE ACTUAL COURT DOCUMENT ACCIDENTALLY POSTED EARLY & QUICKLY DELETED, LISTING SOME OF TRUMP’s CHARGES. YES ITS REAL.
[CourtDoc:] https://twitter.com/AntiToxicPeople/status/1691140749276909568/photo/1
Violation Of The Georgia RICO (Racketeer Influenced And Corrupt Organizations) Act
Solicitation of Violation of Oath by Public Officer
Conspiracy To Commit Impersonating a Public Officer
Conspiracy To Commit Forgery in the First Degree
Conspiracy To Commit False Statements and Writings
Conspiracy To Commit Filing False Documents
Conspiracy To Commit Forgery in the First Degree
Conspiracy To Commit False Statements and Writings
Filing False Documents
Solicitation of Violation of Oath by Public Officer
False Statements and Writings
Solicitation of Violation of Oath by Public Officer
False Statements and Writings
CNN: Exclusive: Former Republican legal officials endorse special counsel’s speedy trial date proposal in Trump Jan. 6 case https://tinyurl.com/37xc4rdt
🐣 RT @rgoodlaw Judge Luttig (@judgeluttig)
Former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales
Former Acting Attorney General Stuart Gerson
+ several other conservative former DOJ officials
Submit amicus brief supporting Jan 2, 2024 start date for Special Counsel #January6th trial
≣ [CourtDoc:] https://tinyurl.com/ywa4hnnd 16p
🐣 RT @kylegriffin1 New on @MSNBC: In the surest sign yet that Fulton County DA Fani Willis is presenting her case against Trump to a grand jury today, ex-Georgia state Senator Jen Jordan and current state Rep. Bee Nguyen were spotted walking to the DA’s office this morning. @NBCNews
🐣 RT @NatalkaKyiv Dmitry Skurikhin, an entrepreneur from the Leningrad region, was sentenced to 1.5 years in prison for holding a poster “I’m sorry, Ukraine.” ¤ The court found Skurikhin guilty of “discrediting the army.” This is a part of the speech he gave in court. #Ukraine #RussiaIsATerroristState #RussianWarCrimes #RussiaUkraineWar #Russia #RussiaIsANaziState
💽 https://twitter.com/NatalkaKyiv/status/1691112595820777474?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @blairmiller Judge sides w/ youth plaintiffs in Held v Montana. Finds MEPA limitation & changes made in SB557 to be unconstitutional. Judge finds plaintiffs have “fundamental constitutional right to a clean and healthful environment, which includes climate…” More coming @dailymontanan #mtpol
[CourtDoc:] https://twitter.com/blairmiller/status/1691125585827987456?s=20/photo/1 -4
NYT: Judge Rules in Favor of Montana Youths in Landmark Climate Case https://tinyurl.com/zn994d8f
// The court found that young people have a constitutional right to a healthful environment and that regulators must be allowed to consider climate impact.
🐣 RT @MikeSington Trump has a complete meltdown on Truth Social. He knows a fourth indictment is coming.
[TextLink:] https://twitter.com/MikeSington/status/1691094850991763456?s=20/photo/1
[Text:] 🐣 RT @realDonald Trump ONE OF THE MANY THINGS I HAVE DONE AS PRESIDENT, & THEREAFTER, IS TO EXPOSE THE MASSIVE CORRUPTION & FRAUD THAT TAKES PLACE ON A REGULAR BASIS WITHIN THE USA. LOOK HOW CORRUPT THE DEPARTMENT OF INJUSTICE HAS TURNED OUT TO BE…& THE FBI, WITH FISA, TWITTER FILES, LIES TO CONGRESS (AND EVERYWHERE), THE LAPTOP FROM HELL, FACEBOOK, THE TOP AGENT IN CHARGE OF THE RUSSIA, RUSSIA, RUSSIA HOAX JUST BEING ARRESTED, THE “INSURANCE POLICY” & 51 INTEL AGENTS SCAM… EXPOSED IT ALL, & I WILL CLEAN IT UP. MAGA!
🐣 RT @steven_seegel Important work. Kudos @60Minutes for investing the time & resources to report on this, rather than just interviewing the usual politicians & pundits.
⋙ 🐣 RT @60Minutes James Nachtwey was in Ukraine at the start of the war, photographing the bodies of civilians that Russian troops had executed. Nachtwey said that of all the military brutality he captured in his career, the Russians “stood apart.” https://cbsn.ws/3YCcP6I
💽 https://twitter.com/60Minutes/status/1690873621470724096?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @TreasChest 😰Fires in Hawaii have already killed 96 people: the number of missing is currently unknown. ¤ Rescuers continue to eliminate the consequences of the disaster. 2,200 buildings are reported to have been destroyed in the historic burned-out town of Lahaina. ¤ Channel 24
🖼 💽 https://twitter.com/TreasChest/status/1691125171577409540?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @cepa “Now is the moment to rethink our Western policy as well, because we weren’t prepared for this kind of war,” @apolyakova explains to @FareedZakaria why the West needs to step up support for Ukraine and provide long-range weapons to help Ukraine’s counteroffensive succeed.
💽 https://twitter.com/cepa/status/1691093418020417536?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @ChuckPfarrer BAKHMUT AXIS /1445 UTC 14 AUG/ Ukraine breaks up Russian attacks at Andriivka and Klischiivka. UKR air defenses shoot down Ka-52 attack helicopter at Andriivka.
🌎 https://twitter.com/ChuckPfarrer/status/1691098451323633664?s=20/photo/1
TheGuardian, Lawrence Tribe and Dennis Aftergut: Trump has no serious first amendment defense in a court of law. Here’s why https://tinyurl.com/6r42ku8x “The law puts it this way: ‘Speech integral to criminal conduct’ is not protected speech”
// Words that criminal defendants have written or spoken are used against them all the time. Perhaps you’ve heard of a confession?
🐣 RT @tribelaw OMG! Well at least this smashes RFK Jr’s already dwindling threat to Biden as a Nader-like spoiler!
⋙ 🐣 RT @NoLieWithBTC New: Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a conspiracy theorist who claims to be a Democrat, is now calling for a nationwide ban on abortion.
⋙⋙ NBCNews: RFK Jr. says he’d sign a federal abortion ban at 3 months of pregnancy, then reverses course https://tinyurl.com/4xyhbr2h
// The three-month ban would have put Kennedy — who’s mounting long-shot bid to unseat President Joe Biden as the Democratic standard-bearer — out of step with most of his party.
🐣 RT @gtconway3d I’m so looking forward to the mug shot.
[TextLink:] https://twitter.com/gtconway3d/status/1691075201692229632?s=20/photo/1 -2
[Text:] 🐣 RT @realDonaldTrump I am reading reports that failed former Lt. Governor of Georgia, Jeff Duncan, will be testifying before the Fulton County Grand Jury. He shouldn’t. I barely know him but he was, right from the beginning of this Witch Hunt, a nasty disaster for those looking into the Election Fraud that took place in Georgia. He refused having a Special Session to find out what went on, became very unpopular with Republicans (I refused to endorse him!), and fought the TRUTH all the way. A loser, he went to FNCNN!
[Text:] 🐣 RT @realDonaldTrump WOULD SOMEONE PLEASE TELL THE FULTON COUNTY GRAND JURY THAT I DID NOT TAMPER WITH THE ELECTION. THE PEOPLE THAT TAMPERED WITH IT WERE THE ONES THAT RIGGED IT, AND SADLY, PHONEY FANI WILLIS, WHO HAS SHOCKINGLY ALLOWED ATLANTA TO BECOME ONE OF THE MOST DANGEROUS CITIES ANYWHERE IN THE WORLD, HAS NO INTEREST IN SEEING THE MASSIVE AMOUNT OF EVIDENCE AVAILABLE, OR FINDING OUT WHO THESE PEOPLE THAT COMMITTED THIS CRIME ARE. SHE ONLY WANTS TO “GET TRUMP.” I WOULD BE HAPPY TO SHOW THIS INFO TO THE G.J.
🐣 RT @AmbJohnBolton Ukrainians’ inability to achieve major advances is the natural result of a U.S. strategy aimed only at staving off Russian conquest. Biden needs to start vigorously working toward victory. It’s time to get moving.
⋙ WSJ, John Bolton: Blame Biden’s Hesitancy for Stalling Ukraine’s Offensive https://tinyurl.com/yekavntv
// Paralyzed by fear of Russian escalation, the administration has sought only to stave off defeat.
🐣 RT @gtconway3d [not GC] This morning’s first attempt at witness intimidation.
[TextLink:] https://twitter.com/gtconway3d/status/1691074321584701440?s=20/photo/1
[Text:] 🐣 RT @realDonaldTrump I am reading reports that failed former Lt. Governor of Georgia, Jeff Duncan, will be testifying before the Fulton County Grand Jury. He shouldn’t. I barely know him but he was, right from the beginning of this Witch Hunt, a nasty disaster for those looking into the Election Fraud that took place in Georgia. He refused having a Special Session to find out what went on, became very unpopular with Republicans (I refused to endorse him!), and fought the TRUTH all the way. A loser, he went to FNCNN!
🐣 RT @WhiteRabidbat New one. 2-parter!
[TextLink:] https://twitter.com/WhiteRabidbat/status/1690960037697699840?s=20/photo/1
[Text:] 🐣 RT @realDonaldTrump The following TRUTH is a quote by highly partisan Judge Tanya Chutkan, angrily sentencing a J-6er in October of 2022. She obviously wants me behind bars. VERY BIASED & UNFAIR!
[Text:] 🐣 RT @realDonaldTrump “I SEE THE VIDEOTAPES. I SEE THE FOOTAGE OF THE FLAGS AND THE SIGNS THAT PEOPLE WERE CARRYING AND THE HATS THAT THEY WERE WEARING, AND THE GARB. AND THE PEOPLE WHO MOBBED THAT CAPITOL WERE THERE IN FEALTY, IN LOYALTY, TO ONE MAN, NOT TO THE CONSTITUTION, OF WHICH MOST OF THE PEOPLE WHO COME BEFORE ME SEEM WOEFULLY IGNORANT; NOT TO THE IDEALS OF THIS COUNTRY, AND NOT TO THE PRINCIPLES OF DEMOCRACY. IT’S A BLIND LOYALTY TO ONE PERSON WHO, BY THE WAY, REMAINS FREE TO THIS DAY.” Judge Tanya Chutkan!
🐣 RT @AntiToxicPeople 12:34 a.m. unhinged mania from a lunatic. ¤ I am sure Judge Chutkan will love this.
[TextLink:] https://twitter.com/AntiToxicPeople/status/1690945622717972481?s=20/photo/1
[Text:] @reaDonaldTrump How dare lowlife prosecutor, Deranged Jack Smith, break into my former Twitter account without informing me and, indeed, trying to completely hide this atrocity from me. What could he possibly find out that is not already known. Just like the early morning raid of Mar- a-Lago! Why isn’t the DOJ raiding Crooked Joe Biden, the most CORRUPT (and Incompetent!) President in the history of the United States?
⭕ 13 Aug 2023
🐣 RT @GovChristie Ignoring Trump’s lies is exactly what enables him. I’m not going to do that, I’m going to expose him. ¤ Whether that angers certain people or not, I don’t care. That’s part of the process. ¤ If your principles aren’t worth fighting for then stay on the bench.
💽 https://twitter.com/GovChristie/status/1690831591214325760?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @gtconway3dg Trump campaign had a report saying dominion machines were secure, but still wanted to appoint Sidney Powell to seize machines using our military—while also trying to gain access to dominion software in Coffee County (where they had 70% of the vote, so didn’t have any other reason to care about the machines there) ¤ sure sounds like they were using officials in Coffee Co. for access to learn how they could alter the votes in machines everywhere (or figure out how to make it look like someone else had)
TheHill, Alexander Motyl: The Ukraine War might really break up the Russian Federation https://tinyurl.com/mryb4nwc “Although the world would be better off with a much weakened Russia, its fall may not go smoothly.” An analysis of opinions …
🐣 RT @ZelenskyyUa Belgium, Czechia, Denmark, Finland, Greece, Iceland, Ireland, Latvia, the Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, Romania, Spain, and Sweden have joined G7 Declaration in support of security guarantees. This, together with Peace Formula, is a signal: peace will come; aggression will fail.
🐣 RT @ChuckPfarrer VELYKA NOVSILKA / 1645 UTC 13 AUG/ Ukrainian forces drive Russian units out of the Mokri Yaly River pocket. UKR units in contact within northern limits of Zavitne Bazhanya. UKR artillery targets RU Lines of Communication and Supply (LOCS).
🌎 https://twitter.com/ChuckPfarrer/status/1690762779840368640?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @AntiToxicPeople Very Stable Genius is completely unhinged this morning, even for him. Too much insanity here to comment on. Enjoy:
[TextLink:] https://twitter.com/AntiToxicPeople/status/1690731466005913601?s=20/photo/1 -2
[Text:] 🐣 RT @realDonaldTrump The only Election Interference that took place in Fulton County, Georgia, was done by those that Rigged and Stole the Election, not by me, who simply complained that the Election was Rigged and Stolen. We have Massive and Conclusive Proof, if the Grand Jury would like to see it. Unfortunately, the publicity seeking D.A. isn’t interested in Justice, or this evidence. Also, as in Manhattan, the corrupt DOJ is pushing hard trying to keep Biden in Office. The whole system is dishonest and broken!
🐣 RT @AntiToxicPeople Holy shit. He just attacked the Judge AGAIN in D.C., this time with a picture of her. He “reposted” someone elses’ nonsense so he thinks that makes it ok? What a lunatic.
[TextLink:] https://twitter.com/AntiToxicPeople/status/1690826659430354944?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @ZaleskiLuke MAGA “defense” of trump’s insurrection
1. didn’t happen (*happened)
2. not an insurrection👆
3. dem’s fault
4. blm’s fault
5. antifa’s fault
6. fbi’s fault
7. capitol police’s fault
8. tourists
9. media’s fault
10. trump w🙃n
11. noone died (*people died)
12. no weapons(*weapons)
🐣 RT @MeidaTouch Trump Repost Compares Himself to Jesus, a “Walking Miracle” for Defeating Infamous “P*ssy Grabber” Tape ¤ Trump’s Repost: Trump is “the Chosen one,” “loved like the King of the Jews”
⋙ 🐣 blasphemy ain’t what it used to be
🐣 RT @Victorshi2020 WHOA. Rep. Jamie Raskin just said Democrats will “release a report about all of the foreign government emoluments & millions of dollars Donald Trump pocketed from the hotels, at the golf courses, through business deals when he was president, & that his family got.” This is good.
🐣 RT @atrupar Rep. Goldman: “If Hunter Biden has committed crimes, he should be charged with them. I’m a Democrat saying that. You don’t hear any currently elected Republicans saying that if Trump committed crimes he should be charged w/ them & held accountable. That’s a critical distinction”
💽 https://twitter.com/atrupar/status/1690718944959557632?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @Tendar The Ukrainian MoD released two spectacular videos, showing surviving Russian troops fleeing from Urozhaine.
¤ https://twitter.com/Tendar/status/1690647124202172416?s=20/photo/1 -2
It is absolute carnage because those Russians have no armored vehicles, no vehicles at all and flee in broad daylight on an open road and fields. The 2nd video is even worse for them because it shows the usage of cluster ammunition, blasting those troops into absolute bits.
This is just another video proving the low quality of Russian command structures. To give so panicking withdrawal orders and allowing the own troops being literally destroyed with no cover from the dark or some vehicles is a masterclass in failure in itself.
It is unlikely that there are any Russian troops alive in Urozhaine. ¤ #Ukraine #Donetsk #Urozhaine
🐣 RT @general_ben I have great faith in the Ukrainian General Staff and their Soldiers. Isolating Crimea and making it untenable for Russian forces is how they win. Crimea is the key. Kremlin won’t care about Donbas once Crimea is done.
🐣📋 RT @ @patmcguinness Trump’s “We took $28 billion from China” is not true. ¤ Trump’s $28 billion in tariffs were TAXES that Americans paid and increased cost of goods for Americans. Because China trade war gutted US farmers, Trump had to spend $40B on bailouts. ¤ A failed tax-and-spend Trump policy.
// tags: tariffs on China tariffs
🐣 RT @KremlinTrolls Priceless response by Jack to Trump’s latest deranged rant
⋙ 🐣 RT @7Veritas4 [Jack Smith] Why is “Felonious” (Like in 78 FELONY CHARGES and COUNTING, get it?) Donald Trump, the severely criminal and corrupt individual who is accused of orchestrating a failed coup, attacking the District Attorney of Fulton County days before his 4th criminal indictment? He should instead focus on his numerous trials and “legal” defenses!
[TextLink:] https://twitter.com/KremlinTrolls/status/1690708317276913664?s=20/photo/1
[Text:] 🐣 RT @realDonaldTrump Why is “Phoney” (Like in PERFECT “PHONE” CALL, get it?) Fani Willis, the severely underperforming D.A. of Fulton County who is being accused of having an “affair” with a Gang Member of a group that she is prosecuting, leaking my name in regard to a Grand Jury pertaining to Election Fraud & Irregularities that I say took place in Georgia. Imade a PERFECT PHONE CALL OF PROTEST. What does Phoney Fani have to do with me? She should instead focus on the record number of murders in Atlanta!
🐣 RT @IuliiaMendel Ukrainians don’t give up, but the war creates new challenges over time. The economy is one of the biggest. Putin targeted our largest export industries and blocked grain exports. The World Bank predicts that by the end of the year, 55% of Ukrainians could be below the poverty line. This means a lot. After all, people who cannot find a job with sufficient pay, cannot find new housing, and eventually get tired. That is why some people are looking for the only possible stability by returning to their homes, even if they are under fire or occupation.
🐣 RT @RonFilipkowski First post of the day from the stable genius
[TextLink:] https://twitter.com/RonFilipkowski/status/1690697049749024768?s=20/photo/1
[Text:] 🐣 RT @realDonaldTrump Rigged Election!
🐣 RT @politicsusa46 I got a little bit of expected pushback on my criticism of Merrick Garland yesterday, suggesting he choked on defendant Trump. I always felt that he would be reluctant to engage in any prosecution that gave the appearance of being politically motivated . It’s an AG’s worst nightmare, unless of course you’re Bill Barr.
💽 https://twitter.com/politicsusa46/status/1690677886951317504?s=20/photo/1
Garland is not a gunslinger prosecutor, he’s a thoughtful careful man that always wants to play fair, even when the opposition is kicking the shit out of him. He’s a good man in a bad man’s world. He belongs on SCOTUS where he can use his brilliant legal mind for the good of the American people.
Mine is not a criticism of his brilliant legal mind, but rather his reluctance to act much sooner. This failure has provided Trump with a potential lifeline to pardon himself, avoiding accountability for his criminal actions. I’m confident that when Garland writes his memoirs, having had time for reflection, he will arrive at the same conclusion.
One of defendant Trump’s few talents is his ability to live rent free in the mind of any figure of authority, who’s intent it is to be seen to play fair. He is a master manipulator that uses short phrases as ear-worms, ‘Lock her up’, ‘Stop the steal’, ‘Stolen Election’. Then he adds nostalgic references like ‘In the good old days’ and ‘Make America great again’. Finally, as a garnish, he uses phrases like ‘everyone is saying’ or ‘they say’, as replacements for facts, then throws in some evangelical references to bolster the legitimacy of his lies. It’s textbook 1930s Nazi propaganda.
He well understands the jeopardy he faces and that’s why he announced his run early and sat at Mar a Lardo until he was forced to campaign.
This is ONLY about staying out of jail. Be in no doubt, if he feels it’s going the wrong way, he WILL incite political and civil unrest. He’s made constant fleeting reference to it ever since losing office.
No independent thinking American fails to recognize the critical threat he poses to the US. They are his kryptonite and the demographic he has to silence by either suppressing their vote, or convincing them to sit it out in 2024.
All it takes to consign defendant Trump to the trash can of history and put him behind bars, is for good people to vote. For good people to step up and speak out. I remain the eternal optimist and I believe that this is exactly what will happen in 2024.
We need an army of the good to defeat Project 2025. Are YOU with us?
#DemsAct #DemVoice1 #wtpBLUE #ONEV1 #FAM46
🐣 RT @Ukrainene #Russia is trying to scare #Poland by placing a couple thousand #Wagner troops in #Belarus.
Meanwhile, this is how the streets of #Warsaw looked like last night.
The #PolishArmy would crush any Wagner incursion within a few hours and #Lukashenko 🤡 knows it. ¤ 🇵🇱💪
💽 https://twitter.com/Ukrainene/status/1690678388711636992?s=20/photo/1
WaPo: Russia’s new high school history textbook teaches Putin’s alternate reality https://tinyurl.com/5dzwyd49 “It includes telling sections ranging from ‘confrontation with the West’ to ‘Ukraine is a neo-Nazi state’ to ‘Russia is a country of heroes’”
The new manuscript — aimed at graduating 17-year-olds and covering the time-period from 1945 until now — blames the United States for the ongoing war in Ukraine and includes a quote from President Vladimir Putin in which he falsely asserts that: “Russia did not start any military actions but is trying to end them.”
It includes telling sections ranging from “confrontation with the West” to “Ukraine is a neo-Nazi state” to “Russia is a country of heroes,” according to scans of the new book posted by Russian state media.
It is also part of an extraordinary gaslighting campaign in which Putin has tried to convince his own people — and the world — that Russia is a victim rather than the aggressor in Ukraine. …
It is also part of an extraordinary gaslighting campaign in which Putin has tried to convince his own people — and the world — that Russia is a victim rather than the aggressor in Ukraine, and that the West is at fault for a war that Putin chose to unleash and has already killed tens of thousands.
“Here history is once again used by the authorities to push a certain agenda, to solve certain political problems,” a school history teacher told The Washington Post, speaking on the condition of anonymity because critics of the Russian government often face retribution. “We have to understand that this is wider than schools — universities will be next, so screws will tighten in historical education, and its degradation won’t bring anything good.”
⭕ 12 Aug 2023
NYT: Ukraine Makes ‘Tactically Significant’ Progress in Its Counteroffensive https://tinyurl.com/39xdrb4t “Kyiv’s goal is to reach the Sea of Azov and drive a wedge into the so-called land bridge between Russia and Crimea, which is vital to the Russian military’s supply routes to the west … ”
// “If they can manage to push through or around Urozhaine, that will put them within 50 miles of the two major port cities of Berdiansk and Mariupol on the Sea of Azov.” ~ NYT
// Troops advanced 10 to 12 miles along two main lines of attack in Kyiv’s drive to reach the southern coast and sever Russian supply lines, while explosions echoed at the vital Kerch Strait Bridge.
🐣 RT @Yuri_Gagarin_UA SBU Military Counterintelligence Strikes Back: Dozens of Occupiers Killed and Wounded, Countless Equipment Damaged!
¤ 🖼 https://twitter.com/Yuri_Gagarin_UA/status/1690569707923849217?s=20/photo/1
In the midnight’s secret embrace, a spark awakens – not just a fleeting glimmer, but a relentless, mesmerizing flame. Crimea, marked by the shadowy hand of interlopers, now trembles under the haunting kiss of righteous fire. Each drone’s descent was not mere violence; it was a dance, a siren’s call, a beckoning into the wild depths of justice.
The occupiers, those tarnished souls, were drawn into the flame’s embrace, their cries an echoing lullaby beneath the entrancing roar of furious redemption. Shockwaves not only shook but seduced the enemy’s soul, their morale shattering like dreams upon the jagged cliffs of reality.
“Consider how small a fire sets ablaze a large forest,” whispers an ancient voice, an incantation reverberating through time, echoing the wisdom of James 3:5. A spark, a flicker, a whisper of destiny ignited the boundless void, a masterful alchemy transforming mere aggression into a swirling dance of chaos. Time seems to stretch; losses build; giants of oppression crumble, lulled into surrender by fate’s hypnotic song.
Let this be an unspoken understanding, a haunting melody to all who dare darken our sacred lands: the fires of righteousness will not be tamed. They will beckon, dance, seduce, driven by the heartbeat of a people entwined, until every last shade is vanquished.
Our resolve is carved from the bones of our ancestors, unbreakable, eternal. Our aim, guided by destiny’s unseen hand, unerring. We will reclaim what whispers our name, no matter the calling of stars, no matter the moaning of the earth.
For we are the wildfire’s essence, the embodiment of justice’s relentless siren call, and we shall burn, enchanting and unbound, until the universe’s final, mesmerizing note.
🐣 RT @AymanMSNBC “This is really a set up for a dictatorship. Our liberty is on the line.” ¤ @tribelaw calls Trump and his allies’ attempt to overturn the 2020 presidential election “a dry run.”
🐣 RT @Maks_NAFO_FELLA 🇺🇸🇯🇵 “Japan and USA to announce this week joint development of interceptor missile to counter Russian, Chinese and North Korean hypersonic missiles”, – Reuters
🐣 RT @WordswithSteph Defendant Trump is depending on sleazy surrogates like Matt Gaetz to deliver his inflammatory remarks and messages of incitement. Alert Judge Chutkan, immediately! ¤ Adjust the Jan. 6 trial date accordingly. ¤ Speed it up! (Judge Chutkan has made clear she is “all for” a speedy trial.)
⋙ 🐣 RT @FrankFigliuzzi1 Matt Gaetz: “Only through force do we make any change…”
💽 https://twitter.com/FrankFigliuzzi1/status/1690459109735227392?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @mccaffreyr3 Always believe when people threaten your democracy with violence. Trump tried to force a coup to take over the government. It failed. In 2024 it will be led by people that embrace the destruction of our institutions.
⋙ 🐣 RT @JoyceWhiteVance They would bring fascism. That is not alarmist. It’s what their own words promise. If we don’t take them seriously, that’s on us.
⋙⋙ 🐣 RT @FrankFigliuzzi1 Matt Gaetz: “Only through force do we make any change…”
💽 https://twitter.com/FrankFigliuzzi1/status/1690459109735227392?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @DoctorHenryCT Let me say this as calmly as I can regarding Joe Biden’s age. He has been the most effective President since FDR, calmly discusses the issues and gets things done. Trump is a raving lunatic, had his chance, accomplished nothing and IS ONLY 3 YEARS YOUNGER THAN JOE BIDEN!!! Phew.
🧵 RT @atrupar say what you want about RSBN but nobody beats this production quality
// Trump at Iowa State Fair
📌 💽 https://twitter.com/atrupar/status/1690428267453362177?s=20/photo/1
NYT: Zelensky Called Him a Criminal. Now Ukraine Calls Him for Guns and Ammo. https://tinyurl.com/49fyycaj “In the name of rushing weapons to the front line, leaders have resurrected figures from Ukraine’s rough-and-tumble past” //➔ reminds me of Red in #TheBlacklist
// By Justin Scheck and Thomas Gibbons-Neff; In its hunt for weapons, Ukraine has rolled back anticorruption rules and turned to people once seen as relics of an anything-goes era.
[…] Mr. Pashinsky and the arms network he built highlight a little-discussed aspect of Ukraine’s war strategy. In the name of rushing weapons to the front line, leaders have resurrected figures from Ukraine’s rough-and-tumble past and undone, at least temporarily, years of anticorruption policies. Government officials stopped blacklisting suppliers who had ripped off the military, and they abandoned many public-disclosure rules intended to reveal self-dealing.
Mr. Zelensky’s administration did all of this while promising to continue fighting corruption. That has led to awkward contradictions — like the administration turning for help to someone it had labeled a criminal, gratefully buying weapons and simultaneously investigating him.
In the immediate term, the gamble is paying off. Ukraine held off Russian troops long enough for international aid to arrive. And Ukrainian Armored Technology has tens of millions of dollars in ongoing contracts to support the war effort. The long-term risk is that these temporary changes become entrenched, and that Mr. Pashinsky and others who had been sidelined will emerge from the war with more money and influence than ever. …
Ukrainian leaders understand this risk. “We are not very idealistic in this regard,” the deputy defense minister, Volodymyr Havrylov, said in an interview. When the war broke out, he said, “we wanted huge amounts, immediately.” …
Mr. Pashinsky’s detractors say he’s a profiteer. Good-governance groups and political adversaries bemoan his resurgence. But even they are nearly unanimous that today’s weapons-at-any-cost environment is perfect for Mr. Pashinsky. ¤ And he’s delivering. …
From Cheseboro Memo (Dec 6, 2020): RE: Important That All Trump-Pence Electors Vote on December 14 https://tinyurl.com/ynp3zwk2
1. (c) On January in a solemn and constitutionally defensible manner , consistent with clear indications that this what the Framers of the Constitution intended and expected , and consistent with precedent from the first 70 years of our nation’s history , Vice President Pence, presiding over the joint session, takes the position that it is his constitutional power and duty , alone , as President of the Senate , to both open and count the votes , and that anything in the Electoral Count Act to the contrary is unconstitutional .
🐣 RT @ tribelaw “Ultimately, Chesebro’s memo highlights a theme of the Trump indictment: the corrupting of the legal profession in the service of one man, a coup attempt, and illicit political power.”
⋙ MSNBC, Norm Eisen et al: The secret memo and obscure lawyer at the center of the Trump indictment https://tinyurl.com/2map8sxj
// also by Joshua Kolb, Fred Wertheimer; The newly revealed document shows us how the fake elector scheme evolved.
Former President Donald Trump’s attempt to overturn the 2020 election has brought a lot of national attention to a previously unknown lawyer: Kenneth Chesebro, christened “Co-Conspirator 5” in special counsel Jack Smith’s federal indictment on Aug. 1. Amid the swarm of bold-faced public figures who have dominated the public narrative around Jan. 6 — not only Trump but Mark Meadows, Rudy Giuliani and John Eastman — Chesebro has stayed mostly under the radar. But this week we have seen, for the first time, the text of a shocking Dec. 6, 2020, memo — first published by The New York Times — that is at the heart of the alleged crimes. It gives new prominence to Chesebro and exposes critical new details of the allegedly criminal scheme to overturn the 2020 election.
The public had already seen other memos sent by Chesebro and additional co-conspirators describing the audacious plot to create fake electoral slates and use them to press Vice President Mike Pence to reject the genuine state electors on Jan. 6. And we did know a little bit about this heretofore unseen piece of evidence. Smith’s indictment says this memo was “a sharp departure” from Chesebro’s earlier Nov. 18, 2020, memorandum outlining a plan to organize alternate electors in Wisconsin, where election litigation was pending. But the indictment’s description was relatively general.
Now that we have the actual document, we can see precisely how the scheme evolved: from an earlier, perhaps legitimate effort to preserve Wisconsin electors for Trump based on genuine litigation into a nationwide sham.
In the Dec. 6 memo, Chesebro argued that the phony Trump electors in six states should meet and certify their votes so that they could later be presented at the Jan. 6 congressional proceeding to certify the winner. This would provide the opportunity for the enactment of the nonsensical legal theory Chesebro promulgated: that Pence, single-handedly, held the power to count the electoral votes and could therefore simply disregard legitimate Biden electors, handing victory to Trump. …
It’s clear Chesebro’s true intention was not to present a neutral or even novel legal theory. This was fundamentally a political strategy, cloaked in the garb of the law.
This crucial distinction also helped tip Chesebro over from legal adviser to co-conspirator. His Dec. 6 memo contains contradictions, distortions and misrepresentations. And the cleverness (by half) of his plan — in contrast to some of the inept lawyering that surrounded the Trump campaign (remember the “Kraken”?) — made it all the more insidious. …
As federal Judge David Carter wrote, the Jan. 6 scheme was “a coup in search of a legal theory.” Chesebro was determined to provide that theory, seemingly irrespective of its legality or integrity. And according to Smith’s indictment, that work was an essential part of the larger plot.
Ultimately, Chesebro’s memo highlights a theme of the Trump indictment: the corrupting of the legal profession in the service of one man, a coup attempt, and illicit political power. Lawyers like Chesebro promoted arguments that they seeem to have known were not legally sound, and did so in hopes of creating conditions on the ground to achieve their favored political ends outside proper legal channels.
In the newly revealed memo, Chesebro argued for his plan regardless of whether the Supreme Court ultimately ruled against it because the legality of assembling fake electors or the constitutionality of the Electoral Count Act was not principally the point. Donald Trump being sworn in as president on Jan. 20, 2021, was the point. Period. …
Fundamentally, Jack Smith brought his indictment to uphold the rule of law. His case serves to counteract the allegedly lawless wreckage created, in part, by lawyers like Chesebro — who are officers of the court and swore an oath to protect the rule of law. The newly revealed memo exposes just how deep the corruption was.
🐣 RT @AntiToxicPeople 🍿🍿🍿🍿
[TextLink:] https://twitter.com/AntiToxicPeople/status/1690411062615781376?s=20/photo/1
[Text:] 🐣 RT @realDonald Trump How can they charge me in Georgia? The phone call
was PERFECT. WITCH HUNT!
🐣 RT @MikeSington Trump attacks Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis on Truth Social. Gag him now.
[TextLink:] https://twitter.com/MikeSington/status/1690344939060973568?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @realDonaldTrump I hear that RACIST Fulton County (Atlanta) District Attorney “Phoney”Fani Willis, who weakly presides over one of the deadliest communities in the U.S., with thousands of murderers, violent criminals & gang members roaming the streets while going untried, free, & are treated with “kid gloves,” is using a potential Indictment of me, and other innocent people, as a campaign and fundraising CON JOB, all based on a PERFECT PHONE CALL, AS PRESIDENT, CHALLENGING ELECTION FRAUD – MY DUTY & RIGHT!
⭕ 11 Aug 2023
MeidasTouch: Federalist Society Turns on Trump: Hard-Right Legal Scholars Say Trump is Disqualified From Office https://tinyurl.com/ms6t5hck “If the public record is accurate, the case is not even close. He is no longer eligible to the office of Presidency,” ~ two Federalist Society authors
// Right-wing legal cabal finally seeks to destroy the monster they created
Two Federalist Society law professors have published their findings stating that Trump is disqualified from serving as President based on the originalist interpretation of the 14th amendment ban on anyone who has engaged in insurrection against the United States from running for office.
Federalist Society professors William Baude of the University of Chicago and Michael Stokes Paulsen of the University of St. Thomas published a sweeping 126 page paper, which stated: “Donald Trump cannot be president — cannot run for president, cannot become president, cannot hold office — unless two-thirds of Congress decides to grant him amnesty for his conduct on Jan. 6.”
In a particularly damning section of their piece, Baude and Paulsen state that Trump engaged in rebellion, and gave aid and comfort to others engaging in rebellion against the United States. ¤ Read that section of the article here[:]
< The bottom line is that Donald Trump both "engaged in" "insurrection or re- bellion" and gave "aid or comfort" to others engaging in such conduct, within the orig- inal meaning of those terms as employed in Section Three of the Fourteenth Amend- ment. If the public record is accurate, the case is not even close. He is no longer eligi- ble to the office of Presidency, or any other state or federal office covered by the Con-stitution. All who are committed to the Constitution should take note and say so.” >
The Federalist Society is best known as a right-wing legal think tank who successfully took control of the U.S. Supreme Court with Donald Trump’s appointment of three of their progenies, Amy Coney Barrett, Brett Kavanaugh, and Neil Gorsuch.
Ironically, the originalist interpretation of the Constitution around which the Federalist Society is based, which has presided over the outright slaughter of liberal democracy in America with the overturning of Roe v. Wade and the dismantling of the Voting Rights Act, may ultimately find them on the right side of history with the understanding that Trump is unfit to serve as President based on his attempt to overthrow the results of a free and fair election.
After the events of January 6th and Trump’s clear intent to engage in a coup to destroy American democracy, even the most strident right-wing law scholars in the land can no longer see their way to acknowledging Donald Trump’s Constitutional right to be President.
🐣 RT @AntiToxicPeople And here we go..we were waiting all day for this 🤪🤪 #Unhinged
P.S. He was appointed by him!
[TextLink:] https://twitter.com/AntiToxicPeople/status/1690184365144461312?s=20/photo/1
[Text:] 🐣 RT @realDonaldTrump David Weiss was picked by the two Democrat Senators from Delaware under “Blue Slip.” He would not have been picked by me. But I have a great idea. Why don’t they use Deranged Jack Smith. Weiss has been investigating Hunter for 4 years, giving him the “sweetheart” deal of all sweetheart deals. But a brilliant Judge in Delaware saw through it all. Now, I read, the Department of Injustice wants a new Judge and Jurisdiction. But so do I, with far stronger reasons than Hunter & Crooked Joe. MAGA!!!
🐣 RT @thejackhopkins After today, I’m going to change my prediction…based on new information. ¤ No, I don’t think Chutkan is going to issue a gag order, and later…detain Donald Trump pre-trial. Here’s why.
¤ https://twitter.com/thejackhopkins/status/1690203623735644160?s=20
She clearly sees a trial date as early as possible being the best thing for the nation. The courtroom is where lies and conspiracy theories go to die.
I’m guessing she also suspects that being jailed is what Trump wants. He wants to be a Martyr. I seriously doubt that she wants to grant him that wish.
January 2nd is only four and a half months away. It’s what the prosecution wants. It’s democracy loving Americans want. I suspect it’s also what Chutkan wants.
Today, she masterfully linked Trump’s refusal to shut his pie hole, to the urgency for a speedy trial. Genius level shit.
Yes…we would like a gag order. Then Trump breaking a gag order, and finally…Trump being jailed awaiting trial. We all would. But…it’s not necessarily what’s best for this country. The country will benefit most…from a speedy trial.
Now, it may turn out….that Judge Chutkan has no choice, and has to wind up jailing him. However…I don’t think that’s her preferred method for dealing with him, and she pretty much revealed…today…the approach she’s decided to take. And….I think her approach….is brilliant.
⋙ 🐣 RT @Susan35763565 If reporting is accurate 7 States are already pursuing 14th Amend. Disqualification which would prevent him from being on the ballot. He would be prevented from holding any office. But it will come down to SCOTUS. As Federalist Society is behind this, likely sway will be anti-45
🐣 RT @MeidasTouch SCARED AND SHAKEN— ¤ After Judge Chutkan warned Trump’s lawyers that their client’s attacks on witnesses could violate his terms of release and necessitate an earlier trial, Trump appears to be terrified to post about the case. For now.
⋙ Meidastouch: Trump Gets Scared After Federal Judge Warns his Lawyers https://tinyurl.com/y7dwxwub
// Trump stopped his daily attacks against prosecutors, and witnesses, and the judge after court hearing…For now…
🐣 RT @ProjectLincoln If it wasn’t obvious before, it’s obvious now – Joe Manchin is aligning himself with the dark money group No Labels in order to hurt President Biden’s re-election bid and benefit Trump
💽 https://twitter.com/ProjectLincoln/status/1690158658053664768?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @GovChristie Just stop, Donald. You didn’t build the wall. ¤ In 4 years, you completed 52 new miles. That’s what your DHS & Border Patrol reported. ¤ I know you want me to stop talking about your failures, but I’m not going to. ¤ You won’t stop lying, and I will never stop telling the truth.
📋◕ https://twitter.com/GovChristie/status/1690135527893135360?s=20/photo/1 -2
⋙ 🐣 RT @realDonaldTrump Reported that Sloppy Chris Christie said I only built 50 Miles of Wall on the Southern Border. Wrong! I built almost 500 Miles of Wall, including the fact that some very dilapidated areas had to be completely demolished with new Wall then built. He knows this but keeps repeating the lies. That is why he left New Jersey with a 9% Approval Rating, the lowest on record, and is currently polling at around 2% in the Republican Primary – with nobody showing up at his “events.” Loser!
🐣 RT @caslernoel It really boggles the mind to witness day after day, what Republicans have metastasized into after 7 years living in the dank shadows of Trump’s taint. They’re just despicable at every turn and any attempt to placate them, judicial or otherwise, is a grave mistake. @GOP
🐣 RT @ levparnas Donald Trump and his minions in the GOP are losing their mind because David Weiss was appointed as special counsel 😂👇
[TextLink:] https://twitter.com/levparnas/status/1690057887979053072?s=20/photo/1
[Text:] Statement from Trump Spokesperson
Crooked Joe Biden, Hunter Biden, and the entire Biden Crime Family have been protected by the Justice Department for decades even though there is overwhelming evidence and credible testimony detailing their wrongdoing of lying to the American people and selling out the country to foreign enemies for the Biden Cartel’s own financial gain. If this special counsel is truly independent – even though he failed to bring proper charges after a four year investigation and he appears to be trying to move the case to a more Democrat-friendly venue – he will quickly conclude that Joe Biden, his troubled son Hunter, and their enablers, including the media, which colluded with the 51 intelligence officials who knowingly misled the public about Hunter’s laptop should face the required consequences.
🐣 RT @atrupar Let’s take a beat to be clear about what’s happening today. Republicans are throwing a tantrum that the AG named a *Trump-appointed* US attorney to be the special counsel investigating the president’s son. Nobody should pretend these complaints are being made in good faith.
🐣 RT @RpsAgainstTrump Tucker Carlson will get really mad if you RT this email showing how he begged Hunter Biden to use his connections to help get his son into an elite Washington university
[TextLink:] https://twitter.com/RpsAgainstTrump/status/1690078026514472960?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @MacFarlaneNews Prosecutors said the first batch of discovery material it will share with Trump’s team includes roughly 11.6 million pages, in 2020 election conspiracy prosecution CBS: https://tinyurl.com/433675sn
🐣 RT @rgoodlaw This is the heart of the Protective Order issued by Judge Chutkan.👇
It defines the scope of ‘Sensitive Materials’ that former President Trump may not discuss publicly.
Protects witnesses, jury pool, and the integrity of the judicial process.
≣ [CourtDoc:] https://tinyurl.com/yc6ycpkw 5p
8. The United States may designate the following materials it produces to defense counsel as “Sensitive Materials”.
a. Materials containing personally identifying information as identified in Federal
Rule of Criminal Procedure 49.1;
b. Rule 6 materials, including grand jury subpoena returns, witness testimony, and
related exhibits presented to the grand jury;
c. Materials obtained through sealed search warrants and 2703(d) orders;
d. Sealed orders obtained by the Government’s filter team related to this case;
e. Recordings, transcripts, interview reports, and related exhibits of witness
interviews; and
f. Materials obtained from other covernmental entities
🐣 RT @mmpadellan [Brooklyn Dad] President Biden loves his son, Hunter, dearly.
🖼 https://twitter.com/mmpadellan/status/1690068156973219840?s=20/photo/1
You could hear it clearly in the message he left for his son while he was in the terrible grips of addiction. “It’s Dad. I called to tell you I love you. I love you more than the whole world, pal. You gotta get some help. I know you don’t know what to do. I don’t either.”
As a Dad, I know he had to be hurting, powerless to help his son climb out of that dark hole.
As a Dad, I know if has to be painful for him to bear with the millions of people clamoring to maliciously smear his son, who is still on the road to recovery from addiction.
As a Dad, I know that it had to be difficult to step aside and allow the Justice Department to appoint a special counsel to investigate his son.
Because you know what? If it were one of MY sons, I don’t know that I’d have the intestinal fortitude to do that. ME PERSONALLY. But then again, I’m not the President, nor do I have any desire to be.
But that had to be hard as hell, knowing that it will give the right wing yet another talking point about his son, regardless of how empty and desperate the GOP’s smear tactics may seem. You want to protect your kids from that, if it’s in your power.
I know Donald Trump wouldn’t do that… shit, Ivanka had those 18 Chinese trademarks approved because of her Dad. Did he approve an investigation into that? Hell no.
What about his son-in-law, Jared Kushner? Jared wasn’t qualified for a job in the White House, couldn’t even correctly complete a security clearance form, and yet Trump put him in there so he could soak up all of those million and billion dollar deals. Investigate him? Hell no.
Come to think of it, the ONLY person Trump approved an investigation into was… HUNTER BIDEN. And what did President Biden do when he took office? Did he defund the investigation? Did he try to derail it? ¤ No. He allowed it to run its course.
So I’m a little pissed that Hunter Biden is being investigated. Talk about weaponization of government? It’s been weaponized against him, to hurt his Dad.
But I am confident that, when the investigation is done, if Hunter is guilty, he will pay the consequences.
But it will NOT change my decision to vote to re-elect President Biden, who is a good Dad, a kind human being, and one of the best Presidents we have had in a long time.
🐣 RT @noclador [Theiner] It’s gonna get much, much worse for the russians soon. ¤. Ukrainians are rapidly reinforcing their beachhead on the Dnipro’s left bank, but OPSEC means no videos, no brigade names, etc. for now. ¤ Tip for the russians: Run!!
⋙ 🐣 RT @yarotrof Russia’s control on the left bank of Dnipro in Kherson is crumbling fast as Ukrainian SOF teams operate deep in the rear. Here, in a video released by Sobchak, troops of Battalion 1822 raised in Moscow say they’ve lost 40% of their men in two weeks.
💽 https://t.me/bloodysx/30018
🐣 RT @MuellerSheWrote NEW: HUNTER BIDEN’S LAWYER: “Whether in Delaware, DC, or anywhere else, we expect a fair resolution on behalf of our client. This US Attornu has been diligently in my client for 5 years & he proposed a resolution that we intend to pursue in court.” 1/
⋙ 🐣 RT @MuellerSheWrote “It is hard to see why he would propose such a resolution if there were other offenses he could have successfully prosecuted and we are aware of none. When this is at and end, my client will have resolution and will be moving on with his life successfully.”
🐣 RT @atrupar watching Fox News and it’s clear these folks would never be satisfied unless Garland appointed Rudy Giuliani as special counsel to investigate Hunter Biden. And even then, they’d accuse Rudy of being part of a cabal if he stopped short of pushing for capital punishment.
🐣 RT @AWeissmann_ A special counsel is supposed to be from outside the govt (sec 600.3(a)), so how is this consistent with the Special Counsel regulations? Weiss already messed up the Hunter plea greenest to a fate the well[?] – now this.
⋙ 🐣 RT @kaitlancollins Attorney General Merrick Garland announces that the Trump-appointed US attorney who is investigating Hunter Biden, David Weiss, has been given “special counsel” status. Weiss requested the special counsel status on Tuesday. (After saying in July he had not requested it.)
🐣 RT @politicsusa46 Slowly but surely we are beginning to see now that Hunter Biden’s real crime is being born into the Biden family.
¤ https://twitter.com/politicsusa46/status/1689943738510913536?s=20
If that’s the crime, we’re going to need hundreds of House and Senate members to resign. The business of Washington is trading on your name.
Politicians arrive in Washington from all walks of life. Almost without exception, they leave politics multi-millionaires. This, despite most only earning mid level executive salaries during their tenure. ¤ Family names buy college places, make traffic tickets disappear, and get the best tables in restaurants, but that’s just the beginning.
Comer is a man who has become intoxicated by the popularity of his baseless manufactured attack on HIS President. He has become an example of what it takes to rise and thrive in the Fox News-fed MAGA universe. ¤ His affable country boy veneer hides a cutthroat ambition he has fully embraced at the expense of truth and objectivity. Comer and Jordan are now the Laurel and Hardy of political accountability.
His committee has become a prototype for using the reputation of a televised government space, to broadcast a cynical false narrative which is then reinforced the same day by Fox, using it as a backdrop to selectively push distilled propaganda. It is the political equivalent of slitting the throat of democracy.
The attack on the ‘Biden Crime Family’ is being turned into a fictional Hollywood TV series, where in their own words, they claim they ‘don’t need to find direct payments to Joe Biden to prove corruption in Hunter Biden business dealings’. REALLY?
This is a crime in progress, being perpetrated on the American people by the House Oversight and Judiciary Committees. In an unconscionable twist, it is being funded by the very victims of the crime. ¤ #DemsAct #DemVoice1 #wtpBLUE #ONEV1 #FAM46
NYT: U.S. Attorney Investigating Hunter Biden Is Made a Special Counsel https://tinyurl.com/8mmw8ch5 🚫 //➔ the weight this puts on Hunter Biden is hard to fathom
// Attorney General Merrick Garland made the announcement, the latest development in a long-running inquiry into the actions of the president’s only living son.
🐣 RT @samstein Fairly universal response from the right is that the appointment of Weiss as Special Counsel in the Hunter case is GOOD news for the Bidens. or, at least, BAD news for the case against Hunter
🐣 RT @harrylitman In terms of content of “non-sensitive materials,” most important decision by Chutkan is to exclude — ie to include as sensitive and subject to the protective order — witness transcripts, which would have been the most obvious fodder for Trump to make trouble with.
WaPo: Trump’s free speech must be limited to protect trial, witnesses, judge says https://tinyurl.com/c2brya2a “Chutkan rejected the government’s request for a blanket protective order …, but granted many of prosecutors’ top line requests for limits with some modifications”
// Veteran jurist, tough sentencer of Jan. 6 riot defendants to decide whether to limit what Trump can reveal about government evidence as prosecutors push for January 2024 trial date
The U.S. judge overseeing Donald Trump’s prosecution for allegedly criminally conspiring to overturn Joe Biden’s election victory said while the former president has First Amendment rights to free speech, those rights are not absolute and must be weighed against protecting the integrity of the court process, regardless of his status as a political candidate.
In her first hearing over Trump’s federal case in D.C., U.S. District Judge Tanya S. Chutkan said that the “existence of a political campaign” will not have a bearing on her decisions and that Trump is running for president should not interfere with the “orderly administration of justice.”
“If that means he can’t say exactly what he wants to say about witnesses in this case, then that’s how it’s going to be,” Chutkan said Friday in a hearing where she sought to resolve an early battle over limiting what the former president and his defense can potentially reveal about government evidence in the case. …
In the hearing, Chutkan rejected the government’s request for a blanket protective order over information released in the case, but granted many of prosecutors’ top line requests for limits with some modifications.
The judge did warn that despite the limits of the protective order, all of Trump’s behavior and statements are covered by his conditions of release. So regardless of whether his statements are made from disclosures derived from discovery or not, if they have the affect of interfering with the administration of justice or intimidating or harassing witnesses, the judge will be “scrutinizing them very carefully.”
“This is a criminal case,” Chutkan said. “The need for this criminal case to proceed in normal order and to protect the integrity of the process means there are going to be limits on the defendants speech.”
Chutkan also warned that Trump’s defense is supposed to happen in the courtroom, not the internet, and the safety of witnesses is critical. …
Chutkan has indicated that she wants to set a trial date at her next hearing, which is scheduled for Aug. 28, and prosecutors asked her to issue the protective order first and let Trump ask to modify it later.
Trump pleaded not guilty last week to charges of conspiring to fraudulently subvert the results of the 2020 election, conspiring and attempting to obstruct Congress’s confirmation of the vote on Jan. 6, 2021, and conspiring against Americans’ civil right to have their votes counted. Since then, he has lobbed varying attacks, calling Smith “deranged” and former vice president Mike Pence — a key witness and 2024 GOP rival — “delusional.” Trump has also gone after judges, accusing them of bias. … … tbc
🐣 RT @JoyceWhiteVance How experienced judges do it: “I caution you and your client to take special care about your public statements about this case,” Judge Chutkan said. “I will take whatever measures are necessary to safeguard the integrity of these proceedings.”
🐣 RT @7Veritas4 Judge Chutkan ran the protective order hearing like a boss. ¤ She’s smart, tough but fair, and firmly understands this moment in history and what’s at stake. ¤ The DOJ shot for the moon and wanted all discovery to be under protective order. We didn’t get it. ¤ The defense wanted exemptions for political speech (shenanigans) and to give unfettered access to their yet-to-be-named “volunteer workforce”. They didn’t get it. ¤ If this hearing is a bellwether of her stewardship, she will follow the law and neither side should expect any preferential treatment. …
🐣 RT @CalltoActivism 🚨🚨🚨MAJOR BREAKING: Federal judge Tanya Chutkan has just REJECTED Donald Trump’s request to designate witness transcripts and videos as non-sensitive, and thereby exclude them from the protective order.
¤ https://twitter.com/CalltoActivism/status/1690023929358786560?s=20/photo/1
Said Chutkan: “Disclosure of any of those materials creates too great a risk that witnesses may be intimidated.” ¤ She notes that Trump’s defense is “conflating what your client needs to do to defend himself and what your client wants to do politically. ¤ Your client’s defense is supposed to happen in this courtroom, not on the internet.” … She added: “He is a criminal defendant, he is going to have restrictions like every single other defendant.” …
🐣 RT @kylegriffin1 Judge Chutkan says Trump’s defense is “conflating what your client needs to do to defend himself and what your client wants to do politically. Your client’s defense is supposed to happen in this courtroom, not on the internet.” @NBCNews
🐣 RT @NormEisen Single most important moment in the hearing on the Trump protective order so far: ¤ Chutkan says she “cannot & will not factor” into her decision the effect on political campaigns for either side ¤ If she applies that rule to the scheduling order we are going to trial in Jan. 2024
🧵 RT @kyledcheney TODAY at the federal courthouse in DC: Almost entirely Jan. 6 defendants, Donald Trump and Peter Navarro. (Plus trial of anti-abortion activists charged with barricading a clinic)
📌 [TextLink:] https://twitter.com/kyledcheney/status/1689991942468141056?s=20/photo/1
[ThreadReader:] https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1689991942468141056.html
⋙ 🐣 RT @kyledcheney Trump’s attorneys John Lauro and Todd Blanche are in the building. Hearing starts at 10 with a focus on setting a protective order governing evidence-sharing in the case.
🐣 RT @MikeSington The hammer comes down. Judge Tanya Chutkan rules that justice will take priority over Trump’s political campaign: “The fact that he (Trump) is running a political campaign currently has to yield to the administration of justice, and if that means he can’t say exactly what he wants to say in a political speech, that is just how its going to have to be.”
🧵 RT @Brandi_Buchman TODAY: The birds and I are up early here at the Prettyman courthouse where I await a hearing before Judge Tanya Chutkan on a protective order sought by Special Counsel Jack Smith in Donald Trump’s Jan. 6 indictment. Hearing starts at 10AM ET. I hope you’ll join me for updates.
📌 [TextLink:] https://twitter.com/Brandi_Buchman/status/1689944883962732544?s=20/photo/1
[ThreadReader:] https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1689944883962732544.html
⭕ 10 Aug 2023
😅😜 RT @RandyRainbow New videos (and new indictments) in the works. For now, enjoy this very stable #TBT. 🤣🧠🙄
💽 https://twitter.com/RandyRainbow/status/1689641549691498501?s=20/photo/1
// ♪ “He is the very model of a very stable genius”
Reason, Steven Calibresi: Trump Is Disqualified from Being on Any Election Ballots https://tinyurl.com/c8e85665 “Some will no doubt say that the voters should be the judges of Trump’s insurrection, but that it not what the Constitution says”: Constitutional law review article
[…] Section Three of the Fourteenth Amendment is self-enforcing. It is “the supreme Law of the Land” binding on each of the 50 State Secretaries of State and their subordinates who draw up primary or general election ballots.
State Secretaries of State and their subordinates may not list on their election ballots as candidates for President anyone who is not eligible to hold the office of President. To be eligible to hold the office of President, one must be: 1) a natural born Citizen; 2) thirty-five years or older; 3) a Resident of the United States for fourteen years; and 4) a person who has not broken their oath of office to support the Constitution by engaging “in insurrection or rebellion against the same.”
No jury verdict is required to determine whether a candidate who seeks to run for the presidency on a primary or general election ballot is: a natural born citizen, who is 35 years of age, and fourteen years a resident of the United States. Likewise, no jury verdict or act of Congress is required to keep a Secretary of States and their subordinates from printing ballots with the name “Donald J. Trump” on them.
Keeping Trump off the ballot after his conduct on January 6, 2021 does not deprive him of life, liberty, or property in the same way that a criminal or a civil jury verdict could. It is a privilege to be eligible to run for President of the United States and that privilege does not extend to constitutional oath breakers who engage “in insurrection or rebellion against the same.”
Webster’s 1828 Dictionary of American English defines “insurrection” as follows:
INSURREC’TION, noun [Latin insurgo; in and surgo, to rise.] 1. A rising against civil or political authority; the open and active opposition of a number of persons to the execution of a law in a city or state. It is equivalent to sedition, except that sedition expresses a less extensive rising of citizens. It differs from rebellion, for the latter expresses a revolt, or an attempt to overthrow the government, to establish a different one or to place the country under another jurisdiction. It differs from mutiny, as it respects the civil or political government; whereas a mutiny is an open opposition to law in the army or navy, insurrection is however used with such latitude as to comprehend either sedition or rebellion.… The Fourteenth Amendment bans either inciting an insurrection or a rebellion. Trump is guilty of inciting an insurrection, even if he may not have meant to cause a rebellion.
Some will no doubt say that the voters should be the judges of Trump’s insurrection, but that it not what the Constitution says. The Constitution says that only Presidents who follow their oath of office, which includes taking care that the laws be faithfully executed, are eligible to be on the ballot and to run for re-election.
The Constitution is undemocratic in preventing non-Native born Americans who are under the age of 35 on January 20, 2025 from being on the ballot for President next year. But, we live in a constitutional republic, not an Athenian democracy of mob rule. …
UPDATE: For much more detail on these matters, see Will Baude’s & Michael Stokes Paulsen’s The Sweep and Force of Section Three, forthcoming in the University of Pennsylvania Law Review.
🐣 RT @HeathMayo This is important. The leading principled conservative legal minds in the world all agree: Trump is ineligible to appear on the ballot. ¤ Baude, Paulsen, Calabresi, Luttig… ¤ That is like the conservative legal hall of fame. Pay attention.
🐣 RT @UChicagoLaw “The question of should [Trump] be allowed to take the constitutional oath again and be given constitutional power again is not a question given to any jury,” Prof. @WilliamBaude told @nytimes’ @adamliptak as he and a colleague write about Section 3.
💙 ⋙ NYT, Adam Liptak: Conservative Case Emerges to Disqualify Trump for Role on Jan. 6 https://tinyurl.com/4d2susa9 “The provision’s language is automatic,” the article says, as basic as the requirements that a candidate be 35yo and native-born; it is not up to a jury or an election
// Two law professors active in the Federalist Society wrote that the original meaning of the 14th Amendment makes Donald Trump ineligible to hold government office.
Two prominent conservative law professors have concluded that Donald J. Trump is ineligible to be president under a provision of the Constitution that bars people who have engaged in an insurrection from holding government office. The professors are active members of the Federalist Society, the conservative legal group, and proponents of originalism, the method of interpretation that seeks to determine the Constitution’s original meaning.
The professors — William Baude of the University of Chicago and Michael Stokes Paulsen of the University of St. Thomas — studied the question for more than a year and detailed their findings in a long article to be published next year in The University of Pennsylvania Law Review.
[Baude] summarized the article’s conclusion: “Donald Trump cannot be president — cannot run for president, cannot become president, cannot hold office — unless two-thirds of Congress decides to grant him amnesty for his conduct on Jan. 6.” …
“There are many ways that this could become a lawsuit presenting a vital constitutional issue that potentially the Supreme Court would want to hear and decide,” Professor Paulsen said.
Mr. Trump has already been indicted twice in federal court, in connection with his efforts to overturn the 2020 election and his retention of classified documents. He is also facing charges relating to hush money payments in New York and may soon be indicted in Georgia in a second election case.
Those cases could give rise to prison time or other criminal punishment. The provision examined in the new article concerns a different question: whether Mr. Trump is eligible to hold office.
There is, the article said, “abundant evidence” that Mr. Trump engaged in an insurrection, including by setting out to overturn the result of the 2020 presidential election, trying to alter vote counts by fraud and intimidation, encouraging bogus slates of competing electors, pressuring the vice president to violate the Constitution, calling for the march on the Capitol and remaining silent for hours during the attack itself.
“It is unquestionably fair to say that Trump ‘engaged in’ the Jan. 6 insurrection through both his actions and his inaction,” the article said. ¤ Steven G. Calabresi, a law professor at Northwestern and Yale and a founder of the Federalist Society, called the article “a tour de force.” …
The provision in question is Section 3 of the 14th Amendment. Adopted after the Civil War, it bars those who had taken an oath “to support the Constitution of the United States” from holding office if they then “shall have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same, or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof.” ¤ Congress can remove the prohibition, the provision says, but only by a two-thirds vote in each House. …
The article concluded that essentially all of that evidence pointed in the same direction: “toward a broad understanding of what constitutes insurrection and rebellion and a remarkably, almost extraordinarily, broad understanding of what types of conduct constitute engaging in, assisting, or giving aid or comfort to such movements.”
It added, “The bottom line is that Donald Trump both ‘engaged in’ ‘insurrection or rebellion’ and gave ‘aid or comfort’ to others engaging in such conduct, within the original meaning of those terms as employed in Section 3 of the 14th Amendment.” …
The provision’s language is automatic, the article said, establishing a qualification for holding office no different in principle from the Constitution’s requirement that only people who are at least 35 years old are eligible to be president.
“Section 3’s disqualification rule may and must be followed — applied, honored, obeyed, enforced, carried out — by anyone whose job it is to figure out whether someone is legally qualified to office,” the authors wrote. That includes election administrators, the article said.
Professor Calabresi said those administrators must act. “Trump is ineligible to be on the ballot, and each of the 50 state secretaries of state has an obligation to print ballots without his name on them,” he said, adding that they may be sued for refusing to do so. …
“The question of should Donald Trump go to jail is entrusted to the criminal process,” he said. “The question of should he be allowed to take the constitutional oath again and be given constitutional power again is not a question given to any jury.”
🐣 RT @ProjectLincoln Earlier this week, Ohioans showed us who can stop radical Republicans from invading our privacy and curbing our rights: voters. ¤ It’s going to take ALL of us to continue this momentum into 2024.
💽 https://twitter.com/ProjectLincoln/status/1689766071807655937?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @RonFilipkowski He’s basically Robert E. Lee after Petersburg fell. The war is over, it’s only a matter of time how long he is going to hold out and how many more people he drags down with him while he attempts to delay the inevitable.
[TextLink:] https://twitter.com/RonFilipkowski/status/1689765674065727488?s=20/photo/1
[Text:] 🐣 RT @realDonaldTrump Deranged Jack Smith has just asked for a trial on the Biden Indictment to take place on January 2nd., just ahead of the important lowa Caucuses. Only an out of touch lunatic would ask for such a date, ONE DAY into the New Year, and maximum Election Interference with IOWA! Such a trial, which should never take place due to my First Amendment Rights, and massive BIDEN CORRUPTION, should only happen, if at all, AFTER THE ELECTION. The same with other Fake Biden Indictments. ELECTION INTERFERENCE!
🐣 RT @AntiToxicPeople NEW: Deranged liar attacks major witness who he almost got killed on January 6th and calls the witness a liar. #VeryStableGenius
[TextLink:] https://twitter.com/AntiToxicPeople/status/1689753151447224323?s=20/photo/1
[Text:] 🐣 RT @realDonald Trump I never asked Mike Pence to “disregard the Constitution.” Nor did I tell him that he was “too honest.” He is under great pressure and getting very bad advice from Marc “Long” and perhaps some of his other advisers. His Poll numbers have just gone down from an already anemic level. Liddle’ Mike now wants to be a tough guy. He could have had greatness, but chose another path!
🐣 RT @AntiToxicPeople WHAT THE HELL? Insane.
[TextLink:] https://twitter.com/AntiToxicPeople/status/1689742992461152257?s=20/photo/1
[Text:] 🐣 RT @realDonald Trump These Fake Indictments against me didn’t come down from heaven, they came from the most corrupt President in the history of the United States, Crooked Joe Biden, in order to Rig & Steal another Election. They shouldn’t even be allowed to go forward. They are all about Election Interference and getting even with the Republicans for the Congressional Hearings currently taking place that show Joe Biden is a CROOK!
🔄 💙 NYT, Adam Liptak: Conservative Case Emerges to Disqualify Trump for Role on Jan. 6 https://tinyurl.com/4d2susa9 “The provision’s language is automatic,” the article says, as basic as the requirements that a candidate be 35yo and native-born; it is not up to a jury or an election
¤ https://twitter.com/Auriandra/status/1689925227981971456?s=20
⋙ ✛ Read here: The Sweep and Force of Section Three, by William Baude (U of Chicago) and Michael Stokes Paulsen (U of St Thomas), forthcoming @PennLRev https://tinyurl.com/2rccwnc4 (I suggest reading the Abstract and the Conclusion; both reference Trump directly)
[TextLink (Abstract):] https://twitter.com/Auriandra/status/1689925229278019584?s=20/photo/1
pdf download: https://tinyurl.com/mw552mxm
⇈ ⇊
🐣 RT @judgeluttig This forthcoming @PennLRev law review article on Section 3 of the Fourteenth Amendment by my friends and constitutional scholars @WilliamBaude and @MStokesPaulsen promises to be of monumental — and historic, if not also contemporary — importance to Constitutional Law.
¤ https://twitter.com/judgeluttig/status/1689719994240925696?s=20
// “Section 3 of the Fourteenth Amendment prohibits anyone who has previously taken an oath of office (Senators, Representatives, and other public officials) from holding public office if they have “engaged in insurrection or rebellion” against the United States.”
⋙ 🐣 RT @WilliamBaude New Article: The Sweep and Force of Section Three, by Michael Stokes Paulsen and me, forthcoming @PennLRev https://tinyurl.com/2rccwnc4
[TextLink:] https://twitter.com/WilliamBaude/status/1689709984744095747?s=20/photo/1
[Text:] The Sweep and Force of Section Three
University of Pennsylvania Law Review, Vol. 172, 2024
126 Pages • Posted:
Willam Baude
University of Chicago – Law School
Michael Stokes Paulsen
Date Written: August 9, 2023
Abstract:
Section Three of the Fourteenth Amendment forbids holding office by former office holders who then participate in insurrection or rebellion. Because of a range of misperceptions and mistaken assumptions. Section Three’s full legal consequences have not been appreciated or enforced. This article corrects those mistakes by setting forth the full sweep and force of Section Three.First, Section Three remains an enforceable part of the Constitution, not limited to the Civil War, and not effectively repealed by nineteenth century amnesty legislation. Second, Section Three is self-executing, operating as an immediate disqualification from office, without the need for additional action by Congress. It can and should be enforced by every official, state or federal, who judges qualifications. Third, to the extent of any conflict with prior constitutional rules, Section Three repeals, supersedes, or simply satisfies them. This includes the rules against bills of attainder or ex post facto laws, the Due Process Clause, and even the free speech principles of the First Amendment. Fourth, Section Three covers a broad range of conduct against the authority of the constitutional order, induding many instances of indirect participation or support as “aid or comfort.” It covers a broad range of former offices, including the Presidency. And in particular, it disqualifies former President Donald Trump, and potentially many others, in the attempted overthrow of the 2020 presidential election. […]
From Conclusion:
“We think that if these constitutional duties are taken seriously, there is a list of candidates and officials who must face judgment under Section Three. Former president Donald Trump is at the top of that list, but he is not the end of it. As we have said, it is not for us to say who all is disqualified by virtue of Section Three’s constitutional rule. That is the duty and responsibility of many officials, administrators, legislators, and judges throughout the country. Where they are called on to decide eligibility to office, they are called on to enforce Section Three, applying the Constitution’s legal standard to the facts before them in a given instance. Our point is to emphasize Section Three’s continuing force, and broad sweep.“At all events, if a President or former President of the United States; a current or former officer of the federal executive branch; a Member or former Member of Congress; a current or former state legislator or state executive official; or a current or former federal or state court judge, planned, supported, assisted, encouraged, endorsed, or aided in a material way those who engaged in the insurrection of January 6, or otherwise knowingly and willfully participated in a broader rebellion against the constitutional system, such persons are constitutionally disqualified from office. In such situations, Section Three’s constitutional disqualifications can, should, and must be carried out.”
🐣 RT @FBI Today, the Director of National Intelligence released the 2023 National Intelligence Strategy, which provides strategic direction for the Intelligence Community over the next four years. Read more at: https://tinyurl.com/2kd7bneb
[TextLink:] https://twitter.com/FBI/status/1689720815518961664?s=20/photo/1 -2
[Text:] [pdf] https://tinyurl.com/bdhmjrrp 20p
Position the IC for Intensifying Strategic Competition
Strategic competition from powers that layer authoritarian governance with a revisionist foreign policy is a principal challenge to a free, open, secure, and prosperous world. The PRC is the only U.S. competitor with both the intent to reshape the international order and, increasingly, the economic, diplomatic, military, and technological power to do so. Russia poses an immediate and ongoing threat to the regional security order in Europe and Eurasia and is a source of disruption and instability globally, but it lacks the across-the-spectrum capabilities of the PRC.
Leadership in technology and innovation has long underpinned our economic prosperity and military strength, and will be critical to outcompeting our rivals, advancing our interests, and safeguarding democracy. The United States must be able to identify the applications and implications of emerging technologies, understand supply chains, and use economic statecraft tools- in coordination with our allies and partners to ensure strategic competitors are not able to undermine our competitiveness and national security.
The IC must deepen and expand its expertise, strengthen its collection and analytic capabilities, and embrace new partnerships and external perspectives to address policymaker needs in this more competitive environment. The IC will invest in developing innovative methods and cultivating new sources, and work more systematically with allies and partners and public and private sector partners to facilitate a common understanding of technological and other risks and how to address them. Given the global nature of strategic competition, the IC will establish methods and systems that promote greater interoperability and
understanding across traditional and distinct geographic and functional areas. These efforts are essential to the IC’s success as a key element of national power in this competition.The IC will improve its ability to provide timely and accurate insights into competitor intentions, capabilities, and actions by strengthening capabilities in language, technical, and cultural expertise and harnessing open source, “big data,” artificial intelligence, and advanced analytics. The IC also must enhance its ability to understand how countries in every region of the world perceive, are implicated by, and seek to navigate this new landscape, and assess their opportunities to enhance strategic relationships with the United States. At the same time, the IC will improve its understanding of how non-state actors might use their growing resources and capacity to exert unilateral and collective influence in a way that could support or undermine U.S. national security. And above all else, the IC will use its authorities and capabilities in ways that strengthen our democratic foundations and principles as we seek to counter increasingly autocratic competitors.
🐣 RT @NunnyaBids The “battle” for the “future of our democracy” can only be “won” with #RankedChoiceVoting = #RCV ¤ Expanding beyond two entrenched choices is the only way to make our political world into a democracy … instead of a “battle”.
◕ 🌎 https://twitter.com/NunnyaBids/status/1644417377365532672?s=20/photo/1 -4
⋙ 🐣 RT @ Yep, outrage media drives hatred of “the OTHER side” of the corrupt two-party system. The number 2⃣ is the💩problem!
#RCV = #RankedChoiceVoting encourages open discussion of multiple alternatives, freeing us from the poisonous “Us vs. Them” mindset.
¤ https://twitter.com/NunnyaBids/status/1617087831759020034
// Ranked Choice Voting
🐣 RT @MacFarlaneNews [CBS] FLASH: In new court filing, Special Counsel Jack Smith recommends Dec 11, 2023 for jury selection and Jan 2, 2024 for trial in Trump’s 2020 election conspiracy case
[CourtDoc:] https://twitter.com/MacFarlaneNews/status/1689696118441967616?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @TomJChicago Trump’s escalating psychotic behavior, along w/ his enablers running anti-prosecution ads, ensures that he will end up receiving a gag order. A psychiatric evaluation would also be good. When he breaks the gag order, he’s breaking bail and it will be necessary to put him in detention without comms to the outside. He wants to have extremely bad things done to the people holding him accountable. Anything less than his confinement is unworkable.
WaPo, Philip Bump: So where’s the bribe, James Comer? https://tinyurl.com/3wdfwh7f “[T]here’s not a whiff of the alleged $5 million paid to Joe Biden by [Ukrainian oligarch] Zlochevsky. It’s less than a phantom. There’s no alleged bribe to Hunter Biden, either”
It has now been more than three months since House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer (R-Ky.) and Sen. Charles E. Grassley (R-Iowa) issued a release in which they accused President Biden of having been “allegedly engaged in a bribery scheme with a foreign national.”
That allegation was based on an FBI interview of an informant who had spoken with Mykola Zlochevsky, founder of the Ukrainian energy company Burisma. If validated, it would mark not only a significant legal violation on the part of Biden, but the first time that Comer’s breathless efforts to tie Biden to foreign payments was actually demonstrated. …
The idea that Biden (and his son Hunter Biden, who served on Burisma’s board) had been bribed took hold as an article of faith on the right. Fox News has mentioned “bribe” or “bribery” in the context of “Biden” more than 1,100 times since the allegation was first made — despite the lack of evidence beyond that FBI interview document and despite the erosion of the credibility of the allegation in at least two ways. Hunter Biden’s business associate Devon Archer testified under penalty of perjury that Joe Biden wasn’t involved in his son’s business. Meanwhile, an old conversation between Zlochevsky and an ally of former president Donald Trump’s lawyer Rudy Giuliani was unearthed in which Zlochevsky denied having any contact with or receiving any assistance from Joe Biden.
… [N]one of the $20 million that Comer claims went to “the Biden family and their business associates” … was shown to have gone to Joe Biden.
… After three months, a period that clearly included more assessments of income received by Hunter Biden (though a lot of the $20 million was already reported), there’s not a whiff of the alleged $5 million paid to Joe Biden by Zlochevsky. It’s less than a phantom.
There’s no alleged bribe to Hunter Biden, either. The new report from Comer delineates regular payments to Hunter Biden and Archer in 2014 and 2015 totaling about $3.3 million. The document points at whistleblower testimony claiming that the pair earned $6.5 million from Burisma. That’s not $5 million for Hunter Biden — and it’s not obviously a “bribe.” The pair sat on the company’s board and, according to Archer’s testimony, did board-related work for Burisma, however obviously derived from Hunter Biden’s last name their work might have been. […] What Comer’s evidence shows, though, so far extends no further than Hunter Biden giving the impression that he might be able to influence his father. …
Speaking on Fox News last month, Comer and House Judiciary Chairman Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) implied that the alleged bribe was paid so that Biden, then vice president, would push for the firing of Ukraine’s prosecutor general. This has been debunked repeatedly, for nearly four years. The timeline presented on Fox didn’t match actual events, and Archer had testified that the eventual firing was understood to be detrimental to Burisma, not beneficial.
But it’s all Comer’s got. His team tried to dig up this bribe that they have convinced their allies exists, without luck. So he issues a news release about the “Biden family” and suggests that bribery claims don’t need actual proof and prepares for his next Sean Hannity interview.
🐣 RT @lindyli Ivanka Trump got 18 trademarks from China & $100 million from the Saudis for her fund
Kushner got $2 billion from MBS, $1 billion from Qatar & $200 million from the UAE
Trump made a killing from hosting LIV & was funded by laundered Russian money
But sure “Biden is the prob”🙄
⭕ 9 Aug 2023
🐣 RT @metroadlib Seriously– ¤ Whether you hate him or not, *surely* we can all agree that this is spectacularly beyond the pale. ¤ He could have EASILY disclosed these things. He *hasn’t* b/c he knows EXACTLY how it looks. And it looks EXACTLY like what it is.
⋙ ≣ ProPublica: Clarence Thomas’ 38 Vacations: The Other Billionaires Who Have Treated the Supreme Court Justice to Luxury Travel https://tinyurl.com/skv7rhzw
🐣 RT @AntiToxicPeople “Projection is stating that other people have certain traits or characteristics, or engage in certain behaviors, when you yourself are actually the person who acts that way.” ¤ The psychopath now says Joe Biden is “dumb and incompetent…and he has gone MAD, a stark raving Lunatic”
[TextLink:] https://twitter.com/AntiToxicPeople/status/1689638362804875264?s=20/photo/1
[Text:] 🐣 RT @ @realDonald Trump I think that Crooked Joe Biden is not only dumb and incompetent, I believe he has gone MAD, a stark raving Lunatic, with his HORRIBLE AND COUNTRY THREATENING ENVIRONMENTAL, OPEN BORDERS, & DOJ/FBI WEAPONIZATION POLICIES. HE IS A MENTAL CATASTROPHE THAT IS LEADING OUR COUNTRY TO HELL!
🐣 RT @twitter_dude I´ve compiled key findings from the report on the Russian genocidal war on Ukraine into a graphic. I know, it´s packed with a mess of info, nonetheless, I think it was worth my time for the sake of presenting an holistic view on the ongoing war crimes committed by Russia.
◕ https://twitter.com/witter_dude/status/1689183212738658306?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @RpsAgainstTrump .@gtconway3d on the news that the FBI shot and killed a Utah man who threatened to kill President Biden: ¤ “All it takes is one man with one gun and one incident and you kill a few people. That’s that’s the scary aspect of it. Donald Trump creates a permission structure these people would not otherwise have to do this. He basically endorses this. He encourages it.”
💽 https://twitter.com/RpsAgainstTrump/status/1689468138474065920?s=20/photo/1
WaPo, Paul Farhi: An architect of Fox’s success picks a new target: Fox https://tinyurl.com/49fauuvy “Padden said he bears no animus toward Murdoch, but he says Fox has done ‘grievous harm’ to the country and should be held accountable”
// Preston Padden, who once worked for Rupert Murdoch, argues that Fox News ‘undermined our democracy’
🐣 RT @Acyn Bolling: Fani Willis… there’s some discussion that she may have some questionable background ¤ Trump: This woman is not a capable woman.
💽 https://twitter.com/Acyn/status/1689431736042586112?s=20/photo/1
// Trump trying to defame Willis; racist and sexual insinuations
🐣 RT @RightWingWatch John Eastman says that if Trump’s effort to overturn the 2020 election had been successful, “one hopes that our military” would have understood its obligation to quell any riots because failure to do so would mean “subjecting yourself to mob rule.” https://bit.ly/3qsLuaj
💽 https://twitter.com/RightWingWatch/status/1689313318748528645?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @EdKrassen BREAKING: The FBI has reportedly shot and killed Craig Deleeuw Robertson of Utah, as they tried to execute an arrest warrant on him at his residence in Provo, Utah early this morning.
¤ https://twitter.com/EdKrassen/status/1689375595698761728?s=20/photo/1 -4
The FBI was investigating Robertson for allegedly making threats directed at Joe Biden and Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg. ¤ He reportedly made threatening social media posts including saying “I hear [XXXXX] is coming to Utah. Digging out my hold Ghillie suit and cleaning the dust off the M24 sniper rifle.”
He also disgustingly said “In my dream I see [XXX XXXXX]’s body in a dark corner of a DC parking garage with his head severed and lying in a huge puddle of blood. Hoorah!”
In March he made a post saying ““I’ll be waiting in the courthouse parking garage with my suppressed Smith & Wesson M&P 9mm to smoke a radical fool prosecutor that should never have been elected,” he posted. “BYE, BYE, TO ANOTHER CORRUPT B______!!!”
The shooting took place at around 6:15 AM. ¤ Complete details of the shooting were not yet made public. Below are reported photos of Robertson and his social media page.
🐣 RT @ itsJeffTiedrich listen up, stupids:
you told us Joe Biden was corrupt. fine, we said, show us your evidence.
you bought out some disgraced FBI agents. they had no evidence.
then you trotted out some overzealous IRS agents. they had no evidence.
then you bragged about some whistleblower who you said had tapes. he turned out to be a spy for the Chinese and a fugitive from justice and, uh-oh, his evidence didn’t exist.
then you yammered on about some business associate of Hunter Biden’s who you said knew everything. but he said he didn’t know anything.
meanwhile, your guy has committed a shitload of crimes for which there is a fuck-ton of evidence.
you see, evidence matters.
that’s why Donald Trump is super fucked
🐣 RT @djrothkopf Greece. Sicily. Maui. Heat so intense in parts of the Mideast that human survival is near impossible. Deaths in Arizona from bare feet burnt from contact with the pavement. Florida waters the temperature of a hot tub. ¤ We did this. We are doing this. And we must act to stop it.
⋙ 🐣 RT @jrothkopf As for big energy, this is on you & you should be held accountable in every way permissible by law. And as for the deniers (liars and fools) you are accomplices and your children and grandchildren will pay the price for what you have helped enable…and they will hate you for it.
🐣 RT @stengel Please don’t take the bait that the Jan 6 indictment violates the defendant’s First Amendment right. His lies about election fraud are protected. What’s not protected is illegally setting up phony electors based on those lies. That’s what he’s indicted for.
🐣 RT @TheRickWilson There’s is a disturbance in the Force.
🐣 RT @ AntiToxicPeople 🚨🚨🚨🚨BREAKING: A Utah man was shot and killed during an FBI raid early Wednesday morning, the FBI confirmed to ABC News. The raid was in connection with an investigation into alleged threats against President Biden and others
⋙ ABCNews: Man killed during FBI raid in connection with threats against Biden, other officials https://tinyurl.com/y5a9edw9
// Craig Robertson was shot and killed during an FBI raid early Wednesday morning.
Robertson was facing three counts, according to the complaint — interstate threats, threats against the president, and influencing, impeding and retaliating against federal law enforcement officers by threat.
The complaint includes numerous social media posts believed to have been made by Robertson threatening to kill Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris, as well as several officials involved in prosecuting former President Donald Trump.
The president is scheduled to visit Utah on Wednesday. ¤ Among the posts allegedly made by Robertson was one published on Aug. 6, three days before Biden’s scheduled visit, according to the complaint. “I hear Biden is coming to Utah. Digging out my old ghillie suit and cleaning the dust off the M24 sniper rifle,” the post said, according to the complaint, which referred to the post as a “willful true threat to kill or cause injury to kill President Biden.”
🐣 RT @clearing_fog When I read Chesebro’s December 6th memo last night it made me so angry that I didn’t even want to post about it. ¤ It is absolutely damning, and proves they were conspiring to discount millions of our votes, specifically to keep Biden from reaching 270.
≣ [NYT Doc:] https://tinyurl.com/ynp3zwk2
🐣 RT @AntiToxicPeople U N H I N G E D 🤪
[TextLink:] https://twitter.com/AntiToxicPeople/status/1689340583528247297?s=20/photo/1
[Text:] 🐣 RT @realDonald Trump Just found out that Crooked Joe Biden’s DOJ secretly attacked my Twitter account, making it a point not to let me know about this major “hit” on my civil rights. My Political Opponent is going CRAZY trying to infringe on my Campaign for President. Nothing like this has ever happened before. Does the First Amendment still exist? Did Deranged Jack Smith tell the Unselects to DESTROY & DELETE all evidence? These are DARK DAYS IN AMERICAI
🐣 RT @l78lancer All eyes should be on Grassley, and rightly so. ¤ Grassley knew.
[TextLink:] https://twitter.com/l78lancer/status/1689313862258937857?s=20/photo/1
[Text:] […] At this point, the Vice President will recuse himself, on the basis that as a candidate for election himself, and given that there is dispute about the electoral votes of some of the States, and especially given that it might well be the responsibility of the President of the Senate to actually count the votes, he has a conflict of interest, and he feels he cannot participate in the proceeding — just as Vice President Humphrey recused himself in the January, 1969, electoral vote count. See Kesavan at 1702 n.219. And just as the Vice President, who presides during impeachment trials, does not preside during an impeachment trial of the President.
At this point, the Vice President will have emphasized the need for focus on plain language and adherence to the Constitution, by rejecting the role of presiding officer imposed by the Electoral Count Act. He will also have made clear that he and the President are not going to be involved in counting the votes concerning their own election, which is why he feels
bound to recuse himself on conflict-of-interest grounds, just as a Democrat did previously.Of course, politically this will insulate him and the President from what will happen next. For it is much easier for someone acting as President of the Senate to defend the prerogatives of the office if he has no conflict of interest (other than, of course, a patisan interest, which is unavoidable).
In the absence of the Vice President, the president pro tempore acts as the President of the Senate, and thus is the one with the sole power and responsibility to play that role in the joint session. So regardless of whether it is Chuck Grassley or another senior Republican who agrees to take on the role of defending the constitutional prerogatives of the President of the Senate, whoever it is then proceeds to open and count first Alabama, and then Alaska, at which point Trump and Pence are leading 12-0.
He then opens the two envelopes from Arizona, and announces that he cannot and will not, at least as of that date, count any electoral votes from Arizona because there are two slates of votes, and it is clear that the Arizona courts did not give a full and fair opportunity for review of election irregularities, in violation of due process.
🐣 RT @RonFilipkowski The good news is, these are the kind of people Trump listens to. Not his lawyers.
[TextLink:] https://twitter.com/RonFilipkowski/status/1689308719090204673?s=20/photo/1
[Text:] 🐣 RT @marklevinshow If the Obama-donating and appointed radical leftwing judge in DC attempts to gag President * TruPostn any significant way, at the behest of the Biden regime, Trump should defy her order and immediately take the matter to the Supreme Court. If she orders him sent to jail for defying such an order, it’ll be the first time in American history such an outrageous act has been taken to silence a presidential candidate, making Trump officially a political prisoner of the Biden regime and their judge. Free speech, the right to defend yourself in the court of public opinion (especially given the relentless leaking by the prosecution), and the right to speak as a candidate when indictments are being used by the opposition party and your political opponents to defeat you (and which they talk about constantly), Trump cannot be gagged this way.
🐣 RT @ AWeissmann_ Trump judge in docs case makes misguided argument curiously similar to Fox News guest: Weissmann […]
⋙ 💽 MSNBC, AlexWagnerTonight: Trump judge in docs case makes misguided argument curiously similar to Fox News guest: Weissmann https://tinyurl.com/fhsc7x76
// Andrew Weissmann, former federal prosecutor, talks with Alex Wagner about the remarkably ill-informed challenge by Judge Aileen Cannon of Justice Department procedure in the Donald Trump classified documents case, and its curious similarity to an identical argument made by a former Trump attorney on Fox News the previous day.
🐣 RT @AccountableGOP Chris Christie: ¤ “When Donald Trump came out at 2:30 A.M. and said the elections been stolen…That was it for me…To this day, the majority of our party believes the 2020 election was stolen because Donald Trump lied to them and they bought the lie.”
💽 https://twitter.com/AccountableGOP/status/1689317710864187393?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @MuellerSheWrotr BREAKING: sources tell CNN DA Fani Willis will seek more than a dozen indictments. She’s set to present her case to the grand jury next week.
⋙ CNN: Atlanta-area prosecutor expected to seek more than a dozen indictments in Trump case https://tinyurl.com/yk5xvcvy
🐣 RT @Principles_1st 🚨🚨 #PrinciplesFirst alert: ¤ Judge Luttig: “For the two and a half years since Jan. 6, these false claims have corrupted American democracy. They corrupted American elections and they’ve corrupted the perception of the American people in America herself.”
💽 https://twitter.com/Principles_1st/status/1689310861683302402?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @kylegriffin1 Special counsel Jack Smith’s election interference investigation is ongoing — and he’s still looking at the finances of Trump’s PAC, with at least one interview this week that focused on fundraising and spending by the political action committee.
⋙ Politico: Special counsel still scrutinizing finances of Trump’s PAC https://tinyurl.com/4e7j68kj
// A week after the newest indictment of the former president, Jack Smith’s investigation remains ongoing.
🐣 RT @NoToAltFacts1 Has he never heard of Google?
⋙ GovInfo[.].gov: Select January 6th Committee Final Report and Supporting Materials Collection https://tinyurl.com/mu2ey5jj
🐣 RT @AntiToxicPeople The dude is a delusional lunatic. He really belongs in a padded room. This is batshit crazy made up nonsense at new levels even for him. I mean, seriously. This is beyond insane.
[TextLink:] https://twitter.com/AntiToxicPeople/status/1689122371171692544?s=20/photo/1
[Text:] 🐣 RT @realDonaldTrump The January 6th Unselect Committee got rid of EVERY THING! Discarded, Deleted, Thrown Out. A Flagrant Violation of the law. They had so much to hide, and now that I have Subpoena Power, they didn’t want to get caught. They knew EXACTLY what they were doing. AN EGREGIOUS CRIMINAL ACT & BLATANT DISREGARD OF THE LAW! Can you imagine if I would have done such a thing???
🐣 RT @ChrisDJackson 🚨 I was just listening to @MollyJongFast’s podcast interview with
@MaryLTrump this morning and heard Mary say something great: ¤ “Joe Biden is the best president of my lifetime.” Wow! This is great not only because it is 💯, but also because it has to really get under her uncle’s thin skin! ¤ I agree with Mary! How about you?
🖼 https://twitter.com/ChrisDJackson/status/1689255802819710977?s=20/photo/1
NYT: Previously Secret Memo Laid Out Strategy for Trump to Overturn Biden’s Win https://tinyurl.com/urb7uchj “The memo had been a missing piece in the public record of how Mr. Trump’s allies developed their strategy to overturn Mr. Biden’s victory.”
// The House Jan. 6 committee’s investigation did not uncover the memo, whose existence first came to light in last week’s indictment.
A lawyer allied with President Donald J. Trump first laid out a plot to use false slates of electors to subvert the 2020 election in a previously unknown internal campaign memo that prosecutors are portraying as a crucial link in how the Trump team’s efforts evolved into a criminal conspiracy.
The existence of the Dec. 6, 2020, memo came to light in last week’s indictment of Mr. Trump, though its details remained unclear. But a copy obtained by The New York Times shows for the first time that the lawyer, Kenneth Chesebro, acknowledged from the start that he was proposing “a bold, controversial strategy” that the Supreme Court “likely” would reject in the end.
But even if the plan did not ultimately pass legal muster at the highest level, Mr. Chesebro argued that it would achieve two goals. It would focus attention on claims of voter fraud and “buy the Trump campaign more time to win litigation that would deprive Biden of electoral votes and/or add to Trump’s column.”
The memo had been a missing piece in the public record of how Mr. Trump’s allies developed their strategy to overturn Mr. Biden’s victory. In mid-December, the false Trump electors could go through the motions of voting as if they had the authority to do so. Then, on Jan. 6, 2021, Vice President Mike Pence could unilaterally count those slates of votes, rather than the official and certified ones for Joseph R. Biden Jr.
While that basic plan itself was already known, the document, described by prosecutors as the “fraudulent elector memo,” provides new details about how it originated and was discussed behind the scenes. Among those details is Mr. Chesebro’s proposed “messaging” strategy to explain why pro-Trump electors were meeting in states where Mr. Biden was declared the winner. The campaign would present that step as “a routine measure that is necessary to ensure” that the correct electoral slate could be counted by Congress if courts or legislatures later concluded that Mr. Trump had actually won the states. …
KyivIndependent, Francis Farrell: Kyivan Rus, then and now https://tinyurl.com/t5rwtwuw “The territories of Kyivan Rus included much of modern-day Ukraine, Belarus, and western parts of Russia. Located in the center of trade routes, it was a link between Europe and the Arab East”
// history of Ukraine
🐣 RT @AWeissmann_ It is not clear why Trump’s lawyers have not already violated the DC court’s Criminal Rule 57.7(b)(1) & (3), which prohibit the media blitz they have engaged in this past week. I wd not be surprised if the Court and govt raise this at Friday’s DC hearing on the protective order.
🐣 RT @AWeissmann_ Bail means restrictions on your rights, up to and including your actual liberty if you are jailed pending trial. Trump is on bail in 3 cases so his rights are subject to court restrictions like any other defendant.
🐣 RT @7Veritas4 Let’s break down this morning gem.
● “Thrown up at me, quickly and haphazardly” = 2.5 years of investigations, multiple grand juries, thousands of depositions, multiple failed appeals (by him) to the Appellate and Supreme Court.
● “It’s not like the state or country is coming down on me” = criminally indicted by a jury of his peers in New York (his original home state) Florida (his new home state), DC and in a few days, Georgia. ¤ Criminally indicted by the United States of America. Twice. So far.
● “Election Interference” – one of the crimes he’s being indicted for.
[TextLink:] https://twitter.com/7Veritas4/status/1689254545191227392?s=20/photo/1
[Text:] 🐣 RT @realDonaldTrump Remember, these Indictments aren’t “Legit, they were all thrown up at me, quickly an haphazardly, including the local ones, by my political opponent, Crooked Joe Biden. It’s not like the State or Country is coming down on me. It’s a dishonest politician and his gang of Thugs breaking the law in order to get re-elected. There should be OUTRAGE at this, a new LOW in American Politics. ELECTION INTERFERENCE! The good news is that the PEOPLE “get it,” and so does the Fake News!
⭕ 8 Aug 2023
🐣 RT @judgeluttig This article in @Just_Security by @tribelaw should be required reading for every court in the land, every member of the legal profession, and every law student and aspiring lawyer.
⋙ JustSecurity, Lawrence Tribe: Anatomy of a Fraud: Kenneth Chesebro’s Misrepresentation of My Scholarship in His Efforts to Overturn the 2020 Presidential Election https://tinyurl.com/2vbv9cdx
🐣 RT @TheSWPrincess “You know, at some point, Joe is gonna have to say, you know, the son thing just isn’t working out.” [~Trump]
Beau Biden, one of the 2 surviving children from Biden’s first marriage, was a veteran who died of cancer. ¤ Hunter is the only remaining child from Joe’s first marriage, which ended with a tragic car accident that killed Biden’s first wife, and his 13 month old daughter, Naomi.
🐣 RT @AWeissmann_ BREAKING: if you are wondering why Judge Cannon issued on 8/7, without the defense requesting it, an Order directing the government why it was using a non-FLA grand jury, here is an answer: on 8/6 former Trump lawyer [Trusty] was on Fox raising that entirely bogus issue. 1/2 clip attached
💽 https://twitter.com/AWeissmann_/status/1689015991248855040?s=20/photo/1
⋙ 🐣 RT @AWeissmann_ You really had to wonder what gave her the idea for the Order, since she raised it on her own, and there was nothing about the known litigation record that raised the issue she flagged, which is so wrong legally.
🐣 RT @svdate Wait. Didn’t he say he *liked* being indicted because it was helping him in the polls? ¤ That he was getting indicted for us? Sort of like Jesus? ¤ And now he wants it “withdrawn”?
[TextLink:] https://twitter.com/svdate/status/1689102102587412480?s=20/photo/1
[Text:] 🐣 RT @realDonaldTrump So now that I have full Subpoena Power because of the Freedom of Speech Sham Indictment by Crooked Joe Biden, Deranged Jack Smith, and the DOJ, it has just been reported that the Unselect January 6th Committee of Political Hacks and Thugs has illegally destroyed their Records and Documents. This is unthinkable, and the Fake Political Indictment against me must be immediately withdrawn. The system is Rigged & Corrupt, very much like the Presidential Election of 2020. We are a Nation in Decline!
🐣 RT @hugolowell NEW: Fulton County DA Fani Willis is expected to present evidence to a grand jury next week and ask it to return indictments as early as Tuesday over Trump’s efforts to subvert 2020 election, per people familiar. @guardian latest w/ @jewelwickershow
⋙ TheGuardian: Fulton county prosecutors to seek new 2020 election charges next week https://tinyurl.com/yvdvp949
// District attorney Fani Willis had indicated to her staff they were sufficiently prepared to go to trial tomorrow
🐣 RT @BillKristol “Banning abortion appears equally ‘out of kilter’ with majority public sentiment in Arizona, Nevada, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin—swing states where Democrats must defend Senate seats next year.”
⋙ CNN: How Ohio’s ballot vote could preview the 2024 politics of abortion https://tinyurl.com/yeyjt8eu
// The ballot initiative Ohio voters will decide Tuesday is likely to demonstrate again the continuing public resistance to last year’s Supreme Court
🐣 RT @FrankFigliuzzi1 This isn’t over yet. When you raise millions based on a fraudulent claim, you’ve committed a crime. And, you just might have to give those millions back…Special counsel still scrutinizing finances of Trump’s PAC https://politi.co/47lMoGh via @politico
🐣 RT @ChuckPfarrer FLASH TRAFFIC / KHERSON /1600 UTC 8 AUG / UKR has launched a surprise crossing of the Dnipro in the vicinity of Kozachi Laheri. It has been confirmed that a significant UKR force has effected a lodgment approximately 800 meters deep N of the village.
🌎 https://twitter.com/ChuckPfarrer/status/1688941957744082945?s=20/photo/1
WaPo: Ohio voters reject higher bar for altering constitution, a win for abortion rights supporters https://tinyurl.com/mwhtt5uy “With about 88 percent of votes counted Tuesday night, 56.5 percent voted against the proposal, while 43.5 percent supported it”
// Ahead of a November vote on abortion rights, Republican lawmakers wanted voters to make it more difficult to amend the state constitution
🐣 RT @BradMossEsq This might come up on Friday at the hearing.
[TextLink:] https://twitter.com/BradMossEsq/status/1689037540207034368?s=20/photo/1
[Text:] 🐣 RT @realDonaldTrump The Obama appointed Judge in the FREE SPEECH Indictment of me by my political opponent, Crooked Joe Biden’s Department of In Justice, shared professional ties at the law firm that worked for Energy Company Burisma, based in Ukraine, of which Hunter Biden and his associate were “proud” MEMBERS OF THE BOARD, and were paid Millions of Dollars, even though Hunter knew almost NOTHING about Energy. How much was the law firm paid? So Horrible. This is a CLASSIC Conflict of Interest! “GATEWAY PUNDIT”
🐣 RT @RpsAgainstTrump Except that you were charged by the independent Special counsel for what you did, not for what you said. ¤ Get out of bed, Don. It’s time for breakfast.
[TextLink:] https://twitter.com/RpsAgainstTrump/status/1688935454450610176?s=20/photo/1
[Text:] 🐣 RT @realDonaldTrump Let’s see! My political Opponent, Crooked Joe Biden, tells Merrick Garland and the DOJ to indict and arrest me on bogus charges and accusations, trying desperately to steal the Election. But that wasn’t enough! He now wants Thug Prosecutor, Deranged Jack Smith, to file for a Court Order taking away my first amendment rights, SPEECH. So, based on yet another Radical Left Hoax, I’II be the only “Politician” in American history not allowed to SPEAK. THE NEVER ENDING WITCH HUNT CONTINUES. MAGA!
🐣 RT @tomiahonen So Trump’s world collapsed on Wednesday last week. Up to Tuesday, he had managed to hold onto the delusional fantasy that he can avoid prison ¤ It was his lawyers on Wednesday who said, no, you cannot win these 3 criminal trials & the prison time out of 641 years will be 561 years
🐣 RT @RBReich What makes a fascist?
-Rejecting democracy for a strongman
-Stoking rage against cultural elites
-Nationalism based on “superior” race
-Glorifying strength and warriors
-Disdain of women and LGBTQ+ people
These five elements find exact expression in Donald Trump.
💽 https://twitter.com/RBReich/status/1688914608093024256?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @Morning_Joe .@GovChristie: “The problem with Trump is that he [has] no sense of history, no intellectual curiosity, and doesn’t care whether he puts himself before the country at every turn…He’s not putting America first. That’s the great irony—He’s putting Donald Trump first.”
💽 https://twitter.com/Morning_Joe/status/1688879323267166208?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @Morning_Joe “You’re choosing a failed reality TV host and a failed politician over America’s rule of law, over the judiciary, over Madisonian democracy. The further we get away from this moment, the more horrific it’s going to look.” — @joenbc on those in GOP who continue to support Trump
💽 https://twitter.com/Morning_Joe/status/1688861742619631616?s=20/photo/1
⭕ 7 Aug 2023
🐣 RT @itsJeffTiedrich how sad it is that Donald Trump is melting straight the fuck down on his crappy app because Judge Chutkan is not fucking around and the walls are closing in and his shitty dime-store lawyers can’t stop what’s coming and he’s fucked and he knows it. wait, did I say it’s sad? I meant to say it’s fucking hilarious. pass the popcorn and keep that champagne on ice
🐣 RT @KatiePhang JUST IN: Judge Chutkan orders a hearing on the DOJ’s Motion for Protective Order.
[CourtDoc:] https://twitter.com/KatiePhang/status/1688718958369886208?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @JoyceWhiteVance 1/ No one who devotes their life to public service should have to live with the threat that a former president is coming after them.
⋙ CNN: Security increases for judge assigned to Donald Trump’s January 6 criminal case https://tinyurl.com/5erfma5f
⋙⋙ 🐣 RT @JoyceWhiteVance 2/ And, a not insignificant point, the bill for the extra security is paid by…you. I’ve lived with this kind of security. It may mean Deputy US Marshals will have to be available weekends & evenings. It disrupts the normal operation of their office & imposes additional costs.
🐣 RT @AWeissmann_ Given Trump’s actions since his third criminal arraignment, the govt has an obligation to present to the courts all evidence of Trump’s threatening statements and to have the courts take measures to protect the integrity of the process, including the safety of all participants.
WaPo: ‘Fake’ elector plot raised concerns over legal peril, indictment shows https://tinyurl.com/59vszahd What Giuliani told “fake electors” about how the slates of electors would be used differed state-by-state; what Pence was told evolved as well
// A contingency plan, a crime or a ‘donkey show’? Doubts across seven states and within the Trump campaign.
🐣 RT @BulwarkOnline “It’s like crack. They’ve addicted themselves to these lies. They live off of these lies, the conservative media profits off of these lies, the political consultants profit off of these lies. The congressmen basically make a living selling these lies.” https://tinyurl.com/53jjd98b
🐣 RT @AntiToxicPeople Oh my god. I mean, oh my god. This is insane, deranged lying even for him.
[TextLink:] https://twitter.com/AntiToxicPeople/status/1688766629386260480?s=20/photo/1
[Text:] 🐣 RT @realDonald Trump Let’s see! My political Opponent, Crooked Joe Biden, tells Merrick Garland and the DOJ to indict and arrest me on bogus charges and accusations, trying desperately to steal the Election. But that wasn’t enough! He now wants Thug Prosecutor, Deranged Jack Smith, to file for a Court Order taking away my first amendment rights, SPEECH. So, based on yet another Radical Left Hoax, I’II be the only “Politician” in American history not allowed to SPEAK. THE NEVER ENDING WITCH HUNT CONTINUES. MAGA
🐣 RT @tribelaw Here’s Jack Smith’s nearly instant devastating response to Trump’s 5 pm filing. As Smith explains, there is no First Amendment right to publicize the discovery materials provided to defendant to help him prepare his defense. Period.
¤ https://twitter.com/tribelaw/status/1688706530936315904?s=20
[CourtDoc:] https://tinyurl.com/5ahzzjmz 8p
🐣 RT @AWeissmann_ Key fn8: Trump claims his threat abt going after enemies is protected political speech, even though made while he’s out on bail in 3 criminal cases. That speech can be restricted in the same way Roger Stone’s posting crosshairs next to a judge’s head can be. Bail=restrictions!
⋙ 🐣 RT @kyledcheney JUST IN: Trump has filed his response to the special counsel’s motion for a protective order. Read the 29-page response here:
[CourtDoc:] https://tinyurl.com/m38b4xyz 29p
⋙⋙ 🐣 sounds like Trump’s lawyers know they can’t control their client so they’re trying to reverse engineer the discovery process to accommodate his need to threaten and intimidate anyone he wants ~ without landing his a$$ in jail
🐣 RT @AntiToxicPeople U N H I N G E D 🤪🤪
[TextLink:] https://twitter.com/AntiToxicPeople/status/1688609119979319297?s=20/photo/1
[Text:] 🐣 RT @realDonald Trump HOW CAN MY CORRUPT POLITICAL OPPONENT PUT ME ON TRIAL(S) DURING A CAMPAIGN THAT I AM WINNING (BY A LOT!), BUT FORCING ME TO SPEND TIME AND MONEY AWAY FROM THE “CAMPAIGN TRAIL” IN ORDER TO FIGHT BOGUS ACCUSATIONS & CHARGES? IS THIS GOING TO BE THE FUTURE OF ELECTIONS IN AMERICA? CAN A PRESIDENT ORDER HIS DEPARTMENT OF JUSTICE TO INDICT AN OPPONENT JUST PRIOR TO AN ELECTION? WHY DIDN’T THEY DO THIS 2.5 YEARS AGO? WHY NOW? NEVER HAPPENED BEFORE IN THE USA. THIS IS ALL ABOUT ELECTION INTERFERENCE!
⏳WaPo: FBI resisted opening probe into Trump’s role in Jan. 6 for more than a year .
// 6/20/2023; In the DOJ’s investigation of Jan. 6, key Justice officials also quashed an early plan for a task force focused on people in Trump’s orbit
⋙ 🐣 Mar 28, 2022: Judge Carter calls Eastman memos “a coup in search of a legal theory”
April: Wray opens investigation into Fake Electors plot
Nov 15: TRUMP ANNOUNCES RUN
Nov 18: Garland appoints Special Counsel
[March 28] With the FBI investigation still not opened, late in March a federal judge presiding over a civil case made a startling ruling: Trump “more likely than not” committed federal crimes in trying to obstruct the congressional count of electoral college votes.
The determination from U.S. District Judge David O. Carter came in a ruling addressing scores of sensitive emails that Eastman had resisted turning over to the House select committee. After reviewing the documents privately, Carter wrote that the actions by Trump and Eastman amounted to “a coup in search of a legal theory” and that “the illegality of the plan was obvious.”
Carter, who was appointed by President Bill Clinton, took the opportunity to express frustration with the pace of the criminal investigation. ¤ “More than a year after the attack on our Capitol, the public is still searching for accountability. … If the country does not commit to investigating and pursuing accountability for those responsible, the Court fears January 6 will repeat itself.”
“In April 2022, more than 15 months after the attack, Wray signed off on the authorization opening a criminal investigation into the fake electors plot.”
“Near the end of July, the Justice Department investigation into Trump’s orbit gained new speed.”
⋙ On November 15, 2022, Trump announced his candidacy at Mar-a-Lago in an hour-long speech. ~ Axios
Then, on Nov. 18, Garland abruptly summoned to Main Justice the D.C.-based prosecutors working on the Jan. 6 conspiracy as well as those who had already gathered extensive evidence of Trump concealing classified records at his Mar-a-Lago resort. The attorney general told them that to ensure the appearance of independence into the two probes of a potential Biden rival, he would appoint a special counsel later that day. While the prosecutors could choose their next steps, Garland said he hoped they would continue the work under Smith.
CNN: Trump attorney says legal team will fight potential protective order in election subversion case https://tinyurl.com/4n9537cz
🐣 RT @kyledcheney NEW DOC: Here is Donald Trump’s signature on the conditions of his release (including the pledge not to tamper with or retaliate against witnesses/victims/informants or officers of the court)
[CourtDoc:] https://twitter.com/kyledcheney/status/1688572394410057730?s=20/photo/1
[Text:] … It is a crime punishable by up to ten years in prison, and a $250,000 fine, or both, to: obstruct a criminal investigation; tamper with a witness, victim, or informant; retaliate or attempt to retaliate against a witness, victim, or informant; or intimidate or attempt to intimidate a witness, victim, juror, informant, or officer of the court. The penalties for tampering, retaliation, or intimidation are significantly more serious if they involve a killing or attempted killing. …
MeidasTouch, Ben Meiselas: Judge Cannon Issues Baffling Order in Trump Document Case https://tinyurl.com/mtbdkupy
// Trump-appointed Judge Aileen Cannon is back at her old ways with latest rulings
🐣 RT @AWeissmann_ Judge Cannon clearly shows her ignorance (bias? both?); the obstruction crimes that were investigated are charges that could have been brought in FLA or in DC and thus could be investigated in either district. And there was conduct that is alleged to have occurred outside FLA.
⋙ 🐣 RT @JoyceWhiteVance Judge Cannon responds to the govt’s request for a hearing on Nauta’s lawyer’s conflicts & discloses the existence of a grand jury investigation in another district while denying gov’t’s motion to seal. The govt can appeal. This may tee up the issue of her fitness on this case.
[TextLink:] https://twitter.com/JoyceWhiteVance/status/1688554537500459008?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @AntiToxicPeople Crazier by the minute now.
[TextLink:] https://twitter.com/AntiToxicPeople/status/1688557907305197568?s=20/photo/1
[Text:] @realDonaldTrump No, I shouldn’t have a protective order placed on me because it would impinge upon my right to FREE SPEECH. Deranged Jack Smith and the Department of Injustice should, however, because they are illegally “leaking” all over the place!
🐣 RT @TheRickWilson Someone really wants to visit a holding cell while the judge orders a mental competency hearing.
[ TextLink:] https://twitter.com/TheRickWilson/status/1688556848633311232?s=20/photo/1
[Text:] @realDonaldTrump Deranged Jack Smith is going before his number on draft pick, the Judge of his “dreams” (WHO MUST BE RECUSED!), in an attempt to take away my FIRST AMENDMENT RIGHTS – This, despite the fact that he, the DOJ, and his many Thug Prosecutors, are illegally leaking, everything and anything, to the Fake News,Media!!!
Politico: Every case everywhere all at once: The increasingly complex multiverse of Trump’s legal troubles https://tinyurl.com/ycyw7ffz
// As the former president faces at least five trial dates over the next year, his actions in some cases are being used against him in others.
🐣 RT @Maks_NAFO_FELLA 250 000 🎉🎉🎉
📋 https://twitter.com/Maks_NAFO_FELLA/status/1688443071313199104?s=20/photo/1
// 250K decommissioned orcs
🐣 RT @NOELreports Slowly it is starting to sink in, even with the propagandists and Kremlin-supporters, that the losses that Russia is taking in Ukraine are staggering and far from ‘fabricated by the West’.
⋙ 🐣 RT @victoriaslog Skabeeva said they found 284,000 obituaries on social media. Finally realistic numbers from the Russian side. The General Staff missed a few thousand somewhere. Most likely, they’ve been turned to dust or are just missing, and their relatives thought they died.
💽 [tr] https://twitter.com/victoriaslog/status/1688271000188710912?s=20/photo/1
⋙⋙ 🐣 RT @victoriaslog Earlier, the Russian government restricted the publication of obituaries in regions with heavy losses to make it harder to count deaths. They forget it’s not the Stone Age, and people would just bring it all to social media.
⋙⋙⋙ 🐣 RT @victoriaslog Prigozhin said Russia hides 2000 bodies of fallen soldiers in the Rostov morgue to hide losses. ¤ Also, Russia prohibits the publication of obituaries in many regions, making it hard to count bodies. Russia calls them heroes but treats like garbage. Relatives don’t know they died.
🌎 https://twitter.com/victoriaslog/status/1672359348012457985?s=20/photo/1
⭕ 6 Aug 2023
NYT, Roger Cohen: Putin’s Forever War https://tinyurl.com/mvh7tu65 //➔ an apologetic travelogue, consistent with NYT coverage of the war in general
// Vladimir Putin wants to lead Russians into a civilizational conflict with the West far larger than Ukraine. Will they follow him?
🐣 one is 77; one is 80
🖼 https://twitter.com/Auriandra/status/1688358431365705728?s=20/photo/1
// Trump Biden
Axios: Pence says Trump’s lawyers asked him to “reject votes outright” https://tinyurl.com/msvvhmd3 “They were asking me to overturn the election. I had no right to overturn the election,” said Pence on CNN’s “State of the Union” Sunday
Pence told CNN’s “State of the Union” Sunday that Trump’s lawyers said on Jan. 5, 2021, the day before the U.S. Capitol riot: “We want you to reject votes outright,” who is challenger front-runner Trump for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination.
● “They were asking me to overturn the election. I had no right to overturn the election,” added Pence, who is challenger front-runner Trump for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination.
“I don’t know what was in his heart, I don’t know what his intentions were, but I do know what he and his lawyers asked me to do. And it’s what no vice president in American history had ever done before, and frankly what no vice president or any one person in Washington should ever do again.”
— Former Vice President Mike Pence on CNN.
🐣 RT @RpsAgainstTrump 51% of Americans said they believe Trump tried to stay in office by illegal means, while 29% think it was legal, according to a new CBS News/YouGov poll.
Only 32% of Republicans believe President Biden is the “Legitimate winner” of the 2020 election. ¤ The majority of Republicans in this country live in total denial. Let that sink in.
This can not be good for the country’s future.
⋙ 📊 CBSNews: CBS News poll finds after latest Trump indictment, many Americans see implications for democracy. For some, it’s personal https://tinyurl.com/3bj9xrsu
[…] There’s a group, about a fifth of the country, who aren’t entirely taking party lines in either direction, who do think Mr. Biden won legitimately, and also that Trump didn’t act illegally. Some voice concern the charges are political, but four in 10 of them say that if Trump did try to overturn the election, it would be undermining democracy. So, this would be the group to watch if, in fact, a trial gets underway, but right now, they aren’t paying as much attention to the events.
🐣 RT @harrylitman The change of venue & motion to recuse that Lauro says Trump will bring are dead losers and will be denied in short order. You have to wonder if part of his strategy is to lose repeatedly w/ crappy motions to try to ground an argument in the public sphere that the court is biased
🐣 RT @ProjectLincoln “The leader of the Republican Party is a career criminal who attempted to subvert a free and fair election in an illegal conspiracy, and he has to be held to account.” @TheRickWilson explains on @MSNBC that Republicans must openly accept this fact in order to escape Trumpism.
💽 https://twitter.com/ProjectLincoln/status/1688245455937761280?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @ChuckPfarrer BRIDGES OUT: Ukrainian forces conducted twin Stormshadow strikes against highway bridges between Crimea and the mainland. The principal M-18 HWY crossing at Chonhar was hit, as was a secondary road bridge at Henichesk.
🌎 https://twitter.com/ChuckPfarrer/status/1688234497668427777?s=20/photo/1.
⋙ AA: Russia claims Ukraine attacked bridges to Crimea with missiles
// Storm Shadow missiles fired at Chonhar bridge, claims Russian-installed head of Kherson region
MTN, Karen Friedman Agnifilo: Defendant Trump’s Sweetheart Deal https://tinyurl.com/4khxzw2f
// Former New York prosecutor Karen Friedman Agnifilo urges prosecutors to treat Trump like any other criminal defendant
🐣 RT @kylegriffin1 Rep. Jamie Raskin: “There are people who are in jail for several years for counterfeiting one vote, if they try to vote illegally once. [Trump] tried to steal the entire election. And his lawyer’s up there saying, ‘Oh, that’s just a matter of him expressing his First Amendment rights.’ That’s deranged.” @MeetThePress
🐣 RT @RonFilipkowski And now Trump attacks the judge.
[TextLink:] https://twitter.com/RonFilipkowski/status/1688214998282027009?s=20/photo/1
[Text:] 🐣 RT @realDonald Trump THERE IS NO WAY I CAN GET A FAIR TRIAL WITH THE JUDGE “ASSIGNED” TO THE RIDICULOUS FREEDOM OF SPEECH/FAIR ELECTIONS CASE. EVERYBODY KNOWS THIS, AND SO DOES SHE! WE WILL BE IMMEDIATELY ASKING FOR RECUSAL OF THIS JUDGE ON VERY POWERFUL GROUNDS, AND LIKEWISE FOR VENUE CHANGE, OUT IF D.C.
🐣 RT @SimonWDC What we learned today from [John] Lauro’s many interviews is that Trump has nothing. Their arguments are ridiculous. Trump is in a lot of trouble.
⋙ 🐣 RT @atrupar “It was a peaceful transition” – Lauro’s argument is that Trump actually left office peacefully (never mind what happened on J6) once Pence “rejected his petition.” This is a bit like arguing that attempting to rob a bank isn’t a crime if the teller refuses to give you the money.
💽 https://twitter.com/atrupar/status/1688193462632419328?s=20
🐣 RT @JoeTrippi So I am not a lawyer, but it does not seem to me that it matters if Trump believed the election was stolen or not. ¤ Follow me.
¤ https://twitter.com/JoeTrippi/status/1688197181923065857?s=20
You receive a statement from your ba[n]k that says your account is overdrawn. ¤ You know this can’t be true. You call the bank and accuse them of stealing your money! ¤ They are thieves!
You tell all your friends that your bank has stolen your money. You know its true. ¤ As is your right, you do any number of press interviews and repeat your absolute certainty that the bank stole your money. ¤ As is your right you go to court 61 times to get that money you know is yours! ¤ And 61 times the courts throw out your case or rule against you! The judges are in on it! ¤ You accuse the bank regulators of being in on the heist! They have to be! Everybody has to be in on it!
All of the above is something every American, regardless of station in life, would be within their rights to say and do – whether they believed what they were saying or knew they were actually overdrawn and lying through their teeth.
But then you cross the line. ¤ You are so certain you are right. So certain the bank stole your money. ¤ You decide to rob the bank! ¤ Damn it! You are going to get your money back! ¤Some of your friends decide to help you! They think you were robbed too! ¤ A whole bunch of people, even some of your lawyers become part of the plot.
But it turns out there are cameras! Millions watch your attempted robbery on TV! And watch it fail. ¤ Lordy there are tapes! ¤ You broke the law. ¤ Some of those friends are testifying against you.s Lawyers who knew better will be disbarred or worse. ¤ And the jail cell awaits – not for what you said. But for what you did.
Accusing the bank of stealing your money was one thing. ¤ Attempting to rob the bank was a crime.
🐣 RT @BeschlossDC Ridiculous and dangerous claim by Trump lawyer on @MeetthePress: “Everything that President Trump did was while he was in office as a President — he is now immune from prosecution for acts that he takes in connection with those policy decisions.”
🐣 RT @RpsAgainstTrump Donald Trump says that “Sick and demented psycho” Nancy Pelosi will someday “live in HELL”. ¤ He’s always projecting. Always.
[TextLink:] https://twitter.com/RpsAgainstTrump/status/1688199882694172672?s=20/photo/1
[Text:] 🐣 RT @realDonald Trump I purposely didnt comment on Nancy Pelosi’s very weird story concerning her husband, but now I can because she said something about me, with glee, that was really quite vicious. “I saw a scared puppy,” she said, as she watched me on television, like millions of others, that didn’t see that. I wasn’t “scared.” Nevertheless, how mean a thing to say! She is a Wicked Witch whose husbands journey from hell starts and finishes with her. She is a sick & demented psycho who will someday live in HELL!
🐣 RT @davidfrum Trump’s on trial for trying to overthrow Americans’ right of self-government, and his defense is to try to overthrow the right of self-government of the Americans of the District of Columbia.
🐣 RT @EdKrassen BREAKING: ¤ Donald Trump just released the following statement on Truth Social. He already appears to be blaming the jury for why he might lose in DC.
¤ https://twitter.com/EdKrassen/status/1688180938637811712?s=20
“No way I can get a fair trial, or even close to a fair trial, in Washington, D.C. There are many reasons for this, but just one is that I am calling for a federal takeover of this filthy and crime-ridden embarrassment to our nation, where murders have just shattered the all-time record, other violent crimes have never been worse, and tourists have fled. The federal takeover is very unpopular with potential area jurors, but necessary for safety, greatness, and for all the world to see!
“Deranged Jack Smith and our highly partisan, and very corrupt, Department of Injustice could have brought this Biden “opponent” case years ago, but chose to wait and bring it right in the middle of my election campaign. No way!!! I hope you are watching, America. Our country is being destroyed. Make America great again!”
Let’s be clear how juries work:
1) A defense can remove an unlimited amount of jurors from the jury pool for “cause,” if the judge agrees with the reasoning.
2) A defense is granted a specific number of peremptory challenges of jurors, in which they can remove that number of jurors without any cause whatsoever. Merely if they just don’t like the juror they can remove them (except for race/sex).
3) It only takes one single juror out of 12 not to believe Trump is guilty beyond a reasonable doubt, in order for Trump not to be convicted.
🐣 RT @JoyceWhiteVance Yes, we all know that if DOJ had indicted earlier, Trump would have meekly submitted to the process
[TextLink:] https://twitter.com/JoyceWhiteVance/status/1688183496290791424?s=20/photo/1
[Text:] 🐣 RT @realDonaldTrump DERANGED JACK SMITH AND OUR HIGHLY PARTISAN, AND VERY CORRUPT, DEPARTMENT OF INJUSTICE, COULD HAVE BROUGHT THIS BIDIN “OPPONENT” CASE YEARS AGO, BUT CHOSE TO WAIT AND BRING IT RIGHT IN THE MIDDLE OF MY ELECTION CAMPAIGN. NO WAY!!! I HOPE YOU ARE WATCHING AMERICA. OUR COUNTRY IS BEING DESTROYED. MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!
🐣 RT @ThisWeekABC “This may have been Trump’s third indictment but this one is different, not because he faces a maximum sentence of 45 years in prison…but because it accuses him of betraying the very oath office he hopes to take once again.” @JonKarl reports: https://trib.al/CWED2BW
💽 https://twitter.com/ThisWeekABC/status/1688176389785038848?s=20/photo/1
// January 6 violence
🐣 RT @ProjectLincoln Now you can get all of Trump’s greatest hits in one collection! A portion of your purchase goes straight to Donald’s indictment fund- he’s going to need it!
💽 https://twitter.com/ProjectLincoln/status/1688196019257806848?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @ZaleskiLuke Trump did this. No one else. He admits it. He wants to pardon them. He said he loves them and to remember this day. So remember this day.
💽 https://twitter.com/ZaleskiLuke/status/1688166749739364352?s=20/photo/1
// January 6 violence
🐣 RT @atrupar Pence on CNN on whether Trump was asking him to pause certifying the election or overturn it: “But frankly, the day before January 6, if memory serves, they came back – his lawyers did – and said we want you to reject votes outright. They were asking me to overturn the election.”
💽 https://twitter.com/atrupar/status/1688179905148686336?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @ProjectLincoln January 6th was a harrowing day for our nation, as insurrectionists, inspired by a former President, stormed our capitol. Though they may claim political persecution, Jack Smith’s indictment of Trump shows us that the rule of law still exists in America.
💽 https://twitter.com/ProjectLincoln/status/1688173113828098048?s=20/photo/1
⭕ 5 Aug 2023
TPM, Josh Marshall: John Eastman Comes Clean: Hell Yes We Were Trying to Overthrow the Government https://tinyurl.com/2xmk7xdj “They knew it was a coup and they justified it to themselves in those terms. … They believed they were justified in trying to overthrow the government”
I want to return to this revelatory interview with co-conspirator John Eastman, the last portion of which was published Thursday by Tom Klingenstein, the Chairman of the Trumpite Claremont Institute and then highlighted by our Josh Kovensky. … [T]he central bit comes just over half way through the interview when Eastman gets into the core justification and purpose for trying to overturn the results of the 2020 election and overthrow the constitutional order itself. He invokes the Declaration of Independence and says quite clearly that yes, we were trying to overthrow the government and argues that they were justified because of the sheer existential threat America was under because of the election of Joe Biden.
January 6th conspirators have spent more than two years claiming either that nothing really happened at all in the weeks leading up to January 6th or that it was just a peaceful protest that got a bit out of hand or that they were just making a good faith effort to follow the legal process. Eastman cuts through all of this and makes clear they were trying to overthrow (“abolish”) the government; they were justified in doing so; and the warrant for their actions is none other than the Declaration of Independence itself.
“Our Founders lay this case out,” says Eastman. “There’s actually a provision in the Declaration of Independence that a people will suffer abuses while they remain sufferable, tolerable while they remain tolerable. At some point abuses become so intolerable that it becomes not only their right but their duty to alter or abolish the existing government.”
“So that’s the question,” he tells Klingenstein. “Have the abuses or the threat of abuses become so intolerable that we have to be willing to push back?” ¤ The answer for Eastman is clearly yes, and that’s his justification for his and his associates extraordinary actions.
… The Declaration of Independence has no legal force under American law. It’s not a legal document. It’s a public explanation of a political decision: to break the colonies’ allegiance to Great Britain and form a new country. But it contains a number of claims and principles that became and remain central to American political life.
The one Eastman invokes here is the right to overthrow governments. The claim is that governments have no legitimacy or authority beyond their ability to serve the governed. Governments shouldn’t be overthrown over minor or transitory concerns. But when they become truly oppressive people have a right to get rid of them and start over. This may seem commonsensical to us. But that’s because we live a couple centuries downstream of these events and ideas. Governments at least in theory are justified by how they serve their populations rather than countries being essentially owned by the kings or nobilities which rule them.
But this is a highly protean idea. Who gets to decide? Indeed this question came up again and again over the next century each time the young republic faced a major political crisis, whether it was in the late 1790s, toward the end of the War of 1812, in 1832–33 or finally during the American Civil War. If one side didn’t get its way and wanted out what better authority to cite than the Declaration of Independence? There is an obvious difference, but American political leaders needed a language to describe it. What they came up with is straightforward. It’s the difference between a constitutional or legal right and a revolutionary one. Abraham Lincoln was doing no more than stating a commonplace when he said this on the eve of the Civil War in his first inaugural address (emphasis added): “This country, with its institutions, belongs to the people who inhabit it. Whenever they shall grow weary of the existing Government, they can exercise their constitutional right of amending it or their revolutionary right to dismember or overthrow it.”
In other words, yes, you have a revolutionary right to overthrow the government if you really think its abuses have gotten that intractable and grave. But the government has an equal right to stop you, to defend itself or, as we see today, put you on trial if you fail. The American revolutionaries of 1776 knew full well that they were committing treason against the British monarchy. If they lost they would all hang. They accepted that. They didn’t claim that George III had no choice but to let them go.
From the beginning the Trump/Eastman coup plotters have tried to wrap their efforts in legal processes and procedures. It was their dissimulating shield to hide the reality of their coup plot and if needed give them legal immunity from the consequences. The leaders of the secession movement tried the same thing in 1861.
In a way I admire Eastman for coming clean. I don’t know whether he sees the writing on the wall and figures he might as well lay his argument out there or whether his grad school political theory pretensions and pride got the better of him and led him to state openly this indefensible truth. Either way he’s done it and not in any way that’s retrievable as a slip of the tongue. They knew it was a coup and they justified it to themselves in those terms. He just told us. They believed they were justified in trying to overthrow the government, whether because of OSHA chair size regulations or drag queens or, more broadly, because the common herd of us don’t understand the country’s “founding principles” the way Eastman and his weirdo clique do. But they did it. He just admitted it. And now they’re going to face the consequences.
🐣 RT @BeschlossDC Sentenced to prison for tax evasion, Al Capone and his entourage claimed that he was victim of a “witch hunt.”
🖼 https://twitter.com/BeschlossDC/status/1687942888892616704?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @ProjectLincoln The United States is seeing an unprecedented attack on its very own judicial system by a major political party at the behest of Donald Trump, while the Biden administration is working to restore faith in our law enforcement. @StuartPStevens has more on @MSNBC.
💽 https://twitter.com/ProjectLincoln/status/1688007350865592320?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @WordswithSteph Expect Trump’s Jan. 6 case to move quickly: Judge Tanya S. Chutkan is the toughest possible draw Trump could have received. ¤ Judge Chutkan — a fierce (but fair) judicial force — will soon help decide the fate of Teflon Don.
¤ https://twitter.com/WordswithSteph/status/1687983994170667008?s=20
“It’s probably the WORST draw for Trump. She’s the worst judge he could’ve gotten handed,” one attorney with prior experience representing a January 6 defendant made clear. “She’s pleasant, she’s nice, and she’s fair, but she’s a tough judge with these Jan. 6 cases.”
While Judge Chutkan is known to be just, cordial, and polite, she is also a judge committed to handing down stiff, painfully heavy sentences in cases involving Jan. 6 rioters. She has sometimes gone further in imposing a sentence than that which prosecutors recommended.
During courtroom proceedings in which “rioters” were being prosecuted, Judge Chutkan has repeatedly voiced her abject revulsion at the actions taken by violent, destructive Trump supporters who seized and occupied the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6 2021. “Every single time that I see videotape or hear recordings of what happened that day, I am struck anew with both the horror of what was going on that day and how close we came — how close we came to not fulfilling one of the basic functions of our democracy, which is a peaceful transfer of power, which we lecture other governments all over the world on and we’re supposed to be an example of, and we were not that day,” Judge Chutkan said during the trial of one “rioter” who was ultimately found guilty and sentenced to 15 months in prison.
Further, Judge Chutkin is determined to deter future acts to subvert American democracy. In her official capacity, she has expressed grave concern: “Every day we are hearing about reports of anti-democratic factions, people plotting potential violence in 2024. It has to be made clear that trying to stop the peaceful transition of power, assaulting law enforcement, is going to be met with certain punishment,” Judge Chutkin explained.
Trump and his legal team are hereby advised to brace themselves: Judge Chutkin will never suffer criminal foolishness or insurrection — obstruction or conspiracy.
🐣 RT @AntiToxicPeople If only when he was avoiding the Vietnam War with fake bone spurs, he had studied what projection is in college. Because the level of projection here is beyond any previously known levels.
⋙ 🐣 RT @Acyn Trump: Deranged Jack Smith. He’s a deranged human being. You take a look at that face, you say that guy is a sick man
💽 https://twitter.com/AntiToxicPeople/status/1687994136220291072?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @AntiToxicPeople This is a very scared & desperate man.
⋙ 🐣 RT @Acyn Trump: What they’re doing with this election interference and the Senate needs to step up. The House is doing a lot of things… [insults McC] They have something on Mitch McConnell. There’s no way he’s doing this. They got something on Mitch McConnell
💽 https://twitter.com/AntiToxicPeople/status/1687993365496037376?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @RonFilipkowski I’ve seen this theory floated before. I disagree. He has no impulse control, born out of a lifetime of pampered privilege & an ability to intimidate & manipulate people. He is always certain the next con is going to work because they always have. He’s a self-deluded megalomaniac.
⋙ 🐣 RT @BeschlossDC Serious question: is Trump deliberately and specifically trying to defy the orders of Judge Chutkan? And if so, what is his purpose?
🐣 RT @AntiToxicPeople Lunatic Trump is speaking to the South Carolina GOP Dinner in a few minutes. Lets hope for a full blown deranged meltdown.
🐣 RT @BeschlossDC The rising sense of confrontation between Trump and Judge Chutkan this weekend is beginning to feel historically a little like the October 1973 weekend when Nixon fired the Watergate special prosecutor, Archibald Cox.
🐣 RT @DeanObeidallah BOOM! US District Judge Tanya Chutkan DENIED Donald Trump’s legal team request for a deadline extension in response to Jack Smith’s motion to put in place a protective order. Judge is not playing with Trump-expect the Judge to set an early trial date!!
🐣 RT @levparnas Jack Smith responds to Donald Trump’s lawyers who asked the court to delay briefing, noting of him: ¤ “Rather than spend time complying with the court’s order, the defendant drafted a filing as to why he did not have time to review the 5pg protective order” ¤ “The Government wants to provide discovery to the defendant. By his motion, the defendant seeks to delay that process. The defendant’s motion should be denied.”
[TextLink:] https://twitter.com/levparnas/status/1687917046531579904?s=20/photo/1 -2
[Text:] GOVERNMENT’S OPPOSITION TO MOTION FOR EXTENSION OF TIME
The Government wants to provide discovery to the defendant. By his motion, the defendant seeks to delay that process. The defendant’s motion should be denied.
Three days ago, on August 2, the Government proposed to defense counsel a protective order that largely tracked one entered in the defendant’s other pending federal criminal case in the Souther District of Florida. See Defense Motion for Extension of Time, ECF No. 11, Ex. A at 1. In emails not appended to the defendant’s extension motion, the Goverment followed up on the evening of August 3 and early afternoon of August 4. Thereafter, defense counsel finally
responded by sending an entirely different protective order. Since the defendant’s proposal was inadequate, the Government proposed another alternative this one modeled after a protective order entered in a case before Judge Carl J. Nichols recently tried by one of the defendant’s attorneys present at his arraignment. Defense counsel declined to substantively confer on that proposal on a Friday evening, see id., after which the Government moved separately for entry the order. The Court ordered the defendant to respond by Monday with a redline of the Govemment’s proposal. See Minute Order, Aug. 5, 2023. Rather than spend time complying with the Court’s order, the defendant drafted a filing as to why he did not have time to review and consider the 5-page proposed protective order.The defendant’s extension motion proposes unnecessary delay to normal order. The defendant suggests that the delay “will enable Defendant to fully assess the Proposed Order and advise the Court of applicable law.” ECF No. 11 at 1. Nothing prevents defense counsel from doing just that on the schedule already ordered by the Court. To the extent defense counsel wants to confer further, Government counsel is available at any time evenings, weekends, or holidays. And if the Court enters the proposed protective order and the defendant later is dissatisfied, the defendant can seek to modify the order at any time.
The Government stands ready to press send on a discovery production. The defendant is standing in the way. The Court should deny the motion. [Signed, Jack Smith],
🐣 RT @7Veritas4 In case you don’t speak criminalese:
“Gone to the Dark Side” = Agreed to tell the truth under oath to a grand jury
“I never told…” = I totally told
“I once read…” = I’m making it up
“Sad!” = I’m screwed
🐣 RT @MuellerSheWrote NEW: TRUMP PUBLICLY AND DIRECTLY GOES AFTER A WITNESS AGAINST HIM IN THE DC CASE. @TheJusticeDept
[TextLink:] https://twitter.com/MuellerSheWrote/status/1687940576946409472?s=20/photo/1
[Text:] 🐣 RT @realDonaldTrump wow, it’s finally happened! Liddle Mike Pence, a man who was about to be ousted as Governor Indiana until I came along and made him V.P., has gone to the Dark Side. I never told a newly emboldened (not based on his 2% poll numbers!) Pence to put me above the Constitution, or that Mike was “too honest.” He’s delusional, and now he wants to show he’s a tough guy. I once read a major magazine article on Mike. It said he was not a very good person. I was surprised, but the article was right. Sad!
🐣 RT @JoyceWhiteVance “If you go after me…” Of course Trump couldn’t let a federal judge, & a woman at that, admonish him against committing further crimes. So he resorted to a threat. Read more: [link Substack]
[TextLink:] https://twitter.com/JoyceWhiteVance/status/1687795430040424448?s=20/photo/1
[Text:] Today, Donald Trump issued what can only be construed as a shot across the bow, after the Magistrate Judge Moxila Upadhyaya admonished him during arraignment yesterday that he must not commit any new crimes while on a pre-trial bond-the thing that’s keeping him out of jail before trial-and that efforts to influence or intimidate witnesses, jurors or others involved in the case were illegal.
🐣 RT @AndriyYermak The enemy will increasingly feel the inevitability of his defeat. ¤ Our victory will become the basis for preserving the rules-based world order.
🐣 RT @AleksandrX13 “Pure despotism is the punishment for the bad conduct of a people.
🖼 https://twitter.com/AleksandrX13/status/1687744298165428224?s=20/photo/1
If a nation is crushed under the will of one despot, it is visibly because it did not have the courage or ability to govern itself.
A society governed arbitrarily perfectly resembles a herd of cows placed under a yoke for the service of a master. He only feeds them enough to put them in condition to serve. He only treats their illnesses insofar as their health can be useful to him. He only fattens them in order to feed off of them, and he uses the skin of some to harness” ~ Voltaire (1694 – 1778)
🐣 RT @saintjavelin The Ukrainian Defense Ministry already released the video of the USV showing the assault against Russian oil tanker “Sig” (which is under US sanctions for aiding Syria).
💽 https://twitter.com/saintjavelin/status/1687700865279307776?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @EuromaidanPress In Kerch Strait, Russian tanker carrying chemicals, named SIG, damaged in attack by Ukrainian maritime drones ¤ It was transporting aviation fuel from Crimea to Syria, which led to its inclusion in US sanctions list in 2019. RU rescue center sent rescuers [link]
🐣 RT @ officejjsmart 🇷🇺 OIL TANKER HIT BY 🇺🇦 DRONE
💽 https://twitter.com/officejjsmart/status/1687695867313086464?s=20/photo/1
⚡️ A few hours ago, the 🇺🇦 intelligence service, SBU, blew up a large 🇷🇺 oil tanker, “SIG”, which was transporting fuel for the Russian troops. It is one of Russia’s best tankers, 5000 tons and built in 2014.
As before, a water drone and 450 kg of TNT were dispatched. Following the attack, the engine room flooded and the boat floated towards the Crimea Bridge – which may have also been struck last night.
It took place in the internationally recognized territorial waters of Ukraine. ¤ One of the reasons for the 🇷🇺 Ruble’s wearing is fear of oil exports being cut-off.
⭕ 4 Aug 2023
NYT, Jamelle Bouie: The Most Frightening Part of the Trump Indictment https://tinyurl.com/mrxtzm7z //➔ My belief is that the military would have rejected the invocation of the Insurrection Act as an illegal order: Milley, Pelosi and McConnell would have backed this
🐣 RT @TheAtlantic Ukrainians “know far more about fighting Russians than anyone in any Western military knows,” @EliotACohen writes. ¤ “Modesty, never an American strong suit, is in order.”
⋙ TheAtlantic, Eliot A Cohen: Western Diplomats Need to Stop Whining About Ukraine https://tinyurl.com/2y5tusne
// Allies can be exasperating. But try being invaded by your neighbor and lectured by everyone else.
[…] Most of the Western sputtering occurred in and around last month’s NATO summit in Vilnius, Lithuania, through anonymous leaks and public grumbles. Indeed, according to one report, the U.S. administration was so miffed by Volodymyr Zelensky’s complaint about the slowness of the NATO accession process that some advocated watering down language about NATO membership for Kyiv. Withdrawing the word invitation from the communiqué would, in their view, be a suitable punishment for a mean tweet. …
Such eruptions occur when officials let their irritations suppress their empathy. At the moment of peak whine, they forget what it means to have a fifth of your country occupied, or to know that a far bigger country is attempting, every night, to smash your power plants, blockade your ports, and destroy your crops. They are not holding in the forefront of their minds obliterated towns and mass graves. They do not know what it is to welcome back exchanged prisoners of war who have been castrated. Or to mourn old men and women murdered, or younger men and women tortured and raped. Or to worry frantically about thousands of children kidnapped. They forget that while a Western official’s sleep may be interrupted by a phone call or an alarm clock, a Ukrainian official’s sleep is more likely (and more often) interrupted by a siren or the crash of a missile slamming into an apartment block.
Ukrainian officials are thankful. Analysis of their speeches reveals plenty of expressions of gratitude. But they are also insistent and vociferous in their cries for help. They would be both inhuman and derelict in their duty if they were to be anything else. Hopefully, after a whiskey (or two) on the plane back to Washington or London, Western officials simmer down and return to some level of maturity in understanding their beleaguered ally. …
American complaints about the pace of Ukraine’s counteroffensive and its failure to achieve rapid breakthroughs are similarly misplaced. The Ukrainians indeed received a diverse array of tanks and armored vehicles, but they have far less mine-clearing equipment than they need. They tried doing it our way—attempting to pierce dense Russian defenses and break out into open territory—and paid a price. After 10 days they decided to take a different approach, more careful and incremental, and better suited to their own capabilities (particularly their precision long-range weapons) and the challenge they faced. That is, by historical standards, fast adaptation. By contrast, the United States Army took a good four years to develop an operational approach to counterinsurgency in Iraq that yielded success in defeating the remnants of the Baathist regime and al-Qaeda-oriented terrorists. …
The Ukrainians are now fighting a slow, patient war in which they are dismantling Russian artillery, ammunition depots, and command posts without weapons such as American ATACMS and German Taurus missiles that would make this sensible approach faster and more effective. They know far more about fighting Russians than anyone in any Western military knows, and they are experiencing a combat environment that no Western military has encountered since World War II. Modesty, never an American strong suit, is in order.
One way to increase understanding among Ukraine’s friends would be to put substantial military legations in Kyiv. American colonels and generals do not have to go on patrols or storm tree lines, but they would benefit from continuous, in-country, face-to-face contact with their Ukrainian counterparts. They would be able to communicate realistic assessments of the fighting and of Ukrainian tactical and operational requirements. They would also convey to Ukraine a reassurance that videoconferences cannot, and perhaps bring a bit of humility to deliberations in Washington.
Such an effort entails risks, but that’s what soldiers sign up for. Maintaining a continuous physical presence in Ukraine with a high-level military mission, supplemented by frequent visits from the head of the U.S. European Command and other senior leaders, would be invaluable in making the judgments that could help Ukraine defeat Russia, regain its territory, and win this war. And winning, not whining, is what it’s all about.
🐣 RT @RonFilipkowski Donald Trump now calls on the US Supreme Court to halt all criminal prosecutions and civil lawsuits against him. King Donald I.
[TextLink:] https://twitter.com/RonFilipkowski/status/1687453265582039040?s=20/photo/1
[Text:] 🐣 RT @realDonald Trump CRAZY! My political opponent has hit me with a barrage of weak lawsuits, including D.A., A.G., and others, which require massive amounts of my time & money to adjudicate. Resources that would have gone into Ads and Rallies, will now have to be spent fighting these Radical Left Thugs in numerous courts throughout the Country. I am leading in all Polls, including against Crooked Joe, but this is not a level playing field. It is Election Interference, & the Supreme Court must intercede. MAGA!
🐣 RT @ZelenskyyUa Tomorrow in Jeddah – in Saudi Arabia – a meeting of advisors to heads of state and representatives of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs regarding the Peace Formula will begin.
💽 [tr] https://twitter.com/ZelenskyyUa/status/1687500881984466945?s=20/photo/1
Many countries will be represented, different continents, including the countries of the Global South. It is very important because in such matters as food security, the fate of millions of people in Africa, Asia, and other parts of the world directly depends on how fast the world will be in implementing the Peace Formula.
I am grateful to Saudi Arabia for this platform for negotiations. Recently, a meeting in the same format was held in Copenhagen. We are moving step by step towards the Global Peace Summit. It is very important that the world sees: a fair and honest end to Russian aggression will benefit everyone in the world. Everyone!
Liberating Ukrainian land from the occupiers means restoring full respect for international law and the UN Charter. Eliminating all threats created by Russia to Ukrainian and global security means returning peace to international relations and stability to global life.
I am grateful to all those who support the Peace Formula and have already joined the joint efforts for the full implementation of the Formula.
🧵 RT @mhmck To hide their losses, the Russian fascist invaders operate a mobile crematorium continuously in Melitopol’. The bodies of dead militants are brought in flatbed trucks. Local residents complain about the constant corpse stench in the city, especially at night.
📌 🌎 https://twitter.com/mhmck/status/1687508673759780868?s=20/photo/1
🧵 RT @BarackObama Four years ago, I teamed up with @EricHolder to launch @AllOnTheLine. The goal was to take on gerrymandering and make democracy more representative. ¤ Since then, they’ve made incredible progress – including helping secure what is by some measures the fairest congressional map in 40 years, and helping win two landmark cases before the U.S. Supreme Court: Moore v. Harper and Allen v. Milligan.
📌 https://twitter.com/BarackObama/status/1687511710339407874?s=20
🐣 RT @BillKristol The totally normal leader of a totally normal political party.
🐣 RT @marceelias I see a bail hearing (or two) in Trump’s immediate future.
🐣 RT @AWeissmann_ This is the kind of thing that DOJ alerts the court to with respect to any defendant out on bail (in this case, in 3 criminal cases, and also is a threat in civil cases like E Jean Carroll). Not addressing this will only cause it to metastasize with undue deadly risks.
⋙ 🐣 RT @lauferlaw @TheJusticeDept should probably request the Court reconsider the former presidents bail conditions.
🐣 RT @neal_katyal I very much appreciate the rapid response prosecution team. It is unacceptable for Trump to try to influence the trial this way. I would not be surprised if Judge calls a hearing in short order ¤ These Trump statements also underscore why a trial should happen soon to minimize future threats
⋙ 🐣 RT @MuellerSheWrote BREAKING: DoJ has filed a motion for a PROTECTIVE ORDER in the trump coup case based on Donald’s social media posts. DoJ argues that improper dissemination of evidence could have a chilling effect on witnesses. I believe they’ll be granted this motion.
🐣 RT @JoyceWhiteVance Free speech is one thing, but this is over the line. As a prosecutor, I’d be sorely tempted to make a motion to revoke Trump’s pre-trial bond & put him in custody. Let him explain it to the judge.
🐣 RT @RadioFreeTom Gotti wasn’t this stupid.
⋙ 🐣 RT @svdate Gotti could not have said it better.
[TextLink:] https://twitter.com/svdate/status/1687571464881389575?s=20/photo/1
[Text:] 🐣 RT @realDonaldTrump IF YOU GO AFTER ME, I’M COMING AFTER YOU!
🐣 RT @neal_katyal Donald Trump’s lawyer says he wants the January 6 trial to be televised. Excellent. Let’s do this and show the world what American justice looks like.
⋙ TheIndependent, Graeme Massie (7/23): Trump jdemands cameras in courtroom for potential election fraud case https://tinyurl.com/yubthucs
// An indictment, Mr Trump’s third in four months, could be handed down any day after he was sent a ‘target’ letter by Jack Smiith
WaPo: A look at the amount of U.S. spending powering Ukraine’s defense https://tinyurl.com/37pstp8u The US is funding the fight of Ukraine against invading Russia for a small fraction of the US annual defense budget
// The United States is the biggest financial supporter of Kyiv’s fight against Russia.
◕ https://twitter.com/Auriandra/status/1687545123645562880?s=20/photo/1
// $1.77Tr vs $66.2B
⭕ 3 Aug 2023
🧵 RT @ rgoodlaw 1/ Public Service Announcement
Q: Do prosecutors have to prove former President Trump knew he lost the election for any of crimes charged?
A: Absolutely not
I wrote this w/ @BarbMcQuade @NormEisen in 2022. ¤ We anticipated Indictment’s charges.
WaPo, Ryan Goodman, Norm Eisen, Barbara McQuade (2022): Did Trump believe his big lie? It’s irrelevant to proving his guilt. https://tinyurl.com/mr2x5uvb
// Regardless of whether he thought the election was stolen, the place to look for ‘criminal intent’ is in any illegal acts in the aftermath
[…] It’s tempting, in assessing Trump’s state of mind, to focus on whether he genuinely believed his assertion that the presidential election was “stolen” — that he had beaten Joe Biden and that therefore his subsequent efforts were merely means well within his power aimed at setting things right. If you can prove that he did know that he lost the election — that it was not “stolen” from him — you go a long way toward clearing that criminal-intent hurdle. Certainly, the House select committee investigating the attack on the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, is amassing evidence that Trump knew he had lost. Numerous Trump aides and lawyers have attested to this before the committee.
But so what. For a number of the possible crimes the committee has identified, it doesn’t matter what Trump believed about the election. Focusing on that aspect misses the true test of criminal intent.
He still had no legal right to use forged electoral certificates or to pressure election officials in Georgia to “find 11,780 votes” that did not exist, or to engage in other extralegal means to try to hold onto power. That includes pressuring the vice president to assume powers he didn’t have. State and federal criminal laws prohibit these things. Vigilante justice is against the law, even if you (wrongly) believe you are a victim. …
It is also immaterial what was in Trump’s head regarding the outcome of the election when he participated in the audacious scheme to falsify alternate slates of electors and get them to Congress to gum up the certification of the election. …
✅ CNN, Daniel Dale: 21 Donald Trump election lies listed in his new indictment https://tinyurl.com/yth22v7k
1. The lie that fraud changed the outcome of the 2020 election, that Trump “had actually won,” and that the election was “stolen.” (Pages 1 and 40-41 of the indictment)
Trump’s claim of a stolen election whose winner was determined by massive fraud was (and continues to be) his overarching lie about the election. The indictment asserts that Trump knew as early as 2020 that his narrative was false – and had been told as such by numerous senior officials in his administration and allies outside the federal government – but persisted in deploying it anyway, including on January 6 itself2. The lie that fake pro-Trump Electoral College electors in seven states were legitimate electors. (Pages 5 and 26)
The indictment alleges that Trump and his alleged co-conspirators “organized” the phony slates of electors and then “caused” the slates to be transmitted to Vice President Mike Pence and other government officials to try to get them counted on January 6, the day Congress met to count the electoral votes.
3. The lie that the Justice Department had identified significant concerns that may have affected the outcome of the election. (Pages 6 and 27)
Attorney General William Barr and other top Justice Department officials had told Trump that his claims of major fraud had proved to be untrue. But the indictment alleges that Trump still sought to have the Justice Department “make knowingly false claims of election fraud to officials in the targeted states through a formal letter under the Acting Attorney General’s signature, thus giving the Defendant’s lies the backing of the federal government and attempting to improperly influence the targeted states to replace legitimate Biden electors with the Defendant’s.”
4. The lie that Pence had the power to reject Biden’s electoral votes. (Pages 6, 32-38)
Pence had repeatedly and correctly told Trump that he did not have the constitutional or legal right to send electoral votes back to the states as Trump wanted. The indictment notes that Trump nonetheless repeatedly declared that Pence could do so – first in private conversations and White House meetings, then in tweets on January 5 and January 6, then in Trump’s January 6 speech in Washington at a rally before the riot – in which Trump, angry at Pence, allegedly inserted the false claim into his prepared text even after advisors had managed to temporarily get it removed.
5. The lie that “the Vice President and I are in total agreement that the Vice President has the power to act.” (Page 36)
The indictment alleges that the day before the riot, Trump “approved and caused” his campaign to issue a false statement saying Pence agreed with him about having the power to reject electoral votes – even though Trump knew, from a one-on-one meeting with Pence hours prior, that Pence continued to firmly disagree.
6. The lie that Georgia had thousands of ballots cast in the names of dead people. (Pages 8 and 16)
The indictment notes that Georgia’s top elections official – Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger – a republican – explained to Trump in a phone call on January 2, 2021 that this claim was false, but that Trump repeated it in his January 6 rally speech anyway. Raffensperger said in the phone call and then in a January 6 letter to Congress that just two potential dead-voter cases had been discovered in the state; Raffensperger said in late 2021 that the total had been updated and stood at four.
7. The lie that Pennsylvania had 205,000 more votes than voters. (Pages 8 and 20)
The indictment notes that Trump’s acting attorney general Jeffrey Rosen and acting deputy attorney general Richard Donoghue had both told him that this claim was false, but he kept making it anyway – including in the January 6 rally speech.
8. The lie that there had been a suspicious “dump” of votes in Detroit, Michigan. (Pages 9 and 17)
The indictment notes that Barr, the attorney general, told Trump on December 1, 2020 that this was false – as CNN and others had noted, supposedly nefarious “dumps” Trump kept talking about were merely ballots being counted and added to the public totals as normal – but that Trump still repeated the false claim in public remarks the next day. And Barr wasn’t the only one to try to dissuade Trump from this claim. The indictment also notes that Michigan’s Republican Senate majority leader, Mike Shirkey, had told Trump in an Oval Office meeting on November 20, 2020 that Trump had lost the state “not because of fraud” but because Trump had “underperformed with certain voter populations.”
9. The lie that Nevada had tens of thousands of double votes and other fraud. (Page 9)
The indictment notes that Nevada’s top elections official – Secretary of State Barbara Cegavske, also a Republican – had publicly posted a “Facts vs. Myths” document explaining that Nevada judges had rejected such claims.
10. The lie that more than 30,000 non-citizens had voted in Arizona. (Pages 9 and 11)
The indictment notes that Trump put the number at “over 36,000” in his January 6 speech – even though, the indictment says, his own campaign manager “had explained to him that such claims were false” and Arizona House Speaker Rusty Bowers, a Republican who had supported Trump in the election, “had issued a public statement that there was no evidence of substantial fraud in Arizona.”
11. The lie that voting machines in swing states had switched votes from Trump to Biden. (Page 9)
This is a reference to false conspiracy theories about Dominion Voting Systems machines, which Trump kept repeating long after it was thoroughly debunked by his own administration’s election cybersecurity security arm and many others. The indictment says, “The Defendant’s Attorney General, Acting Attorney General, and Acting Deputy Attorney General all had explained to him that this was false, and numerous recounts and audits had confirmed the accuracy of voting machines.”
12. The lie that Dominion machines had been involved in “massive election fraud.” (Page 12)
The indictment notes that Trump, on Twitter, promoted a lawsuit filed by an alleged co-conspirator, whom CNN has identified as lawyer Sidney Powell, that alleged “massive election fraud” involving Dominion – even though, the indictment says, Trump privately acknowledged to advisors that the claims were “unsupported” and told them Powell sounded “crazy.”
13. The lie that “a substantial number of non-citizens, non-residents, and dead people had voted fraudulently in Arizona.” (Page 10)
The indictment alleges that Trump and an alleged co-conspirator, whom CNN has identified as former Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani, made these baseless claims on a November 22, 2020 phone call with Bowers; the indictment says Giuliani never provided evidence and eventually said, at a December 1, 2020 meeting with Bowers, “words to the effect of, ‘We don’t have the evidence, but we have lots of theories.”
14. The lie that Fulton County, Georgia elections workers had engaged in “ballot stuffing.” (Pages 13 and 14)
This is the long-debunked lie – which Trump has continued to repeat in 2023 – that a video had caught two elections workers in Atlanta breaking the law. The workers were simply doing their jobs, and, as the indictment notes, they were cleared of wrongdoing by state officials in 2020 – but Trump continued to make the claims even after Raffensperger and Justice Department officials directly and repeatedly told him they were unfounded.
15. The lie that thousands of out-of-state voters cast ballots in Georgia. (Page 16)
The indictment notes that Trump made this claim on his infamous January 2, 2021 call with Raffensperger, whose staff responded that the claim was inaccurate. An official in Raffensberger’s office explained to Trump that the voters in question had authentically moved back to Georgia and legitimately cast ballots.
16. The lie that Raffensperger “was unwilling, or unable,” to address Trump’s claims about a “‘ballots under table’ scam, ballot destruction, out of state ‘voters’, dead voters, and more.” (Page 16)
In fact, contrary to this Trump tweet the day after the call, Raffensperger and his staff had addressed and debunked all of these false Trump claims.
17. The lie that there was substantial fraud in Wisconsin and that the state had tens of thousands of unlawful votes. (Page 21)
False and false. But the indictment notes that Trump made the vague fraud claim in a tweet on December 21, 2020, after the state Supreme Court upheld Biden’s win, and repeated the more specific claim about tens of thousands of unlawful votes in the January 6 speech.
18. The lie that Wisconsin had more votes counted than it had actual voters. (Page 21)
This, like Trump’s similar claim about Pennsylvania, is not true. But the indictment alleges that Trump raised the claim in a December 27, 2020 conversation with acting attorney general Rosen and acting deputy attorney general Donoghue, who informed him that it was false.
19. The lie that the election was “corrupt.” (Page 28)
The indictment alleges that when acting attorney general Rosen told Trump on the December 27, 2020 call that the Justice Department couldn’t and wouldn’t change the outcome of the election, Trump responded, “Just say that the election was corrupt and leave the rest to me and the Republican congressmen.” (Deputy attorney general Donoghue memorialized the reported Trump remark in his handwritten notes, which CNN reported on in 2021 and which were subsequently published by the House committee that investigated the Capitol riot.)
20. The lie that Trump won every state by hundreds of thousands of votes. (Page 34)
The indictment says that, at a January 4, 2021 meeting intended to convince Pence to unlawfully reject Biden’s electoral votes and send them back to swing-state legislatures, Pence took notes describing Trump as saying, “Bottom line-won every state by 100,000s of votes.” This was, obviously, false even if Trump was specifically talking about swing states won by Biden rather than every state in the nation.
21. The lie that Pennsylvania “want[s] to recertify.” (Page 38)
Trump made this false claim in his January 6 speech. In reality, some Republican state legislators in Pennsylvania had expressed a desire to at least delay the congressional affirmation of Biden’s victory – but the state’s Democratic governor and top elections official, who actually had election certification power in the state, had no desire to recertify Biden’s legitimate win.
🐣 RT @Lyla_lilas First Lady of Ukraine Olena Zelenska in an interview for the Independent: “If the aggressor wins now, it will be the worst scenario for all of humanity. This will mean that global deterrents do not work. This will mean that anyone who has the power, strength and sufficient financial opportunities, he can do whatever he wants in this world.”
🐣 RT @Gerashchenko_en ⚡️Security Service of Ukraine established that Russia wants to use Wagner PMC to involve Belarus in a full-scale war against Ukraine.
🌎 ◕ https://twitter.com/Gerashchenko_en/status/1687418375960424448?s=20/photo/1
The Security Service of Ukraine (SSU) has obtained intelligence indicating that Russians are preparing a large-scale false flag provocation at the strategic facility of Belarus – Mozyr Oil Refinery.
According to available data, a sabotage and reconnaissance group consisting of Russian military personnel and Russian special services officers who were sent to the territory of Belarus under the guise of Wagner PMC fighters is preparing an attack.
This Russian reconnaissance group is supposed to carry out a provocation at the refinery, posing as “Ukrainian saboteurs.” The Russian Federation plans to blame Ukraine for the crime in order to once again try to involve Minsk in a full-scale war against our country.
The SSU received information about the planned terrorist attack in Belarus from several sources – in particular, from the testimony of a Russian Armed Forces serviceman, who was captured by Ukrainian defenders in Zaporizhzhia direction.
SSU cyber specialists also recovered and analyzed information on the captured Russian serviceman’s cell phone.
Among other things, it was established that he had previously participated in hostilities against the Defense Forces in the South of Ukraine, and recently he was instructed to relocate to Belarus as a member of Wagner PMC.
Already at the stage of changing the place of service, the Russian military received information about a “special mission” at the Mozyr Oil Refinery. Security Service of Ukraine cyber specialists found deleted correspondence with other performers, pictures of the facility and some information about the operation on his phone.
Security Service of Ukraine warns the Belarusian army against participating in a full-scale war against Ukraine. Every invader who crosses the border of our country will be destroyed by our security and defense forces.
🧵 RT @Yuri_Gagarin_UA 🪖Noticed this silence yet, my dark comrades? It’s the sound of the world that just crashed onto the heads of Russian supporters. In the Moscow region, an oxygen-battery warehouse has exploded – a place where batteries for drones were made.
📌 💽 https://twitter.com/Yuri_Gagarin_UA/status/1687191842767405057?s=20/photo/1
The echoes of the blast, painful and shocking, aren’t the focal point of this tale. What matters here is the cold, hard fact that we, Ukrainians, warned you. You crossed the line, you stoked the flames of war and you expected us to bow down in surrender. How wrong you were.
Just a gentle reminder, Vanya, we’re men of our word. Your time is running out. Tick-Tock, Vanya, keep your ear to the ground
Souls, taken by each new day of war desecrated, fuels our rage.
our anger doesn’t burn – it obliterates. ¤ #TickTockVanya #JusticeIsComing
WaPo: Trump pleads not guilty to charges that he plotted to overturn election https://tinyurl.com/ypx6hwa2
// ‘A very sad day for America’ the former president declares as the clock begins ticking toward his trial on Jan. 6-related charges
WaPo: Hunter tried to sell family name but Joe Biden never talked business, says ex-associate https://tinyurl.com/53u3szjf
//. Devon Archer’s testimony to House Oversight investigators included his assertion that Hunter Biden was not able to influence his father’s actions or policy decisions
🧵 RT @PhillipsPOBrien Just sent out a midweek substack–which takes aim at the ludicrous criticisms that Ukraine is somehow not able to execute a NATO style combined-arms offensive like it was trained to do. It simply doesnt have the fires, particularly air support… [link]
📌 https://twitter.com/PhillipsPOBrien/status/1687111970628292609?s=20
⋙ 🐣 RT @PhillipsPOBrien that NATO would take for granted. NATO has never and would never undertake an offensive in such a situation. Its the cheapest kind of criticism–Ukraine is doing what it has to do within the situation it finds itself. Wasting Russian forces for a while now is smarter…
⋙ 🐣 RT @PhillipsPOBrien than continually trying to attack Russian defended lines without air supremacy and enough fire support.
NYT, Peter Baker: Trump’s Case Has Broad Implications for American Democracy https://tinyurl.com/5tycnc7m 🇺🇸 versus 🤡 //➔ why is this so difficult?
// The third indictment of the former president is the first to get to the heart of the matter: Can a sitting leader of the country spread lies to hold onto power even after voters reject him?
[N]ot since the framers emerged from Independence Hall on that clear, cool day in Philadelphia 236 years ago has any president who was voted out of office been accused of plotting to hold onto power in an elaborate scheme of deception and intimidation that would lead to violence in the halls of Congress.
What makes the indictment against Donald J. Trump on Tuesday so breathtaking is not that it is the first time a president has been charged with a crime or even the second. Mr. Trump already holds those records. But as serious as hush money and classified documents may be, this third indictment in four months gets to the heart of the matter, the issue that will define the future of American democracy.
At the core of the United States of America v. Donald J. Trump is no less than the viability of the system constructed during that summer in Philadelphia. Can a sitting president spread lies about an election and try to employ the authority of the government to overturn the will of the voters without consequence? The question would have been unimaginable just a few years ago, but the Trump case raises the kind of specter more familiar in countries with histories of coups and juntas and dictators.
In effect, Jack Smith, the special counsel who brought the case, charged Mr. Trump with one of the most sensational frauds in the history of the United States, one “fueled by lies” and animated by the basest of motives, the thirst for power. In a 45-page, four-count indictment, Mr. Smith dispensed with the notion that Mr. Trump believed his claims of election fraud. “The defendant knew that they were false,” it said, and made them anyway to “create an intense national atmosphere of mistrust and anger and erode public faith in the administration of the election.” …
The framers considered the peaceful transfer of power fundamental to the new form of government they were devising. It was a fairly radical innovation in its day, an era when kings and emperors generally gave up power only upon natural death or at the point of a weapon. In the newborn republic, by contrast, the framers set limits on power through four-year presidential terms renewable only by the voters through the Electoral College.
George Washington established the precedent of voluntarily stepping down after two of those terms, a restraint later incorporated into the Constitution through the 22nd Amendment. John Adams established the precedent of peacefully surrendering power after losing an election. Ever since, every defeated president accepted the verdict of the voters and stepped down. As Ronald Reagan once put it, what “we accept as normal is nothing less than a miracle.”
Until Mr. Trump came along.
For all of the many, many allegations made against him on all sorts of subjects during his time on the public stage, everything else feels small by comparison. Unlike the indictment by New York State for allegedly covering up a payment to a porn actress and Mr. Smith’s previous indictment for allegedly jeopardizing national secrets after leaving the White House, the new charges are the first to deal with actions taken by a president while in office.
While he failed to keep his grip on power, Mr. Trump has undermined the credibility of elections in the United States by persuading three in 10 Americans that the 2020 election was somehow stolen from him, even though it was not and many of his own advisers and family members know it was not. …
The most essential facts of the case, after all, are not in dispute, nor did he deny any of the assertions made in the indictment on Tuesday. Mr. Trump was astonishingly open at the time in declaring that he wanted to overturn the election. Since leaving office, he has even called for the “termination” of the Constitution to reinstall him in the White House immediately. …
[A]s the indictment methodically documented, Mr. Trump was told over and over again by his own advisers, allies and administration officials that the allegations he was making were not true, yet he publicly continued to make them, sometimes just hours later.
He was told they were not true by not one but two attorneys general, multiple other Justice Department officials and the government’s election security chief — all his appointees. He was told by his own vice president, campaign officials and the investigators they hired. He was told by Republican governors and secretaries of state and legislators. As one senior campaign adviser put it at the time, it was “all just conspiracy” garbage “beamed down from the mothership.”
Despite all that, Mr. Trump has never backed down in the two and a half years since, even as assertion after assertion has been debunked. Not a single independent authority who was not allied with or paid by Mr. Trump — no judge, no prosecutor, no election agency, no governor — has ever validated any substantial election fraud that would have come close to reversing the results in any of the battleground states, much less the three or four that would have been necessary to change the winner.
The one who tried to defraud the United States, Mr. Smith charged, was Mr. Trump, with bogus claims that he knew or had every reason to know were bogus, all in a bid for power. The former president will argue that this is all politics and that he should be returned to office in next year’s election, and so far millions of Americans have taken his side.
Now the justice system and the electoral system will engage in a 15-month race to see which will decide his fate first — and the country’s. The real verdict on the Trump presidency is still to come.
🐣 RT @ DCelesteSpencer NBC News confirms: During a trip to the White House in June, former President Barack Obama made it clear to President Biden that he was committed to doing whatever it takes to support his reelection! #DemVoice1 #ProudBlue
🖼 https://twitter.com/DCelesteSpencer/status/1686888644252950530?s=20
🐣 RT @TheRickWilson If only there was a simple, easy to remember phrase for this… #ETTD
⋙ 🐣 RT @kaitlancollins Bill Barr on Trump’s two co-defendants: “He leaves in his wake ruined lives like this. The people who went up to Capitol Hill, these individuals, many of the people who served him in government that got sucked into things, he just leaves all this carnage in his wake.”
💽 https://twitter.com/TheRickWilson/status/1687036790115282944?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @AntiToxicPeople The terror is dripping off his orange face.
[TextLink:] https://twitter.com/AntiToxicPeople/status/1686940772975947777?s=20/photo/1
[Text:] 🐣 RT @realDonald Trump The latest Fake “case” brought by Crooked Joe Biden & Deranged Jack Smith will hopefully be moved to an impartial Venue, such as the politically unbiased nearby State of West Virginia! IMPOSSIBLE to get a fair trial in Washington, D.C., which is over 95% anti-Trump, & for which I have called for a Federal TAKEOVER in order to bring our Capital back to Greatness. It is now a high crime embarrassment to our Nation and, indeed, the World. This Indictment is all about Election Interference!!!
⭕ 2 Aug 2023
🧵 📋 RT @Victorshi2020 This is amazing news: Bank of America, the 2nd biggest bank in the US, just declared there will be NO recession & we are in for a soft landing. They say GDP is HIGHER than expected & inflation is LOWER than expected. This is because of Bidenomics. Thank you, President Biden.
📌 https://twitter.com/Victorshi2020/status/1686792836950474752?s=20
// US economic forecast https://tinyurl.com/2p8y6yaf
🐣 RT @USA_Polling US life expectancy
◕ https://twitter.com/USA_Polling/status/1686899049356554241?s=20/photo/1
// KFF/Peterson analysis of CDC, OECD, etc data: US vs “comparable countries”
⋙ 🐣 vaccine denialism, guns, Fentanyl ¤ the price of so-called “freedom”
🐣 RT @atrupar Bill Barr on CNN: “As the indictment says, they’re not attacking his First Amendment right. He can say whatever he wants. He can even lie. He can tell people that the election was stolen when he knew better. But that does not protect you from entering into a conspiracy.”
NYT Editorial: A President Accused of Betraying His Country https://tinyurl.com/yc3jbwef The peaceful transfer of power, Mr. Smith said, “is foundational to the United States democratic process, and until 2021, had operated in a peaceful and orderly manner for more than 130 years”
🚫 NYT: Ukrainian Troops Trained by the West Stumble in Battle https://tinyurl.com/4wxwb3yx
// discouraging; Ukraine’s army has for now set aside U.S. fighting methods and reverted to tactics it knows best.
🐣 RT @voter1vote Fitch cuts US credit rating to AA+; Treasury calls it ‘arbitrary’
https://tinyurl.com/3e4jkhdc Yellen speaks out! No reason for this now! #inners
🐣 RT @TheRickWilson I wrote this in 2017 as a caution to my then-fellow Republicans. I think it holds up rather well.
⋙ WaPo: If you work for Trump, it’s time to quit https://tinyurl.com/ywcdffj9
// 5/18/2017; After the Comey firing and the Russia intel leak, the I’m-taking-one-for-the-team ship has sailed.
⋙ 🐣 as advice for individuals, fine ¤ but in the end, it was those who grew their consciences late who were there to stop him
🐣 📋 RT @politico Trump now faces 78 felony charges across three criminal cases so far ⬇️ ¤ https://politi.co/3YxtBE5
◕ https://twitter.com/politico/status/1686516301332668416?s=20/photo/1
🧵 RT @judgeluttig I was traveling yesterday, but I gave CNN @jamiegangel a statement on the indictment of the former president for his efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential election and for the January 6 attack on the United States Capitol. ¤ Among other things, I said:
📌 https://twitter.com/judgeluttig/status/1686733788133617664?s=20
[ThreadReader:] https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1686733788133617664.html
This is an historic, tragic, and regrettable day for America.
This day is all the more tragic and regrettable because the former president has cynically chosen to inflict this embarrassing spectacle on the Nation — and a spectacle it will be.
For the first time in history, an American president will be on criminal trial in multiple venues — federal and state — during a presidential campaign in which he will be the presumptive nominee of the Republican Party for the Presidency of the United States of America.
January 6 and the effort to overturn the 2020 presidential election, together with the first criminal trials of an American president, will now become singularly infamous events in American history.
These events will forever scar and stain the United States. And they will forever scar and stain the United States in the eyes of the world.
Never again will the world be inspired by America’s democracy in the way that it has been inspired since America’s founding almost 250 years ago.
🐣 RT @Maks_NAFO_FELLA 12 countries joined the G7 declaration on security guarantees for Ukraine! ¤ These are Belgium, Denmark, Ireland, Iceland, Spain, Norway, the Netherlands, Portugal, Romania, Finland, the Czech Republic and Sweden. ¤ 🇺🇦 President Zelensky at a meeting with ambassadors of Ukraine.
🐣 RT @BillKristol Mike Pence unleashed.
⋙ 🐣 RT @Acyn
[TextLink:] 💽 https://twitter.com/Acyn/status/1686819913833267227?s=20/photo/1
[Text:] Pence: Let’s be clear on this point. It wasn’t that they asked for a pause. The president specifically asked me and his gaggle of crackpot lawyers asked me to literally reject votes which would have resulted in the issue of being turned over to the house of representatives
🐣 RT @RonFilipkowski Transcript of an audio tape filed in the lawsuit by his former assistant. Not hearsay, not her saying it, Rudy’s voice on tape. Trump’s friend, lawyer and nightly guest of right-wing media. You all should be so proud to stand with Rudy.
[TextLink:] https://twitter.com/RonFilipkowski/status/1686771985706024960?s=20/photo/1
1 MR. GIULIANI: Come here, big tits.
2 Come here, big tits. Your tits belong to me.
3 Give them to me (indiscernible). I want to claim
4 my tits. I want to claim my tits. I want to
5 claim my tits. These are my tits.
6 MS. DUNPHY: Oh, yeah. MR. GIULIANI: These breasts belong to
8 me. Nobody else can get near these, okay? I
9 don’t care if they’re flirting or they give you
10 business cards. These are mine, you got it?
11 MS. DUNPHY: Yes.
12 MR. GIULIANI: Understand? I’m very
13 fucking possessive. I’ve gone easy on you.
14 MS. DUNPHY: I don’t know.
15 MR. GIULIANI: I’ve been easy on you.
16 MS. DUNPHY: You’re pretty tough on me.
17 MR. GIULIANI: I’ve been easy on you.
18 Give them to me.
19 MS. DUNPHY: Maybe – –
🐣 RT @AntiToxicPeople This incredibly pathetic, demented, empty shell of a human being managed to hijack a 169 year old political party that worships him like Jim Jones.
[TextLink:] https://twitter.com/AntiToxicPeople/status/1686855967378714624?s=20/photo/1
[Text:] 🐣 RT @realDonaldTrump Where’s Hunter?
🐣 RT @AntiToxicPeople In all seriousness, he is a deranged, delusional lunatic.
[TextLink:] https://twitter.com/AntiToxicPeople/status/1686824927503290369?s=20/photo/1.
[Text:] RT @realDonaldTrump I feel badly for Mike Pence, who is attracting no crowds, enthusiasm, or loyalty from people who, as a member of the Trump Administration, should be loving him. He didn’t fight against Election Fraud, which we will now be easilv able to prove based on the most recent Fake Indictment & information which will have to be made available to us, finally – a really BIG deal. The V.P. had power that Mike didn’t understand, but after the Election, the RINOS & Dems changed the law, taking that power away!
🐣 RT @SkinnerPm Our former president was indicted on federal charges, for his actions to steal a fair election he still lies about (& fundraises on) being stolen. He’s a criminal. A lifelong unrepentant bragging criminal. And he’s the leading presidential candidate for the Republican Party.
🐣 RT @ProjectLincoln January 6th was an unprecedented assault on the seat of American democracy fueled by Trump’s lies about the 2020 election. He must be held to account.
💽 https://twitter.com/ProjectLincoln/status/1686536528842063878?s=20/photo/1
// Jack Smith announces charges against Trump
Propublica: How a Secretive Billionaire Handed His Fortune to the Architect of the Right-Wing Takeover of the Courts https://tinyurl.com/yvy5crtw
// In the largest known political advocacy donation in U.S. history, industrialist Barre Seid funded a new group run by Federalist Society co-chair Leonard Leo, who guided Trump’s Supreme Court picks and helped end federal abortion rights.
🐣 RT @KeneAkers U.S. District Judge Tanya S. Chutkan has been assigned the responsibility of presiding over the case involving former President Trump’s alleged efforts to overturn the outcome of the 2020 election. In this crucial role, Judge Chutkan will impartially assess the legal matters at hand and ensure a fair and just judicial process. As an experienced and respected judge, her expertise and commitment to upholding the principles of the legal system will be integral in navigating this contentious case.
🖼 https://twitter.com/KeneAkers/status/1686609197646204928?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @Reuters Jack Smith, the US special counsel who filed a second federal criminal indictment against Donald Trump, has a reputation for winning tough cases against war criminals, mobsters and crooked cops https://reut.rs/3YkX440
⭕ 1 Aug 2023
WaPo: Trump charged in probe of Jan. 6, efforts to overturn 2020 election https://tinyurl.com/3nfrjwa6
// The indictment alleges four different crimes and describes six unnamed, uncharged co-conspirators
A grand jury indicted former president Donald Trump on Tuesday for a raft of alleged crimes in his brazen efforts to overturn Joe Biden’s election victory — the latest legal and political aftershock stemming from the riot at the U.S. Capitol two and a half years ago.
The four-count, 45-page indictment accuses Trump, who is again running for president, of conspiring to defraud the United States, conspiring to obstruct an official proceeding, attempting to obstruct an official proceeding and conspiring against people’s civil right to have their vote counted. The maximum potential sentence on the most serious charge is 20 years in prison.
“The attack on our nation’s Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, was an unprecedented assault on the seat of American democracy,” special counsel Jack Smith told reporters after the indictment was filed. “It was fueled by lies, lies by the defendant.”
Smith also praised the law enforcement officers who defended the Capitol, saying that they “did not just defend a building or the people sheltering in it. They put their lives on the line to defend who we are as a country and as a people.”
The charges represent the third indictment of the former president filed since March — setting the stage for one of the stranger presidential contests in history, in which a major-party front-runner may have to alternate between campaign stops and courtroom hearings over the next year and a half.
A federal grand jury in Miami indicted Trump last month on charges of mishandling classified documents after leaving the White House and obstructing government efforts to get them back. A state grand jury in New York has charged him with falsifying business records in connection with hush money payments during the 2016 campaign. And a state grand jury in Georgia is weighing whether to charge Trump for his efforts to undo the 2020 election results there. … …
🐣 RT @MuellerSheWrote This is important. There’s so much more to charge, but getting this simple indictment out now allows DoJ to try him ahead of the election. ¤ You can’t continue to utilize a grand jury for funsies. It has to be in pursuit of something. Expect more charges. MANY more.
⋙ 🐣 RT @kylegriffin1 Jack Smith says his team is not done: “Our investigation of other individuals continues.”
NBC: What to know on Jack Smith, special counsel in the Trump federal investigations https://tinyurl.com/msfc4zzm
// Smith investigated war crimes and previously was a federal prosecutor.
Prior to being named special counsel in the Trump investigations, Jack Smith most recently served as the chief prosecutor for the special court in The Hague, where he investigated war crimes committed during the Kosovo War. …
Before The Hague, Smith served as the vice president of litigation for the Hospital Corporation of America, the nation’s largest nongovernmental health care provider.
Smith began his prosecutorial career in 1994 as an assistant district attorney with the New York County District Attorney’s Office. In 1999, he became an assistant U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of New York, where he worked for nine years prosecuting issues such as gang murders of police officers as well as civil rights violations, according to a bio from the Justice Department.
From 2008 to 2010, Smith worked at the International Criminal Court where he oversaw war crimes investigations.
In 2010, Smith returned to the Justice Department where he worked as chief of the Public Integrity Section, overseeing public corruption and elections-related investigations. In 2015, he served as the first assistant U.S. attorney for the Middle District of Tennessee before becoming the acting United States attorney.
Attorney General Merrick Garland said when he named Smith as special counsel in November, that Smith would be returning to the U.S. from his position at The Hague and would begin his role as special counsel immediately.
🐣 RT @HawaiiDelilah McConnell following the Jan 6 impeachment: “Trump didn’t get away with anything yet. We have a criminal justice system in this country…And former presidents are not immune from being accountable by either one.” ¤ Don’t let anyone forget what he said.
💽 https://twitter.com/HawaiiDelilah/status/1686583758169001984?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @davidfrum If Zelenskyy had surrendered to Trump’s extortion in 2019, who knows where we’d be today. Hero of two democracies.
NYT: A Run of Strong Data Buoys Biden on the Economy https://tinyurl.com/bdhfzbse
// Voters continue to rate the president poorly on economic issues, but there are signs the national mood is beginning to improve.
📊 Poll: When Nixon left office, fully half of Republicans still supported him https://tinyurl.com/466edv65
◕ https://twitter.com/Auriandra/status/1686569949848858624?s=20/photo/1
// Charles Franklin
🐣 RT @neal_katyal This will be the most significant trial in our lifetimes. There will be so much disinformation and spinning. And so much that will go to the heart of who we are as a people. ¤ All Americans should be able to see the trial for themselves. It absolutely must be televised. I very much hope the Chief Justice authorizes it.
TheAtlantic, Tom Nichols: This Is the Case https://tinyurl.com/2ty47xdv //➔ In 2026, the United States is due to be a quarter of a millennium old, the oldest surviving democracy on earth ~ ‘if this nation so conceived and so dedicated can (that) long endure.’ Will we make it?
// Special Counsel Jack Smith has sounded the call, but voters must answer it if they wish to preserve American democracy.
Over the past year, state and federal prosecutors have alleged that Donald Trump went on something like a crime spree as a presidential candidate, as the sitting president, and then as a private citizen after his defeat. The charges, from Manhattan to Mar-a-Lago, include business fraud, the illegal retention of classified material, and the destruction of evidence.
All of these accusations, however, pale in importance next to the indictment handed down today. ¤ Trump is accused of multiple conspiracies against the United States, all designed to keep him in power against the will of the voters and in violation of the Constitution. The former president—once our chief executive, the commander in chief, the leader we entrusted with the keys to nuclear hell—is accused of knowing that he lost a free and fair election, and, rather than transferring power to a duly elected successor, engaging in criminal plots against our democracy, all while firing up a mob that would later storm the Capitol.
Long before now, however, Americans should have reached the conclusion, with or without a trial, that Trump is a menace to the United States and poisonous to our society. (Senator J. D. Vance of Ohio once referred to Trump as “cultural heroin,” but that was before he decided to seek power in the Republican Party.) The GOP base, controlled by Trump’s cult of personality, will likely never admit its mistake: As my colleague Peter Wehner writes, Trump’s record of “lawlessness and depravity” means nothing to Republicans. But other Republicans now, more than ever, face a moment of truth. They must decide if they are partisans or patriots. They can no longer claim to be both.
The rest of us, as a nation but also as individuals, can no longer indulge the pretense that Trump is just another Republican candidate, that supporting Donald Trump is just another political choice, and that agreeing with Trump’s attacks on our democracy is just a difference of opinion. (Those of us who share our views in the media have a particular duty to cease discussing Trump as if he were a normal candidate—or even a normal person—especially after today’s indictment.) I have long described Trump’s candidacies as moral choices and tests of civic character, but I have also cautioned that Americans, for the sake of social comity, should resist too many arguments about politics among themselves. I can no longer defend this advice. […]
TheAtlantic, David A Graham: Trump Attempted a Brazen, Dead-Serious Attack on American Democracy https://tinyurl.com/2a9z2nbw
// And now he’s been indicted for it.
More than two and a half years after Donald Trump attempted to steal the 2020 presidential election, a grand jury in Washington, D.C., has indicted the former president on four felony counts related to the plot.
This is the third time that Trump has been charged with felonies in 2023, but it is also the most significant case against him. Although other charges allege serious misconduct, this indictment cuts to the gravest act he committed: his lengthy, concerted effort to subvert American democracy.
The grand jury handed up the indictment this afternoon, charging Trump with conspiracy to defraud the United States, conspiracy to obstruct an official proceeding, obstruction of and attempt to obstruct an official proceeding, and conspiracy against rights.
The indictment, obtained by Special Counsel Jack Smith of the Department of Justice, doesn’t break open new storylines, though it does add detail. But the 45-page document brings together every aspect of the paperwork coup, from the origins of Trump’s attempt to stay in power just after the election up to the desperate last efforts on January 6.
Trump, aided by six specific co-conspirators, used several avenues, Smith alleges. They tried to get state governments to subvert the election results. They encouraged the creation and submission of fraudulent slates of electors. They attempted to weaponize the power of the Justice Department by standing up sham investigations. And they unsuccessfully pressured Vice President Mike Pence to exceed his powers and throw the certification of the election into turmoil. Although the charges don’t accuse Trump of criminal misconduct in inciting the mob that attacked the Capitol, they do say that he “exploit[ed] the violence and chaos.” …
In the days after the election, Smith writes, Trump “spread lies” about the election being tainted by fraud. “These claims were false, and the Defendant knew that they were false,” the indictment adds. Like any American, Smith notes, Trump had a right to spread these lies. But since none of them changed the outcome, Trump soon turned to steps that were not legal. Starting on November 13, 2020, “the Defendant and his co-conspirators executed a strategy to use knowing deceit in the targeted states to impair, obstruct, and defeat the federal government function.” …
A few advisers and lawyers, though, continued to push the claims. Although the co-conspirators are not named in the indictment, details suggest that they include the attorneys Rudy Giuliani, John Eastman, and Sidney Powell, and the Justice Department official Jeffrey Clark. The co-conspirators, too, understood that they were playing with falsehoods and fire, the indictment claims. “We don’t have the evidence, but we have lots of theories,” Giuliani told Arizona House Speaker Rusty Bowers. When a top Trump adviser told Eastman that his legal proposal wouldn’t work but would “cause riots on the streets,” Eastman “responded that there had been points in the nation’s history when violence was necessary to protect the republic.”
Trump was blithe about the violence too. In one striking juxtaposition, the indictment notes that he tweeted a broadside at 2:24 p.m. against Pence for refusing to participate in the plot—just one minute before Secret Service agents had to evacuate the vice president to protect him from a crowd calling him a traitor and demanding his lynching.
… Never before in history has the U.S. failed to conduct a peaceful transfer of power. Never before has a president committed such a grave offense against the nation he was elected to serve.
In a sense, it didn’t work: Trump left office 14 days after the riot, and he’s now charged with serious crimes for his behavior. In another sense, however, the country is still in danger. Trump is the leading Republican candidate for president in 2024, and he could return to the White House. One of his first acts would surely be to try to rid himself of the federal cases against him; he has already indicated that he’d then move on to eliminating the guardrails that prevented him from succeeding on January 6 and that have sought to hold him accountable since. The judgment of the entire American electorate will be more important than what any grand or petit jury can deliver.
🔆 This❗️⋙ NYT, Charlie Savage and Adam Goldman: The Trump Jan. 6 Indictment, Annotated https://tinyurl.com/y2vxk9m7
// The Justice Department unveiled an indictment on Tuesday charging former President Donald J. Trump with four criminal counts. They relate to Mr. Trump’s attempts to overturn the results of the 2020 election, which culminated in the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol by a mob of his supporters.
⇈ ⇊
From JustSecurity: https://tinyurl.com/bdz7jdhw
// copyable, word-searchable
⇈ ⇊
🔄 📔 💙 CourtDoc: Indictment: [ pdf ] https://tinyurl.com/nrna2sh7 45p
UNITED STATES OF AMERICA v. DONALD J. TRUMP, Defendant.
VIOLATIONS:
Count 1: 18 U.S.C. § 371 (Conspiracy to Defraud the United States)
Count 2: 18 U.S.C. § 1512(k) (Conspiracy to Obstruct an Official Proceeding)
Count 3: 18 U.S.C. §§ 1512(c)(2), 2 (Obstruction of and Attempt to Obstruct an Official Proceeding)
Count 4: 18 U.S.C. § 241 (Conspiracy Against Rights)1. The Defendant, DONALD J. TRUMP, was the forty-fifth President of the United States and a candidate for re-election in 2020. The Defendant lost the 2020 presidential election.
2. Despite having lost, the Defendant was determined to remain in power. So for more than two months following election day on November 3, 2020, the Defendant spread lies that there had been outcome-determinative fraud in the election and that he had actually won. These claims were false, and the Defendant knew that they were false. But the Defendant repeated and widely disseminated them anyway—to make his knowingly false claims appear legitimate, create an intense national atmosphere of mistrust and anger, and erode public faith in the administration of the election. …
🐣 RT @NoahBookbinder When Donald Trump tried to keep himself in power after losing an election, that was an assault on this republic and on the form of government that we’ve had for centuries. And that is just about the most dangerous thing a leader in this country can do.
⋙ USAToday: An assault on this republic’: What the Jan. 6 charges Trump faces say about our democracy https://tinyurl.com/5n8shhm5
🐣 RT @AntiToxicPeople The desperately deranged Former President is comparing evidence backed criminal charges that have been filed against him to NAZI GERMANY. What a deeply sick & twisted scumbag.
[TextLink:] https://twitter.com/AntiToxicPeople/status/1686500379473719296?s=20/photo/1
// rant on letterhead
🐣 RT @AccountableGOP Jack Smith: “The attack on our nation’s capital on Jan. 6 was an unprecedented assault on the seat of American democracy…it was fueled by..lies by the defendant, targeted at the nation’s process of collecting, counting and certifying the results of the presidential election.”
🐣 “‘And hast thou slain the Jabberwock?
Come to my arms, my beamish boy!
Oh frabjous day! Calloo, calay!”
he chortled in his joy”
— Lewis Carroll, Jabberwocky💥º°¨¨¨*
🐣 RT @RonFilipkowski We agree the wait was too long. But it’s finally here.
[TextLink:] https://twitter.com/RonFilipkowski/status/1686481932568190976?s=20/photo/1
[Text:] @realDonaldTrump I hear that Deranged Jack Smith, in order to interfere with the Presidential Election of 2024, will be putting out yet another Fake Indictment of your favorite President, me, at 5:00 P.M. Why didn’t they do this 2.5 years ago? Why did they wait so long? Because they wanted to put it right in the middle of my campaign. Prosecutorial Misconduct!
✅ NYT (updated Jun 20): Hunter Biden’s Tangled Tale Comes Front and Center https://tinyurl.com/3texzeey “The real Hunter Biden story is complex and very different in important ways from the narrative promoted by Republicans — but troubling in its own way”
// orig. from Jan
🐣 RT @AntiToxicPeople Psychotic, and he will only get worse every hour. He posted this at 1 a.m.
[TextLink:] https://twitter.com/AntiToxicPeople/status/1686260504187326464?s=20/photo/1
[Text:] 🐣 RT @realDonaldTrump Barr was a terrible and gutless A.G. Once the Radical Left Democrats wanted to Impeach him, he became a marshmallow. It was an honor to fire him. A COWARD RINO WHO LET US DOWN ON ELECTION INTEGRITY, AND MORE!
⭕ 31 Jul 2023
🐣 RT @EdKrassen As you listen to Congressman Dan Goldman talk about Joe Biden’s phone conversations, and as Devon Archer confirmed today that Joe Biden was on phone calls with Hunter Biden’s business associates, let’s address something…
💽 https://twitter.com/EdKrassen/status/1686107706447269888?s=20/photo/1
If Republicans think having phone conversations with your son’s business partners and friends is illegal, then why isn’t Donald Trump in jail for having conversations with his own business associates while he was President?
Additionally the Trump organization made $160 million in business deals while Trump was in the WH. Do you know who the owner of the Trump organization is?
Donald Trump.
Yes he transferred ownership to a revocable trust during his Presidency, but he was still permitted to tell the trustees how to run the company and fire them at any time. Trump retained his financial stake in the business, despite having offered during the campaign to put all his assets in a blind trust should he win the presidency.
Why is there a completely different standard for Hunter Biden who wasn’t even working in the WH?
🐣 RT @AntiToxicPeople You knew his rant about the lameness of the Hunter Biden witness today would be something insane & lie filled…but this is….special. Enjoy.
[TextLink:] https://twitter.com/AntiToxicPeople/status/1686160557999865861?s=20/photo/1
[Text:] @realDonald Trump Wow! “Crooked Joe Biden was on dozen’s of calls with Hunter’s Business Associates. He lied, said he didn’t know anything about his son’s business. Demanded the Ukrainian prosecutor be fired, immediately.” Laura Ingraham, FoxNews. “This is AMAZINGLY CORRUPT BEHAVIOR,” Mollie Hemingway. This is really bad news for Biden, which means I will probably be Indicted again, soon, in order to kill the News Cycle!!! MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN
🐣 RT @Porter_Anderson Media: @gtconway3d to @wolfblitzer: #DonaldTrump wasn’t just obstructing justice here. He was obstructing justice about his other efforts to obstruct justice. He was trying to ditch the surveillance tapes so no one could show that he was moving the boxes around to hide them from the feds. It’s like a Matroyshka doll of criminality. Open it up, and there’s another crime and another crime and another crime. Which is why you can’t blame #JackSmith for investigating further.”
🐣 RT @EdKrassen [Sarcastic] Breaking: It turns out that Hunter Biden was secretly running a business for Joe while Joe Biden was in office. The business made $160 million in deals during his time in office, and Joe Biden is set to get the entirety of the business when he leaves office. [ . . . ]
¤ https://twitter.com/EdKrassen/status/1686190971162148864?s=20
Whoops never-mind. That was the Trump Organization which Donald Trump put in a trust that he essentially had complete control over and that Don Jr. and Eric officially ran during his presidency. The business brought in millions of dollars including via hotel rentals from foreign governments that likely looked to get favors from Trump. Trump Organization was then convicted of fraud and forced to shut down.
Additionally Ivanka and Jared Kushner got a $1.2 billion lease on a NY City property from a company that was majority owned by Qatar, just as Trump was supporting a middle east blockade against Qatar. Suddenly after the lease went through, Trump stopped supporting the blockade.
Then while in office, Ivanka Trump got trademarks granted to her while Donald supported a ZTE deal that benefitted China. On the very date Trump and Ivanka dined at Mar-a-Lago with the Chinese President, China awarded her 3 preliminary trademark approvals, all while Trump was President and Ivanka worked in the White House.
Then after 4 years of pro-Saudi policies, and a surprising arms deal, Trump and Kushner both signed business deals worth billions of dollars with the Saudis after leaving office.
Then, during Trump’s presidency Don Jr.’s personal business parter Gentry Beach, who was doing business overseas, got access to meet with top national security officials in the Trump administration during Trump’s presidency. The NSC officials were directed by the Trump White House to take the meeting because Beach and the businessman were friends of Trump Jr.
But tell me again how Joe Biden had friendly personal phone calls with Hunter Biden’s business partners.
🐣 RT @cspan .@RepDanGoldman following closed-door testimony from Devon Archer: “How much longer are we going to go on this fishing expedition? There is no evidence connecting President Biden to anything related to Hunter Biden.”
💽 https://twitter.com/cspan/status/1686102046120816640?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @CalltoActivism Omg this is embarrassing. ¤ GOP Rep. Andy Biggs was just asked if the star Hunter Biden whistleblower, Devon Archer, knew anything about President Biden accepting any bribes and he said HE DID NOT. ¤ Case closed assholes!
💽 https://twitter.com/CalltoActivism/status/1686114797358583808?s=20/photo/1
🧵 RT @TheRickWilson 1/ Given the new NYT/Sienna poll, I’d just like to remind you one more time that spending money to defeat Trump in the primary is burning through donor resources that will be desperately needed in the general election. ¤ In this, there are three schools of thought, all wrong.
📌 https://twitter.com/TheRickWilson/status/1685988958293942272?s=20
[ThreadReader:] https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1685988958293942272.html
2/ The first school of thought is that Ron DeSantis can be magically elevated to surpass Trump. There’s a LOT of Republican (and some Dem-leaning) donor money trying to make this point. ¤ If DeSantis wasn’t in the lower quartile of warmth, connection, personality, humanity…
3/ …you might almost squint and see the case. However, we learned in 2016 that “being a conservative governor” vs Trump is worth exactly nothing. As we speak, the ocean of donor money DeSantis took in is now Jeff Roe’s slush fund.
4/ This money will go to Youngkin next, and Roe is already planning it. Sorry, Ron. You knew Jeff was a snake before you took him in. ¤ This Establishment lane strategy vs Trump died in 2016. Trust me, I was there to call TOD.
5/ The next futile track is “But X is a bold truth-teller.” ¤ OK, I can’t say I’m not happy to see Asa, Christie, and Will Hurd flensing Trump. I’m delighted. any flicker of light in the chthonic gloom of the GOP’s moral midnight is better than nothing.
6/ But add up all the people telling the truth about the criminal master mind who runs the GOP and you get to 1/2 of a DeSantis. ¤ They’re rounding error. Put a billion behind them, and they’re still rounding error. Will future generations remember them? I hope so…
7/ …Will Hurd particularly. Christie will never wash the stink of Trump off him. ¤. The GOP base in our polling, and literally every public and private poll I’ve seen does not give a damn about the truth viz Trump. At. All. ¤ Zero. Nada.
8/ The final group of people are trying to weaken Trump by calling him a loser (he is), political poison (he is), a criminal (QED, everything), and a weak man who will lose to Joe Biden are hoping against hope that moral or political suasion will reform the GOP base.
9/ The base is irredeemable. They can only be changed by destroying the GOP as it exists today. No ad strategy, alternate candidate, impassioned op-ed, or heartfelt speech will reclaim them from the spell of Trump, Fox, and Facebook.
10/ They’re not economically anxious. They’re not the Forgotten Workin’ Man. They’re not Ordinary Folks Who Just Don’t Like All These Progressives Ideas. ¤ They’re willing members of an authoritarian personality cult. They’ve bent and sworn.
11/ The approach we’re taking is to keep splitting off the parts of the base (a narrow path, to be sure, but one we’ve walked in 2020 and 2022) is to make Trump morally, politically, aesthetically, and socially poison. ¤ It’s not a secret how we do it.
12/ It worked in 2020 and in 2022. ¤ LP [Lincoln Project] is an antibody in the traditional system. Trump hates us passionately, and so do our former friends in the GOP who still desperately want to be put back in the Matrix and have their old world back. ¤ So do some gentry Never Trumpers.
13/ Hoping to either create a new movement to steal the GOP away from Trump, or praying for some improbably exogenous event to take him out are theories disproven by 2016 and beyond. ¤ We’re setting up for the general election campaign. That’s the battle. That’s the moment. ¤ End.
🐣 RT @AntiToxicPeople “Get the thorazine!”
[TextLink:] https://twitter.com/AntiToxicPeople/status/1686227509497716739?s=20/photo/1
[Text:] 🐣 RT @ @realDonaldTrump MAGA, which is most of the Republican Party, is very angry at FoxNews for continuing to push Ron DeSanctimonious, no personality and all, and guys like Chris Sununu of New Hampshire, who couldn’t even start a presidential run because of zero poll numbers, whose got his father’s look, but not his father’s brain. He was interviewed today on FoxNews and has a serious case, along with Creepy Karl Rove, of Trump Derangement Syndrome, Republican Version. These guys should forget their failures!
🐣 RT @USNATO We reaffirm our unwavering solidarity with the government and people of Ukraine in the heroic defense of their nation, their land, and our shared values. We fully support Ukraine’s inherent right to self-defense as enshrined in Article 51 of the UN Charter [Biden]
💽 https://twitter.com/USNATO/status/1685977104255438848?s=20/photo/1
AP: Biden decides to keep Space Command in Colorado, rejecting move to Alabama https://tinyurl.com/w525zkws It would be inconsistent, after yanking the Space Force from under the Air Force, to go by the Air Force’s – and not the Space Force’s – leadership’s preferences
⋙ ✛ oh, and it makes a big difference that women serving in the Space Force should have access to the full complement of medical care: what woman would choose to live in – and what parent would want to raise their daughters in – the misogynistic state of Alabama?
U.S. officials told The Associated Press on Monday that Biden was convinced by the head of Space Command, Gen. James Dickinson, who argued that moving his headquarters now would jeopardize military readiness. Dickinson’s view, however, was in contrast to Air Force leadership, who studied the issue at length and determined that relocating to Huntsville, Alabama, was the right move.
⭕ 30 Jul 2023
🐣 📋 RT @NAFO_AnkleBiter
[TextLink:] https://twitter.com/NAFO_AnkleBiter/status/1685862069529456641?s=20/photo/1
// Russian stats Russian data
[Text:] When only 14% of your citizens go to church on a regular basis, 73 out of 100 marriages end in divorce, you’ve got 500 000 abandoned children, you’re the European leader of children raised by single parents and abortions per capita, but you still managed to convince the leaders of the Western alt-right that you’re the true bastion of conservative values because of anti-LGBT laws and high levels of domestic violence. (Highest HIV Rate in Europe lol)
🐣 RT @peterbakernyt Trump calls on Hill GOP to block military aid to Ukraine until Biden administration cooperates more with investigations of Hunter Biden. So much for denying the quid pro quo, as he did in 2019. @iarnsdorf
⋙ WaPo, Isaac Arnsdorf: Trump calls for conditioning Ukraine aid on congressional Biden probes https://tinyurl.com/ytta3uuk
// The demand echoed Trump’s withholding Ukraine aid to seek an investigation into Biden, leading to his first impeachment
[…] “Congress should refuse to authorize a single additional shipment of our depleted weapons stockpiles … to Ukraine until the FBI, DOJ and IRS hand over every scrap of evidence they have on the Biden Crime Family’s corrupt business dealings,” Trump said at the rally. He added that any Republican lawmakers who didn’t join the effort should face primary challenges, a tactic he used last year to unseat Republicans who voted to impeach him for inciting the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection.
Republicans are investigating Hunter Biden’s business dealings in China and Ukraine during the Obama administration, when his father was vice president. Hunter Biden held a well-paid board position at a Ukrainian energy company. The White House has said Republicans have failed to present evidence of wrongdoing by President Biden.
Congressional Republicans have voiced frustration with the administration’s responses to their demands for records, a common point of tension between lawmakers and administrations of opposing parties. The Oversight Committee has obtained thousands of pages of financial records, in addition to viewing bank activity reports from the Treasury Department and a sensitive internal FBI report.
Hard-liners have been raising pressure on House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) to escalate the probes to an impeachment inquiry. In a shift, last week McCarthy signaled openness toward starting impeachment proceedings, without specifying the evidentiary basis.
Democratic National Committee spokesman Ammar Moussa responded Saturday: “Just like when he was impeached, Trump is using aid to Ukraine to play politics, which only serves to benefit one person: Vladimir Putin. MAGA Republicans like Marjorie Taylor Greene and Kevin McCarthy are echoing Trump’s baseless attacks, floating a political impeachment, and wasting taxpayer dollars instead of working with President Biden on actually delivering lower costs, more jobs, and safer communities for the American people.”
In 2019, Trump spoke on the phone with Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky and responded to his plea for missiles to help the country resist Russia’s invasion by saying, “I would like you to do us a favor though.” Trump went on to ask Zelensky to assist in finding Democratic National Committee emails that were, without substantiation, purported to be in Ukraine. He also asked Zelensky to talk to his lawyer Rudy Giuliani and Attorney General William P. Barr about investigating Hunter Biden.
The phone call led to a whistleblower complaint that prompted an impeachment inquiry. Trump stonewalled the proceedings and was impeached for abuse of power and obstruction of Congress. The Senate acquitted him in February 2020, with Sen. Mitt Romney (R-Utah) joining the Democrats.
Trump has insisted his phone call with Zelensky was “perfect,” a claim he repeated at Saturday’s rally. …
💙 🔄 NationalMemo, Joe Conason: How Many Of ‘Her Emails’ Were Classified? Actually, Zero https://bit.ly/3D0f3nt
// 11/3/2022
⋙ 🐣 [Hillary’s emails in a nutshell]
◕ https://twitter.com/Auriandra/status/1566178022163714048?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @AntiToxicPeople Fun to watch his brain melt down. 🍿
[TextLink:] https://twitter.com/AntiToxicPeople/status/1685778887815647232?s=20/photo/1
[Text:] 🐣 RT @realDonald Trump Hillary Clinton deleted 33,000 Emails, many of them
Classified, after getting a Subpoena from Congress. Nothing happened to her, & stupid James Comey, then head of the FBI, stated that no reasonable prosecutor would prosecute this. Then why is Deranged Jack Smith prosecuting me when I did nothing wrong, as per the PRA? The answer is Election Interference – They are using the Department of Injustice in an attempt to Rig & Steal the Presidential Election on 2024. This is Prosecutorial Misconduct!
🐣 RT @AntiToxicPeople He is an insufferable imbecile at levels hard to comprehend.
[TextLink:] https://twitter.com/AntiToxicPeople/status/1685773197814493184?s=20/photo/1
[Text:] 🐣 RT @realDonald Trump Is Special Counsel Robert Hur going to step up and behave like Deranged Jack Smith with regard to Crooked Joe Biden’s MANY Document crimes (remember, unlike me, Biden is not covered by the Presidential Records Act!) and all of the other crimes committed by him and the Biden Crime Family? Will Hur prosecute these grifters? Everybody is laughing at Robert Hur, saying he is not tough like Deranged Jack Smith. Show them, Robert, that you are every bit the
man as the “Deranged One.” MAGA!
🐣 RT @anders_aslund Putin is a deadender, just like Hitler. He will try to expand his war until he is defeated. Therefore, the aim must not only be to liberate Ukraine but to defeat Putin. He must be completely humiliated so that the Russian elites finally kick him out.
⋙ 🐣 RT @anneapplebaum Remember all of that rubbish about not “humiliating” Putin? Here’s the @FT arguing that he isn’t looking for an “off-ramp” because he wants a much bigger war
⋙⋙ FT: Putin is looking for a bigger war, not an off-ramp, in Ukraine https://tinyurl.com/mrya9456
// New mobilisation law is part of a wider effort to maximise Russia’s firepower and blunt western support for Kyiv
🐣 RT @IuliiaMendel Russian defenses are weakening. Ukrainian fighters are advancing to crucial heights, forcing Russian Federation to commit reserves and striking ammunition depots in the rear – The Times ¤ The Ukrainian armed forces have disrupted the Russian army’s logistics and made it difficult to move troops quickly on the front. There are now 3 likely directions for the AFU:
● to move east of Bakhmut and turn south toward Donetsk;
● to move south from Ugledar to Mariupol;
● to move to Tokmak and then to Melitopol to isolate Crimea and all troops.
With the latter option, Crimea would be within reach of Ukrainian artillery and air attacks. This means that even without capturing the peninsula, the Ukrainians could make Crimea impossible for Russian military and civilians to stay.
🐣 RT @front_ukrainian ⚡️🇬🇧Great Britain is preparing 🇺🇦 Ukrainian special forces to liberate Crimea by Christmas, – writes the Daily Express. ¤ The operations will include air, land and sea strikes and will be supported by a stockpile of long-range missiles supplied by Britain, the 🇺🇸US and 🇩🇪Germany. https://tinyurl.com/bdcu6us3
🐣 RT @ProjectLincoln Lawless, violent, and cruel. This is Trump’s Republican party. This is all that they have to offer. 2024 will be a choice between liberty & oppression, your freedom & their control, truth & propaganda. It’s going to take all of us in this fight. Are you in?
💽 https://twitter.com/ProjectLincoln/status/1685636358734512128?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @AntiToxicPeople LOL.
1) No one said the tapes were actually deleted. They brazenly conspired to do so.
2) It was not “illegally leaked to the press”, it was contained in a publicly filed indictment!
3) More insane, made up racist nonsense about “Chinatown” and Biden.
He is so boring.
[TextLink:] https://twitter.com/AntiToxicPeople/status/1685682327056523264?s=20/photo/1
[Text:] 🐣 RT @realDonaldTrump The Crooked Election Interference “Thugs” from the DOJ, headed by the worst Thug of them all, Deranged Jack Smith, are now admitting that the Mar-a-Lago Security Tapes were NOT DELETED. That’s not what they were illegally leaking to the press. These guys should be prosecuted for MISCONDUCT. Also, whatever happened to Crooked Joe’s Documents? Where are the ones he sent and stored in Chinatown? Is Deranged Jack going to Indict him for this and, at the same time, receiving BRIBES FROM CHINA?
🐣 RT @AntiToxicPeople Unhinged maniac starts out the day ignoring the advice of any lawyer in the world and lies some more & attacks a witness against him.
[TextLink:] https://twitter.com/AntiToxicPeople/status/1685681417702060033?s=20/photo/1
[Text:] 🐣 RT @realDonald Trump MAR-A-LAGO SECURITY TAPES WERE NOT DELETED. THEY WERE VOLUNTARILY HANDED OVER TO THE THUGS, HEADED UP BY DERANGED JACK SMITH. WE DID NOT EVEN GO TO COURT TO STOP THEM FROM GETTING THESE TAPES. I NEVER TOLD ANYBODY TO DELETE THEM. PROSECUTORIAL FICTION & MISCONDUCT! ELECTION INTERFERENCE!
🐣 RT @ChuckPfarrer VELYKA NOVOSILKA /1530 UTC 30 JUL/ UKR forces press contact south along T-05-18 HWY axis at Staromaiorske. Bridges at Urozhaine & Zavitne-Bazhanya are critical objectives for UKR.
🌎 https://twitter.com/ChuckPfarrer/status/1685671743174684673?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @GirkinGirkin Worrying thread 🤒
[TextLink:] [tr] https://twitter.com/GirkinGirkin/status/1685592206361387008?s=20/photo/1
[Text:] Alexander Khodakovsky. [Ukr who “defected and became the leader of the pro-Russian ‘Patriotic Forces of Donbas’”– Wikipedia]
Despite the fact that the Staroayorskoye- Urozhaynoye direction is not militarily strategic for the enemy, any victory correctly promoted in the media gives general strategic dividends. By concentrating efforts in the Zaporizhia direction and planning a strike against Energodar, which is further confirmed by the intensification of reconnaissance in this area, the enemy seeks to pin down our forces in other sectors, preventing us from transferring reinforcements to more important areas where the fate of this segment of the war depends on the outcome of
events.After the occupation of Staromavorskove, the enemy did not begin to consolidate in order to organize a solid defense there, but cleared our engineering obstacles in the direction of Urozhaynoye. Today, enemy aircraft have already made about seven raids on this settlement, electronic warfare is actively working to suppress our communications, and artillery preparation is underway. It is obvious that an attempt is being made to storm Harvest. Some time ago, having directed the main blow to Novodonetskoye, the enemy almost captured Urozhaynoye by exile, but they did not have enough perseverance. After that, we increased our presence in this village and for the last few days have stopped any attempts to take Urozhaynoye head-on. By capturing Staromayorskoye, the enemy was able to go the flank or Urozhaynoye, creating a threatening position for our defense.
⭕ 29 Jul 2023
🐣 RT @llccar1 “This is such an air-tight case. The evidence against Trump is so overwhelming. Trump was told by his OWN lawyers not to destroy, move or obstruct any of the stolen documents, but defied them anyway.”
– Ty Cobb, Former Trump White House Lawyer
🖼 https://twitter.com/llccar1/status/1685336065668677632?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @58bugeye MOVIE OF THE WEEK ¤ A failed businessman and reality show host named Donald tried to pull off the crime of the century along with his butler, Walt and Carlos the pool boy. ¤ It all went wrong when Donald, Walt and Carlos solicited the help of a third accomplice, the computer nerd who was unwilling to participate in the crime.
🖼 https://twitter.com/58bugeye/status/1685297675405791232?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @GirkinGirkin Enigma thread 👽
[TextLink:] https://twitter.com/GirkinGirkin/status/1685492287038484480?s=20/photo/1
[Text:] Why every time they fly plus or minus along the same trajectory and are “suppressed” over Moscow is still a mystery. Earlier, Vladimir Putin repeatedly set the task for the Ministry of Defense and Sergei Shoigu personally to ensure the anti-missile security of Donetsk,which in the end was never achieved. Now it becomes clear that Shoigu’s department cannot even protect the center of the Russian capital, which is only worth a UAV strike on the Kremlin.
– @grey_zone
🐣 RT @Flash_news_ua ⚡️ Polish Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki says that more than 100 “Wagnerians” has gone towards the Suwałki Gap connecting Poland with the Baltic States. ¤ According to him, they will be disguised as Belarusian border guards and will help illegal immigrants to enter the country and destabilize the situation in Poland. ¤ Morawiecki called it an “unconditional step” towards a further hybrid attack on Poland.
🐣 RT @HerrDr8 #UkrOffensive2023ZAP #KtoRomanchukQuiz #1PageAssessUKRWar #Robotyne Romanchuk continues to stutter at Omaha Sector, ZAP front. —
📌 🌎 ◕ https://twitter.com/HerrDr8/status/1685514130327826432?s=20/photo/1 -3
Ukrainians paused after pounding Russians near Robotyne (weather/op pause). He reinforces with more crapola – another BARS unit…and fails to correct a few glaring errors.
The two alleged anchors for the Line of Crapola, 22nd and 45th Spetsnaz have taken a beating in the war. 45th had their HQ pop’d mid July. And, a unit reportable in mutiny, the 70th motor rifle taking up space on the flank. ¤ Will be keeping an eye on this sector of the front the next few days.
NYT: Trump Threatens Republicans Who Don’t Help Him Exact Vengeance https://tinyurl.com/4u6tpm9r
// Casting Republicans as meek, former President Donald J. Trump said members of his party should pursue investigations against Democrats — or risk losing their seats.
Former President Donald J. Trump lashed out at Republicans in Congress while campaigning in Pennsylvania on Saturday, threatening members of his party who do not share his appetite for pursuing corruption investigations against President Biden and his family — and for retribution.
In a litany of grievances about his deepening legal woes and the direction of the country, the twice-indicted former president cast G.O.P. holdouts as meek during a rally in Erie, Pa., criticizing their response to what he described as politically motivated prosecutions against him. ¤ “The Republicans are very high class,” he said. “You’ve got to get a little bit lower class.”
And then Mr. Trump, the overwhelming front-runner for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination, put party members on notice. ¤ “Any Republican that doesn’t act on Democratic fraud should be immediately primaried,” said Mr. Trump, to the roaring approval of several thousand supporters at the Erie Insurance Arena. Throughout the night he referenced the case against Hunter Biden and accused the president of complicity in his son’s troubles. …
As Mr. Trump prepared to take the stage, campaign workers helped fill in an empty section near the back of the arena, which had been configured to seat 8,000. ¤ The playlist for the rally featured “Try That in a Small Town,” the Jason Aldean hit that was filmed at the site of a lynching and pulled from Country Music Television amid criticism. …
With Mr. Trump as its standard-bearer, the Republican Party has watched Democrats in Pennsylvania secure high-profile victories in the last year, including flipping a U.S. Senate seat, holding on to the governor’s office and gaining control of the statehouse. ¤ In 2020, Mr. Trump lost the battleground state by nearly 82,000 votes to Mr. Biden, who was born there.
💙 🐣 RT @LlopisMarta9 So powerful 🇺🇦
💽 https://twitter.com/LlopisMarta95/status/1685193855090528256?s=20/photo/1
// moving short vid of Ze/family
WaPo: Trump PAC has spent more than $40 million on legal costs this year for himself, others https://tinyurl.com/mts338y5
// Donald Trump’s political group is financing legal work that has prompted questions from prosecutors about potential conflicts of interest
🐣 RT @DavidCayJ
[TextLink:] https://twitter.com/DavidCayJ/status/1685365302941417472?s=20/photo/1
[Text:] A federal judge (appointed by Trump) issued a search warrant at the request of the Director of the FBI (appointed by Trump). It was executed by a DOJ attorney (appointed by Trump) who charged him with violating a law (passed by Trump). There’s not a single witness involved who’s a Democrat. They’re all handpicked (by Trump).
His lawyers. His employees.
Their communications.
Their photos.
Everything.
THEM: “What a Democratic witch hunt.”
🐣 RT @ ChuckPfarrer STEADY AS YOU GO: As many ‘impatient’ western media types winge about UKR’s progress, Col. JE Sweet (Ret) @JESweet2022 and journalist Mark Toth @MCTothSTL examine the facts of Kyiv’s summer offensive. You can read their latest in the @KyivPost. https://kyivpost.com/opinion/19980
⋙ KyivPost, Col. (Ret.) JE Sweet and Mark Toth: Opinion: Ukraine’s Deliberate Push to Secure Victory https://tinyurl.com/2cfv84yf //➔ “You go to war with the army you have,” a US Defense Secy once said. In Ukraine’s case, it could be ‘… with the army your allies LET you have’
// “Ukraine is eating the Russian bear one bite at a time. Death by a thousand cuts as the saying goes, but eventually they need to deliver a decisive blow.”
… Progress is being made, though slowly. But that may be just the way Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and his Commander-in-Chief General Valery Zaluzhny want it.
“Without an air component to provide close air support, limited engineering assets to breach the extensive defensive fortifications and obstacles, and a limited deep strike capability to interdict Russian forces, their equipment, and the headquarters that command and control the war from the opposite side of the border, [President Zelensky and General Zaluzhny] have been abundantly cautious with the army they have.”
To mass combat power in one place would expose them to Russian artillery – the backbone of the Russian army. So, Kyiv had to make some adjustments to their tactics – to string the defense out across a 600-mile front, expose their positions, the artillery formations supporting them, the depots supplying them, and the commanders leading them.
The Kyiv Post recently published an article suggesting the Ukraine counteroffensive was a strategy of attrition which, to borrow a phrase from Washington, was an effort to ‘weaken Russia.’ In a reversal of fortune for the Russian army, artillery has become the pointy end of the spear for the Ukrainian military. HIMARS and dual-purpose improved conventional munition (DPICM) are the preferred choice in the close fight.
General Zaluzhny’s counteroffensive is likely broken down into phases – build combat power in phase one. Conduct individual and collective training in phase two, and in phase three gather intelligence and begin to set conditions for when and where to launch the main effort. The first three phases have been on-going sequentially throughout the winter and spring months, and now into the summer.
We are likely witnessing the tail end of the third phase of the operation now, wherein the Ukrainian military is developing the enemy situation and setting conditions for phase four – their main effort. Ukraine is conducting armed reconnaissance, raids, assaults, and local counter attacks. They are mapping the battlefield, looking for vulnerabilities, weak spots in the defense, and potential locations to breakthrough. And, as the Kyiv Post reported, attritting the enemy in the process and affecting his ability to respond with deep strikes.
Ukraine’s military forces have been very successful locating and striking Russian troop formations with artillery and destroying Russian ZOOPARK 1-M counter battery radars. This was a major point of contention with the Commander of Russia’s 58th Combined Arms Army fighting in the southern Zaporizhzhia region of Ukraine. General Major Ivan Popov was relieved of command after raising questions about “the lack of counter-battery combat, the absence of artillery reconnaissance stations and the mass deaths and injuries of our brothers from enemy artillery.”
Kyiv has also been successful locating Russian commanders on the battlefield and killing them. The most recent casualty was Lt. Gen Oleg Tsokov, deputy commander of Russia’s southern military district. He was reportedly killed when a Storm Shadow cruise missile struck a hotel in Berdyansk housing Russian military commanders.
Deep strikes into Crimea and along the Sea of Azov coast – utilizing Storm Shadow and SCALP air launched cruise missiles, drones, unmanned surface vessels (USV), and partisan fighters have also destroyed ammunition storage facilities, fuel depots, repair depots and damaged the Kerch Strait Bridge on two occasions. Interdiction – setting conditions for the next day’s fight.The fourth phase is likely conditions based. When Zelensky and his Generals believe they have acquired the weapons and munitions they deem necessary to launch a combined arms assault, when they can mass combat power to achieve the force ratios they deem appropriate, and when they can achieve a rapid breakthrough while maintaining momentum – they will attack.
We may be witnessing the start of that now in southern Ukraine.
The New York Times and Institute for the Study of War both reported a sizable mechanized infantry force manoeuvring towards Robotyne in the western Zaporizhzhia region on July 26th. It was described as the “main thrust” that may have achieved a “possible partial breakthrough” of defensive positions south of Orikhiv. Another report came in from Staromaiorske, where Ukrainian special forces had captured paratroopers from Russia’s 247th Parachute Regiment and a video captured Russian fighters leaving their positions and retreating.
Zelensky posted footage on July 27th showing Ukrainian forces inside Staromaiorske, tweeting: “Our South. Our Guys.”
This was followed by the General Staff of the Armed Forces of Ukraine announcing on July 28th that: “Ukrainian Defense Forces liberated the settlement of Staromaiorske.” This may well be a push towards the Sea of Azov by Ukraine to sever Moscow’s land bridge to occupied Crimea.
But can Ukraine sustain momentum? ¤ Ukraine is eating the Russian bear one bite at a time. Death by a thousand cuts as the saying goes, but eventually they need to deliver a decisive blow. Will they wait for a decision on ATACMS? For their pilots to receive training on the F-16? For additional armor in the form of the U.S. M1A1 Abrams main battle tank?
What conditions are Zelensky, and his Generals are waiting for? ¤ Only they know. ¤ One thing is for sure. Zelensky has made it clear that Ukraine will take back Crimea. On July 26th he doubled down on that message advising “Russian occupiers in Crimea to consider returning to Russia while the bridge built by the invaders across the Kerch Strait [Crimean (Kerch) Bridge] is still functioning.”
He went on to say: “Crimea, like all of Ukraine, will be free – free from all Russian evil, starting with Russian missiles and ending with every Russian occupier. Russia will lose this war, and no missile will save it.”
Meanwhile, we must remain vigilant and wait until we see the actual signs of Ukraine’s main counteroffensive thrust. Like Pluskat on D-Day, we will know it when we see it.
🐣 RT @HerrDr8 #UkrOffensive2023ZAP #TheOrcTriangle #1PageAssessUKRWar ISW reporting 247 VDV in mutiny at Juno Sector, after Russia rout from Staro #1.
🌎 https://twitter.com/HerrDr8/status/1685123384454127616?s=20/photo/1
// VDV are Russian Airborne
⋙ 🐣 RT @TheStudyofWar Ukrainian forces conducted offensive operations along the #Donetsk-#Zaporizhia Oblast border and reportedly advanced on July 28. http://isw.pub/UkrWar072823
🐣 RT @7Veritas4 Captain Capslock is not having a good weekend.
[TextLink:] https://twitter.com/7Veritas4/status/1685391695855206400?s=20/photo/1
[Text:] 🐣 RT @realDonaldTrump WHY DIDN’T THE CORRUPT MARXIST PROSECUTORS BRING THESE RADICAL & UNJUSTIFIED CHARGES AGAINST ME 2.5 YEARS AGO, LONG BEFORE MY PRESIDENTIAL CAMPAIGN HAD BEGUN. NOW DERANGED JACK SMITH WILL PROBABLY BRING ANOTHER CASE, ALONG WITH THE RACIST D.A. IN CRIME RIDDEN ATLANTA, WHO HAS BEEN WAITING FOR THE PERFECT TIME DURING MY CAMPAIGN TO FILE. THIS IS ELECTION INTERFERENCE & PROSECUTORIAL MISCONDUCT! THEY ARE ALL, IN A COORDINATED ATTACK, TRYING TO STEAL ANOTHER ELECTION, BUT WE WON’T LET THEM!!!
🐣 RT @United24media Only about 10% of the candidates make it into the Special Operations Forces. Those who succeed become the elite of the Ukrainian army, carrying out the most secretive tasks, including sabotage, psy-ops, and much more. ¤ Check out our vid about the SOF here: http://youtu.be/sH8XRQ8FauI
💽 https://twitter.com/United24media/status/1685312171859664896?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @pravda_eng 💥 Ukrainian Armed Forces announces successful strike on Chonhar Bridge
⋙ PravdaUA: Ukrainian Armed Forces announces successful strike on Chonhar Bridge https://tinyurl.com/3ry2nkvu
// The defence forces of Ukraine successfully struck the Chonhar Bridge on Saturday morning.
🧵 RT @EPICGOPFAIL Long before it was a thing, i wanted to do a coffee table book of russian outhouses. Yeah, yeah, but even IF i could convince a publisher, there’s no way Mrs UMARF’d permit such a horror. However, she is powerless to stop this thread. Will update with fresh material whenever
📌 🖼 https://twitter.com/EPICGOPFAIL/status/1617355752863330304?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @DenesTorteli President Zelensky’s afternoon speech: “Today – in Donetsk region. Chasiv Yar, Kramatorsk, Sloviansk, Druzhkivka, Kostiantynivka. …
💽 [tr] https://twitter.com/DenesTorteli/status/1685373801696010241?s=20/photo/1
With our warriors, our heroes. I congratulated and had the honor to personally congratulate, shake hands, and award warriors of the Special Operations Forces on the occasion of their professional day. They are always at the hottest areas of the front, on the most responsible, special tasks.
What we can talk about now, of course, is participation in key combat operations. Bakhmut in particular, Avdiivka, Krasnohorivka, Maryinka. Soledar. Together with everyone, they defended Kyiv and Hostomel, and Bucha, and Irpin, and Moschun, and Makariv. Snake Island – also SOF together with intelligence, together with the Alpha group and the Navy. Kinburn Spit. Kherson. Now – the liberation of Staromayorske, this is also a result, in particular, of the SOF.
Let every loss of Russia be retribution for its evil, and let every occupier, every Russian murderer, all those responsible for this terror against Ukraine and Ukrainians know – while they are still alive – that justice wins. Ukraine will win! Thanks to everyone who brings our victory closer! Eternal memory to everyone who gave his life for the sake of Ukraine! Glory to Ukraine!”
🔄 🐣 RT @edfranks Alert to all Westerners: Please. Take. This. Class! It’s only 23 lectures (50′ ea) & u’ll thank me when finished. Snyder is THE Ukraine-Meister. Really. “Timothy Snyder: The Making of Modern Ukraine. Class 1: Ukrainian Questions Posed by Russian Invasion.”
💽 https://twitter.com/edfranks/status/1685419101840355328?s=20/photo/1
// Snyder course
WSJ: Saudi Arabia to Host Ukraine Peace Talks as Part of Western Effort to Woo Global South https://tinyurl.com/yc5zs8jw
// Washington and Europe are hoping the talks, which exclude Russia, can lead to international backing for peace terms favoring Ukraine
🐣 RT @LuxFella This is for people who still push the narrative of “separatists” in the Donbas: you can drop the act, it’s over. It was russia all along.
⋙ MoscowTimes: Russia’s Igor Strelkov: I Am Responsible for War in Eastern Ukraine https://tinyurl.com/ye24299y
// 11/21/2014; Igor Girkin
Russian national Igor Strelkov, a former commander of pro-Moscow separatists in eastern Ukraine, has claimed personal responsibility for unleashing the conflict in which 4,300 people have been killed since April.
“I was the one who pulled the trigger of this war,” Strelkov said in an interview published Thursday with Russia’s Zavtra newspaper, which espouses imperialist views. ¤ “If our unit hadn’t crossed the border, everything would have fizzled out — like in [the Ukrainian city of] Kharkiv, like in Odessa,” Strelkov, who uses that nom-de-guerre meaning “Shooter” to replace his last name Girkin, was quoted as saying. …
💙 NYT: Elon Musk’s Unmatched Power in the Stars https://tinyurl.com/p5sa7knx
// The tech billionaire has become the dominant power in satellite internet technology. The ways he is wielding that influence are raising global alarms.
On March 17, Gen. Mark A. Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and Gen. Valeriy Zaluzhnyi, the leader of Ukraine’s Armed Forces, dialed into a call to discuss Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Over the secure line, the two military leaders conferred on air defense systems, real-time battlefield assessments and shared intelligence on Russia’s military losses.
They also talked about Elon Musk. ¤ General Zaluzhnyi raised the topic of Starlink, the satellite internet technology made by Mr. Musk’s rocket company, SpaceX, three people with knowledge of the conversation said. Ukraine’s battlefield decisions depended on the continued use of Starlink for communications, General Zaluzhnyi said, and his country wanted to ensure access and discuss how to cover the cost of the service.
General Zaluzhnyi also asked if the United States had an assessment of Mr. Musk, who has sprawling business interests and murky politics — to which American officials gave no answer.
Mr. Musk, who leads SpaceX, Tesla and Twitter, has become the most dominant player in space as he has steadily amassed power over the strategically significant field of satellite internet. Yet faced with little regulation and oversight, his erratic and personality-driven style has increasingly worried militaries and political leaders around the world, with the tech billionaire sometimes wielding his authority in unpredictable ways.
Since 2019, Mr. Musk has sent SpaceX rockets into space nearly every week that deliver dozens of sofa-size satellites into orbit. The satellites communicate with terminals on Earth, so they can beam high-speed internet to nearly every corner of the planet. Today, more than 4,500 Starlink satellites are in the skies, accounting for more than 50 percent of all active satellites. They have already started changing the complexion of the night sky, even before accounting for Mr. Musk’s plans to have as many as 42,000 satellites in orbit in the coming years. …
A combustible personality, the 52-year-old’s allegiances are fuzzy. While Mr. Musk is hailed as a genius innovator, he alone can decide to shut down Starlink internet access for a customer or country, and he has the ability to leverage sensitive information that the service gathers. Such concerns have been heightened because no companies or governments have come close to matching what he has built.
In Ukraine, some fears have been realized. Mr. Musk has restricted Starlink access multiple times during the war, people familiar with the situation said. At one point, he denied the Ukrainian military’s request to turn on Starlink near Crimea, the Russian-controlled territory, affecting battlefield strategy. Last year, he publicly floated a “peace plan” for the war that seemed aligned with Russian interests.
At times, Mr. Musk has openly flaunted Starlink’s capabilities. “Between, Tesla, Starlink & Twitter, I may have more real-time global economic data in one head than anyone ever,” he tweeted in April. …
WaPo: Judge throws out Trump’s ‘Big Lie’ defamation lawsuit against CNN https://tinyurl.com/y3dtr2m3 “CNN isn’t the only place where Trump has been compared, directly or indirectly, to members of the Nazi regime.” //➔ In 2020 Biden said Trump was repeating the Big Lie as Goebbels did
🐣 RT @RonFilipkowski Team Trump is furious at host IA Governor Kim Reynolds after Trump’s intro song last night started out with the lyrics, “One could end up going to prison.”
💽 https://twitter.com/RonFilipkowski/status/1685257020549607424?s=20/photo/1
⭕ 28 Jul 2023
WaPo, Dana Milbank: Aliens are among us — and they want to impeach Biden https://tinyurl.com/ycyaka23 It’s ‘Morning in America’? “Time to create some chaos!”
Inflation has calmed, the stock market is at its highest since 2021, illegal border crossings are down, unemployment remains at its lowest in decades, and GDP growth just came in better than expected. ¤ Time to create some chaos!
Members of the group of far-right Republican lawmakers gathered this week to outline their priorities for the House when it returns in September from its six-week recess. Their agenda can be summarized roughly as follows:
The first order of business is to shut down the federal government. The second order of business is to impeach President Biden — on charges TBD. …
Specifically, members of the Freedom Caucus demanded that House Speaker Kevin McCarthy renege on the bipartisan budget-and-debt-ceiling deal he agreed to with Biden about two months ago. Instead, they insisted on cutting 2024 spending by an additional $200 billion or so — and McCarthy, as usual, appears to be surrendering to their demands. The speaker also acceded to the extremists’ insistence on adding an apothecary full of poison-pill amendments to the 2024 spending bills, blocking abortion access, LGBTQ+ rights and efforts to promote racial diversity.
McCarthy’s latest surrender to the Freedom Caucus puts House Republicans on a seemingly inevitable collision course not just with Biden, who has promised to veto the bills, but also with their fellow Republicans in the Senate, who want to set spending above the debt ceiling deal so that the military gets more funds. …
🐣 RT @JosephPolitano The US is still leading the economic recovery in the G7!
Compared to just before the pandemic, here’s how GDP has changed across G7 members:
◕ https://twitter.com/JosephPolitano/status/1684902523961020416?s=20/photo/1
US +6.7%
Canada +4% (through Q1)
Italy +1.6% (through Q1)
France +1.3%
Germany +0.5%
UK -0.5% (through Q1)
Japan -1.1% (through Q1)
WaPo, Perry Stein: How the superseding indictment and third defendant impact Trump documents case https://tinyurl.com/2k8w2v93 “The superseding indictment accuses Trump of working with his employees to try to delete security camera footage from being reviewed by investigators”
// … while adding a new count of willfully retaining national defense information”
🐣 RT @ProjectLincoln Lawless, violent, and cruel. This is Trump’s Republican party. This is all that they have to offer. 2024 will be a choice between liberty & oppression, your freedom & their control, truth & propaganda. It’s going to take all of us in this fight.
💽 https://twitter.com/ProjectLincoln/status/1684941873083768832?s=20/photo/1
🐣 📊 RT @Flash_news_ua ⚡️Three quarters of Americans believe that it is important for the United States that Ukraine wins the war against Russia. 86% of Democrats and 71% of Republicans share the same opinion. ¤ This is evidenced by a survey conducted by the Ronald Reagan Presidential Foundation and Institute. 👉Follow @Flash_news_ua
◕ https://twitter.com/Flash_news_ua/status/1685047135778009088?s=20/photo/1
NYT: New Trump Charges Highlight Long-Running Questions About Obstruction https://tinyurl.com/mpzcpz5n
// The accusation that former President Donald J. Trump wanted security camera footage deleted at Mar-a-Lago added to a pattern of concerns about his attempts to stymie prosecutors.
🐣 RT @EuromaidanPress At the Russia-Africa Economic Forum, Prigozhin covertly engaged with African leaders in a bid to preserve Wagner’s roles in Africa, as well as its lucrative military and mining contracts. ¤ Reportedly, African leaders are still bewildered by the coup.
⋙ EuromaidanPress: Prigozhin secretly woos African leaders at St. Petersburg Forum – ISW https://tinyurl.com/y5t86y4c
// At the Russia-Africa Economic Forum, Wagner financier Prigozhin covertly engaged with African leaders in an apparent bid to preserve Wagner’s roles in Africa
🐣 RT @kaitlancollins Trump is now claiming the surveillance footage was “voluntarily” given to the special counsel, despite how the indictment says Trump Org attorneys got a draft of a subpoena requiring it on 6/22/2022 and a final grand jury subpoena for it 6/24/2022.
[TextLink:] https://twitter.com/kaitlancollins/status/1685039313946386432?s=20/photo/1 -2
[Text:] 🐣 RT @realDonaldTrump The Security Tapes that were VOLUNTARILY given to Deranged Jack Smith and the DOJ were not, I am told, deleted in any way, shape, or form. Prosecutorial Misconduct!
🐣 RT @AntiToxicPeople And…5 minutes later…another insane rant. 🍿
[TextLink:] https://twitter.com/AntiToxicPeople/status/1685005248291823618?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @ @realDonaldTrump I expect NOTHING from the meeting with my lawyers and the Lunatics in the DOJ regarding January 6th. They just want to interfere with the Presidential Election on 2024. It is their new form of CHEATING, but we will WIN!!!
🐣 RT @AntiToxicPeople Lol. What an utterly deranged imbecile. Also a terrified one.
[TextLink:] https://twitter.com/AntiToxicPeople/status/1685003736081653760?s=20/photo/1
[Text:] 🐣 RT @realDonald Trump. 55s How can Deranged Jack Smith bring a case on January 6th., as ridiculous as it is anyway, when I have already won such a case, and been fully acquitted, in the U.S. Senate? In other words, I was Impeached on this, and WON!!! ELECTION INTERFERENCE & PROSECUTORIAL MISCONDUCT, all rolled up as one. We are truly a Nation In Decline!
🐣 RT @AntiToxicPeople More completely unhinged by the minute. ¤ This demented rant is quite….something, especially the first sentence.
[TextLink:] https://twitter.com/AntiToxicPeople/status/1684969008888676352?s=20/photo/1
[Text:] 🐣 RT @realDonald Trump They ought to throw Deranged Jack Smith and his Thug Prosecutors in jail, with Meritless Garland and Trump Hating Lisa Monaco. They have totally Weaponized the Department of Injustice. Whatever happened to the Crooked Joe Biden Boxes Case? Why was Hillary Clinton allowed to delete 33,000 emails, many of them Classified, AFTER getting a Subpoena from Congress? Why was Bill Clinton allowed to take tapes out of the W.H. in his socks? Why has no other President ever been charged? ELECTION FRAUD!
🐣 RT @AntiToxicPeople Holy crap. Much crazier and deranged than I even expected.
[TextLink:] https://twitter.com/AntiToxicPeople/status/1684951688233504768?s=20/photo/1
[Text:] 🐣 RT @realDonaldTrump At the direction of Crooked Joe Biden and his Weaponized DOJ, Deranged Jack Smith is attempting to destroy the lives of two fine people who have worked for me (and have done a great job!) for a long time. They are being persecuted with one goal, to “Get Trump.” This is textbook Third World intimidation by rabid, lawless prosecutors. These same craven tactics were used, and failed, during the Russia, Russia, Russia Witch Hunt and other Hoaxes. We will not let RadicalLunatics destroy our Country!
🧵 FT: Historian Tim Snyder: ‘Our misreading of Russia is deep. Very deep’ https://tinyurl.com/epd28df2 “In Russia, the west … is not seeing a mirror nation-state to its own. It is a different paradigm of power altogether, driven by ‘Weberian notions of charismatic leadership,’ says Snyder”
// The Yale professor on why the west got Putin wrong — and what the past tells us about the war in Ukraine
📌 https://twitter.com/Auriandra/status/1685071059945459712?s=20/photo/1
“Russia can’t have a domestic policy,” Snyder muses. “The elite have stolen all the money, all the laws are corrupted, and there’s almost no social mobility or possibility of change in most Russians’ lives, so foreign policy has to compensate and provide the raw material—the scenography—for governance.”
🐣 RT @ front_ukrainian ❗️The Armed Forces of 🇺🇦Ukraine will soon enter Crimea, – the head of the Main Intelligence Directorate of the Ministry of Defense of Ukraine Budanov. ¤ Answering the question when Ukrainian troops will enter Crimea, the head of Ukrainian military intelligence answered briefly and clearly: “Soon.” ¤ Budanov did not specify the exact date of deoccupation of the peninsula, but only once again assured that it will happen soon.
🖼 https://twitter.com/front_ukrainian/status/1685011507195621378?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @AdamSchiff So nice to get together with Alex and Eugene Vindman, two great patriots. ¤ Just back from Ukraine, they gave me another invaluable briefing on the progress of the counteroffensive, the lasting impacts of Prigozhin’s rebellion and how the U.S. can be even more effective in our assistance.
🖼 https://twitter.com/AdamSchiff/status/1684974084164132883?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @ChuckPfarrer VELYKA NOVASILKA /1450 UTC 28 JUL/ UKR forces have liberated Staromaiorske, which was the keystone of the RU defense of the T-05-18 HWY axis and the Mokri Yaly river valley. UKR forces are now in contact at Urozhaine, E of the T-05-18 HWY, & W of the road at Pryiutne.
🌎 https://twitter.com/ChuckPfarrer/status/1684938595214233600?s=20/photo/1
⋙ 🐣 RT @ChrisFlaherty8 VELYKA NOVASILKA axis constitutes the centre of the Russian battle line. Its progressive weakening, and ongoing Ukrainian forces’ advance, if this continues will split the Russian line, allowing for a drive to the Sea of Azov, and liberation of Zaporizhzhia NPP. Current model:
◕ https://twitter.com/ChrisFlaherty8/status/1685044686891909120?s=20/photo/1
📔 DailyBeast: The KGB Papers: Here Are the Originals https://tinyurl.com/m45n4rb8
// purchased 2017
🐣 RT @NatalkaKyiv “Today is the Day of Ukrainian Statehood. Statehood is not just attributes: anthem, coat of arms, flag, Constitution. Behind us is the thousand-year history of the state of Kyivan Rus-Ukraine.
🖼 https://twitter.com/NatalkaKyiv/status/1684800679787757568?s=20/photo/1
It was here, in Kyiv, that the foundation of the state traditions of Ukrainians was laid, this is where our coat of arms comes from – the Trident of Volodymyr the Great, a monetary unit, and Kyiv as the political and cultural center of Ukraine.
Therefore, it is symbolic that we celebrate the Statehood Day on the day of memory of the holy Equal-to-the-Apostles Prince Volodymyr, one of the main founders and patrons of our statehood. This symbolizes the continuity of the thousand-year history of Ukraine, our nation.
On this day, we honor all the stages of our nation-building – from Rus to the present day, and all those who made efforts to ensure that Ukraine existed as an independent, democratic state.
The history of Ukrainian state formation is inextricably linked with the development of the Ukrainian army and national military traditions. And today we continue to create the history of statehood – bringing peace in Ukraine closer after our Victory.”
– Serhiy Popko, head of the Kyiv City Military Administration #Ukraine
⭕ 27 Jul 2023
ForeignAffairs, Phillips O’Brien: The War That Defied Expectations https://tinyurl.com/bdu45jus “Ukrainian troops have repeatedly proved that they are far more determined and skilled than their Russian opponents.”
// What Ukraine Revealed About Military Power
[…] … Defense experts tend to think of conflicts in terms of weapons and plans, yet the invasion of Ukraine suggests that armed power is as much about a military’s structure, morale, and industrial base as it is about armaments and blueprints. Russia, for instance, fell down not because it lacked sophisticated weapons but because it could not properly operate its systems. The country faltered because its military logistics—the process by which an armed force equips itself with the materiel needed to conduct attacks—were poor, and because its forces have low levels of motivation. …
… Particularly after Russia’s success in Syria and in Ukraine’s east in the years after it annexed Crimea in 2014, Russian troops were thought capable of undertaking operations that were similar to the ones American forces had carried out. The U.S. government itself repeatedly described Russia’s military as a near peer and close competitor to its armed forces.
But rosy assessments assumed that Moscow was honest about the quality of its weapons and that Russia would operate its systems efficiently. Neither premise proved true. Rather than being in top shape, many of Russia’s weapons systems were poorly maintained or stripped down by corruption. According to Ukrainian observers, for example, Russia may have sold off the reactive armor that is vital to protecting many military vehicles, making it far easier for Ukrainians to destroy its enemy’s tanks. The country also did not do enough to train its troops in proper tank warfare. …
… In fact, the Russians have done such a bad job of protecting their aircraft or operating mutually supportive systems that most of the time their planes fly far back from the frontline in order to stay far away from Ukrainian defense rockets. As a result, with a few rare exceptions, Ukrainian forces behind the frontlines have been able to move freely on open roads in broad daylight.
… Military analysts like to say that amateurs discuss tactics whereas experts discuss logistics, but compared to the amount of time spent chronicling the quantities of Russian airpower and armor, there was little talk among experts about whether Russia could properly supply, maintain, and regenerate these forces in war. In fact, some detailed reports that explored how a Russian invasion of Ukraine might progress almost entirely neglected to consider logistics. Instead of discussing how far and to what extent Russian supplies could be transported and maintained in the face of Ukrainian fire, experts seemed content to study what Russian systems could do in battle. …
🐣 RT @AntiToxicPeople Trump’s first response tonight is brainless whataboutism involving his usual unhinged insanity & delusional lies. ¤ Of course zero commentary about the incredibly damning details in today’s superseding indictment.
[TextLink:] https://twitter.com/AntiToxicPeople/status/1684755735203426304?s=20/photo/1
[Text:] 🐣 RT @realDonald Trump Whatever happened to the Crooked Joe Biden Document’s case? He had 20 times more Boxes than I did, and he wasn’t covered by the Presidential Records Act. I was! When it first came out that Biden had all of these Docs, many Classified, almost everyone, including those on the Left, said, “there goes the case against Trump.” But they waited and waited, got failed prosecutor Deranged Jack Smith, and STRUCK – but did almost nothing on the REALLY BAD Biden Documents case, many stored in Chinatown!
🐣 RT @RonFilipkowski I’m sure Jack Smith will give that the weight and consideration it deserves.
[TextLink:] https://twitter.com/RonFilipkowski/status/1684614398113873928?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @realDonaldTrump My attorneys had a productive meeting with the DOJ this morning, explaining in detail that I did nothing wrong, was advised by many lawyers, and that an Indictment of me would only further destroy our Country. No indication of notice was given during the meeting – Do not trust the Fake News on anything!
NYT, David French: Try Tolerance in a Small Town https://tinyurl.com/5n8edxd7 “Over the course of our 12 years in Columbia, my family slowly but surely progressed from insiders to outsiders, beginning with the adoption of our youngest daughter, a beautiful girl from Ethiopia”
// “The measure of a community isn’t how it treats insiders, but rather how it treats outsiders”
🐣 RT @wartranslated A short movie about the liberation of Staromaiorske:
“On July 27, 2023, the personnel of the 35th separate marines brigade named after Rear Admiral Mykhailo Ostrogradsky, together with their comrades from the 7th separate battalion of AREY UDA, liberated the settlement of Staromayorske, located in Donetsk region.”https://t.me/operativnoZSU/107489
💽 https://twitter.com/wartranslated/status/1684675527423008768?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @TheRickyDavila The orange asshole who wanted Hillary Clinton locked up over her email server was just indicted for trying to delete a server to erase surveillance footage. You can’t make this shit up if you tried. 🤣🍷
🐣 RT @HerrDr8 #UkrOffensive2023Zap #TheOrcTriangle #1PageAssessUKRWar Been some good developments for UA regarding the summer offensive over the last few days. Their BH Liddell Hart approach is paying increasing dividends…1st chart.
◕ https://twitter.com/HerrDr8/status/1684756114376691712?s=20/photo/1 -2
⋙ 2nd chart is the current OOB according to Ukraine Control Map. Per that, RUS continues to shuffle in absolute bunk units to the ZAP front and not rotate out exhausted unit. Given low RUS unit morale, that should set up a very favorable situation for Ukraine; especially given poor quality of RUS kit and current logistics.
WaPo: Trump charged with seeking to delete security footage in documents case https://tinyurl.com/5by6kxxj ‘The new indictment levels accusations of a broader effort by Trump and some around him to cover their tracks as the FBI sought to retrieve highly classified documents’
// Unsealed indictment charges second aide at Mar-a-Lago and brings new counts against the former president and longtime valet Walt Nauta
Prosecutors announced additional charges against Donald Trump on Thursday in his alleged hoarding and hiding of classified documents at Mar-a-Lago, accusing the former president and a newly indicted aide of trying to keep security camera footage from being reviewed by investigators and bringing the number of total federal charges against Trump to 40.
Trump already faced 31 counts of illegally retaining national defense information, but federal prosecutors led by special counsel Jack Smith have added a 32nd to the list. That count centers on a now-infamous conversation Trump allegedly had at his golf club and summer residence in Bedminster, N.J., in July 2021, focused on what has been described by others as a secret military document concerning Iran.
In that conversation, which was recorded, Trump said: “As president I could have declassified it. … Now I can’t, you know, but this is still secret.”
The new indictment also levels accusations of a broader effort by Trump and some of those around him to cover their tracks as the FBI sought to retrieve highly classified documents kept at Mar-a-Lago, Trump’s home and private club, long after his presidency ended. The indictment charges that Trump and two aides, Waltine “Walt” Nauta and Carlos De Oliveira, requested that another Trump employee “delete security camera footage at the Mar-a-Lago Club to prevent the footage from being provided to a federal grand jury.” …
The superseding indictment additionally accuses him of illegally showing to others the document about Iran, an act the indictment describes as “presentation concerning military activity in a foreign country.” It alleges for the first time that the document Trump is heard talking about in the Bedminster conversation is a real classified document, not just a random sheaf of papers. And it says the material was classified as “top secret,” not to be shown even to foreign allies … .
All three defendants are now charged with altering, destroying, mutilating or concealing an object, as well as a similar crime of corruptly altering, destroying, mutilating or concealing a document or object.
De Oliveira was also charged with lying to the FBI in a January interview in which he allegedly denied seeing boxes being moved or helping move boxes.
The new version of the indictment recounts an alleged exchange between De Oliveira and another Trump employee on June 27, 2022, in which De Oliveira allegedly asked to have a private discussion in an “audio closet” at Mar-a-Lago.
De Oliveira allegedly asked the other employee how long the footage from the security cameras were stored on their computer server. When the employee replied 45 days, De Oliveira told the employee “that ‘the boss’ wanted the server deleted,” the indictment alleges. The other employee is referred to only as “Employee 4” in the indictment, but a person close to the investigation, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss it, has said that person is an IT worker named Yuscil Taveras.
The employee replied “that he would not know how to do that, and that he did not believe that he would have the rights to do that,” according to the indictment. “De Oliveira then insisted to Trump Employee 4 that ‘the boss’ wanted the server deleted and asked, ‘What are we going to do?’”
The indictment does not allege that the footage was actually deleted, and authorities have said in court papers that the security camera footage they received provided critical evidence in their case.
After the FBI conducted a court-authorized search of Trump’s home last August to retrieve the documents with classified markings that he hadn’t returned, at least one Trump employee apparently wanted to make sure that De Oliveira wouldn’t tell officials about attempts to hide the materials, according to the indictment.
“Someone just wants to make sure Carlos is good,” Nauta allegedly said in a call with another Trump employee. That employee assured Nauta that De Oliveira was “loyal” and “would not do anything to affect his relationship with Trump.” The indictment notes that on the same day, Trump called De Oliveira “and told De Oliveira that Trump would get De Oliveira an attorney.” …
WaPo: Senate passes $886B Pentagon policy bill by a bipartisan vote of 86-11, teeing up partisan clash with House https://tinyurl.com/ykkektmb The Senate draft extends the Ukraine Security Assistance Initiative (USAI) and strengthens the United States commitment to NATO”
// The showdown will mark a test for Speaker Kevin McCarthy, who faced complaints that he allowed a House version of the bill to be hijacked by GOP rebels
🐣 RT @7Veritas4 Guys, let’s pack it up. He’s saying he did nothing wrong.
[TextLink:] https://twitter.com/7Veritas4/status/1684635959520866304?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @realDonaldTrump My attorneys had a productive meeting with the DOJ this morning, explaining in detail that I did nothing wrong, was advised by many lawyers, and that an Indictment of me would only further destroy our Country. No indication of notice was given during the meeting – Do not trust the Fake News on anything!
🐣 RT @RaduHossu The nightly summary (27.07.2023 at 06.30 RO/UA Time): It’s going to be short, but with good news:
¤ https://twitter.com/RaduHossu/status/1684408650582962176?s=20
1. Counter-offensive:
1.1 Orihiv-Tokmak axis: The Ukrainian Army (AFU) has advanced 5km east of Robotyne and about 2km west of Robotyne in the last 24 hours. They are also attacking directly from the north.
1.2 Velyka-Novosilka axis: The Ukrainian army (AFU) has entered Staromayske. Russian sources even say that they have passed this locality, but there is no visual confirmation of this other than that they are shelling Russian positions south of Staromayske.
1.3 Herson Axis: The AFU has extended its bridgehead towards Oleshky and taken control of several islands on the east bank of the Dnieper.2. Battle for Bakhmut 2.0:
2.1 Andrivka is at least partly liberated. Ukrainian sources say that the town is completely liberated, and the Russians do not deny this information. This place is important because from there they can blockade T0513, which is an important communication line for ,the Russians.
2.2 Klishivka is 30-40% liberated and there are pictures of Russian troops retreating from the town in disarray.
3. [SOURCES!!!] 2 Pentagon sources report that the Ukrainian counter-offensive has entered a new phase, that is, the phase in which the reserve brigades, including what we have called “The Nine”, “The Nine”, which have most of the Western equipment, but also most of the Western-trained troops, have been brought forward to support the counter-offensive.
Why now? It is most likely because the Ukrainian command is confident that it has destroyed a sufficient number of Russian artillery units, radars, and air defense systems with HIMARS.3. Kupyansk-Kreminna front:
3.1 The Russians have advanced toward Kupyansk, but they have a river in front of them and high ground behind them, so in my opinion this was a deliberate move by the Ukrainians to trap the Russians, but this is just my speculation.
3.2 In the Kreminna area the Russian advance slowed to a near halt. This is not due to any supernatural causes, but because the Ukrainians have managed to stabilize the front in the area of Torske.
—-
Today is the last day of the “Water for Herson” campaign, those who wish to donate today can find my Patreon in my bio:As I’ve stood with many of those who are now on the offensive, my thoughts are with them. Many of them will never see their families again, so I want to remind people: yes, we look at maps and rejoice at Ukrainian successes, but they come at a price many of us can’t even imagine. Unfortunately, I can, because I’ve seen and felt it.
So in the coming days, we will see how this new phase of the counteroffensive unfolds. As the Americans say: Godspeed to you! May God, the universe, good luck, and good fortune be with the brave Ukrainian military who are fighting to liberate the territories that are illegally occupied at the moment by the Russian invaders!
Today is an important day, if the entry into the new phase of the counteroffensive is confirmed (and I can tell you that today it will be confirmed), so for this information, but also for the effort to gather help for Herson and beyond, please share, leave a comment and give a like to the post, so that the Russian manipulation does not occupy all the information space around the world! ¤ Slava Ukraini!
🐣 RT @DefenceHQ Latest Defence Intelligence update on the situation in Ukraine
– 27 July 2023. ¤ Find out more about Defence Intelligence’s use of language: https://ow.ly/2s7550PmpKP ¤ 🇺🇦 #StandWithUkraine 🇺🇦
● As Ukrainian forces continue major offensive operations in Zaporizhzhia Oblast, one of the single most influential Russian weapon systems in the sector is the Ka-52 HOKUM attack helicopter. Russia has highly likely lost around forty Ka-52s since the invasion, but the type has also imposed a heavy cost on Ukraine.
● In recent months, Russia has highly likely augmented the force in the south with at least a small number of brand new, Ka-52M variants: a heavily modified aircraft, informed by lessons from Russia’s experience in Syria. Evidence supporting the M variant’s use in Ukraine includes photos posted on social media of aircrew posing next to the new aircraft and thanking well-wishers for sending them morale items.
● Another key improvement to the Ka-52 fleet is the integration of a new anti-tank missile, the LMUR, which has a range of approximately 15km. Ka-52 crews have been quick to exploit opportunities to launch these weapons beyond the range of Ukrainian air defences.
⋙ 🐣 RT @_ScarySharp KA-52 “Alligator” NATO reporting name is HOKUM B. The single seat version, the KA-50 “Black Shark” is the HOKUM A.
🐣 RT @shashj “The United States and other allies have trained about 63,000 Ukrainian troops…American officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal deliberations, said on Wednesday that most of those reserves had been committed.”
⋙ NYT: https://tinyurl.com/yjw66r37
… The task facing the advancing Ukrainian troops is monumental. Since seizing Ukrainian territory in last year’s invasion, Russia has built a dense defensive web of minefields, trenches, bunkers, tank traps and other obstacles. That has made the counteroffensive slow going, frustrating Ukrainians and international supporters. …
One of Ukraine’s military objectives is to drive south from the current front line through the town of Tokmak to the city Melitopol near the coast. Both are highway and railroad hubs, and driving a wedge that deep would effectively split the Russian-held territory in two, making resupply and coordination more difficult for Moscow’s forces. …
Local occupation officials reported fierce battles raging south of Orikhiv, involving brigades of foreign-trained troops and armor donated by the United States and Germany.
At the same time, Russia mounted a missile barrage on Wednesday at targets across Ukraine, launching about three dozen cruise missiles and four hypersonic ballistic missiles from aircraft.
“There were a few hits, and some missile fragments fell,” President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine said in his nightly address on Wednesday, without providing details.
Mr. Zelensky was vague about the counteroffensive. “Today our guys at the front had very good results,” he said. “More details later.”
🐣 RT @officejjsmart 🇺🇦 COUNTEROFFENSIVE’S GOALS
⚡️⚡️ “Over the next two-three weeks, one of the goals of the counteroffensive of the 🇺🇦 Armed Forces is to reach the Sea of Azov.” ¤ – New York Times 🇺🇸
🌎 https://twitter.com/officejjsmart/status/1684433511715835904?s=20/photo/1
📌 The front in Zaporizhia is one of its three axes as the general thrust is to the southeast.
📌 Ukraine 🇺🇦 will try to reach Melitopol & Tokmak.
📌 Destroy the Russians’ connectivity / bridge to 🇷🇺-occupied Crimea.
Say a prayer for the 🇺🇦 heroes: It will cost many lives to ward off the fascist occupiers.
⭕ 26 Jul 2023
NewLinesMag, Michael Weiss and James Rushton: Russians See Ukrainian Progress Where Others Don’t https://tinyurl.com/vvxjkz5z
// Kyiv’s long-awaited counteroffensive is portrayed as more successful by enemy soldiers and their cheerleaders than by Western analysts
🐣 RT @ ChrisDJackson 🚨 BREAKING #BIDENOMICS does it again! Today, the stock market TIED AN ALL-TIME RECORD (set in 1987) by rising for the 13th consecutive day! Wow! ¤ Since the media refuses to recognize @POTUS @JoeBiden’s strong economic record, let me recap:
🖼 https://twitter.com/ChrisDJackson/status/1684315457052876800?s=20/photo/1
💪 Unemployment below 4% for 1.5 years
🧑🏭 13M jobs created, 800K in manufacturing
⬇️ Inflation down 2/3
⛽ Gas prices down ~$1.50
🛣️ 35K infrastructure projects
📈 Improving consumer confidence
📊 Stock market ties the all-time record for consecutive positive days
The Biden Boom is real, folks! Spread the word!
🐣 RT @emptywheel Beryl Howell orders Rudy to start paying up for his corporate person blowing off Ruby Freeman’s discovery.
[TextLink:] https://twitter.com/emptywheel/status/1684334529220050945?s=20/photo/1
~~~~~~~~
🐣 RT @AWeissmann_ Trump, Eastman, Chesebro and Clarke all seem like likely defendants in the upcoming federal indictment.
⋙ 🐣 RT @TristanSnell BREAKING: John Eastman’s lawyers send memo to DOJ for why he shouldn’t be indicted. ¤ TRANSLATION: John Eastman is about to get indicted by DOJ for his participation in the January 6 coup.
🐣 RT @wartranslated While Girkin is gone, his mate Murz from the 4th “LPR” Brigade is taking the turn in doom posting: he says Ukrainians are successfully realising their plans of strong pushes in any area of the frontline that is available, destroying Russian artillery and taking out trained forces. He says if this goes on, the late summer and fall can be very difficult for Russia when it starts running out of personnel. And then the Russian authorities who are delaying the next mobilisation will be forced to throw new mobiks into battle from trains in WW2 style just to try and stop the continued Ukrainian offensive.
[TextLink:] https://twitter.com/wartranslated/status/1684125524338040832?s=20/photo/1 -3
⋙ 🐣 RT @wartranslated Doom posting is not an overstatement, he’s genuinely very concerned about the lack of people to conduct even the most basic of tasks, not even talking about military operations. He says Ukrainian strikes are forcing Russians to disperse stockpiles which leads to a significant slowing down of transportation of ammo. Current attempts to bring as many troops as possible from various formations to the hotspots on the frontline cannot compensate for technical improvement for Ukrainians.
[TextLink:] https://twitter.com/wartranslated/status/1684128463320391682?s=20/photo/1 -2
🐣 RT @wartranslated There’s another interesting account from a Russian officer, sorry long post again, but he tells what led to Ukrainian success in Klischiivka, including Russia bringing up unprepared troops from various units into an area, describing them as disorganised. He also mentions relentless shelling and drone attacks. A long excerpt here but you can read even more by following the links:
https://t.me/BKPROGRESSor/91
https://t.me/BKPROGRESSor/92
[TextLink:] https://twitter.com/wartranslated/status/1684322599025754114?s=20/photo/1 -3
🐣 RT @OccupyDemocrats BREAKING: President Biden scores a MASSIVE win ahead of 2024 as U.S. Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell announces that they are no longer forecasting an economic recession. ¤ But the good new doesn’t end there…
¤ https://twitter.com/OccupyDemocrats/status/1684302392509227009?s=20
Powell also said that Fed staff believes “we do have a shot” to get inflation back to its target without a great number of jobs losses. He also mentioned the powerful “resilience” of Biden’s economy.
This is a huge win for the American people and a nightmare for Republicans. Incumbent presidents running with a strong economy are historically extremely difficult to defeat at the ballot box.
Trump will run on the Big Lie. Biden will run on jobs.
It is now undeniable that Bidenomics is one of the most successful economic programs in modern history. Investing in the middle class instead of giving tax cuts to the rich really works!
Please retweet and ❤️ if you support Bidenomics — and consider joining the growing exodus to Tribel, a “woke” new Twitter competitor that banned Trump for life and is exploding in popularity because Elon Musk banned Tribel’s Twitter account — but he forgot to ban this link to download the new Tribel app: http://tribel.app.link/okwPIHYCIqb
🐣 RT @BlogUkraine #519dayofwar ⚡U.S. President Joseph Biden Orders U.S. to Share Evidence of Russian War Crimes With Hague Court, – writes NYT
#Ukraine #UkraineWar #UkraineRussiaWar
⋙ 🐣 RT @BlogUkraine American intelligence agencies are said to have gathered information including details about decisions by Russian officials to deliberately strike civilian infrastructure in Ukraine and forcibly deport thousands of Ukrainian children from occupied territory, – writes NYT https://tinyurl.com/2p8tm8ba
🔆 This❗️⋙ NYT: U.S. Says Main Thrust of Ukraine’s Counteroffensive Has Begun https://tinyurl.com/2sr4y9a6
⋙ NYT: ‘This is the big test’: US officials describe a new Ukrainian effort to sever Russia’s hold on the south https://tinyurl.com/ytv34xht ‘Thousands of reinforcements are pouring into the grinding battle, many of them trained and equipped by the West and, until now, held in reserve’
🐣 RT @7Veritas4 Now you know why we have an Adderall shortage.
[TextLink:] https://twitter.com/7Veritas4/status/1684204456051712009?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @realDonaldTrump SO, THEY IMPEACH ME OVER A “PERFECT” PHONE CALL, AND THEY DON’T IMPEACH BIDEN FOR BEING THE MOST CORRUPT PRESIDENT IN THE HISTORY OFTHE UNITED STATES???
🐣 RT @realDonaldTrump We’ll have fun on the stand with all of these people that say the Presidential Election wasn’t Rigged and Stollen. THE TRIAL OF THE CENTURY!!!
🐣 RT @realDonaldTrump 2024 ELECTION INTERFERENCE!!!
🐣 RT @realDonaldTrump PROSECUTORIAL MISCONDUCT!!!
🐣 RT @ DoctorHenryCT Joy Behar made a good point on the view. Republicans used Billy Carter & Roger Clinton in attempts to smear Jimmy Carter & Bill Clinton. Now it’s Hunter Biden. I would only add that the common denominator in all of these smears is pardoned convict Roger Stone.
🐣 RT @llccar1 “The depths of [Trump’s] dishonesty is just astounding to me. The dishonesty, the transactional nature of every relationship, though it’s more pathetic than anything else. He is the most flawed person I have ever met in my life.” – John Kelly, Former WH Chief of Staff
[TextLink:] https://twitter.com/llccar1/status/1684254754124202004?s=20/photo/1
WaPo: The war in Ukraine is spurring a revolution in drone warfare using AI https://tinyurl.com/2pxpft32 “Drones have allowed Ukraine to surveil and hit sensitive targets far behind enemy lines while improving the accuracy of its conventional artillery”
// The advent of AI-enabled drones holds huge promise for Ukraine’s military but may also be exploited by nefarious non-state actors
⭕ 25 Jul 2023
🐣 RT @AntiToxicPeople Orange Grandpa Simpson is yelling at the clouds again
[TextLink:] https://twitter.com/AntiToxicPeople/status/1683961552079319044?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @realDonaldTrump So, let’s get this straight? The Democrat SLIMEBALLS in Congress, then headed by Crazy Nancy Pelosi, Impeached me over a PERFECT PHONE CALL (I Won!), and are now Indicting me over their continuing, illegal, and long running Witch Hunt, but Crooked Joe Biden, who has stolen and extorted millions of dollars, won’t be Impeached or Indicted by a very kind, friendly, and politically correct Republican Congress. Gee, that seems very fair to me? MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!!!
🐣 📊 RT @matt_barnum NEW: The conventional wisdom is that parents have grown increasingly furious with public schools. But it’s actually people without school-age children who are particularly skeptical of public schools, multiple surveys show. https://tinyurl.com/2rv2a52k
◕ https://twitter.com/matt_barnum/status/1683903661716406287?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @ItsArtoir Lengthy post from milblogger Bulba of Thrones discussing the “Genocide of Ru artillery” ¤ TLDR; Ukrainian losses pale in significance to Ru and while Bradley’s etc can be replaced, Howitzers, MRLs and other Ru artillery cannot. ¤ The crackdown on dissenters such as Girkin, bloggers and military figures is seen as preparation for bad news in the Autumn. ¤ Another “goodwill gesture” is predicted soon. ¤. The map he refers to and included below is from @GeoConfirmed
[TextLink:] 🌎 https://twitter.com/ItsArtoir/status/1683871771840086017?s=20/photo/1 -3
WaPo: Heat waves in U.S., Europe ‘virtually impossible’ without climate change, study finds https://tinyurl.com/y2zsu7bw
// Such events will become only more intense and more frequent unless humans halt the burning of fossil fuels that warm the planet, scientists say
⋙ ImperialCollegeLondon: Extreme heat in North America, Europe and China in July 2023 made much more likely by climate change [pdf] https://tinyurl.com/25huvw7b 23p
🐣 RT @maria_drutska The Main Intelligence Directorate (GUR) has published a secret russian report on the systematic disruption of the “grain deal”, detailing that the entire process took place in three stages:
¤ https://twitter.com/maria_drutska/status/1683781017142693888?s=20
♦️In the first stage, russia’s goal was to reduce the amount of Ukrainian grain being supplied by initiating putin’s suspension of the “grain deal” from October 29 to November 3, 2022
♦️The second involved implementing measures to limit the admission of ships to the Southern Port, stopping the registration of grain carriers, and reducing inspection teams to no more than two. This allowed russia to significantly restrict the volume of food exports from Ukraine, which essentially led to Kyiv being unable to export about 20 million tons of cargo
♦️The third – a complete disruption of grain supplies and termination of the “grain deal”
The GUR noted that if the grain agreement is extended, the russians will act according to the same scheme, in which the shelling of Ukrainian sea ports is part of the plan’s implementation.
WaPo: Putin appeared paralyzed and unable to act in first hours of rebellion https://tinyurl.com/2p8t66yy “Without any clear orders, local military and security chiefs took the decision not to try to stop the heavily armed Wagner troops, officials said”
⭕ 24 Jul 2023
🐣 RT @HerrDr8 #RussianMissiles #RussianMissileTerrorCampaign Guess I need to update the chart again. Putin evidently quite desperate to feed Make Russia Great Again crowd with strikes on Ukrainian civilian targets (like churches), given recent setbacks on the battlefield, Kerch bridge, hits on HQs/Ammo/LoCs and a ongoing mutiny/purge.
◕ https://twitter.com/HerrDr8/status/1683658374217338886?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @PoliticusSarah Rachel #Maddow “It’s good to remember it’s not just the authoritarian right that is ascendant as a global trend. It is also resistance to authoritarianism that can be a global trend. That is a global trend. The fight back is ascendant too. Resilience matters.”
💽 https://twitter.com/PoliticusSarah/status/1683669073085755392?s=20/photo/1
💽 https://twitter.com/PoliticusSarah/status/1683669073085755392?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @robreiner Time to stop all the hand wringing. Joe Biden is having the most successful and accomplished Presidency in the last 60 years. And the choice could not be more clear. Do you want Democracy or Fascism?
🐣 RT @SenatorRomney It’s in our interests that Ukraine is successful in defending itself against Putin’s Russia, an adversary of the United States. By supporting Ukraine, we help weaken Russia’s military—safeguarding our well-being, livelihoods, and the freedom and prosperity we enjoy in America.
🐣 RT @Angry_Staffer A Trump ally has turned over thousands of documents to special counsel Jack Smith – including materials that haven’t been previously disclosed to investigators looking into events surrounding January 6, 2021.
CNN: Special counsel received documents from Giuliani team that tried to find fraud after 2020 election https://tinyurl.com/4e55jmce
// End Note: “This headline and story have been updated with additional reporting.”
Among the materials turned over to special counsel Jack Smith about supposed fraud in the 2020 election are documents that touch on many of the debunked conspiracies and unfounded claims of widespread voter fraud peddled by former Donald Trump attorney Rudy Giuliani.
The documents had been withheld by former New York Police Commissioner Bernie Kerik, who claimed they were privileged, only to be handed over to Smith on Sunday at what appears to be the late stages of the federal investigation into efforts to overturn the 2020 election.
The files include affidavits claiming there were widespread “irregularities,” shoddy statistical analyses supposedly revealing “fraudulent activities,” and opposition research about a senior employee from Dominion Voting Systems that are central to civil litigation and a federal criminal probe stemming from a voting systems breach in Colorado.
The documents turned over by Kerik also connect him and other members of the Trump legal team to the efforts to smear a Dominion Voting Systems executive – efforts that are now the subject of both civil litigation and the Colorado state criminal investigation. ¤ The tranche includes a 29-page dossier on the executive, Eric Coomer, detailing his anti-Trump rhetoric on social media, as well as his background working for the voting machine company. …
The documents turned over by Kerik also include a 105-page report from after the 2020 election compiled by the Trump campaign and Giuliani that contained the campaign’s unfounded allegations of fraud, including witness statements and false allegations of over-votes and illegal votes.
They also include communications between investigators hired by Giuliani – including Kerik – about the debunked report about irregularities in Antrim County, Michigan, that Trump was repeatedly told was bogus but continued to tout up to and on January 6, 2021.
One example is a memo titled “Briefing materials for Senate members” sent by Katherine Friess – a former Trump lawyer – to Kerik, Steve Bannon and an email address known to belong to Giuliani on January 4, 2021.
This tranche of documents turned over to Smith further illustrates the scope of unproven fraud claims that were being circulated to high-level Trump allies at the time.
One of the research documents turned over by Kerik was a report on so-called U-Voters, a theory that there is “an army of phantom voters,” who have accumulated on the voter rolls over the last several years, “who can be deployed at will.”
The report was referenced in late December 2020 letters sent to the Justice Department and to then-Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell by Pennsylvania state Sen. Doug Mastriano, a top promoter of Trump’s election reversal gambits who ran unsuccessfully for governor in 2022. The letter to McConnell, signed by other Pennsylvania Republicans as well, asked him to dispute the election’s certification.
The Kerik documents also include several versions of a research memo purporting to analyze the Pennsylvania election and claiming to find an “indication” of fraud. The Trump team’s focus on Pennsylvania, and how its bogus claims of fraud there affected election officials in the state, has been the subject of scrutiny by Smith.
In addition, the internal communications handed over by Kerik suggest Trump’s team attempted to seize on an earlier Government Accountability Office report about the Department of Homeland Security’s cyber arm to undercut what Trump was told – and embraced – during a February 2020 Oval Office meeting about election security.
They include the GAO report and what appears to be a memo highlighting the fact that “DHS Critical Infrastructure and Security Agency (CISA) failed to fully execute multiple strategies to secure the 2020 Presidential elections.”
The memo seeks to counter CISA’s public statement that the election was “the most secure in American history,” based on security programs officials presented to Trump during the February 2020 briefing. Trump had seemed to embrace the programs in early 2020, to the point of suggesting the agencies hold a press conference so he could take credit for their work, CNN reported Monday.
🐣 RT @anno1540 AP: US to send $400 million in extra military aid to Ukraine, including nanodrones and missiles for HIMARS
¤ https://twitter.com/anno1540/status/1683689465024217089?s=20
The Associated Press reports, citing unnamed US officials, that the administration of US President Joe Biden will send additional $400 million in military aid to Ukraine. ¤ These funds are allocated under the so-called “presidential drawdown authority” – a scheme that allows Biden to release funds without the approval of Congress.
According to the agency, the new package will include:
● Batch of nanodrones for Hornet observation;
● Missiles for HIMARS multiple launch rocket systems and NASAMS air defense systems;
● Hydra-70 air-to-ground missiles;
● Stinger and Javelin anti-aircraft and anti-tank missiles;
● 32 Stryker armored vehicles;
● Shells for howitzers;
● 28 million rounds for firearms
● Subversives.As the agency recalls, since the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the United States has already provided more than $41 billion in military assistance to Kyiv. ¤ @bbcrussian // Defense budget
🐣 RT @FarnoushAmiri New: DOJ writes to Rep. Jim Jordan saying they are concerned about GOP’s misrepresentation of Hunter Biden probe and that US Attorney Weiss will be made available to testify publicly after August recess because “it is strongly in the public interest” to hear from him directly.
[TextLink:] https://twitter.com/FarnoushAmiri/status/1683607913380675589?s=20/photo/1 -2
🐣 RT @levparnas [Jul 19] Here is my letter I sent to @RepJamesComer and the @GOPoversight, @OversightDems [link]
¤ https://twitter.com/levparnas/status/1681792307748642816?s=20
WaPo, Philip Bump: Trump wanted Ukraine to impugn Biden. D.C. Republicans finally delivered. https://tinyurl.com/5f94hyz2 It’s once again the time of the election season for Trump to claim he has 🎉“Dirt on Joe Biden”🎊 stemming from unverified claims about Burisma and Ukraine
// Why did Sen. Charles E. Grassley (R-Iowa) choose now to release the unverified allegation against Biden that he’s possessed all along?
🐣 RT @PresidntTicTac Lev Parnas was the person that went to Ukraine to help build a disinformation campaign with Rudy Giuliani.
[TextLink:] https://twitter.com/PresidntTicTac/status/1682946060942024709?s=20/photo/1
He’s now trying to get people to understand that the FD-1023 document released today based on their findings is bogus.
Republicans are ignoring what Lev Parnas is saying because they say he’s a felon and is not credible. ¤ Do you not see how INSANE that is? ¤ Lev sent them a letter saying “you CAN’T TRUST any of the information in this document because I was part of the disinformation campaign that lead to its creation.”
Republicans are saying “Lev Parnas can’t be trusted … we believe EVERYTHING in the FD-1023 document!” ¤ They’re trying to drown out all the TRUMP INDICTMENTS with a document full of CONSPIRACY THEORIES.
🐣 RT @motytchak this is why we should win this war fast — to not pass it to the next generation. ¤ and this is what the West’s slowness is actually doing — passing this war to the next generation.
[TextLink:] https://twitter.com/motytchak/status/1683369449481551872?s=20/photo/1
● All Russian school children are to be taught the basics of operating combat drones. Russian Senator Artem Sheikin announced that the lessons will include how to conduct terrain reconnaissance and ways to counter enemy uncrewed aerial vehicles (UAVS).
● The UAV lessons join assault rifle training, hand grenade skills and combat first aid in the revised Basics of Life Safety’ syllabus for year 10 and 11 students, due to be mandated from 1 September 2023.
● Russia’s renewed emphasis on military induction for children is largely an effort to cultivate a culture of militarised patriotism rather than develop genuine capability. However, the addition of UAV skills does highlight how Russia has identified the use of tactical UAVs in Ukraine as an enduring component of contemporary war.
🐣 RT @1JaySC [ — ]
[TextLink:] https://twitter.com/1JaySC/status/1683418999684513794?s=20/photo/1
“He has dared, taunted, provoked, and goaded Department of Justice to prosecute him for his offenses on and relating to January 6 for two and a half years. The former president has left Jack Smith no choice but to bring charges, lest the former president make a mockery of the Constitution of the United States and the Rule of Law.” — JUDGE MICHAEL LUTTIG
🐣 RT @AntiToxicPeople The unhinged and terrified rantings of a lunatic, past midnight: ¤ Unless I am misunderstanding something here, it seems like he has been informed he has been indicted again or is about to be within days.
[TextLink:] https://twitter.com/AntiToxicPeople/status/1683349106885013505?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @ @realDonaldTrump Do you think that A.G. Garland, and Deranged Jack Smith, understand that we are in the middle of a major political campaign for President of the United States? Have they looked at recent poll numbers? Why didn’t they bring these ridiculous charges years before – Why did they wait to bring them NOW – A virtually unheard of scenario? PROSECUTORIAL MISCONDUCT! ELECTION INTERFERENCE!
🐣 RT @realDonaldTrump How many times can Crooked Joe Biden’s DEPARTMENT OF INJUSTICE, TOGETHER WITH THEIR LOCAL DEMOCRAT D.A.’S & A.G.’S, INDICT HIS POLITICAL OPPONENT DURING THE COURSE OF THE CAMPAIGN? DO THEY UNDERSTAND THE DAMAGE BEING DONE TO AMERICA? IT WILL ONLY GET WORSE. WE MUST STOP THESE “MONSTERS” FROM FURTHER DESTROYING OUR COUNTRY!
🐣 RT @Henness87
The weight of the world..
The future of his country..
The hopes, and the pain, of all who look to him..
The immutable threat of death to himself, his wife, his two precious children..
All of this.. on his shoulders..
🖼 https://twitter.com/Henness87/status/1682405097232531456?s=20/photo/1
// Zelensky
⋙ 🐣 almost single-handedly, he has egged the West on ~ to believe in itself again ¤
a hero for the ages
⭕ 23 Jul 2023
🐣 RT @intermarium24 #BREAKING Ukraine takes down massive pro-russian bot farm -this time it’s about 150,000 SIM cards. ¤ The bots were used to push Russian propaganda on social media justifying Russia war in Ukraine. ¤ #Ukraine #ukrainian #ukrainians #Russia #russian #russians #nato#eu
💽 https://twitter.com/intermarium24/status/1683076599179104256?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @ @sentdefender The Ukrainian Minister of Defense, Oleksii Reznikov told CNN today that they will Win the War by the Summer of next year with Ukraine then able to join the NATO Alliance by the Summit in July 2024.
🐣 RT @anneapplebaum I believed Russia would not destroy historic Odesa, because of the city’s significance to the Russian empire. But I was wrong – now it seems they know they will never control it again, so they are happy to see it burn.
⋙ 🐣 RT @EuromaidanPress One of the buildings damaged in Russia’s night missile attack on Odesa is the Count Pototskyi Palace (Palace of Scientists). Many halls are damaged, and exhibits lost. [pics via] USI
🖼 https://twitter.com/anneapplebaum/status/1683062055249809410?s=20/photo/1 -4
🐣 RT @juliaioffe Odessa is one of the most charming cities on the planet. It is also essentially sacred to every Soviet Jew. It was the center of so much culture and history, the birthplace of Soviet Jewish humor. So many of us, myself included, have roots there. It’s why we call it Odessa Mama.
⋙ 🐣 RT @avalaina It’s painful. Russia deliberately hit the historical center of Odessa, which is under UNESCO protection. The Russian rocket destroyed the cathedral. Russia continues to destroy Ukrainian cities. We need modern planes to he able to protect them.
Photo from libkos and babel
🖼 https://twitter.com/avalaina/status/1683140573690232833?s=20/photo/1 -4
🐣 RT @steven_seegel Love for a city. The Kremlin just doesn’t get that the city is more than something mapped between hard borders, movable jigsaw pieces like on #maps of Stalin. Cities are more than landmarks or strategic structures, the made & unmade. Odesa is its people & they will not be broken.
⋙ 🐣 RT @mattia_n People are helping to clear the severely damaged Transfiguration Cathedralin Odesa. Video Sispilne Odesa.
💽 https://twitter.com/mattia_n/status/1683030399356747776?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @HerrDr8 #4WestCampsUkrWar #1pageassessukrwar Need some more of Meloni fire in Team In It to Win It. ¤ A little too much foot dragging over artillery shells (cluster), longer range missiles and better planes; especially in light of #RussianMissiles continuing attack on civilian targets…and a need to press the offensive given Russian strategic dislocation (the ongoing mutiny/purge).
◕ https://twitter.com/HerrDr8/status/1683230771203457027?s=20/photo/1
// “The 4″Western” Camps regarding Ukraine/Russia at the moment”
🐣 RT @IAPonomarenko A bit of news from me: I am no longer part of @KyivIndependent anymore. My history with this media outlet that I co-established in November 2021 is over now. … I and the KI will continue cooperating to produce a book on the war in Ukraine that I wrote for you. It’s already being edited, and I have a deal with a widely respected publisher based in the United States. ¤ The book is probably due in early 2024. The manuscript’s working title as of now is: “Guerilla Radio: How Russia Failed in the Battle of Kyiv.”
¤ https://twitter.com/IAPonomarenko/status/1683234728537669633?s=20
⭕ 22 Jul 2023
BylineSupplement, Benjamin Tallis: The Rise of the New Idealists https://tinyurl.com/2s988m5p
// 7/22/2023; Dr Benjamin Tallis on a dramatic sea change in international politics
⋙ See under Entire Articles: Tallis New Idealists 7-2023
● What is Neo-Idealism?
● Against Realism
● Beyond Liberal Internationalism
● Neither Neo-Conservative, Nor Restraint Coalition
● Democracies’ Choice
There is a new idealism at work in international politics. Pioneered by people and politicians in Ukraine, the Baltic states, and the Czech Republic, but increasingly apparent in the actions and words of leaders across the free world, it has opened the door to a better kind of grand strategy for liberal democracies.
The standard bearers for this new hard-edged, forward-looking idealism in (geo)politics include Estonian Prime Minister Kaja Kallas and her erstwhile Finnish counterpart Sanna Marin, as well as President Edgars Rinkēvičs (Latvia) and Foreign Ministers Gabrielius Landsbergis (Lithuania) and Jan Lipavsky (Czechia).
They are joined by European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, a leader reborn in the crucible of Europe’s response to Russian aggression. At the head of the pack though is Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky who, channelling the courage and conviction of his people, has done most to pioneer the ‘Neo-Idealist’ synthesis of morality and materiel, principle and progress.
What is Neo-Idealism?
Neo-Idealism is a morally-based approach to geopolitics, grounded in the power of values conceived as ideals to strive for: human rights and fundamental freedoms, social and cultural liberalism, democratic governance; self-determination for democratic societies; and perhaps most importantly, the right of citizens in those societies to a hopeful future.Crucially, its proponents see the struggle for these ideals, and making progress toward them, not as luxuries to be set aside when hard-nosed interests are at stake. For the Neo-Idealists, our values are our interests.
Spearheaded by Zelensky, Ukraine’s government has drawn on the courage shown by Ukrainians to appeal to the better instincts of democracies across the world. Citing principle after moral principle, Zelensky has appealed to parliaments, leaders, and peoples across the West to help his country by giving them the hard power tools they need to fight – and win. He has encouraged people and politicians to relive the heroic moments of their history and confronted them with examples of where they failed to live up to their ideals.
By emphasising that his country’s fight is just one front in the wider struggle for freedom against tyranny, Zelensky convinced people around the world that Ukraine’s fight is their fight too. This approach gained particular traction in Central and Eastern Europe (CEE), where it resonated with historical experience of resisting Russian oppression. It also re-awakened the long-dormant hopeful, forward-looking politics of the 1990s associated with figures such as Václav Havel and Lennart Meri. [… … ]
Democracies’ Choice
The future foreign policy direction of many of the key democratic states is uncertain and current doctrines seem ill-equipped to master the multiple transitions we face. The Neo-Idealists have opened the door to a new type of geopolitics and have made Ukraine into a clear case for this approach but there will be more ambiguous challenges to come.
The current Neo-Idealists and their successors must now develop and broaden their approach, while remaining consistent and deciding which challenges to prioritise. This would provide a genuine alternative to the inadequate model of the recent past and the chance to uncancel our democratic future – we should seize it.
🐣 RT @ KyivIndependent ⚡️UK Defense Ministry: Girkin’s arrest likely to ‘infuriate’ elements within pro-war Russian factions. ¤ Russian war criminal Igor Girkin’s arrest is likely to “infuriate” members of Russia’s military blogger community and elements within Russia’s military, the U.K. Defense Ministry wrote in its July 22 intelligence update.
[TextLink:] https://twitter.com/KyivIndependent/status/1682728840450195457?s=20/photo/1
● Russian former intelligence officer and leading nationalist mil-blogger Igor Girkin was almost certainly arrested for ‘extremism’ on 21 July 2023. Girkin has long been a critic of the Russian Ministry of Defence’s conduct of the war. However, in recent days his comments have turned to direct criticism of Russian President Vladimir Putin and his time in power.
● The move is likely to infuriate fellow members of the mil-blogger community – and elements within the serving military – who largely see Girkin as an astute military analyst and patriot. He played a major role in Russia’s war in the Donbas from 2014 and spent months on the front line in 2022
● While Girkin is no ally of the Wagner Group, he was likely only prepared to push the limits of public criticism in the context of Wagner chief Yevgeny Prigozhin’s June 2023 abortive mutiny. The taboo against unmasked criticism of the Putin regime has been significantly weakened.
WaPo: U.S. in no hurry to provide Ukraine with long-range missiles https://tinyurl.com/5b7n4mk4 “The limited number of ATACMS is the U.S. military’s most pressing concern” ~ “Lockheed Martin has made only about 4,000 since production began”
// Kyiv says it needs ATACMS, but the Pentagon says it doesn’t have enough to spare and Ukraine doesn’t really need them
The Pentagon believes that Kyiv has other, more urgent needs than ATACMS, and worries that sending enough to Ukraine to make a difference on the battlefield would severely undercut U.S. readiness for other possible conflicts.
The number of ATACMS in American stockpiles is fixed, awaiting replacement with the next generation, longer-range Precision Strike Missile, called the Prism, for PrSM, which is expected to enter service by the end of this year, officials said. Lockheed Martin still manufactures 500 ATACMS each year, but all of that production is destined for sale to other countries. …
The ATACMS would allow Ukrainian forces to target the farthest reaches of Russian-occupied Crimea from their own current front lines, including the 12-mile Kerch Bridge and the Russian naval base at Sevastopol. …
Last month, the House Armed Services Committee included funds to send ATACMS to Ukraine in its draft of the defense budget, and the House Foreign Affairs Committee passed a bipartisan resolution calling for the United States to “immediately” provide the missiles.
“There’s no reason to give Ukraine just enough to bleed but not enough to win,” Committee Chairman Michael McCaul (R-Tex.) said. “If we’re going to be helping them, either go all in or get out.” The resolution was backed by the committee’s chief Democrat, Rep. Gregory W. Meeks (N.Y.). …
The recent arrival of British Storm Shadow and French SCALP missiles means Ukraine has even less need for ATACMS, Colin Kahl, until early this month the Pentagon’s undersecretary for policy, said during the same Aspen panel at which Yermak appeared. …
“The problem is not a hundred kilometers away, it’s one kilometer in front of them with the minefields” the Russians have laid, along with rows of trenches and tank traps, in defensive lines along the 600-mile front line, Kahl said. …
“There’s a very limited number [of ATACMS] available to export, and for distances longer than the GMLR can reach, the Ukrainians have been given Storm Shadows and SCALPS,” the defense official said. This fall or winter, Ukraine also will receive U.S. GLSDB, or Ground Launched Small Diameter Bombs, with a range of 93 miles and the ability to fire on a 360-degree trajectory.
ATACMS are nearly two-ton guided missiles. Each one is 13 feet long, 2 feet in diameter, and costs nearly $1.5 million. First designed in the 1980s, they were used in combat by the Army in both the 1991 Persian Gulf War and the 2003 invasion of Iraq. The Ukrainians believe the ground-launched missiles would provide a capability beyond the cruise missiles, which are launched from aircraft.
The limited number of ATACMS is the U.S. military’s most pressing concern. While the exact number in the U.S. arsenal is classified, Lockheed Martin has made only about 4,000 since production began, many of them used by the U.S. Army in combat, exercises and periodic testing. …
🐣 RT @Adam0902731 MAGA and Trump banging on about Biden supporting Ukraine because he’s corrupt. ¤ Doesn’t really explain why all western counties also support Ukraine though. ¤ Trump is a fucking clown.
💽 https://twitter.com/Adam0902731/status/1682949298424811520?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @ltgrusselhonore 1. Authoritarians 2,Climate Change 3 Destroying the Ocean 4 Voter Suppression 5 #UkraineRussiaWar 6 Safe Drinking Water 7 #Trump 8 Continuous Poverty 9 Homeless People 10 Failed Immigration System
🖼 https://twitter.com/ltgrusselhonore/status/1682817205509971968?s=20/photo/1
// “The future we fear is here “
🐣 RT @IuliiaMendel Russia has come under pressure at the UN security council from its ally China and developing countries as well as western nations to avert a global food crisis and quickly revive Ukrainian grain shipments.
¤ https://twitter.com/IuliiaMendel/status/1682645890643705856?s=20
Associated Press reports that Moscow was also criticised by the UN and council members on Friday for attacking Ukrainian ports after pulling out of the year-old grain deal and destroying port infrastructure.
In response to Russia declaring wide areas in the Black Sea dangerous for shipping, the UN warned that a military incident in the sea could have “catastrophic consequences”.
China’s deputy UN ambassador, Geng Shuang, expressed hope that Russia and the UN would work together to resume exports from both countries “at an early date” in the interest of “maintaining international food security and alleviating the food crisis in developing countries in particular”
CNBC: Morgan Stanley credits Bidenomics for ‘much stronger’ than expected GDP growth https://tinyurl.com/4bd47uk8 “Morgan Stanley now projects 1.9% GDP growth for the first half of this year. That’s nearly four times higher than the bank’s previous forecast of 0.5%.”
“🐣 RT @IuliiaMendel Russia has come under pressure at the UN security council from its ally China and developing countries as well as western nations to avert a global food crisis and quickly revive Ukrainian grain shipments.
¤ https://twitter.com/IuliiaMendel/status/1682645890643705856?s=20
Associated Press reports that Moscow was also criticised by the UN and council members on Friday for attacking Ukrainian ports after pulling out of the year-old grain deal and destroying port infrastructure.
In response to Russia declaring wide areas in the Black Sea dangerous for shipping, the UN warned that a military incident in the sea could have “catastrophic consequences”.
China’s deputy UN ambassador, Geng Shuang, expressed hope that Russia and the UN would work together to resume exports from both countries “at an early date” in the interest of “maintaining international food security and alleviating the food crisis in developing countries in particular”.
🐣 RT @mccaffreyr3 Hard pressed to make this Russian State TV stuff up. Use a 100 megaton nuke to blow up the North Pole? This is a Russian man-child. A Colonel who thinks these are effective, cheap weapons. He’s an infant playing with matches in a gas filled home.
⋙ 🐣 RT @JuliaDavisNews Meanwhile in Russia: appearing on state TV, retired Colonel Konstantin Sivkov, Deputy President of the Russian Academy of Rocket and Artillery Sciences, suggested blowing up the North Pole if that’s what it takes to teach the West a lesson.
⭕ 21 Jul 2023
🔄 📋 🐣 RT @chrisderose Oppenheimer is sure to revive some debates about the end of WWII. Worth noting: Purple Heart medals awarded in Korea, Vietnam, the Gulf, War on Terror—all 370,000 since 1945—were manufactured for the anticipated invasion of Japan. We have 120,000 remaining.
¤ https://twitter.com/chrisderose/status/1682398770695409666?s=20
⋙ 🐣 my father was on a ship heading to Japan when the bomb was dropped ¤ my mother was already a war widow when she met my father; her first husband had died on d-day
🐣 RT @gtconway3d “Of more than $35m raised between March and June, the campaign received $17.7m…. The rest went to the Save America PAC, which … has been spending millions on lawyers…. ‘A lot of money is going to legal and people who don’t do much, and not … to do marketing and advertising.’”
⋙ 🐣 RT @JaxAlemany “To illustrate how Trump’s criminal defense is swallowing his campaign, just over half of the $$ he raised last quarter went not to the campaign itself but to an affiliated PAC that is footing the legal bills.” Via @iarnsdorf & @jdawsey1 >
⋙⋙ WaPo: Trump prosecutions consume campaign funds and messaging as charges mount https://tinyurl.com/48tdubkd
// Any distinction between the former president’s White House bid and his criminal defense is vanishing
🐣 RT @jimsciutto !!: “NATO has an open door policy, Russia has an open windows policy”, says @SecBlinken just now of threat to Prigozhin. #AspenSecurity
🐣 RT @HerrDr8 #1WayTrainRideRus #1PageAssessUkrWar Agree…Putin a placeholder while the Kremlin teams pick a new tsar.
◕ https://twitter.com/HerrDr8/status/1682557173648310274?s=20/photo/1
⋙ 🐣 RT @michaeldweiss ICYMI: @christogrozev, @Dobrokhotov and I queried Russian spies, security officials and others about the Prigozhin rebellion. Most weren’t surprised, many said he had help from within the services and army, and all said Putin is weaker than ever.
🐣 RT @mhmck Igor Girkin is the Butcher of Slovyansk. In 2014, he summarily executed Ukrainian civilians in the temporarily-occupied city. He kidnapped evangelical Christians and tortured them to death. ¤ News media should be ashamed for calling Girkin a “critic” and normalizing mass-murder.
🐣 RT @EuromaidanPress Zelenskyy called the Crimean Bridge a target that “must be neutralized” ¤ “For us, this is an enemy object built in violation of our law & international law. It brings war, not peace & must be neutralized,” Zelenskyy said, speaking at the Aspen Security Forum.
🐣 RT @MikeSington President John F. Kennedy’s grandson endorses President Biden, slams Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and his campaign.
💽 https://twitter.com/MikeSington/status/1682428447442993152?s=20/photo/1
// Jack Schlossberg, Caroline’s son
🐣 RT @ officejjsmart KYIV 🇺🇦 HAS BECOME MORE BEAUTIFUL!
The Soviet emblem has been removed from the Motherland Monument in Kyiv 🇺🇦; replaced with the 🇺🇦 trident.
Ukraine 🇺🇦 wants nothing to do with modern 🇷🇺-fascism or 🇷🇺-introduced communism.
Ukraine 🇺🇦 wants to be free.
Ukraine 🇺🇦 will be free!
🐣 RT @ukraine_map According to US 🇺🇸 National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan, both President Biden and Zelensky are discussing the transfer of Long Range ATACMS Missiles to Ukraine 🇺🇦
WaPo: Russia arrests Igor Girkin, ex-security officer who led operations in Ukraine https://tinyurl.com/anjs97sy “Girkin … directly accused Putin of indecisiveness, and he criticized the president’s increasing absence from the public eye and the country’s poor performance on the battlefield”
Russian authorities on Friday detained Igor Girkin, a former Russian commander in Ukraine and prominent war blogger, reportedly on charges of promoting extremism — marking the first time Moscow has taken action against a fervent supporter of the war in Ukraine but one who voiced loud criticism of Russian leaders and their often botched military strategy.
Criticizing the war and the military is illegal in Russia, and authorities have cracked down mercilessly on those expressing antiwar views, including schoolchildren. But Russian law enforcement has ignored fierce, often fiery, criticism from pro-war hawks who have lambasted battlefield decisions, decried repeated military setbacks and demanded harsher attacks on Ukraine.
Girkin, who is also known by his nom de guerre Igor Strelkov, is an ex-officer of the Federal Security Service, or FSB. He played a role in Russia’s invasion and annexation of Crimea in 2014 and then served as a commander in Russian-controlled areas of Donbas in eastern Ukraine, where he helped foment a separatist war and was accused of extrajudicial killings.
In November, Girkin and two co-defendants were convicted by a court in the Netherlands of murder in the downing of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 over eastern Ukraine in 2014, an attack that killed all 298 passengers and crew members aboard. Russia had shielded Girkin from extradition in that case.
Now, however, Girkin is being accused of “public calls for extremist activities” online, Russian state news agencies reported. On Friday evening, he appeared in a Moscow court at a pretrial hearing where investigators asked that he be jailed for two months.
Girkin’s wife, Miroslava Reginskaya, first reported the news of her husband’s detention on his Telegram blog, which has nearly a million subscribers, saying that officers entered their apartment on Friday morning and “took him away to an unknown location.”
Girkin’s supporters, in a statement on his blog, linked the detention to his criticism of how Russia runs its war in Ukraine and to his demands for accountability after the short-lived mutiny staged by the Wagner mercenary boss Yevgeniy Prigozhin in late June.
“Recently, after the events of June 24 of this year, Igor consistently sought condemnation at the state level of the actions of an illegal armed group — PMC ‘Wagner’ and the activities of its leader Prigozhin, and received open threats for this,” the statement said. “We believe that today’s detention undermines the confidence of the country’s population in law enforcement agencies and view it as a continuation of the dishonest fight against Igor that has extremely negative consequences for the stability of the country amid the special military operation,” the statement added, using the Kremlin’s euphemism for the war.
Prigozhin’s rebellion, in which several Russian military aircraft were shot down and a convoy of Wagner fighters with heavy weaponry made a brief “march on Moscow” until Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko helped broker a deal to call it off, has rattled Russia’s “patriotic” camp — a group of outspoken commentators, bloggers and former military officers that the Kremlin had permitted to criticize the military, apparently because of the group’s relentless support for the war overall.
Many in that group have called on Putin to punish Prigozhin for destabilizing society, and they were outraged when the Russian leader allowed Prigozhin and Wagner to go free. Others have suggested that Prigozhin was justified in his criticism of the country’s top military brass and their attempts to absorb the mercenary group, which has been lauded as one of Russia’s more efficient units, while the regular army is often viewed as dysfunctional.
In addition to permitting their criticism, Putin even granted some top pro-war commentators several personal meetings to hear their grievances. But the case against Girkin signals that the Kremlin’s tolerance may have worn out.
Girkin, on his blog, had called Prigozhin a traitor and ridiculed Putin’s decision to meet with him and other Wagner commanders just days after the mutiny, suggesting it was a sign of weakness on the president’s part.
“Those who remained under the command of the bastard and traitor Prigozhin now, after the rebellion and the murder of the Russian military … are traitors because they have shown their willingness to kill anyone, anywhere, on the orders of those who pay them money,” Girkin wrote in early July.
Girkin also directly accused Putin of indecisiveness, and he criticized the president’s increasing absence from the public eye and the country’s poor performance on the battlefield.
“Wretched whining, complaints about partners … for a very, very long time, the president’s rhetoric does not even remotely resemble the traditional ‘male standard’ … just a lot of chatter, little action and total lack of any will to take responsibly for failures,” Girkin wrote on July 18. “This is the style of ‘late Putin,’ since around 2014 along with baseless boastful lies.”
Just a half an hour later, Girkin followed with another post suggesting that Putin step down, something that has landed Russian opposition figures in prison and could be viewed under Russian law as “calls for extremism.”
“The country will not survive another six years with this cowardly mediocrity in power,” Girkin wrote. “And the only useful thing he could do ‘before the end’ is to ensure the transfer of power to someone truly capable and responsible.” …
🐣 RT @Gerashchenko_en Russian propagandist Skabeyeva has a discussion with another propagandist:
“We are ready to wage war with Turkey. Erdogan claims the Black Sea.”
“Olya, we won’t go to war with Turkey.”
“What about Bulgaria, Romania? We’ll just hit them, maybe?”
“Olya, we have to finish in Ukraine first, let’s not be thoughtless and overconfident.”
Propagandist Skabeyeva is very eager to start a war with one of the NATO countries.
💽 [tr] https://twitter.com/Gerashchenko_en/status/1682395286323228672?s=20/photo/1
🧵 RT @kurteichenwald Wow. This is the biggest pile of nonsense I have ever read. A few problems: 1. Viktor Shokin never conducted a criminal investigation of Burisma. There was a criminal investigation in *Britain* of Mykola Zlochevsky, founder of Burisma, for purportedly laundering money stolen…/1
📌 https://twitter.com/kurteichenwald/status/1682128981103894530?s=20
[ThreadReader:] https://tinyurl.com/4b765ez4
⋙⋙ 🐣 RT @GOPoversight 🚨BREAKING🚨 ¤ The FD-1023 form alleging then-Vice President JOE BIDEN was involved in a $5,000,000 bribery scheme with a Burisma executive has been released by @ChuckGrassley. ¤ Read 👇
[TextLink:] https://twitter.com/GOPoversight/status/1682067528242151427?s=20/photo/1 -4
🐣 RT @wartranslated [Girkin/Strelkov in a glass cage]
💽 https://twitter.com/wartranslated/status/1682394039868440576?s=20/photo/1
⋙ 🐣 RT @CingHsian So they arrested him for “discrediting” the Russian military?
⋙⋙ 🐣 RT @normalnie90950 Nope. Oficially, for extremism
↥ ↧
TASS: Former head of DPR militia Igor Strelkov [Girkin] detained in Moscow — wife https://tass.com/society/1650027 “My husband has been charged under Article 282 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation (extremism),” his wife, Miroslava Reginskaya, said
// Currently, Igor Strelkov is under investigation
Former head of the militia of the People Republic of Donetsk (DPR), Igor Strelkov (Girkin), has been detained in Moscow, his wife Miroslava Reginskaya told TASS on Friday. ¤ “My husband has been charged under Article 282 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation (extremism),” she said.
TASS received confirmation from law enforcement agencies about the arrest of Strelkov. ¤ “On Friday morning, Igor Strelkov (Girkin) was detained in Moscow. Currently, he is under investigation,” a representative in the law enforcement agencies said.
In 2014, Igor Girkin led the militia of the DPR, served as Minister of Defense of the republic. He also served as head of the Novorossiya public movement.
🐣 RT @AntiToxicPeople Deranged lunatic trying to order Fox News to become like North Korean State TV. Very sane stuff.
[TextLink:] https://twitter.com/AntiToxicPeople/status/1682398389026295808?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @realDonald Trump Fox is gone, just like in 2016, and the only way they come back is if they go “ALL TRUMP ALL THE TIME.” Our people have had it! MAGA and America First are stronger than ever before, but we want and deserve support like the Radical Left Democrat Fascists get from so many sources, including the Fake News Media and Law Enforcement. Bring back Fox, before it’s too late!
🐣 RT @TheRickWilson Hello, darkness.
⋙ 🐣 RT @DecodingFoxNews This is for the fans.🤣 I did a zoom close up from the incredibly awkward moment on Fox & Friends where Steve Doocy explained the charges Trump might face in his next indictment. His co-stars appeared mortified.
🐣 RT @MonicaSmalls2 Aileen Cannon has set a trial date for May, 2024 re: the federal documents case. ¤ Fulton county, you’re up!
TheGuardian: Fulton county prosecutors prepare racketeering charges in Trump inquiry https://tinyurl.com/42w6whwm
// Exclusive: racketeering charges based on influencing witnesses and computer trespass, sources say
The racketeering statute in Georgia requires prosecutors to show the existence of an “enterprise” – and a pattern of racketeering activity that is predicated on at least two “qualifying” crimes. … In the Trump investigation, the Fulton county district attorney, Fani Willis, has evidence to pursue a racketeering indictment predicated on statutes related to influencing witnesses and computer trespass, the people said. …
The specific evidence was not clear, though the charge regarding influencing witnesses could include Trump’s conversations with Georgia’s secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, in which he asked Raffensperger to “find” 11,780 votes, the people said – and thereby implicate Trump. …
The breach of voting machines involved a group of Trump operatives – paid by the then Trump lawyer Sidney Powell – accessing the voting machines at the county’s election office and copying sensitive voting system data. ¤ The copied data from the Dominion Voting Systems machines, which are used statewide in Georgia, was then uploaded to a password-protected site from where election deniers could download the materials as part of a misguided effort to prove the 2020 election had been rigged. …
🐣 RT @RpsAgainstTrump The Fulton County DA Fani Willis has enough evidence to indict Donald Trump for racketeering charges next month, The Guardian reports. ¤ Happy Friday, everyone!
WaPo: Former Trump State Dept. appointee guilty in Jan. 6 tunnel assaults https://tinyurl.com/mve4k4c8 “D.C. police officer Daniel Hodges … was recorded on camera being pinned to a metal door frame by the mob with Klein’s help”
// Former Trump appointee Federico Klein found guilty in Jan. 6 tunnel assaults on police
⭕ 20 Jul 2023
🐣 RT @RonFilipkowski Trump Truth Social post [RT]: “If you f*ck around with us, if you do something bad to us, we are going to do things to you that have never been done before.”
💽 https://twitter.com/RonFilipkowski/status/1681984045326950401?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @ProjectLincoln No Labels doesn’t want all of America to know where their funding comes from. But we know. [Hint: the “dark money” funding is from GOP donors]
💽 https://twitter.com/ProjectLincoln/status/1682231425888665604?s=20/photo/1
NYT: As Russia Steps Up Attacks on Grain Ports, U.S. Warns of Possible Ruse https://tinyurl.com/36axzf95 “The basic calculation for Russia [is] to damage Ukraine’s economy and free itself from Western sanctions without widening a war in which it is already stumbling”
// A White House official said Moscow might stage an attack on a commercial ship and blame Ukraine.
Russia on Thursday stepped up its aerial assaults on Ukrainian ports critical to the world’s food supply, as the White House warned that the Kremlin has mined sea routes and might be setting the stage for attacks on commercial transport ships.
Moscow has already put shipping companies on notice that they now cross the Russian blockade in the Black Sea at their own peril, and could be treated as military targets. The warning came days after Russia pulled out of a multinational deal that had allowed desperately needed Ukrainian grain to make it to the world market.
In a further sign of rising tensions, Ukraine on Thursday issued its own warning: Ships heading to Russian ports or to ports in occupied Ukraine, the Ministry of Defense said, will now be considered to be carrying “military cargo, with all the corresponding risks.” …
The basic calculation for Russia, he said, has not changed: to damage Ukraine’s economy and free itself from Western sanctions without widening a war in which it is already stumbling.
NYT: C.I.A. Director Says Kremlin ‘Appeared to Be Adrift’ During Aborted Mutiny https://tinyurl.com/5n85efm2 “For a lot of Russians watching this, used to this image of Putin as the arbiter of order, the question was ‘Does the emperor have no clothes?’” Mr. Burns said
Speaking at the Aspen Security Forum, an annual national security conference, William J. Burns, the C.I.A. director, said that for much of the 36 hours of the rebellion last month, Russian security services, the military and decision makers “appeared to be adrift.”
“For a lot of Russians watching this, used to this image of Putin as the arbiter of order, the question was ‘Does the emperor have no clothes?’” Mr. Burns said, adding, “Or at least ‘Why is it taking so long for him to get dressed?’”
Mr. Burns’s remarks on the Kremlin’s paralysis during the uprising carried out by Yevgeny V. Prigozhin and his mercenary group built on comments a day earlier from his British counterpart, Richard Moore, the chief of MI6, who said the rebellion showed cracks in Mr. Putin’s rule. …
Mr. Prigozhin has also been bitterly critical of the Kremlin’s argument for the war against Ukraine. Mr. Burns said the Telegram channel where Mr. Prigozhin posted a video challenging Russia’s main argument for invading Ukraine was watched by a third of the Russian population.
“That video was the most scathing indictment of Putin’s rationale for war, of the conduct of the war, of the corruption at the core of Putin’s regime that I have heard from a Russian or a non-Russian,” Mr. Burns said. …
He said he would be surprised if Mr. Prigozhin ultimately “escapes further retribution.” ¤ “What we are seeing is a very complicated dance between Prigozhin and Putin,” Mr. Burns said. “I think Putin is someone who generally thinks revenge is a dish best served cold, so he is going to try to settle the situation to the extent he can.”
Mr. Burns, a former U.S. ambassador to Russia who served in Moscow as the Russian president consolidated power nearly two decades ago, added that the Russian leader is “the ultimate apostle of payback.”
And, Mr. Burns suggested, it would not just be Mr. Prigozhin who faces repercussions. ¤ U.S. officials have said privately that a senior Russian general, Sergei V. Surovikin, had advance knowledge of Mr. Prigozhin’s plans and may have supported the rebellion. ¤ Asked if General Surovikin was free or detained, Mr. Burns said, “I don’t think he enjoys a lot of freedom right now.”
🧵 RT @atrupar My video thread on Jim Jordan’s “weaponization” hearing featuring RFK Jr begins here
📌 💽 https://twitter.com/atrupar/status/1682014063302148099?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @ DevanaUkraine The Russian occupiers want to put power unit No. 4 of the ZNPP into a “hot stop” mode, – “Energoatom”. ¤ Ukrainian personnel refuse to comply with the “instruction” because it poses a threat to nuclear and radiation safety
🐣 RT @Faytuks BREAKING: Ukraine’s Defence Ministry says that it may consider all ships travelling to Russian and Ukrainian ports occupied by Russia as potential carriers of military cargoes from midnight on July 21 “with all the associated risks” https://t.me/ministry_of_defense_ua/7783
[TextLink:] https://twitter.com/Faytuks/status/1682003751454875648?s=20/photo/1
[Text:] Statement of the Ministry of Defense of Ukraine
[T]he Russian Federation has once again brutally violated the universal right to free navigation for the whole world and is deliberately undermining food security, condemning millions of people to starvation.
By openly threatening civilian ships transporting food from Ukrainian ports, launching missile attacks and drone attacks on civilian infrastructure in peaceful cities, deliberately creating a military threat on trade routes, the Kremlin has turned the Black Sea into a danger zone, primarily for Russian ships and vessels heading in the waters of the Black Sea in the direction of seaports of the Russian Federation and Ukrainian seaports located on the territory of Ukraine temporarily occupied by Russia. The responsibility for all risks lies entirely with the Russian leadership.
The fate of the cruiser “Moscow” proves that the Defense Forces of Ukraine have the necessary means to repel Russian aggression at sea.
The Ministry of Defense of Ukraine warns that from 00:00 on July 21, 2023, all vessels heading in the waters of the Black Sea in the direction of seaports of the Russian Federation and Ukrainian seaports located on the territory of Ukraine temporarily occupied by Russia may be considered by Ukraine as such. carrying military cargo with all the associated risks.
⭕ 19 Jul 2023
🐣 RT @levparnas [Jul 19] Here is my letter I sent to @RepJamesComer and the @GOPoversight, @OversightDems [link]
¤ https://twitter.com/levparnas/status/1681792307748642816?s=20
KyivPost: Donald Trump’s Latest Rant About Ukraine Makes Multiple Dubious Claims https://www.kyivpost.com/post/19622 “I will ask Europe to reimburse us for the cost of rebuilding the stockpiles sent to Ukraine,” Trump said
// While Trump doesn’t have a single negative word for President Putin, he has plenty for “weak and disrespected” President Biden and Ukraine’s European allies.
Donald Trump has claimed “peace was breaking out all over the world” when he left office in 2020 and that President Biden – rather than President Putin – is “dragging us into World War 3.” ¤ The Republican hopeful for re-election next year, also said if elected he would insist European countries reimburse the US for the costs of the weapons supplied to Ukraine since the start of Russia’s full-scale invasion last year.
In a campaign video released on Tuesday, July 18, he said: “Less than three years ago, I’d fully rebuilt the United States military and steered America into such a strong global position that peace was breaking out all over the world. ¤ “We had peace through strength. ¤ “Twenty-nine months later, the arsenals are empty, the stockpiles are bare, the Treasury is drained, the ranks are being hollowed out, our country has been totally humiliated, and we have a corrupt, compromised president, crooked Joe Biden, who is dragging us into World War III.”
The four-and-a-half-minute speech makes no mention of Putin and refers to Russia only once, when Trump says the “last thing we should be doing is risking a war with nuclear-armed Russia.” ¤ Trump fails to condemn Russia’s full-scale invasion or blame it for the current situation the US and Ukraine’s Western allies find themselves in and goes on to bemoan the vast amount of weaponry being sent to Kyiv, particularly the vast stockpiles of artillery shells.
“Biden accidentally admitted that we are sending cluster bombs to Ukraine because the United States is running out of ammunition,” Trump said. ¤ “I don’t know how that works, but that’s what he said.”
While Trump did spend hundreds of billions of dollars on the US military, he neglects to mention the fact his administration completely failed to predict or prepare for Europe’s largest land war since World War II by, for example, increasing the production of conventional munitions.
Trump also claimed if re-elected, he would “return to a foreign policy that puts America’s interests first,” adding: “America’s chief interest in Eastern Europe is peace and stability. We want people to stop dying. ¤ “This war should never have happened, but it is long past time to end the senseless death and destruction. ¤ “The numbers are much worse than you’re reading about or hearing about. Many more people are dying than you have any idea about.”
Trump has been widely mocked for his plan to stop Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, which he has repeatedly said he could achieve “in 24 hours.” …
“In addition, I will ask Europe to reimburse us for the cost of rebuilding the stockpiles sent to Ukraine, which they should be doing now, but Joe Biden is too weak and too disrespected to even ask,” Trump said. …
🐣 RT @LePapillonBlu2 This right here looks like obstruction of Justice to me, what say you?
[TextLink:] https://twitter.com/LePapillonBlu2/status/1681686649355358215?s=20/photo/1
[Text:] 🐣 RT @realDonaldTrump The Republican Party must get tough, now. This is the strong sentiment that’s flowing through the veins of Patriots. DO SOMETHING!!!
NYT: Potential Trump Charges Include Civil Rights Law Used in Voting Fraud Cases https://tinyurl.com/72w92ab6 ‘Modern usage of the law raises the possibility that Trump, who declared the election to have been rigged, could be prosecuted for trying to rig the election himself’
// A target letter sent by the special counsel investigating Donald Trump’s efforts to reverse his election loss cited three statutes that could be the basis for a prosecution.
🐣 RT @AndrewDesiderio Senate votes 65-28 to approve Kaine/Rubio amendment that would prevent a president from pulling U.S. out of NATO without congressional review.
WaPo: Judge clarifies: Yes, Trump was found to have raped E. Jean Carroll https://tinyurl.com/bdhb9vwc
🐣 RT @sentdefender The Russian Ministry of Defense has announced that any Ship which enters the Black Sea that appears to be heading towards a Ukrainian Port beginning tonight at Midnight and moving forwards from July 20th will be considered a “Hostile Military Transport” carrying Weapons.
🐣 RT @ officejjsmart PRIGOZHIN IS ALIVE – AND HE’S ANGRY
⚡️⚡️⚡️The first post-rebellion video of Evgenii Prigozhin – the founder of 🇷🇺 Wagner Group – speaking with his soldiers in Belarus 🇧🇾, has appeared.
💽 [Vid Ru]https://twitter.com/officejjsmart/status/1681680217931145216?s=20/photo/1
Key points:
📌 “What is happening now at the front is a disgrace in which we do not need to participate.”
📌 “We are going to start a new journey – to Africa”;
📌 “Maybe we will return to the war in Ukraine 🇺🇦 – at the moment when we are sure that we will not be forced to disgrace ourselves”;
📌 “We will stay in Belarus 🇧🇾 for some time and, I am sure, we will make the Belarusian army the second army in the world.”
🐣 RT @wartranslated Russia opened a criminal case against Colonel of GRU Vladimir Kvachkov, a close Girkin’s ally and a member of the “Angry Patriots Club”, accusing him of discrediting the Russian Armed Forces.
⭕ 18 Jul 2023
NYT, Norm Eisen and Ryan Goodman: Trump’s Conspirators Are Facing the Music, Finally https://tinyurl.com/3mwn25d4 “Until now there have been no charges centered on the fake electors plot. For that reason alone, Michigan’s action brings a sense of needed accountability”
We’ve reached a turning point in the effort to ensure there are consequences for those who deliberately attempt to undermine our democracy: Michigan’s attorney general, Dana Nessel, charged 16 Republican leaders in her state on Tuesday for their role as fake electors working to overturn the results of the 2020 election. The charges, coming on the heels of news that the special counsel Jack Smith has informed Donald Trump that he’s a target of the Department of Justice’s investigation into the Capitol riot, mean we are witnessing a new and necessary phase in this quest for accountability, one in which the federal and state wheels of justice work to hold people accountable not only for the violence on Jan. 6, but also for what got us there: the alleged scheme to interfere with the transfer of power. …
The offenses include conspiracy to commit forgery, since the defendants are accused of signing documents stating they were the qualified electors (they were not), and publishing forged documents by circulating these materials to federal and state authorities. On paper, the penalties for the offenses range from five to 14 years, but sentencing in this case would presumably be lower than that maximum.
Until now there have been no charges centered on the fake electors plot. For that reason alone, Michigan’s action brings a sense of needed accountability for those who fanned the rioters’ passions leading up to Jan. 6 by spinning a false narrative about a stolen election.
Michigan saw some of the most outrageous fake electoral certificates to emerge during the period leading up to the Capitol riot. Unlike the fake certificates in Pennsylvania and New Mexico, the Michigan documents did not include a disclaimer that they were to be used only in the case of litigation. What’s more, the documents contained more outright false statements than simply declaring that the signers were the lawful electors of the winning candidate. …
The case of the fake electors is far more egregious than most of those other cases: The defendants here were politically engaged individuals who should have been aware of the election results, as well as the flat rejection by the courts and Michigan Legislature of the Trump campaign’s claims of voter fraud. …
🐣 RT @SimonWDC As the Jan 6 prosecutions nationally and in the states intensify, just consider how damaged the GOP brand already is. Here’s @Civiqs:
GOP 29 fav/62 unfav (-33)
DeSantis 34/56 (-22)
Dems 38/55 (-17)
GOP brand already deeply toxic. It’s about to get much worse.
◕ https://twitter.com/SimonWDC/status/1681421173958082561?s=20/photo/1
🔄 🐣 RT @fasc1nate What’s your all time favorite quote?
¤ https://twitter.com/fasc1nate/status/1681467058016649217?s=20
⋙ 🐣 “Civilization is hideously fragile…there’s not much between us & the Horrors underneath, just about a coat of varnish” – CP Snow
🐣 RT @JoeBiden I approve this message.
💽 https://twitter.com/JoeBiden/status/1681424737384435713?s=20/photo/1
// MTG thinks she’s criticizing Biden by comparing him to FDR and LBJ
🐣 RT @washingtonpost Breaking news: Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel announced felony charges Tuesday against the 16 Michigan Republicans who falsely claimed to be the state’s 2020 presidential electors for forgery and other crimes. https://wapo.st/3K5Wf93
🐣 RT @RpsAgainstTrump We never had a corrupt former president like you, that’s true.
[TextLink:] https://twitter.com/RpsAgainstTrump/status/1681439165811163147?s=20/photo/1
[Text:] 🐣 RT @realDonaldTrump • WITCH HUNT!!! CROOKED JOE BIDEN & HIS INJUSTICE DEPARTMENT WANT TO INDICT & ARREST HIS PRESUMED POLITICAL OPPONENT (ME!), WHO IS LEADING HIM IN THE POLLS IN THE UPCOMING PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION OF 2024. SUCH A THING HAS NEVER HAPPENED IN OUR COUNTRY BEFORE…..AND IN THE MIDDLE OF THE CAMPAIGN??? ELECTION INTERFERENCE & PROSECUTORIAL MISCONDUCT!!!
🐣 RT @kylegriffin1 Each defendant has been charged with:
• One count of Conspiracy to Commit Forgery, a 14-year felony
• Two counts of Forgery, a 14-year felony
• One count of Conspiracy to Commit Uttering and Publishing, a 14-year felon
• One count of Uttering and Publishing, a 14-year felony
• One count of Conspiracy to Commit Election Law Forgery, a 5-year felony
• Two counts of Election Law Forgery, a 5-year felony
⋙ 🐣 RT @kylegriffin1 BREAKING: Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel has just announced felony charges against 16 Michigan residents “for their role in the alleged false electors scheme following the 2020 U.S. presidential election.”
🐣 RT @MuellerSheWrote BREAKING: per Rolling Stone: The statutes listed in his 1/6 target letter include conspiracy to defraud the US (18 U.S.C. § 371), Witness tampering (likely 1513(c)(2) obstructing an official proceeding), and 18 U.S.C. § 242 (deprivation of rights).
⋙ Rollingstone: Special Counsel’s Jan. 6 Target Letter to Trump Mentions Conspiracy, Tampering https://tinyurl.com/29a5tz9y
// The letter does not mention statutes relating to insurrection or sedition, a source tells Rolling Stone
🐣 RT @ByNickEWoot GA Supreme Court Ruling Trump v Willis Here is the full filing for those interested: https://tinyurl.com/hpxmyp9m #gapol
🐣 RT @7Veritas4 Yadi yada I’m screwed blah blah someone help me waaaah waaaah I hate Jack Smith.
[TextLink:] https://twitter.com/7Veritas4/status/1681315116028162050?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @[realDonaldTrump] Under the United States Constitution, I have the right to protest an Election that 1am fully convinced was Rigged and Stolen, just as the Democrats have done against me in 2016, and many others have done over the ages. But the Democrats have gone much further than has ever happened before – they cheated on the elections. Rather than looking at the CHEATERS, the WEAPONIZED DOJ AND FBI target and harass those who complain about the cheaters, and the massive fraud that took place. The prosecutor involved in this case, and likewise the Boxes Hoax, the Manhattan and Atlanta District Attorneys, the New York A.G., etc., has been overturned unanimously in the Supreme Court, headed and caused the Lois Lerner IRS scandal, and failed miserably in his prosecution of John Edwards, where the case was forced to be dropped, along with numerous other catastrophes. He has had a vicious but disastrous career, and is a known biased and obsessed Trump Hater (as is his family). Whether it’s their failure to mention the Presidential Records Act (Prosecutorial Misconduct), their dominance of the Manhattan D.A., including the fact that a Hillary Clinton lawyer, Mark Pomerantz, left a top Democrat law firm (run by Chuck Schumer’s brother) to join the D.A.’s Office and become a prosecutor against me, and then quit, against all rules, regulations, and laws when the Office would not prosecute (he wrongfully wrote a book while working at the Office and is now under scrutiny!), or a perfect phone call made to many lawyers and a Secretary of State, without any protestation of my call, because nothing that was said was wrong, (it was clearly a complaint about an election), these are all Hoaxes and Scams made up to stop me from fighting for the American People – BUT I WILL NEVER STOP!
This has been a neverending fight from the day I came down the escalator in Trump Tower, many years ago. So interesting that in this case the information was delivered to me on a Sunday night, less than 24 hours after I suggested during a major speech that the Federal Government ASSUME CONTROL of a filthy, unsanitary, neglected, and crime-ridden Washington, D.C., where murder and violent crime are rampant and people no longer want to go to our Nation’s Capital… and yet, that is where Biden’s DO actually wants my trial to take place, all because they think, especially after my strong words of a Federal takeover at the speech, a D.C. jury will do whatever they want. VERY UNFAIR!
🐣 RT @scienceisstrat1 The US 🇺🇸 economy and the EU 🇪🇺 were roughly the same size in 2008. ¤ The US is now nearly twice as big 📊
◕ https://twitter.com/scienceisstrat1/status/1680959906969444352?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @ @petestrzok Looks like someone received another target letter [Posted on TruthSocial:]
[TextLink:] https://twitter.com/petestrzok/status/1681295768773181440?s=20/photo/1
‼️ 🐣 RT @realDonaldTrump Statement by Donald J. Trump
45th President of the United States
WOW! On Sunday night, while I was with my family, having just arrived from the Turning Point event in Florida, where I won the Straw Poll against all other Republican candidates with 85.7%, with all polls showing me leading in the Republican Primary by very substantial numbers, almost everyone predicting that I will be the Republican Nominee for President, and as I am leading Democrat Joe Biden in the polls by a lot, HORRIFYING NEWS for our Country was given to me by nmy attorneys.
Deranged Jack Smith, the prosecutor with Joe Biden’s DOl, sent a letter (again, it was Sunday night) stating that I am a TARGET of the January 6th Grand Jury investigation, and giving me a very short 4 days to report to the Grand Jury, which almost always means an Arrest and Indictment.
So now, Joe Biden’s Attorney General, Merrick Garland, who I turned down for the United States Supreme Court in retrospect, based on his corrupt and unethical actions, a very wise decision!), together with Joe Biden’s Department of Injustice, have effectively issued a third Indictment and Arrest of Joe Biden’s NUMBER ONE POLITICAL OPPONENT, who is largely dominating him in the race for the Presidency. Nothing like this has ever happened in our Country before, or even close. They illegally spied on my Campaign, attacked me with a totally Fake “Dossier” that was funded by Hillary Clinton’s Campaign and the DNC, Impeached me twice (I wonl), they failed on the Mueller Witch Hunt (No Collusion!), they failed on the Russia, Russia, Russia Hoax, the 51 “Intelligence” Agents fraud, the FBI/Twitter files, the DOJ/Facebook censorship, and every other scam imaginable. But on top of all of that, they have now effectively indicted me three times (the DOJ staffed and runs the D.A’s Office in Manhattan), with a probable fourth coming from Atlanta, where the DOJ are in strict, and possibly illegal, coordination with the District Attorney, whose record on murder and other violent crime is abysmal. THIS WITCH HUNT IS ALL ABOUT ELECTION INTERFERENCE AND A COMPLETE AND TOTAL POLITICAL WEAPONIZATION OF LAW ENFORCEMENT It is a very sad and dark period for our Nation!
⭕ 17 Jul 2023
🐣 RT @ [Georgia Supreme Count denial of Trump ] Here is the full filing for those interested:
#gapol
🐣 RT @ ProjectLincoln “The problem with the Ron DeSantis campaign is Ron DeSantis.” @StuartPStevens explains that no matter how much his donors and enthusiasts will it, he is fundamentally unlikeable and aimless. His candidacy is a joke and the American people know it.
💽 https://twitter.com/ProjectLincoln/status/1681108156460482563?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @TristanSnell Fani Willis isn’t just going to indict Donald Trump.
She’s going to indict Rudy Giuliani.
She’s going to indict John Eastman.
She’s going to indict Sidney Powell.
She’s going to indict Lindsey Graham.
This is going to be a legal and political earthquake.
🐣 RT @DeadlineWH “The tendency is, we look at the last Trump administration and say well democracy survived. But, what I think a lot of people forget is, democracy was on the emergency room table with no heartbeat, bleeding out from multiple wounds” – @petestrzok w/ @NicolleDWallace
💽 https://twitter.com/DeadlineWH/status/1681063799380496386?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @sentdefender The President of Ukraine, Volodymyr Zelensky stated today that the Black Sea Grain Deal can continue without the Cooperation of Russia and that he is calling on the World, specifically Turkey, to Protect the Shipments from the “Madness of Russia.”
🐣 📋 RT @RBReich A history of the top marginal tax rates on the wealthiest Americans:
1940: 81%
1950: 84%
1960: 91%
1970: 72%
1980:70%
1990: 28%
2000: 40%
2010: 35%
For 50 years, corporate backed politicians in Congress have slashed taxes to line the pockets of their wealthy donors
🐣 📋 RT @EuromaidanPress Ukraine’s eastern front threatened by Russia’s massive buildup of troops, according to Ukraine’s Colonel Serhii Cherevatyi ¤ Russia amasses over 100K troops, around 900 tanks, 555 artillery systems & 370 MLRS in Lyman-Kupiansk sector, Cherevatyi said.
⋙ EuromaidanPress: Russia amasses over 100,000 troops for offensive on eastern front, Ukrainian military spox says https://tinyurl.com/37s3r7za
🐣 📋 RT @carlquintanilla Real wages since 2019:
* Germany: down 3%*
* Italy: down 3.5%
* Spain: down 3.5%
* Greece: down 6%
* U.S.: UP 6%
@WSJ
🐣 RT @ChuckPfarrer KERCH BRIDGE ATTACK: UKR’s attack likely utilized 2nd Generation variants of its Unmanned Surface Vessels (USV). Two naval drones conducted the strike. The first stealthy approached the bridge and detonated at 0300 local time. The second exploded at 0320 on 16 JUL both extensively damaged the road spans.
🌎 ◕ https://twitter.com/ChuckPfarrer/status/1680987879697154048?s=20/photo/1
⋙ 🖼 https://twitter.com/ChuckPfarrer/status/1681026752812920832?s=20/photo/1 -4
🐣 RT @washingtonpost Ukraine attacked the Crimean Bridge, a key link from Russia to the illegally annexed Crimean peninsula, killing two people and disrupting vehicle traffic early Monday, Russian and Ukrainian officials said.
⋙ WaPo: Ukraine hits Crimean Bridge, but railway undamaged; Russia halts grain deal https://tinyurl.com/cvnceruw
🐣 RT @Maks_NAFO_FELLA”The attack on the Crimean bridge was planned by the American and Anglo-Saxon special services”, – the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Russian Federation 🤡
🐣 RT @TheRickWilson I want you to read every word of this article. It puts the stakes of 2024 into stark relief.
🐣 RT @TheRickWilson I want you to read every word of this article. It puts the stakes of 2024 into stark relief.
💙 ⋙ NYT: Trump and Allies Forge Plans to Increase Presidential Power in 2025 https://tinyurl.com/r9k2k7bt
// The former president and his backers aim to strengthen the power of the White House and limit the independence of federal agencies.
⋙ See under Entire Articles: Fascism USA 7-17-2023
Donald J. Trump and his allies are planning a sweeping expansion of presidential power over the machinery of government if voters return him to the White House in 2025, reshaping the structure of the executive branch to concentrate far greater authority directly in his hands.
Their plans to centralize more power in the Oval Office stretch far beyond the former president’s recent remarks that he would order a criminal investigation into his political rival, President Biden, signaling his intent to end the post-Watergate norm of Justice Department independence from White House political control.
Mr. Trump and his associates have a broader goal: to alter the balance of power by increasing the president’s authority over every part of the federal government that now operates, by either law or tradition, with any measure of independence from political interference by the White House, according to a review of his campaign policy proposals and interviews with people close to him.
Mr. Trump intends to bring independent agencies — like the Federal Communications Commission, which makes and enforces rules for television and internet companies, and the Federal Trade Commission, which enforces various antitrust and other consumer protection rules against businesses — under direct presidential control.
He wants to revive the practice of “impounding” funds, refusing to spend money Congress has appropriated for programs a president doesn’t like — a tactic that lawmakers banned under President Richard Nixon.
He intends to strip employment protections from tens of thousands of career civil servants, making it easier to replace them if they are deemed obstacles to his agenda. And he plans to scour the intelligence agencies, the State Department and the defense bureaucracies to remove officials he has vilified as “the sick political class that hates our country.”
“The president’s plan should be to fundamentally reorient the federal government in a way that hasn’t been done since F.D.R.’s New Deal,” said John McEntee, a former White House personnel chief who began Mr. Trump’s systematic attempt to sweep out officials deemed to be disloyal in 2020 and who is now involved in mapping out the new approach.
“Our current executive branch,” Mr. McEntee added, “was conceived of by liberals for the purpose of promulgating liberal policies. There is no way to make the existing structure function in a conservative manner. It’s not enough to get the personnel right. What’s necessary is a complete system overhaul.”
Mr. Trump and his advisers are making no secret of their intentions — proclaiming them in rallies and on his campaign website, describing them in white papers and openly discussing them.
“What we’re trying to do is identify the pockets of independence and seize them,” said Russell T. Vought, who ran the Office of Management and Budget in the Trump White House and now runs a policy organization, the Center for Renewing America.
The strategy in talking openly about such “paradigm-shifting ideas” before the election, Mr. Vought said, is to “plant a flag” — both to shift the debate and to later be able to claim a mandate. He said he was delighted to see few of Mr. Trump’s Republican primary rivals defend the norm of Justice Department independence after the former president openly attacked it.
Steven Cheung, a spokesman for Mr. Trump’s campaign, said in a statement that the former president has “laid out a bold and transparent agenda for his second term, something no other candidate has done.” He added, “Voters will know exactly how President Trump will supercharge the economy, bring down inflation, secure the border, protect communities and eradicate the deep state that works against Americans once and for all.”
The two driving forces of this effort to reshape the executive branch are Mr. Trump’s own campaign policy shop and a well-funded network of conservative groups, many of which are populated by former senior Trump administration officials who would most likely play key roles in any second term.
Mr. Vought and Mr. McEntee are involved in Project 2025, a $22 million presidential transition operation that is preparing policies, personnel lists and transition plans to recommend to any Republican who may win the 2024 election. The transition project, the scale of which is unprecedented in conservative politics, is led by the Heritage Foundation, a think tank that has shaped the personnel and policies of Republican administrations since the Reagan presidency.
That work at Heritage dovetails with plans on the Trump campaign website to expand presidential power that were drafted primarily by two of Mr. Trump’s advisers, Vincent Haley and Ross Worthington, with input from other advisers, including Stephen Miller, the architect of the former president’s hard-line immigration agenda.
Some elements of the plans had been floated when Mr. Trump was in office but were impeded by internal concerns that they would be unworkable and could lead to setbacks. And for some veterans of Mr. Trump’s turbulent White House who came to question his fitness for leadership, the prospect of removing guardrails and centralizing even greater power over government directly in his hands sounded like a recipe for mayhem.
“It would be chaotic,” said John F. Kelly, Mr. Trump’s second White House chief of staff. “It just simply would be chaotic, because he’d continually be trying to exceed his authority but the sycophants would go along with it. It would be a nonstop gunfight with the Congress and the courts.”
The agenda being pursued has deep roots in the decades-long effort by conservative legal thinkers to undercut what has become known as the administrative state — agencies that enact regulations aimed at keeping the air and water clean and food, drugs and consumer products safe, but that cut into business profits.
Its legal underpinning is a maximalist version of the so-called unitary executive theory. ¤ The legal theory rejects the idea that the government is composed of three separate branches with overlapping powers to check and balance each other. Instead, the theory’s adherents argue that Article 2 of the Constitution gives the president complete control of the executive branch, so Congress cannot empower agency heads to make decisions or restrict the president’s ability to fire them. Reagan administration lawyers developed the theory as they sought to advance a deregulatory agenda.
“The notion of independent federal agencies or federal employees who don’t answer to the president violates the very foundation of our democratic republic,” said Kevin D. Roberts, the president of the Heritage Foundation, adding that the contributors to Project 2025 are committed to “dismantling this rogue administrative state.”
Personal power has always been a driving force for Mr. Trump. He often gestures toward it in a more simplistic manner, such as in 2019, when he declared to a cheering crowd, “I have an Article 2, where I have the right to do whatever I want as president.”
Mr. Trump made the remark in reference to his claimed ability to directly fire Robert S. Mueller III, the special counsel in the Russia inquiry, which primed his hostility toward law enforcement and intelligence agencies. He also tried to get a subordinate to have Mr. Mueller ousted, but was defied.
Early in Mr. Trump’s presidency, his chief strategist, Stephen K. Bannon, promised a “deconstruction of the administrative state.” But Mr. Trump installed people in other key roles who ended up telling him that more radical ideas were unworkable or illegal. In the final year of his presidency, he told aides he was fed up with being constrained by subordinates.
Now, Mr. Trump is laying out a far more expansive vision of power in any second term. And, in contrast with his disorganized transition after his surprise 2016 victory, he now benefits from a well-funded policymaking infrastructure, led by former officials who did not break with him after his attempts to overturn the 2020 election and the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol. …
🐣 That’s rich. What is Russia’s war on Ukraine, if not an endless series of terrorist attacks, many aimed at civilians and civilian infrastructure. The Kerch Bridge is a legitimate military target as defined by the United Nations. ¤ #RussiaisATerroistState”
🐣 RT @Gerashchenko_en Russian “military correspondent” writes on his Telegram channel: ¤ “Another successful attack by the Ukrainian armed forces on the Crimean bridge was inevitable due to two factors.
¤ https://twitter.com/Gerashchenko_en/status/1680871235746426880?s=20
The first is political, related to the policy of “deal-making” with Ukraine and its allies, which the Kremlin and President Putin personally are actively trying to pursue. “Grain deal” allowed Ukraine to launch semi-submersible kamikaze drones from the sea coast near Odesa, as well as from sea cargo ships supporting this deal from the waters of the Black Sea. This is also facilitated by the de facto ban on strikes on Ukrainian transportation communications, as well as on production facilities involved in the production of Ukrainian Mikola-3 marine drones, as well as on energy facilities that provide these enterprises with energy.
The second factor is military-technical. The Russian army has no weapons systems capable of successfully combating semi-submersible kamikaze drones. In the course of the largest deindustrialization in world history over the past 30 years, hundreds of defense enterprises and research institutes were deliberately destroyed. As a result, thousands of technologies have been lost and in this respect our lagging behind the advanced countries is already dozens of years.
To successfully combat semi-submersible kamikaze drones, it is necessary to detect them in time by means of space and aviation technical reconnaissance. ¤ But our space grouping is extremely small and is unable to fulfill this task.
Our naval aviation is more dead than alive. In order to timely detect these drones and target them, it is necessary to ensure round-the-clock patrolling of the airspace over the Black Sea by anti-submarine patrol aircraft equipped with modern radar means of detecting surface and underwater objects. But, according to the open press, we have only 22 outdated anti-submarine aircraft IL-38 and about 20 Tu-142 in the Northern and Pacific fleets. All of them by their tactical and technical characteristics do not meet the requirements of today and are significantly inferior to modern American anti-submarine aircraft Boeing P-8 Poseidon, of which only the U.S. has 128 and dozens of their allies. In addition, it is unknown whether the outdated radar equipment of our IL-38 and Tu-142 will be able to effectively detect small semi-submersible kamikaze drones. The delivery of new anti-submarine aircraft to the Russian army is not even planned.
Another effective means of detecting semi-submersible kamikaze drones are long-range radar detection and control aircraft (AEW&C), which can easily detect surface sea targets. But we have huge problems with these as well. Our nine obsolete A-50 (A-50U) aircraft produced in the eighties are not able to meet all the needs of the Armed Forces because of their small number, and we have no production of new AEW&C.
And without long-range detection of semi-submersible kamikaze drones by technical means with subsequent targeting of strike aircraft, it is impossible to effectively combat them “on the far frontiers”.
Only passive means of struggle remain – blocking the Kerch Strait with booms, which proved their effectiveness back in the First World War to combat submarines. Judging by today’s attack, they are absent in the Kerch Strait. Why? Is there a large sea traffic from the Black Sea to the Sea of Azov and vice versa in the conditions of war in connection with the withdrawal of the Russian group on the coast of the Sea of Azov and its transformation into the internal sea of the Russian Federation? Is it not possible to temporarily stop this traffic completely and thereby secure the Crimean bridge at least from strikes by semi-submersible kamikaze drones.
I am sure that now there will be many among my readers who will start asking the question: “What does Putin have to do with this?”. ¤ I hope that the majority will not ask such a question.”
⭕ 16 Jul 2023
🐣 RT @tribelaw This extraordinary piece of work shows exactly how Trump can and probably will be charged for the attempted coup and the insurrection
❤️ ⋙ JustSecurity: Trump on Trial: A Model Prosecution Memo for Federal Election Interference Crimes https://tinyurl.com/596f7fua
// 7/13/2023; by Norman L. Eisen, Noah Bookbinder, Donald Ayer, Joshua Stanton, E. Danya Perry, Debra Perlin and Kayvan Farchadi
[Document:] Trump on Trial: A Model Prosecution Memo for Federal Election Interference Crimes (Second Edition) https://tinyurl.com/47bwz9cs
🐣 RT @WarintheFuture The Russians appear to have misplaced at least one span of their Kerch Strait Bridge to occupied Crimea.
⋙ 🐣 RT @georgewbarros The Kerch Strait Bridge is a logistically significant object. ¤ Russia will only have 1 ground supply line – the costal highway on the Sea of Azov – to sustain (or evacuate) its tens of thousands of troops in occupied Kherson & Crimea if UKR manages to degrade/destroy the bridge.
🌎 https://twitter.com/georgewbarros/status/1680770032119283712?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @officejjsmart “TAKE THE FERRY OR GO HOME!”
‼️ A traffic jam is gathering near the Crimean bridge and the cops suggests that people can “take the ferry or go home.” ¤ People in panic are trying to leave the peninsula, they are being turned back. Media reports that the ferry crossing is not working – there may still be a missile threat.
🐣 RT @AmbDanFried On “Face the Nation” today, @JakeSullivan46 affirmed that Ukraine’s future is in NATO, that all 31 NATO members agree, and that this is not up for negotiation, i.e., with Russia. Good. Vilnius moved the needle.
⋙ CBSNews: Transcript: National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan on “Face the Nation,” July 16, 2023 https://tinyurl.com/k3enajch
⭕ 15 Jul 2023
🐣 RT @ChuckPfarrer BAKHMUT AXIS /1515 UTC 15 JUL/ UKR forces advanced the line of contact to conform to the rail right of way east of the village of Klischiivka. The Russian MOD announced that General Vladimir Seliverstov, commander the Tula 106th Airborne Division (VDV) at Bakhmut has been relieved of command.
🌎 https://twitter.com/ChuckPfarrer/status/1680231573872885763?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @ChuckPfarrer PRIGOZHIN’S GIFT: Last week, @officejjsmart and I wrote how the Wagner mutiny drove Putin closer to the most incompetent of his henchmen. By his ineptness and corruption, Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu has almost single handedly derailed Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Read about it here: https://kyivpost.com/opinion/19194
⋙ 🐣 RT @ officejjsmart ⚡️ HUBRIS: THE SIN THAT MAKES EMPIRES FALL
🇷🇺 Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu, whose personal corruption – stealing billions from the 🇷🇺 Army – has been a great assistance to Ukraine 🇺🇦.
📌 Shoigu’s father was an ethnic Tuvan & his mother was from Ukraine 🇺🇦.
📍 Obviously, Shoigu does not care about his mom’s family & has done nothing with his billions to help the impoverished Tuvan region.
📌 Shoigu, the target of Prigozhin’s hatred, is an incompetent civil engineer, with no military experience, who worked in furniture before becoming Russia’s top soldier.
👉 The good news?
⚡️ Russian Telegram is picking up more-and-more that Shoigu (a close ally of Putin) is costing Russia dearly.
👉 Why is that good?
⚡️ Putin has remained steadfast & loyal to Shoigu. The longer Putin demonstrates his disregard for the Russian soldiers (& people), the more likely the 🇷🇺 Military will begin to collapse.
👉 Doubt it?
⚡️⚡️ When soldiers lose faith in their officers & government – bad things can happen.
👉 Example?
⚡️⚡️⚡️Check out how 1916-1917 turned out for Nicholas II in the First World War.
The house pictured in Shoigu’s mistress’.
🖼 https://twitter.com/officejjsmart/status/1680323788171366404?s=20/photo/1
⭕ 14 Jul 2023
PravdaUA: Six more countries join G7 in providing security guarantees to Ukraine – Zelenskyy https://tinyurl.com/y6w87b3v
⭕ 13 Jul 2023
❤️ WaPo: Zelensky’s angry tweet on NATO membership nearly backfired https://tinyurl.com/3wv4ced9
//. The Ukrainian president’s fiery response to NATO’s conditions-based pledge in Vilnius touched off a scramble — and brief consideration of watering down what Kyiv would be offered, officials said
🐣 RT @ABC NEW: Hunter Biden’s attorney sends cease-and-desist letter to former Pres. Trump’s legal team, claiming Trump’s rhetoric on social media and elsewhere “could lead to [Hunter Biden’s] or his family’s injury.” [link]
🚫 🐣 RT @igorsushko 🚨BREAKING: Voronezh in Russia is under attack! Doubtful this has anything to do with Ukraine. Appears to be internal Russian developments. The Voronezh-45 nuclear military facility captured by Wagner PMC during the coup is in the area.
💽 https://twitter.com/igorsushko/status/1679599195370684416?s=20/photo/1
// @igorsushko not very trustworthy
🐣 RT @ChuckPfarrer MOSCOW SURPRISE: @officejjsmart reports that a convoy of Wagner troops and vehicles has left a camp in Belarus and are heading in the direction of Moscow. The Wagner convoy is accompanied by police units and faces an uncertain reception back in Russia. Vladimir Putin does not forget or forgive.
⋙ 🐣 RT @officejjsmart WAGNER ON THE MOVE Russian news reports that Wagner had left their camp in Belarus 🇧🇾 and are headed, accompanied by 🇷🇺 police, in the direction of Moscow.
💽 https://twitter.com/ChuckPfarrer/status/1679598130075934722?s=20/photo/1
⭕ 12 Jul 2023
🐣 RT @tedlieu In office, Donald Trump bent the knee in front of Vladimir Putin. Out of office, Trump continues to bend the knee before Putin. Why?
[TextLink:] https://twitter.com/tedlieu/status/1679316454221463555?s=20/photo/1
[Text:] 🐣 RT @realDonaldTrump Remember in Helsinki when a 3rd rate reporter asked me, essentially, who I trusted more, President Putin of Russia, or our “Intelligence” lowlifes. My instinct at the time was that we had really bad people in the form of James Comey, McCabe (whose wife was being helped out by Crooked Hillary while Crooked was under investigation!), Brennan, Peter Strzok (whose wife is at the SEC) & his lover, Lisa Page. Now add McGonigal & other slime to the list. Who would you choose, Putin or these Misfits?
WaPo: At NATO summit, Biden’s caution clashed with calls to draw Ukraine closer https://tinyurl.com/mu2nkpw2 “The calculus of wanting to contain the conflict inside Ukraine’s borders and avoid nuclear escalation imbues every action the administration takes”
// Tensions in Vilnius exposed the challenges Washington will face as its allies push plans that some fear could risk a wider war with Russia
🐣 RT @Teoyaomiquu
☑️ Ukraine will get F16s after the pilot training is complete, likely from EU countries.
☑️ ATACAMS are still being discussed.
@JakeSullivan46 at @GMA ¤ Great news.
🐣 RT @wartranslated Ivan Popov, commander of the 58th Army of the Russian armed formations, currently in Zaporizhzhia, who was removed from his position earlier today says that Ukrainian artillery and missile strikes are causing significant casualties to the occupiers holding defence.
¤ https://twitter.com/wartranslated/status/1679258082302459904?s=20
Explaining in an audio message, Popov says he delivered a damning report about the state of Russian counter-battery fire directly to Chief of the General Staff Gerasimov which resulted in his immediate dismissal.
In a four-minute audio message, Popov talks about betrayal from the most senior military leadership, echoing the sentiment expressed by Wagner mercenaries:
“A difficult situation with the leadership emerged. It was a choice between remaining silent and afraid and saying what they wanted to hear, or calling things for what they are. In your name, in the name of all perished comrades-in-arms, I didn’t have the right to lie. Hence I named all the problems that exist today in the army regarding operations, supply. I pointed the attention to the most important tragedy of the modern war – the lack of counter-battery fire, lack of artillery reconnaissance stations, and mass casualties and injuries of our brothers from enemy artillery.
I also raised a number of other issues, expressed them to the highest levels, did it openly and very brutally. Due to this, the seniors likely felt some danger in me and instantly, in one day, put together an order to the Minister of Defence and got rid of me.
As many commanders of regiments and divisions said today, our army was not broken through the front, but our most senior commander hit us in the back, thus treacherously beheading the army in the most difficult period.”
🐣 RT @therecount During questioning with FBI Director Christopher Wray, House Dems Vice Chair Ted Lieu runs through a list of Trump officials who were convicted in federal court:
“It is not the fault of the FBI that Donald Trump surrounded himself with criminals.”
💽 https://twitter.com/Mad_as_heII/status/1679234737301516288?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @MuellerSheWrote WOW! Garland is appealing the Oath Keepers’ seditious conspiracy sentences saying they are not long enough.
⋙ 🐣 RT @kyledcheney ! DOJ is appealing the sentences imposed by Judge Mehta against the Oath Keepers convicted of seditious conspiracy or obstruction, including the 18-year term for Stewart Rhodes. ¤ All of the sentences, even Rhodes’, were well below what the sentencing guidelines called for.
[TextLink:] https://twitter.com/kyledcheney/status/1679256215887511552?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @ResisterSis20 There is one reason that Russia has not taken control of #Ukraine. There is one person standing in the breech between Democracy and Totalitarianism.
There is one man who for 31 months has united the West, brought Finland, and Sweden into #NATO, and led a united effort to protect Ukraine while avoiding nuclear conflict with Russia. He does not fear Putin, and will not abandon allies.
Joseph R. Biden is the experienced, calm, geopolitically prepared leader both America and the world needs. #FreshResists
🖼 https://twitter.com/ResisterSis20/status/1679134521701138433?s=20/photo/1
// Biden and Zelensky
🐣 RT @nexta_tv President Zelenskyy commented on his meeting with US President Biden ¤ “We discussed in detail the situation on the frontline, our capabilities, further long-term defense cooperation, and internal Russian processes given the recent events.
//. The United States has stood side by side with Ukraine throughout our defense against aggression. We appreciate it tremendously. Thank you personally to President of the United States, the Congress and the American people for the vitally important assistance – military, financial, political – provided to Ukraine since the beginning of Russia’s full-scale invasion,” wrote Zelenskyy in his telegram channel.
🐣 RT @JenniferJJacobs Asked if he is thinking yet about sending ATACMS to Ukraine, Biden told me: Yes, but they already have the equivalent of atacms and what they need most of all is artillery shells. “We’re working on that,” he said on tarmac as we left Vilnius.
🐣 RT @BillKristol Since 1945 we’ve had an unprecedented degree of global peace, prosperity, & freedom. Maybe Truman et al knew what they were doing.
Now: Unemployment’s low, real wages & markets are up. Maybe Yellen et al know what they’re doing.
Maybe centrist liberalism knows what it’s doing.
🐣 The US had the 2nd highest rate of deaths from COVID-19 in the world (Peru was first)
Once vaccines were introduced, the excess death rate for Republicans was 153% higher than for Democrats
Yale (2022): https://tinyurl.com/5n97hav5
🐣 RT @ZelenskyyUa A very good, powerful meeting with Mr. President Biden @POTUS
● The meeting was at least twice as long as planned, and it was as meaningful as it needed to be. If the protocol had not stopped the meeting, we would have talked even longer. All the topics. Long-term support. Weapons. Politics. @NATO
● We clearly see how to end this war with our common victory.
Thank you, Mr. President! ¤ #UkraineNATO33 ¤ 🇺🇦🇺🇸
🐣 RT @MeidasTouch Trump just defamed E. Jean Carroll AGAIN
[TextLink:] https://twitter.com/MeidasTouch/status/1679144064472715268?s=20/photo/1 -3
Page 1: The DOJ will not defend me in the E. Jean Carroll civil case, which is all part of the political Witch Hunt, lawyered up by a political operative who I just beat in another case, financed by a big political funder, and “judged by a Clinton appointee who truly hates “TRUMP.” The statements that I made about Carroll are all true. I didn’t Rape her (I won that at trial) and other than for this case, I have NO IDEA WHO SHE IS, WHAT SHE LOOKS LIKE, OR ANYTHING ABOUT HER…
Page 2: The Carroll civil case against me is a Miscarriage of Justice and a total Scam. The trial was very unfair, with the other side being able to do and present virtually anything they wanted, and our side being largely and wrongfully shut down by an absolutely hostile, biased, and out of control judge. My lawyers, due to their respect for the Office of the President and the incredulity of the case, did not want me to testify, or even be at the trial.
Page 3: The net result of this horrible INJUSTICE, where a completely unknown to me woman made up a ridiculous stor. wrote it in a book to increase publicity and sales, I correctly disputed the story and got sued for Defamation, whereupon a hostile Judge and Jury shockingly awarded a woman who I don’t know, have never known, and don’t want to know, $5,000,000, while at the same time throwing out the Fake Rape claim. WE ARE STRONGLY APPEALING THIS TRAVESTY OF JUSTICE!!!
🐣 RT @AndriyYermak NATO summit in Vilnius. Hard, but successful. We have great defense aid agreements and the Joint Declaration of Support for 🇺🇦 agreed by the G7. It is an important step towards forming a system of bilateral security agreements between 🇺🇦 and guarantor states.
⋙ 🐣 RT @AndriyYermak The agreed Declaration is a great result of many months of communications with partners and daily work our team performed together with 🇺🇸, 🇬🇧, 🇫🇷 and 🇩🇪 NSAs. Many thanks to the national security advisors, the state leaders, and our EU partners.
🐣 RT @nexta_tv The #G7 countries, by providing security guarantees to #Ukraine, are “encroaching on the security of Russian Federation” and this “leads to very, very negative consequences”, #Peskov said.
🐣 RT @ ZelenskyyUa We all need certainty – in particular, institutional certainty. And it is very good that the NATO-Ukraine Council can really give us the necessary institutional certainty. It is important for us that the NATO-Ukraine Council will be an instrument of integration, not just partnership. Thank you for that!
While we are on our way to NATO membership, Ukraine needs effective security guarantees on the way to the Alliance. We now have an appropriate package of guarantees, and I ask you to support and join it. Such support will give our joint work a much-needed concrete and practical success.
It is now established that no Membership Action Plan will be required on the path to Ukraine’s membership in NATO. And this is fair. Thank you for this recognition.
I would also like to draw your attention to the wording regarding the “conditions” that we must meet in order to receive an invitation to NATO. The absolute majority of our people expect specifics about these conditions. We perceive them as security conditions. We understand that Ukraine cannot become a member of NATO while the war is ongoing. But then it will be our common strength when Ukraine joins the Alliance. ¤ #UkraineNATO33 ¤ 🇺🇦🇺🇦🇺🇦
🐣 RT @wartranslated Conspirologist Girkin says he believes Prigozhin’s mutiny was “successful” and the balance of power is shifting in the Russian leadership with powers backing Prigozhin slowly taking over. He says they want to lead Russia to withdraw from war. ¤ I say they’re going to lose either way but any internal struggle is welcome – great observation by the terrorist.
[TextLink:] https://twitter.com/wartranslated/status/1679070151465992192?s=20/photo/1
[Text:] I am forced to seriously consider the version put forward by one of the like-minded people, which is in the following:
THE COUP WAS SUCCESSFUL. The powers within the ruling mafia are currently being redistributed as (or close to) planned by the conspirators behind Prigozhin. The “Shoigu-Vorobiev-Sobyanin Tower” has lost some of its positions (although not completely demolished), and part of its influence and resources “flows” into the group of oligarchs of the “Ozero Cooperative” (Rotenbergs, Kovalchuks and Co.). This group, vitally interested in ending the war “on any terms” – will not let us win in an case and will lead the president to realize the need to accept defeat and transfer supreme power to a successor nominated from this group (Kiriyenko? Prigozhin?).
In the coming months, we should expect new campaigns aimed at undermining not only of the RF Ministry of Defense, but also at the demolition of the influence of Patrushev and those parts of the FSB that are not controlled (or not completely controlled) by the President Administration and the oligarchic groups behind it. In the meantime, they will do everything so that the urgently necessary measures to prepare the army, rear and industry for a long hard war are not taken or slowed down as much as possible. This may include major defeats at the front, caused by a lack of reserves and a shortage of personnel, military equipment and ammunition. (And then these defeats will be the reason for a new blow to the “siloviki” in favor of the “peacekeepers” (or, rather, supporters of surrender).
⭕ 11 Jul 2023
NYT: Inflation Continues to Cool https://tinyurl.com/2ybffafw “Consumer prices rose 3 percent in the year through June, another decline in the pace of inflation. The deceleration in ‘core’ inflation, a measure closely watched by the Federal Reserve, was also notable”
◕ https://twitter.com/Auriandra/status/1679122729461587969?s=20/photo/1
WaPo: Zelensky slams NATO for omitting a timeline for Ukraine to join https://tinyurl.com/kmk56ndv “In a fiery tweet, Zelensky frustrated Ukraine’s advocates inside the alliance who believed they had secured a win for Kyiv by pushing the United States, Germany and other reluctant countries to consent “to extend an invitation to Ukraine to join the alliance when allies agree and conditions are met,””
// Alliance says Ukraine can join when ‘conditions are met.’ Zelensky says the statement is ‘absurd.’
🐣 📋 RT @EliotJacobson The 7 hottest days on Earth in the last 100,000+ years all happened in the last week:
July 6 ~ 17.23°C / 63.01°F
July 7 ~ 17.20°C / 62.96°F
July 4 ~ 17.18°C / 62.93°F
July 5 ~ 17.18°C / 62.92°F
July 8 ~ 17.17°C / 62.90°F
July 10 ~ 17.12°C / 62.81°F
July 9 ~ 17.11°C / 62.79°F
¤ https://twitter.com/EliotJacobson/status/1678727804110905344?s=20
🐣 RT @DigitalWarfare1 The Great State of California would like to thank the Fascist State of Florida for the Disneyland expansion in Anaheim, 2,200 new jobs & $253,000,000 in new revenue. Keep it up Florida Republicans. #Fresh #ProudBlue #DemVoice1
⋙ TheGuardian: Disney ramps up spending in California amid war with Ron DeSantis in Florida https://tinyurl.com/2en7bctr
// Company goes all in on growth program in Anaheim, California, after cancelling $1bn project and pulling plug on Star Wars hotel
NYT: The GOP Backed Him on Hunter Biden Claims. Now He Has Been Indicted. https://tinyurl.com/yc65mpb4 “[P]rosecutors painted a portrait of Mr [Gal] Luft … as an unscrupulous political fixer working for China who made much of his cash as a back-channel arms and oil broker”
// Gal Luft, promoted by House Republicans as possessing evidence of corruption by the Biden family, was charged by federal prosecutors with lobbying and sanctions violations and with brokering arms deals with China and Iran.
🌎 WaPo: Four maps explain how Sweden and Finland could alter NATO’s security https://tinyurl.com/mr35hknu
@StateDept It looks as if there was no attempt to provide Ukraine with a heads up about what to expect at the Vilnius NATO summit today. This was humiliating fof Zelensky, dismissive of Ukraine’s suffering and can only encourage Russia to make sure the war never ends. ¤ @POTUS @SecBlinken @JakeSullivan46 @StateDeptSpox
🐣 RT @RepRoKhanna Countries have banned cluster bombs due to their indiscriminate nature & threat to civilians. We should ban them, as I called for with @RepBarbaraLee & others last year. ¤ That’s why I cosponsored @RepSaraJacobs’s NDAA amendment to stop the transfer of cluster munitions.
⋙ 🐣 it’s the Ukrainians’ land and they are asking for them; they say they will keep records of where they are used for later de-mining ¤ although cluster munitions have been used by Ru to target civilians, they were designed to clear an enemy from entrenched positions, what Ukr needs
🐣 RT @CarnegieRussia Many are frustrated by the lack of a clear timeline for Ukraine’s membership in NATO. ¤ But, wrote Eric Ciaramella, “this disappointment should not be cause for despair… Western leaders are drafting a set of formal commitments to Ukraine’s self-defense.”
⋙ WaPo: Ukraine will get meaningful security guarantees at the NATO summit https://tinyurl.com/yt7k6wyk
// These commitments are not a consolation prize to full NATO membership, but a pragmatic solution that will make joining the alliance easier down the road.
🐣 RT @anno1540 The US State Department assured that Russia’s opinion does not affect Ukraine’s membership in NATO
¤ https://twitter.com/anno1540/status/1678886910758985728?s=20
Moreover, they only strengthen the defense capabilities of our army and the ability to deter Russian aggression in Europe, so it can be stated that the Russian dictator Vladimir Putin miscalculated.
US State Department spokesman Matthew Miller emphasized that today Ukraine is receiving unprecedented military aid to counter Russian aggression
“As for the calculations that Vladimir Putin could make, he should look at the security support that we have already provided to Ukraine to help deter Russian attacks, the security support that they (Ukrainians – ed.) have applied on the ground battle with great benefit,” the representative of the State Department noted. All the details [link]
By: Maryna Pohorilko
Attempts by the terrorist state of Russia to deny the possibility of Ukraine joining NATO do not affect the process of Euro-Atlantic integration of official Kyiv . Moreover, they only strengthen the defense capabilities of our army and the ability to deter Russian aggression in Europe, so it can be stated that the Russian dictator Vladimir Putin miscalculated.
Ukrinform reports that Matthew Miller, the spokesman for the US State Department, made the corresponding statement during a briefing in Washington . He emphasized that today Ukraine receives unprecedented military aid to counter Russian aggression. [link]
“As for the calculations that Vladimir Putin could make, he should look at the security support that we have already provided to Ukraine to help deter Russian attacks, the security support that they (Ukrainians – ed.) have applied on the ground battle with great benefit,” the representative of the State Department noted.
Miller recalled that before the start of the full-scale invasion, the Russian Federation strongly opposed Ukraine’s accession to NATO and tried to achieve an inviolable corresponding commitment from the Alliance. however, at the summit in Vilnius on July 11, the allies clearly confirmed that the future of our country lies in the Alliance.
We will remind: President of Ukraine Volodymyr Zelenskyi, who arrived in Lithuania on July 11 to participate in the NATO summit, spoke on the central square in Vilnius. In his speech, he emphasized: it is extremely important that no one ever looks back at Moscow [link]
The Ukrainian president noted Lithuania’s military aid and the country’s position regarding our country’s accession to NATO. He reminded that Ukraine is currently restraining Russia and protecting its European neighbors as well.
– on the second day of the NATO summit, which is held in Vilnius, Lithuania, Ukraine and partners will work on strengthening our defense , which is the first priority. In addition, a number of bilateral meetings and the first inaugural meeting of the Ukraine-NATO Council are planned; [link]
Oleksiy Danilov, Secretary of the NSDC, explained what the decision of the Vilnius NATO summit to cancel the MAP for Ukraine means. Now our country has to fulfill a number of tasks in order to meet the standards of the Alliance. [link]
🐣 RT @JayinKyiv NATO’s message to Putin: “Keep bombing Ukraine and we’ll keep them out of NATO.”
🐣 RT @mccaffreyr3 MSNBC. 11July 23. Zelensky is banging on a locked door. Zero chance of 31nations signaling to Russia that we are pending Art 5 protection to Ukraine. Would play to Putin advantage. NATO already providing tens of $Billions in economic and military aid.
🐣 RT @mhmck The damage from the failed NATO summit will ripple outward from Ukraine to Eastern Europe to people of good conscience everywhere who believed the alliance could provide security for the North Atlantic area. ¤ The Russian invaders in Europe will exploit this damage ruthlessly.
🐣 RT @mhmck NATO just signalled to aggressor Russia that it should continue to invade, commit war crimes and carry out genocide indefinitely. ¤ Russians would be crazy to end the war under any circumstances because that would satisfy a condition for Ukraine to be invited to join the alliance.
Politico: State Department doubles down after Zelenskyy slams reluctance on Ukraine’s entry to NATO https://tinyurl.com/4vcfn9zx
// State Department press secretary Matthew Miller said the United States’ hesitancy to see Ukraine join NATO was because of the ongoing war with Russia.
“We are ready to extend an invitation when conditions are met,” Miller said. “There is an important reason why they are not becoming a member of NATO right now — because it would instantly put the United States in a shooting war with Russia.”
🐣 RT @GicAriana “As long as there is Russia, there will never be such a thing as ‘after the war.’ You should say it frankly: ‘after RU.’ Maybe then the world would have a chance,” ¤ Vytautas Landsbergis, Lithuania’s first leader after regaining independence, nails it.
⋙ AP: NATO summit host Lithuania is a small country with a loud voice, especially when it comes to Russia https://tinyurl.com/3kauy4pz
🐣 RT @Biz_Ukraine_Mag The 2023 NATO summit in Vilnius failed to deliver a clear commitment on future Ukrainian membership, leaving many in Ukraine angered by the apparent lack of urgency among the country’s allies amid Russia’s ongoing invasion, writes Peter Dickinson
⋙ AtlanticCouncil, Peter Dickinson: NATO summit leaves Ukrainians frustrated https://tinyurl.com/2s98nu9k
🐣 RT @AtlanticCouncil “The communiqué presents a clear-eyed snapshot of the Alliance in an era of great power rivalry and strategic competition,” explains @RichOutzen. “Russia receives thorough and excoriating attention as the shatterer of peace and a continuing threat.”
⋙ AtlanticCouncil: Experts react: What NATO’s Vilnius summit communiqué means for Ukraine and the Alliance’s future https://tinyurl.com/5n8f74ke
🐣 RT @DefenceU .@ZelenskyyUa ¤ Today, a Ukrainian battle flag from Bakhmut is flying over Vilnius. The Battle for Bakhmut is one of the most defining battles for freedom in Europe, and will be remembered as such by our children and grandchildren. This battle flag from Bakhmut reassures Lithuanians that you will never again have to fight against russian soldiers, either under the Vilnius TV tower or anywhere else in the capital of your country.
💽 https://twitter.com/DefenceU/status/1678839035270242304?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @Kasparov63 🎯 It’s moral cowardice and strategic incompetence. NATO nations are obliged to do everything possible to protect the country defending their eastern flank. And they should seize the opportunity to defeat the enemy NATO was created to fight.
⋙⋙ 🐣 RT @general_ben The problem is is not reforms which Ukraine should make…it’s about reforms that some of our Leaders should make. Where is the bold, clear strategic thinking that created the post WWII international order? Don’t ask Ukraine for strategic patience…we need strategic bravery.
⋙ 🐣 we’re literally opening new factories to produce missiles, calling back retired workers to make MPADS, providing ordinance we have moral qualms about; plus, there’s the price tag that is used as a political bludgeon (GOP planning govt shutdown in Sept) ¤ it’s complex
🐣 RT @mhmck The failure of NATO’s 2008 Bucharest summit was caused by Germany and France and led directly to Russia invading Georgia and Ukraine. ¤ The failure of the 2023 NATO summit in Vilnius was caused by the United States and Germany and will escalate Russia’s wars beyond measure.
⋙ 🐣 there has never been an option for Ukr to join NATO before the war is over acc to Biden/US; I’d like to see a timeline with specific milestones & interim goals; these may exist in more detailed workplans ¤ to not see this new statement as a step forward, is, I think, to misread it
🐣 RT @ AccountableGOP .@mkraju: “Do you have any concerns that…Sen. Tuberville seems to have a hard time denouncing white nationalism, especially when it pertains to white nationalism in the military?” ¤ McConnell: “White supremacy is simply unacceptable in the military and in our whole country.”
TheAtlantic, David A Graham: Trump Confirms Another Liberal Conspiracy Theory https://tinyurl.com/4y4z56j3
//. Trump critics for years spread the innuendo that he was running for president to avoid prosecution, and … his legal team … just filed it in federal court.
A recurring dynamic of the Trump era is that his opponents warn darkly about his secret motives or actions, and then he bluntly confirms their hunches in public.
For years, Democrats insisted that Trump had secret, illicit ties to Russia. Then, in the summer of 2017, Donald Trump Jr. abruptly disclosed a 2016 meeting he’d held with Russians promising “dirt” on Hillary Clinton. “I … worked on this story for a year … and … he just … he tweeted it out,” one writer famously lamented. Two years later, congressional Democrats launched an investigation to prove that the president was privately pressuring Ukraine to investigate the Bidens; Trump promptly asked China, publicly, to do so. He was accused of interfering secretly in the 2020 election; he started just doing it by tweet. More recently, claims spread that Trump was sifting through boxes of documents he’d removed from the White House; when Sean Hannity gave Trump a chance to deny the suggestion, he confirmed it instead.
One common anti-Trump belief—one might even call it a conspiracy theory—post-2020 is that Trump is running for president again in 2024 mostly as a way of trying to avoid prosecution in the several current and possible cases against him. He frequently talks about how annoying it was for him to leave behind his comfortable life to be president, and he didn’t really seem to enjoy the job much. His 2024 campaign has so far been mostly about bad personal vibes, not building walls and making Mexico pay for them. Almost exactly a year ago, Rolling Stone reported that Trump was “leaving confidants with the impression that, as his criminal exposure has increased, so has his focus on the legal protections of the executive branch.”
True to form, the former president’s lawyers have now confirmed all these suspicions, contending in a court document that his status as presidential contender ought to indefinitely spare him a trial. In a filing last night to Judge Aileen Cannon, the judge overseeing his indictment for mishandling classified documents, they asked that a trial be delayed at least until after the 2024 election.
For one thing, they write, he’s just too busy. “President Trump is running for President of the United States and is currently the likely Republican Party nominee. This undertaking requires a tremendous amount of time and energy, and that effort will continue until the election on November 5, 2024.” As for his co-defendant, Walt Nauta, his “job requires him to accompany President Trump during most campaign trips around the country. This schedule makes trial preparation with both of the Defendants challenging.” Many defendants in criminal cases would prefer to pursue other opportunities instead of face charges, but that doesn’t usually entitle them to indefinite delay. Although some commentators have argued that a current or prospective president ought to be held to a higher standard of behavior, Trump’s lawyers are effectively arguing the reverse, saying he should receive extra forbearance because of the job he’s seeking.
They go on to argue that he simply can’t go through the judicial system now because he is running for president: “There is simply no question any trial of this action during the pendency of a Presidential election will impact both the outcome of that election and, importantly, the ability of the Defendants to obtain a fair trial.” (They do, however, nod to his other legal troubles, adding, “Previously scheduled trials in other matters for both President Trump and defense counsel make it nearly impossible to prepare for this trial by December 2023.”) …
If Trump wins, he would have the effective power to shut down any federal case against him. He and his allies are already laying the groundwork for further eroding the political insulation of the Department of Justice, which brought the documents case against him. (He would also presumably argue that, once he was president-elect or president, he would be too busy to stand trial.) If he does not win the election, his legal prospects are bleaker—which gives him additional incentives to subvert the election, just as he tried to do in 2020. …
[Cannon’s] response to the filing will give some indication of the prospects for the case. In the meantime, though, Trump’s critics for years spread the innuendo that he was running to avoid prosecution, and … his legal team … just filed it in federal court.
🐣 RT @BradMossEsq Just the former president calling for the current president’s son to be put to death. ¤ Just another day.
🐣 RT @leahmcelrath Perhaps I’ve memory-holed something, but I feel like Trump calling for “a death sentence” for Hunter Biden is an escalation:
[Text:] https://twitter.com/leahmcelrath/status/1678832272722522116?s=20/photo/1
[Text:] @realDonaldTrump Weiss is a COWARD, a smaller version of Bill Barr, who never had the courage to do what everyone knows should have been done. He gave out a traffic ticket instead of a death sentence. Because of the two Democrat Senators in Delaware, they got to choose and or approve him. Maybe the judge presiding will have the courage and intellect to break up this cesspool of crime. The collusion and corruption is beyond
description. TWO TIERS OF JUSTICE!
🐣 RT @washingtonpost Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky on Tuesday upended a summit of NATO leaders discussing his country’s potential membership, blasting an agreement for its lack of a concrete timeline for Kyiv to join the alliance as well as the “absurd” process by which it was drafted. https://wapo.st/3NLbdTa
💽 [tr] https://twitter.com/washingtonpost/status/1678808809462956043?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @shashj NATO communique is out. The key passage. “today we recognise that Ukraine’s path to full Euro-Atlantic integration has moved beyond the need for the [MAP]…We will be in a position to extend an invitation to Ukraine to join the Alliance when Allies agree and conditions are met.”
[TextLink:] https://twitter.com/shashj/status/1678789817100804096?s=20/photo/1
[Text:] 11. We fully support Ukraine’s right to choose its own security arrangements. Ukraine’s future is in NATO. We reaffirm the commitment we made at the 2008 Summit in Bucharest that Ukraine will become a member of NATO, and today we recognise that Ukraine’s path to full Euro-Atlantic integration has moved beyond the need for the Membership Action Plan. Ukraine has become increasingly interoperable and politically integrated with the Alliance, and has made substantial progress on its reform path. In line with the 1997 Charter on a Distinctive Partnership between NATO and Ukraine and the 2009 Complement, Allies will continue to support and review Ukraine’s progress on interoperability as well as additional democratic and security sector reforms that are required. NATO Foreign Ministers will regularly assess progress through the adapted Annual National Programme. The Alliance will support Ukraine in making these reforms on its path towards future membership. We will be in a position to extend an invitation to Ukraine to join the Alliance when Allies agree and conditions are met.
🐣 If @POTUS is concerned that two nuclear powers at war could mean WWIII, why can’t NON-nuclear powers in NATO form a “coalition of the willing” to fight alongside Ukraine, as we had for Iraq (which is not to say that war was ever morally justified like this one is )
🐣 RT @DevanaUkraine A great promotional video of the #NATO Summit in Vilnius. #NATOSummit #NATOSummitVilnius #NAFOSummit
💽 https://twitter.com/DevanaUkraine/status/1678747046067462145?s=20/photo/1
// music detracts
🐣 RT @Kasparov63 It ends in victory for Ukraine, the destruction of Ukraine, or it ldoesn’t end at all. Ukraine must win.
⋙ ⋙ 🐣 RT @ svennihelga “War on values doesn’t end at the negotiating table.” Garry @Kasparov63 speaking at #NATO Public Forum about the importance of victory for #Ukraine against #Russia. Enlightening and challenging discussions on the sidelines of #NATOSummit in #Vilnius. #WeAreNATO
🐣 RT @ChuckPfarrer MERCI, PARIS: France will send SCALP/EG air launched cruise missiles to Ukraine. The SCALP/G’s stealth characteristics and low radar signature make it difficult to identify and intercept. These will allow Ukraine to launch deep precision strikes through heavily contested airspace. [via MSN https://tinyurl.com/mr2xd78s ]
◕ https://twitter.com/ChuckPfarrer/status/1678740363786240000?s=20/photo/1
WSJ: U.S. at Odds With NATO Allies Over Ukraine’s Membership https://tinyurl.com/4cuct4ws “Biden has emerged as the leading opponent to granting Ukraine speedy membership in the alliance, or even offering clear guidance on when membership might be considered”
// Biden says Ukraine isn’t ready to join alliance, warns of being drawn into war
[TextLink:] https://twitter.com/Auriandra/status/1678740177424994306?s=20/photo/1
[Text:] Biden’s outspoken concerns with Ukraine’s push to join NATO—he has raised the prospect that doing it too early could start World War III—have frustrated officials in Kyiv and beyond.
“I don’t think it’s ready for membership in NATO,” Biden said in an interview with CNN that aired on Sunday, warning that bringing Ukraine into the alliance while it is at war with Russia would draw the U.S. and Europe into the conflict. He said NATO should lay out a path for Ukraine’s eventual entry into the alliance, but he said Kyiv still has work to do to meet the alliance’s standards for membership in areas like democratization.
In drawing a line on the issue, Biden is breaking with several NATO members, including Central and Eastern European nations that have publicly backed Kyiv’s push for expedited membership.
🐣 RT @Maks_NAFO_FELLA “This is a very important, critical moment for Ukraine and the issue of NATO, which you continue to strive for… We agreed on the wording that you proposed, which are related to Ukraine’s accession to NATO” – Biden said in a joint speech with NATO Secretary General Stoltenberg.
🐣 RT @ZelenskyyUa We value our allies. We value our shared security. And we always appreciate an open conversation. (¤)
Ukraine will be represented at the NATO summit in Vilnius. Because it is about respect. ¤ But Ukraine also deserves respect. Now, on the way to Vilnius, we received signals that certain wording is being discussed without Ukraine.
And I would like to emphasize that this wording is about the invitation to become NATO member, not about Ukraine’s membership. ¤ It’s unprecedented and absurd when time frame is not set neither for the invitation nor for Ukraine’s membership. While at the same time vague wording about “conditions” is added even for inviting Ukraine.
It seems there is no readiness neither to invite Ukraine to NATO nor to make it a member of the Alliance. ¤ This means that a window of opportunity is being left to bargain Ukraine’s membership in NATO in negotiations with Russia. (¤)
And for Russia, this means motivation to continue its terror. ¤ Uncertainty is weakness. And I will openly discuss this at the summit.
🐣 RT @pravda_eng NATO’s decision on Ukraine’s accession to membership will be agreed in a few hours, NATO Secretary General Stoltenberg said ¤ “I am convinced that the wording of the summit communiqué will be positive, will be a strong signal regarding Ukraine and the way forward to membership”
DailyBeast: GOP’s ‘Missing’ Biden Probe Witness Faces Laundry List of Federal Charges https://tinyurl.com/5afdf9yp
// Gal Luft was accused Monday of being an unregistered foreign agent, international arms trafficking, violating U.S. sanctions on Iran, and lying to investigators.
The “missing” witness long-touted by Republicans in Congress as the missing link to their probe into alleged Biden family corruption was accused Monday of being an unregistered foreign agent for China and an international arms trafficker while violating U.S. sanctions on Iran and lying to investigators, among a laundry list of other federal charges.
Dual U.S.-Israeli citizen Gal Luft had already skipped out on his bail while in Cyprus awaiting extradition to the U.S. for a separate case in March—though he alleges that the sprawling case against him represents political persecution and retaliation by the Biden administration against a potential witness.
i’m
The House Oversight Committee has for months touted a secret “informant” who could provide evidence of an alleged “quid pro quo” deal for foreign aid between an Obama-era Biden and an unnamed country—though details of the arrangement remain murky and unverified at best.Those claims partially unraveled when Rep. James Comer (R-KY) in May held a much-hyped press conference in which he promised to expose the preliminary findings of four months’ worth of scrutiny into the Biden family’s business dealings—while failing to air any real evidence of corruption. He then offered a partial excuse for the failure: their star witness had up and disappeared. …
Monday’s charges add to the laundry list of alleged crimes Luft is accused of—including a 2016 scheme to “recruit and pay” a White House adviser to support China-friendly policies without first filing as a foreign agent.
The situation was memorialized in a much-publicized Fox News interview, in which a credulous Maria Bartiromo appeared shocked by the revelations.
💽 https://twitter.com/atrupar/status/1657750128772497410?s=61&t=jia5AsIAAtLZVzHyMuLcXw/photo/1
⭕ 10 Jul 2023
TheHill: Think tank leader who claims to have given FBI info on Hunter Biden charged by Justice Department https://tinyurl.com/44zax5j4
The head of a U.S. think tank who has repeatedly accused President Biden and his family of corruption has been charged with acting as an unregistered agent of China, Manhattan prosecutors announced Monday evening.
Gal Luft, co-director of the Maryland-based Institute for the Analysis of Global Security, is accused of recruiting and paying an unnamed former high-ranking U.S. government official on behalf of principals based in China in 2016, without registering as a foreign agent, which is legally required.
The former high-ranking official was an advisor to then President-elect Trump and was allegedly paid to publicly support certain policies pertaining to China, according to the 58-page, eight-count indictment unsealed Monday.
Manhattan prosecutors also allege Luft attempted to broker illicit arms deals to sell weapons to countries including Libya, the United Arab Emirates and Kenya without having a license to do so, as is legally required in the U.S.
And Luft is accused of violating Iran sanctions by setting up meetings between Iranian officials and a Chinese energy company to discuss oil deals. When interviewed by U.S. law enforcement, Luft allegedly made false statements regarding his role brokering those deals.
“As alleged, the defendant engaged in multiple schemes to evade sanctions and laws intended to protect our national security,” Christie M. Curtis, FBI acting assistant director in charge, said in the press release. “The FBI is determined to defend our nation by enforcing laws designed to promote transparency of foreign influence within the United States.”
A dual citizen of the U.S. and Israel, Luft was arrested on Feb. 17 in Cyprus, but fled after being released on bail and remains a fugitive, the Justice Department said in a press release.
In a video first published by the New York Post, Luft made bribery allegations against the Biden family and called himself “patient zero of the Biden family investigation.”
He claims in the video that he was arrested to prevent him from testifying before the House Oversight Committee on shady Biden family business dealings. He also claims he shared his allegations with FBI and DOJ officials during a March 2019 meeting, which he said they covered up.
Rep. James Comer, R-Ky., chairman of the Oversight Committee, called Luft a “very credible witness on Biden family corruption” in a tweet last week. Comer and other Republicans have heralded Luft as a whistleblower in the Hunter Biden laptop probe.
Luft faces up to 100 years in prison if convicted of all eight counts and sentenced to the maximum amount of prison time, though such a sentence is unlikely.
🐣 RT @MeidasTouch This is what James Comer said *yesterday* about his fake whistleblower who was just indicted for being a Chinese spy: ¤ “He’s very credible and the people on MSNBC who made fun of me when I said we had an informant that was missing, they should feel like fools right now. And this is their worst nightmare.”
💽 https://twitter.com/MeidasTouch/status/1678550013218263042?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @MollyMcKew The 2024 plotline I will absolutely flee CONUS to avoid having to hear about is pretty much the the-right-wing’s-supposed-whistleblower-on-potus-family-china-ties-somethingsomethinglaptop-turns-out-to-be-a-creep-china-spy+arms-trafficker-brokering-illegal-oil-deals-for-Iran story
🐣 RT @SykesCharlie That awkward moment when the guy you are touting as a “whistleblower” is indicted as a Chinese spy.
⋙ 🐣 RT @SenRonJohnson Is DOJ trying to silence Dr. Gal Luft from publicly exposing Biden family corruption? The American people deserve the truth and Dr. Luft must have the chance to testify before Congress.
⋙⋙ 🐣 RT @john_sipher Guess what? The American people got the truth. The truth we expected. Your entire scam exploded because you and your idiot brethren continually spread lies to fit your ugly extremist narrative.
🐣 RT @Reuters Ukraine’s head of military intelligence, Kyrylo Budanov, told @Reuters that Wagner fighters reached a Russian nuclear base called Voronezh-45 during their mutiny with the intention of acquiring small Soviet-era nuclear devices in order to raise the stakes https://reut.rs/3D9U54x
🐣 RT @ZelenskyyUa The security reality here on NATO’s eastern flank depends on Ukraine. When we applied to join @NATO, we were frank: 🇺🇦 is de facto already in the Alliance.
Our weapons are the weapons of the Alliance. Our values are what the Alliance believes in. Our defense is the very element of the formula of Europe that makes it united, free and peaceful. ¤ Vilnius must confirm all this.
We are still working on the wording, that is, on the specific words of such confirmation, but we already understand the fact that 🇺🇦 will be in the Alliance, and we are working to make the algorithm for gaining membership as clear and fast as possible. Our work for this – the work of the entire Ukrainian team – will continue each and every minute of these days.
🐣 If Dems want to lose the next election, keep talking about reparations, crt, and trans issues. Listen to Obama: TheAtlantic: https://tinyurl.com/3pyxn8u7
[TextLink:] https://twitter.com/Auriandra/status/1678562055505207301?s=20
[Text:] Theoretically, you can make, obviously, a powerful argument that centuries of slavery, Jim Crow, discrimination are the primary cause for all those gaps. That those were wrongs done to the black community as a whole, and black families specifically, and that in order to close that gap, a society has a moral obligation to make a large, aggressive investment, even if it’s not in the form of individual reparations checks, but in the form of a Marshall Plan, in order to close those gaps. It is easy to make that theoretical argument. But as a practical matter, it is hard to think of any society in human history in which a majority population has said that as a consequence of historic wrongs, we are now going to take a big chunk of the nation’s resources over a long period of time to make that right.
🐣 RT @Terror_Alarm 🚨🇷🇺🇹🇷 Just in: Russia attacks Turkish military base in Aleppo, #Syria.
🐣 RT @SykesCharlie “It’s too early to write Twitter’s obituary and pronounce Musk its sole killer, but a lot of anecdotal evidence supports the notion that he has single-handedly made Twitter worse. And as a result, Musk now looks like a complete and total buffoon.”
⋙ Mediaite: Elon Musk Massive Fall in Public Standing Perfectly Illustrated By Immediate Success of Twitter Rival Threads https://tinyurl.com/bd5swe6v
🐣 RT @KenDilanianNBC In a new letter to the Senate judiciary committee, Delaware U.S. Attorney David Weiss, who reached a plea deal with Hunter Biden, says he never asked for special counsel authority, contrary to claims by Republican lawmakers and an IRS whistleblower.
🐣 RT @WarFrontline 🚨#Breaking, Very good news🍻
“Bakhmut. The enemy is trapped, the city is under fire control of the Defense Forces” — Syrsky🔥‼️🇺🇦
🐣 RT @stavridisj Wise words from a deeply experienced Secretary General of NATO @jensstoltenberg. Need to add Sweden, and eventually Ukraine to @NATO @ForeignAffairs
⋙ ForeignAffairs, Jens Stoltenberg: A Stronger NATO for a More Dangerous World https://tinyurl.com/mu9nx8h3
// What the alliance must do in Vilnius—and beyond.
Russia’s illegal war against Ukraine is a turning point in history. War has returned to Europe and great-power rivalries are growing. Authoritarian regimes are coming together to challenge the global rules and institutions that underpin peace and stability. Russian President Vladimir Putin is clamping down on freedoms and deepening divisions within his own country, as the Wagner paramilitary company’s rebellion clearly demonstrated. But no one should underestimate Russia or the dangers facing the world today.
The North Atlantic Treaty Organization is responding to a more unpredictable world with unity and strength. NATO allies in Europe and North America, and our partners across the globe, have provided unprecedented economic and military support to Ukraine. Over the last decade, NATO has implemented the largest reinforcement of our collective defense in a generation. We have strengthened our military presence in eastern Europe and increased defense spending. With Finland’s membership—and soon Sweden’s—NATO is growing stronger and larger. …
What we do—or do not do—now will define the world we live in for generations. So we will send a clear message: NATO stands united, and authoritarian aggression will not pay off. …
The Ukrainian forces are now engaged in fierce fighting to reclaim occupied territory, but they face strong Russian defenses and tough terrain. If Russia stops fighting, there will be peace. If Ukraine stops fighting, it will cease to exist as a nation. Ukrainians will not waiver, because the more gains they make on the battlefield, the stronger their hand will be at the negotiating table.
Everyone wants this brutal war to end, but a just peace cannot mean freezing the conflict and accepting a deal dictated by Russia. A false peace would only give Moscow time to regroup, rearm, and attack again. We must break the cycle of Russian aggression, and the best way to achieve lasting peace tomorrow is to support Ukraine, so that it prevails as a sovereign nation now.
NATO allies have stood by Ukraine since it gained independence 30 years ago. We provided years of training and support after Russia illegally annexed Crimea and destabilized the Donbas in 2014. Since Moscow’s February 2022 invasion, we have stepped up unprecedented support for Ukraine’s right to self-defense, enshrined in the UN Charter. Over the last year and a half, NATO countries have trained and equipped new Ukrainian armored brigades and provided tanks, combat vehicles, and advanced air defenses. NATO allies will also train Ukrainian pilots on fourth-generation fighter jets. This support shows that we are committed to Ukraine for the long haul. …
Over the last 18 months, Ukraine has taken huge strides in transitioning away from military doctrines, training methods, and equipment dating from the Soviet era, toward NATO standards and equipment. Ukraine is more integrated with our alliance than ever before, and so we must take steps to reflect this reality.
In Vilnius, we will upgrade our political ties by hosting the first meeting of the new NATO-Ukraine Council, together with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. This is a platform for decisions and crisis consultation, where NATO allies and Ukraine will sit as equals to tackle shared security concerns. All NATO allies agree that Ukraine will become a member of NATO. NATO’s door remains open, as we have proved by inviting Finland and Sweden to join last year. Ukraine’s NATO membership is a matter for NATO allies and Kyiv to decide: Russia does not have a veto. In Vilnius, we will set out a strong vision for Ukraine’s future and bring the country closer to NATO.
After the Cold War, NATO worked hard to forge more constructive relations with Moscow, including on arms control, countering terrorism, combating piracy, and increasing our scientific cooperation. But Putin walked away from peaceful cooperation, with a pattern of increasingly reckless behavior from Chechnya to Georgia, and Syria to Ukraine. He has dismantled the international arms control architecture and is engaging in dangerous nuclear saber-rattling.
Even if the war were to end tomorrow, there is no sign that Putin’s broader ambitions have changed. He sees freedom and democracy as a threat and wants a world where big states dictate what their neighbors do. This puts him in constant confrontation with NATO’s values and international law.
If Putin wins in Ukraine, it would be a tragedy for Ukrainians and dangerous for the world at large. It would send a message to other authoritarian regimes that they can achieve their objectives through force. China, in particular, is watching to see the price Russia pays, or the reward it receives, for its aggression. It is learning from Moscow’s military failures and the response of the international community. When I visited Japan and South Korea at the start of this year, their leaders were clearly concerned that what is happening in Europe today could happen in Asia tomorrow. …
As autocratic regimes draw closer to one another, those of us who believe in freedom and democracy must stand together. NATO is a regional alliance of Europe and North America, but the challenges we face are global. That is why I have invited the leaders of the European Union and of our Indo-Pacific partners—Australia, Japan, New Zealand, and South Korea—to join us in Vilnius. We must have a common understanding of the security risks we face and work together to strengthen the resilience of our societies, economies, and democracies. …
Now we are taking further major steps to strengthen our deterrence and defense. We will agree to new, detailed regional defense plans, which are fully connected with the forces, capabilities, and command and control needed to execute them. NATO will have 300,000 troops on higher alert, including substantial air and naval combat power. …
Putin’s war of aggression against Ukraine has shattered any remaining illusions of peaceful cooperation, so we must spend more and do more together to stay safe. The challenges are great, but NATO has been an anchor of stability for Europe and North America for almost 75 years. In a world of growing dangers, NATO will continue to protect our people, defend our democratic values, and keep our nations strong.
TheAtlantic, Joe Scarborough: America Is Doing Just Fine https://tinyurl.com/ys86ket2 “America has fed and freed more human beings than any other country in history. And despite the blather that cable-news hosts spit at you daily, your country is doing pretty damn well”
// The United States deserves a robust defense
[…] Unlike in years past, American allies no longer grouse about the U.S. “leading from behind” or burrowing itself into a self-defeating “America First” hole. Instead, the U.S. is first among equals in a dynamic and expanding NATO alliance that just added a new member with more than 800 miles of Russian border, and that has provided a devastating response to Vladimir Putin’s illegal invasion of Ukraine.
Looking east, the United States has finally begun its pivot to Asia, strengthening military cooperation with Japan, the Philippines, Guam, South Korea, and Australia. The current disruption in U.S.-Sino relations may have less to do with spy balloons and diplomatic missteps than with Xi Jinping’s rational fear of being hemmed in by an increasingly muscular U.S. military presence surrounding the South China Sea. President Joe Biden’s recent diplomatic overtures toward India were likewise calculated to contain China’s regional ambitions.
The most significant U.S. geopolitical failure of late was the country’s withdrawal from Afghanistan, a move promised by the past three presidents and supported by 70 percent of Americans before the evacuation. Even after the chaos unfolded in Kabul, most Americans told pollsters they supported Biden’s decision to get U.S. troops out after 20 years. Be assured that nobody in Moscow or Beijing is still looking at the Afghanistan withdrawal in light of recent events and parroting Republican’s un-American talking point that our armed forces are “woke” and “weak.” …
Every year, American colleges and universities dominate rankings of the best schools in the world. Maybe that’s why some of the most powerful political and business leaders across the globe keep sending their children to American colleges. They do so for the same reason many Republican politicians with Ivy League degrees worked hard to get admitted into Yale, Harvard, and the University of Pennsylvania years ago: because nobody in the world does higher education better than the United States of America.
All of this anti-American drivel coming from Trumpists can be tedious. But stay with me, because there’s much more to be said in America’s defense.
Childhood poverty has dropped to the lowest level on record; teenage pregnancy has done the same; the U.S. dollar has experienced generational highs over the past year; unemployment recently hit a 54-year low; the number of job openings this past year also hit record highs.
Overall, the U.S. economy continues to surge forward despite economists’ dire predictions. America’s GDP grew to $25 trillion last year; Texas has a bigger economy than Russia, and although California is routinely rebuked by right-wing critics, it has the fourth-strongest economy in the world—stronger than Britain’s, France’s, Canada’s, or India’s. The United States and its European allies collectively run an economic machine that doubles China’s stagnating output. Despite record debt levels, a stubborn case of inflation, and other structural challenges, American capitalism continues to drive and dominate the world economy.
All of this is not to say that the United States is free of challenges. Like any great power, we have our fair share of political and moral failings.
Our Declaration of Independence was written by a slaveholder, the government has yet to address what it owes to Native Americans, and the right of women to control their own bodies has been shattered by Supreme Court rulings and radical state legislation.
But it was American democracy that provided a swift political rebuke to the overturning of Roe v. Wade and led to right-wing defeats in red states such as Kansas, Kentucky, and Wisconsin. The political backlash to Roe’s demise has been so dramatic that even Ann Coulter and The Wall Street Journal editorial page now take exception to the GOP’s extreme abortion stance.
And when Abraham Lincoln emancipated millions of enslaved Americans in 1863, he was relying on the logic of that same Declaration of Independence, which Martin Luther King Jr. proclaimed “a promissory note” to all Americans.
James Madison, another slaveholder, wrote a Constitution that provided the checks and balances that led the same high court that overturned Roe to rebuff Donald Trump’s most autocratic plans. As politically disorienting as it may seem after the overturning of Roe and affirmative action, the Roberts Court also finally stopped Trump’s efforts to steal the 2020 presidential election, and is now allowing criminal cases against him to move forward.
So yes, it’s true that a fulsome defense of Uncle Sam often requires dialectical thinking. But remember this: Even with all of its failings, America has fed and freed more human beings than any other country in history. And despite the blather that cable-news hosts spit at you daily, your country is doing pretty damn well.
🐣 RT @kvistp What percentage for joining NATO in Ukraine doing Russia?? 👀
#RussiaIsCollapsing FOR NATO membership: 2013 20%, After 2014 invasion 54%, Jan 2023 86%
◕ https://twitter.com/kvistp/status/1678343986182799362?s=20/photo/1
// “No one has done more to promote NATO in Ukraine than Russia”
FT: China on brink of consumer deflation https://tinyurl.com/35j7u6jx “The weakening economic performance comes as Chinese economists are urging the government to shift from its traditional form of stimulus — investing in big-ticket infrastructure projects — to targeting consumers”
// Latest signs of economic weakness likely to spur calls for government stimulus measures
◕ https://twitter.com/Auriandra/status/1678363591274004480?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @ Gerashchenko_en Putin’s spokesperson Peskov confirmed that Putin met with Prigozhin and Wagner commanders on 29th June.
¤ https://twitter.com/Gerashchenko_en/status/1678352536166625280?s=20
According to Peskov, the meeting lasted for almost three hours. “He invited 35 people to it. All the commanders and heads of the company, including Prigozhin. The meeting took place on 29th June. It lasted almost three hours. Details unknown. The president gave an evaluation of actions on the frontlines, and also evaluated the event on the 24th” – Peskov.
“The commanders gave their own version [of events], underlined that they are faithful supporters of the commander-in-chief and they are ready to continue their work” – Peskov added.
Earlier, Libération media cited its sources in Western intelligence to report that Prigozhin met with Putin on 1st July in the Kremlin.
🐣 RT @nexta_tv Erdogan demanded #Turkey’s admission to the #EU in exchange for Turkey’s agreement to admit #Sweden to #NATO. ¤ “First, open the way for Turkey to join the EU, and then we will clear the way for Sweden’s NATO bid, just as we did with Finland,” the Turkish president said.
🐣 RT @WSJ Breaking: Wagner leader Yevgeny Prigozhin met with Russian President Vladimir Putin days after his short-lived revolt against Moscow, according to the Kremlin
⋙ WSJ: Wagner Leader Prigozhin Met With Putin Days After Aborted Revolt, Kremlin Says https://tinyurl.com/57xsvh3x
🐣 RT @IuliiaMendel It is important for Ukrainian soldiers fighting Russians to hear a signal from Western partners that Ukraine will be accepted in NATO.
🐣 RT @ MavkaSlavka ruZZia’s Soviet enslavement over Ukraine was only made possible by Stalin’s massacre of Ukrainian elites. Ukrainian culture demonstrated a striking revival in the years between the dissolution of the ruZZian empire and the start of Stalin’s repressions.
🖼 https://twitter.com/MavkaSlavka/status/1678325015245357065?s=20/photo/1
// “The executed Renaissance: Ukrainian writers killed by Stalin in the 1930s”
🐣 RT @PhillipsPOBrien The countours of the agreement with Ukraine and NATO are coming into shape. Looks like expedited membership when this war is over.
⋙⋙ 🐣 RT @DmytroKuleba Following intensive talks, NATO allies have reached consensus on removing MAP from Ukraine’s path to membership. I welcome this long-awaited decision that shortens our path to NATO. It is also the best moment to offer clarity on the invitation to Ukraine to become member.
⋙ 🐣 RT @PhillipsPOBrien If this is the deal–European security will be ensured for decades. A cause for celebration for people who live on the continent.
🐣 RT @KyivPost 💬 “There is a signal that there might be another mutiny in Russia, a revolution. More than that, there are many people who might support such a mutiny. #Putin doesn’t have a military force inside Russia,” Volodymyr #Zelensky said in an interview with ABC News.
🐣 RT @Maks_NAFO_FELLA “Biden visited London on the eve of the NATO summit. Today, the US President will meet with Sunak, and will also meet with Charles III for the first time after his coronation” — BBC
🖼 https://twitter.com/Maks_NAFO_FELLA/status/1678302832015941634?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @NOELreports For the first time since the Prigozhin mutiny, Gerasimov appeared. A video with him was published today by the Ministry of Defense of Russia. The Daily Mail’s information that Gerasimov was removed from his post and replaced by General Teplinsky therefore seems premature/untrue.
💽 https://twitter.com/NOELreports/status/1678303298120548352?s=20/photo/
⭕ 9 Jul 2023
🐣 RT @Kasparov63 Ukraine must win. Ukraine belongs in NATO. That’s what I wish to hear from Biden when we both arrive in Vilnius. No more delays, lack of strategic clarity, or backchannel BS with Putin’s terrorist regime. My article:
⋙ WSJ, Gary Kasparov: Ukrainians Die as America Dawdles https://tinyurl.com/3kyakmbr //➔ “Anyone else would be better [than Putin].” This not true. Those who might replace Putin might well be worse. Many of those who might follow him are more like Prigozhin than Gorbachev
// Fears of ‘escalation’ leave Russia feeling free to attack innocent civilians like Victoria Amelina.
🐣 RT @Kasparov63 Ukraine must win. Ukraine belongs in NATO. That’s what I wish to hear from Biden when we both arrive in Vilnius. No more delays, lack of strategic clarity, or backchannel BS with Putin’s terrorist regime. My article:
⋙ WSJ, Gary Kasparov: Ukrainians Die as America Dawdles https://tinyurl.com/3kyakmbr
// Fears of ‘escalation’ leave Russia feeling free to attack innocent civilians like Victoria Amelina.
🐣 RT @OlgaNYC1211 Interesting if true! Russian telegram war criminal propagandists report that Gerasimov has been removed and replaced by war criminal Teplinsky. Putin now fulfilling Prigozhin’s demands?
🐣 RT @annanemtsova Putin fired the head of Russian General Staff Valeriy Gerasimov, who Prigozhin had accused of “genocide” and appointed 54-year-old air-force commander, Mikhail Teplinsky [Ru link]
🐣 RT @ChuckPfarrer BAKHMUT /1700 UTC 9 JUL/ UKR forces conducted offensive ops N of Soledar; frontline sources report that UKR units are in contact 2.5 Km north of Soledar. Contact is also ongoing to the W & E of Yakolivka. UKR forces continue to be engaged on the hilltops overlooking the village of Klischiivka.
🌎 https://twitter.com/ChuckPfarrer/status/1678084169971236864?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @TVPWorld_com On the 80th anniversary of the Volhynia Massacre, in which over 100,000 Poles perished as a result of the murderous acts by the Ukrainian nationalists, the presidents of Poland and Ukraine, @AndrzejDuda and @ZelenskyyUa, participated in an ecumenical liturgy at Lutsk Cathedral on Sunday, commemorating the victims of the massacre.i
🖼 https://twitter.com/TVPWorld_com/status/1677979410777948161?s=20/photo/1
⋙ TVPWorld: ‘Together we are stronger’. Polish, Ukrainian presidents pay homage to Volhynia massacre victims https://tinyurl.com/k8uj9puu
On the 80th anniversary of the Volhynia Massacre, in which over 100,000 Poles perished as a result of the murderous acts by the Ukrainian nationalists, the presidents of Poland and Ukraine, Andrzej Duda and Volodymyr Zelenskyy, participated in an ecumenical liturgy at Lutsk Cathedral on Sunday, commemorating the victims of the massacre.
After the prayer, the leaders placed candles in front of the altar. “Together we pay tribute to all the innocent victims of Volhynia! Memory unites us! Together we are stronger,” the Polish President’s Office wrote on Twitter.
80 years ago, on July 11 and 12, 1943, the Ukrainian Insurgent Army launched a coordinated attack on about 150 villages inhabited by Poles in the Vladimir, Horokhov, Kowel and Lutsk districts of the former Volyn province.
“Bloody Sunday” is considered the climax of the genocide carried out by Ukrainian nationalists against Poles in Volhynia and Eastern Galicia in 1943-1945. As a result of genocidal actions in Volhynia, about 100,000 Poles were killed.
The perpetrators of genocide were the members of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists – B (Stefan Bandera’s faction), the Ukrainian Insurgent Army subordinated to it, as well as members of local Ukrainian population, who were often related to the Poles by blood ties. The direct responsibility for issuing the criminal order lies with the main commander of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army, Roman Shukhevych. ¤ The OUN-UPA called its actions an “anti-Polish action,” aiming to make Ukraine an area populated exclusively by Ukrainians.
WaPo/AP: Poland starts observances of WWII massacres by Ukrainians that have marred neighborly ties https://tinyurl.com/yhx7pf95
💙❤️ openDemocracy, Andrii Portnov (2016): Clash of victimhoods: the Volhynia Massacre in Polish and Ukrainian memory https://tinyurl.com/3yun8dah
// 11/16/2016; As we become increasingly aware of the tragic past, how can we avoid fuelling resent
WaPo: Ukraine pushes to reclaim Bakhmut, fighting on fallen city’s flanks https://tinyurl.com/mtr2d46x “Getting to Russian lines now means crossing a no man’s land of mines, trenches & ‘dragon’s teeth,‘ an antitank defense … of concrete or metal points protruding from the earth”
⭕ 8 Jul 2023
🐣 RT @MedvedevRussiaE Why does the sleepy old man Biden sticks to such dangerous politics? ¤ It would be the easiest to think that it is the policy of any American leader and the US deep state, i.e., to dominate and constrain other countries, especially as recalcitrant as Russia.
¤ https://twitter.com/MedvedevRussiaE/status/1677718467678466049?s=20
You could also say that he is an ill and miserable old man, suffering from severe dementia. Like, he doesn’t know what he’s doing. This is what Trump, and a significant part of Americans are yelling about.
But what if it’s just different? Could it be that a dying old man obsessed with his morbid fancy, decided to simply make an impressive exit, causing nuclear Armageddon, and taking half of humanity with him to the other side?
⋙ 🐣 There you have it, folks. Russia comes out for Trump.
🧵 RT @Mylovanov Medvedev offers a classic example of propaganda. He accuses the West of what Russia is doing. This technique is called projection and deflection. Let’s see.
📌 https://twitter.com/Mylovanov/status/1677942893690888193?s=20
[ThreadReader:] https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1677942893690888193.html
1. He claims that the West “sticks to dangerous politics”, while in fact it is Russia that started the war. 1/
What could be more dangerous than starting the war, by invading a country with a 100 of brigades, trying to displace the government, killing tens of thousands of civilians, committing numerous war crimes, disrupting food and energy security in the region? 2/
What could be more dangerous than militarizing and mining a nuclear power plant, blowing up a mine, using incendiary weapons over areas with civilians, and shooting missiles at cities and villages where people live? 3/
2. Medvedev next claim is that the US policy is to dominate and constrain other countries, especially Russia. ¤ The truth is that no one really cared about constraining Russia until it started the war. 4/
It is Russia that was trying to dominate and constrain Ukraine. When the “soft techniques” such as corruption, funding pro Russian parties in Ukraine, running propaganda and polarization ops failed, Russia invaded. 5/
3. Then he goes on accusing Biden of being detached from reality. ¤ But it is Putin who has contracted and acted upon a fictions world, in which Ukraine can fall in 3 days. 6/
4. Medvedev accuses the U.S. of risking a nuclear war. ¤ But in fact it is Russia that constantly uses nuclear rhetoric, and it threatens to fire a nuke. If it does, the nuclear war is caused by Russia, not someone else. No one attacked Russia, Russia attacked Ukraine 7/
The last paragraph is very telling. If we substitute the implied name of Biden for Putin, it will read 8/ ¤ Could it be that a dying old Putin obsessed with his morbid fancy, decided to simply make an impressive exit, causing nuclear Armageddon, and taking half of humanity with him to the other side? 8X
🐣 RT @ front_ukrainian ⚡️The Minister of Defense of 🇺🇦Ukraine, Oleksiy Reznikov, explained how Ukraine will use 🇺🇸US cluster munitions:
● ammunition will not be used on the territory of the Russian Federation – only for the de-occupation of internationally recognized Ukrainian territories;
● ammunition will be used only in places where the Russian military gathers;
● Ukraine will keep strict records of the use of these weapons and the local areas where they will be used. After liberation, these areas will be prioritized for demining;
● Ukraine will report to partners on the use of these ammunitions and their effectiveness.
🐣 RT @ KramarenkoMari3 I can’t believe I cite him, but 😅
“Whoever controls the Snake island controls the course of world history” – Dugin
🖼 https://twitter.com/KramarenkoMari3/status/1677608233328934913?s=20/photo/1
// Zelensky does fist from boat
🐣 RT @polidemitolog
🖼 https://twitter.com/polidemitolog/status/1677610501499396098?s=20/photo/1
// Zelensky, no caption
WaPo: Kremlin smears Wagner boss Prigozhin, hailing Putin as Russia’s savior https://tinyurl.com/2rcavkpd “The Kremlin’s powerful propaganda apparatus is in overdrive working to discredit Prigozhin & project President Vladimir Putin as the wise leader who saved Russia from civil war”
⭕ 7 Jul 2023
◕ WaPo: Analysis: Do blue-state taxes really subsidize red-state benefits? https://tinyurl.com/yvjtby7s
// red state blue state; The Department of Data answers your most frequently asked question
💙 WaPo: CIA Director Burns: What U.S. intelligence needs to do today — and tomorrow https://tinyurl.com/yc5e9jsf “First is the challenge of … China — and from a Russia that constantly reminds us that declining powers can be at least as disruptive as rising ones.”
I worked early in my career as an American diplomat for Secretary of State James Baker. It was one of those rare “plastic moments” in history. The Cold War was ending, the Soviet Union was about to collapse, Germany would soon be reunified, and Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait would soon be defeated.
It was a world of uncontested American primacy. History’s currents seemed to flow in our direction, the power of our ideas driving the rest of the world in a slow but irresistible surge toward democracy and free markets. Our sometimes overbearing self-assurance seemed well-founded in the realities of power and influence, but it also obscured other gathering trends. …
… I’ve now lived and served long enough to face another plastic moment — in a world that is far more crowded, complicated and contested than the one I experienced in those heady days as a young diplomat three decades ago. It is a world in which the United States is no longer the only big kid on the geopolitical block — a world in which humanity faces both peril and promise. …
… Our success will depend on our ability to navigate a world with three distinctive features. ¤ First is the challenge of strategic competition from a rising and ambitious China — and from a Russia that constantly reminds us that declining powers can be at least as disruptive as rising ones. ¤ Second are the problems without passports, such as pandemics and the climate crisis, which are beyond the reach of any one country to address and are growing more extreme and existential. ¤ And third is the revolution in technology, which is transforming how we live, work, fight and compete, with possibilities and risks we can’t yet fully grasp.
The most immediate and acute challenge to international order today is Vladimir Putin’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. ¤ I’ve spent much of the past two decades trying to understand and counter the combustible combination of grievance, ambition and insecurity that Putin embodies. … ¤ Putin’s war has already been a strategic failure for Russia — its military weaknesses laid bare; its economy badly damaged for years to come; its future as a junior partner and economic colony of China being shaped by Putin’s mistakes; its revanchist ambitions blunted by a NATO that has only grown bigger and stronger. …
Russia’s aggression poses a formidable test. But China is the only country with both the intent to reshape the international order and, increasingly, the economic, diplomatic, military and technological power to do so. ¤ The issue is not China’s rise per se but the actions that accompany it. President Xi Jinping is embarking on his third term with more power than any Chinese leader since Mao. And rather than use that power to reinforce, revitalize and update the international system that enabled China’s transformation, Xi seeks to rewrite it. …
… We face an equal threat to international order and indeed to the lives and livelihoods of our people from shared or transnational challenges, of which the climate crisis poses the most clear and present danger. We can no longer talk about “tipping points” and “catastrophic climate impacts” in the future tense. They are here and now, imperiling our planet, our security, our economies and our people. …
Advances in computing-related technologies are leading to breakthroughs of remarkable scale and scope. In just the few months since the first public version of ChatGPT debuted in November, we’ve seen newer models outperform humans in graduate-level entrance exams, and in assessments of doctor-to-patient engagements in medical training programs.
We see this “hockey stick” trendline time and again, outstripping our expectations, imaginations and capacity to govern the use of enormously powerful technologies — for good or for ill. Nowhere is that more evident than in biotechnology and biomanufacturing — which can unlock extraordinary climate and health solutions and boost our economies, but whose abuse and misuse could lead to catastrophe. … […]
🐣 RT @front_ukrainian ⚡️The 🇺🇸USA officially announced a new security package for 🇺🇦Ukraine, the White House. It includes: https://twitter.com/front_ukrainian/status/1677390212471595009?s=20
// Defense budget
— 32 Bradley infantry fighting vehicles and 32 Stryker armored personnel carriers;
— additional ammunition for Patriot and HIMARS air defense systems;
— AIM-7 air defense missiles;
— anti-aircraft complexes Stinger, Javelin;
— 31 155-mm howitzers;
— 105-mm and 155-mm artillery shells, including DPICM;
— tube-launch missiles, Penguin unmanned aerial systems and explosive munitions;
— demining equipment, spare parts, small arms and 28 million cartridges for them;
— 27 tactical vehicles for lifting equipment;
— 10 tactical vehicles for towing and transporting equipment;
🐣 RT @LindseyGrahamSC I will be working with Republicans and Democrats in the Senate to pass a resolution urging the admission of Ukraine into NATO. ¤ The best way to prevent future wars and promote peace is to create security guarantees that make aggressor nations think twice before starting wars. ¤ Ukrainian NATO membership is vital to the future security of Europe and the world. I believe there is an overwhelming majority of Senators supporting this proposition.
🐣 RT @djrothkopf Yes. It. Does.
⋙ 🐣 RT @yasminalombaert “Ukraine deserves NATO membership,” Erdogan said during the joint press conference with Zelensky.
🖼 https://twitter.com/yasminalombaert/status/1677441180043288576?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @ChuckPfarrer BAKHMUT AXIS / 2345 UTC 7 JUL/ Front line sources indicate that UKR has advanced from the hilltops overlooking the village of Klischiivka. Contact is now reported along the rail right of way to the east of the village.
🌎 https://twitter.com/ChuckPfarrer/status/1677417578602397696?s=20/photo/1
WaPo: How Twitter lost its place as the global town square https://tinyurl.com/53ebvfmy
// A series of disastrous missteps over the past year has robbed Twitter of its relevance
CNN: Exclusive: Special counsel prosecutors question witnesses about chaotic Oval Office meeting after Trump lost the 2020 election https://tinyurl.com/5btc2wp6
// Mike Flynn, Sidney Powell and “the Overstock person”
Special counsel Jack Smith’s team has signaled a continued interest in a chaotic Oval Office meeting that took place in the final days of the Trump administration, during which the former president considered some of the most desperate proposals to keep him in power over objections from his White House counsel. …
Prosecutors have specifically inquired about three outside Trump advisers who participated in the meeting: former Trump lawyer Sidney Powell, one-time national security adviser Michael Flynn and former Overstock CEO Patrick Byrne, sources said. …
The special counsel’s sustained interest in the chaotic episode comes as Smith’s team appears to be nearing charging decisions in the investigation into efforts to overturn the election results. Investigators are still gathering evidence, reaching out to several new witnesses in recent weeks and working to schedule interviews.
During the heated Oval Office meeting on December 18, 2020, outside advisers faced off with top West Wing attorneys over a plan to have the military seize voting machines in crucial states that Trump had lost. They also discussed naming Powell as special counsel to investigate supposed voter fraud, and Trump invoking martial law as part of his efforts to overturn the election.
Shouting and insults ensued; the night ended with Trump tweeting that a coming gathering in Washington, DC, on January 6, 2021, to protest the election results “will be wild.”
Among the witnesses questioned by the special counsel’s team was former national security adviser Robert O’Brien, who told the January 6 House select committee that he was patched into the December 18 meeting by phone after it had already devolved into a screaming match between Flynn, Powell and White House lawyers, according to a transcript of O’Brien’s deposition that was released by the panel.
Details about subsequent secret grand jury testimony and closed-door interviews illustrate how the special counsel and his prosecutors are looking at the various ways Trump tried to overturn his electoral loss despite some of his top officials advising him against the ideas.
The consistent emphasis on the December 18 Oval Office meeting appears to overlap with the special counsel’s broader effort to home in on the actions of several Trump lawyers and allies during the period from December 14, 2020, to January 6, 2021.
The December 14 date is of particular interest to prosecutors, sources told CNN. On that day, slates of alternate Republican electors in seven battleground states signed certificates falsely asserting Trump had won. Also that day, members of the Electoral College met in all 50 states to officially cast their ballots, declaring Joe Biden the winner with 306 electoral votes to Trump’s 232.
Investigators have focused on efforts to recruit the illegitimate electors, have them sign certificates falsely asserting Trump had won, and then use them as a pretense to pressure then-Vice President Mike Pence to delay certification of Biden’s Electoral College win on January 6.
At least one witness has told prosecutors in recent weeks that Trump allies asked Pence to question the legitimacy of Biden’s electors in those seven states based on unfounded claims about widespread voter fraud and kick the decision of certification back to the states themselves, one source said.
CNN: Exclusive: Special counsel prosecutors question witnesses about chaotic Oval Office meeting after Trump lost the 2020 election https://tinyurl.com/5btc2wp6
🐣 RT @ChuckPfarrer CLUSTER BOMBS FOR UKRAINE? The latest US $800M arms package to Ukraine will likely include cluster munitions. Among them would be the M864: Dual Purpose Improved Conventional Munition for Ukraine’s NATO supplied 155mm artillery pieces. Here’s how they work
◕ https://twitter.com/ChuckPfarrer/status/1677359975625105420?s=20/photo/1
⭕ 6 Jul 2023
🐣 RT @TheresaAFallon There is a reason why Prigozhin is still alive–for now–he is indispensable to Putin as Wagner is active in Syria, Libya, Sudan, [the Central African Republic], and Mali and his operations there are necessary for Putin’s larger geopolitical calculus.
⋙ 🐣 RT @TheresaAFallon Prigozhin leaves analysts shrugging their shoulders saying I dunno. “The apparent contradictions in Prigozhin’s relationship with the Kremlin are a glaring sign of weakness, a former senior Russian official said. ¤ “This is just complete impotence. There’s nothing deep there. Everyone has heard Putin settling scores with Prigozhin a week [after the mutiny]. It’s total madness,” the former official said. “Putin just doesn’t notice we’re turning into a banana republic without any bananas.”
⋙⋙ FT: Wagner boss Yevgeny Prigozhin’s tangled links to Vladimir Putin leave Kremlin in a bind https://tinyurl.com/55pek82w
// Moscow’s ‘impotence’ on failed mutiny turns Russia ‘into a banana republic without any bananas’, says former official
🐣 RT @ AntiToxicPeople Another completely deranged, delusional rant about the Presidential Records Act that is 0.00% accurate and false, every syllable of what he is saying. Is he laying the groundwork for an insanity defense? He keeps saying stuff that is the literal inverse of reality & the law here.
[TextLink:] https://twitter.com/AntiToxicPeople/status/1677091274019545088?s=20/photo/1
// Trump “Statement” on Letterhead
[Text:] Vital caselaw, of which there is much, further confirms that the Presidential Records Act (PRA) is the only statute which applies to Presidents and their records. These cases build on the Clinton Socks case in making it clear that Presidents have complete latitude and authority when it comes to documents, as well as that the PRA has no criminal enforcement mechanism.
Deranged Jack Smith knows this, but refuses to even mention the words “Presidential Records Act” in his Scam Indictment of Biden’s Political Opponent (who is leading by a lot) in the middle of a Campaign-a No, No! The same Department of Justice that is now going after “President Trump,” just a few years ago argued on behalf of the President for a wide and complete application of the PRA in many cases, and won in front of Democrat appointed judges such as Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, who ruled totally in favor of the President.
These facts decisively and without question explain why the current weaponized DOJ corruptly failed to mention the PRA in their contrived indictment against me and are also just some of the key reasons why that “case” should be summarily dropped, with a strong rebuke of the extensive prosecutorial misconduct that has been committed by Merrick Garland, Deranged Jack Smith, Lisa Monaco, and many other Trump haters within the DOJ and FBI.
🐣 RT @AntiToxicPeople Deranged lunatic is like a 6 year old spoiled child. He has to lash out like this with insane lies & nonsense every time someone nails him/criticizes him in a way that is widely seen. Amazing. ¤ Very Stable Genius kind of stuff.
[TextLink:] https://twitter.com/AntiToxicPeople/status/1677062010146521088?s=20/photo/1
[Text:] 🐣 RT @realDonaldTrump Brit Hume of Fox has really gotten it wrong! First of all, he never thought I would win in 2016, & some things never change. In 2020 | got more votes than any sitting President in history, by far. Biden didn’t get 80 million votes. The Election was Rigged, even if you just want to go by the recent FBl/Twitter Files Hoax, or the DOJ/ Facebook Scam, or True the Vote, where tapes of millions of Votes are shown being “Stuffed.” He likes to say lost, but I didn’t, & my Endorsements almost all won!
↥ ↧
🔄 💙 ⋙🐣📔 Definitive: Lost, Not Stolen: The Conservative Case that Trump Lost and Biden Won the 2020 Presidential Election https://lostnotstolen.org by John Danforth, Benjamin Ginsberg, Thomas B Griffith, David Hoppe, J. Michael Luttig, Michael W McConnell, Theodore B Olson, Gordon H Smith
// 7/14/2022
⋙ pdf: http://bit.ly/3caHzaE 72p
// Signatories: Senator John Danforth, Benjamin Ginsberg, The Honorable Thomas B. Griffith, David Hoppe, The Honorable J. Michael Luttig, The Honorable Michael W. McConnell, The Honorable Theodore B. Olson, Senator Gordon H. Smith
As part of his post-election attempts to retain the presidency, Donald Trump and his supporters filed 64 cases containing 187 counts in the six key battleground states, in addition to utilizing some of the recount and contest procedures available to them under state law. The former president maintains to this day that the 2020 election was stolen and the results fraudulent.
This Report takes a hard look at the very serious charges made by Trump and his supporters. The consequences of a president and a major party candidate making such charges are monumental. If true, our electoral system is in desperate need of repair. If not true, that must be said because such false charges corrode our democracy and leave a significant share of the population doubting the legitimacy of our system, seriously weakening the country. To have 30 percent of the country lack faith in election results based on unsubstantiated claims of a “stolen” election is not sustainable in a democracy, and it discredits the political party making those charges. We hope that setting out the full record in this Report will help restore faith in the reliability of our elections.
🐣 RT @7Veritas4 Ok, why don’t you file to dismiss the charges based on your hilarious understanding of the PRA and Clinton socks case? ¤ When everyone is done laughing at you, we can proceed to trial.
[TextLink:] https://twitter.com/7Veritas4/status/1677076989818142723?s=20/photo/1
[Text:] 🐣 RT @realDonaldTrump Deranged Jack Smith purposefully omitted the Presidential Records Act from his sham Indictment, even though he knows that the PRA is the only law that applies to this subject. Nor does he mention the Clinton Socks Case, or any of the many others cases that are exactly on point, and completely vindicate me. He should be ashamed of himself but, more importantly, he, the DOJ, and the FBI, should be sanctioned for PROSECUTORIAL MISCONDUCT and Grand Jury Abuse. ELECTION INTERFERENCE!!!
🐣 RT @harrylitman This could be a very illuminating deposition. Trump was single-minded in his focus on them and dragged them through the public wringer repeatedly.
⋙ 🐣 RT @lawofruby TRUMP DEPOSITION: Despite a motion for reconsideration by DOJ, Judge Amy Berman Jackson of the D.C. federal court has ordered that Trump must sit for a limited deposition in Pete Strzok and Lisa Page’s lawsuit relating to the violation of their privacy/retaliation.
[TextLink:] https://twitter.com/harrylitman/status/1677068650262720512?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @OAlexanderDK How it started: How it is going:
[TextLink:] https://twitter.com/OAlexanderDK/status/1677044148858134528?s=20/photo/1 -2
// 1. Musk demeans former Twitter employees
2. Musk asserts Twitter’s rights over trade secrets
[Text:] Dear Mr. Zuckerberg:
I write on behalf of X Corp., as successor in interest to Twitter, Inc. (“Twitter). Based on recent reports regarding your recently launched “Threads” app, Twitter has serious concerns that Meta Platforms (“Meta*) has engaged in systematic, willful, and unlawful misappropriation of Twitter’s trade secrets and other intellectual property.
Over the past year, Meta has hired dozens of former Twitter employees. Twitter knows that these employees previously worked at Twitter; that these employees had and continue to have access to Twitter’s trade secrets and other highly confidential information; that these employees owe ongoing obligations to Twitter; and that many of these employees have improperly retained Twitter documents and electronic devices. With that knowledge, Meta deliberately assigned these employecs to develop, in a matter of months, Meta’s copycat “Threads” app with the specific intent that they use Twitter’s trade secrets and other intellectual property in order to accelerate the development of Meta’s competing app, in violation of both state and federal law as well as those employees’ ongoing obligations to Twitter.
Twitter intends to strictly enforce its intellectual property rights, and demands that Meta take immediate steps to stop using any Twitter trade secrets or other highly confidential information. Twitter reserves all rights, including, but not limited to, the right to seek both civil remedies and […]
🐣 RT @ChuckPfarrer BAKHMUT AXIS /1810 UTC 6 JUL/ Ukraine broke up RU platoon / company sized offensive operations at Orikhovo-Vasylivka, Bohdanivka, Hyrhorivka, Khromove & Bohdanivka. On 5 JUL, UKR units were reported to have gained the high ground overlooking the village of Klischvika.
🌎 https://twitter.com/ChuckPfarrer/status/1677015792339111936?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @Victorshi2020 Holy shit. The June jobs report is jaw-dropping. Private sector jobs INCREASED by 497,000 which is 270,000+ MORE than expected. Annual pay also rose at 6.4%. Folks, this is Bidenomics working in real time and it’s simply amazing. Thank you, President Biden.
⋙ 🐣 RT @Victorshi2020 Wow. Watch the moment Fox learned about the new jobs report today. “Big, big, big jump”; “That’s not recessionary at all”; The U.S. economy is “strong.” These are Fox’s words, not mine. And all I have to say is thank you, President Biden.
🐣 RT @ officejjsmart ZAPORIZHIA NUCLEAR: BAD SIGNS FROM 🇷🇺
The situation is worsening with the Zaporizhia Nuclear Power Plant. The 🇷🇺 Government & proxies have released documents that mirror those that they published right before destroying the Kakhovskaya Hydroelectric Station, stating:
1. No nuclear accidents in the “new [🇷🇺-occupied] territories” will be investigated for 5 years.
2. Russia’s nuclear agency bears no responsibility for nuclear incidences.
3. Russian citizens affected by a nuclear incident will not receive compensation.Another bad sign: a company in St Petersburg 🇷🇺, specializing in cleaning-up disasters, just listed vacancies for doing nuclear disaster clean-up.
Putin is a terrorist: He will do terrorism: ¤ WE MUST STOP PUTIN NOW.
🐣 RT @KyivIndependent Putin signed an executive order in April, setting a deadline for applying for Russian citizenship in occupied areas of Ukraine. Those who decline and keep their Ukrainian passports risk losing property rights, imprisonment, and deportation. [link]
WaPo: Mercenary boss Prigozhin returned to Russia to collect money and guns https://tinyurl.com/mrujkxbj “Officials in Moscow appear to be wrestling with the difficult question of how Wagner can be replaced, both in Ukraine and in its operations in Africa”
ForeignAffairs: The Surprising Bipartisanship of US Foreign Policy https://tinyurl.com/4cuhzct3 “[V]igorous internal debate has long been a strength of the US system, facilitating greater deliberation before important decisions & providing … course corrections when things go awry”
// Even in Times of Polarization, Consensus Has Prevailed
🐣 RT @ChuckPfarrer AVDIIVKA AXIS /1315 UTC 7 JUL/ During the nights of 4, 5 and 6 JUL, UKR missile/artillery units conducted a series of strikes that targeted a Petroleum, Oil and Lubricants (POL) depot near Yasynuvata, and 3 large ammo storage areas near Makivka. Large quantities of RU ammunition and fuel were destroyed.
🌎 https://twitter.com/ChuckPfarrer/status/1676939396489138176?s=20/photo/1
NBCNews: Former U.S. officials have held secret Ukraine talks with prominent Russians https://tinyurl.com/28bw82vs “‘If you’re having Track Two negotiations about how to end the war, Ukrainians have to be there,’ said [Former US Ambassador to Russia, Michael] @McFaul”
// The aim of the discussions is to lay the groundwork for potential negotiations to end the war, people briefed on the talks tell NBC News.
🚫 ⋙ 🐣 Step 1: Refuse to supply Ukraine with ATACMS and F-16s which are needed to employ NATO-style combined arms warfare, assuring Step 2: Counter-offensive stalls, Step 3: Initiate secret negotiations with Russia: Step 4: Force a ceasefire: So much for “nothing about Ukr w/o Ukr”
TVPWorld (2018): Volhynia massacres and its significance in Polish-Ukrainian relations https://tinyurl.com/2k5fm3p7
// 7/10/2018; history
🐣 RT @ManiacMagic1 263K Euros of 650K were already raised to purchase a Slovakian made Bozena-5 remote demining machine. With the 200k down payment collected, it should begin production and be delivered before the end of the year.
💽 https://twitter.com/ManiacMagic1/status/1676909627689123841?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @anno1540 Russia is ripe for civil war – Kyrylo Budanov
¤ https://twitter.com/anno1540/status/1676910252007014400?s=20
According to the secret data of the Ministry of Internal Affairs of the Russian Federation, analyzed by Ukrainian military intelligence, during the mutiny on June 24 and 25, the owner of “Wagner” Prigozhin had the support of the population of 17 of the 46 regions of Russia, and the Russian dictator Putin – the 21st. In particular, the latter could count on the loyalty of Moscow, but not St. Petersburg, and the lowest support for Putin was recorded in Dagestan.
“This is what we see now: Russian society is torn in two. The situation indicates exactly what our service was talking about: the Russian Federation is on the verge of civil war. A small internal “issue” is needed, and the internal conflict will intensify,” explained Kyrylo Budanov. https://t.me/UaOnlii/55470
🐣 📋 RT @ @highbrow_nobrow 📊Election 2020
1. President Joe Biden won 477 counties that together generate 70% of U.S. GDP.
2. Donald Trump carried 2,497 counties that generate 29% of the American economy.
@CNBC, @BrookingsInst.
◕ [CNBC:] https://twitter.com/highbrow_nobrow/status/1676843812319121410?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @Flash_news_ua ⚡️ Volodymyr Zelenskyy told CNN about changes in attitudes in russian society and the obvious weakening of the current russian leader:
“18 or 19 regions of russia supported the actions of prigozhin, the same [ed. regions supported] putin, and this is a clear indication that his [ed. putin’s] so-called «power vertical» — spilled. Almost the entire rutin army is on the territory of Ukraine; he no longer controls the situation in the regions, the security situation in his state… The world must put pressure on putin’s regime and himself right now when he is so weak”
⭕ 5 Jul 2023
WaPo: New details of Trump Mar-a-Lago search warrant request unsealed https://tinyurl.com/3jnhc55x More boxes were taken out than were returned to the storage room; then lawyer Corcoran swore falsely that all documents had been turned over: Trump had lied to him
// The previously secret sections describe statements by Donald Trump’s lawyer and recount movements of boxes caught on camera
🐣 RT @anno1540 The Ministry of Foreign Affairs reacted to the US statement on the terms of Ukraine’s membership in NATO and called on the world not to look back at Moscow
¤ https://twitter.com/anno1540/status/1676934461634560000?s=20
The press secretary of the White House Karin Jean-Pierre said that Kyiv needs to carry out reforms to meet the standards of the North Atlantic Alliance before joining it.
“Apart from Ukraine, there is currently no other country in the world that would carry out so many reforms in the conditions of a large-scale war on its territory . Fundamental internal transformations in Ukraine will inevitably continue,” – responded the spokesman of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Ukraine Oleg Nikolenko
“As soon as our partners will consider the issue of Ukraine’s membership in NATO without looking back at Moscow, it will become obvious that giving Ukraine an invitation to join the Alliance already at this stage meets the security interests of the allies, it will be an important step for restoring peace in Ukraine and Europe in general and making it impossible repetition of Russian aggression in the future,” the diplomat added ¤ Details: [Ru link]
NBCNews: Former U.S. officials have held secret Ukraine talks with prominent Russians https://tinyurl.com/28bw82vs “‘If you’re having Track Two negotiations about how to end the war, Ukrainians have to be there,’ said [Former US Ambassador to Russia, Michael] @McFaul”
// The aim of the discussions is to lay the groundwork for potential negotiations to end the war, people briefed on the talks tell NBC News.
🚫 ⋙ 🐣 Step 1: Refuse to supply Ukraine with ATACMS and F-16s which are needed to employ NATO-style combined arms warfare, assuring Step 2: Counter-offensive stalls, Step 3: Initiate secret negotiations with Russia: Step 4: Force a ceasefire: So much for “nothing about Ukr w/o Ukr”
TVPWorld (2018): Volhynia massacres and its significance in Polish-Ukrainian relations https://tinyurl.com/2k5fm3p7
// 7/10/2018; history
🐣 RT @ManiacMagic1 263K Euros of 650K were already raised to purchase a Slovakian made Bozena-5 remote demining machine. With the 200k down payment collected, it should begin production and be delivered before the end of the year.
💽 https://twitter.com/ManiacMagic1/status/1676909627689123841?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @EuromaidanPress Russia plans to mobilize additional 500,000 soldiers – Ukraine’s General Staff ¤ Russia is preparing to fully provide its armed forces with significant mobilization resources to wage a long war of attrition. [link]
¤ https://twitter.com/EuromaidanPress/status/1676788558907179009?s=20
🐣 RT @TreasChest I wanted our counteroffensive to take place much earlier, because everyone understood that if the counteroffensive was launched later, most of our territory would be mined, — President of Ukraine Volodymyr Zelenskyi in an exclusive interview with CNN.
¤ https://twitter.com/TreasChest/status/1676780716032401409?s=20
“In any direction that Ukraine chooses to attack, time is the enemy and the later we start, the more difficult it will be for us, because in this way we give our enemy time and the opportunity to prepare their defensive lines,” Zelenskyi said.
All this time, the Ukrainian president has constantly and repeatedly appealed to Western governments with a request to provide Kyiv with more modern weapons as soon as possible, but the issue of supplying the same ATACMS is still not resolved.
“Today we have the opportunity to launch a counteroffensive in some directions.
But in some directions we cannot even think about its beginning, because we do not have the appropriate weapons.
And throwing our people to death with Russian long-range weapons would be simply inhuman,” Zelenskyi said.
@POTUS @SecBlinken @SecDef @nato @SpeakerMcCarthy What are you waiting for? Please give them everything they need to move forward and stop procrastinating
🐣 RT @ChuckPfarrer AVDIIVKA AXIS /0200 UTC 6 JUL/ During the night of 4 JUL, UKR missile/artillery units conducted a precision strike on a RU ammo depot at Malivka. A large explosion was followed by scores of secondary blasts which lasted until daylight. This success was followed on 5 JUL, with a second UKR strike that targeted a Petroleum, Oil and Lubricants (POL) depot near Yasynuvata.
🌎 https://twitter.com/ChuckPfarrer/status/1676727523697209347?s=20/photo/1
Reuters (6/30): Fact Check: Politico did not report that 20 million Ukrainians would die to win war https://tinyurl.com/2p8kxtxd “No such headline was published by Politico, said Emma Krstic, the outlet’s audience development editor” ⋙ in fact, no such article
🐣 We are: DOD (June 13): DOD Announces New Round of Aid for Ukraine https://tinyurl.com/yckdfm9n “dozens more Bradley Infantry Fighting Vehicles and Stryker Armored Personnel Carriers”; also mentions munitions for HIMARS and NASAMS
🔄 USBank: Understanding tax law changes https://tinyurl.com/3y2cw885
// 1/6/2023
📋 TheGuardian (2022): Wealthiest Americans pay just 3.4% of income in taxes, investigation reveals https://tinyurl.com/mth3f87h
// 4/13/2022; Tax records from 2014 to 2018, analysed by ProPublica, show 25 Americans collectively earned $401bn but paid just $13.6bn
🐣 RT @ChuckPfarrer OUT OF THE BLUE: @Azovsouth reports that a Ukrainian HIRMARS strike has targeted the administration building at Volnoakha in occupied Donetsk Oblast. Other sources suggest the building was the ‘residency’ of the FSB detachment of RU intelligence.
🌎 https://twitter.com/ChuckPfarrer/status/1676633182878269449?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @djrothkopf They are to blame. They knew it would happen. They covered it up. Why aren’t they subject to massive law suits?
⋙⋙ 🐣 RT @SenWhitehouse July 3 was hottest day ever recorded across Planet Earth. It will get worse. The fossil fuel industry is to blame. Reuters: https://tinyurl.com/57t6uy75
⋙ 🐣 TheGuardian (June 7): Game changing’: spate of US lawsuits calls big oil to account for climate crisis https://tinyurl.com/5f8234n8
🐣 RT @ChuckPfarrer BAKHMUT AXIS /1645 UTC 5 JUL/ Front line reportage on 5 JUL indicates that UKR forces have advanced 250 meters and have taken the hilltops dominating the village of Klischiivka [See Inset]. The capture of this key terrain will likely lead to further advances south of the Bakhmut urban area,
🌎 https://twitter.com/ChuckPfarrer/status/1676628607475630080?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @front_ukrainian ⚡️⚡️Bakhmut will be released, the losses of the 🇷🇺Russians are 8-10 times higher than the 🇺🇦Ukrainian losses, – Commander of the Ground Forces of the Ukrainian Armed Forces Sirskyi.
● The counteroffensive is going according to plan, and Ukraine has not yet used its main forces.
● For PMC “Wagner” the end has come, and the story with them will be closed.
● Now the main goal is to exhaust the enemy’s forces in order to create a breakthrough at the front.
● The command takes into account the presence of the enemy’s nuclear weapons and the possibility of using them, but is not afraid of it.
AZCentral: Arizona Secretary of State’s Office subpoenaed by Special Counsel Jack Smith in Jan. 6 inquiry https://tinyurl.com/3ku9xymj
// “The inquiries highlight the key role Arizona played in the 2020 presidential election, where Joe Biden edged out Trump by 10,457 votes — the narrowest margin in the nation. The election has drawn ongoing scrutiny since the polls closed in November 2020, extending to a contentious state Senate review of Maricopa County’s presidential ballots and numerous lawsuits.”
🐣 RT @AntiToxicPeople The utterly deranged former President is out with another ALL CAPS unhinged rant that would land pretty much anyone else in the psych ward.
[TextLink:] https://twitter.com/AntiToxicPeople/status/1676592528412295169?s=20/photo/1
[Text:] 🐣 RT @realDonaldTrump MASSIVE PROSECUTORIAL MISCONDUCT IS CURRENTLY TAKING PLACE IN AMERICA. THE WEAPONIZATION OF LAW ENFORCEMENT CANNOT BE ALLOWED TO HAPPEN. CRIME & INFLATION ARE RAMPANT, OUR BORDERS ARE OPEN, OUR ELECTIONS ARE RIGGED, OUR ECONOMY IS IN SHAMBLES, OUR ENERGY INDEPENDENCE IS GONE, OUR “LEADER” IS MERCILESSLY MOCKED, & OUR COUNTRY IS BEING DESTROYED BOTH INSIDE & OUT. DO THE PEOPLE OF THIS ONCE GREAT NATION EVEN HAVE A CHOICE BUT TO PROTEST THE POTENTIAL DOOM OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA??? 2024!!!
🐣 Russia has nothing to offer the wider world besides Active Measures ~
No useful governance model (Mob State)
No working economic system (Oligarchy)
No products beyond fossil fuels
Your military is WW2, decrepit
Your valor is stolen
Even your vaunted great writers despised you
🐣 RT @CherylRofer A “Chernobyl II” is not possible. The fuel in the ZNPP reactors is hard oxide, and there is no graphite to burn as it did in Chernobyl. Additionally, the containment is a reinforced concrete building around a stainless steel vessel, unlike the containment of Chernobyl.
¤ https://twitter.com/CherylRofer/status/1676336228537618432?s=20
⋙ NuclearDiner, Cheryl Rofer: The Danger At Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant https://tinyurl.com/5cxnkf6c
[…] The six reactors at ZNPP are not at all like the Chernobyl reactor and cannot, CAN NOT, have the same kind of accident. Chernobyl had a graphite moderator, and the building it was in was not the heavily reinforced concrete of the reactors at ZNPP. The ZNPP reactors have hard oxide fuel encased in metal, and are inside a stainless steel vessel. Chernobyl had no such vessel. …
The Post mentions the possibliity of a Fukushima-type accident. The reactors at Fukushima operated right up until the earthquake. The ZNPP reactors have been mostly shut down for months. That means that the Fukushima reactors were much hotter, both thermally and radiologically, than the ZNPP reactors are now. Additionally, all control was lost at Fukushima. There are measures the ZNPP operators can take to mitigate such an accident. …
WaPo: The DNC Has a Primary Problem https://tinyurl.com/3rnyu63j //➔ The idea that Blacks (20%) are the “backbone of the party” is incorrect: White Women are (35%, followed by 25% White Men) and are critical to winning in the crucial Swing States; NH should go first, not SC @TheDems
// The White House wanted South Carolina to vote first in 2024. The Democratic National Committee obliged. It hasn’t gone according to plan.
🐣 RT @TreasChest 🤔 The ISW assessed the threat of a terrorist attack at the ZNPP. ¤ Researchers believe that the Kremlin will not dare to take such a step. According to their data, the provocative statements of Russian politicians are more aimed at accusing Ukraine of irresponsibility at the ZANP before the upcoming NATO summit. ¤ Channel 24
🐣 RT @NOELreports Russian military correspondent Alexander Sladkov claims that Russian forces have left Klishchiivka. ¤ “We left Klishchiivka. This is near Bakhmut. It is necessary to check, and if refuted, I will be glad. If it is true, that’s bad and Bakhmut will be under fire control of the Armed Forces of Ukraine. I can’t say a bad word about our guys who moved away. According to my data, this is again a lack of shells. I’ll be glad to be wrong. You won’t be strong without strength. The weak don’t win. The city of Bakhmut is under threat of assault. Can we keep it? Yes, who knows.”
🐣 RT @Feher_Junior 🇨🇳 Chinese leader Xi Jinping personally warned Putin against using nuclear weapons in Ukraine during his visit to Moscow in March -Financial Times
Keeping Putin from using such weapons has been a central element of China’s campaign to repair damaged ties with Europe.
⭕ 4 Jul 2023 🇺🇸
WhiteHouse (July 4): Joe Biden on NATO Secretary General Stoltenberg’s Extension https://tinyurl.com/4m2vdx4s
[TextLink:] https://twitter.com/Auriandra/status/1676876997341978624?s=20/photo/1
Joe Biden: “I welcome the announcement that NATO will extend Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg’s term for an additional year.
With his steady leadership, experience, and judgment, Secretary General Stoltenberg has brought our Alliance through the most significant challenges in European security since World War II.
Today, our Alliance is stronger, more united and purposeful than it has ever been. I look forward to continuing the work with Secretary General Stoltenberg to further strengthen the Alliance next week at the NATO Summit in Vilnius, and ahead of the 75th Anniversary NATO Summit in Washington, D.C. next year.”
🐣 RT @IuliiaMendel Russians are good in creating panic. I’ve seen this multiple times through my career. Rumors, unverified accounts, propaganda news that play with people’s fears and emotions… I don’t know if Russians are going to blow up ZNPP tonight, but they have definitely created the panic online…. #StandWithUkraine
FT: Ukraine provides ideal ‘testing ground’ for western weaponry https://tinyurl.com/3z926shd “Experts had long suspected the Patriot was capable of shooting down a Kinzhal, but it took the Ukrainian military to demonstrate it. They have since intercepted more than a dozen.”
// Kyiv’s defence minister says allies are gaining priceless intelligence about the performance of their munitions
🔆 This❗️⋙ WaPo: Judge blocks U.S. officials from tech contacts in First Amendment case https://tinyurl.com/26jyt7k5 “Doughty’s order comes as social media companies recently have begun to unwind some of the programs created to address disinformation”
// The Trump-appointed judge’s move could upend years of efforts to enhance coordination between the government and social media companies
🐣 RT @lukeharding1968 The situation at Zaporizhzhia nuclear power station – behind me yesterday – is alarming. Kyiv says the Russians have placed explosives today on top of reactors three and four ahead of a possible false flag operation. Rus Telegram channels report an imminent “Ukrainian attack”
🖼 https://twitter.com/lukeharding1968/status/1676312736202911756?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @KateGoesTech Occupiers are leaving Energodar, where the Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Station is located ¤ All 🇷🇺 channels claim “🇺🇦 is preparing the provocation” tonight ¤ 🇺🇦 channels are checking the direction of the wind … ¤ It is devastating what Eastern Europeans have to deal with mentally [link]
🌎 https://twitter.com/KateGoesTech/status/1676317959269089282?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @7Veritas4 Get ready to explain “put out to rest” to the judge this week.
[TextLink:] https://twitter.com/7Veritas4/status/1676357392970268672?s=20/photo/1
[Text:] As my Poll numbers go higher & higher, the Communists, Marxists, & Fascists get more & more CRAZY with their ridiculous Indictments & Election Interference plans & plots, all controlled by an out of control, & very corrupt, DOJ/FBI. They have WEAPONIZED Law Enforcement in America at a level not seen before. Deranged Jack Smith, who is a sick puppet for A.G. Garland & Crooked Joe Biden, should be DEFUNDED & put out to rest. Republicans must get tough or the Dems will steal another Election. MAGA!
🐣 RT @ChuckPfarrer ZAPORIZHZHIA NUCLEAR PLANT /2000 UTC 4 JUL/ UKR’s Defense Intelligence service has information of a planned Russian provocation at the occupied Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Plant. Sources indicate that Russian troops have emplaced demolition charges within reactor containment structures.
🌎 https://twitter.com/ChuckPfarrer/status/1676313821839761409?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @ZelenskyyUa Now we have information from our intelligence that the Russian military has placed objects resembling explosives on the roof of several power units of the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant. Perhaps to simulate an attack on the plant. Perhaps they have some other scenario. But in any case, the world sees – can’t but see – that the only source of danger to the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant is Russia and no one else. Unfortunately, there was no timely and large-scale response to the terrorist attack on the Kakhovka hydroelectric power plant. And this may incite the Kremlin to commit new evil. It is the responsibility of everyone in the world to stop it, no one can stand aside, as radiation affects everyone.
‼️ 🐣 RT @EricHolthaus Just in: July 3rd was the hottest day ever measured in human history. ¤ We are in a climate emergency. ¤ IPCC: We need “rapid, far-reaching and unprecedented changes in all aspects of society” — and you are part of the solution. https://climatereanalyzer.org/clim/t2_daily/
◕ https://twitter.com/EricHolthaus/status/1676276743672406022?s=20/photo/1
↥ ↧
‼️ 🐣 RT @rgatess Perhaps there’s no conclusive evidence that we’ve crossed climate tipping points, but based on current extreme anomalies in several climate system areas, we may be exceptionally close. From a geological perspective we are at the very precipice. @MichaelEMann Graphic from @ZLabe
◕ https://twitter.com/rgatess/status/1676264749645049856?s=20/photo/1
// global sea ice
⋙ 🐣 RT @MichaelEMann The current weather extremes really don’t indicate any tipping point behavior. They are consistent with steady human-caused warming plus El Niño. The truth is bad enough.
🐣 RT @ChuckPfarrer BAKHMUT AXIS /1730 UTC 4 JUL/ Under heavy fire from aircraft and artillery, Ukrainian forces successfully repelled RU offensive operations at Hyrhorivka, Bohdanivka, Yahidne, Ivanivske, & Bila Hora. Front line reportage on 4 JUL indicates that UKR has launched offensive operations E of Orikhovo-Vasylivka, N of Yahidne and at Klischiivka. (Developing).
🌎 https://twitter.com/ChuckPfarrer/status/1676283250170372096?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @USA_Polling Republicans more likely to fall for misinformation than Democrats
Article: https://doi.org/10.3758/s13428-023-02124-2
◕ https://twitter.com/USA_Polling/status/1676259418076266496?s=20/photo/1
Russia has no more right to be on the Security Council than Ukraine. In fact it has less. More Ukrainians died as % of pop. and war in the East was for Ukraine:
⋙ EuromaidanPress, Timothy Snyder (2017): Nazi dreams of an enslaved Ukraine: the blind spot of Germany’s historical memory https://tinyurl.com/47spba6p
🐣 RT @NOELreports Russian channels claim that tomorrow evening, Ukraine will launch a missile and drone attack on the Zaporizhzia Nuclear Power Plant. While simultaneously dropping munition from an aircraft filled with radioactive material. The backup plan is a Tochka-U filled with radiactive substances.
🐣 RT @Gerashchenko_en Prigozhin received back the money found during searches in his office in St. Petersburg
The Russian newspaper Fontanka reports that the law enforcers initially had no intention of returning the money they found – 10 billion rubles [$111 million], hundreds of thousands of dollars, and five bars of gold. ¤ However, according to the source, “a force majeure circumstance intervened…”. According to preliminary reports, Prigozhin was in Moscow that weekend, attending some meetings.
Instead of the owner of Wagner PMC, his driver arrived to pick up the billions with an official power of attorney. ¤ Did it look like it was Putin’s personal order?
I suppose Prigozhin might have some compromising information about Putin, since after an armed mutiny he gets away with it and gets his money back. Will he use it to sponsor his next rebellion?
⋙ 🐣 RT @KathyLehan3 seems Prigozhin is needed to keep the calm for now as Putin attempts to repaint and downplay Wagner’s populism while maintaining the congruence. Wagner’s success is paramount to Putin’s, and Prigozhin is it’s “handler”.SCO and Africa fit in here.
🐣 RT @anno1540 🦀⚖️🔗 A new case against Putin: lawyers have found a way to bring the head of Russia to trial for the main crime – an attack on Ukraine.
¤ https://twitter.com/anno1540/status/1676186306429218819?s=20
Two parallel trials on crimes against Ukraine and its citizens may start in The Hague. In addition to the International Criminal Court, which deals with war crimes and has already issued arrest warrants for Putin and Belova for the theft of Ukrainian children, a full-fledged tribunal is being prepared for the military aggression against Ukraine itself.
Yesterday, the International Center for the Prosecution of the Crime of Aggression against Ukraine (ICPA) opened in The Hague. “ The most important thing about this news is that this center is the first step towards the creation of an international criminal tribunal over the military and political leadership of Russia,” international lawyer Sergei Golubok told MO. The Special Military Tribunal is a separate judicial body that is not related to the International Criminal Court. Its establishment is necessary in order to judge the leadership of the Russian Federation precisely for the crime of aggression .
🔺 The crime of aggression is the very fact of the invasion of Ukraine on February 24, 2022. This is not the same as war crimes , which are a consequence of an invasion. The ICC can only investigate war crimes. In March, he issued an arrest warrant for Putin for the illegal deportation of Ukrainian children. But the crime of aggression does not fall under its jurisdiction, since the initiation of such a case requires the sanction of the UN Security Council , in which Russia has the right of veto.
Thus, a legal vacuum arose that did not allow Putin to be tried for an attack on Ukraine. In January, the European Parliament adopted a resolution calling for the creation of a special tribunal over the military and political leadership of Russia , bypassing the sanctions of the UN Security Council , in order to still bring the aggressor to justice. The ICPA was the first step towards the establishment of such a tribunal. https://tinyurl.com/554xdkkj
🔺ICPA will support national investigations into the invasion of Ukraine. The investigation will be carried out by independent prosecutors from different countries , including Ukraine, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, Poland and Romania and the United States. Later, other countries will be able to join the work of the center. The Judicial Center will also work closely with the ICC. Most likely, the jurisdiction of the special tribunal will be based on the national criminal legislation of Ukraine, a source familiar with the organization of this process told MO.
🔺ICPA is organized on the basis of the EU justice agency Eurojust. Eurojust will provide operational, legal, financial and logistical support, including for the preservation, conservation and analysis of evidence. The Center is funded by the Foreign Policy Instruments Service of the European Commission, with an initial contribution of 8.3 million euros.
Read more about the future work of the Tribunal here.
https://t.me/mozhemobyasnit/14593
⚠️ Subscribe, we will explain everything
https://t.me/mozhemobyasnit
💙 🐣 RT @URDailyHistory 4 July 1826: Thomas #Jefferson, the third #president of U.S. and John #Adams, the second president, die on the same day. They died on the 50th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence. #RIP #IndependenceDay #history #OTD #ad https://amzn.to/2CXziVR
🖼 https://twitter.com/URDailyHistory/status/1676155135179862016?s=20/photo/1
⭕ 3 Jul 2023
🐣 RT @NEWSMAX WOW! NEWSMAX #1 for all cable news ratings growth! Fox News declines bigtime . . . See Nielsen ratings: https://bit.ly/46mFC2q?twclid=2-4jmgw9ib3tg62kvmh92mdttaf
⋙ 🐣 While NewsMax’s rate of GROWTH may have increased, its absolute number of viewers is still much smaller than FOX’s https://tinyurl.com/4mpetfwz
◕ https://twitter.com/Auriandra/status/1676487176962318338?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @vinm300 Russian Tsar & Ottoman Sultan “Our Lord on earth”
Moscow is Asian in outlook and governance
Kyiv & Novgorod historically western
Land ownership – ALL land owned by Sultan/Tsar
Boyars addressed the Tsar saying “I am your slave”
Moscow is Asian
Kyiv is Western
🐣 RT @ChuckPfarrer RUSSIAN OFFENSIVE? UKR intel reports that RU is amassing a considerable force on the eastern front. This is likely the reason that UKR has been highly conservative in its offensive operations to date. Preparing to meet (and defeat) a possible RU attack would take priority over liberating occupied territory.
// “… amassing as many as 180,000 troops near the eastern front”
🌎 https://twitter.com/ChuckPfarrer/status/1676016592419713025?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @KyivIndependent⚡Zelensky urges Biden to support Ukraine’s NATO membership ¤ President Volodymyr Zelensky called on U.S. President Joe Biden to invite Ukraine to join NATO immediately, Zelensky told CNN in an interview on July 3.
🐣 RT @VovaDolbaeb Prigozhin was given the Ok from Lukashenko to recruit from Belarus prisons. ¤ He made an audio recording where he promised new victories on the front. ¤ Which front that will be, remains to be seen
💽 https://twitter.com/VovaDolbaeb/status/1676065057543794688?s=20/photo/1
WaPo: Civil rights complaint targets Harvard’s legacy admissions preference https://tinyurl.com/4nd49z6u “About 34% of applicants from the United States who were children of Harvard alumni were admitted” compared to just 6% for non-legacy applicants
// Group asks federal government to stop the university’s practice of giving a boost to children of alumni
🐣 RT @tribelaw “Unhinged from judicial standards, the court now roves through the policy landscape, overturning decades of law and reordering Americans’ lives and institutions. It upends women’s health, revamps college admissions, snatches student aid from millions and redefines public accommodations (allowing egregious discrimination). In aggrandizing power, the court illegitimately dominates policymaking, undermining democracy to an extent we have not seen in nearly 100 years” — @JRubinBlogger
🐣 RT @ChuckPfarrer RUSSIAN OFFENSIVE? UKR intel reports that RU is amassing a considerable force on the eastern front. This is likely the reason that UKR has been highly conservative in its offensive operations to date. Preparing to meet (and defeat) a possible RU attack would take priority over liberating occupied territory.
🌎 https://twitter.com/ChuckPfarrer/status/1676016592419713025?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @officejjsmart 🇷🇺 AMASSING > 180,000 TROOPS ⚡️⚡️Russia 🇷🇺 is amassing more than 180,000 troops near the front: There are 120,000 in the Limano-Kupyansk direction & around 50,000 near Bakhmut. – Sergey Cherevaty, Spokesman, Eastern Group, 🇺🇦 Armed Forces.
‼️Send Ukraine 🇺🇦 weapons NOW!!
🌎 https://twitter.com/officejjsmart/status/1675921394427633689?s=20/photo/1 -2
🐣 RT @ChuckPfarrer 2nd ORDER EFFECTS: Russia’s sabotage of the Kakhovka dam has almost completely drained the Dnipro reservoir. As the exposed riparian terrain is baked by the sun, it will provide a multitude of crossing points for Ukrainian forces. This unintended consequence will make it difficult for RU to defend the occupied south bank.
🌎 https://twitter.com/ChuckPfarrer/status/1675899259437170688?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @ ChuckPfarrer KHERSON AXIS /1500 UTC 3 JUL/ UKR forces continue in contact on the south bank of the Dnipro. A UKR drone took out a Russian Tigr armored vehicle in Olesky. Sources also report that A Russian Ka-52 attack helicopter was downed in the vicinity of Skadovsk.
🌎 https://twitter.com/ChuckPfarrer/status/1675881342637047808?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @ChuckPfarrer ORIKHIV AXIS /1740 UTC 3 JUL/ UKR forces are pressing contact at Bilohiria and along the H-08 HWY toward Luhivske. On the T-04-08 HWY axis, Russian units were engaged and pushed back after an encounter west of Kopani. UKR forces are in contact at Robotyne and are reported to have made incremental progress south.
🌎 https://twitter.com/ChuckPfarrer/status/1675995955169046529?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @ChuckPfarrer BAKHMUT AXIS /1315 UTC 3 JUL/ UKR maintains control of the pace of battle in the Bakhmut Area of Operations. RU attacks on the M-03 axis were defeated at Orikhovo-Vasylivka. RU attacks at Bohdanivka were broken up. UKR forces are have exploited a weekend breakthrough against Russian VDV units and are engaged on the high ground near Klischiivka.
🌎 https://twitter.com/ChuckPfarrer/status/1675853090308730880?s=20/photo/1
WSJ: Volodymyr Zelensky: Happy Birthday, America https://tinyurl.com/2exdyrbt “When Ukrainians took to the streets in 2014 to oust the Russian dictator, they … desperately wanted to be free—to be part of the West, governed by the ideals forged during the American Revolution”
// Ukraine is grateful to the U.S. for providing both support for and an example of liberty.
America’s Founders upended history when they forged a republic based on individual freedom and political pluralism, pledging to live as “free and independent states.” It was, and is, the greatest attempt in history to rid mankind of tyranny. They broke with centuries of subservience to create a new type of nation, one where all are equal and live free.
This majestic reality was created on July 4, 1776. On Feb. 24, 2022, we Ukrainians made the same choice. The American people stood with us and, I am sure, will stand with us to the end. Today, as Americans celebrate their freedom and independence, we celebrate with you and envision the day when every inch of Ukraine is free of the cruel tyranny that seeks to extinguish us.
A decade ago the current boss of Russia wrote that “America is not exceptional.” What he did later shows what he really meant. Many tyrants in human history have claimed global influence, but none of them could inspire the rest of the world to strive for the best in human nature. That’s why today’s Russian tyrants, like all tyrants, are fundamentally weak and their regime will crumble over time. When any tyrant hates America and denies its exceptional role in the struggle for freedom, he recognizes his own inevitable defeat. To Russian tyranny I say the world needs more, not less, American exceptionalism.
When Ukrainians took to the streets in 2014 to oust the Russian-backed dictator, they did so because they desperately wanted to be free—to be part of the West, governed by the ideals forged during the American Revolution, the idea “that all men are created equal, that they are endowed, by their Creator, with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” …
🐣 RT @ TelegraphWorld 🇺🇦 Around 700,000 children have been taken from conflict zones in Ukraine into Russian territory, a Russian MP has said.
Follow our liveblog for updates: [7:57am] https://tinyurl.com/mrrvktfp
¤ https://twitter.com/TelegraphWorld/status/1675760278707789824?s=20
Grigory Karasin, the head of the international committee in the Federation Council, Russia’s upper house of parliament, wrote on Telegram on Sunday: “In recent years, 700,000 children have found refuge with us, fleeing the bombing and shelling from the conflict areas in Ukraine.”
On Friday, Ukrainian prosecutors charged a Russian politician and two suspected collaborators with war crimes over the alleged deportation of dozens of orphans from the occupied village of Kherson in September and October 2022.
There is an arrest warrant issued by the International Criminal Court for Russian President Vladimir Putin for the alleged “unlawful deportation” and “unlawful transfer” of children from occupied areas of Ukraine to Russia that was issued in March.
Moscow has said that its programme of bringing children from Ukraine into Russian territory is to protect orphans and children abandoned in conflict zones. ¤ Ukraine had estimated that more than 19,000 children had been illegally transferred to Russia or Russian-held territory.
🐣 RT @Podolyak_M The importance of this year’s #NATO Summit in #Vilnius exceeds that of all the cumulative summits of the #Alliance since the infamous #Bucharest. The political leaders of the Alliance today must recognize their literal global and historical responsibility to the planet and the number of eyes that are now closely watching them. In Vilnius, the Alliance must demonstrate a will of steel, a clear unity and a fortitude that will inspire all Allies and sober those with evil intentions. This can be achieved not by bright speeches, but only by concrete decisions: we need a clear green light for #Ukraine’s accession to NATO in the foreseeable future and concrete large-scale decisions to strengthen military support for Ukraine’s defenders.
⭕ 2 Jul 2023
WaPo: Ukraine says Putin is planning a nuclear disaster. These people live nearby. https://tinyurl.com/5uht89k4 “Earlier this week, Ihor Klymenko, who heads the Ministry of Internal Affairs, announced training exercises at all levels of government to deal with a possible nuclear disaster”
💙 NYT, Ezra Klein: Biden Is Taking Aim at Trump’s Biggest Strength https://tinyurl.com/yp4fhsb6 “[L]etting globalization and automation hollow out domestic manufacturing …‘frayed the socioeconomic foundations on which any strong and resilient democracy rests’” […]
🐣 RT @ jimstewartson I was watching Trump’s event in Pickett, SC and called it a “Nuremberg rally.” ¤ As a test, I put the the end of Trump’s speech and Hitler’s from Nuremberg 1935, together. ¤ NOTE: The music is coming from Trump’s speech. It’s mixed in. No other editing or additions except labels.
💽 https://twitter.com/jimstewartson/status/1675272279314554882?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @Mike_Pence It is absolutely essential that United States continue to provide military support to the Ukrainian military to push back on Russian aggression. If Russia were able to overrun Ukraine, it would not be long before Putin ordered his troops over a border, that under NATO, we would be required to send our men and women in uniform.
Reuters: Musk’s Twitter rate limits could undermine new CEO, ad experts say https://tinyurl.com/bdfb98um “This move signals to the marketplace that he’s not capable of empowering her to save him from himself,” said advertising consultancy head Lou Paskalis
// “Lou Paskalis, the founder of advertising consultancy AJL Advisory and former marketing boss at Bank of America, said Yaccarino is Musk’s “last best hope” to salvage ad revenue and the company’s value.”
NYT: Lithium Scarcity Pushes Carmakers Into the Mining Business https://tinyurl.com/tmhcfz63 “In the first quarter of 2023, sales of battery-powered cars, pickups and sport utility vehicles in the United States rose 45 percent from a year earlier”
// Ford, General Motors and others are striking deals with mining companies to avoid raw material shortages that could thwart their electric vehicle ambitions.
WaPo Editorial: Hold Russia accountable for its war crimes https://tinyurl.com/d7fdywuu “True accountability would not be achieved by prosecuting individual Russian soldiers or officers while leaving the Kremlin’s cabal untouched”
🐣 RT @FareedZakaria Russia’s biggest problem is not that it’s losing the Ukraine war but that it’s losing the 21st century. ¤ My take:
💽 https://twitter.com/FareedZakaria/status/1675566288913981446?s=20/photo/1
🧵 RT @TrentTelenko [6/19] The size and duration (6 hours plus) of the secondaries at the Rykove (Partyzany) ammo depot (below) argue the PSU storm Shadow Strike hit a RuAF theater level ammo storage depot. ¤ This means things.Artillery Logistical 1/
📌 https://twitter.com/TrentTelenko/status/1670971803987058688?s=20
🧵 RT @BriannaWu 1/ I’m sorry to keep hammering on this story about @ElonMusk, but there are so many things to criticize. This is not up to @nytimes quality. ¤ First of all, there is issue that they take Musk’s statements at face value. This is journalistic malpractice.
📌 https://twitter.com/BriannaWu/status/1675546566780940288?s=20
WSJ: Departing CDC Director Rochelle Walensky Warns of Politicized Science https://tinyurl.com/3w7ypepm “[P]ublic health shouldn’t fall along partisan lines. ‘Some of our biggest divides were based on jurisdictions and how they voted,” Walensky said of Covid-19 vaccination rates’”
// Stepping down after 2 1/2 years, she says public needs to be wary of misinformation
🐣 📋 RT @mitchellvii That’s it. Trump is on drugs. ¤ He claims that 99% of the people he endorsed won. We know for a fact 64% of Trump endorsements in competitive swing districts in 2022 LOST. ¤ He claims that there were 75,000 at his Pickens rally. Actually it was about 2000. This stadium is what 75,000 looks like. This was Trump’s crowd. ¤ Trump is a delusional liar
🖼 https://twitter.com/mitchellvii/status/1675544589749321728?s=20/photo/1 -3
🐣 RT @Morning_Joe “The Republican Party’s big donors are uniting against Trump in a way they didn’t do in 16.”— @JoeNBC on the Koch network and other wealthy Republicans supporting other candidates to thwart Donald Trump’s potential nomination in 2024
⋙ 💽 MSNBC, MorningJoe: ‘Can money stop Trump in 2024?’: Koch network’s $70M move https://tinyurl.com/bdcuzpyy
// High-profile Republican donors, including the Koch network and Leonard Leo, are rallying their financial support behind initiatives to thwart Donald Trump’s potential nomination in 2024. This shift signals a departure from the 2016 election when the wealthy donors were divided. The question remains whether this concentrated effort will be enough to overcome Trump’s loyal base and find a viable candidate capable of defeating him. The Morning Joe panel discuss.
🐣 RT @wartranslated Chairman of the so-called “Russian parliament” Vyacheslav Volodin says the events of a week ago showed how strongly “the society is consolidated around the president”, that “no one supported the rebellion”, and that “Putin came out of this as even a bigger leader who strenghtened his position in the country and around the world”. ¤ This is some incredible level of cope but you wouldn’t expect anything else from a guy like Volodin.
[TextLink:] https://twitter.com/wartranslated/status/1675429029187395586?s=20/photo/1
🔄💙 EuromaidanPress, Timothy Snyder (2017): Nazi dreams of an enslaved Ukraine: the blind spot of Germany’s historical memory https://tinyurl.com/47spba6p
// 6/23/2017
🐣 RT @kylegriffin1 A ‘standing order’ that Donald Trump claimed authorized him to instantly declassify documents removed from the Oval Office could not be found by either the Justice Department or Office of Director of National Intelligence.
⋙ Bloomberg: Trump ‘Standing Order’ to Declassify Not Found by DOJ, Intelligence Agency https://tinyurl.com/4t73c5t8
// A “standing order” that former President Donald Trump has claimed authorized him to instantly declassify documents removed from the Oval Office could not be found by either the Justice Department or Office of Director of National Intelligence.
… [G]overnment attorneys have since confirmed in a letter sent Thursday to Bloomberg News that each agency “possesses no records responsive to your request” about the existence of a declassification standing order. ¤ The government was compelled to make the disclosure about the standing order after a judge in a similar case in Massachusetts ordered the agencies to say whether the standing order or records referencing it exist.
🐣 RT @maria_drutska Russia may start withdrawing troops from southern Ukraine to hold Bahmut, according to @TheStudyofWar
¤ https://twitter.com/maria_drutska/status/1675394347238342656?s=20
Analysts note that, due to Ukraine’s counter-offensive in Bahmut, the russian command is reallocating forces from other regions of Ukraine. It is known that the russians recently moved an unspecified airborne regiment from the Lyman direction to Bahmut.
However, if the reinforcements already sent to Bahmut are insufficient, russia might have to risk creating significant vulnerabilities in the Kherson or Luhansk regions or start withdrawing troops from southern Ukraine.
🐣 RT @DefenceHQ [UK]
Latest Defence Intelligence update on the situation in Ukraine – 2 July 2023.
Find out more about Defence Intelligence’s use of language: https://ow.ly/1OrG50P24zn
🇺🇦 #StandWithUkraine 🇺🇦
[TextLink:] https://twitter.com/DefenceHQ/status/1675379034190934016?s=20/photo/1
● Russia has cancelled the 2023 iteration of MAKS, its premier international air show. Scheduled every other year, MAKS takes place near Moscow and showcases Russia’s civil and military aerospace sectors and has become key to securing exportcustomers.
● The show has probably been cancelled largely due to genuine security concerns, following recent uncrewed aerial vehicle attacks inside Russia. Organisers were highly likely also aware of the potential for reputational damage if fewer international delegations attended.
● The war has been exceptionally challenging for Russia’s aerospace community. The sector is struggling under international sanctions; highly trained specialists are being encouraged to serve as infantry in the Roscosmos space agency’s own militia. Meanwhile, Commander in Chief of the Aerospace Forces, General Sergei Surovikin, has not been seen in public since the abortive mutiny by Wagner Group, for whom he served as point of contact with the Russian Ministry of Defence.
🐣 RT @DevanaUkraine Did you know that during the time of Peter the Great, the Russian language did not exist, and there was never a single Slav on the territory of Russia? More about it in this video with English Subtitles.
💽 https://twitter.com/DevanaUkraine/status/1675427909178122240?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @wartranslated Prigozhin has completely disappeared from the picture. His once very popular audio messages are no more. His “press service” has been silent for days. It really is quite a scene. ¤ But the aftertaste for Russians is not pleasant. Officials are going out of their way to minimise the impact of the mutiny. Prigozhin was allowing the pressure of the enormous Russian losses and incompetency to release. Now there’s no such valve, and there’s no one of weight and importance to replace him. ¤ If it goes off again, it will not be pretty.
WSJ: Ukraine’s Zelensky Seeks to Stay Strong—and Human https://tinyurl.com/5y7wm7cf “He chatted at length with injured soldiers and medics at a hospital. He chaired a meeting on exports at the port. Then he sat for more than an hour with the Journal”
// President talks about remaining grounded, projecting strength, rejecting talks with Russia
⭕ 1 Jul 2023
🐣 RT @officejjsmart “THE 🇷🇺 REVOLT IS NEARING” ¤ ⚡️⚡️⚡️ Igor Girkin (Strelkov), a 🇷🇺 nationalist who played a key role in Russia’s 2014 invasion of Ukraine 🇺🇦, just wrote his 900K Telegram followers something important.
¤ https://twitter.com/officejjsmart/status/1675244110159007745?s=20
Key parts:
📌 A week since Prigozhin revolted, which shot down 6 aircraft & killed “more than 10 (no one knows for sure) 🇷🇺 soldiers – no measures have been taken to punish the rebels.
📌 Rather, Prigozhin travels around and freely enters Russia – and everyone behaves like “this is normal.”
📌 None of the “incompetent or cowardly” government leaders, nor those who ran away when Prigozhin showed-up, have been punished. AND the “President” doesn’t even talk about it.
⚡️⚡️⚡️ 📌 “The result??
ANOTHER REBELLION IS NOT FAR OFF. WE ONLY NEED TO WAIT FOR ANOTHER DEFEAT AT THE FRONT AND THE REBELLION WILL BEGIN .”
⚡️⚡️⚡️ 📌 “It does not matter who starts the revolt – NOW NO ONE WILL RESIST AGAINST THE REBELLION. NOBODY AT ALL. ¤ IT MAKES NO SENSE RISKING YOUR LIFE DEFENDING SUCH A USELESS AND MISERABLE GOVERNMENT.”
📌 You cannot save a country whose leaders are so “rotten that they have lost even the elementary instinct of self-preservation. They prefer to do nothing.”
When well-known, hardline 🇷🇺 nationalists, who happen to be former intelligence, openly say the situation in Russia 🇷🇺 is out-of-control: ¤ Things are about to get VERY exciting in Moscow. 🔥🔥🔥
🐣 RT @ yasminalombaert Putin regime:
1. Allowed a criminal to organize an illegal private army
2. Allowed to recruit drug addicts, murderers, pedophiles into this army
3. Supply this gang with weapons
4. I pumped tens of billions from the state budget into this gang
5. Praised this gang on TV
6. Advertised this gang at every turn
7. Rewarded the leaders of this gang
8. Released killers and pedophiles from this gang to freedom
9. Persecuted those who criticized this gang
10. Turned a blind eye to public executions
And when the gang, brutalized by weapons, money, blood and impunity, rebelled, the Putin regime blamed the West for everything, and declared itself the savior of Russia. ¤ https://t.me/AteoGo
Video : Channel 4 News
TheGuardian: ‘Yevgeny Prigozhin will never be discussed again’: Russian media to erase all traces of mutinous warlord https://tinyurl.com/3wt3pupc
// The Wagner mercenary group boss who marched on Moscow has had his internet outlets blocked and troll factory closed down
Suddenly, Yevgeny Prigozhin is a phantom. Is he in Belarus or St Petersburg? … For nearly a decade, Prigozhin has sown scandal in Russia, creating a troll factory empire, leading Russia’s interference into foreign elections and bankrolling the Wagner mercenary group that fought in Ukraine and has propped up dictators in Africa.
In last weekend’s mutiny, he also called for upheaval, leading an armed rebellion that many fear could turn to score-settling or even looting in Moscow, including the upmarket homes of Moscow’s wealthy Rublyovka district. ¤ “This call to go get those thieves in Rublyovka was revolutionary,” said Konstantin Remchukov, editor-in-chief of Nezavisimaya Gazeta, who saw Vladimir Putin last week at a closed-door meeting for top editors. “[The elite] truly fear Prigozhin as a possible alternative to Putin. There would be no guarantees, no protection, no rules to the game.”
Instead, it is Prigozhin’s empire that will now crumble, ending a decade of his schemes and tricks doing some of the Kremlin’s dirtiest work. ¤ On Friday, Russia blocked the websites of the Ria Fan, Politics Today, Economy Today, Neva News and People’s News online media outlets, part of a constellation of online sites that pushed out fake news in support of Prigozhin’s agenda. ¤ The St Petersburg-based outlet Rotunda also reported that Prigozhin’s Internet Research Agency, a troll factory where low-paid interns would try to sow anger and distrust by writing aggressive comments under news and social media posts, had also been closed down. …
Many of Prigozhin’s tactics, from online social sabotage to recruiting convicts from prisons, have since been adopted by the Russian government. Numerous state corporations and even private businesspeople sponsor their own small mercenary groups now. …
Long seen as plausibly deniable, he will now be simply ignored as the Russian government seeks to maintain his overseas mercenary empire and its influence in Africa while eliminating Prigozhin’s personal role.
“Until the war and Bakhmut, we would rarely write about Prigozhin – he was seen as an unclear character, not anti-government but best not to touch,” said a former editor at a Russian state news agency, citing contacts with colleagues. “Now it is as though he never existed.” ¤ “[Editors] are saying: ‘Right, we’ve addressed [the mutiny] but now we are going to get back to normal, and Prigozhin will never be discussed, definitely not on TV.’” …
For some wealthy Russians, Prigozhin is now synonymous with the chaos of a potential battle for power in Russia. The Kremlin and its supporters claim that the mutiny actually consolidated Putin’s power because it showed that without him there could be a civil war. …
Prigozhin himself is supposedly in Belarus, although he has not been photographed there recently. But many have asked the question: how long can he survive? ¤ “I’ve thought a few times about what I would write if he died,” said the former state news editor, when asked if they had prepared an obituary. “I can’t imagine that he will be alive for long.”
🐣 RT @RBReich Let’s talk about the real affirmative action in America. ¤ In Harvard’s Class of 2022, 36 percent of those admitted were legacy students. ¤ 70 percent of those legacy applicants were white. ¤ This is a reality that’s echoed amongst other elite universities across the country.
🐣 RT @ ChuckPfarrer A PROPHECY: @officejjsmart has translated a tweet by Igor Firkin [Girkin], the ‘Cassandra’ of RU Mil Bloggers. Girkin is sure another Russian rebellion only awaits the next military defeat. A rebellion of front line Russian troops — who lay down their weapons and refuse to fight — would spell the end of the Special Military Operation and of Putin.
🖼 https://twitter.com/officejjsmart/status/1675244110159007745?s=20/photo/1
⋙ 🐣 RT @officejjsmart “THE 🇷🇺 REVOLT IS NEARING” ⚡️⚡️⚡️ Igor Girkin (Strelkov), a 🇷🇺 nationalist who played a key role in Russia’s 2014 invasion of Ukraine 🇺🇦, just wrote his 900K Telegram followers something important.
Key parts:
📌 A week since Prigozhin revolted, which shot down 6 aircraft & killed “more than 10 (no one knows for sure) 🇷🇺 soldiers – no measures have been taken to punish the rebels.”
📌 Rather, Prigozhin travels around and freely enters Russia – and everyone behaves like “this is normal.”
📌 None of the “incompetent or cowardly” government leaders, nor those who ran away when Prigozhin showed-up, have been punished. AND the “President” doesn’t even talk about it.
⚡️⚡️⚡️ 📌 “The result?? ¤ ANOTHER REBELLION IS NOT FAR OFF. WE ONLY NEED TO WAIT FOR ANOTHER DEFEAT AT THE FRONT AND THE REBELLION WILL BEGIN .”
⚡️⚡️⚡️ 📌 “It does not matter who starts the revolt – NOW NO ONE WILL RESIST AGAINST THE REBELLION. NOBODY AT ALL. ¤ IT MAKES NO SENSE RISKING YOUR LIFE DEFENDING SUCH A USELESS AND MISERABLE GOVERNMENT.”
📌 You cannot save a country whose leaders are so “rotten that they have lost even the elementary instinct of self-preservation. They prefer to do nothing.”
—
When well-known, hardline 🇷🇺 nationalists, who happen to be former intelligence, openly say the situation in Russia 🇷🇺 is out-of-control: ¤ Things are about to get VERY exciting in Moscow. 🔥🔥🔥
🐣 RT @ChuckPfarrer ORIKHIV AXIS /0210 UTC 2 JUL/ UKR forces are pressing contacts on the rail line paralleling the H-08 HWY east of Mala Tokmachka. UKR task elements are reported in contact within the limits of Luhivske. Russian units have broken contact and withdrawn along the Konka River toward Polohy.
🌎 https://twitter.com/ChuckPfarrer/status/1675324020760227841?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @Tendar I’m increasingly hearing and reading the following comments from Russians in regards to the war in Ukraine:
¤ https://twitter.com/Tendar/status/1675198134392086529?s=20
“The war is wrong, but we cannot allow to lose now. Everything what has been invested in this war would have been lost and it all would have been in vain.” ¤ You know how this is called? ¤ Sunk-cost fallacy
A significant part of Russians have now subscribed to a nation-wide experiment, in (false) hopes that the continuation of the war will yield something to a point which would be better than before, despite seeing evidence for the exact opposite. The Russian high-water mark in this war was early March 2022. Ever since this point Russia lost literally according all possible metrics. Let’s just go through some of them:
– less net-controlled territory
– humiliating defeats in Kherson and Kharkiv
– much more destruction
– 150.000 more Russian casualties
– the modern Russian army gear almost entirely destroyed
– cities in ruins, even in Russia
– emboldened and unified Ukraine and West
– Russia’s stance in the world considerably diminished
– open rebellion by Wagner and incursions by Russian rebels
– large economic projects such as Nordstream destroyedEtc. I could go on and on. You will not find a single aspect which was in better shape for Russia after March 2022. Every further “investment” in this lost cause just increased problems and it will increase the bill Russia has to pay after the war, which is certain.
The sunk-cost fallacy is the death trap for every dictatorship, cult or doomed company. Instead admitting to have drawn the wrong conclusions, change directions and write off the mistakes, failed leader such as Putin double down on stupid and hope that perceived strength is just as good as real strength. But even children learn sooner rather than later that closing your own eyes does not make the inconvenient aspects of life disappear. Facts have the inconvenient behavior to ignore your wishful thinking and come back, twice as strong than before. Seeing some ordinary Russians falling for this is not surprising, but when the whole Russian ship goes down like the Moskva then many Russians will have only one question left:
“How we couldn’t have seen that?” ¤ Well, because you chose to.
NYT, Paul Sonne: Mutiny Provided Glimpse of a Post-Putin Russia. Is the Window Still Open? https://tinyurl.com/52vywd2h Prighozhin “showed how someone willing to tell hard truths about the Russian government’s mistakes in Ukraine could find a sympathetic audience”
// Yevgeny Prigozhin’s revolt showed the possibility of a Russia after Vladimir Putin — and how pro-democracy forces may not be the ones that take over.
🔄🐣 RT @ randymot4 How much is US aid to Ukraine actually costing US taxpayers? Let’s use $40 billion a year (which is the highest year). …
◕ https://twitter.com/randymot4/status/1675104052588298242?s=20/photo/1
… Most is spent in US, so it is really not $40 billion of lost revenue, since expenditures in US generate jobs and tax revenue (historically defense spending is 0.6 net reveneue loss). Real revenue impact is probably more like $27 billion.
But let’s use the full $40 billion from the peak year: 50% of federal revneue comes from income taxes. So $20 billion of that comes from individual tax payers. The top 10% pay about 48% of individual income tax collected. So the bottom 90% (where those complaining are) pay about $10 billion of their taxes toward Ukraine aid. Approximately 160 million tax returns are filed, so 90% would be 144 million taxpayers for $10 billion of UKR aid or about 20 cents a day.
So the whining, low information American who does not think defeating the Russian army and destroying Putin’s capacity to wage war is worth it, is complaining about 20 cents a day out of their pocket. This is after the US has spent trillions trying to deter Russia.
This is the most well-spent money in the Federal budget. #UkraineAid#DefundUkraine ???
KyivPost, Chuck Pfarrer and Jason Jay Smart: Chaos May Be Coming to Russia https://tinyurl.com/5z759t4v “Despite his best efforts to project strength, Russian President Vladimir Putin is in the weakest and most precarious position of his career. [He] may now be gazing into the abyss”
// Russian history has shown that military defeat is the handmaiden of political change. Recent events could lead Russian soldiers to decide it’s better to surrender than die in a futile war.
Russia’s 72-hour “Special Military Operation” is now into its 16th month, and there are signs that Putin’s war of conquest may be about devour him instead of Ukraine. The repercussions of a Russian military collapse would be earth shaking.
Despite his best efforts to project strength, Russian President Vladimir Putin is in the weakest and most precarious position of his career. The uncontested autocrat, who has ruled from the Kremlin for 23 years, may now be gazing into the abyss.
Wagner chief Yevgeny Prigozhin has shaken the Kremlin to its foundations. In the coming days, Putin must gingerly move forward with a purge to sort out loyalists from rebels; and he does so “blindfolded” – with no real idea how deep the Wagner conspiracy might go.
WaPo: Trump pressured Arizona Gov. Doug Ducey to overturn 2020 election https://tinyurl.com/mppvbd5e “Ducey, long eyed by national Republicans as a formidable candidate for the U.S. Senate, passed on a 2024 bid after his standing with the Trump base cratered”
🐣 RT @randymot4 Quietly under opsec, Ukraine is blowing big holes in the Russian lines. Bakhmut is a pendning disaster for Russia. Near Tokmak UKR units have made very significant gains. The bridgehead over the Dnirpo is still there, after days of Russians futile efforts. Patience has won out over impulsiveness. Ukraine stood against calls to hurry up, in order to save lives and reduce the Russian defenses to the point of the current crumbling. …
🐣 RT @oleksiireznikov Dear #fellas, it’s an honor for me to be a proud member of #NAFO. Just want to take this opportunity to once again thank you for what you are doing: donating to support our troops, fighting misinformation and propaganda, and of course, bonking those russian trolls.
We will win, and we’ll rock out at that Crimean Beach Party 🏖️ 🎉 🍹
⭕ 30 Jun 2023
Politico, Alyona Getmanchuk and Olena Halushka: Why Ukraine should get an invitation to NATO https://tinyurl.com/2b2h57w9
// Opening accession talks won’t drag the Alliance into the war with Russia — in fact, it will prevent it.
WaPo: CIA director, on secret trip to Ukraine, hears plan for war’s endgame https://tinyurl.com/2av7b7xm “In an ideal scenario favored by Kyiv, Ukraine’s military would … advance troops and powerful weapons to the edge of Ukraine’s boundary with Crimea”
// During meetings in Kyiv, William Burns was told of Ukraine’s ambitious goal to retake territory and push Moscow into talks by the end of the year
TheTimes [UK]: Putin knows his history: the end will be brutal and from within https://tinyurl.com/yu7s5ues //➔ Great history and great writing #highlyrec
// 6/30/2023; Despite having the trappings of a functional constitution Russia remains an autocracy in which, from Peter the Great to Stalin, leaders either anoint their successors or are removed by bloody force, writes Simon Sebag Montefiore
⋙ See under Entire Articles: Putin’s End 6-30-2023
In the history of a nation famed for its blood-spattered successions, it was the most savage liquidation of an autocrat — and is ever in the mind of a history-obsessed Russian ruler who this week may be feeling the insecurity of a system in which the despot seems omnipotent but in which there is no orderly succession nor safe retirement and in which the jeopardy is intensified by his own merciless war. At midnight on March 23, 1801, Tsar Paul, successor and son of Catherine the Great, heard footsteps on the stair of his impregnable new residence, Mikhailovsky Castle. He did not have time to wonder how the assassins had gained access, nor how none of his multiple security agencies had reported the conspiracy, nor why this paradomaniacal military enthusiast was about to be challenged by his own elite officers.
Paul leapt out of bed in his nightgown and hid behind a tapestry. The conspirators, almost a hundred, were led by his top generals and many of them were drunk after a pre-regicidal champagne drinks party. They were let in by the emperor’s closest servant. They passed the bedrooms of his mistress, who did nothing. His son Alexander, heir to the throne, waited listening downstairs as they burst into the chamber. Paul was destroyed by war: his capricious foreign policy, including sending an army to attack British India, and his crazy, inconsistent personal terror, humiliating officers and nobles, convinced his trusted chief minister, Count Peter von der Pahlen, and his generals to depose him.
The conspirators saw his feet and dragged him out. When he refused to abdicate, a giant officer hit him with a golden snuffbox, knocking out an eye, then several threw themselves on to him. Holding down his limbs, they smashed his head on the floor and strangled him with his sash. When it was done, several drunkenly stomped the head to pulp. Downstairs his sobbing son, Alexander I, learnt he was now emperor and a parricide. Russian government, joked the French femme-de-lettres Germaine de Staël, was “autocracy tempered by strangulation”. Its 21st-century governance is not much improved.
Vladimir Putin surely knows the story well: he is a history buff specialising in 18th-century tsars and empire-builders. (God save us from omnipotent history buffs!) His three favourite characters — Peter the Great, Catherine the Great and Prince Potemkin — all either faced attempted military coups or successfully launched them.
Russia is run in such a way that orderly successions are virtually impossible. It has the trappings of a functioning constitution — elections, presidency, legislature — but that is cosplay. It is actually an autocracy that tolerates no real opposition, so the politics takes place in secret cabals in palace corridors, lubricated by money and vodka, enforced by pistol and swagger. Coups, intrigues, covins and conspiracies are the only ways to get anything done. …
🐣 RT @RepDanGoldman In just 2 days, this Court has set civil rights back decades and blocked life-changing opportunities for millions of Americans. Precedent means nothing to conservative justices legislating from the bench with no transparency or accountability. ¤ We need reform and we need it now.
🐣 RT @RollingStone Commentary: The Supreme Court has become just another arm of the religious right — and the rest of us are all paying for it.
⋙ RollingStone: The Supreme Court Sold Its Soul to the Christian Right https://tinyurl.com/yc6nsjny
// From affirmative action to LGBTQ rights to student loans, the court delivered for a vocal minority made up of religious extremists
🐣 RT @igorsushko Kremlin asset Nigel Farage says his bank in the UK closed his accounts without explanation and 7 other banks refused his money. Well, yea, they don’t want the liability of holding his dirty money. Free market at work. I’m sure he’s welcome at Sberbank in Russia. [CNB link]
🐣 RT @RonFilipkowski This makes me think that he, or his lawyers, were told something. Maybe not, but this seems rather random for him to make this prediction today.
[TextLink:] https://twitter.com/RonFilipkowski/status/1674842153099329536?s=20/photo/1
[Text:] 🐣 RT @@realDonaldTrump I predict that the Racist District Attorney in Atlanta, with the per capita WORST crime record in the Country, Fani Willis, where murderers “get away with murder,” and are seldom charged and almost never prosecuted, will be dropping all charges against me for lack of a case. I made a PERFECTLY LEGAL PHONE CALL, AS PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES, ABOUT AN ELECTION THAT I STRONGLY FEEL WAS RIGGED AND STOLLEN. NONE of the MANY LAWYERS on the call minded my words, or even hinted at
wrongdoing. SCAM!
NYT, Mikhail Zygar: Putin Thinks He’s Still in Control. He’s Not. https://tinyurl.com/mr33faj7 The uprising showed Putin “in the worst possible light: weak, vacillating, incapable of exerting control. He alone is to blame for what happened, something that is obvious to everyone except him”
🐣 RT @michaeldweiss The problem with being a useful idiot for this regime is that the regime always ends up diminishing your usefulness and amplifying your idiocy.
⋙ 🐣 RT @TheGEC Putin on Wagner:
2020 “Wagner does not receive funding from the Russian state” https://bit.ly/434B8uD
2022 “Russian state has nothing to do with Wagner” https://bit.ly/3NpkG2a
2023 June 27 “all of the funding the Wagner Group received came from the state” https://bit.ly/46l2sHT
🐣 RT @maria_drutska I haven’t heard Medvedev’s nuclear threats for over a week; I almost started worrying about how he’s doing. ¤ Meanwhile, scientists have created a visualization of a nuclear war between the USA and russia. ¤ In such a scenario, more than 5 billion people could die from explosions, radiation, and starvation, including approximately 99% of the populations of the United States, Europe, russia, & China.
💽 https://twitter.com/maria_drutska/status/1674675418698244097?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @maria_drutska “The FSB has been tasked to kill Prigozhin,” – Head of the GUR Budanov
🐣 RT @GlasnostGone #Ukraine’s military intelligence agency said Russia’s reducing number of personnel & military at Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant. Few people would be surprised if Putin caused an #ecocide nuclear explosion to delay Ukraine’s advance on occupied #Crimea.
⋙ TheGuardian: Russia reducing number of personnel at Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant – reports https://tinyurl.com/wbaze6f8
// Russia is gradually reducing the number of personnel at the occupied Zaporizhzhia nuclear power station in southern Ukraine, Ukraine’s military intelligence agency said on Friday.
🐣 RT @GlasnostGone No one can be “unbothered” by the “horrific developments taking place now in #Ukraine & the crimes committed by Russia. #Ecocide & environmental destruction is a form of warfare…” Yesterday, @GretaThunberg visited Kyiv & talked to President Zelensky.
⋙ CNN: Greta Thunberg highlights environmental cost of war in Kyiv meeting with Zelensky https://tinyurl.com/h3szy6ra
⭕ 29 Jun 2023
🐣 RT @mccaffreyr3 Enormous insights into the fragility of the Putin regime. A bunch of corrupt gangsters. Hard to unseat Putin. He’s off gassing vulnerability. The bench waiting to take power are weak, divided, don’t trust anyone. Couple of thousand tac nukes.
⋙ 🐣 RT @Tendar Of course Prigozhin had help from Russian generals. (…)
¤ https://twitter.com/Tendar/status/1673972979452051456?s=20
You don’t march 800 km through 4 Russian oblasts virtually unimpeded if there is no significant support in the Russian generality. Putin had to order mayors with dump cars and excavators to set up barricades, because the Russian army was AWOL.
Even though the circumstances of Wagner`s stopping at the gates of Moscow are murky, I stand by my word that Moscow would have been taken by Sunday. The resistance of Putin’s regime was nonexistent or not willing to defend Putin and the question is not if Russian generals helped in this insurrection, but how many were involved.
The dissolution of Russian statehood is continuing and Putin is facing the dilemma whether to send out his few remaining bloodhounds to track down the insurrectionists and by doing so expedite the downfall of the Russian war effort or remain being a lame duck and being removed altogether in a short period of time. Since he is revengeful narcissist who already said that he will never forgive betrayal he would eventually go after the traitors, if he can regain some relative power back, and his enemies are most certainly aware of that fact. ¤ It’s going to be interesting either way, since he will lose no matter what. ¤ Source: [Below] #Russia #Ukraine #PMCWagner
🐣 RT @Mike_Pence While I strongly support American involvement in Ukraine, I heard again today frustration about how slow the Biden Administration has been in providing that military support. We are the most powerful Nation on Earth, we have the most powerful military on Earth, and we ought to be providing them with what they need to win.
💽 [CNN:] https://twitter.com/Mike_Pence/status/1674598630748037121?s=20/photo/1
BBC: Chinese spy balloon did not collect information, says Pentagon https://tinyurl.com/3pd3jaxv “The US ‘took steps to mitigate’ what intelligence the suspected spy balloon could collect, officials said on Thursday”
AtlanticCouncil, Taras Kuzio: Putin’s Wagner weakness is a signal to support Ukraine’s counteroffensive https://tinyurl.com/umc7ry2v “Putin’s failure to punish mutinous troops … has revealed him as a weak leader who is more inclined to capitulate than escalate”
🐣 RT @walter_report There were 17 schools in Bakhmut (11,600 children).
There were 29 kindergartens in Bakhmut (3,500 children).
In Bakhmut there were 3 colleges (2,000 students), 2 academies (6,000 students), several music schools, 5 cultural centers, 12 libraries…
There was a salt mine near Bakhmut with World’s largest underground concert hall.
A magnificent winery with a unique bottling method was also in Bakhmut.
There was a lot in Bakhmut. Was. Not anymore.
Such a city no longer exists.
Leveled down by russians.
Wherever russians come to – they ruin and destroy everything.
Scourge.
@apostrophe_ua
🖼 https://twitter.com/walter_report/status/1674538905939394560?s=20/photo/1
WaPo: Russian elite brace for sweeping Kremlin investigation into Wagner rebellion https://tinyurl.com/3ynky94r
WaPo, Ishaan Tharoor: The battle in Syria that looms behind Wagner’s rebellion https://tinyurl.com/yu28wtwt
🧵 RT @ChrisO_wiki The bitter feud between Yevgeny Prigozhin, Russian Defence Minister Sergei Shoigu and Chief of the General Staff Valery Gerasimov appears to have originated in Syria, as an interesting personal account by Prigozhin of the February 2018 Battle of Khasham illustrates. ⬇️
📌 https://twitter.com/ChrisO_wiki/status/1674479633545175047?s=20
[ThreadReader:] https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1674479633545175047.html
🐣 RT @gtconway3d From the journalist who first reported that a federal indictment was about to drop.
⋙ 🐣 RT @AndrewFeinberg NEW: Federal prosecutors are prepared to seek indictments against multiple figures in former president Donald Trump’s orbit and may yet bring additional charges against the ex-president in the coming weeks, The @Independent has learned
⋙⋙ TheIndependent: Prosecutors are prepared to hit Trump and his allies with new charges, sources say https://tinyurl.com/2n6sbwjt
// Prosecutors could bring between 30 to 45 additional criminal charges against the former president in the coming weeks
🐣 RT @ArmedMaidan Ukrainian forces breached dense mine fields and formidable defenses in a well-planned operation near Klishchiivka, south of Bakhmut, that advanced so rapidly it cut off an entire Russian airborne company, which surrendered after realizing too late it was surrounded, Euromaidan Press says in its latest frontline report […]
🌎 https://twitter.com/ArmedMaidan/status/1674540142441250816?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @Mike_Pence I know the difference between a genius and a war criminal, and I know who needs to win this war in Ukraine, and it’s the people fighting for their freedom and fighting to restore their national sovereignty. There is no room in our party for apologists for Putin. There is only room for champions of freedom.
🐣 RT @McFaul The longer autocrats stay in power, the more mistakes they make. They become isolated, surrounded by yes-men, and cut off from society. They think they know everything & stop listening to advisors. They get tired. #Putin has been in power for 23 years. That’s a long time.
🐣 RT @ KyivPost 🇺🇸Former US Vice President and candidate for nomination from the Republican Party, Mike #Pence, made an unannounced visit to #Ukraine, NBC News reported. ¤ He met with President #Zelensky, visited Moschun, #Bucha and #Irpin. ¤ “Supporting Ukrainian military is in our national interest,” Pence said.
🐣 RT @ZelenskyyUa The support of the United States for our fight for freedom is vital. The support of all Americans, every American family, all civil society groups, the Congress – both parties, both houses, and of course the support of President Joe Biden. I am grateful for this support!
Today, the 48th Vice President of the United States @Mike_Pence is in Kyiv. We discussed our defense, interaction between our nations, security cooperation, and importance of partners’ determination and certainty regarding Ukraine’s future membership in NATO. 🇺🇦🇺🇸
🐣 According to this @WashingtonPost chart, in states where affirmative action has been banned, Whites benefit by 2%, Asian-Americans by 1% and Blacks(!) by .5%; Hispanics are disadvantaged by 2%. Of greater importance is the fact that these effects are at the margins.
◕ https://twitter.com/Auriandra/status/1674487442957815810?s=20/photo/1
⋙ 🐣 ⇈ The relative positions of the groups don’t change much relative to one another.
WaPo: State affirmative action bans helped White, Asian students, hurt others https://tinyurl.com/y7fxu59s
🐣 RT @gtconway3d Before people start criticizing a decision they haven’t read, they should take a look at the facts of these “affirmative action” cases, in particular the outrageous facts of the case from my alma mater, Harvard. ¤ Race wasn’t just a “factor” in the mix. Asian-Americans were systematically denied admission because of their race, and everyone should stop pretending otherwise.
⋙ 🐣 What Harvard needs to do away with, if it seriously wants to eliminate bias, are legacy admissions.
⋙⋙ 🐣 RT @TafkaTrap Legacies are a red herring. The merit gap is small & it’s legacy whites bumping non legacy whites. Black/brown AA admits bump Asians/Jews & the merit gap is huge. Legacies are not comparable. At all. They’re also not illegal racial discrimination.
⋙⋙⋙ 🐣 whites are not all the same: other factors matter, like family income, regional, urban/rural, ethnicity, religion; I get really annoyed at all whites being viewed as one undifferentiated mass ¤ legacy admissions are the closest thing we have to a hereditary, landed gentry
🐣 RT @nytimes Breaking News: The Supreme Court rejected affirmative action at Harvard and UNC. The major ruling curtails race-conscious college admissions in the U.S., all but ensuring that elite institutions become whiter and more Asian and less Black and Latino.
🔆 This❗️⋙ NYT: Supreme Court Rejects Affirmative Action Programs at Harvard and UNC https://tinyurl.com/jerh5nkp
// In earlier decisions, the court had endorsed taking account of race as one factor among many to promote educational diversity.
📔≣ ⋙ NYT: Read the Supreme Court Decision https://tinyurl.com/ycxshf3t
// [CourtDoc (copyable)]
🐣 RT @Acyn Reporter: Is this a rogue court? ¤ Biden: This is not a normal court
🐣 RT @gtconway3d Before people start criticizing a decision they haven’t read, they should take a look at the facts of these “affirmative action” cases, in particular the outrageous facts of the case from my alma mater, Harvard. ¤ Race wasn’t just a “factor” in the mix. Asian-Americans were systematically denied admission because of their race, and everyone should stop pretending otherwise.
⋙ 🐣 What Harvard needs to do away with, if it seriously wants to eliminate bias, are legacy admissions.
WSJ: U.S. Considers ATACMS Long-Range Missiles to Bolster Ukraine’s Fight https://tinyurl.com/57y96sec “The precision-guided missiles can hit GPS-located targets … with pinpoint accuracy, impeding Russia’s ability to put its rear-echelon operations out of Ukrainian reach”
// Officials see new urgency after long reluctance to provide advanced missile system
🐣 RT @BettyBowers Man whose sister did his homework in high school, who paid someone smart to take the SAT for him, got into college cause his daddy gave them money, and was called “the dumbest goddamn student I ever had” by a professor is happy we’re going back to “merit-based” enrollment, y’all.
[TextLink:] https://twitter.com/BettyBowers/status/1674476477935386624?s=20/photo/1
// [Text:] “Donald Trump was the dumbest goddamn student I ever had!” — Dr. William T. Kelley
🐣 RT @Maks_NAFO_FELLA “The war between the security forces – the FSB and the Ministry of Defense of Russia – is entering an active phase” – GUR ¤ Therefore, physical destruction as a result of this confrontation is not excluded.
💙 🐣 RT @djrothkopf Bidenomics is real. It is a revolutionary. And it is producing better lives for Americans. By focusing on it, Biden is doing something else radical. He is not pandering or lying as his opponents do. He is running on the truth of his record.
⋙ 🐣 RT @JRubinBlogger Economists may look back on this time as an inflection point when historic investments ushered in a new era of domestic manufacturing, gave a new lease on life to the Rust Belt and improved the balance sheet of middle-class Americans.
⋙⋙ WaPo, Jennifer Rubin: ‘Bidenomics’ is transformative. Biden needs to ensure voters know it https://tinyurl.com/226e9s8d
The economy has created 13 million jobs, inflation has been more than cut in half, huge investments are being made in infrastructure and green energy, wage growth has begun to outpace inflation, the first drug price controls are going into effect and the biggest corporations will finally be forced to pay something in federal taxes. Yet polls show voters incorrectly think we are in a recession and remain negative about the economy. ¤ The White House is well aware of the problem.
🔄 Beginning this week, the White House is making a focused push to narrow the gap between performance and perception. On Monday, senior Biden advisers Mike Donilon and Anita Dunn released a four-page memo explaining the president’s vision, which they call “Bidenomics.”
🐣 📊 RT @KyivPost 78% – the vast majority of Ukrainians have close relatives or friends who were injured or killed during the Russian invasion of #Ukraine, according to the results of a sociological survey conducted by the #Kyiv International Institute of Sociology on May 26 to June 5, 2023 ¤ At the same time, 64% of Ukrainians have at least one close relative or friend who was wounded, and 63% have at least one close relative or friend who was killed.
¤ https://twitter.com/KyivPost/status/1674379118446559232?s=20/photo/1
⋙ 🐣 Respect 🙏
🖼 https://twitter.com/Auriandra/status/1674406871455637504?s=20/photo/1
// “Peaceful and Free Europe” / “Ukraine Refusing to Surrender”
🐣 RT @OleksiyDanilov [tr] The collapse of the “Budapest Memorandum” (1994), the failed Bucharest NATO summit (2008) were successive steps to encourage the Russian attack on Ukraine. The third mistake can be critical. History has proven that world stability is impossible without solving Ukraine’s security issues. We expect maximum specifics in the “anti-Budapest” style from the upcoming Vilnius summit…
🐣 📊 RT @ EuromaidanPress Ukrainiansv attitudes toward the largest allied countries remains very positive.
94% consider Poland a friendly country, 86% consider the United States friendly, 85% consider the United Kingdom friendly,
80% – Germany, a jump from 65% last year [link]
◕ https://twitter.com/EuromaidanPress/status/1674378348372393986?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @Flash_news_ua ⚡️The issues of Ukraine’s future membership in NATO will be discussed already after the summit in Vilnius, NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg said. ¤ “After the NATO summit, we will discuss Ukraine’s aspirations for NATO membership. And I am absolutely sure that the allies will send a very strong signal of support to Ukraine,”- said the Secretary General.
🐣 RT @ hwag_ucmc ‼️ Russian Threat to Europe’s Largest Nuclear Power Plant, Ukrainian intelligence issues stark warning ¤ Watch our explainer here: https://youtu.be/7tDWtvFhkxM
💽 https://twitter.com/hwag_ucmc/status/1674385565737795584?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @ @FinancialTimes Breaking news: Top Russian army general Sergei Surovikin — known as ‘General Armageddon’ — has been detained as the Kremlin cracks down on Wagner sympathisers following the militia’s failed mutiny last week https://on.ft.com/44pBQU2
🐣 RT @WarFrontline Wagner” will no longer fight in Ukraine, – Budanov
PMC “Wagner” will no longer participate in hostilities on the territory of Ukraine.And this is the most effective unit of the Russian Federation,which knew how to achieve success at any cost, said the head of intelligence💪🏼‼️👀
🐣 RT @ZelenskyyUa We have to realize that the path to our victory is difficult. And now, no one can say when we will complete it. But when the goal is clear and fair, it does not matter how thorny the path to this goal is. Ukraine will walk this path to victory! And this is no longer a dream – it is a reality.
🐣 RT @NOELreports “Bakhmut is fully controlled by the Armed Forces from the air, the occupiers are retreating from the northern streets,” commander Denys Yaroslavskyi said.
// “Defenders of Ukraine actually are working to take control of Klishchiivka and Berkhivka and its strategic heights near the city. After their capture, Bakhmut can be taken into an operational encirclement,” he added.
🐣 RT @Maks_NAFO_FELLA Girkin… Oh-oh again 👀
[TextLink:] https://twitter.com/Maks_NAFO_FELLA/status/1674317347434160128?s=20/photo/1
[Text:] Strelkov Igor Ivanovich #KRP ¤ While the face, vaguely similar to President (and absolutely not requiring compliance with the two-week quarantine necessary to get an appointment with the president) walked around Derbent, Hero of Russia Yevgeny Prigozhin traveled around Moscow, and then around St. Petersburg (where, apparently, he is now). No one is going to detain an eminent citizen who has recently been accused of rebellion. Although the whole country mourns at least 10 combat pilots killed through his fault. Listen, citizens: Do we really need to follow at least some laws in our country? Or is everything already possible?
🐣 RT @TelegraphWorld 🔴 Yevgeny Prigozhin was forced to launch his mutiny early because Russia’s security agency learnt of the plan in advance, Western intelligence agencies have said. ¤ Full story: https://tinyurl.com/bdz6yuyz
⭕ 28 Jun 2023
NewYorker, Susan Glasser: Why Donald Trump Was So Mad at Mark Milley That He Confessed to a Crime https://tinyurl.com/4p9t97k7 “Milley [was] concern[ed] throughout the volatile post-election period that Trump might escalate a confrontation with Iran”
… Milley [was] concern[ed] throughout the volatile post-election period that Trump might escalate a confrontation with Iran. I learned about this as part of my reporting for “The Divider,” a book on Trump’s Presidency I was working on with my husband, Peter Baker of the Times, and decided to publish the information then, given its relevance to the new disclosures about the Trump-Milley rift. The resulting July 15, 2021, piece described repeated meetings after the election, during which Milley objected to the prospect of strikes, which were being pressed on Trump by a circle of Iran hawks around the President as well as by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Milley even flew to Israel to have a meeting with him, at his home in Jerusalem, to urge him to back off. “If you do this, you’re gonna have a fucking war,” Milley told Netanyahu. Iran was in fact the subject of the final meeting Milley had with Trump, on January 3, 2021, when the chairman and other national-security advisers were summoned to the Oval Office on a Sunday afternoon to debate the matter one last time. At the end of the meeting, Trump raised the upcoming January 6th rally of his supporters to Milley and his acting Defense Secretary, Christopher Miller. “It’s gonna be a big deal,” Milley heard Trump say. “You’re ready for that, right?” …
[…] When Meadows’s ghostwriters showed up at Bedminster that day, the former President saw a chance to plant his story about Milley. It worked, by the way: the book that Meadows ultimately published in November of 2021, “The Chief’s Chief,” included a detailed account of the meeting in Bedminster, with the “sound of children laughing” at the pool outside drifting into the room as Trump, “dressed in a sport coat and a crisp white shirt,” recalled “a four-page report typed up by Mark Milley himself” that purportedly “contained the general’s own plan to attack Iran.”
No one made much of this attack on Milley when Meadows’s book came out. If anything, it underscored Trump’s own ignorance about the role of the Pentagon in dealing with its Commander-in-Chief. It is the military’s job, and that of its chairman as the President’s senior military adviser, to draw up war plans for any number of scenarios. Presenting such a plan to Trump on Iran is hardly proof of advocacy to use it.
What Milley had been so worried about in the final days of Trump’s Presidency was the spectre of an erratic leader, one who was cavalier with the nation’s secrets, impetuous in his thinking about war and peace, and consumed with himself and his effort to stay in power. All this was only confirmed by Trump’s rant against him. “This totally wins my case,” Trump had said in the taped interview that will now be used against him in court. But it already seems clear that the case it proved was Milley’s.
🐣 RT @ChakhoyanAndrew “Contrary to the conventional wisdom, when pushed against the wall, Putin did not lash out or become more dangerous. Rather, he became amenable to compromise and negotiation, focused on salvaging his position.” #mustread @MacaesBruno
⋙ NewStateman, Bruno Maçães: What Ukraine knew about the Wagner mutiny https://tinyurl.com/yty6tu7f
// Kyiv had been expecting Yevgeny Prigozhin to act for weeks. Now the truth is out: there is no Russian state.
🐣 RT @christogrozev As I said on @OutFrontCNN last night, we discovered a surge of panicky midnight communication between FSB, GRU and FSO already the night of 22 to 23 June, a full day before Prigozhin launched the coup attempt. This report may explain why.
⋙ 🐣 RT @bopancScoop: Wagner’s Prigozhin planned to capture Russia’s military leadership as part of his mutiny but had to rush the operation after Russian intelligence FSB learned of the plot some 48 hours in advance, which could in part explain its failure. [link] via @WSJ
⋙⋙ WSJ: Wagner’s Prigozhin Planned to Capture Russian Military Leaders https://tinyurl.com/439nfn7c
// Western intelligence officials say Russian domestic intelligence agency learned of plot in advance
🐣 RT @Flash_news_ua ⚡ EU members France and Germany, alongside the UK and US, have led efforts to agree on bilateral security arrangements to provide Ukraine with long-term financing, military supplies, training, and intelligence aimed at helping it repel russia’s full-scale invasion and protect it from future aggression, — Financial Times.
The proposed EU declaration is aimed at sending “a very clear political signal” to Ukraine and russia, according to one diplomat involved in the discussions. It is also seen as ensuring the bloc has a stake in the broader security framework being devised to protect Ukraine and is not sidelined by US-led Nato, according to a second official. 👉 Follow @Flash_news_ua
🐣 RT @OmarRiverosays BREAKING: Trump is hit with more bad news as legendary “Watergate” journalist Bob Woodward declares on live national television that he “has never seen anyone in government” who is such “an alarming, dangerous threat to national security” as Trump. ¤ But it gets even worse for Trump…
⋙ Woodward continued his brutal rant on CNN, revealing that the “contingency plans” that Trump stole “are most sensitive documents in the government because they outline during a crisis how we might attack Iran, what the casualties would be, how many ships would be sunk, how long it might take.” ¤ This should strike fear in the heart of EVERY American who cares about our national security and democracy.
🐣 RT @MuellerSheWrote Sorry, trump. This investigation started wayyyyy before you declared your candidacy. So technically, trumps candidacy is interfering with Jack Smith’s investigation.
⋙ 🐣 RT @KFaulders In response to ABC’s reporting, Trump’s campaign accused special counsel Jack Smith of “openly engaging in outright election interference and meddling by targeting one of the leaders of President Trump’s re-election campaign.” […]
🐣 RT @AccountableGOP Chris Christie: “We had people trying to hunt down the Vice President of the U.S. chanting, ‘Hang Mike Pence.’ And Donald Trump…sat outside the Oval Office in that dining room of his eating a well-done cheeseburger and watching TV and doing nothing to stop what was going on.”
💽 https://twitter.com/AccountableGOP/status/1674239987439501312?s=20/photo/1
🧵 RT @ WarintheFuture The ripples from the Wagner mutiny in Russia over the weekend continue to propagate across the Russian systems. A quick assessment of the impact on Russia’s ‘fighting power’. 1/25
📌 https://twitter.com/WarintheFuture/status/1674162791199174657?s=20
[ThreadReader:] https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1674162791199174657.html
🐣 RT @IuliiaMendel A joy to my heart. Ukrainian forces have reportedly crossed the Dnipro River and retaken territory on the left bank of Kherson province, in a move that paves the way for a future possible advance towards Crimea. ¤ According to pro-Russian Telegram channels, Ukrainian troops have seized the village of Dachi, opposite the city of Kherson, and near the destroyed Antonivskyi Bridge. They have dug in and are seeking to establish a bridgehead, the channels said. @guardian
🐣 RT @ ChuckPfarrer VELYKA NOVOSLIKA /0015 UTC 29 JUN/ UKR units on the Velyka Novoslika axis have liberated Rivnopil & the area to its south. RU forces were dislodged from the hamlet and fled toward Starornnaiorske. UKR has consolidated gains on the east bank of the Mokri Yaly River.
🌎 https://twitter.com/ChuckPfarrer/status/1674207386028867585?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @ Gerashchenko_en “And it would be right for Russia to ask for Ukraine’s membership in NATO now. ¤ Because NATO members defend themselves, not attack. ¤ NATO states defend nations, not rush into their neighbors to destroy their future. ¤ Russia, as the aggressor, knows this better than anyone else, a Russia that is now entering an era of rebellion and systemic weakness, is more than anyone interested in security on its internationally recognized borders. ¤ Therefore, Russia is also interested in Ukraine being in NATO” – @ZelenskyyUa
🐣 📊 RT @KyivIndependent Poll: 65% of Americans support arming Ukraine. ¤ Around 81% of Democrats, 56% of Republicans, and 57% of independents expressed their support for supplying Ukraine with weapons, a Reuters/Ipsos poll published on June 28 revealed.
🐣 RT @McFaul Obviously waiting for further confirmation, but very big news if true. Remember Putin named Surovikin to command Russian forces in Ukraine & then soon removed him, replacing him with Gerasimov. Was reporting at the time that soldiers were disappointed with that decision. Wonder what they are thinking now?
⋙ 🐣 RT @Faytuks Russian general Sergei Surovikin has been arrested, two sources close the Russia’s ministry of defence tells The Moscow Times
🐣 RT @igorsushko Exhibit for the Hague, if Putin lives to see his trial for war crimes. Russia “fully” funded Wagner Group atrocities around the globe. Russian state paid Wagner over ₽166.371 billion in the past year. $1.935 billion.
🐣 RT @BradMossEsq Big news is this wasn’t just an interview: it was a proffer session. Rudy is trying to avoid an indictment. ¤ Giuliani Sat for Voluntary Interview in Jan. 6 Investigation
⋙ NYT: Giuliani Sat for Voluntary Interview in Jan. 6 Investigation https://tinyurl.com/yhsvety9
// The onetime personal lawyer for Donald Trump answered questions from federal prosecutors about the former president’s efforts to remain in power after his 2020 election loss.
🧵 RT @ChrisO_wiki 1/ Russian sources reportedly say that Sergei Shoigu’s plan to defang the Wagner Group failed because he didn’t anticipate Yevgeny Prigozhin’s personal popularity. Prigozhin had prior knowledge of the moves being made against him, leading to his strike against Rostov-on-Don.
📌 https://twitter.com/ChrisO_wiki/status/1673963225845493764?s=20
[ThreadReader:] https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1673963225845493764.html
2/ Shoigu is nonetheless said to be unsackable due to knowing too many secrets and having too extensive a network of loyalists to be easily uprooted. Meanwhile, Putin is said to have been in complete confusion and reportedly put the FSB in charge during the mutiny. ⬇️
3/ The VChK-OGPU Telegram channel reports that a source has told it about what happened on the Russian government side immediately before Wagner’s mutiny: ¤ “The harbinger of a coup in Russia is always a strengthening of the protection of state institutions.
4/ “A few days before the escalation of the situation with the Wagner PMC, the FSO [Federal Protective Service] suddenly asked Rosgvardia [Russian National Guard] chief Zolotov for assistance from fighters of Dzerzhinsky division.
5/ “The Rosgvardians reinforced FSO patrols near the Kremlin, the White House [the Russian government’s main office], the presidential administration and other government facilities in the capital.
6/ “On 27 June, the reinforcements were withdrawn as suddenly as they appeared and the main state institutions were guarded as normal.
7/ “In addition to the strengthening of the security of the buildings, operative groups of the Central Security Service and the Main Staff of the Ministry of Defence flew to the war zone in advance, supported personally by Defence Minister Shoigu and his high-ranking entourage.
8/ “A group of officers of the Main Personnel Directorate of the Defence Ministry also flew to Rostov. They all were told there that by 1 July, the Wagner PMC shall be disbanded and cease to exist.
9/ “Newly arrived task force units and operational staff on the ground were ordered to make this transition without any excesses. ¤ Thus, with Moscow’s approval, the operation to disband Prigozhin’s army was to take place.
10/ “The protracted conflict between the defence minister and the head of the PMC was to have been ended. But things did not go according to plan.
11/ “According to the sources of VChK-OGPU, Shoigu was initially motivated by someone to take very drastic measures against several leaders of Wagner. Under any circumstances, Prigozhin and his associates, which included [Dmitry] Utkin, were to be interned.
12/ “But they did not take into account the popularity of the country’s chief chef with front-line officers, soldiers and service operatives. All possible scenarios for the detention of Prigozhin and his men have been made available to the latter.
13/ “As the VChK-OGPU source believes, they did not envisage the main thing – the unwillingness [of the military] to take the side of the extremely unpopular Special Military Operation leaders, Shoigu and Gerasimov.
14/ “That is when a missile strike was launched against Wagner’s positions. After the failed missile strike on Wagner’s positions the action unfolded. ¤ In a matter of hours the headquarters of the southern grouping and the city of Rostov-on-Don were taken.
15/ “The Defence Minister fled to Moscow. ¤ Then within twenty-four hours the Wagnerites effectively approached the capital.”
16/ As many commentators noted, Shoigu disappeared from view during the mutiny. According to VChK-OGPU, it was because he was effectively put into protective custody by the FSO while negotiations took place between the government and Prigozhin over his future.
17/ “Several VChK-OGPU sources confirmed information that after fleeing Rostov and the rapid advance of the Wagner PMC towards Moscow, Sergei Shoigu was effectively isolated by the FSO, he was not allowed anywhere under the pretext of personal security.
18/ “In reality, Shoigu was at this point the object of negotiations between Prigozhin and Lukashenko. It was because of Shoigu that Prigozhin initially broke off the negotiations (Putin refused to give up his defence minister).
19/ “However, the situation became more difficult by the hour, the convoy was rapidly approaching Moscow. As a result, Putin effectively met all Prigozhin’s demands by pushing back on Shoigu.
20/ “But even then he was not taken out of the isolation, because FSB Deputy Director Korolev personally initiated an urgent revision of all materials regarding the Defense Ministry (the issue regarding Deputy Minister Tsalikov is still open, by the way).”
22/ “[Aleksey] Dyumin also persuaded Putin of the need to “remove” Shoigu. But Putin decided otherwise – to make Shoigu into an almost-hero who defeated Prigozhin.
23/ “The source believes that the point here is that Shoigu is extremely dangerous in the event of resignation because of his knowledge, the huge number of people loyal to him in senior positions and his leverage over processes in the Kremlin.
24/ “This is not the harmless [Dmitry] Medvedev or [Vladislav] Surkov, whose silence and inaction can be bought with money, this is more serious. Putin is not ready for such a conflict right now,” reckons our interlocutor.”
25/ The FSB is said to have played a central role in dealing with the mutiny. During Wagner’s march on Moscow, VChK-OGPU published a cryptic account from a source: “In fact, the country is currently under the control of the FSB. Everywhere there’s fear and confusion.”
26/ The channel reports that another source in the Russian government “speaks of Putin’s utter confusion [during the mutiny] – he was only seen this way in 2014, when a Malaysian civilian Boeing was shot down by mistake [✛ TG Sources]
🐣 RT @ChuckPfarrer LONG RANGE PUNCH: US Senator James Risch says the possibility of sending long-range ATACMS missiles to Ukraine is high. Risch said in an interview with the Voice of America yesterday (27 June) that ‘ATACMS missiles are an effective weapon that Ukraine must receive ASAP’.
◕ https://twitter.com/ChuckPfarrer/status/1674174234052919297?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @haltman As Prigozhin sets up shop in Belarus, heads appear to be rolling in Russia of military leaders and others who may have helped him.
⋙ TheDrive: Purges Underway In Russian Security Apparatus After Prigozhin’s Mutiny https://tinyurl.com/mryc85wj
// Reports say Gen. Sergei Surovikin, head of the Russian Air Force and erstwhile Prigozhin ally, was arrested for his part in the mutiny.
🐣 RT @McFaul Surovikin is not some mid-level colonel. He is/was second in command in Ukraine and was first in command before Putin removed him. Having him out of the fight would be good for Ukraine. Having Russian soldiers pissed off about him being out of the fight would be even better.
🐣 RT @clashreport After the failed attempt of an armed rebellion, Moscow is conducting an “audit” of the activities of Wagner PMC around the world. ¤ Similar messages were transmitted to the authorities of the Central African Republic, Mali and the forces of Khalifa Haftar in Libya.
🐣 RT @7Veritas4 For those in the back, the investigations of his criminal conduct had started long before he declared his intentions. ¤ He isn’t running for President. He is running from his crimes. ¤ He isn’t being indicted for you. He is being indicted for Justice and the rule of Law.
[TextLink:] https://twitter.com/7Veritas4/status/1674032911551479809?s=20/photo/1
[Text:] 🐣 RT @realDonald Trump IF I WASN’T RUNNING FOR PRESIDENT, OR IF I WAS LOSING BADLY IN THE POLLS (I AM WINNING BY RECORD NUMBERS, & AGAINST BIDEN ALSO!), I WOULD NEVER HAVE BEEN FAKE INDICTED. LIKEWISE, IF THE VERY CORRUPT DEMOCRATS TRULY WANTED TO RUN AGAINST ME, I WOULDN’T HAVE BEEN INDICTED. IT IS ALL A BADGE OF HONOR & COURAGE. I AM BEING INDICTED FOR YOU!!!
🐣 RT @Maks_NAFO_FELLA INFORMATION FROM RUSSIAN MILITARY CORRESPONDENTS!!! According to preliminary information, Commander-in-Chief of the Russian Forces Surovikin and his deputy, Colonel-General Yudin, were detained and taken to the Lefortovo pre-trial detention center.
NYT: Something Is Messing With Earth’s Axis https://tinyurl.com/3pru9uy2 “In terms of the effect on Earth’s axis, pumping up water from underground was second in magnitude, between 1993 and 2010, only to the post-glacier adjustment of the planet’s crust, the study found”
🐣 RT @sentdefender U.S. Officials have told the NYT they believe that Command-in-Chief of the Russian Aerospace Forces, General Sergey Surovikin alongside several other Members of Russian Military Leadership knew about and possibly Supported the “Coup” by Yevgeny Prigozhin and the Wagner PMC Group.
🐣 RT @wartranslated Luka[shenko] the Mediator with his own vision of what happened on Friday, claims Putin made a decision to challenge Wagner with force, but Luka the Wise managed to get hold of Prigozhin who wasn’t picking up Putin’s calls.
NYT: Russian General Knew About Mercenary Chief’s Rebellion Plans, U.S. Officials Say https://tinyurl.com/2r25ctbb “If General [Sergei] Surovikin was involved in last weekend’s events, it would be the latest sign of the infighting that has characterized Russia’s military leadership”
// Yevgeny Prigozhin, the head of Wagner, may have believed he had support in Russia’s military.
⭕ 27 Jun 2023
🐣 RT @wartranslated Luka[shenko] the Mediator with his own vision of what happened on Friday, claims Putin made a decision to challenge Wagner with force, but Luka the Wise managed to get hold of Prigozhin who wasn’t picking up Putin’s calls.
📔 ChahamHouse: Report: How to end Russia’s war on Ukraine https://tinyurl.com/2hyyxape
// Safeguarding Europe’s future, and the dangers of a false peace
[…] Backing a full and unambiguous Ukrainian victory is therefore essential not only on moral but also practical grounds. Although recent increases in Western supplies of munitions and other hardware are welcome, the fundamental solution to many of the problems raised in this report remains: that Ukraine still needs a massive influx of weaponry. Without it, Ukraine will cease to exist as a sovereign state and an emboldened Russia will continue its imperialist campaign of expansionism against neighbours and aggression against perceived adversaries, democratic and otherwise, the world over. In the longer term, backing Ukraine will serve to deter other aggressors while potentially sowing the seeds for positive political change in Russia.
NYT: Supreme Court Rejects Theory That Would Have Transformed American Elections https://tinyurl.com/22kujys5 “The Constitution, Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. said, ‘does not exempt state legislatures from the ordinary constraints imposed by state law’”
// The 6-to-3 majority dismissed the “independent state legislature” theory, which would have given state lawmakers nearly unchecked power over federal elections.
The vote was 6 to 3, with Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. writing the majority opinion. The Constitution, he said, “does not exempt state legislatures from the ordinary constraints imposed by state law.” ¤ Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel A. Alito Jr. and Neil M. Gorsuch dissented.
… Though some of the biggest cases are still to come, probably arriving by the end of the week, the court has so far repeatedly repudiated aggressive arguments from conservative litigants. …
The case concerned the “independent state legislature” theory. It is based on a reading of the Constitution’s Elections Clause, which says, “The times, places and manner of holding elections for senators and representatives shall be prescribed in each state by the legislature thereof.”
Proponents of the strongest form of the theory say this means that no other organs of state government — not courts, not governors, not election administrators, not independent commissions — can alter a legislature’s actions on federal elections.
Chief Justice Roberts [writing for the majority ] rejected that position. “The Elections Clause does not insulate state legislatures from the ordinary exercise of state judicial review,” he wrote.
The ruling soundly dismissed the theory, one that an unusually diverse array of lawyers, judges and scholars across the ideological spectrum viewed as extreme and dangerous. Adopting the theory, they warned, could have profound consequences for nearly every aspect of federal elections, including by erasing safeguards against partisan gerrymandering and curtailing the ability to challenge voting restrictions in state courts.
But some election law specialists cautioned that Tuesday’s decision elevated the power of federal courts in the process, allowing them to second-guess at least some rulings of state courts based on state law.
“This gives the U.S. Supreme Court the ultimate say over the meaning of state law in the midst of an election dispute,” Richard L. Hasen, a law professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, wrote in a blog post. “This is a bad, but not awful, result.”
Others said the decision was a nearly complete victory and a resounding reaffirmation of the status quo. “I see no evidence of interest by the Supreme Court to make mischief here,” said Vikram David Amar, the dean of the University of Illinois College of Law
WaPo: After Putin speech on deal with mercenaries, Russia confronts divisions https://tinyurl.com/yc8ex5e8 “‘There was so little support for the regime that it was really striking. The military didn’t move. The police didn’t move. People were just watching’”
The Kremlin on Tuesday went into overdrive to try to project unity and reassert Putin’s strength while also moving to taint Yevgeniy Prigozhin, the former Putin ally who led the rebellion. But the official explanations for why Prigozhin was allowed to escape without punishment looked unusually thin, highlighting new doubts about Putin’s strength and competence in a crisis.…
The admission that Russian authorities spent so much money on a “private” mercenary group could backfire on Putin, as a telling example of the cost of the Ukraine war, which the Kremlin generally has sought to obscure from the public. The disclosure could be especially damaging after Prigozhin’s repeated accusations that Russian military leaders are minimizing the death toll in Ukraine, which he claims has run as high as 1,000 soldiers a day either killed, seriously wounded or deserting. …
Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu was present at Putin’s meeting with military officers, in a clear sign that the president is unlikely to remove him, despite intense resentment over Shoigu’s handling of the war among hard-line nationalists and some Russian military officers. Prigozhin, a ferocious critic of Shoigu, tried to leverage those divisions in his unsuccessful mutiny.
In Moscow, the FSB announced that charges against Prigozhin’s Wagner Group had been dropped because “it was established that its participants stopped their actions aimed at committing a rebellion,” the Tass state-owned news agency reported. ¤ Putin and the Defense Ministry have acknowledged that several Russian military pilots were killed in the rebellion when Wagner fighters shot down their helicopters and at least one plane. …
Moscow-based Russia analyst Boris Kagarlitsky, a former Soviet dissident and critic of the Putin regime, said Kremlin claims that unity saved Russia were “just nonsense,” adding that many citizens observed the mutiny unfold without backing one side or another. ¤ “There was so little support for the regime that it was really striking. The military didn’t move. The police didn’t move. People were just watching. Nobody rushed to the government offices to show support,” he said. …
🐣 RT @ChuckPfarrer VELYKA NOVOSLIKA /1720 UTC 27 JUN/ UKR forces on the Velyka Novoslika axis have liberated Rivnopil. UKR has continued to push RU south along the T-05-18 HWY, consolidating gains on the E bank of the Mokri Yaly River & are now in contact at Starornnaiorske and Urozhaine.
🌎 https://twitter.com/ChuckPfarrer/status/1673740371241713669?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @ChuckPfarrer KREMINNA AXIS /1830 UTC 27 JUN/ During the reporting period 26-27 JUN, RU forces including elements of the 76th Air Mobile Division (VDV) reduced offensive operations in the Kreminna AO. They are assessed to have failed in their attempt to reach the Zherebets watershed.
🌎 https://twitter.com/ChuckPfarrer/status/1673758354814935072?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @ChuckPfarrer KHERSON CITY /2115 UTC 27 JUN/ RU conducted two airstrikes against UKR positions on the S bank. Fires are presently visible in the vicinity. Darkness is hampering assessment of the situation, though it appears UKR forces remain in contact along the M-14 HWY axis.
🌎 https://twitter.com/ChuckPfarrer/status/1673800484245700608?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @ChuckPfarrer WESTERN THEATER /27 JUN/ Ukrainian ‘crossing attempts’ along the Dnipro will necessarily force Russia to divert units from covering the major axes of advance to the Sea of Azov– namely the M-18 HWY to Melitopol and the H-30 HWY to Tokmak. Ukraine will dictate the pace of battle.
🌎 https://twitter.com/ChuckPfarrer/status/1673698540416032768?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @DemocracyDocket BREAKING: In a victory for voters, the U.S. Supreme Court rejects the radical independent state legislature theory in Moore v. Harper. State courts will continue to have the power to strike down unfair maps & voting laws for violating state constitutions. http://bit.ly/mooredecision
🧵 RT @ JuliaDavisNews Lukashenko is starting to reveal the alleged details of his negotiations with Prigozhin (thread):
*This is Google Translate, which is not familiar with some expressions. I made a few corrections so you can get the gist of what is being said.
📌 [TextLink:] https://twitter.com/JuliaDavisNews/status/1673695100671602688?s=20/photo/1 -n
🐣 RT @7Veritas4 Could somebody please explain to Captain Capslock, his family, and his friends, that even a former President is not above the law? ¤ “Smith”
[TextLink:] https://twitter.com/7Veritas4/status/1673655397960278017?s=20/photo/1
[Text:] 🐣 RT @realDonaldTrump COULD SOMEBODY PLEASE EXPLAIN TO THE DERANGED, TRUMP HATING JACK SMITH, HIS FAMILY, AND HIS FRIENDS, THAT AS PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES, I COME UNDER THE PRESIDENTIAL RECORDS ACT, AS AFFIRMED BY THE CLINTON SOCKS CASE, NOT BY THIS PSYCHOS’ FANTASY OF THE NEVER USED BEFORE ESPIONAGE ACT OF 1917. “SMITH” SHOULD BE LOOKING AT CROOKED JOE BIDDEN AND ALL OF THE CRIMES THAT HE HAS PERPETRATED ON THE AMERICAN PUBLIC, INCLUDING THE MILLIONS & MILLIONS OF DOLLARS HE EXTORTED FROM FOREIGN COUNTRIES!
🐣 Sovereignty does not depend on self-sufficiency. It is established by domestic and international law:
≣ Declaration of State Sovereignty of Ukraine (1990)
https://tinyurl.com/5d84vmrh
≣ Law on the Succession of Ukraine (1991)
https://tinyurl.com/2p8xrztc
🐣 RT @nexta_tv #Putin’s main henchman in Europe came out with a new scandalous statement. ¤ It was directed, of course, against #Ukraine.
“Ukraine is no longer a sovereign state. It has no money and no weapons. It can only fight thanks to aid. The U.S. decides when peace will come,” said Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor #Orban.
In addition, Orban said he did not consider #Putin a war criminal and opposed sanctions.
💽 Ukraine’s Mineral Resources https://youtu.be/BftqoZOryDo
🐣 RT @Gerashchenko_en Lukashenko gave his version of how events developed during the mutiny: ¤ “I said don’t make a hero out of me in any case, neither of me, nor of Putin, nor of Prigozhin, because we missed the situation, and then we thought that it would dissolve, but it did not dissolve. And two people who fought on the front collided. There are no heroes in this case.” ¤ “My position: if Russia collapses, we will all be left under the rubble, we will all die.”
🐣 RT @wartranslated Putin is set to award soldiers who “took part in suppressing the mutiny” in Kremlin. Shoygu is ready to receive another award. Man is not going anywhere, it seems.
🐣 RT @sentdefender The Russian Federal Security Service (FSB) has Confirmed that the Criminal Charges against Yevgeny Prigozhin and the Fighters within the Wagner PMC Group which Participated in the “Armed Rebellion” on June 23-24 have been Completely Dropped.
🐣 RT @ MingtheMercil15 Girkin is so depressed, he’s descended into black parody.
[TextLink:] https://twitter.com/MingtheMercil15/status/1673591731097329665?s=20/photo/1
[Text:] His Majesty Reba the First looked sadly at the members of the Privy Council, dejectedly huddled in their chairs … There were reasons for sadness and despondency:
Not only did the war “not go very well” but also the recent rebellion of the beloved royal cook, on whom such great hopes were pinned, and instead of gratitude – who raised the Gray Companies and almost broke into Arkanar on the way from the Irukan front.
Everyone on whom His Majesty’s gaze fell lowered their gaze and began to fidget nervously.
Here is the Supreme Constable sitting… With a face like a baked apple. Once offended by fate at birth, but by it (as if in compensation for a congenital lack of intelligence and incurable moral deformity) ascended to the very heights under the last King (Pitz the Sixth Forever Drunk) and even more ascended after the right choice made upon coming to power Slaves of the First.
🐣 RT @Maks_NAFO_FELLA “The criminal case of an armed rebellion against Prigozhin was closed” – the FSB of the Russian Federation
🐣 RT @NOELreports Prigozhin has likely also arrived in Belarus. His business jet flew from Rostov-on-Don to Belarus and landed at the Machulishchy airbase near Minsk at 07:40.
⋙ 🐣 RT @NOELreports “Lukashenko : “I gave all orders to bring the army to full combat readiness. We must be stronger than the threats looming over our land. And the threats again come from the West,” he added.
⋙ 🐣 RT @NOELreports Lukashenko: “Today we clearly see a new wave of NATO expansion and an unprecedented build-up of the potential of the alliance member countries in the region, including in the immediate vicinity of our borders. Demonstration after demonstration, a demonstration of strength.”
⋙ 🐣 RT @NOELreports Lukashenko: “Under no circumstances should you make a hero out of me, neither of Putin, nor of Prigozhin, because we messed up the situation, and then we thought it would get better, but it didn’t get better. And two people clashed, who fought at the front. There are no heroes in this matter.”
🐣 RT @ZMiST_Ua 🇬🇧 British Defense Secretary Ben Wallace said that the provision of Storm Shadow missiles to Kyiv “had a significant impact on the battlefield” in Ukraine, and their accuracy was “almost flawless”. ¤ “We encourage international partners to provide Ukraine with their long-range systems,” he added.
⭕ 26 Jun 2023
🐣 RT @Samizdat24 I’ll keep saying it. Either Putin lays down a massive show of force, cracks the whip on Wagner and their allies or he’s cooked. The toothpaste is out of the tube, you can’t “oh well whatever nevermind” a fucking thunder run on Moscow, even an aborted one.
⋙ 🐣 RT @DylanBurns1776 Telegram is not taking Putin’s speech well ¤ People are confused by the inaction in response to the mutiny. Pro/anti Wagner crowd are disappointed, and everyone else seems to be doomering. ¤ Feels like Putin’s mystique cracked. While his ministry of defense has never looked weaker.
⋙⋙ 🐣 RT @UkrainianAna Russian reactions to Putin’s “sensational” and “fate determing” speech for your enjoyment 😁
[TextLink:] https://twitter.com/UkrainianAna/status/1673416487233548307?s=20/photo/1 -2
[Text:] OK, fine.
That’s it.
What was that?
Vova are you a fucktard?
No, really, it’s over. Over.
And that’s it?
That’s it?
OK. I am a naive fool. I am done.
Determined the fate for real…
Umm. OK.
Translations for you all.
NYT: Biden and Putin Have Dueling Messages on the Mutiny in Russia https://tinyurl.com/2s8f5ez3 “Mr. Biden said his first move was to gather key allies on a video call because ‘we had to make sure we gave Putin no excuse’ to ‘blame this on the West or to blame this on NATO’”
// The White House concluded that it had to get ahead of any argument by Vladimir V. Putin that the uprising was serving the interests of Russia’s adversaries.
🐣 RT @ChuckPfarrer WAGNER’S AIR DEFENSE: During Wagner’s lunge at Moscow, Pregozhin’s mutineers shot down this rare and valuable Il-22M Command and Control aircraft. RU is said to have only 12 of these aircraft. Also downed were 6 Russian helicopters, taking the lives of as many as 30 RU airmen.
🖼 https://twitter.com/ChuckPfarrer/status/1673517322798071809?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @AntiToxicPeople Holy shit. Trump’s response to the incredibly incriminating tape is even MORE insane than I expected.
[TextLink:] https://twitter.com/AntiToxicPeople/status/1673530252038144003?s=20/photo/1
[Text:] 🐣 RT @realDonaldTrump The Deranged Special Prosecutor, Jack Smith, working in conjunction with the DOJ & FBI, illegally leaked and “spun” a tape and transcript of me which is actually an exoneration, rather than what they would have you believe. This continuing Witch Hunt is another ELECTION INTERFERENCE Scam. They are cheaters and thugs!
🐣 RT @ cepa “I think the most important thing we learn from this very strange sequence of events is that Putin is far weaker than we thought, and his regime is much more fragile than we thought,” @apolyakova explains to @GeoffRBennett what Prigozhin’s failed mutiny means for Russia.
💙 🐣 RT @MartinSauerbrey Putins Speech in short: You are all traitors, we defeated you without problem: Would you like to go home, fight on with us or go to a Spa in Belarus with your boss in order to resume plotting against me? I’m the one and only President of the RF. Am I?
NBCNews: Five or six Secret Service agents have testified before Jan. 6 grand jury, sources say https://tinyurl.com/29rjdrtx
// It is not known what the agents’ proximity to Trump was on Jan. 6 or what information they may have provided to the grand jury.
🐣 RT @MuellerSheWrote BREAKING: talk about burying the lede. RAFFENSPERGER will be interviewed by Jack Smith’s office IN ATLANTA on Wednesday. Is Smith prosecuting trump in Georgia? Sweet baby Jesus, I can’t keep up!
💙❤️ ⋙ WaPo: Justice Dept. asking about 2020 fraud claims as well as fake electors https://tinyurl.com/7me4xcfs
The Justice Department’s investigation of efforts by Donald Trump and his advisers to overturn the 2020 election results is barreling forward on multiple tracks, according to people familiar with the matter, with prosecutors focused on ads and fundraising pitches claiming election fraud as well as plans for “fake electors” that would swing the election to the incumbent president.
Each track poses potential legal peril for those under scrutiny, but also raises tricky questions about where the line should be drawn between political activity, legal advocacy and criminal conspiracy.
A key area of interest is the conduct of a handful of lawyers who sought to turn Trump’s defeat into victory by trying to convince state, local, federal and judicial authorities that Joe Biden’s 2020 election win was illegitimate or tainted by fraud.
Investigators have sought to determine to what degree these lawyers — particularly Rudy Giuliani, Jenna Ellis, John Eastman, Kurt Olsen and Kenneth Chesebro, as well as then-Justice Department lawyer Jeffrey Clark — were following specific instructions from Trump or others, and what those instructions were, according to the people familiar with the matter, who like others interviewed for this article spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe an ongoing investigation.
Special counsel Jack Smith’s team has extensively questioned multiple witnesses about the lawyers’ actions related to fake electors — pro-Trump substitutes offered up as potential replacements for electors in swing states that Biden won. …
In the weeks after the election, an advertising firm created three ominously named spots for Trump’s fundraising effort: “Overwhelming,” “Stop the Steal” and “On Tape.” But when lawyers for the campaign reviewed the advertisements, they raised concerns that the spots contained false information and might not meet network standards, according to people familiar with the matter.
The campaign was facing a repeated problem, Trump adviser Jason Miller wrote to Larry Weitzner, an executive at the firm producing campaign ads for Trump. ¤ “The campaign’s own legal team and data experts cannot verify the bullshit being beamed down from the mothership,” he wrote, according to four people familiar with the email. That was why Giuliani and his lawyers were “0 for 32,” Miller added, an apparent reference to the number of times Trump’s legal team had challenged the election results in court and lost.
The email is one of many pieces of evidence prosecutors have obtained indicating that Trump advisers privately didn’t believe or were at least skeptical of voter fraud claims. Some of those messages came as top campaign officials continued to approve advertisements raising money off the claims and as Trump falsely continued to say the election was “rigged.” …
🐣 RT @ AWeissmann_ I remember as a young prosecutor, the John Gotti prosecutor telling me that his upcoming trial was not about the proof, as Gotti was on tape confessing to the murders, it was about the jury being willing to follow the law.
Now we have that issue for the jury and the electorate.
⋙ 🐣 That’s why I’m worried. So many people in this country seem to have forsaken a commitment to “the facts and the law.”
🐣 The point Trump was trying to make about Milley and Iran was covered extensively at the time. Trump claims the document “proves” it was DOD that wanted to attack Iran, not him. Trump apparently had asked for “options.” What he’s ‘waving around’ is likely one of the “options.”
🐣 RT @RadioFreeTom LOOK AT THIS CLASSIFIED THING RIGHT HERE THAT IS TOTALLY CLASSIFIED THAT I AM SHOWING YOU RIGHT HERE
⋙ 🐣 RT @Acyn Wow CNN got the tape of Trump’s conversation about classified documents
🔊 https://twitter.com/RadioFreeTom/status/1673496118724816896?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @Gerashchenko_en Terrorist Girkin-Strelkov commented on Prigozhin’s latest statements: ¤ “I will repeat my conclusions. It was an attempted armed rebellion to remove Putin from power. There was an aim specifically to commit a coup d’état
¤ https://twitter.com/Gerashchenko_en/status/1673447203979894784?s=20
The whole military operation was perfectly executed and prepared. A real master class. Those who have served and know at least something about an army should understand that unprepared units will not achieve such results. If the march had not been prepared, it would have ended halfway from lack of diesel and other things.
I will try to give my version of this coup attempt
Every coup has power and a political component. After the beginning of the SMO, it became clear to all that a conspiracy and a palace coup was possible. The question remained who could do it. As it turns out, Wagner was the perfect armed tool. There is a conflict with the Ministry of Defense. There was the possibility of preparing a conspiracy without fear of anything, because Prigozhin’s protection is perfect. And there are many other factors as well
Timing was perfect. The Ukrainian offensive; everyone was busy managing and defending. No one could imagine someone launching an insurgency. Wagner was recovering from Bakhmut. Everyone believed that the PMC was almost incapacitated. There was a weekend ahead. Officials and enforcers were relaxed. Some were on holiday. Administration buildings were empty
Route of travel. Don route was full of people, which was beneficial to the rebels as a “human shield”. Plus the longest days. Prigozhin actually admitted that they almost arrested Gerasimov in time to leave Rostov. I am sure that the aim was to arrest Shoigu and Gerasimov in Rostov. The capture of Rostov was a militarily competent action. As I have written before, it was impossible to carry out an operation in Rostov to arrest Prigozhin
Wagner’s units were not just marching, they were breaking through to Moscow. What facilities were they supposed to take? That question remains open. They had every opportunity to blockade the Ministry of Defense, General Staff, Lubyanka, PA and possibly the airports. There are witnesses that strange groups appeared in Moscow and St. Petersburg in the morning and moved around in an organized manner, dressed in camouflage uniforms just about in the street
Striking at the Wagner base was a “legitimate” reason for Prigozhin to take action. What they said about the reluctance to shed blood was a lie. It started to be shed immediately. The “protest” was a lie. There was no need to fly to Moscow for that. It would have been enough to take Rostov. In such cases, almost immediately Dzerzhinsky’s division is brought into Moscow. Kantemirovka and Tamanskaya were on full alert, but there was no order to go to Moscow. Putin clearly outlined what was happening. So did Sobyanin
Masses of people with their own tasks were to turn up in St Petersburg too. A GAZelle with cash was not just stored on the street. It happens when you have to distribute money to people quickly. It was like that on Maidan, by the way. Apparently, for some reason the political plan failed. Prigozhin, apparently, really did not want to take power himself. He had to provide a power plan. It is said that Putin flew urgently to St Petersburg. If so, Prigozhin stopped because there was no point in continuing the military operation. And then there were behind-the-scenes negotiations and so on
Everyone felt there was no state for about twenty-four hours. I guess in the future we will find out who the conspiracy was made for. In any case, this was just the beginning. Stakes are as high as ever. Next time the conspirators may succeed
If something looks like a duck, swims like a duck and quacks like a duck, it is probably a duck.
P.S. The main thing now is to show the public that this was not a conspiracy. We need to shift the public’s attention from political categories to disputes between “economic entities” and personal grievances. That is being done.”
🐣 RT @ChuckPfarrer BAKHMUT AXIS /2240 UTC 16 JUN/ The UKR Gen’l Staff reports that Russia was forced to carry out an aviation strike mission against Soledar; This strongly indicates that UKR forces have crossed the T-05-13 HWY between Krasbohorivka and Blahodatne.
🌎 https://twitter.com/ChuckPfarrer/status/1673457271613816833?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @ChuckPfarrer KHERSON AXIS /1810 UTC 26 JUN/ On 24-25 JUN sources reported that UKR units had established a pontoon bridge augmented by ferries in the vicinity of the M-14 HWY (Anatovsky) bridge at Kherson. Over the next 18 hours, UKR established a bridgehead centered on the M-17 HWY axis.
🌎 https://twitter.com/ChuckPfarrer/status/1673389363357425669?s=20/photo/1
⋙ 🐣 RT @ChuckPfarrer UPDATE/ 2230 UTC 26 JUN/ Frontline sources report a strong Russian counter-attack is in progress on the M-14 HWY axis north of Oleshky. The status of the UKR bridgehead will be updated as information becomes available.
NYT: Zelensky shows himself with Ukrainian troops in the east as Putin faces the fallout from an armed mutiny. https://tinyurl.com/5yx9nev2
.
President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine said he visited front-line positions on Monday, projecting unity with his troops as Russia continued to grapple with the fallout of a short-lived military mutiny.
In a series of photos, videos and messages posted on social media, Mr. Zelensky was shown addressing soldiers and meeting with commanders. He said the photos and videos were taken in the country’s east, where Kyiv’s forces are waging a counteroffensive to recapture territory from Russian control.
NYT: A Visibly Angry Putin Stresses Failure of Wagner Revolt https://tinyurl.com/yh9mzy4p
// Header changed to: Putin Says Russia Is United Behind Him, After Quelling Rebellion
// The Russian president made brief public remarks on Monday, his first since the end of the short-lived rebellion by the Wagner mercenary group and its leader, Yevgeny Prigozhin.
A visibly angry Vladimir V. Putin on Monday denounced as “blackmail” a weekend rebellion by the Wagner mercenary group even as he defended his response to the mutiny and hinted at leniency for those who took part, saying that “the entire Russian society united” around his government.
Speaking publicly for the first time in two days, Mr. Putin, in an address broadcast on Monday night, refused to utter the name of the Wagner boss behind the insurrection, Yevgeny V. Prigozhin. But his contempt was clear for those who had seemed, briefly, to threaten civil war and upend Russia’s war effort in Ukraine, where Ukrainian forces are mounting a counteroffensive.
🧵 RT @FreudGreySkull Putin came across as a lame duck in his latest post mutiny speech
📌 https://twitter.com/FreudGreyskull/status/1673426564330188800?s=20
[ThreadReader:] https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1673426564330188800.html
Putin thanked the population of Russia for solidarity and patriotism. The highest consolidation of society is shown. Everyone took a single position – the entire Russian society.
Everyone was united by responsibility for the fate of the Fatherland.● From the very beginning of the events, decisions were made to neutralize the threat and protect the constitutional order. In any case, an armed rebellion would have been suppressed –
the organizers could not help but understand this. The organizers went to criminal actions, splitting the country at the moment when at the front with the words “Not a step back!” our comrades are dying.The organizers of the rebellion pushed their subordinates to shoot at their own. This is what the enemies of Russia wanted: for Russia to lose, and society to split, choke in bloody civil strife. They rubbed their hands, wanting to take revenge in the so-called counteroffensive.
● Putin thanked the power structures and law enforcement agencies. The courage of the fallen pilots saved Russia from tragic events.
They tried to use Wagner PMC fighters in the dark.
Steps were taken from the very beginning to resolve the crisis and conflict. Putin thanked the Wagner commanders who stopped at the last line. Now they have the opportunity to conclude a contract with the Russian MOD, other power structures or go to Belarus.
🐣 I’m seeing news reports that say Putin approved the Wagner organization moving to Belarus. Is that true? I’ve seen only that Prigozhin could go there. What “promise” is Putin keeping? @McFaul @JuliaDavisNews @Gerashchenko_en
WaPo: Putin claims Russia would have crushed rebellion but Wagner fighters will be allowed to go to Belarus https://tinyurl.com/2p9ycpbu
● In his Monday address, Putin said that Wagner fighters who want to may go to Belarus because “the promise I gave will be fulfilled.” He said that Russia is under unprecedented pressure with “traitors” betraying their own citizens and Russian fighters — “that’s what Ukrainian nazis and national traitors wanted,” he added.
● Prigozhin said in his video message that the rebellion, which he calls a “march of justice,” came after orders that would have resulted in the absorption of Wagner mercenary forces in Ukraine into the conventional military, beginning July 1. He claimed that most Wagner members had refused to sign contracts with Russia’s Defense Ministry, fearing that they would be used as cannon fodder by incompetent commanders, and he reiterated accusations that his fighters came under attack from Russian forces.
● The success of Wagner’s rapid advance toward Moscow suggests that the group should have been responsible for the drive to take Kyiv in the early days of the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, Prigozhin said. If that attack “was carried out by a unit of a similar level of training and moral composure such as Wagner then perhaps the ‘special operation’ would have lasted a day,” he said.
● Prigozhin did not reveal his location. He did not discuss his reported acceptance of exile in Belarus. State Department spokesperson Matthew Miller said Monday afternoon that he does not have any assessment of Prigozhin’s location.
🐣 RT @revishvilig Putin tried to show decisiveness but his speech was utterly weak.
The big news is that Prigozhin with the Wagner fighters can move to Belarus.
Lukashenko’s address is postponed and will be tomorrow, very interesting what he will say.
🐣 RT @ JuliaDavisNews Putin did his best to look confident and decisive, but so far failed to utter anything new.
🐣 RT @McFaul Putin’s main objective tonight was to try to divide the Wagner fighters from their leaders.
🐣 RT @ wartranslated As always, anticlimactic from Putin:
– Any attempts to start a mutiny will fail.
– An armed mutiny would have been suppressed anyway. Perpetrators must’ve known about this.
– By betraying their country, they also lied and forced others to kill their own soldiers.
– All the enemies abroad and national traitors wanted us to fight each other. They failed.
– The majority of Wagner commanders and fighters are patriots. They were used covertly against their brothers-in-arms.
– I made steps to avoid large bloodshed. This needed time including letting those who made a mistake change their mind and see the consequences this will lead to.
– Stability was possible thanks to the enormous support of civil society who united during the difficult time.
– Putin will keep his word regarding PMC employees (possibly regarding no prosecution. Some can go to Belarus, rest can sign contracts with MoD. The choice is theirs.
≣ Putin’s Speech: Today I once again appeal to all citizens of Russia. Thank you for your endurance, solidarity and patriotism. This civic solidarity has shown that any blackmail, any attempt to create internal turmoil is doomed to failure.
I repeat,the highest consolidation of society, executive and legislative power at all levels was shown. A firm, unambiguous position in support of the constitutional order was taken by public organizations, religious denominations, leading political parties, in fact, the entire Russian society. Everyone was united and rallied by the main thing – responsibility for the fate of the Fatherland.
I emphasize that from the very beginning of the events, all the necessary decisions were immediately taken to neutralize the threat that had arisen, to protect the constitutional order, the life and security of our citizens.
An armed rebellion would have been suppressed in any case. The organizers of the rebellion, despite the loss of adequacy, could not fail to understand this. They understood everything, including that they went to criminal acts, to split and weaken the country, which is now confronting a colossal external threat, unprecedented pressure from outside. When at the front with the words “not a step back!” our comrades are dying.
However, the organizers of the rebellion, betraying their country, their people, betrayed those who were drawn into the crime. They lied to them, pushed them to death, under fire, to shoot at their own.
It was precisely this outcome – fratricide – that Russia’s enemies wanted: both the neo-Nazis in Kyiv, and their Western patrons, and all sorts of national traitors. They wanted Russian soldiers to kill each other, to kill military personnel and civilians, so that in the end Russia would lose, and our society would split, choke in bloody civil strife.
They rubbed their hands, dreaming of taking revenge for their failures at the front and during the so called counteroftensive, but they miscalculated.
I thank all our military personnel, law enforcement officers, special services who stood in the way of the rebels, remained faithful to their duty, oath and their people. The courage and self-sacrifice of the fallen heroes-pilots saved Russia from tragic devastating consequences.
At the same time, we knew and we know that the vast majority of the fighters and commanders of the Wagner group are also Russian patriots, devoted to their people and state. They proved it with their courage on the battlefield, liberating the Donbass and Novorossiya. They tried to use them in the dark against their brothers in arms, with whom they fought together for the sake of the country and its future.
Therefore, from the very beginning of the events, on my direct instructions, steps were taken to avoid a lot of bloodshed. This took time, including to give those who made a mistake a chance to think again, to understand that their actions are resolutely rejected by society, and to what tragic, destructive consequences for Russia, for our state, the adventure in which they were dragged leads.
I thank those soldiers and commanders of the Wagner group who made the only right decision – they did not go to fratricidal bloodshed, they stopped at the last line.
Today you have the opportunity to continue serving Russia by entering into a contract with the Ministry of Defense or other law enforcement agencies, or to return to your family and friends. Whoever wants to can go to Belarus. The promise I made will be fulfilled. I repeat, the choice is yours, but I am sure it will be the choice of Russian soldiers who have realized their tragic mistake.
I am grateful to the President of Belarus Alexander Grigoryevich Lukashenko for his effortsand contribution to the peaceful resolution of the situation.
But I repeat, it was the patriotic spirit of the citizens, the consolidation of the entire Russian society that played a decisive role these days. This support allowed us to overcome the most difficult trials for our Motherland together.
Thank you for that. Thank you.
🐣 RT @DenesTorteli Ukrainian deputy defence minister Hanna Maliar: “Russia’s task now is to stop our offensive at any cost. By blowing up dams, mining fields, continuous shelling, sabotage, information injection and even ‘nuclear’ rhetoric. The motivation ‘not to lose’ the occupied lands will be much stronger than the motivation to ‘seize’ our lands. Because this is their mental primordial trauma. It is psychologically easier for them to endure an unsuccessful offensive than the loss of conquered lands. This demoralizes and demotivates them irreparably. They won’t be able to assemble their army on their own, because, like in Kharkiv region, the fighters will start refusing to obey orders en masse. So we have to understand this. Our troops are really having a hard time now. It is very difficult. But they are moving forward. They are moving forward. Because we are fighting a just war. And this is our strength.” https://t.me/annamaliar/887
🐣 RT @GlasnostGone Feel the distance difference between dictatorship & all for one democracy. #StandWithUkraine️
🖼 https://twitter.com/GlasnostGone/status/1673400121365504024?s=20/photo/1 -3
🐣 RT @JuliaDavisNews In the aftermath of Yevgeny Prigozhin’s mini-mutiny, state TV propagandists had a mission: to praise Putin’s wisdom for quickly ending the ordeal. Nonetheless, they couldn’t hide their outrage that the Wagner boss didn’t get “a bullet to the forehead.”
⋙ DailyBeast, Julia Davis: Russian State TV Anchors Are Aghast That Vladimir Putin Didn’t Kill Yevgeny Prigozhin Over Mutiny https://tinyurl.com/re7a94y2
// The Kremlin’s propagandists praised Putin but were dumbfounded that he allowed the Wagner boss and his mercenaries to escape punishment.
WaPo: Defiant Prigozhin says Wagner mercenaries to operate from Belarus https://tinyurl.com/4jvxbykz //➔ a lot going on here, much of it contradictory; @washingtonpost says it’s free to read until June 30, so go at it; tumultuous times
Wagner mercenary chief Yevgeniy Prigozhin resurfaced Monday for the first time since his Saturday mutiny, and declared that his motive was to save the private militia from being subsumed into the Russian military — not to topple President Vladimir Putin.
Prigozhin, who did not disclose his whereabouts, said he ordered the rebellion after Russia’s military killed 30 Wagner fighters in a missile strike on one of the militia’s camps, and he said he accepted a deal to avoid prosecution and move to Belarus because it would allow Wagner to continue its operations there.
Whatever his intentions, however, Prigozhin’s brazen revolt confronted Putin with the fiercest challenge he has faced in more than 23 years as Russia’s supreme leader, and it laid bare bitter divisions over the handling of the war in Ukraine that could have serious repercussions on the battlefield. …
Speaking in an 11-minute audio address posted on Telegram on Monday, Prigozhin said Wagner fighters were strongly opposed to signing a contracts with the Russian Defense Ministry — as they had been ordered to do by July 1 — because it would have effectively dismantled the group. Wagner had decided to hand back its equipment to the Defense Ministry when the missile strike occurred, he claimed.
Prigozhin expressed regret about Russian aircrews killed by Wagner during Saturday’s rebellion, “but these assets were dropping bombs and delivering missile strikes,” he said.
He boasted that Wagner was perhaps the “most experienced and combat-ready unit in Russia, and possibly in the world” and had performed a huge number of tasks in the interests of the Russian state, in Africa, the Middle East “and around the world.”
“Recently, this unit has achieved good results in Ukraine,” he said, adding that Wagner had received an outpouring of support from Russians in Saturday’s revolt, which he called a “march for justice.”
While Prigozhin issued his defiant statement, Russia’s embattled leadership tried to demonstrate control on Monday after the bruising, chaotic mutiny by airing a video of Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu visiting a command post. The Kremlin released video of a recorded address by President Vladimir Putin to young engineers. ¤ It was not clear when the video address by Putin was recorded …
Shoigu’s exact whereabouts and the timing of the video released by the Defense Ministry also were not clear. Russian media reported that it was prerecorded, probably on Friday, before the Wagner rebellion.
By contrast, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky visited his troops near the front lines in eastern Ukraine on Monday and his office quickly released video of the him greeting soldiers.
As a state of emergency in the Russian capital was lifted, Russians were left trying to make sense of Putin’s reversal from his threat of tough action against what he called “treason,” and what it could mean in the near term, especially for the ongoing war in Ukraine, and in the longer term for stability in the country and for Putin’s political future.
State-owned media, meanwhile, reported Monday that the insurrection charges against Prigozhin had not yet been rescinded. …
Russian news outlet Verstka reported that a Wagner base for 8,000 soldiers was being constructed in Belarus, in the Mogilev region southeast of Minsk. The report could not be confirmed. …
Russian Prime Minister Mikhail Mishustin called for moves to strengthen Russian unity in the wake of the crisis, but he insisted that the Russian government worked “smoothly and clearly” during the crisis. …
“It is important to ensure the sovereignty of the Russian Federation and the security of citizens, taking into account recent events,” Mishustin said at a meeting of deputy prime ministers Monday. “It is necessary to consolidate society against the backdrop of an attempted armed rebellion.”
Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said Wagner would continue operating in Mali and the Central African Republic, calling Wagner operatives there “instructors.” …
Lavrov said the U.S. ambassador to Russia, Lynne Tracy, had spoken with Russian government representatives Sunday and conveyed Washington’s view that the events were Russia’s internal affair and its hope that Russian nuclear weapons remained secure. …
News coverage by Russian media displayed how deeply the events have rattled Putin’s authoritarian state, which is built on his power as supreme leader, with the rule of law readily dispensable and competing fiefs — including oligarchs and officials — jostling constantly for presidential favor, state benefits and influence.
An opinion column in the Russian newspaper Moskovsky Komsomolets said that the “most terrifying scenario” — of fighting in the streets of Moscow and elsewhere and a split in Russia’s military and security forces — had been averted.
“Russia displayed its vulnerability to the whole world and to itself. Russia dashed to the abyss at full speed and with the same speed stepped back from it,” the columnist, Mikhail Rostovsky, wrote under the headline: “Prigozhin Leaves, Problems Remain: Deep Political Consequences of a Failed Coup.”
But there were signs of a potential crackdown on Russian private military companies, with widespread calls to bring them to heel, even though they are already technically illegal in Russia. One key reason for Wagner’s mutiny was Prigozhin’s refusal to sign Defense Ministry contracts that would have sidelined the militia and submitted it to Shoigu’s authority.
Russia’s Federal Security Service, or FSB, carried out raids Saturday at the addresses of current and former Wagner mercenaries, Russian media outlet Important Stories reported.
Andrei Kartapolov, chairman of the defense committee in the State Duma, Russia’s lower house of parliament, told the Vedomosti newspaper there was no need to ban Wagner, calling it the most combat-ready unit in Russia. Kartapolov said Wagner fighters could continue to serve in the war in Ukraine if they signed contracts with the military. Such a path may be unpalatable to many Wagner fighters, who are intensely loyal to Prigozhin.
The state-controlled Tass news agency reported Monday that Wagner’s recruiting offices in Novosibirsk and Tyumen had reopened, after they closed during the mutiny, and that the group’s office in St. Petersburg was open and working. Wagner is seen by many in Russia as a more prestigious, elite and effective force than regular Russian military units.
Another newspaper, Nezavisimaya Gazeta, called for all armed formations not officially part of the security structures to be disarmed given “today’s political reality,” in an article published Sunday. …
“The events of June 24 will undoubtedly have long-term consequences for the country. It became clear that a man with a gun, if he is not a state official, is a real threat to the state and statehood,” the newspaper’s editor, Konstantin Remchukov, wrote in an opinion column. “In Russia there should not be armed people who are loyal first to their commanders and only secondarily to someone else.”
Social media pages connected to Prigozhin, Wagner and key figures associated with him were blocked on Saturday. By Sunday, many pro-Kremlin Telegram channels were rushing to discredit the Wagner leader. In St. Petersburg, local media published photographs of gold bars, fake passports, millions in cash and “white powder” reportedly seized from his properties by the authorities.
Alexander Khodakovsky, head of the pro-Moscow Vostok Battalion, which is fighting in eastern Ukraine, published a story that Prigozhin had one of his underlings beaten “half to death,” after the subordinate told the mercenary leader that it would not be possible to recruit 1,000 Russian prisoners, but only 300.
“This incident told me everything: I made an approximate psycho-portrait of Prigozhin, and I began to warn everyone of the growing threat,” Khodakovsky wrote. “It was clear to me that a person with such manners serves only his own interests,” he added. “I always cringed when I saw how the figure of Prigozhin was erected on a pedestal.”
NYT: One Big Winner of Kremlin-Wagner Clash? The Dictator Next Door https://tinyurl.com/2jfmhk5f “Belarusian media machine has been trumpeting [Lukashenko’s] role as a power broker, a rare role reversal at a time when the dictator has become overwhelmingly dependent on Russia”
// The strongman leader of Belarus, a dependable ally of Vladimir Putin’s, may see a chance to rebrand himself as a statesman.
Mr. Putin agreed to mediation, and when “the president of Belarus called, Yevgeny Prigozhin immediately picked up the phone,” said Mr. Gigin, on whom the European Union once imposed sanctions for “supporting and justifying repression against the democratic opposition and civil society.”
The conversation between Mr. Lukashenko and Mr. Prigozhin was “very difficult,” said Mr. Gigin, who this month became the director of the National Library of Belarus. “They immediately blurted out such vulgar things it would make any mother cry. The conversation was hard, and as I was told, masculine.”
Though other possible explanations have been advanced for why Mr. Prigozhin gave up on his “march for justice” to Moscow, some offering minimal credit to Mr. Lukashenko, the Belarusian media machine has been trumpeting his role as a power broker, a rare role reversal at a time when the dictator has become overwhelmingly dependent on Russia.
“Putin lost because he showed how weak his system is, that he can be challenged so easily,” said Pavel Slunkin, a former Belarusian diplomat and analyst at the European Council on Foreign Relations. “Prigozhin challenged, he attacked, he was so bold and then he retreated, looking like a loser. Only Lukashenko won points — first in the eyes of Putin, in the eyes of the international community as a mediator or negotiator, and as a possible guarantor of the deal.” …
Opposition leaders believe that Mr. Putin’s ambitions are not limited to Ukrainian territory. Eventually, they predict, he will try to strengthen his control over Belarus.
With his reported mediation in the Wagner crisis, Mr. Lukashenko may hope to reclaim some of his rapidly eroding sovereignty, and stem Belarusian fears of being swallowed by its larger neighbor, said Dmitri Avosha, the founder of the Belarusian website Tribuna.
Lukashenko simply did a favor to Putin in its purest form, and helped himself solve the problem of occupation,” he said. …
However much the balance of power between Mr. Lukashenko and Mr. Putin may have shifted now, both men still need each other to remain in power. ¤ “They are two Siamese twins,” said Pavel Latushka, a former Belarusian diplomat and minister now in exile. “They can’t live without each other. It’s one body, two heads. The fall of one means the political death of another.”
Reuters: Russia’s Shoigu appears in video for first time since Wagner mutiny https://tinyurl.com/4b3fbvaj “Markov, a former Kremlin advisor … , said the defence ministry video was ‘a signal to everyone that Shoigu is in office and will probably remain defence minister now’
// ‘Putin will not do anything under pressure from a mutineer,’ Markov said.”
🐣 RT @Gerashchenko_en ⚡️Prigozhin about his deal with Lukashenko: ¤”Lukashenko extended his hand and offered to find a solution to continue the work of Wagner PMC in legal jurisdiction.”
💽 https://twitter.com/Gerashchenko_en/status/1673363320542298114?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @sentdefender Preparations are reportedly underway for the Construction of a Major Operations Base for the Wagner PMC Group near the Town of Osipovichi in the Mogilev Region of Eastern Belarus, with the Base said to be able to House and Support up to 8,000 Fighters; Belarusian Media has stated this is part of a plan to Build a Network of Camps and Facilities for the Wagner Group across Southern and Eastern Belarus with the Majority being roughly 100 Miles from the Border with Ukraine.
⋙ 🐣 How would the Wagnerites get to Belarus? Not through Ukraine, certainly. Would Putin let them go through Russia? Hard to imagine. Letting Wagner set up camp in Belarus would give Lukashenko a lot of fierce fighters who are Russian citizens, a threat to Putin.
🐣 RT @wartranslated Summary of Prigozhin’s 26 June address to clarify the situation: it was to demonstrate protest against the “destruction of PMC Wagner, not toppling the Russian authorities”:
¤ https://twitter.com/wartranslated/status/1673345844148314112?s=20
What were the prerequisites for the March for Justice?
– PMC Wagner carries out tasks around the world. It was meant to stop existing on 1 July 2023. “Employees” all refused to sign the contract with MoD, only 1-2% decided to join the Russian army.– The original plan was to go to Rostov on 30 July and transfer all vehicles to MoD, which were ready for transport.
– Despite any aggression, Wagner suffered a missile attack, followed by helicopter attack. Around 30 PMC Wagner fighters died. This triggered an immediate decision to move out early and respond militarily.
– Throughout the 24-hour march, one column went to Moscow, another to Rostov. They made 780 km of progress in one day. They regret being forced to attack the army aircraft but the bombs were dropped which caused the response. During the march, all military objects on the way were blocked and disarmed. None of the military have died on the ground.
– The objective was to not allow destruction of Wagner and take to responsiblity those who with their unprofessional actions made a huge number of mistakes during the SMO. All the military met along the way supported this.
– Wagner stopped when the advanced storm unit deployed artillery, conducted reconnaissance and realised a lot of blood will be shed in an upcoming battle. They decided that demonstration of the protest was enough, and turned around.
– Factors that made Wagner turn around: first, they didn’t want to shed Russian blood. Secondly, they wanted to demonstrate their portest, not overtake the authority in Russia.
– Lukashenko offered to find solutions for further legal operation of Wagner legally. Columns turned aroound and went back to field camps.
– The march showed many things demonstrated before. Serious secruity concerns around the country. All military bases and airfields were blocked.
– If actions on 24 Feb 2022 were done by forces as trained as Wagner, the special operation could have ended in 1 day. This shows the level of organisation that the Russian army should be following.
🧵 RT @Faytuks Prigozhin has posted a new long audio message (11 minutes+) on telegram. I will translate below. [🔊link]
📌 https://twitter.com/Faytuks/status/1673341974882004994?s=20
[ThreadReader:] https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1673341974882004994.html
No one has agreed to sign a contract with Russia’s Defence Ministry – Head of Wagner PMC Prigozhin
We started our “March” due to injustice and we showed no aggression, but despite this, we were hit by missiles and helicopters – Head of Wagner PMC Prigozhin
The Wagner group was bound to cease existence on July 1 – Head of Wagner PMC Prigozhin
We showed master-class on how February 24, 2022, had to look, however, we turned around to avoid spilling the blood of Russian soldiers – Head of Wagner PMC Prigozhin
The aim of the March was to avoid the destruction of the Wagner group. We regret that we had to hit Russian aviation – Head of Wagner PMC Prigozhin
We wanted to hold accountable those who made mistakes during the special military operation in Ukraine – Head of Wagner PMC Prigozhin
We didn’t do a “march of justice” to overthrow Russia’s leadership, however, it showed serious security problems in the country – Head of Wagner PMC Prigozhin
When the first assault detachment approached Moscow, it became obvious that a lot of blood would be shed, so we felt that a “demonstration of what we wanted to do was sufficient” – Head of Wagner PMC Prigozhin
During the march, civilians were happy and greeted PMC Wagner with Russian flags. Many residents supported the PMC because they saw support for the “fight against bureaucracy” – Head of Wagner PMC Prigozhin
The march lasted 24 hours, during the day the columns travelled 780km and were 200km (124 miles) from Moscow – Head of Wagner PMC Prigozhin
If the actions on February 24 were carried out by a unit by the level of training, like the Wagner PMC, the special operation might have lasted a day – Head of Wagner PMC Prigozhin
Lukashenko extended his hand and offered to find solutions for the further work of the Wagner PMC group within “legal jurisdiction” – Head of Wagner PMC Prigozhin
Among the PMC fighters, there are several wounded and two dead. The dead were servicemen of Russia’s Ministry of Defense who joined Wagner. No one was forced to “march” – Head of Wagner PMC Prigozhin
🐣 RT @vtchakarova According to @meduzaproject’s sources close to the presidential administration, around midday on June 24, #Prigozhin started trying to get in touch with the Kremlin himself – and allegedly even “tried to call Putin, but the president did not want to talk to him.
¤ https://twitter.com/vtchakarova/status/1673299718426750981?s=20
According to Meduza’s sources close to the Kremlin and the Russian government, it is likely that Prigozhin realized that he had “exceeded the limit” and that “the prospects for his columns to move are foggy. When the Kremlin saw Prigozhin’s changed mood, it allegedly decided against a “bloody clash,” according to Meduza’s sources. They claim that a large group of officials, including Chief of Staff of the Presidential Executive Office Anton Vaino, Security Council Secretary Nikolai Patrushev, and Russian Ambassador to Belarus Boris Gryzlov, were engaged in the final negotiations.
“Prigozhin needed a worthy confidant to get out of the game [saving face]. Lukashenko acted as such. He loves PR and understands the benefits – so he agreed,” says the interlocutor of “Meduza. According to him, the “benefit” for Lukashenko is obvious: publicly he became the man who “saved Russia from a civil war at most, but at least from a great blood. #geopolitics #Velsig
🐣 RT @Gerashchenko_en 𝙏𝙝𝙚 𝙨𝙩𝙧𝙚𝙣𝙜𝙩𝙝 𝙖𝙣𝙙 𝙨𝙩𝙚𝙖𝙙𝙛𝙖𝙨𝙩𝙣𝙚𝙨𝙨 𝙤𝙛 𝙋𝙪𝙩𝙞𝙣’𝙨 𝙧𝙚𝙜𝙞𝙢𝙚 𝙩𝙪𝙧𝙣𝙚𝙙 𝙤𝙪𝙩 𝙩𝙤 𝙗𝙚 𝙫𝙞𝙧𝙩𝙪𝙖𝙡. Wagner’s “March of Justice” showed that the Kremlin does not know its own country. The government in Russia is only strong on TV, but in reality, it is as rotten as the wooden barracks in the Russian provinces.
¤ https://twitter.com/Gerashchenko_en/status/1673296158670614529?s=20
𝑾𝒉𝒂𝒕 𝒘𝒂𝒔 𝒑𝒍𝒂𝒏𝒏𝒆𝒅:
One plausible explanation for Prigozhin’s rebellion is that it was conceived as a play to cover up a multi-stage operation. At the end of it they were counting on:
🔹 Putin having a “carte blanche” to change the military leadership;
🔹 Prigozhin continuing his looting of Africa;
🔹 Wagner PMC being transferred to the Ministry of Defense as of July 1;
🔹 the authorities demonstrating that they know how to cope with crisis situations, uniting elites and the general population around them.𝑾𝒉𝒂𝒕 𝒕𝒉𝒆𝒚 𝒈𝒐𝒕:
The staging got out of hand and almost led to the regime’s collapse.
🔹 Directors of the “performance” did not take into account that Prigozhin has huge support inside the Russian Federation, and support of Putin’s vertical was declarative;
🔹 Lack of initiative from officials, incapable of independent decisions, was revealed;
🔹 Unity of the nation, uniting around the figure of Putin, was a fiction. The population was completely passive and loyal to the rebels.𝑨𝒔 𝒂 𝒓𝒆𝒔𝒖𝒍𝒕:
🔹 Russian system was proven to be rotten and dysfunctional;
🔹 The regime holds on to a virtual picture that it broadcasts to the population and to itself;
🔹 Any critical situation inside the country threatens to collapse the system, the regime and the country.Russia turned out to be not a fortress, but a gateway. Russian Volunteer Corps is free to enter the Belgorod region; the capital and the Kremlin are attacked by drones, and the mercenary army is capable of taking not Kyiv but Moscow without a fight in two days.
Based on analytical materials by @future_ui
🐣 RT @nexta_tv PMCs will no longer be able to enter into contracts with prisoners. This was announced by the chairman of the State #Duma Committee on Legislation and State Construction Pavel Krasheninnikov. According to him, now the contracts are concluded only with the Ministry of Defense of the #Russian Federation.
🐣 So, only the members of Wagner who did not participate in failed coup are welcome in the regular army. Hard to see how they would fit in. & what about the participants? Hard to see them melting away. ¤ And what about Prigozhin’s troll operation & his people in Syria and Africa?
🐣 RT @Tendar
– Girkin demands Prigozhin to be hung.
– Prigozhin wants to kill Shoigu, but goes to king potato
– Lame duck Putin is nowhere to be seen
– Kadyrov makes selfies on empty bridges
– Margarita Simonyan asks why Russia needs anyway the Ukrainian oblast
Like I mentioned on Saturday. This is a collapse of the last remnants of Russian statehood, and I accept everyone who says that Russian Federation was never even a state in the first place but a mafia entity.
⭕ 25 Jun 2023
🐣 RT @ZelenskyyUa From time to time my son comes to my office. From time to time, but nevertheless. And he is most interested here in these chevrons. Military personnel, volunteers, relatives of our soldiers handed them to me. At the front and in Kyiv, in hospitals, during the award ceremonies for heroes in the Mariinsky Palace…
💽 [tr] https://twitter.com/ZelenskyyUa/status/1672898482842001408?s=20/photo/1
The number of chevrons on the chevron board is growing, but very slowly, as every time Kyrylo takes them away. And I am happy that he is interested in this. Our heroes, our defense, Ukrainian chevrons.
A long time ago I wanted to make a special series of posts in my social networks about these chevrons. About where they came from. Who gave them to me. What these units are. And today, we will start issuing such posts.
Maybe someone else wants to talk about the chevrons you have. I think that is correct. It is correct that our people, our children, should know to whom we owe our lives and Ukraine’s freedom.
Thank you, warriors! Thank you to everyone who fights and works for Ukraine!
Glory to Ukraine!
TheAtlantic, Anne Applebaum: Putin Is Caught in His Own Trap https://tinyurl.com/4zpy98h7 “The Wagner mercenaries showed up in the [Rostov-on-Don] early Saturday morning. They met no resistance. Nobody shot at them. … People shook their hands, brought them food, took selfies.”
// After spending years cultivating public apathy, the Russian president found his people indifferent to his fate.
The Wagner Group mercenaries marched 800 kilometers across Russia, shot down planes and helicopters, took over a regional military command, provoked a panic in Moscow—troops dug trenches; the mayor told everyone to stay home—and then stood down. Yet in a way, the strangest aspect of Saturday’s aborted coup was the reaction of the people of Rostov-on-Don, including the city’s military leaders, to the soldiers who arrived and declared themselves to be their new rulers.
The Wagner mercenaries showed up in the city early Saturday morning. They met no resistance. Nobody shot at them. One photograph, published by The New York Times, shows them walking at a leisurely pace across a street, one of their tanks in the background, holding yellow coffee cups.
Yevgeny Prigozhin, Wagner’s violent ex-con leader, posted videos of himself chatting with the local commanders in the courtyard of the headquarters of Russia’s Southern Military District. Nobody seemed to mind his being there. …
People shook their hands, brought them food, took selfies. “People are bringing pirozhki, apples, chips. Everything there in the store has been bought to give to the soldiers,” one woman said on camera. In the evening, after Prigozhin had decided to stand down and go home (wherever home turns out to be), he drove away in an SUV with crowds filming him on their cellphones and cheering him on, as if he were a celebrity leaving a movie premiere or a gallery opening. Some chanted “Wagner! Wagner!” as the troops emerged into the street. This was the most remarkable aspect of the whole day: Nobody seemed to mind, particularly, that a brutal new warlord had arrived to replace the existing regime—not the security services, not the army, and not the general public. On the contrary, many seemed sorry to see him go.
The response is hard to understand without reckoning with the power of apathy, a much undervalued political tool. Democratic politicians spend a lot of time thinking about how to engage people and persuade them to vote. But a certain kind of autocrat, of whom Putin is the outstanding example, seeks to convince people of the opposite: not to participate, not to care, and not to follow politics at all. The propaganda used in Putin’s Russia has been designed in part for this purpose. The constant provision of absurd, conflicting explanations and ridiculous lies—the famous “firehose of falsehoods”— encourages many people to believe that there is no truth at all. The result is widespread cynicism. If you don’t know what’s true, after all, then there isn’t anything you can do about it. Protest is pointless. Engagement is useless.
But the side effect of apathy was on display yesterday as well. For if no one cares about anything, that means they don’t care about their supreme leader, his ideology, or his war. Russians haven’t flocked to sign up to fight in Ukraine. They haven’t rallied around the troops in Ukraine or held emotive ceremonies marking either their successes or their deaths. Of course they haven’t organized to oppose the war, but they haven’t organized to support it either.
Because they are afraid, or because they don’t know of any alternative, or because they think it’s what they are supposed to say, they tell pollsters that they support Putin. And yet, nobody tried to stop the Wagner Group in Rostov-on-Don, and hardly anybody blocked the Wagner convoy on its way to Moscow. The security services melted away, made no move and no comment. The military dug some trenches around Moscow and sent some helicopters; somebody appears to have sent bulldozers to dig up the highways, but that was all we could see. Who will respond if a more serious challenge to Putin ever emerges? Certainly the military will think twice: Perhaps a dozen Russian servicemen, mostly pilots, died at the hands of the Wagner mutineers, more than died during the failed coup of 1991. Nobody seems particularly bothered about them.
One day after this aborted coup, it is too early to speculate about Prigozhin’s true motives, about what he was really given in exchange for standing down, about where Putin really spent the day on Saturday—some say St. Petersburg, some say a dacha in Novgorod—or about anything else, really. But the flimsiness of this regime’s ideology and the softness of its support have been suddenly laid bare. Expect more repression as Putin tries to stay in charge, more chaos, or both.
Substack Home&Away, Richard Haass: All Politika is Local https://tinyurl.com/yc63syzh
FT, Gideon Rachman: The Putin system is crumbling https://tinyurl.com/2px4v3eb “Sticking with Putin once seemed the safe option for the country’s elite. But as the system crumbles, these calculations are changing”
// After the march on Moscow, things cannot go back to normal in Russia
The images that defined Volodymyr Zelenskyy as a leader were filmed on February 25 last year. As Russian troops closed in on Kyiv, the Ukrainian president walked the streets of the city with his close colleagues, reassuring citizens that: “All of us are here, protecting our independence and our country.”
Now contrast that with Vladimir Putin’s performance, as the Wagner militia briefly threatened to march on Moscow over the weekend. From the comfort of an office, the Russian president raged about “betrayal” and “treason”. Then he disappeared. …
🐣 RT @JuliaDavisNews Meanwhile in Russia: even the obedient state TV propagandists were flabbergasted by Putin’s decision to let Yevgeny Prigozhin stay alive, much less to walk free after committing his mini-mutiny. More in my latest article, linked below
⋙ 🐣 RT @JuliaDavisNews In the aftermath of Yevgeny Prigozhin’s mini-mutiny, state TV propagandists had a mission: to praise Putin’s wisdom for quickly ending the ordeal. Nonetheless, they couldn’t hide their outrage that the Wagner boss didn’t get “a bullet to the forehead.”
⋙⋙ DailyBeast, Julia Davis: Russian State TV Anchors Aghast that Putin Didn’t Kill Prigozhin https://tinyurl.com/y7k9njj3
// The Kremlin’s propagandists praised Putin but were dumbfounded that he allowed the Wagner boss and his mercenaries to escape punishment.
💙 NYT, J Michael Luttig: It’s Not Too Late for the Republican Party https://tinyurl.com/3wfck47f “[R]ushing to model their campaign on Mr. Trump’s breathtakingly inane template is as absurd as it is ill fated. They will be defending the indefensible”
Donald Trump this month became the first former or incumbent American president to be charged with crimes against the nation that he once led and wishes to lead again. He cynically calculated that his indictment would ensure that a riled-up Republican Party base would nominate him as its standard-bearer in 2024, and the last few weeks have proved that his political calculation was probably right. …
In a word, the Republicans are as responsible as Mr. Trump for this month’s indictment — and will be as responsible for any indictment and prosecution of him for Jan. 6. One would think that, for a party that has prided itself for caring about the Constitution and the rule of law, this would stir some measure of self-reflection among party officials and even voters about their abiding support for the former president. …
… As only the Republicans can do, they are already turning this ignominious moment into an even more ignominious moment — and a self-immolating one at that — by rushing to crown Mr. Trump their nominee before the primary season even begins. Building the Republican campaign around the newly indicted front-runner is a colossal political miscalculation, as comedic as it is tragic for the country. No assemblage of politicians except the Republicans would ever conceive of running for the American presidency by running against the Constitution and the rule of law. But that’s exactly what they’re planning. …
From his distant second place, Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida denounced the Biden administration’s “weaponization of federal law enforcement” against Mr. Trump and the Republicans. Mike Pence dutifully pronounced the indictment political. And both Governor DeSantis and Mr. Pence pledged — in a new Republican litmus test — that on their first day in office they would fire the director of the F.B.I., the Trump appointee Christopher Wray, obviously for his turpitude in investigating Mr. Trump. It fell to Kevin McCarthy, the House speaker, to articulate the treacherous overarching Republican strategy: “I, and every American who believes in the rule of law, stand with President Trump against this grave injustice. House Republicans will hold this brazen weaponization of power accountable.” ¤ There’s no stopping Republicans now, until they have succeeded in completely politicizing the rule of law in service to their partisan political ends. …
Republicans have waited in vain for political absolution. It’s finally time for them to put the country before their party and pull back from the brink — for the good of the party, as well as the nation. ¤ If not now, then they must forever hold their peace.
🐣 RT @Osinttechnical We officially have the first “Russians requesting airstrikes via telegram” of the counteroffensive
⋙ 🐣 RT @wartranslated A more recent update is now convincingly requesting air support to assist in destroying the group. It appears as if a Telegram channel is the only way to do it as the situation is deteriorating rapidly.
[TextLink:] https://twitter.com/wartranslated/status/1673072580104798213?s=20/photo/1
[Text:] The area under the Antonovsky Bridge (about 150 meters) is also used by the enemy to supply and rotate groups that have settled in the “Hotel”, as well as in the “Dachas” area – in this area the enemy is using Polish-made mortars against the positions of our troops.
According to the latest information, reinforcements continue to arrive to enemy units, the total number of manpower in the bridge area at the moment is up to 100 people.
Also, due to the difficulty of passing information from the fields through official channels, we are forced to report: in this area, for several days, at different times, groups of our fighters were blocked that were performing the tasks of cleaning up the area, one group was evacuated, it’s not possible to evacuate the second group at the moment since enemy firing points are not suppressed and evacuation groups get under heavy enemy fire.
The enemy knows about the blocked group. For several days, artillery, including heavy flamethrower systems, attacked the enemy in this area, but, as colleagues rightly noted, only tactical aviation of the Russian Aerospace Forces can solve this problem; ground forces do not present an effective solution. If necessary, solution. If necessary, all available information, as well as the coordinates of enemy concentration sites, are ready to be transmitted via any convenient communication channel.
🐣 RT @officejjsmart “RESIGN PUTIN!”
⚡️⚡️⚡️Girkin (Strelkov) urged Putin to “act as commander in chief or resign.”
According to Ateo Breaking, the former 🇷🇺 intelligence officer, who organized the 2014 invasion of Ukraine 🇺🇦 & who has a wide following in 🇷🇺, is not holding-back about Putin. 💥💥💥
🖼 https://twitter.com/officejjsmart/status/1673003142026330113?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @mhmck Understand Russians.
They are nihilists. There is no limit to their behaviour. They will commit any atrocity.
They are liars. They don’t recognize the possibility of truth or a world of shared experience.
They are slaves. They only understand dominance and submission.
🐣 RT @Gerashchenko_en Who will pay Prigozhin now? ¤ Prigozhin’s private army existed thanks to Putin’s dirty money. ¤ For the money from selling oil, gas, timber, metals, gold and other resources of Russia to the West and to the East.
Yesterday, Russian media reported that during searches in the offices of the PMCs, colossal amounts of cash were found – 4 billion rubles, (about $50 million).
Prigozhin immediately admitted that this was money of the PMC and that it was intended for paying the so-called “coffin” money – payments to the relatives of killed mercenaries.
“Wagner PMC has existed for 10 years using cash only. When we were working in Africa, in Ukraine and in other countries, when America was a nightmare, everyone was satisfied with cash. And now they came with searches,” Prigozhing commented.
Let’s talk about the dirty economy of Wagner PMC. ¤ Using simple arithmetic calculations, multiplying the declared number of mercenaries in the PMC – 50,000 people, by their average payment for a bloody contract – RUB 240,000, we get the amount of $150 million a month. And this amount does not include any other costs for the maintenance of Prigogzhin’s private army. ¤ According to my rough estimates, maintaining a private Wagner army cost Putin between $250 million and $350 million in cash per month.
It is possible that one of the reasons that prompted Prigozhin to revolt against Putin was the conflict over the verification of how he spent more than $2 billion received from Putin and his oligarchs during the 15 months of war.
We still do not know the reasons why Prigozhin stopped his march on Moscow by his mercenaries. Neither he, nor Putin, nor Lukashenko made a single public statement after the talks.
But I have several questions:
1. Will Putin, after Prigozhin’s rebellion, finance his PMC in the same way as before? I highly doubt it! And if not, then where will Prigozhin get $250 million per month to maintain PMCs?
2. Will Prigozhin now be provided with shells, cartridges, missiles – after his mercenaries shot down helicopters and a Russian plane yesterday with the same missiles? I don’t think so!
3. Will the Russian military, who until this moment idolized Prigozhin as a real military leader, forgive him the Russian pilots and officers killed by him? I think that he lost their trust, both after the murders and after a cheap provocation about the alleged shelling of the rear camp of the PMC, staged by Prigozhin himself as a pretext for rebellion.
4. How will Prigozhin withstand the powerful blow of Kremlin propaganda? Already last night it was clearly visible how quickly and clearly the position of Kremlin propaganda in relation to the Wagner PMC has changed. From yesterday’s heroes, they quickly began to turn into traitors, rebels, and murderers of valiant pilots. A few more weeks and instead of Prigozhin and his accomplices, instead of the Wagnerites “heroes of Russia”, propaganda will show them as a bunch of scoundrels, rebels and murderers – which, in fact, they are.
Therefore, future events look obvious to me – yesterday Prigozhin lost his chance to seize power in Russia. ¤ There will most likely not be a second campaign against Moscow, since Wagner PMC will slowly collapse through a gradual reduction in funding for salaries to mercenaries, through contradictions between those who are 100% loyal to Prigozhin and who feel deceived and thrown into the furnace of the ambitions of the bloody Bakhmut butcher.
And Ukraine only benefited from this failed rebellion, as fascist Russia became even weaker – and that’s good news!
🐣 RT @sentdefender Russian Sources are stating that Russian Minister of Defense, Sergei Shoigu is currently under a form of “House Arrest” by the FSB pending an Investigation into his Leadership within the MoD and the Theft of Military Funding, Sources believe that Major Announcements regarding charges in the Chain-of-Command and General Staff of the Russian Armed Forces are expected sometime today, June the 26th or this week.
[TextLink:] [tr] https://twitter.com/sentdefender/status/1673171204209795072?s=20/photo/1 -2
WaPo: What just happened in Russia? The Wagner crisis, explained. https://tinyurl.com/2p92vhju Basic backgrounder
🐣 RT @maryilyushina An overview of why Prigozhin marched on Moscow, the irony of his predictions of a revolution in Russia and the surprising warmth Wagner received from Rostov residents — something that should rattle Kremlin quite a bit
⋙ WaPo, Mary Ilyushina: Mercenary boss warned of revolution in Russia, but his own was short-lived https://tinyurl.com/wc8mhw6w
🚫 🐣 RT @MattPPea Shoigu arrested according Wagner channels. Thanks to @Wales4Ukraine [link]
// need confirmation
🐣 RT @randymot4 Both the Wagner group and the Free Russian forces have demonstrated that Russia is very poorly defended. Virtually the entire army is in Ukraine and even that is not enough to cover the long defensive lines. The Ukrainian attack force not committed includes abput 9-10 heavy brigades, fully mobile incl support vehicles. They will cut through the opening in the Russia lines – probably in two or three places – and go a long way toward ending the war. A mobile operation gives Ukraine a huge advantage due to the slowness of Russian command & control. #RussiaLosing
🐣 RT @randymot4 Both the Wagner group and the Free Russian forces have demonstrated that Russia is very poorly defended. Virtually the entire army is in Ukraine and even that is not enough to cover the long defensive lines. The Ukrainian attack force not committed includes abput 9-10 heavy brigades, fully mobile incl support vehicles. They will cut through the opening in the Russia lines – probably in two or three places – and go a long way toward ending the war. A mobile operation gives Ukraine a huge advantage due to the slowness of Russian command & control. #RussiaLosing
🐣 RT @Stanovaya [Carnegie Eurasia] Below is a brief description of Prigozhin’s mutiny and the factors that contributed to its outcome. We, as observers, initially missed important details due to the scarcity of information and lack of time for in-depth analysis. Here’s the perspective that currently seems most plausible:
1️⃣ Prigozhin’s rebellion wasn’t a bid for power or an attempt to overtake the Kremlin. It arose from a sense of desperation; Prigozhin was forced out of Ukraine and found himself unable to sustain Wagner the way he did before, while the state machinery was turning against him. To top it off, Putin was ignoring him and publicly supporting his most dangerous adversaries.
2️⃣ Prigozhin’s objective was to draw Putin’s attention and to impose a discussion about conditions to preserve his activities – a defined role, security, and funding. These weren’t demands for a governmental overthrow; they were a desperate bid to save the enterprise, hoping that Prigozhin’s merits in taking Bakhmut (that’s why he needed it!) would be taken into account and the concerns would catch Putin’s serious attention. Now it appears that these merits helped Prigozhin to get out of this crisis alive, but without a political future in Russia (at least while Putin is in power).
3️⃣ Prigozhin was caught off-guard by Putin’s reaction and found himself unprepared to assume the role of a revolutionary. He also wasn’t prepared for the fact that Wagner was about to reach Moscow where his only option remained – to “take the Kremlin” – an action that would inevitably result in him and his fighters being eradicated.
4️⃣ Those in the elites who were able reached out to Prigozhin with offers to surrender. This likely added to his sense of impending doom. However, I don’t believe any high-level negotiations took place. Lukashenko presented Prigozhin with a Putin-endorsed offer to retreat on the condition that Prigozhin would leave Russia and Wagner would be dissolved.
5️⃣ I don’t think Prigozhin was in a position to make demands (such as the resignation of Shoigu or Gerasimov – something many observers expect today. If that happens, it will be due to another reason.) After Putin’s address in the morning of June 24th, Prigozhin’s primary concern was to find an off-ramp. The situation would have led to inevitable death in merely a few hours. It is possible that Putin has promised him safety on the condition that Prigozhin remains quietly in Belarus.
I stand by my previous assertion that Putin and the state have been dealt a severe blow (which will have significant repercussions for the regime). However, I want to emphasize that image has always been a secondary concern for Putin. Setting optics aside, Putin objectively resolved the Wagner and Prigozhin problem by dissolving the former and expelling the latter. The situation would have been far worse if it had culminated in a bloody mess in the outskirts of Moscow.
And no, Putin doesn’t need Wagner or Prigozhin. He can manage with his own forces. He’s now certainly convinced of that. I will disclose many more details in my bulletin to be issued tomorrow evening.
NYT, Anton Trianovski: Revolt Raises Searing Question: Could Putin Lose Power? https://tinyurl.com/yfp6u4ju “The fact that Mr. Prigozhin and his forces were not being punished punctured Mr. Putin’s reputation as a decisive leader who would not tolerate disloyalty.”
// Russians with ties to the Kremlin expressed relief that the mercenary leader’s mutiny did not spark a civil war. But they agreed that Vladimir Putin had come off looking weak in a way that could be lasting.
🧵 RT @CanadianKobzar FELLAS! STAY AWHILE AND LISTEN! In the theme of the recent “coup”, today I will discuss a true revolution. One that is integral to understanding the current war. A heroic fight to break the chains of corruption – Euromaidan and the Revolution of Dignity of 2013/14. 1/21
📌 https://twitter.com/CanadianKobzar/status/1672832074150027264?s=20
🐣 RT @ @ZelenskyyUa With just 15 days to go until the @NATO Summit in Vilnius, we are doing everything to ensure that the summit has real content. Strong content.
💽 [tr] https://twitter.com/ZelenskyyUa/status/1673071448427053057?s=20/photo/1
Positive decisions for 🇺🇦 in Vilnius are the only possible positive decisions for our common security in Europe and in the Alliance as a whole.
Thank you to everyone who supports Ukraine! Thank you to 🇺🇸 Mr. President @POTUS, the Congress, both parties and all Americans for the historic strengthening of freedom in the world! Thank you to 🇨🇦 Mr. Prime Minister @JustinTrudeau and all Canadians for your unwavering support! Thank you to 🇵🇱 Mr. President @AndrzejDuda and everyone in Poland who stands with 🇺🇦 in the defense of Europe!
🐣 RT @home_fella Russia is planning to blow up Zaporizhzhya NPP -Budanov ¤ “Russian troops have deployed equipment with explosives near 4 of the 6 power units of ZNPP. The plan for a terrorist attack on ZNPP is fully developed and approved. They can use technical means to accelerate the disaster”
🖼 https://twitter.com/home_fella/status/1672994165003616256?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @ChuckPfarrer ORIKHIV AXIS /2050 UTC 25 JUN/ UKR forces are reported to have advanced south on the T-04-08 HWY axis and have consolidated a 1 KM gain in the vicinity of Robotyne.
🌎 https://twitter.com/ChuckPfarrer/status/1673071069228326916?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @ Gerashchenko_en “The coup was being prepared for eight months and all of Prigozhin’s publicity was aimed at preparing it” – GULAGU NET
¤ https://twitter.com/Gerashchenko_en/status/1672936813646757895?s=20
GULAGU NET published a list of the National Guard, Federal Security Service and Ministry of Defence of the Russian Federation units that have partially or fully moved over to Prigozhin’s side.
A description of what is happening was also provided: ¤ This special operation was being prepared and developed over a period of more than eight months. Surovikin and Alexeyev not only knew but were also involved and verbally instructed some commanders not to offer armed resistance. That is why they were urgently taken under control and forced to make a video-recorded appeal addressed to Prigozhin. Later, when taking over the headquarters of the Southern Military District of the MoD, Alexeyev uttered an important phrase to Prigozhin’s demand of giving them Chief of the General Staff Gerasimov: “Yes, take him away”. They were ready to hand over their commander (superior officers) to the rebels. This is a fact of betrayal, a decision on which is about to be made.
This special operation involved former commanders and fighters of the Special Operations Forces of the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation, 2nd and 15th GRU brigades of Wagner PMC (under the command of Utkin), who had previously participated in special operations on the territory of foreign countries, primarily to capture customs posts, communication points, local army units and strategic weapons.
Formally, Yevgeny Prigozhin himself was at the headquarters of the Southern Military District of the MoD, and did not physically move from there, holding talks with the Deputy Minister of Defense and giving orders to detain or capture anything, unlike Utkin, Kuznetsov and other PMC commanders, and neither Putin, nor Peskov promised them immunity and non-prosecution. By the end of the year, they will be detained or liquidated. ¤ Source: GULAGU NET
Meduza: ‘Putin was nowhere to be found’ An inside look into the Kremlin’s attempted negotiations with Prigozhin and why it took Lukashenko to put an end to the rebellion https://tinyurl.com/bddc472y
🐣 RT @ ZelenskyyUa I spoke with 🇺🇸 President @POTUS. A positive and inspiring conversation.
We discussed the course of hostilities and the processes taking place in Russia. The world must put pressure on Russia until international order is restored.
I thanked the @POTUS for the unflagging support of 🇺🇦, especially for Patriots. ¤ It is important to further increase 🇺🇦 capabilities to protect our skies. In this context, I also thanked him for the support of the fighter jet coalition. ¤ We discussed further expansion of defense cooperation, with an emphasis on long-range weapons.
I am grateful for the readiness of the 🇺🇸 and the American people to stand side by side with Ukraine until the full liberation of all our territories within internationally recognized borders.
We coordinated our positions on the eve of the @NATO Summit in Vilnius, discussed further work on the implementation of 🇺🇦 Peace Formula and preparations for the Global Peace Summit.
🧵 RT @khodorkovsky_en Wagner PMC chief Yevgeny Prigozhin’s attempted military coup was one of the most serious political events to take place in Russia in the last 20 years. Why did it happen, what does it mean and what lessons can be learned from it?
📌 https://twitter.com/khodorkovsky_en/status/1672952267287433216?s=20
[ThreadReader:] https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1672952267287433216.html
⭕ 24 Jun 2023
NewYorker, David Remnick: Yevgeny Prigozhin’s Rebellion: Putin’s Weakness Unmasked https://tinyurl.com/nhjwuvf2 “‘Putin is still alive. He is still there in his bunker. But there is the growing feeling that he is a lame duck, and they have to prepare for Russia after Putin’”
// 6/24/2023
⋙ See under Entire Articles: Prig Coup Nykr Jun 2023
NYT: Rebel Wagner Forces, Threatening March to Moscow, Abruptly Stand Down https://tinyurl.com/4nnpehtt “The head-spinning sequence of events that played out in less than 24 hours plunged a nation already struggling to wage the war in Ukraine into a full-blown domestic crisis”
// The mercenary group had seized the Russian city of Rostov-on-Don, the center of Moscow’s military operations in Ukraine, posing a grave threat to President Vladimir Putin’s government.
🐣 RT @ChuckPfarrer YOUR PAPERS, PLEASE: The Russian FSB raided the HQ of the Wagner Group, where they discovered various passports belonging to Yevgeny Prigozhin. Many were made out to his alter ego, Vladimir Vasilovich Bobov, & oddly, one made out to in his real name, with someone else’s picture.
🖼 https://twitter.com/ChuckPfarrer/status/1672790835694370816?s=20/photo/1
WaPo, David Ignatius: Putin and Prigozhin played a game of chicken — and both swerved in the end https://tinyurl.com/5r88y3kk “Putin might have saved his regime … , but this day will be remembered as part of the unraveling of Russia as a great power — which will be Putin’s true legacy”
President Vladimir Putin looked into the abyss Saturday and blinked. After vowing revenge for what he called an “armed mutiny,” he settled for a compromise. ¤ The speed with which Putin backed down suggests that his sense of vulnerability might be higher even than analysts believed. Putin might have saved his regime Saturday, but this day will be remembered as part of the unraveling of Russia as a great power — which will be Putin’s true legacy.
Putin’s deal with renegade militia leader Yevgeniy Prigozhin is likely to be a momentary truce, at best. The bombastic rebel will head for Belarus, in a deal brokered by his pal President Alexander Lukashenko, in exchange for Putin dropping charges against him and his mutinous soldiers, according to Kremlin spokesman Dimitry Peskov.
This was a real coup, until it wasn’t. For much of Saturday, Prigozhin was marching units of his 25,000-man Wagner militia toward the gates of Moscow, rolling through Russia’s Ukrainian command headquarters at Rostov-on-Don and north to Voronezh. Sources tell me the Russian FSB put up roadblocks along the way, to little effect. Putin called up the National Guard to defend Moscow. …
The Biden administration’s response to this mad day in Russia seemed to be a version of the advice attributed to Napoleon: “Never interrupt your enemy when he is making a mistake.” That, as well as the usual Biden prescription: focus on allies and partners.
President Biden and his team stayed in contact with foreign leaders. White House and State Department officials spoke to the other major democracies, known as the Group of Seven; they added India and Australia as members of the “Quad.” They consulted with NATO and the European Union.
The message in all these calls, I’m told, was “cool it.” Don’t make the crisis in Russia more dangerous by seeking to intervene or profit from the disarray. This message was focused especially on Ukraine; U.S. officials stressed their desire that Kyiv not seem to take advantage of the strife in Russia in ways that might spiral into an even more dangerous moment. The Ukrainians, from what we can see, followed that advice.
What comes next, surely, is more trouble for Putin in Ukraine. Prigozhin told the truth flat out in the days before his march on Moscow. Ukraine didn’t threaten Russia, and Russia’s invasion was unnecessary — a mistake of epic proportions. Even Putin, the ice man, can’t freeze the burning truth of his Ukraine disaster.
🐣 RT @RadioFreeTomThe Prigozhin episode is not a win for Putin, writes @RadioFreeTo: “The Russian dictator has been visibly wounded, and he will now bear the permanent scar of political vulnerability.”
TheAtlantic, Tom Nichols: The Coup Is Over, but Putin Is in Trouble https://tinyurl.com/4x9w26bb
// The Wagner Group’s chief may have lost spectacularly, but Russia’s dictator suffered a huge political blow.
A short recap of the past 24 hours in Russia reads like the backstory for a fanciful episode of Madam Secretary or The West Wing. Yevgeny Prigozhin, the brutal convicted criminal who leads the Wagner mercenary group, declared war on the Russian Ministry of Defense and marched into the city of Rostov-on-Don. He then headed north for Moscow, carrying his demand for the ousting of Minister of Defense Sergei Shoigu and Chief of the General Staff Valery Gerasimov. The city went on alert.
Prigozhin and his men came within 125 miles of the capital—that is, closer to Moscow than Philadelphia is to Washington, D.C. He then said that a deal had been struck and that Wagner’s forces were turning around to avoid bloodshed. Apparently, however, the blood Prigozhin saved from being shed was his own. If the “deal” announced by the Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov accurately reflects the outcome of this whole bizarre episode, Prigozhin has in the space of a day gone from being a powerful warlord to a man living on borrowed time in a foreign country, waiting for Russian President Vladimir Putin’s inevitable retribution. …
Nonetheless, this bizarre episode is not a win for Putin. The Russian dictator has been visibly wounded, and he will now bear the permanent scar of political vulnerability. Instead of looking like a decisive autocrat (or even just a mob boss in command of his crew), Putin left Moscow after issuing a short video in which he was visibly angry and off his usual self-assured game. Putin reportedly worries a great deal about being assassinated, and so perhaps he wanted to hunker down until he had more clarity about who might be in league with Prigozhin. But whatever the reason, he vowed to deal with Prigozhin decisively and then blew town, probably to his retreat at Valdai, in a move that looked weak and disorganized. …
Prigozhin gets to stay alive, at least for the moment, but his life as he knew it (and maybe in any sense) is over. Putin, however, is now politically weaker than ever. The once unchallengeable czar is no longer invincible. The master of the Kremlin had to make a deal with a convict—again, in Putin’s culture, among the lowest of the low—just to avert the shock and embarrassment of an armed march into the Russian capital while other Russians are fighting on the front lines in Ukraine.
… [T]wo things appear certain. First, Putin has suffered a huge political blow, and he has survived by making deals both with Prigozhin and with his own colleagues in the Kremlin that are, by any definition, a humiliation. And second, Yevgeny Prigozhin has changed the Russian political environment surrounding Putin’s war in Ukraine. ¤ Prigozhin’s rebellion and its effects will last beyond today, but how long he will live in Belarus—or stay alive in Belarus—to see how the rest of it plays out is unclear.
NYT: Timeline: What Led to the Standoff Between Russia and Prigozhin https://tinyurl.com/msah4sxu Prigozhin had debunked Russian justifications for the war and accused the military of corruption and incompetence; Wagner got to within 200km of Moscow when a deal was cut
// The leader of the Wagner mercenary group had kept a low profile for years, only acknowledging his force’s existence in September of last year.
WaPo: Wagner uprising is reckoning for Putin’s rule https://tinyurl.com/27x65zpv “[O]bservers said the uprising was ‘a symptom of a deep sickness’ within the Russian state brought on by Putin’s messianic mission to capture what he believes are Russia’s historical lands in Ukraine”
Vladimir Putin faced the gravest challenge to his presidency after the system he has presided over for the last twenty-three years buckled this weekend under the pressure of the war he launched in Ukraine and, for a moment, devolved into armed conflict inside Russia.
The march on Moscow by an irate onetime ally, Yevgeniy Prigozhin, accompanied by a convoy of armed members of his private Wagner mercenary group, was a reckoning for a presidency that till now has thrived on Putin’s ability to divide and rule by pitting rival groups against each other and serving as the ultimate arbiter among feuding elites.
Although eventually aborted, Prigozhin’s insurrection exposed the deep weaknesses inside Putin’s rule, raising the specter of civil war and, for several hours on Saturday, appearing to pose a threat to Putin’s position itself. After more than two decades of autocratic rule, Putin’s hubris has repeatedly clouded his judgment — both in invading Ukraine and in misjudging whether Prigozhin could pose a threat — and allowed a months-long standoff between the Wagner chief and the Russian military leadership to spiral this weekend into armed rebellion.
“Recently, Putin has been making mistake after mistake, and Prigozhin could become for him a critical mistake,” said Mikhail Khodorkovsky, Russia’s onetime richest man who became a leading exiled opposition figure after Putin jailed him for ten years. “When you are in power for twenty years and everyone tells you what a genius you are, who knows what happens to your consciousness.” ¤ The current crisis, however it ends, will ultimately further weaken Putin’s regime, Khodorkovsky said. …
WaPo: Wagner uprising is reckoning for Putin’s rule https://tinyurl.com/27x65zpv “[O]bservers said the uprising was ‘a symptom of a deep sickness’ within the Russian state brought on by Putin’s messianic mission to capture what he believes are Russia’s historical lands in Ukraine”
🧵 RT @MarkHertling It hit me we’re thinking of Prigozhin in the wrong way. ¤ His actions have confused us these last 48 hours (and beyond) because we see him as the leader of a large mercenary body, fighting for pay (or freedom from jail) instead of what soldiers fight to defend (the state). 1/4
📌 https://twitter.com/MarkHertling/status/1672738004102705152?s=20
⋙⋙ 🐣 RT @LamarEsq @MarkHertling: Thank you, General, for the brief primer, on CNN, re: Prigozhin as modern warlord. You nailed the characteristics and the reason for 21st-century bafflement. Excellent insight.
After some research, I’m now concluding he fits the definition of a modern day warlord, with these attributes: ¤ Here are the characteristics of a warlord: · an individual with limited military skills, who is accountable to no one, who has no true ideology… 2/4
…who rules through patronage, who flourishes only when the central government is weak, and who further fragments the politics, the unified military action, and the economics of a central government. ¤ There is no contribution to a nation’s power, only the individual’s. 3/4
If this definition fits Prigozhin, it also suggests that Russia is therefore a failed – although semi-functioning – quasi modern state. ¤ We know Putin is a kleptocratic authoritarian, so this seems to fit. ¤ Would be interested in what others think of this conclusion. 4/4
🐣 RT @front_ukrainian ⚡️Summarizing all the events and the words spoken, we can say that Yevgeny Prigozhin bet everything and lost. Most likely, PMC Wagner will cease to exist and will be disbanded
🐣 RT @mccaffreyr3 MSNBC. 23 June 23. Putin’s control and stature gravely weakened by the criminal war in Ukraine. He’s brutal but scared. Still has an iron clamp on the security institutions. His continued leadership of Russia is more tenuous each month.
// 11thHour
🐣 RT @Gerashchenko_en Terrorist Girkin-Strelkov: “I have to admit with great bitterness that the Russian Federation is one step closer to its final and irrevocable demise.
As of today, the Russian Federation has two presidents – the real president, Yevgeny Viktorovich Prigozhin, and Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin, the acting president to serve his term. The main purpose of the acting president is to periodically address the real president, kneeling down, with the question: “What do you want, Yevgeny Viktorovich?”
Never, even in my worst nightmare, I couldn’t imagine that I would see this shame and destruction of my country.”
🐣 RT @ ZelenskyyUa We all remember how the head of Russia threatened the world in 2021. He had some ultimatums, he was trying to show a kind of strength…
¤ https://twitter.com/ZelenskyyUa/status/1672658185641926660?s=20
The year 2022 showed that he confused – confused his illusions and the lies he was fed with strength. They in the Kremlin are capable of resorting to any terror, capable of resorting to any stupidity, but they cannot provide even one percent of the necessary control. And they are the problem.
In one day, they lost several of their million-plus cities and showed all Russian bandits, mercenaries, oligarchs and anyone else how easy it is to capture Russian cities and, probably, arsenals with weapons.
Now, it is very important that no one in the world remains silent because of being afraid of this Russian chaos. All the actions of the leaders now can be historic. Every word of journalists is worth its weight in gold. It is necessary to clearly name the source of the problem. And if someone in the world tries to ignore the situation, if someone in the world is under the illusion that the Kremlin is capable of regaining control… this only postpones the problem until the next breakthrough of chaos – even more dangerous. ¤ We all know the solutions.
🐣 RT @McFaul What has weakened Putin’s grip on power? His disastrous war in Ukraine. The longer the war continues, the weaker Putin’s regime becomes. Those that want to avoid Russian state collapse (i.e. Xi) should be pushing Putin to end his war.
🐣 RT @wartranslated Civilians chanting “Shame!” and “Traitors!” at the police units which arrived back in Rostov after Wagner units withdrew.
💽 https://twitter.com/wartranslated/status/1672737054973739010?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @Gerashchenko_en By my estimates, Putin’s rating in Russia fell below 30% in the 24 hours of Prigozhin’s “coup d’etat”. The bloody murderer turned into a limping duck, his “macho” image shattered both in Russia and abroad
It’s really like Russia had two presidents today – the real one, a determined, capable murderer, and the old one – cowering with fear deep down in his bunker, sending his bloody accomplice Lukashenko to negotiate.
Why did Lukashenko become the mediator in negotiations with criminal Prigozhin? I think the answer is simple. Wagner convoys were only a few hours away from Moscow. If they had captured the capital, they would take control over government buildings, including the Kremlin. That would lead to the collapse of Putin’s regime, and that, in turn, would have caused the collapse of Lukashenko’s regime. That’s why one rushed to save the other.
What will happen next?
1. No one really knows the exact agreements that were reached in negotiations with Prigozhin. The fact is – a convoy of Wagner PMC stopped and walked away 200 km from Moscow, and that Prigozhin’s forces left the headquarters of Southern Military Region in Rostov.
2. A lot will depend on whether Putin will honor his side of the deal, including the resignation of Shoigu and Gerasimov (assuming that was included in the agreement).One thing is clear:
There will be a sequel of some sort.
🐣 RT @ChuckPfarrer A LONG STRANGE TRIP: The Wagner Group mercenary Group, led personally by Yevgeny Prigozhin, has seized the Southern District Military Command Center in Rostov-on-Don. Wagner units are now embarking on a Quixotic 1000 km (600 mi) journey to Moscow.
🌎 https://twitter.com/ChuckPfarrer/status/1672622608565583872?s=20/photo/1
⋙ BBC: Wagner boss to leave Russia and charges dropped, state media says https://tinyurl.com/3aft9t2f
🐣 RT @JuliaDavisNews Putin’s spokesman Dmitry Peskov said that criminal charges against #Prigozhin will be dropped. Other #Wagner members will likewise not be prosecuted for their participation. Prigozhin agreed to move to #Belarus.
🐣 RT @nicholadrummond After what’s happened today – with Putin openly accusing Prigozhin of treason and Prigozhin responding that Putin colluded with Shoigu and Gerasimov to start the SMO under false pretences – there really is no going back for either man. This ends badly for one or the other.
🐣 RT @mhmck The most prudent and stabilizing way to end the war and build peace is to inflict public, chaotic and humiliating defeats on the leader-of-the-moment of the Russian terrorist state.
🐣 RT @301military BREAKING: Peskov announced that the criminal case against Prigozhin will be dropped, and he will leave for Belarus.
🐣 RT @ 🐣 RT @ ZelenskyyUa Today, the world saw that the bosses of Russia do not control anything. Nothing at all. Complete chaos. Complete absence of any predictability.
// 12:47pCT
[TextLink:] https://twitter.com/ZelenskyyUa/status/1672662657881571332?s=20
First, the world should not be afraid. We know what protects us. Our unity. ¤ Ukraine will definitely be able to protect Europe from any Russian forces, and it doesn’t matter who commands them. We will protect. The security of Europe’s eastern flank depends only on our defense.
Ukrainian soldiers, Ukrainian guns, Ukrainian tanks, Ukrainian missiles are all that protect Europe from such marches as we see today on Russian territory. And when we ask to give us the F-16 fighters or the ATACMS, we’re enhancing our common defense. Real defense.
Second, everything must be real. It’s time for everyone in the world to frankly say that all of Russia’s criminal actions against Ukraine were and are unprovoked. And we all have to focus exclusively on our common security priorities. NATO is not just a word or a set of formal promises. These are reliable guarantees for everyone that peace won’t be destroyed. Without Ukraine, such guarantees are worthless. Already in July at the summit in Vilnius, it is a historic chance for real decisions without looking back at Russia. Any nation that borders Russia supports this.
What will we, Ukrainians, do? ¤ We will defend our country. We will defend our freedom. We will not be silent and we will not be inactive. We know how to win – and it will happen. Our victory in this war.
And what will you, Russians, do? ¤ The longer your troops stay on Ukrainian land, the more devastation they will bring to Russia. The longer this person is in the Kremlin, the more disasters there will be.
🐣 RT @McFaul Can anyone remember a mutiny or coup attempt that lasted 24 hours and no one really fought or was killed? We all watched how easy it was for Wagner to seize Rostov. Something strange going on here.
🐣 RT @McFaul Putin could not control a mercenary force that he created & run by his buddy. He had to rely on Lukashenko of all people to cut a deal with a guy he called just hours ago a traitor. These are signs of real weakness, not strength.
🐣 RT @ChuckPfarrer ORIKHIV AXIS /1715 UTC 23 JUN/ UKR forces in contact south of the H-08 HWY axis; RU units are reported to be on the defensive. UKR has advanced south along the T-04-08 HWY & is in contact north of Robotyne. UKR units are in contact NW of Verbove.
🌎 https://twitter.com/ChuckPfarrer/status/1672291679699648519?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @ igorsushko 🚨 Prigozhin released a recording that he will turn his columns around and stop his March of Justice on Moscow after coming within 200km. There’s going to be so much more to this. Either a fake out or some insane deal has been struck, and not necessarily with Putin. 🍿
🐣 RT @ 🐣 RT @wartranslated Prigozhin says it’s over: ¤ “They were going to dismantle PMC Wagner. We came out on 23 June to the March of Justice. In a day, we walked to nearly 200km away from Moscow. In this time, we did not spill a single drop of blood of our fighters. Now, the moment has come when blood may spill. That’s why, understanding the responsibility for spilling Russian blood on one of the sides, we are turning back our convoys and going back to field camps according to the plan.” ¤ Audio: https://t.me/concordgroup_official/1303
🔆 This❗️⋙ WaPo: Wagner chief says mercenaries are turning back after advance toward Moscow https://tinyurl.com/w9mcbp9u “With security guarantees for Wagner Group on the table, Prigozhin agreed to stop his forces’ progress toward Moscow”; the deal was brokered by Lukashenko
// 2:45pCT
The agreement for Prigozhin’s forces to turn around was brokered by Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko, who spoke with Putin before negotiating with Prigozhin, according to Belarusian state-owned news agency Belta. With security guarantees for Wagner Group on the table, Prigozhin agreed to stop his forces’ progress toward Moscow.
Mercenaries are halting their travel toward Moscow and turning back from the city, Wagner Group leader Yevgeniy Prigozhin said in an audio message Saturday. After a day of mounting tension in Russia as Prigozhin’s forces advanced in the direction of the capital, his statement appeared to signal a possible end to the immediate crisis.
Prigozhin said his forces had gotten within 200 kilometers of Moscow, and now “we turn our columns around and leave in the opposite direction to the field camps according to the plan.” The Washington Post could not immediately clarify his whereabouts. Prigozhin called his forces’ movement on Saturday — which began after Prigozhin called for Russians to join his campaign against President Vladimir Putin’s military leadership — a “march of justice.”
Wagner forces on Saturday had moved north from the Voronezh region to the Lipetsk region, which is roughly 250 miles from the Russian capital.
🐣 RT @front_ukrainian⚡️⚡️⚡️Columns of “Wagner” entered the Moscow region, passing through the city of Barabanov, – Russian media ¤ Now they are only 2 hours away from Moscow.
🌎 https://twitter.com/front_ukrainian/status/1672604539797512193?s=20/photo/1
CNN: Putin is at risk of losing his iron grip on power. The next 24 hours are critical https://tinyurl.com/y349teru
🐣 RT @@wartranslated ❗️Prigozhin audio message 10:19AM BST – “no one will surrender to the demands of the President”:
[TextLink:] https://twitter.com/wartranslated/status/1672536701997072384?s=20
“Regarding the betrayal of the Motherland, the President is deeply mistaken. We’re patriots of our Motherland. We fought and we are fighting, all fighters of PMC Wagner. And no one is going to surrender to the demands of the President, FSB, or anyone else. Because we don’t want the country to live further in corruption lies, and bureaucracy.
When we fought in Africa, we were told that we needed Africa, and then they dumped it, because they stole all the money that was meant to come for help.
When we were told we are fighting with Ukraine, we went and fought. But it turned out that the ammo, weapons, all money put towards this were also being stolen, while officials are sitting and saving them for themselves for an incident that happened today, when someone is going towards Moscow.”
Now they are not saving anything, they are striking us with planes and helicopters at the columns with civilians. And they hit civilians because they’re missing. And they hit anywhere they can.
Thus, we are the patriots, but those resisting us today are those who gathered around scumbags. Audio: https://t.me/Prigozhin_hat/3812
🐣 RT @WarFrontline The Belarusian regiment of Kalinouski is preparing an appeal to the Belarusian people at 17:00.👀👀
🐣 RT @JayinKyiv Medvedev and his family have fled Moscow according to Russian channels.
🐣 RT @TheDeadDistrict Interception of the Russian radio: The Russian 205th Brigade in the Kherson direction is thinking about “turning its guns to Russia”. Audio in my TG channel
🐣 RT @Gerashchenko_en It’s really high time for Russian liberals to talk to Russians in Russia and abroad, to raise their voice and to give vision of future of people of Russia. Future without Putin or Prigozhin. ¤ Peoples of Russian Federation, if you have been waiting for a chance – this is it! ¤ Please share/tag with everyone to whom this may concern.
🌎 https://twitter.com/Gerashchenko_en/status/1672542872665505792?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @ ZelenskyyUa Everyone who chooses the path of evil destroys himself. Who sends columns of troops to destroy the lives of another country and cannot stop them from fleeing and betraying when life resists. …
[TextLink:] https://twitter.com/ZelenskyyUa/status/1672543858863767552?s=20
… Who terrorizes with missiles, and when they are shot down, humiliates himself to receive Shahed drones. Who despises people and throws hundreds of thousands into the war, in order to eventually barricade himself in the Moscow region from those whom he himself armed. For a long time, Russia used propaganda to mask its weakness and the stupidity of its government. And now there is so much chaos that no lie can hide it. And all this is one person, who again and again scares by the year 1917, although he is able to result in nothing else but this.
Russia’s weakness is obvious. Full-scale weakness. And the longer Russia keeps its troops and mercenaries on our land, the more chaos, pain, and problems it will have for itself later. It is also obvious. Ukraine is able to protect Europe from the spread of Russian evil and chaos.
We keep our resilience, unity and strength.
All our commanders, all our soldiers know what to do.
Glory to Ukraine!
🐣 RT @Den_2042 Prigozhin: “As with regard to the high treason, the President has made a big mistake. We are the patriots[…] We don’t want the country to continue to live in corruption, in lies and in bureaucracy.”
🐣 RT @DefenceHQ [UK] Latest Defence Intelligence update on the situation in Ukraine – 24 June 2023.
Find out more about Defence Intelligence’s use of language: https://ow.ly/s3ez50OWlAF 🇺🇦 #StandWithUkraine 🇺🇦
[TextLink:] https://twitter.com/DefenceHQ/status/1672505632325238784?s=20/photo/1
● In the early hours of 24 June 2023, the feud between Yevgeny Prigozhin’s Wagner Group and the Russian MoD escalated into outright military confrontation.
● In an operation characterised by Prigozhin as a ‘march for freedom”, Wagner Group forces crossed from occupied Ukraine into Russia in at least two locations. In Rostov-on-Don, Wagner has almost certainly occupied key security sites, including the HQ which runs Russia’s military operations in Ukraine
● Further Wagner units are moving north through Vorenezh Oblast, almost certainly aiming to get to Moscow. With very limited evidence of fighting between Wagner and Russian security forces, some have likely remained passive, acquiescing to Wagner.
● Over the coming hours, the loyalty of Russia’s security forces, and especially the Russian National Guard, will be key to how the crisis plays out. This represents the most significant challenge to the Russian state in recent times.
🧵 RT @ MarkGaleotti All still pretty unclear as to Prigozhin’s rebellion, but am struck by the uncompromising language in Putin’s emergency address in which he denounces this as treason and a betrayal of the Fatherland 1/
📌 https://twitter.com/MarkGaleotti/status/1672517490495180800?s=20
[ThreadReader:] https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1672517490495180800.html
All still pretty unclear as to Prigozhin’s rebellion, but am struck by the uncompromising language in Putin’s emergency address in which he denounces this as treason and a betrayal of the Fatherland 1/
If Prigozhin thought there was a deal to be struck, this implies not. But I suspect VVP has (belatedly) come down hard because he must realise just how far his own legitimacy and credibility is on the line. 2/
Putin created Prigozhin, as a useful and biddable instrument (never one of his friends), and Putin allowed the Prigozhin/Shoigu rivalry to continue way past the point at which is was becoming dangerous and dysfunctional. 3/
His whole system is based on them, divide and rule on steroids, but it means that arbitrating these rows is one of his key and unique roles. No one else can do it – and so the buck stops with him when they spin out of control. 4/
🐣 RT @front_ukrainian ❗️”Either we take advantage of this historic chance, or we will lose everything,” Belarusian volunteer Sakhashchyk, founder of the 1st separate amphibious assault company in the Armed Forces of Ukraine, addressed the Belarusian military in connection with the events in the RF
🐣 RT @front_ukrainian “We will destroy everything around us, we are all ready to die – all 25 thousand, and then another 25 thousand, because the Russian people must be freed,” – Prigozhin.
🐣 RT @wartranslated “The war will end inside Russia, the process has begun” – Oleksiy Danilov, Secretary of the National Security and Defense Council of Ukraine.
🐣 RT @yasminalombaert Russia’s chief state propagandist Vladimir Solovyov comments on the Wagner Putsch.
💽 [tr] https://twitter.com/yasminalombaert/status/1672516463830204418?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @wartranslated❗️Kadyrov emerges, supports Putin, calls this a military coup, requests Wagners to lay down weapons.
🐣 RT @MalcolmNance WARNING: MUTINY IN RUSSIA MAY LEAD TO A COUP. What started as a small, localized mutiny by Yevgeny Pregozhin & PMC Wagner mercenaries against Russian Federation army commanders has escalated into a pre planned full blown coup. Whether Putin is the target or just Shoigu, Wagner is now marching on Moscow.
🐣 RT @Gerashchenko_en Russian Telegram channels report that Wagner PMCs have entered Voronezh and are on the outskirts of Krasnodar and Volgograd. No one is resisting the militants.
🐣 RT @Gerashchenko_en Today, Ukraine has become a few steps closer to complete Victory over Russia and complete return of its territories, including Crimea.
[TextLink:] https://twitter.com/Gerashchenko_en/status/1672520308790525953?s=20/photo/1
A vile, but useful in this case monster – Prigozhin, raised an armed rebellion against Shoigu and Gerasimov, captured the headquarters of the Southern Military District of the Russian Federation, and now his advanced groups are heading towards Voronezh, and then towards Moscow.
In fact, this is a rebellion, not against war criminals Shoigu and Gerasimov, but against Putin himself, whose place Prigozhin has long wanted to take and create his own regime in Russia.
What are the true motives of Prigozhin that prompted him to launch an armed rebellion? I think that he, as a person who has known Putin personally for more than 30 years, treats him with contempt and sees that Putin, having unleashed a bloody massacre against Ukraine, for the sake of his illusory greatness, no longer controls the situation.
In addition, Prigozhin, who has already participated in military coups in Africa for 10 years, decided that if it was possible to seize power in Sudan or the Central African Republic, then it is possible to do it in Russia as well, which Putin has lowered during his 23 years of rule to the level of puppet tropical dictatorships .
An interesting question – what exactly was the reason for the mutiny? Yesterday at 7:30 p.m., Prigozhin published a video showing footage of a rocket attack on the rear camp of the “Wagner” military unit, as a result of which his fighters were allegedly killed.
I am convinced that this provocation was organized by Prigozhin himself, because there was no sense for Shoigu and Gerasimov to attack one of the dozens of military camps of the “Wagner” military group.
If they really wanted to solve their problem with the bloody clown, they would have to eliminate him himself, not attack some tent in the forest and give Prigozhin an excuse to start a riot.
Prigozhin had been preparing for this mutiny for a long time. It is for this reason that he has been raising his profile for the past six months by accusing Shoigu and Gerasimov of sabotage, and gaining the trust of the Russian military, who are not satisfied with the way the criminal war against Ukraine is being waged. It was for this reason that he opened Wagner centers in all subjects of the Russian Federation and recently toured half of Russia.
Prigozhin has crossed his Rubicon, and will not turn from his path until he is physically destroyed or he achieves his goals.
In my opinion, what are the further possible options for the development of the situation?
The first: Putin’s power today and tomorrow will crumble like a house of cards. Prigozhin’s troops will enter Moscow, seize the Kremlin, the Ministry of Defense and all power, and Prigozhin will appoint himself the military dictator of Russia, on the basis that Putin cannot perform his duties due to a sharp deterioration in his health.
The second: Putin will give an order to physically destroy Prigozhin, which has already been effectively declared an outlaw, with a blow from “Kinzhal” or “Iskander”, as well as to destroy from the air the PMC convoys that are now heading from Russian South towards Moscow. I say from the air, since it is unlikely that any ground unit of the Russian army would dare to engage in open combat with the experienced and strictly disciplined mercenaries of the Wagner Army.
The third option: Putin will abandon the plan to physically destroy Prigozhin and try to come to an agreement with him, fulfilling his demands to remove Shoigu, Gerasimov and other ineffective war criminals, replacing them with Prigozhin’s proteges, in order to increase military pressure on Ukraine and our allies.
This will still mean the actual transfer of power to the hands of Prigozhin and the departure of Putin from power, and in the future the possibility of being shot together with Kabayeva for treason, as the Ceausescu couple was shot in 1989, on the second day after the beginning of the uprising.
You can choose which of the three options is the most beneficial for Ukraine, or write your vision in the comments.
In my opinion, all three options that I mentioned above only strengthen Ukraine’s position and bring our Victory closer.
If Prigozhin seizes power in the Kremlin, it will with a 99% probability lead to the collapse of Russia, which I have predicted since 24 February, 2022.
Kadyrov and the leaders of other national subjects of the federation in the Caucasus, Povolzhie (Volga region), and Siberia, know that Prigozhin considers all of them second-class people and will easily give an order to shoot and destroy any of them. Therefore, they will negotiate with the local commanders of the armed forces of the Russian Federation, the Russian Guards, the FSB, and declare their independence from Prigozhin.
An armed war of clans will begin for power, for resources, there will be such chaos and disorder, compared to which the year 1917 will seem like a fairy tale.
If, after all, Putin gives the order and Prigozhin is eliminated, then the Russian army, which was still somehow holding on due to the belief in some improvements, will completely lose the remnants of faith in the possibility of winning in the confrontation with us and our NATO allies.
Next will be our successful offensive, the total overthrow of the remnants of the Russian front, and the Russians and together with their henchmen will run and stop only after crossing our borders. ¤ Onwards to Victory!
🐣 RT @wartranslated ❗️AP Wagner: “The trigger of the Civil War was pulled by Pypa [Putin]. Instead of sending one or two degenerates into retirement, he gave the order to neutralize the most combat-ready unit in Russia. The life of one or two traitors was placed above 25,000 heroes. Who is evil in this conflict is already obvious. The victory will be for PMC “Wagner”. ¤ AP Wagner is one of numerous channels associated with senior figures in Wagner.
🐣 RT @wartranslated ❗️Full morning of 24 June address by Putin to the nation in regards to the military coup:
[TextLink:] https://twitter.com/wartranslated/status/1672508593969549312?s=20
“I appeal to the citizens of Russia, to the personnel of the Armed Forces, law enforcement and security services, fighters and commanders currently fighting on their positions, repelling the enemy attacks, doing it heroically.
I spoke to the commanders in all directions last night. I appeal also to those who were deceptively pulled into the criminal adventure, pushed towards a serious crime of an armed mutiny.
Russia today is leading the most difficult war for its future, repelling the aggression of neo-nazis and their handlers. Against us, the whole military, economical and information machines of the West are turned.
We fight for the lives and security of our people. For our sovereignty and independence. The right to remain Russia, a state with 1000 years of history.
It’s a battle where the fate of our people is decided requires uniting of all our forces, unity, consolidation and responsibility. Everything else [t]hat weakens us must be shoved to the side.
Our external enemies are using any arguments to undermine us from within. Thus, actions splitting our unity is a betrayal of our people, our combat brothers who fight now at the frontline. It’s a strike in the back of our country and our people.
Exactly this strike was dealt in 1917 when the country was in WW1, but its victory was stolen. Intrigues, and arguments behind the army’s back turned out to be the greatest catastrophe, destruction of the army and the state, loss of huge territories, resulting in a tragedy and a civil war.
Russians were killing Russians, brothers killing brothers. But the beneficiaries were various political chevaliers of fortune and foreign powers who divided the country, and tore it into parts. We will not let this happen.
We will protect our people and state from any threats, including internal betrayal. What we’re facing is exactly internal betrayal. Extraordinary ambitions and personal interests led to treason. Treason of their own country and people and of the case that fighters of Wagner were dying for alongside our soldiers.
Heroes who liberated Soledar and Artemivsk, towns and cities of the Donbas. They fought and were giving lives to Novorossiya and the unity of the Russian world. Their name and glory were also betrayed by those who are trying to organise the mutiny, pushing the country into anarchy and brother-killing, to a defeat, in the end, and capitulation.
Repeat: any internal mutiny is a deadly threat to our state, to us as a nation. It’s a strike against our nation, our people. And our actions to defend the fatherland from such a threat will be brutal.
Anyone who consciously went on the path of betrayal, who prepared the armed mutiny, went on the path of blackmail and terrorist actions, will take an inevitable punishment.
They will answer to the law and our people. The Armed Forces and other departments were properly instructed. Extra anti-terrorist measures are now being implemented in Moscow, Moscow region, and a number of other regions.
Decisive actions will be taken to stabilise the situation in Rostov-on-Don. It remains difficult. The operation of civilian and military control departments is practically blocked.
As a President of Russia and the Supreme Commander, as a citizen of Russia, I will do everything to defend the country, protect the Constitution, lives and safety, liberty of the citizens.
Those who prepared the military mutiny, who raise weapons against combat brothers, have betrayed Russia, and will pay for this. And those who are being pulled into the crime, I’m asking to not make this crucial, tragic, unrepeatable mistake. Do the one right choice – stop participating in criminal actions.
I believe that we will defend and preserve what’s sacred for us. And together with the motherland, we will overcome all challenges, and become even stronger.
🐣 RT @McFaul OK, so both sides are now all in.
⋙ 🐣 RT @Gerashchenko_en Wagner PMC Telegram channel:
“Putin made the wrong choice. All the worse for him. Soon we will have a new president”
🐣 RT @Tendar Russian insurgent forces are spreading in all directions. Volgograd, Krasnodar, Moscow, you name it. No serious resistance is reported. #Russia #Coup
🐣 RT @Tendar Putin just made his last big mistake. It is monumental self-own.
For the Russian troops in Ukraine this must be the most-confusing moment in their lives.
Expect major developments in Ukraine but also outside!
This is a once-in-lifetime moment!
🐣 RT @KyivPost ⚡️#Putin promised to fight back: “They’re pushing us to a defeat and capitulation, a strike against Russia, our people. Our actions will be brutal… As a citizen of #Russia, I will do everything to defend the country.”
🐣 RT @Tendar Putin has given formal orders to “neutralize” the rebellion and de facto kill Prigozhin. ¤ That’s it. All hell is lose.
🐣 RT @McFaul That analogy casts Putin as Nicholas II and Prigozhin as Lenin –an odd image to be invoking.
⋙ 🐣 RT @ McFaul Strange to me that Putin invoked 1917 in his speech today. Not a good analogy for him to be resurrecting.
🐣 RT @Gerashchenko_en Putin called the situation a criminal adventure, betrayal, treason, rebellion, apostasy and a stab in the back – from his address regarding Prigozhin.
🐣 RT @s_hnizdovskyi Putin recorded an address, calling Prigozhin a traitor. Putin said he had given instructions to MoD and other agencies to deal harshly with the coup organizers. Prigozhin will “answer not only in front of the law but in front of the people”, Putin said. More of his quotes:
“❗️Any turmoil is a deadly threat, our actions will be tough.” ⚡️Russian armed forces received the necessary order to neutralize those who organized an armed insurgency, Putin said.
🐣 📊 RT @s_hnizdovskyi Russians place more trust in protecting Russia’s border regions from the attacks on Wagner PMC (43%) than in the Security Forces (FSB) (37%). This may indicate that the state’s monopoly on military power has been undermined (especially regarding the current events)
◕ https://twitter.com/s_hnizdovskyi/status/1672505425915269121?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @ PhillipsPOBrien So let me get this straight. Wagner controls Rostov and the Ukrainians have damaged/destroyed the transport links from Crimea to Russian forces in Ukraine. Basically, the Russian army supply situation is, in a word, screwed.
🐣 RT @PhillipsPOBrien So, looks like Prigozhin is doing this on his own, wow. Question. How many Russian army troops are actually in Russia and can be used to stop him?
⋙ 🐣 RT @ NOELreports President Putin is now adressing the Russian nation.
“We are fighting for the right to remain Russia, a state with a thousand-year history. Actions that are being carried out now are apostasy from the nations. This is a stab in the back of our country and our people.”
🐣 RT @ IAPonomarenko So, no deal with the Wagner, as far as I understand.
It’s a 100% war now. ¤ It remains to be seen how strong is the loyalty of Russia’s regular military (a large part of which are mobilized cannon fodder slaves) toward the ridiculed dictator who is growing childish day by day.
🐣 RT @ nexta_tv ⚡️#Putin: “The Russian Armed Forces received the necessary order to neutralize those who organized the rebellion. ¤ All those who consciously embarked on the path of betrayal will suffer inevitable punishment.”
🐣 RT @McFaul The idea that Putin will let Prigozhin overthrow his buddy Shoigu & then do a deal with him strikes me as rather far-fetched. If I were Putin, Id be very scared of Prigozhin. But these are strange, volatile times.
🐣 RT @ @AndriyYermak Разом із Залужним, Шапталою, Неїжпапою, Олещуком та Хоренком. ¤ Команда Президента Зеленського. У росіян буде палати🔥
[Translated from Ukrainian by Google]
Together with Zaluzhny, Shaptala, Neizhpapa, Oleschuk and Khorenk.
President Zelenskyi’s team. The Russians will have chambers 🔥
🖼 https://twitter.com/AndriyYermak/status/1672488121999454209?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @NOELreports Solovyov seems sad in his first response to what is happening in Russia.
“Every kingdom, if it is torn apart by strife, will be desolate, and every city or house where there is strife will not stand.”
💽 https://twitter.com/NOELreports/status/1672495008568541184?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @ Gerashchenko_en Putin’s address expected soon – Peskov ¤ It was supposed to have started almost 45 minutes ago.
🐣 RT @gorsushko 🚨Wagner PMC reports they have taken control of military objects around Voronezh and the Russian army there has chosen to side with ‘the people.’ They mean Wagner PMC.
🌎 https://twitter.com/igorsushko/status/1672493722217467904?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @AlexBondODUA “pootin postponed his morning speech, previously announced by Peskov”- rus media. ¤ People say that there are some serious troubles with the logistic of 💼🧻 for Mr. president.
🐣 RT @OstapYarysh Wagner group claims to control military objects in Rostov and Voronezh.
Counter-terrorist regime introduced in Moscow and Moscow Region.
Putin is expected to deliver a special address.
And it’s only 9:30 am in Moscow.
🐣 RT @EuromaidanPR All mass events in Moscow have been cancelled, Moscow Mayor Sobyanin said.#Prigozhin #RussiaIsCollapsing
🐣 RT @ McFaul Wow. Russia now has two armies in control of two different parts of the country. That’s the definition of a civil war or (according to Tilly/Trotsky) a “revolutionary situation.”
⋙ 🐣 RT @igorsushko 🚨 Prigozhin issued his first public address from the headquarters of the Southern Military District in Rostov-on-Don, a city with a population of 1.1 million, which Wagner PMC now fully control.
💽 [tr] https://twitter.com/McFaul/status/1672482027701166081?s=20/photo/1
⭕ 23 Jun 2023
WaPo: New video undercuts claim Twitter censored pro-Trump views before Jan. 6 https://tinyurl.com/4hccbtdk
// In the internal video call from Jan. 5, 2021, workers were told not to take tougher action against a growing wave of tweets they feared were veiled incitements to violence.
🐣 RT @ wartranslated Prigozhin says the army supports him, and accuses Shoygu of hiding 2000 dead Russian corpses in Rostov morgue to hide losses:
“The majority of the military are warmly supporting us. We get messages: “Finally, the jusice in the army will come! Finally, you will ensure we will get the ammo and won’t be thrown as meat!”
Just now, the information came through: in Rostov morgue, the Minister of Defence ordered to hide 2000 bodies, which are held there to avoid showcasing the losses.” ¤ Audio: https://t.me/concordgroup_official/1290
🐣 RT @YVindman It’s hard for me to imagine Russian forces in Ukraine staying and fighting while there is an insurrection at home. If this persists / gathers momentum, I can see a rapid collapse of Russian forces in Ukraine.
WaPo: Wagner mercenary boss faces arrest over ‘incitement to armed rebellion’ https://tinyurl.com/msvj5ar4 “The bizarre and chaotic events Friday were the latest sign of the damage that Putin’s war in Ukraine has inflicted in Russia over the past 16 months”
Russia’s Federal Security Service late Friday announced a criminal case against Wagner mercenary chief Yevgeniy Prigozhin, accusing him of “incitement to armed rebellion” after he declared an open conflict with Russia’s military leadership and called on Russians to join 25,000 Wagner fighters against Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu and other top commanders.
🐣 RT @RealCynicalFox #RussianCoup Several initial thoughts:
1. If this is in fact a coup attempt, which remains to be seen, Putin needs to show himself publicly as soon as possible to rally loyalist Russian forces as soon as possible to prevent further defections. There are repeated reports of Russian troops joining Wagner forces.
2. Again, assuming this is a coup, Putin now finds himself in the same position Tsar Nicholas did in 1917 in at least one sense. His most reliable units – the VDV and Spetsnaz – have been seriously weakened by recent casualties. These are the units who would normally be used to put down such an action against the government. Their capability & reliability is now far more questionable in their current (somewhat) rebuilt state than it was pre-war.
3. The lack of public statements from Putin, Shoigu, and Gerasimov is genuinely concerning and raises questions as to their current status.
4. The choice of Wagner center of gravity at Rostov is curious if this is an outright coup attempt. It certainly impacts the Russian war effort in Ukraine.
5. If this spirals into something prolonged and/or a genuine threat to the current Russian government, the situation for the UAF may change dramatically. This may develop into a genuine opportunity for Kyiv.
🐣 RT @McFaul What is happening in Russia so far is not a conventional coup in that Prigozhin is not trying to overthrow Putin, but just the Russian generals in charge of the armed forces.
🐣 RT @igorsushko 🚨 Special Operations Forces (SSO) commanded by Major General Valery Flustikov have taken over control of the Ministry of Defence headquarters on Frunzenskaya in Moscow. Right now, there’s no way of knowing whose side he is really on: Shoigu or Prigozhin. Probably “wait & see.”
🖼 https://twitter.com/igorsushko/status/1672352313091178496?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @AVindman Rostov houses the command of the Southern Military District and the Operational Headquarters for the war in Ukraine. It’s also one of Russia most important logistical hubs for the war. Wagner could get it hands on enormous stockpiles.
🐣 RT @Stanovaya Here are a few insights into the situation surrounding Prigozhin:
1️⃣ For a long time, Prigozhin has been out of direct contact with Putin, yet he’s believed he was acting in Putin’s interests “by default”. His significant contributions in the war enhanced his sense of exclusivity and privilege.
2️⃣ The President’s administration maintained the stance that unless explicitly directed, it wasn’t feasible to openly confront Prigozhin, despite a strong inclination to do so. In fact, they had even convinced themselves of his usefulness.
3️⃣ As I’ve previously stated, the atrocities of war can drive people to the brink of sanity. Even the most loyal players, who are dependent on the Kremlin (which doesn’t imply complete manageability), can lose their sense of proportion. This is especially true when there appears to be no response to the continual attempts to escalate the situation.
4️⃣ Now that the state has actively engaged, there’s no turning back. The termination of Prigozhin and Wagner is imminent. The only possibility now is absolute obliteration, with the degree of resistance from the Wagner group being the only variable. Surovikin was dispatched to convince them to surrender. Confrontation seems totally futile.
5️⃣ The impending end of Wagner has satisfied many in power. He had become excessively anti-state, which is intolerable during a war. However, a significant number of those outside of power now lament the loss of a character like Prigozhin, who had begun to appeal due to his daring and audacity. Consequently, political repercussions are expected.
A crucial point to note is that many within the elite will now personally fault Putin for letting the situation escalate to such extremes and for his lack of a timely, adequate response when to many it was evident that Prigozhin was pushing the limits of Kremlin’s tolerance. Therefore, this entire saga is also an undercut to Putin’s standing.
🐣 RT @Gerashchenko_en Prigozhin: two aircraft are above Wagner’s convoy. He’s asking them not to obey criminal orders, threatens revenge if they do. Calls Russian military to turn against Shoigu and Gerasimov who are responsible for more than 100,000 Russian deaths.
🐣 RT @Gerashchenko_en The addresses of Surovikin and deputy head of Russian intelligence department were filmed in front of a suspiciously similar backgrounds. They look like they’ve been arrested.
🐣 RT @@HerrDr8 #1WayTrainRideRUS #1PageAssessUKRWar This from APR 2022. Discontinued the analytical thread then when it became clear Putin survived the initial debacle. TOTALLY unclear who has THE influence chit on Prig.
◕ https://twitter.com/HerrDr8/status/1672421111034785794?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @ maria_drutska Update of russia vs. russia
● Prigozhin claims Wagner has entered Rostov (please note, Rostov is a logistics hub for the russian military), but no proof of this, yet; though more and more videos do seem to be appearing to show this
● President Biden has been briefed on the situation
● Missile strikes in Kyiv, and other cities
● Prigozhin claims to have shot down a russian helicopter; he didn’t provide evidence, but there are videos circulating which have not been authenticated, yet
● Google News blocked in russia
● Governor of Rostov region tells civilians to stay indoors
● Prigozhin’s name seems to be blocked from russian media
● Girkin claims that the military coup is pre-planned, and done prematurely – he’s pissed (remember he hates Prigozhin)
● Supposedly FSB & police have been put on full alert in Rostov
● FSB has setup checkpoints along highways, and also in Moscow where people are being searched
● Kremlin appears to be locked down, with military vehicles patrolling; putin was informed a few hours ago
● military vehicles are seen patrolling in various cities including Rostov & Moscow
● russian tv channels (I believe channel 1) were interrupted with an emergency message about Prigozhin & Wagner
● Earlier, Surovikin released a video (general who oversaw russia’s Kherson goodwill gesture) pleading with Wagner / Prigozhin to return to their barracks
● This all started earlier today when Prigozhin released a video blaming Gerasimov and Shoigu for the shortcomings of the russian invasion, leading to the deaths of 100K russian soldiers. He also dismissed russian narrative about Ukraine bombing civilians in Donbas for 8 years, and several other Kremlin talking points.
● Then, Prigozhin accused Shoigu of bombing Wagner, which the russian MOD denied (the video looks staged, but I’m not an expert in this)
● There were messages on Telegram of russian units firing on other russian units who were fighting near the front; again, I can’t confirm this
● Prigozhin has stated that he wishes to hang Shoigu in the red square, publicly
● Prigozhin to be investigated for mutiny by the FSB; the Wagner building in Moscow was searched earlier todayThere are more and more videos coming out, but they haven’t been authenticated, yet. Western media outlets are starting to pick up on this, and russian Telegram is talking non-stop about this. ¤ But, remember, whatever is happening now, for russia, it will get worse. ¤ Good night, and Slava Ukraini!
🐣 RT @Gerashchenko_en VCHK-OGPU – from their source: “The attempts to act against Prigozhin come solely from FSB and Russian Guards. The Ministry of Defense has withdrawn itself, lower-rank officers either simply refuse to follow orders, or openly support Wagner.
As for Shoigu and co. – they simply hid and entirely lost their touch with reality. Apparently, the scare is serious.”
🐣 RT @Kasparov63 As I said, there is no Russian state, no political chain of command, and total failure in Ukraine has exposed that. Who will obey whose orders now? If Prigozhin is still alive and free in 24 hours, we will have entered a new reality.
🐣 RT @Tendar At this point it is absolutely irrelevant if Prigozhin’s coup will succeed or not. Literally everybody in Russia and outside will know after this night that the war in Ukraine is lost. The morale of the Russian army, which was already low, will hit rock bottom and the mood in Russia altogether will be Armageddon-like.
What started as an attempt to overthrow the Ukrainian government and annex all of Ukraine has eventually backfired on a monumental scale. The last chapter of this Russian-made tragedy has opened and I doubt that it will be a long chapter.
🐣 RT @Gerashchenko_en Russian media:
“The source says there is panic in the Kremlin, no one can reach Putin”
“Source: Right now the Kremlin is negotiating about something with general governor Dyumin”
Source: Some people in the Kremlin, from the presidential administration, are finding out about a possible emergency relocation. One of the few available destinations is Uruguay”.
* Alexei Gennadyevich Dyumin is a Russian politician, serving as Governor of Tula Oblast since 2016. Previously he served as President Vladimir Putin’s chief security guard and assistant before being promoted to lead the Russian military’s Special Operations Forces, where he oversaw the annexation of Crimea in 2014
🐣 RT @ ChuckPfarrer RED ON RED ENGAGEMENT: @PStyle0ne1 reports that an armed convoy of Wagner PMC troops has left Shakhty and is apparently en route to a RU military command center at Rostov-on-Don. It appears the long-simmering feud between Wagner PMC and the Russian MOD may be about to go hot.
🌎 https://twitter.com/ChuckPfarrer/status/1672393600812961793?s=20
🐣 RT @PaulaChertok Whether #Prigozhin coup succeeds, let’s remember Putin only turned on him today, AFTER the Wagner head blew open all the Kremlin’s lies about the war. He admitted #Ukraine did nothing to provoke #Russia. Greedy Russia just wanted to install a puppet so oligarchs could plunder it.
⋙ 🐣 RT @PaulaChertok 🔥 Key #Prigozhin admissions that Russia’s rationales for war are lies:
-denazification
-demilitarization
-genocide in Donbas
-protecting Russian speakers, ethnic Russians
AND P admits plan was to install a puppet & plunder Ukraine for oligarchs.
#RussiaIsTerroristKleptocracy
⋙⋙ 🧵 RT @SamRamani2 Yevgeny Prigozhin has crossed another red line
The Wagner Group chief is now attacking the rationale for Russia’s war with Ukraine
Here are some key points /1
📌 https://twitter.com/SamRamani2/status/1672250346805116928?s=20
🐣 RT @FreudGreyskull The head of the General Staff of the Russian Federation gave the order to launch airstrikes on the columns of Wagner PMC – Prigozhin. ¤ Yevgeny Prigozhin thanked the pilots, who, in his words, “refused to obey the order.”
🐣 RT @Fireblade577 A civil war is brewing in Russia between the established Elite and Prigozhin and these videos are clearly designed to recruit those dissatisfied with the established elite to his side. This could blow up any moment (or not at all) or we could see attempts at eliminating 1/2
⋙⋙ 🐣 RT @wartranslated In continuation of his interview, Prigozhin lists two reasons for the start of the SMO: a) personal ambitions of Shoygu and b) the desire of Russia’s ruling clan, who were not satisfied with the Donbas, to appoint Medvedchuk as the president of Ukraine and divide its assets between each other for plundering. According to Prigozhin, denazification and demilitarisation make no sense since Azov wouldn’t be exchanged for Medvedchuk otherwise.
💽 https://twitter.com/wartranslated/status/1672186669762596865?s=20/photo/1
⋙ 🐣 RT @Fireblade577 Prigozhin who is clearly staying close to the front where he can be protected by his Wagner Loyalists 2/2
⭕ 22 Jun 2023
🐣 RT @TimothyDSnyder All of these Ukrainian actions are taking place on Ukrainian sovereign territory. Russia has no more business making threats about this than it does about actions in Iceland, Liberia, or New Zealand.
⋙ TheGuardian: Russia accuses Ukraine of using UK-supplied missiles to strike bridge to Crimea https://tinyurl.com/5as5xxux
// Chonhar Bridge is one of a handful of infrastructures linking Crimea with the mainland
Sergei Shoigu, the Russian defence minister, said on Tuesday that the potential use of US-made Himars and the Storm Shadow missiles against targets in Crimea would mark the west’s “full involvement in the conflict and would entail immediate strikes upon decision-making centres in Ukrainian territory”.
Shadow missiles have a range “in excess of 250km” (155 miles), according to their manufacturer, the European arms group MBDA, significantly further than the high-precision Himars rocket launchers, which have been used heavily by Ukraine.
The shorter-range missiles have become less effective as Russia moves its troop and supply reserves further from the frontlines. The Storm Shadow missiles should allow Ukraine to strike at targets previously out of reach.
WaPo: IRS whistleblower says Justice Dept. slowed, stifled Hunter Biden case https://tinyurl.com/ddpy8xpe
// Tax investigator says prosecutor decisions whittled down the case against the president’s son
🐣 RT @nother_fella I find myself agreeing with Senator Graham, Strelkov and even Prigozhin today; never thought that would happen! ruzzia is desperate but must be deterred from blowing the ZNPP. 🇬🇧 has given 🇺🇦 Storm Shadows; 🇺🇦 should be permitted to use them to sink part of the Black Sea Fleet as a warning.
⋙ 🐣 RT @Gerashchenko_en Terrorist Girkin-Strelkov: Russia has no chance to win, Putin and the higher ranks of Russian leadership are delusional. Russia lost all initiative on the frontlines.
💽 [tr] https://twitter.com/Gerashchenko_en/status/1671200203083329541?s=20/photo/1
🧵 RT @LindseyGrahamSC The Graham-Blumenthal resolution: ¤ 1⃣ Agrees that the deployment of the Russian Federation’s tactical nuclear weapons within the Republic of Belarus is a threat to Ukraine and NATO member states.
📌 https://twitter.com/LindseyGrahamSC/status/1671916293832802304?s=20
⋙ 2⃣ Views the use of any tactical nuclear weapon by the Russian Federation, the Republic of Belarus, or their proxies, or the destruction of a nuclear facility, dispersing radioactive contaminates into NATO territory causing significant harm to human life….. ……as an attack on NATO requiring an immediate response, including the implementation of Article V of the North Atlantic Treaty.
⋙ 3⃣ Urges the current administration to consult with NATO leaders and other European partners to develop a comprehensive response to minimize the threat to civilians and coordinate a diplomatic and military response commensurate with the situation.
🐣 RT @7Veritas4 His daily plea to his congressional shills to save him.
[TextLink:] https://twitter.com/7Veritas4/status/1671853418380419072?s=20/photo/1
[Text:] 🐣 RT @realDonaldTrump Congress will hopefully now look at the ever continuing Witch Hunts and ELECTION INTERFERENCE against me on perfectly legal Boxes, where I have no doubt that information is being secretly “planted” by the scoundrels in charge, the Perfect Phone Calls (Atlanta), the illegal DOJ/Pomerantz/Manhattan D.A. Hoax, where virtually EVERYONE agrees THERE IS NO CASE, and the NYSAG SCAM, where I have proven beyond a doubt that there is no case, but have a hostile Judge who should not be on this case!
🐣 RT @7Veritas4 “Congress, if you’re listening…” ¤ – Captain Capslock
[TextLink:] https://twitter.com/7Veritas4/status/1671854828945920000?s=20/photo/1
[Text:] 🐣 RT @realDonaldTrump CONGRESS, PLEASE INVESTIGATE THE POLITICAL WITCH HUNTS AGAINST ME CURRENTLY BEING BROUGHT BY THE CORRUPT DOJ AND FBI, WHO ARE TOTALLY OUT OF CONTROL. THIS CONTINUING SAGA IS RETRIBUTION AGAINST ME FOR WINNING AND, EVEN MORE IMPORTANTLY TO THEM, ELECTION INTERFERENCE REGARDING THE 2024 PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION. IT WILL BE THERE UPDATED FORM OF RIGGING OUR MOST IMPORTANT ELECTION. LOOK AT THE POLLS – THEY CAN’T BEAT ME (MAGA!) AT THE BALLOT BOX, THE ONLY WAY THEY CAN WIN IS TO CHEAT. STOP THEM NOW!
🐣 RT @ChuckPfarrer KAMIANSKE AXIS /1750 UTC 22 JUN/ On 21 JUN, UKR repelled a RU counterattack Piatykhatky. Also on 21 JUN, a UKR missile strike targeted a troop & equipment & concentration in Shyroke, destroying a KSHM command vehicle, several trucks and artillery pieces and killing 50 RU troops.
🌎 https://twitter.com/ChuckPfarrer/status/1671936471232544768?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @ChuckPfarrer CUTTING THE CORD: UKR carried out a long range precision strike that severed the M-18 HWY bridge linking Crimea to Melitopol. The destruction of this bridge will negatively affect RU logistics in the southern area of operations.
🌎 https://twitter.com/ChuckPfarrer/status/1671947294684446732?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @kvistp Russia will no longer be able to normally supply its troops in the occupied Zaporizhia region after blowing up the Chongar bridge. ¤ The last escape route for supplies for the occupiers is marked. This route can be fired with HIMARS MLRS without any problems, so any trip along it will be really hot for all Russians.😁💙💛
🌎 https://twitter.com/kvistp/status/1671923051301158940?s=20/photo/1
WaPo Editorial: Dictators’ dark secret: They’re learning from each other https://tinyurl.com/3vufwj5j “All who believe in democracy must find new ways to advance it. … Democracy’s greatest strength is openness. It should be harnessed to tell the truth loudly and widely”
🐣 RT @ZelenskyyUa We have just had a report from our intelligence and the Security Service of 🇺🇦. ¤ Intelligence has received information that Russia is considering a scenario of a terrorist attack on the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant. A terrorist attack with radiation leakage. They have prepared everything for this.
Unfortunately, I have repeatedly had to remind that radiation has no state borders, and who it will hit is determined only by the wind direction.
We share all available information with our partners – everyone in the world. All the evidence. Europe, America, China, Brazil, India, the Arab world, Africa – all countries, absolutely everyone should know this. International organizations. Everyone.
There should never be any terrorist attacks on nuclear power plants anywhere. This time it should not be like with Kakhovka – the world has been warned, so the world can and must act.
🐣 RT @wartranslated Russian military blogger explains the importance of the Chongar bridge: it was best suited for the Russian military and civilian supply in Kherson region, it carried 70% of the traffic. While it can be repaired, Russia does not have reliable means to prevent cruise missile strikes in the area. https://t.me/zhivoff/9740
[TextLink:] https://twitter.com/wartranslated/status/1671790854812450817?s=20/photo/1 -2
[Text:] Strike on the bridge over Chongar: consequences
The first thing to understand is that this is not just a strike on a bridge, it is a strike on a land corridor. The strike was serious, and it is possible that it will happen again. 70% of all military and civilian traffic went through Chongar.
The second thing that has now become obvious is that we are very poorly protected from attacks by Storm Shadow missiles, and previous arrivals in Genichesk were an element of breaking through our air defenses in the north of Crimea.
The logistics of supplying new regions after the attack of the bridge will seriously become more complicated, and the risk of repeated arrivals will scare many away from attempting to cross. Both the military and commercial operators, and all of us who work in the liberated territories, will get into trouble.
2/2 Thirdly, the border crossing of Armyansk goes to Kherson, it is worse equipped, and you will have to make a detour of 100 km along completely unusable roads that have not been put in order. And the Chaplynka border crossing is generally not really suitable for civil traffic, and there are no roads there either.
Over the past week, the enemy has inflicted serious damage on the civilian infrastructure of the Kherson region. It is still not very clear how the political administration of the region can work without a bridge and under the threat ofthe arrival of new missiles.
Fourth: visually, the bridge is quite suitable for movement, it can be repaired fairly quickly, but something must be done about the constant threat of repeated strikes. In general, the situation is difficult. In such cases, the enemy must be dealt a disproportionately strong blow in order to wean him from attacks on his own infrastructure, but premonition tells us that we will refrain.
🐣 RT @Maks_NAFO_FELLA Three roads connect Crimea with the Kherson region: two in the Armyansk region (through Kalanchak and Chaplynka) and one in the Dzhankoy region – through Chongar ¤ It is the road through Chongar that is most convenient for transporting military equipment to the Zaporizhzhia region
⋙ 🐣 RT @ Maks_NAFO_FELLA In Chongar, an automobile bridge connecting the peninsula with the mainland was attacked. ¤ Previously, Storm Shadow missiles were used for the attack. The road surface on the bridge was damaged. Traffic is blocked.
🖼 https://twitter.com/Maks_NAFO_FELLA/status/1671749471351324673?s=20/photo/1 -3
🐣 @AdamSchiff
You may shoot me with your words,
You may cut me with your eyes,
You may kill me with your hatefulness,
But still, like air, I’ll rise.
– Maya Angelou
🙏💙
⭕ 21 Jun 2023
🐣 RT @wartranslated ❗️Prigozhin accuses the Russian MoD of hiding facts about the Ukrainian offensive and Russian losses. ¤ In a 4-minute audio message, Prigozhin declares there are areas where no military reporters are allowed to hide the truth about casualties Russia is taking during the counter-offensive. According to Prigozhin, Ukrainians are aiming to reach Molochny Lyman (likely to cut the Russian Zaporizhzhia group into two). If things progress the same way, Russians will one day wake up with Crimea being Ukrainian, says Prigozhin. ¤ He once again attacks Shoygu for inactivity and brings up the dead sailors of the Moskva cruiser lost by Russia last spring.
💽 [tr] https://twitter.com/wartranslated/status/1671528539655491585?s=20/photo/1
WaPo Editorial: House Republicans censuring Adam Schiff says more about them than him https://tinyurl.com/3cnj7cpd The measure passed only after Trump threatened to support primary opponents against any GOP Representatives who did not vote for the censure
[…] Contrary to what many Trump supporters claim, the investigation by Robert S. Mueller III never exonerated Mr. Trump. Indeed, the special counsel’s report laid out significant evidence of obstruction of justice. It’s indisputable that Russia interfered in the 2016 election on Mr. Trump’s behalf.
After 20 Republicans voted last week with Democrats to table the censure resolution, Mr. Trump wrote on social media that he’d support primary challengers against them. (Mr. Schiff had spearheaded Mr. Trump’s first impeachment and played a leading role on the select committee that investigated the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection.) When the resolution came up again Wednesday, this time without a threat to fine Mr. Schiff $16 million, most of those Republicans capitulated. …
In so doing, they weakened the power of congressional censure as an official rebuke reserved for egregious conduct — and, in the process, made themselves appear to be the wrongdoers.
🐣 RT @RepAdamSchiff To my Republican colleagues who introduced this sham resolution: You honor me with your enmity.
You flatter me with this falsehood.
Your words tell me that I have been effective in the defense of our democracy, and I am grateful.
💽 https://twitter.com/RepAdamSchiff/status/1671595167827079171?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @ProjectLincoln .@tedlieu refuses to mince words and play the GOP’s games – it’s clear that the Durham report is a sham drummed up by Republicans desperate for anything that might discredit the Biden administration.
💽 https://twitter.com/ProjectLincoln/status/1671699526883876864?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @BryanDawsonUSA If you want to know why pathetic, traitorous Kevin McCarthy and his traitorous Republican horde voted to censure Adam Schiff, watch him own John Durham and get him to admit, and agree with the Mueller report, that the Trump campaign colluded with Russians:
💽 https://twitter.com/BryanDawsonUSA/status/1671741420682506240?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @RpsAgainstTrump Special Counsel John Durham: “Our report should not be read to suggest in any way that Russian election interference was not a significant threat. It was.”
💽 [8:22m] https://twitter.com/RpsAgainstTrump/status/1671701257600245761?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @OccupyDemocrats BREAKING: Democratic Congressman Adam Schiff humiliates John Durham, the author of Trump’s phony “Durham report,” during a hearing today by the House Judiciary Committee.
¤ https://twitter.com/OccupyDemocrats/status/1671605195447447554?s=20
It all started when Durham tried to claim that the Justice Department’s investigation into Trump and Russia was a hoax. ¤ That’s when Congressman Schiff expertly cut Durham off, declaring, “Mr. Durham, just so people remember what this is all about, let me ask you. The Mueller investigation revealed that Russia interfered in the 2016 election in a sweeping and systemic fashion, correct?
This is when the fun began, because Durham had no choice it to respond, “Yes, that is correct.” ¤ But Schiff didn’t stop there, continuing to hammer Durham:
SCHIFF: And Russia did so through a social media campaign that favored Trump and disparaged Hillary Clinton, correct?
DURHAM: The report says yes.SCHIFF: Mueller found that a Russian intel service hacked computers associated with the Clinton campaign and then released the stolen documents publicly. Is that right?
DURHAM: That report speaks for itself as well.SCHIFF: Mueller also reported that though he could not establish the crime of conspiracy beyond a reasonable doubt, he also said, quote, “a statement that the investigation did not establish certain facts does not mean there was no evidence of those facts,” and also appears in the report, doesn’t it?
DURHAM: Yes.SCHIFF: In fact, you cited that very statement in your own report, did you not, as a way of distinguishing between proof beyond a reasonable doubt and evidence that falls short of proof beyond a reasonable doubt?
DURHAM: Correct.SCHIFF: Both Mueller and congressional investigations found that Trump’s campaign chairman Paul Manafort was secretly meeting with an operative linked to Russian intelligence named Konstantin Kilimnik, correct?
DURHAM: Yes.SCHIFF: And that Manafort gave that Russian intel operative the campaign’s internal polling data. Correct?
DURHAM: Yes.SCHIFF: Is it true, Mr. Durham, that Mueller and congressional investigations also revealed that Don Jr. was informed that a Russian official was offering the Trump campaign, quote, “very high level and sensitive information,” unquote, “that would be incriminating of Hillary Clinton was part of,” quote, “Russia and its government support of Trump.” Are you aware of that?
DURHAM: Sure, people get phone calls all the time from individuals who claim to have information like that.SCHIFF: Really? The son of a presidential candidate gets calls all the time from a foreign government offering dirt on their important opponent. Is that what you’re saying?
DURHAM: I don’t think that’s so unique.SCHIFF: Are you really trying to diminish the significance of what happened here and the secret meeting that the president’s son set up in Trump Tower to receive that incriminating information?
DURHAM: I don’t think that that was a well-advised thing to do.SCHIFF: Oh, not well advised. All right. Well, that’s the understatement of the year. So you think it’s perfectly appropriate or maybe just ill-advised for a presidential campaign to secretly meet with a Russian delegation to get dirt on their opponent? You would merely say that’s inadvisable?
DURHAM: I wouldn’t do it, but it wasn’t illegal, was it? It was stupid, foolish, ill advised.SCHIFF: Well, it’s illegal to conspire to get incriminating opposition research from a hostile government. Wouldn’t that violate campaign laws?
At this point, all that Durham could respond with a was a shameless “I don’t know.”Please retweet and ❤️ to thank Schiff for setting Durham straight — and consider investing in Tribel, a “woke” new Twitter competitor that’s currently doing a round of equity crowdfunding and just blew past $1.8 million raised from 4,400 of its users. If you want to own a piece of the “next big thing” in social media, here is the link to do so, http://wefunder.com/Tribel. You can invest as little as $100 — or as much as you’d like.
🐣 RT @AWeissmann_ This is a stain on this institution, led by Trump but carried out by enablers who are complicit. The death of statesmen and women.
⋙ 🧵 RT @lukebroadwater House Democrats have gathered in the well of the House chanting “shame! shame! shame!” after the chamber votes along party lines, 213-209, to censure Rep. Adam Schiff
📌 https://twitter.com/lukebroadwater/status/1671651279762751489?s=20
⋙⋙ 🐣 RT @lukebroadwater The Democrats are surrounding Schiff and cheering for him as he approaches the well for the censure
⋙⋙ 🐣 RT @lukebroadwater Some are now chanting “Santos! Santos!” ¤ Swalwell shouts out “pathetic!”
⋙⋙⋙ NYT: House Censures Adam Schiff Over His Role Investigating Trump https://tinyurl.com/3uexs7h6
// The move by the G.O.P.-led House was the first in what could be a series of votes seeking to punish those whom Republicans have deemed enemies of the party.
🐣 RT @AntiToxicPeople I guess he’s not happy with what an embarrassing shitshow Durham’s testimony was, on top of his ever increasing unhinged lunacy continuing at a rapid pace.
[TextLink:] https://twitter.com/AntiToxicPeople/status/1671640920595525632?s=20/photo/1
[Text:] 🐣 RT @realDonald Trump Just think of it??? All these failed criminal acts against me, and then I get indicted on phony “Trumped Up” charges where they refuse to use the Presidential Records Act, and the Clinton Socks Case, under which I am totally innocent and a charge could not even be brought. ELECTION INTERFERENCE!!! These thugs and criminals must be punished!
💙🧵 RT @rgoodlaw This is the exchange I’ve been waiting for. @RepAdamSchiff demonstrates Durham’s disregard of clear evidence of Trump Campaign-Russian collusion. ¤ Durham admits he lacks knowledge of undeniable parts of record, indicates why his report ignores episodes.
📌 💽 https://twitter.com/rgoodlaw/status/1671562659525689347?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @Gerashchenko_en The war in Ukraine is the largest drone war in the history of humankind. We are actually in a transitional stage – our war combines elements of all the wars of the 20th century.
From WWI when soldiers stayed in trenches, aiming rifles at each other and seizing positions with bayonet attacks ¤ To ¤ “Swarms of drones”, AI and neuronetworks actually being used to gain advantage on the battlefield. ¤ Ukraine has combined all the elements of past wars. The one who remains on old positions and will fight with old methods will lose.
But our enemy must not be underestimated. Russians also understand the importance of drones very well and produce good ones, like Lancet and Orlan. They increase production by circumventing sanctions. So it is very important to disrupt Russian supply chains, simplify and develop the drone market, support drone producers in Ukraine as well as those who produce anti-drone means.
🐣 RT @EuromaidanPress Russia will not launch a nuclear strike on Ukraine, Ukraine’s Intel chief, Kyrylo Budanov, says
For all my dislike of Russia, this country is not run by idiots only, Budanov said.
🖼 http://president.gov.ua
⭕ 20 Jun 2023
(✅)NYT: Hunter Biden’s Tangled Tale Comes Front and Center https://tinyurl.com/3texzeey
// 1/11/2023, Updated 6/20/2023; Federal prosecutors could decide soon whether to indict the president’s son on tax and gun charges, and he faces a fresh round of hostile congressional hearings. But a close look at his story shows that it differs in important ways from the narrative promoted by Republicans.
[Oversight Committee Doc:] A President Compromised: The Biden Family Investigation https://tinyurl.com/bdz2zjt4 Interim Report
// 11/17/2022
⋙ See under Entire Articles: Hunter Tangled 6-20-2023
🐣 RT @NatalkaKyiv Seems like Budanov is addressing the whole world in this video. Note how he repeats the words ‘the Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant’ over and over.#Budanov #Zaporizhzhia #Russia #Ukraine #RussiaUkraineWar
💽 [tr] https://twitter.com/NatalkaKyiv/status/1671382408594173953?s=20/photo/1
WaPo, Philip Bump: Trump is offering talking points, not defenses https://tinyurl.com/y5fx9dnx In the infamous photo of items laid out on the floor were Secret items he had already sorted out and kept together in a leather-bound box in his office, where he often entertained guests
The “2A” identifier corresponds to the government’s documentation of the evidence it collected at Mar-a-Lago during the search. In the manifest of what was seized, Item 2A is listed as “[v]arious classified/TS/SCI documents.” It is apparently a subset of Item 2, identified as a “[l]eather-bound box of documents.” That box and its contents were removed not from the storage room near the Mar-a-Lago pool but from Trump’s office, where he was in the habit of entertaining visitors.
It isn’t identified as “a box with some shirts and a few documents.” It’s just a box — a leather-bound one — sitting in Trump’s office, with documents. In that, it seems, were the documents that appear in that famous photo. Of the 15 documents originally identified by the FBI as bearing “top secret” classification, six were found in the Item 2A batch. Four were “TS/SCI,” which means they were classified as “top secret” and included “sensitive compartmented information,” a more restricted level of control.
WaPo, Philip Bump: The tedious demand that everything be subjected to made-for-TV ‘debate’ https://tinyurl.com/ayp9jz2u “We have turned ‘debate’ into a cudgel meant not to inform but to entertain, to validate our skepticism and to feed our dislike of our opponents”
Science does not arise from debate. “The scientific process for vetting and evaluating claims about science and medicine … involves other experts reviewing and considering the subject. It involves testing methodologies and writing lengthy papers articulating competing claims and arguments.” ~ Philip Bump, WaPo
Take, for instance, the research that proved the ineffectiveness of hydroxychloroquine in treating COVID-19. First comparative studies were done that showed statistically that it didn’t have any effect. Then a group of German scientists discovered why: Most cell studies had been done using a default cell culture of renal (Vero) cells, and hydroxychloroquine was effective on them. But lung cells have a “back door” that allowed thhe virus in. COVID-19 can infect lung cells.
To reach scientific conclusions, you have to “commit science,” you have to do the work. Others have to be able to replicate it. If human subjects are involved, there are ethical rules and processes. Medicine is a profession and a discipline. You can “debate” until the cows come home, but until you do the work of science, nothing can be resolved. ¤ https://tinyurl.com/4xmzjxmr
NYT: Judge in Trump Documents Case Sets Tentative Trial Date as Soon as August 14 https://tinyurl.com/4ru7e236 //➔ Mark the date: Use pencil
// The judge, Aileen M. Cannon, set an aggressive schedule for moving the case forward, though the proceedings are likely to be delayed by pretrial clashes.
WaPo, Editorial: Why Hunter Biden’s plea deal is justified https://tinyurl.com/5f4hm6u5 “The outcome appears similar to what other defendants might have gotten for similar violations of the law”
🐣 RT @ChuckPfarrer BAKHMUT /2120 UTC 20 JUN/ UKR broke up RU attacks on Dubovo-Vasylivka & Hyrhorivka. Russian losses for the period include 1,010 KIA, 8 Main Battle Tanks, 15 Armored Fighting Vehicles and more than 27 artillery and Multiple Rocket launch systems.
🌎 https://twitter.com/ChuckPfarrer/status/1671263713469538304?s=20/photo/1
WaPo, Michael McFaul: The U.S. needs to launch a diplomatic surge on Ukraine https://tinyurl.com/mv6ysrbj //➔ China, Turkey, a group of African nations, selected EU countries and the Pope have all offered to help broker peace talks and rebuilding: Where is the US?
WaPo: Hunter Biden reaches deal to plead guilty in tax, gun case https://tinyurl.com/4pz487ju “[T]he lead prosecutor in the case, said the investigation ‘is ongoing,’ suggesting that matters beyond the tax and gun issues are still under scrutiny”
// The president’s son would get about two years probation and enter a diversion program, people familiar with the negotiations said
🐣 RT @ JohnWDean Hunter Biden accepted responsibility for his malfeasance. Something Republicans never do! Hunter did not get a deal, notwithstanding GOP efforts to make it into a capital crime. Trump NEVER takes responsibility and the GOP NEVER holds him responsible. GOP is embarrassing itself.
🐣 RT @renato_mariotti It insults the intelligence of the American people to compare misdemeanor tax charges to a scheme to steal Top Secret documents and obstruct justice when the government asked for them back. ¤ If anything, Hunter Biden was treated harshly — those crimes are rarely charged.
🐣 RT @ lindyli If you don’t care about Jared Kushner grifting $2 billion from MBS & another $500 million from the UAE
Or about Ivanka grifting $100 million from MBS
Or about Trump profiting off LIV
Or about Mnuchin grifting $2 billion from MBS
No one cares what you say about Hunter Biden
🐣 RT @RepDanGoldman My statement on the resolution of Hunter Biden’s criminal case.
[TextLink:] https://twitter.com/RepDanGoldman/status/1671200170485198856?s=20/photo/1
[Text:] “This was a thorough, professional, and exhaustive investigation into Hunter Biden’s finances which started under the Trump Administration and was investigated by a Trump-appointed U.S. Attorney, David Weiss, for five years.
I have every confidence that the charges levied against Hunter Biden reflect Mr. Weiss’s fidelity to the rule of law – and his oath to proceed without fear or favor – and hold Hunter Biden accountable for every charge Mr. Weiss could prove. ¤ “Ultimately, Hunter Biden is accepting responsibility for crimes and conduct that is virtually never charged by the DOJ.
‘It is also clear that the U.S. Attorney’s exhaustive examination of Hunter Biden’s finances found no wrongdoing connected to President Biden, further debunking the rumors, hearsay, and innuendo coming from House Republicans.
“As with Donald Trump’s indictments, this case should be litigated in the court of law, not the court of public opinion, and most definitely not the halls of Congress.
🐣 RT @SykesCharlie He’s taking this rather well, I think.
[TextLink:] https://twitter.com/SykesCharlie/status/1671230641831129088?s=20/photo/1
[Text:] 🐣 RT @realDonald Trump The Hunter/Joe Biden settlement is a massive COVERUP & FULL SCALE ELECTION INTERFERENCE “SCAM” THE LIKES OF WHICH HAS NEVER BEEN SEEN IN OUR COUNTRY BEFORE. A “TRAFFIC TICKET,” & JOE IS ALL CLEANED UP & READY TO GO INTO THE 2024 PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION – AND THIS AS CROOKED DOJ, STATE, & CITY PROSECUTORS, MARXISTS & COMMUNISTS ALL, HIT ME FROM ALL SIDES & ANGELS WITH BULL…! MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!!!
🧵 RT @PeterHotez 1/n Awful to read Mr. Ackman’s account of my activities. I have no pharma conflicts, I co-developed low-cost patent-free Covid vaccines for global health reaching 100 million doses. I never took a cent for any cable news/podcast/radio appearances., spoke tirelessly to low-income
📌 https://twitter.com/PeterHotez/status/1671183258384474112?s=20
⋙ 🐣 RT @PeterHotez 2/n ..communities to help them survive during the pandemic. I spoke endlessly to teacher groups, school boards and parents so we could keep schools open at difficult times. And you have the audacity to present phony conspiracy websites that monetize the internet as your evidence?
⋙ 🐣 RT @PeterHotez 3/n: 200,000 Americans needlessly perished because they fell victim to antivaccine activism during the pandemic, mostly during the delta and BA.1 waves when Covid vaccines were 90% protective, because they listened to the conspiracists and politically motivated talking heads.
⋙ 🐣 RT @PeterHotez 4/n I saved lives during the pandemic. And now you’ve shown us your contribution.
PravdaUA: Russian Defence Minister began to threaten strikes on “decision-making centres” in Ukraine https://tinyurl.com/4cyfm7a8
At a military collegium, Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu began to threaten strikes on “decision-making centres” in Ukraine, in the event that the Armed Forces strike occupied Crimea.
Source: The press release of the Ministry of Defence of the Russian Federation
Shoigu’s direct quote: “According to our data, the leadership of the Armed Forces of Ukraine plans to strike the territory of the Russian Federation, including Crimea, with HIMARS and Storm Shadow missiles.”Details: Shoigu is convinced that the occupied Ukrainian peninsula is outside the war zone, so the Russian military leadership will consider possible strikes on Crimea as drawing the US and the UK into the war and will strike back at the “decision-making centres” in Ukraine.
Shoigu also complained that since 4 June, the Armed Forces of Ukraine had carried out 263 attacks on the positions of the Russian occupiers. …
🐣 RT @ AWeissmann_ Hunter Biden note: 3 factors why this is on the up and up:
1. to go forward with the tax deal, the DOJ Tax Division had to sign off on this deal;
2. the USAttorney is a Trump appointee, held over by Garland;
3. 1st time tax offense like this rarely get prosecuted/jail time.
⋙ 🐣 RT @ kyledcheney JUST IN: Hunter BIDEN has pleaded guilty to two misdemeanor tax offenses and entered a diversion agreement on a felony count of being a drug user in possession of a firearm. https://tinyurl.com/bdekahkf
[TextLink:] https://twitter.com/AWeissmann_/status/1671180294345433091?s=20/photo/1
EuromaidanPress: Prigozhin escalates conflict with Russia’s Ministry of Defense – UK intelligence https://tinyurl.com/3ez86b3s “Wagner financier Yevgeny Prigozhin is defying the Russian Ministry of Defense’s orders for his mercenaries to sign official state contracts”
// Amid Ukraine’s counteroffensive, Wagner financier Yevgeny Prigozhin is defying the Russian Ministry of Defense’s orders for his mercenaries to sign official state contracts and says he awaits the ministry’s reply to a “contract” of his own making, the UK intelligence says in its daily update:
🐣 I don’t think it’s possible to debate facts with Trump
He’s a black hole of delusion that sucks in everything it encounters and turns it into spaghetti (to borrow Stephen Hawking’s metaphor)
He remains extremely and singularly dangerous
🔄 💙 🐣 RT @ BryanDawsonUSA [15 Jun] Watch the Congressional testimony where Comey admits FBI investigators found no emails marked classified on Hillary’s server:
💽 https://twitter.com/BryanDawsonUSA/status/1669359690692845573?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @ChuckPfarrer KREMINNA AXIS /0130 UTC 20 JUN/ Russian social media and Telegram channels report that RU forces are advancing west of Kreminna. These sources claim the VDV’s the 76th Air Mobile Division has launched an attack along the O-130501 Road axis toward Yampolivka.
🌎 https://twitter.com/ChuckPfarrer/status/1670966307750027266?s=20/photo/1
⭕ 19 Jun 2023
🧵 RT @TrentTelenko [6/19] The size and duration (6 hours plus) of the secondaries at the Rykove (Partyzany) ammo depot (below) argue the PSU storm Shadow Strike hit a RuAF theater level ammo storage depot. ¤ This means things.Artillery Logistical 1/
📌 https://twitter.com/TrentTelenko/status/1670971803987058688?s=20
GovExec (2020): Who Really Defeated the Islamic State – Obama or Trump? https://tinyurl.com/wd56kd2e The plan was Obama’s and about 50% of the success was achieved under him: Trump adopted Obama’s plan but gave more leeway to the military, however at the cost of more civilian deaths
// 10/19/2020; President Trump has claimed the Islamic State was completely defeated on his watch – but an analysis of government maps and other reports shows his administration did only half the work
NYT: GOP Targets Researchers Who Study Disinformation Ahead of 2024 Election https://tinyurl.com/387nc4vx “Many Republicans are convinced that researchers who study disinformation have pressed social media platforms to discriminate against conservative voices”
// A legal campaign against universities and think tanks seeks to undermine the fight against false claims about elections, vaccines and other hot political topics.
On Capitol Hill and in the courts, Republican lawmakers and activists are mounting a sweeping legal campaign against universities, think tanks and private companies that study the spread of disinformation, accusing them of colluding with the government to suppress conservative speech online.
The effort has encumbered its targets with expansive requests for information and, in some cases, subpoenas — demanding notes, emails and other information related to social media companies and the government dating back to 2015. Complying has consumed time and resources and already affected the groups’ ability to do research and raise money, according to several people involved.
They and others warned that the campaign undermined the fight against disinformation in American society when the problem is, by most accounts, on the rise — and when another presidential election is around the corner. Many of those behind the Republican effort had also joined former President Donald J. Trump in falsely challenging the outcome of the 2020 presidential election.
“I think it’s quite obviously a cynical — and I would say wildly partisan — attempt to chill research,” said Jameel Jaffer, the executive director of Columbia University’s Knight First Amendment Institute, an organization that works to safeguard freedom of speech and the press. …
A conservative advocacy group led by Stephen Miller, the former adviser to Mr. Trump, filed a class-action lawsuit last month in U.S. District Court in Louisiana that echoes many of the committee’s accusations and focuses on some of the same defendants.
Targets include Stanford, Clemson and New York Universities and the University of Washington; the Atlantic Council, the German Marshall Fund and the National Conference on Citizenship, all nonpartisan, nongovernmental organizations in Washington; the Wikimedia Foundation in San Francisco; and Graphika, a company that researches disinformation online.
In a related line of inquiry, the committee has also issued a subpoena to the World Federation of Advertisers, a trade association, and the Global Alliance for Responsible Media it created. The committee’s Republican leaders have accused the groups of violating antitrust laws by conspiring to cut off advertising revenue for content researchers and tech companies found to be harmful.
The committee’s chairman, Representative Jim Jordan of Ohio, a close ally of Mr. Trump, has accused the organizations of “censorship of disfavored speech” involving issues that have galvanized the Republican Party: the policies around the Covid-19 pandemic and the integrity of the American political system, including the outcome of the 2020 election.
Much of the disinformation surrounding both issues has come from the right. Many Republicans are convinced that researchers who study disinformation have pressed social media platforms to discriminate against conservative voices.A central premise of the committee’s investigation — and the other complaints about censorship — is that the researchers or government officials had the power or ability to shut down accounts on social media. They did not, according to former employees at Twitter and Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram, who said the decision to punish users who violated platform rules belonged solely to the companies.
No evidence has emerged that government officials coerced the companies to take action against accounts, even when the groups flagged problematic content.
“We have not only academic freedom as researchers to conduct this research but freedom of speech to tell Twitter or any other company to look at tweets we might think violate rules,” Mr. Hancock said. …
🐣 RT @ChrisDJackson Fact check: this photo was taken in 2013 by @PeteSouza.
𝘝𝘪𝘤𝘦 𝘗𝘳𝘦𝘴𝘪𝘥𝘦𝘯𝘵 𝘑𝘰𝘦 𝘉𝘪𝘥𝘦𝘯 𝘢𝘯𝘥 𝘓𝘪𝘴𝘢 𝘔𝘰𝘯𝘢𝘤𝘰, 𝘈𝘴𝘴𝘪𝘴𝘵𝘢𝘯𝘵 𝘵𝘰 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘗𝘳𝘦𝘴𝘪𝘥𝘦𝘯𝘵 𝘧𝘰𝘳 𝘏𝘰𝘮𝘦𝘭𝘢𝘯𝘥 𝘚𝘦𝘤𝘶𝘳𝘪𝘵𝘺 𝘢𝘯𝘥 𝘊𝘰𝘶𝘯𝘵𝘦𝘳𝘵𝘦𝘳𝘳𝘰𝘳𝘪𝘴𝘮, 𝘵𝘢𝘭𝘬 𝘰𝘯 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘴𝘵𝘦𝘱𝘴 𝘧𝘳𝘰𝘮 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘊𝘰𝘭𝘰𝘯𝘯𝘢𝘥𝘦 𝘵𝘰 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘙𝘰𝘴𝘦 𝘎𝘢𝘳𝘥𝘦𝘯 𝘢𝘵 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘞𝘩𝘪𝘵𝘦 𝘏𝘰𝘶𝘴𝘦 𝘧𝘰𝘭𝘭𝘰𝘸𝘪𝘯𝘨 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘗𝘳𝘦𝘴𝘪𝘥𝘦𝘯𝘵𝘪𝘢𝘭 𝘋𝘢𝘪𝘭𝘺 𝘉𝘳𝘪𝘦𝘧𝘪𝘯𝘨, 𝘰𝘯 𝘔𝘢𝘺 1, 2013. 𝘖𝘧𝘧𝘪𝘤𝘪𝘢𝘭 𝘞𝘩𝘪𝘵𝘦 𝘏𝘰𝘶𝘴𝘦 𝘗𝘩𝘰𝘵𝘰 𝘣𝘺 𝘗𝘦𝘵𝘦 𝘚𝘰𝘶𝘻𝘢
🖼 https://twitter.com/ChrisDJackson/status/1670977573684142082?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @TheRickWilson Robert F Kennedy, Jf. is an expert on vaccines in the same way the insane guy out behind the bus station screaming that aliens have a tracking device shoved up his ass is an aerospace engineer.
🐣 📋 RT @NewVoiceUkraine Ukraine has only deployed 25% of its forces accumulated for the counter-offensive, while the Russians have thrown 90% of their reserves into defense. [link]
¤ https://twitter.com/NewVoiceUkraine/status/1670921398376878080?s=20
💽 Fox: Entire Trump Interview https://www.foxnews.com/video/6329757073112
// full hour
🐣 RT @Acyn Trump: First of all, I won in 2020 by a lot
Baier: You lost the 2020 election
Trump: They were counting ballots, not the authenticity of the ballot. The ballots were fake ballots. [etc etc]
💽 https://twitter.com/Acyn/status/1670922502510452738?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @OccupyDemocrats BREAKING: Donald Trump’s night goes from bad to worse as FOX News host Brit Hume humiliates him live on the air over his disastrous interview with his fellow FOX News host Bret Baier, declaring that Trump’s rambling defense of his charges for violating the Espionage Act was “on the verge of incoherent.” ¤ But it gets worse for Trump…
First, the FOX host began by congratulating his colleague Bret Baier in front of millions of FOX viewers for pushing back against Trump and not letting him get away with lying about the indictment and his culpability.
Then, Hume set his sights on Trump, declaring, “I will say a couple of things. His answer on the matters of the law seem to me to verge on incoherent. He seemed to be saying that the documents were really his, and that he didn’t give them back when he was requested to do so by a subpoena because he wasn’t ready to because he hadn’t sorted them and separated the classified information or whatever from his golf shirts, whatever he was saying.”
Hume concluded his brutal rant by putting Trump on notice that he has MAJOR problems waiting for him when the trial begins, declaring that Trump “seems to believe that the documents were his and that he had declassified them, when there was evidence to the contrary. And therefore, he could do whatever he wanted with them. Which I don’t think is gonna hold up in court.” ¤ That’s right. Even FOX News knows that Trump is TOAST.
Please retweet and ❤️ if you think that Trump MUST be found guilty — and consider investing in Tribel, a “woke” new Twitter competitor that is currently doing a round of equity crowdfunding and just blew past $1.6 million raised from 4,000 of its users. If you want to own a small piece of what is quickly becoming the “next big thing” in social media, here is the link to do so, http://wefunder.com/Tribel. You can invest as little as $100 — or as much as you’d like. Here’s the link to download the new Tribel app that Elon Musk is so afraid of: http://tribel.app.link/okwPIHYCIqb
🐣 RT @MeidasTouchTrump just does not know when to keep his mouth shut.
💽 https://twitter.com/MeidasTouch/status/1670913684305215488?s=20/photo/1
In a new interview with Bret Baier on Fox, Trump says the National Archives should have begged him for the documents back: “The only way NARA could ever get this stuff, this back, would be ‘please, please, please could we get them back.'”
NARA *did* ask Trump for the documents and then subpoenaed him when he refused. Even then, Trump lied about fully complying with the subpoena and instructed his aide, Walt Nauta, to move the boxes to a different location.
Trump gives a incredibly weak excuse that he was “very busy” and “wanted to go through the boxes and get all of [his] personal things out” before turning them over.
🐣 RT @MeidasTouch This is absolutely brutal for Trump. Ouch. This is absolutely brutal for Trump. Ouch.
💽 https://twitter.com/MeidasTouch/status/1670925881781669889?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @RonFilipkowski Holy shit this guy is the biggest idiot I have ever seen! This is the best story he can come up with? This guy is cooked. Keep talking moron.
⋙ 🐣 RT @Acyn There’s a lot going on here and this is going to reviewed: Trump on the recording of him
💽 https://twitter.com/RonFilipkowski/status/1670921724911558665?s=20/photo/1
NYT: China’s Rebound Hits a Wall, and There Is ‘No Quick Fix’ to Revive It https://tinyurl.com/54cwr6zs “China’s exports to the United States were down 18.2 percent last month compared with May last year”
// Policymakers and investors expected China’s economy to rev up again after Beijing abruptly dropped Covid precautions, but recent data shows alarming signs of a slowdown.
🐣 RT @anneapplebaum If you were wondering why the Ukrainians won’t stop fighting
⋙ 🐣 RT @ChakhoyanAndrew “Since Russia’s soldiers first stormed 🇺🇦, women have been gang-raped, men castrated, children sexually abused, & civilians forced to parade naked in the streets, according to the UN.” #ThisIsRussia #RussianCulture
⋙⋙ TheTelegraph [UK]: Castration, gang-rape, forced nudity: How Russia’s soldiers terrorise Ukraine with sexual violence https://tinyurl.com/3y32rup3
// 11/28/2022; The Kremlin has been accused of terrorising Ukrainians with sexual violence systematically – and known reports are the ‘tip of the iceberg’
🐣 RT @front_ukrainian⚡️🇨🇳China does not provide 🇷🇺Russia with lethal weapons, – 🇺🇸Blinken ¤ “We and other countries received assurances from China that it does not and will not provide lethal aid to Russia for use in 🇺🇦Ukraine. We appreciate that and have seen no evidence to the contrary.”
WaPo: FBI resisted opening probe into Trump’s role in Jan. 6 for more than a year https://tinyurl.com/mu4ta6fc ‘Inside DOJ, some have complained that the AG’s determination to steer clear of any claims of political motive has chilled efforts to investigate the former president’
// In the DOJ’s investigation of Jan. 6, key Justice officials also quashed an early plan for a task force focused on people in Trump’s orbit
🐣 RT @ChuckPfarrer ORIKHIV AXIS /2330 UTC 19 JUN/ RU carried out an airstrike against Novodarivka, and shelled Orikhiv, Novoandriyivka and Mala Tomachka. UKR forces are in contact along the T-04-08 HWY axis. West of Luhivske, UKR units are reported to be in contact along the T-08-15.
🌎 https://twitter.com/ChuckPfarrer/status/1670934566016614400?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @ChuckPfarrer,KAMIANSKE-ORIKHIV AXIS /1430 UTC 19 JUN/ The 0600 briefing of the UKR Gen’l Staff reports that its forces have expanded control of a Piatykhatky. UKR troops are in contact in the vicinity if Luhove and N of Hrozove. RU conducted air strikes on Novodanvilivka and Orikhiv.
🌎 https://twitter.com/ChuckPfarrer/status/1670798606285111298?s=20/photo/1
🔄 🐣 RT @ChuckPfarrer WE COVER THE WAR: Indications & Warnings @ChuckPfarrer and @MriyaReport post daily maps of the Ukraine War. We cover Svatove, Kreminna, Bakhmut, Avdiivka, Vuhledar, Kamianske and Kherson, as well as partisan actions near Melitipol and long range strikes and sabotage in Crimea.
🌎 https://twitter.com/ChuckPfarrer/status/1670895985977901058?s=20/photo/1
// Index chart of fronts
🐣 RT @ChuckPfarrer BAKHMUT AXIS /1510 UTC 19 JUN/ Over the past 72 hours, UKR forces have consolidated significant gains north and south of the Bakhmut urban area. Gains of as much as 3 Km have been registered along the M-03 HWY axis. UKR has consolidated gains S of the H-32 and Ivanivske.
🌎 https://twitter.com/ChuckPfarrer/status/1670810073189285889?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @OleksiyDanilov War is hard work. At this time, our job is to eliminate the russian occupiers, their forces and means. Calmly, carefully, step by step. Today, Ukraine’s Defense Forces are doing their job perfectly! ¤ Everything will be Ukraine, and it will be within the borders of 1991.
🐣 RT @maxseddon The clandestine operation to eliminate a C.I.A. informant in Miami represented a brazen expansion of Mr. Putin’s campaign of targeted assassinations. ¤ “The red lines are long gone for Putin. He wants all these guys dead.”
NYT: Russia Sought to Kill Defector in Florida https://tinyurl.com/2h35dkmr
// A failed plot to assassinate a C.I.A. spy in 2020 in part led to expulsions of the agency’s chief in Moscow and his Russian counterpart in Washington.
As President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia has pursued enemies abroad, his intelligence operatives now appear prepared to cross a line that they previously avoided: trying to kill a valuable informant for the U.S. government on American soil.
The clandestine operation, seeking to eliminate a C.I.A. informant in Miami who had been a high-ranking Russian intelligence official more than a decade earlier, represented a brazen expansion of Mr. Putin’s campaign of targeted assassinations. It also signaled a dangerous low point even between intelligence services that have long had a strained history.
“The red lines are long gone for Putin,” said Marc Polymeropoulos, a former C.I.A. officer who oversaw operations in Europe and Russia. “He wants all these guys dead.” …
“We cannot allow a foreign power to interfere in our democratic process with impunity,” President Biden said at the White House in announcing the penalties. He made no mention of the plot involving Mr. Fuentes.
⭕ 18 Jun 2023
TheAtlantic, Peter Wehner: Morality Is for Trump What Colors Are to the Color-Blind https://tinyurl.com/3kph2vmm “Other shady and unethical individuals have served in the White House … but Trump’s full-spectrum corruption puts him in a category all his own”
// The majority of his enablers, though, still know right from wrong.
… Trump doesn’t just cross moral lines; he doesn’t appear capable of understanding moral categories. Morality is for Trump what colors are to a person who is color-blind.
But what’s true of Trump isn’t true of the majority of his enablers. They see the colors that Trump cannot. They still know right from wrong. But for a combination of reasons, they have consistently overridden their conscience, in some cases unwittingly and in some cases cynically. They have talked themselves into believing, or half-believing, that Trump is America’s martyr and America’s savior.
Trump’s behavior obviously speaks to his own character. But Trump’s behavior has also proved to be a test of the character of others—Republican politicians and voters, the GOP establishment and the evangelical movement. It’s proved to be a test of character for those who claim to be “constitutional conservatives” and “family values” advocates, for ethicists and public intellectuals, for right-wing commentators and party strategists.
With very few exceptions, and to varying degrees, they have failed it. They have turned against—or at the very least, at a crucial hour, they have failed to defend—ideals and institutions they once claimed to cherish. Donald Trump could not have so deeply wounded our republic without his enablers. It took a team effort.
And now here we are, eight summers after Trump announced his first bid for the presidency, and we find him facing 71 felony counts while still 30 points above his nearest GOP rival, having transformed the Republican Party in his own image in ways that exceed even what Ronald Reagan did. His imprint is on the party in a thousand different ways. Tens of millions of Americans see Trump as their angel of vengeance, and they can’t wait for the second act to get started.
The moral wreckage of Donald Trump’s presidency and post-presidency was predictable and even inevitable. The reason? Trump’s moral depravity, which touches every area of his life, private and public, has long been in public view, undisguised and impossible to miss.
In July 2016, I described Trump as temperamentally unfit to be president—erratic, unprincipled, unstable, obsessive, a serial liar, and a misogynist who made racist appeals and who suffered from what, at the time, I called a “personality disorder.” On the day after Trump’s inauguration, I wrote, “A man with illiberal tendencies, a volatile personality and no internal checks is now president. This isn’t going to end well.” It hasn’t.
The scope and seriousness of Trump’s misconduct over the past eight years are staggering. He has relentlessly promoted lies and conspiracy theories, brutalized and dehumanized his opponents, threatened prosecutors and judges, and used his pardon power to subvert the legal system. He was found liable in a civil case of sexual abuse and defamation. He made hush-money payments to a porn star. He instigated a violent attack on the Capitol and attempted to overturn an election. He was impeached twice. And he is the first former president to be indicted, not once but twice. More indictments are likely to come.
Other shady and unethical individuals have served in the White House—Richard Nixon and Warren Harding among them—but Trump’s full-spectrum corruption puts him in a category all his own. His degeneracy is unmatched in American presidential history and unsurpassed in American political history.
If Trump’s malice is obvious, what’s behind it is more difficult to assess. In 2016, the psychologist Dan McAdams wrote a psychological portrait of Trump for The Atlantic, which he later expanded into a book, The Strange Case of Donald J. Trump: A Psychological Reckoning. McAdams describes Trump as “psychologically singular,” a man who “lacks an inner story to provide his life with temporal continuity, purpose, and meaning. He is the episodic man, living (and fighting) in the moment.” And that moment is free of ethical considerations and ethical constraints. …
Whatever the precise nature of Trump’s psychological pathologies—McAdams says Trump is “way more strange than any mental illness category that one can apply or create”—we can see for ourselves how they manifest: extreme narcissism, lack of empathy, feelings of persecution, grandiosity, and deceitfulness; impulsivity, shamelessness, remorselessness, and rage; a compulsive desire for attention, an obsessive need to dominate others, an eagerness to shatter social norms, and the belief that rules that apply to others don’t apply to him.
In his 1983 book, Statecraft as Soulcraft, George Will, one of the most consequential conservatives of the past half century, wrote that “the purpose of politics is to facilitate, as much as is prudent, the existence of worthy passions and the achievement of worthy aims.” Will was channeling Aristotle, who said in the Nicomachean Ethics, “The main concern of politics is to engender a certain character in the citizens and to make them good and disposed to perform noble actions.” …
Donald Trump, rather than using the presidency to elevate human sensibilities, did the opposite, and he did it relentlessly. Among the most damaging legacies of the Trump years is his barbarization of America’s civic and political life. He called the spirits from the vasty deep, and they came when summoned.
Many millions of Americans responded, determined that their country become more decent, more humane, more just. We are now in mid-story; none of us knows quite how it will end. An extraordinary drama is playing out, and each of us has a role to play in shaping the outcome. …
WaPo: Barr slams Trump’s defense in documents case as ‘absurd’ and ‘wacky’ https://tinyurl.com/99r38y59 “‘I think the government acted responsibly,’ Barr said on Fox News. ‘They gave him every opportunity to return those documents. They acted with restraint’”
// Speaking to CBS News’s “Face the Nation,” Barr, a Republican, pushed back on a number of his party’s talking points in excusing the former president’s alleged actions.
🐣 RT @KateGoesTech How many F-16s are gathering dust in each country:
🇺🇸 USA: 2,256
🇮🇱 Israel: 362
🇹🇷 Turkey: 270
🇪🇬 Egypt: 220
🇳🇱 Netherlands: 213
🇰🇷 South Korea: 180
🇬🇷 Greece: 170
🇹🇼 Taiwan: 150
🇵🇰 Pakistan: 111
🇦🇪 UAE: 80
🇩🇰 Denmark: 77
🇯🇴 Jordan: 64
🇸🇬 Singapore: 62
🇧🇪 Belgium: 54 …
// 5/30/2023
🐣 RT @ChuckPfarrer ZAPORIZHZHIA FRONT /0245 UTC 18 JUN/ Early contact reports suggest that UKR troops have broken through S of Novodanvilivka. Preliminary info suggests that UKR is expanding a widening pocket from Novopokrovka in the E, Verbove and Novoprokopivka in the S and Kopani in the West.
🌎 https://twitter.com/ChuckPfarrer/status/1670261602648567808?s=20/photo/1
⭕ 17 Jun 2023
🐣 RT @TheStudyofWar #WagnerGroup financier Yevgeny #Prigozhin continued to signal his disinterest in formally subordinating the #Wagner private military company (PMC) to the Russian Ministry of Defense (MoD). http://isw.pub/UkrWar061723
[TextLink:] https://twitter.com/TheStudyofWar/status/1670260251570913281?s=20/photo/1
Wagner Group financier Yevgeny Prigozhin continued to signal his disinterest in formally subordinating the Wagner private military company (MC) to the Russian Ministry of Defense (MoD). Prigozhin sarcastically criticized the MoD’s formalization efforts on June 17 after previously portraying himself as compliant with the Russian MoD’s order for volunteer formations to sign formal contracts by July 1 and claimed he attempted to submit a contract to formalize Wagner under the Russian MoD.[19] Prigozhin implied that the Russian MoD will confiscate weapons that volunteer units obtained outside of the Russian MoD’s weapon deliveries and noted that inexperienced Russian commanders with higher military education will replace what he claimed are more combat-effective volunteer commanders. 20] Prigozhin added that formalization will destroy hierarchies within volunteer formations and force volunteers to serve in the military without the Russian MoD respecting military contract deadlines. Prigozhin noted that the Russian MoD will not provide sufficient supplies or weapons for volunteers and will mistreat irregular forces. Prigozhin did not discuss the contents of his claimed formalization contract with the Russian MoD on June 17, but a Wagner-affiliated milblogger suggested that Prigozhin demanded a series of powers and concessions from the Russian military command discussed in the force generation section of this update. [21] Prigozhin’s behavior indicates that he is unlikely to subordinate Wagner forces to the Russian MoD unless such a move would grant him more political power within Russia.
🧵 RT @ @Mylovanov The African delegation brokering peace between Ukraine and Russia achieves nothing. ¤ Putin interrupted the arguments of the delegation after they stated that the peace should be based on internationally recognized borders. ¤ Putin made several claims. Let’s address them. 1/
[ThreadReader:] https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1670174144946749441.html
📌 https://twitter.com/Mylovanov/status/1670174144946749441?s=20
// by economist mostly about grain exports
🐣 RT @igorsushko Russian war criminal & former FSB spetsnaz, Igor ‘Strelkov’ Girkin predicts Russia’s collapse if Ukraine is able to break through the current frontline, which he calls the thinnest thread on which everything hangs for Russia.
💽 [tr] https://twitter.com/igorsushko/status/1670256908341772289?s=20/photo/1
⋙ 🐣 RT @igorsushko Strelkov is of the belief the depth of the defences are quite shallow.
🐣 RT @ EmbassyofRussia 🇷🇺 President of #Russia Vladimir #Putin: ¤ I do not rule out that if there had been a different administration in #US, then perhaps it would have been possible to take a different path in the situation with Ukraine.
⋙ 🐣 RT @dylanc78 I do not rule out that if there had been a different administration in #Russia, then perhaps it would have been possible to take a different path. Russia would be a prosperous and respected member of the international community. But instead, Russia is a kleptocracy.
🐣 RT @ RusEmbUSA 💬President #Putin: As for 🇷🇺-🇺🇸 contacts, there are practically none. ¤ ❌ It is not us who refuse to carry on a dialogue with them, they just shifted the focus of this dialogue to arms supplies. ¤ 🔥 We will burn everything they have supplied and see what they will do next.
🐣 RT @ChuckPfarrer ROLL THE BONES: As Putin & Lukashenko try desperately to scare someone with Belarus’ nuclear weapon starter kit, a pair of USAF B-1B bombers did a fly over of Lativa. The B-1B, known as ‘The Bone’, is the key weapons platform of the United States’ Global Strike Command (GSC).
⋙ 🐣 RT @NATO_AIRCOM 2️⃣ strategic 🇺🇸 B-1B flew over 🇱🇻Riga on 17 June. Bombers are currently deployed in Europe & conducted Air-Land-Integration with @Latvijas_armija forces.
🇱🇻MinDef: “B-1B training flight shows that our Allies are capable of defending Latvia swiftly & with impressive fire power.”
🐣 RT @ChuckPfarrer KAMIANSKE AXIS /2000 UTC 17 JUN/ RU mil bloggers and social media reports that Russian forces are retreating from Luhove. UKR units are in contact south of [Zherebianky] and Piatykhatky. It is assessed that UKR is consolidating lodgments west and south of the T-08-12 HWY axis.
🌎 https://twitter.com/ChuckPfarrer/status/1670157308704223233?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @ChuckPfarrer VELYKA NOVSLIKA / 17 JUN/ UKR forces broke up Russian counter attacks at Blahodante, Storozhove and Makarivka. RU forces have been steadily pressed south down the T-05-18 HWY. UKR units are now in contact in the vicinity of Urozhaine. Heavy fighting is continuing.
🌎 https://twitter.com/ChuckPfarrer/status/1670180697674338306?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @ChuckPfarrer KHERSON AXIS /1350 UTC 17 JUN/ Sources report that Ukrainian SOF units have crossed in force in the vicinity of Nova Kakhovka. The operation may have been staged with the possible goal of establishing a bridgehead. RU forces will be forced to redeploy to contain the attempt.
🌎 https://twitter.com/ChuckPfarrer/status/1670080695799103488?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @ChuckPfarrer AVDIIVKA AXIS /1350 UTC 17 JUN/ UKR downed a Russian Ka-52 attack helicopter on 16 JUN. UKR forces broke up RU attacks at Stepove, Avdiivka & Peske. A RU airstrike was carried out against Avdiivka and RU fire missions were conducted against the settlement of Vesele.
🌎 https://twitter.com/ChuckPfarrer/status/1670063859401465857?s=20/photo/1.
💙 WaPo: Trump’s indictment plus candidacy could endanger democracy and the rule of law https://tinyurl.com/3cnkkdbs “Not since the Vietnam War in the 1960s or perhaps the mid-19th century before the Civil War has the country’s governing structure faced such disunity and peril”
// The collision of former president Donald Trump’s criminal indictment with the presidential campaign could further undermine confidence in democratic principles and institutions of government, experts say
🐣 RT @sentdefender Russian Sources are claiming that Ukrainian Forces have begun to Deploy a Significant number of Electronic-Warfare Systems along the Frontline in the Donetsk Region result in “Huge Drone Losses by Russian Units” and leading many to believe that a Ukrainian Operation in the Region is Imminent.
[TextLink:] https://twitter.com/sentdefender/status/1669861229022642177?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @KyivIndependent ⚡Kremlin spokesman claims Ukraine largely ‘demilitarized’. ¤ Kremlin press secretary Dmitriy Peskov claimed that Russia’s goal of “demilitarizing” Ukraine was largely completed, saying that it was using “fewer and fewer of its own weapons” and increasingly relying on weapons provided by the West.
🐣 RT @RonFilipkowski John Eastman, who wrote the legal brief Trump cited to pressure Pence to overturn the election, is complaining that he lost his job as a tenured law professor, and the judge ordered that his CA disbarment hearing be live-streamed this Tues so the American public can watch.
💽 https://twitter.com/RonFilipkowski/status/1670165526214066177?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @berlin_bridge Yes, like how the Nazis kindly let the Allies land at Normandy. A gentlemen’s agreement don’t you know.
⋙ 🐣 RT @BowesChay Vladimir Putin has revealed that #Russian troops withdrew from #Kiev and other regions in #Ukraine on the basis of a peace deal agreed in #Turkiye, this casts serious doubts over Ukrainain narratives about defeat of Russia in the “battle of Kiev”
¤ https://twitter.com/BowesChay/status/1670153379509686272?s=20
He showed African leaders and press the document at their meeting in St Petersburg. Russian journalists published the title page of the document both sides provisionally agreed to titled “Treaty on Permanent Neutrality and Security Guarantees of Ukraine”
According to the President of the Russian Federation, Ukraine and Russia agreed in principle to the draft agreement spring 2022 in Istanbul, but then Kiev refused to sign it after Russian troops voluntaraly pulled back when ordered by Moscow as part of the deal.
The text says that the UK, China, Russia, the USA, France, and Turkey would act as guarantors. Sources suggest Boris Johnston travelled to Kiev soon after to insist / threaten Zelensky not to continue with the deal.
⋙⋙ 🐣 why would Ukraine sign such a draft statement with Russia still occupying >20% of their land? ¤ if they “withdrew” from northern Ukr as part of a deal, why didn’t they state it at the time? ¤ fact is, they were trounced and so, once again, rewrite history
¤ https://twitter.com/Auriandra/status/1670174521750429702?s=20/photo/1
// apple or banana meme
🐣 RT @JayinKyiv Yesterday’s African delegation to Kyiv was a mere PR event organized by Kremlin. ¤ Now they’re in Moscow reading a list of prepared Kremlin disinfo narratives. ¤ And NOW, they’ll get PAID.
[TextLink:] https://twitter.com/JayinKyiv/status/1670129228203847681?s=20/photo/1 -2
[Text:] [Russian Talking Points:] [ Only Putin speaks ]
● The leadership of Unkraine refused to negotiate, not us. Russia is ready for a constructive dialogue with all who are for peace.
● Kyiv began hostilities against the Donbass in 2014, it was he who unleashed a war in Ukraine.
● The food crisis in the world is caused not by a special operation, but by the actions of the West.
● For a long time we tried to restore the situation by peaceful means, but the West led us by the nose.
● The logic of recognizing the LPR and DPR, and protecting Donbass is impeccable from the point of view of international law and the UN Charter.
🐣 RT @AntiToxicPeople Amazing to read this NYT op-ed from 50 years ago today, 6/17/73, the 1st anniversary of Watergate. Read it & compare to what we are living through now. ¤ This was 8 days before John Dean’s riveting, explosive testimony that revealed Nixon’s deep complicity in a massive cover up.
[TextLink:] https://twitter.com/AntiToxicPeople/status/1670103841042481153?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @Sky_Lee_1 21 post in less than an hour. He’s imploding!
💽 https://twitter.com/Sky_Lee_1/status/1670086757852016643?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @mfa_russia 💬 FM #Lavrov: Democracy is not only for domestic consumption. The West believes it has the right to impose its domestic democratic rules on others. ¤ ☝️The principle of the UN Charter – the sovereign equality of states – applies in the international arena https://t.me/MFARussia/16273
🐣 “The West believes it has the right to impose its domestic democratic rules on others” ¤ Ukraine chose a democratic future: it was not imposed. Rather, after promising Ukraine he would seek EU membership, Putin compelled Yanukovych to renege. Putin imposed. Then, Maidan.
⭕ 16 Jun 2023
🐣 RT @RusEmbUSA 🇷🇺🇺🇸 Russian Ambassador to the USA Anatoly Antonov met with U.S. Ambassador to Russia Lynne Tracy in Washington, DC on June 16. ¤ Topical issues of the bilateral agenda were discussed.
AP: NATO moves to protect undersea pipelines, cables as concern mounts over Russian sabotage threat https://tinyurl.com/42a4jv5w
🐣 RT @NatalkaKyiv After the Russian terrorist attacks on the Kyiv region on the same day African leaders were visiting Kyiv President Zelensky doesn’t hold back at a press conference with his African colleagues. ¤ #Zelensky #Putin #Ukraine #RussiaUkraineWar #RussiaIsATerroristState #RussianWarCrimes #Russia #Africa
💽 https://twitter.com/NatalkaKyiv/status/1669925867470897153?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @Ukrinform_News The root of the evil is Russia. And this root must be extracted. It’s absurd that the UN deploys its humanitarian missions under the threat of shelling by Russia, which sits in the chair of a UNSC permanent member.@SergiyKyslytsya spoke with Ukrinform.
NYT, Stephen Wertheim: The Tale the West Tells Itself About Ukraine https://tinyurl.com/2p9a7v52 //➔ Wertheim takes the view that, because Iraq was a mistake, Ukraine must be, too.
¤ https://twitter.com/Auriandra/status/1669978804310224898?s=20
But Ukraine is a EUROPEAN conflict in that it embodies the West’s commitment to democracy over autocracy.
If the West cannot defend a country that so desires Enlightenment values, the entire Western project is lost, there is nothing to offer the World, and we have no recourse but to let “the Darkness drop again” (Yeats) @stephenwertheim
✛ “Stephen Wertheim (@stephenwertheim) is a senior fellow in the American Statecraft Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and a visiting lecturer at Yale Law School and Catholic University. He is the author of ‘Tomorrow, the World: The Birth of U.S. Global Supremacy.’”
↥ ↧
TheGuardian, Stephen Wertheim: Two decades later, it feels as if the US is trying to forget the Iraq war ever happens https://tinyurl.com/3uua7vh5
// 3/17/2023
BookReviews (Amazon):
Stephen Wertheim: Tomorrow, the World: The Birth of U.S. Global Supremacy
October 27, 2020
● David Shulman 4.0 out of 5 stars The Fall of France Shock
January 27, 2021
Columbia University historian and co-founder of the noninterventionist Quincy Institute offers up a conspiracy theory of how a small group of intellectuals centered around the Council on Foreign Relations in the early 1940’s became the vanguard of American hegemony in the years to come. The elite view was highlighted by Henry Luce’s famous “American Century” article in Life Magazine in February 1941. To me there is some truth in what Wertheim writes, but history is far more complicated than the theory he lays out.
He argues that it was not Pearl Harbor that turned the tide against isolationism, but rather the fall of France in May 1940. Although France’s fall did not move public opinion all that much, it certainly moved elite opinion. But why did it move elite opinion? My answer is that it was an enormous geopolitical shock that would have worked its way through policy in any event, elite opinion or not. Why?
Simply put, the correlation forces drove policy far more than a few intellectuals. The fall of France meant that the balance of power in Europe was broken and Germany ruled supreme. England was up against the wall and the wily Stalin understood the geopolitical underpinnings of his pact with Hitler were rendered moot. Stalin’s hope of Western Europe bleeding white in a manner similar to World War I was shattered and instead of the Soviets being able to pick up the pieces of a shattered Europe, his country would soon become Hitler’s prey.
In America the isolationists/noninterventionists believed that the European balance of power would be preserved obviating the need to intervene. The collapse of France shattered that illusion. Thus, the noninterventionist idea of hemispheric defense looked kind of lame in the face of a Nazi dominated Europe. Simply put by not acting the United States would be on the strategic defensive, a hardly desirable outcome.
After the war, the United States stood astride the world like no other power ever before. But contrary to what Wertheim argues, instead of pressing its military advantage, the U.S. demobilizes and remains that way until the Korean War. It was Soviet expansionism in Europe and China that forces the United States into becoming a global hegemon, albeit an enlightened one.
I wish Wertheim would have cited Walter Russell Meade’s “American Providence” which discusses the four strands of American foreign policy. In that book Meade outlined the conflict between the Wilsonian internationalists and the Jeffersonian isolationists on the eve of World War II. That argument was settled initially by the Jacksonians revenge against the Pearl Harbor attack and later the Hamiltonian internationalists seized the economic prizes that were available in the postwar world. ¤ In a word, Wertheim overstates his case, and the book could have used a better editor. It is a slog at too many points.
● Amazon Customer 3.0 out of 5 stars Containment is neglected
February 8, 2021
As some reviewers have stated, the argument does not develop any of the issues related to containment introduced by George Kennan as the US demobilized after WW2. While the discussion of the projection of American power in 1940 and 1941 is an interesting intellectual exercise, the fact that the US was slowly getting drawn into the war had to be justified to the public (and members of Congress) which had firmly turned against any involvement. A rationale for engagement was thus necessary, ergo, the necessity of arguments in support of what were essentially moral imperatives for an American presence globally. In reality, it was the USSR that tripped the scales in favor of an American presence in so far as Germany was defeated anyway and Soviet power was rapidly taking hold in Europe–then of course there was China, Korea, Vietnam, etc. In addition, lets not forget that D-Day, June 1944 was as much about defeating Germany as it was an attempt to prevent the Russians from occupying all of Europe right up to the English Channel, the 1942 Second Front issue not withstanding. The democratic debacle in Czechoslovakia in 1948 was itself a sufficient reason to have the Americans on edge, especially after the allied discussions at Yalta and Potsdam.
● not me 3.0 out of 5 stars Buyer Beware: Recycled Dissertation
June 19, 2021
“Tomorrow, the World” has big ambitions. Looking for the roots of American imperial overreach, it focuses on the early 1940s, when “elites” (the author’s phrase) in New York and Washington redefined “internationalism” to mean U.S. global dominance, in contrast to an older “internationalism” that rejected power politics and emphasized international law and free trade. These “elites” wanted the U.S. to police the world, with the UN and the British Empire serving as auxiliary vehicles for American power. The author sees a direct connection between their plans and the global war on terror of the 2000s (somehow the Cold War gets left out of the story). These issues are important but, unfortunately, “Tomorrow, the World” is based mainly on the author’s PhD research in the archives of the Council on Foreign Relations and in the correspondence of a handful of academics and journalists (such as Quincy Wright and Walter Lippman). As a result, the book ends up as little more than a recycled dissertation, with all the limitations of that genre, even though it is packaged as something grander. (If anyone doubts how limited the book is, consider the fact that Henry Stimson and Harry Hopkins aren’t even mentioned in the index.) The author now needs to write a real book based on the archives of the State Department, the War and Navy Departments, the White House, the Congress, the British government, and major newspapers. If nothing else, a better-researched and comprehensive book would avoid the cramped trivia and faint John Birch Society odor that mar this one.
NYT: African Leaders Talk Peace in Ukraine, as Missiles Explode Overhead https://tinyurl.com/2p8u5zvs Zelensky insisted that peace talks can only begin after Russia leaves the land it invaded and occupies. The African Leaders are eager for grain imports to resume and urge talks now.
// After meeting with the Africans, including some who have close ties to Moscow, President Volodymyr Zelensky suggested that their peace plans were unrealistic.
NYT: Evidence in Trump Documents Case Hints at ‘Ongoing Investigations,’ Filing Says https://tinyurl.com/5df2wxtu “Judge Cannon asked the federal magistrate judge assigned to help her with the case…. Judge Bruce E Reinhart issued [the] warrant used by the FBI to search Mar-a-Lago”
// Court papers from federal prosecutors in the case against Donald Trump suggested that other criminal cases could potentially emerge from the inquiry.
[…] The government’s motion for a protective order, which Mr. Trump’s lawyers did not oppose, said that prosecutors were ready to start turning over a trove of nonclassified evidence that they had collected during the documents investigation. That included information about investigative techniques, material related to potential witnesses and things like grand jury transcripts, exhibits and recordings of witness interviews, the motion said.
It also sought to restrict disclosure of the evidence to Mr. Trump’s legal team; to people who might be interviewed as witnesses and their lawyers; and to any others who were specifically authorized by the court. …
Shortly after the government requested the protective order, Judge Cannon asked the federal magistrate judge assigned to help her with the case, Bruce E. Reinhart, to handle the question of whether to impose it. It is common in the Southern District of Florida for magistrate judges, not district judges like Judge Cannon, to handle pretrial motions.
Judge Reinhart is no stranger to the case. Last summer, he issued a warrant used by the F.B.I. to search Mar-a-Lago, Mr. Trump’s private club and residence in Florida, suggesting that he believed there was probable cause that investigators would find evidence of a crime at the compound.
It could be a significant development moving forward if Judge Reinhart handles the more substantial legal motions that will be filed by Mr. Trump’s lawyers in the months to come, given that Judge Cannon was widely criticized for making rulings favorable to Mr. Trump in an early stage of the investigation.
TheDailyMail: EXCLUSIVE: Saudi crown prince bragged that Jared Kushner gave him CIA intelligence about other Saudis saying ‘here are your enemies’ days before ‘corruption crackdown’ which led to torture and death https://tinyurl.com/22ud5brc
// 4/5/2018
● Saudi crown prince Mohammed bin Salman met with Jared Kushner in October
● Salman has since bragged about using classified intelligence from Kushner as part of a crackdown on ‘corrupt’ princes and businessmen in Saudi Arabia
● He said the intelligence from Kushner included information on those who were disloyal to Salman and who were his ‘enemies’, insiders tell DailyMail
● Kushner’s attorney’s spokesman said it was ‘false’ that the president’s son-in-law passed on secrets and that he was ‘well aware of the rules’
● The crown prince launched his crackdown on corruption in November, days after he met Kushner for talks in Riyadh
● Hundreds were rounded up, including princes from rival parts of the Saudi royal family and some of the country’s wealthiest businessmen
● But the crackdown saw accusations of torture and at least one reported death
🐣 RT @BlackKnight10k The CIA was spooked in 2021 because all of their assets were being captured and murdered and I think about it all the time ever since the FBI found those classified documents at Mar-a-Lago
⋙ TheHill: CIA admits to losing dozens of informants around the world: NYT https://tinyurl.com/y4d78ncy
// 10/5/2021; CIA assets killed
🐣 RT @RonFilipkowski Here he is. Fox producer and former Tucker show Editor Alexander McCaskill, leaving Fox today with his stuff after getting fired for posting the ‘Wannabe Dictator’ chryon about Biden. Have a nice weekend!
¤ https://twitter.com/RonFilipkowski/status/1669834209526005761?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @Igorsushko Incredibly bizarre video published by Yevgeny Prigozhin. He went to Russia’s Ministry of Defence to hand over the signed agreement which would allegedly subordinate Wagner PMC to the Ministry of Defence. Prigozhin and Shoigu are playing a game of intrigue. English translation:
💽 https://twitter.com/igorsushko/status/1669789313918459904?s=20/photo/1
⋙ 🐣 RT @Igorsushko UPDATE: To absolutely no one’s surprise, the “agreement” Prigozhin signed was drafted by Wagner and not the MoD. It stipulates the MoD must send unlimited funding, armament, and soldiers to Wagner PMC. This is not the contract Shoigu and Putin ordered Prigozhin to sign. Theatre.
[TextLink:] https://twitter.com/igorsushko/status/1669836174041534470?s=20/photo/1 -3
🐣 RT @mkraju Senate GOP John Thune, amid calls from some on the right to defund parts of DOJ: “I think defunding is a really bad idea.” ¤ GOP Rep. Don Bacon says Trump lied about holding top secrets at his house and showed them to people. “I’m not in the mood for defending that.”
💽 https://twitter.com/mkraju/status/1669817197462421504?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @petestrzok As details about Trump’s handling of classified material emerge, the level of likely damage to national security only increases. ¤ Trump was and remains a counterintelligence nightmare, unrivaled in Presidential history.
Thanks to @NicolleDWallace for the conversation.
⋙ 🐣 RT @DeadlineWH “Donald Trump is a counterintelligence nightmare, still to this day… He took this stuff with him everywhere it appears, so the chances in my opinion are high that there was classified info at Bedminster… at Trump Tower” – @petestrzok w/ @NicolleDWallace
💽 https://twitter.com/petestrzok/status/1669832491773878278?s=20/photo/1
WaPo, Dana Milbank: As Trump is arrested, Republicans honor the insurrectionists https://tinyurl.com/59hf8v93 Fake hearing for fake “patriots” ~ more cosplaying for the violent fringe of the MAGA base
… In the Capitol complex, Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.), with sidekick Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) and four other far-right lawmakers, held a “hearing” that honored participants in the riot, family members of Jan. 6 rioters and organizers of the attempted overthrow of the 2020 vote.
Technically, Gaetz couldn’t call such a hearing, because he isn’t a committee chairman. But House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, who is trying to win back the support of extremists such as Gaetz, let it happen anyway.
Gaetz did his all to make the proceedings look official. There were congressional seals on his nameplate and on the big screen behind him. A meeting room in the Capitol visitor center was arranged to appear like a committee room, with lawmakers facing the witnesses. Gaetz advertised the “field hearing” as part of how “the 118th Congress is investigating the weaponization of the federal government.”
He impersonated a chairman — “you are recognized,” “thank you for your testimony,” “I’ll recognize myself [for] questions,” “her time has expired” — and the others played along (“Thank you for the opportunity to testify,” “I yield back”). Gaetz said testimony could be used “for the official record [of the] House” or for “work in the Judiciary Committee, upon which I serve, or the Oversight Committee.” C-SPAN carried the proceedings live. …
🔄 ≣ Wikipedia: The Presidential Records Act (PRA) of 1978, 44 U.S.C. §§ 2201–2209 https://tinyurl.com/bdhkft8m
APNews: NATO moves to protect undersea pipelines, cables as concern mounts over Russian sabotage threat https://tinyurl.com/42a4jv5w
🐣 RT @ukraine_map The US 🇺🇸 Congress draft National Defense Authorization Act For Fiscal Year 2024 from the House Armed Services Committee says that no less than $80 million of USAI funds should be used for the procurement of ATACMS for Ukraine 🇺🇦
⭕ 15 Jun 2023
🔄 💙 🐣 RT @ BryanDawsonUSA [15 Jun] Watch the Congressional testimony where Comey admits FBI investigators found no emails marked classified on Hillary’s server:
💽 https://twitter.com/BryanDawsonUSA/status/1669359690692845573?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @ukraine_map The US 🇺🇸 Congress draft National Defense Authorization Act For Fiscal Year 2024 from the House Armed Services Committee says that no less than $80 million of USAI funds should be used for the procurement of ATACMS for Ukraine 🇺🇦
WaPo, Jennifer Rubin: Trump’s chances of a Jan. 6 indictment soar https://tinyurl.com/4ntm266c Five factors: “the convictions of Jan. 6 participants, the Georgia investigation, Smith’s success in getting witness testimony, [Judge] Carter’s decision and general public sentiment”
[…] Five factors now point to a federal indictment on Jan. 6-related charges. ¤ First, the Justice Department has already obtained multiple convictions on the most serious charge — seditious conspiracy — and long prison terms for multiple militia group members. Smith might not be able to directly tie Trump to the violence, but it would be a gross injustice for the people Trump told to go to the Capitol to do his bidding to get heavy jail sentences but to let the man they believed sent “orders” to go free.
Moreover, by winning convictions on seditious conspiracy, the department has proved that the events of Jan. 6 were sedition, namely an effort “to overthrow, put down, or to destroy by force the Government of the United States … or to oppose by force the authority thereof, or by force to prevent, hinder, or delay the execution of any law of the United States.”
If Trump cannot be tied directly to the violence (either in calling for his supporters or allowing them to run amok for 187 minutes), his effort nevertheless plainly sought to prevent the execution of the law and the constitutional transfer of power.
Second, a state filing in Georgia based on the phony elector scheme and the effort to cajole Georgia officials to “find” just enough votes to flip the state to Trump more or less force Garland’s hand. The federal counterparts to expected state charges (e.g., interference with an election official, voting fraud) cannot be wished away. If the facts are available for Fulton County District Attorney Fani T. Willis, they are there for the Justice Department.
Third, Smith has the goods. The inner circle has been pierced; credible witnesses with percipient knowledge of the relevant facts are arrayed against Trump. He’s got the evidence the House select committee on Jan. 6 committee obtained. He has the testimonies of former vice president Mike Pence, former chief of staff Mark Meadows and former White House lawyers. …
Fourth, U.S. District Judge David O. Carter, in a case involving John Eastman’s assertion of attorney-client privilege, already found that (albeit at a lower standard of proof) “President Trump attempted to obstruct an official proceeding by launching a pressure campaign to convince Vice President Pence to disrupt the Joint Session on January 6.” Looking at the accumulated evidence, he found, “These actions more likely than not constitute attempts to obstruct an official proceeding.” …
Fifth, the conversation about the propriety of indicting a former president has percolated throughout the political system. As evidence of Trump’s liability (on multiple grounds, in different venues) has mounted, we saw the shift from “How can we indict without becoming a banana republic?” to “How can we fail to indict without becoming a banana republic?” Certainly, MAGA Republicans remain devoted to their cult figure, with no regard for the rule of law. But polling during and after the Jan. 6 hearings showed that majorities think he did something illegal and/or should be indicted.
This does not mean Smith should be guided by public polls. It does mean there is no flashing red light to suggest the public would rise up in opposition to an indictment, no threat to the institutional integrity of the Justice Department beyond those already screaming “witch hunt!” or making wild, baseless accusations about misconduct.
Given the convictions of Jan. 6 participants, the Georgia investigation, Smith’s success in getting witness testimony, Carter’s decision and general public sentiment, it would be foolhardy to bet against an indictment on Trump’s most serious breach of his oath: his attempt to overthrow the results of a presidential election. All Americans should look forward to the day when he is held accountable for his attack on democracy.
WaPo, Ben Hodges: How to know whether Ukraine’s counteroffensive is working https://tinyurl.com/bddht592 ‘Watchful waiting’ by the US means Ukraine will always be under supplied with military equipment and ammo. Ukraine needs ATACMS now.
🧵 RT @igorsushko Having spent dozens of hours analyzing every word spoken by Prigozhin during his hour-long interview to develop a precise translation (9,117 words!), here are my key takeaways. ¤ Thanks to everyone who donated to http://woc.one to make this project possible!
📌 💽 [tr] https://twitter.com/igorsushko/status/1669549294515531777?s=20/photo/1
// 57min video interview w Prigozhin
1. Putin no longer controls Prigozhin. Prigozhin’s brazen sense of security as he incites a revolution against Putin’s regime can only mean one thing – someone else with immense power in the regime has guaranteed Prigozhin’s personal safety.
2. Prigozhin is a very conniving & extremely intelligent monster. In some instances he is clearly lying, but none of his statements ever break the logical chain. The interview was not scripted.
3. He far surpasses Putin with his level of intellect.
4. Although the audience for his populist message is the Russian public, he sprinkles in unambiguous signals that he’d never use nuclear weapons if he were in charge, calling the idea mentally-ill. Target audience for this part is clearly the West’s intelligence community.
5. Interest in Prigozhin in Russian society is through the roof. He has succeeded in legitimizing himself through this kind of medium by speaking directly to the people. His support is rapidly rising, including in local government offices.
⋙ DailyMail: Putin’s chef is now more popular than Vladimir in Russia: Internet searches show Russians are more interested in the Wagner mercenary chief than their president https://tinyurl.com/4r3rysh6
// Russians appear to be more curious about Wagner boss Yevgeny Prigozhin. Google Trends from May showed Prigozhin had greater popularity than Putin6. Idea of Prigozhin as the savior of Russkiy Mir (Russian World) is permeating various levels of society among the hardcore warmongers, exactly those who have thus far supported Putin.
7. Direct calls to execute the Russian military leadership is an unambiguous attack on Putin. In response, Defence Minister Shoigu ordered to disband & absorb all Russian PMCs, including Wagner, just 5 days later. Prigozhin said “Shoigu will die” if he tries to take over Wagner. Note that Putin has now publicly come out in support of Shoigu’s order to disband Wagner PMC.
🐣 RT @TreasChest 16 ballistic missiles were aimed at the Patriot, after they were shot down they learned that among them were 6 “Kinzhal” missiles, — the commander of the 96th Anti-Aircraft Missile Brigade Iaremenko (Granit)
¤ https://twitter.com/TreasChest/status/1669543191983411200?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @AndrewFeinberg I don’t think anyone read him the Miranda warning…
[TextLink:] https://twitter.com/AndrewFeinberg/status/1669481318336348170?s=20/photo/1
[Text:] 🐣 RT @realDonaldTrump SO NOW THAT EVERYONE UNDERSTANDS THAT THE PRESIDENTIAL RECORDS ACT, PLUS THE CLINTON SOCKS CASE, TOTALLY EXONERATED ME FROM THE CONTINUING WITCH HUNT BROUGHT ON BY CORRUPT JOE BIDEN, THE DOJ, DERANGED JACK SMITH, AND THEIR RADICAL LEFT, MARXIST THUGS, WHEN ARE THEY GOING TO DROP ALL CHARGES AGAINST ME, APOLOGIZE, AND RETURN EVERYTHING THAT WAS ILLEGALLY TAKEN (FOURTH AMENDMENT) FROM MY HOME? THIS WAS NOTHING OTHER THAN ELECTION INTERFERENCE!!!
🐣 RT @Faytuks President Biden is ‘open’ to a proposal from NATO’s Secretary general to remove the Membership Action Plan requirement for Ukraine to join NATO ¤ “MAP requires a candidate nation to make military and democratic reforms with NATO’s advice and assistance”
[TextLink:] https://twitter.com/Faytuks/status/1669482487133642752?s=20/photo/1
⋙ Politico: Biden ‘open’ to plan that eases Ukraine’s path to NATO membership https://tinyurl.com/2p8s3fpy
// The proposed removal of the Membership Action Plan would provide neither a formal invitation nor a timeline for joining the alliance.
🐣 RT @ChuckPfarrer ZAPORIZHZHIA AXIS / 2230 UTC 15 JUN/ UKR forces have expanded a series of lodgments south of Orikhiv and the H-08 HWY. Coordinated UKR offensive operations have pushed south of Novodanylivka in the east, in a pocket extending to Robotyne and Novoprokopivka in the west.
🌎 https://twitter.com/ChuckPfarrer/status/1669470248934731776?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @ArmedMaidan Ukraine “appears to be taking Russian prisoners at a faster pace than at any time in the war so far… this is a sign of the Russian army cracking”: Korshak
🌎 https://twitter.com/ArmedMaidan/status/1669428732136660992?s=20/photo/1
Ukraine’s 47th Brigade, which famously lost a small number of Bradleys and Leopards while advancing near Orikhiv last week, suffered few casualties in that action (thanks to the Western armour), remains “fully combat-capable,” went on to liberate two villages and appears to have recovered at least some of the damaged armour, Korshak says
Korshak also comments on Putin’s admission Tuesday that Russia lost 54 tanks in the previous week ¤ “If he’s admitting 54, then what’s the real number his underlings didn’t tell him? If his subordinates are giving the loss numbers even a 50 percent haircut, and say the real number for the week was 100 tanks, then we are left with, for Russia, the disconcerting sum that this offensive is knocking out 15 or so Russian tanks A DAY, and the thing about that is — that estimate is almost exactly the same as the UAF [Ukrainian Armed Forces] official estimates for the same period. Point being, if we assume Putin is being lied to by a factor of 50 percent, then that is yet more evidence that when the UAF reports they took out a Russian tank, honestly, they probably did” ¤ https://tinyurl.com/4txjr7tz #Ukraine #UkraineRussiaWar #UkraineCounteroffensive #VelykaNovosilka
🐣 RT @shashj Stupendous. Sixteen months into his botched war, Putin declares that military bloggers are the first people to have told him about the problems facing Russian units.
⋙ (🧵) RT @RALee85 Sladkov says the last 30 minutes was a closed meeting where the voenkors told Putin about problems facing Russian units. According to Sladkov, Putin said “I didn’t know about this…I’m hearing about this for the first time” after hearing about problems. https://t.me/Sladkov_plus/7958
📌 https://twitter.com/RALee85/status/1669120068687372288?s=20
⇈ ⇊
🐣 [Lead tweet] RT @RALee85 [Jun 13] A good indication of the influence of prominent Russian Telegram channels and voenkors in this meeting with Putin, including Sladkov, Kots, Poddubny, Pegov, Filatov, Kulko, Rudenko, Steshin, Gazdiev, Zimenkin, Agranovich, Kuksenkova, Ushenin, etc […] [link]
¤ https://twitter.com/RALee85/status/1668657779156955139?s=20/photo/1 -4
⋙ 🐣 RT @RALee85 Putin’s repeated meetings with them also indicates that he wants a different source of information on the war than his intelligence and military commanders.
⋙ 🐣 RT @RALee85 Some of these voenkors have been very critical of Russian generals, as a whole and focusing on individuals.
⋙ 🐣 RT @RALee85 [above tweet]
🐣 RT @ddale8 Here are *7* cases from 2017 to 2023 in which an obscure citizen was convicted and sentenced to prison time for having classified material at home — under the exact same Espionage Act “willful retention” provision Trump is charged under:
[TextLink:] https://twitter.com/ddale8/status/1669446554648715264?s=20/photo/1 -2
⋙ CNN, Daniel Dale: Fact check: Multiple non-spies have received prison sentences under Espionage Act provision Trump is charged with violating https://tinyurl.com/yh6ywzvw
💙 WaPo: Trump rejected lawyers’ efforts to avoid classified documents indictment https://tinyurl.com/mvrrc799 “Trump time & again rejected the advice from lawyers & advisers who urged him to cooperate & instead took the advice of Tom Fitton, the [non-lawyer] head of … Judicial Watch”
// 6/14, upd 6/15; The former president was not interested in attempting to negotiate a settlement in the classified documents investigation
💙 NYT: The Radical Strategy Behind Trump’s Promise to ‘Go After’ Biden https://tinyurl.com/3dabf95t About-to-be-disbarred (and likely to be indicted for Jan 6 offenses) Geoffrey Clark one-ups Barr on the powers of the President to micro-manage the Department of Justice
//. Conservatives with close ties to Donald J. Trump are laying out a “paradigm-shifting” legal rationale to erase the Justice Department’s independence from the president.
[…] The naked politics infusing Mr. Trump’s headline-generating threat underscored something significant. In his first term, Mr. Trump gradually ramped up pressure on the Justice Department, eroding its traditional independence from White House political control. He is now unabashedly saying he will throw that effort into overdrive if he returns to power.
Mr. Trump’s promise fits into a larger movement on the right to gut the F.B.I., overhaul a Justice Department conservatives claim has been “weaponized” against them and abandon the norm — which many Republicans view as a facade — that the department should operate independently from the president.
Two of the most important figures in this effort work at the same Washington-based organization, the Center for Renewing America: Jeffrey B. Clark and Russell T. Vought. During the Trump presidency, Mr. Vought served as the director of the Office of Management and Budget. Mr. Clark, who oversaw the Justice Department’s civil and environmental divisions, was the only senior official at the department who tried to help Mr. Trump overturn the 2020 election.
Mr. Trump wanted to make Mr. Clark attorney general during his final days in office but stopped after the senior leadership of the Justice Department threatened to resign en masse. Mr. Clark is now a figure in one of the Justice Department’s investigations into Mr. Trump’s attempts to stay in power. [ He has lost his tenured position and is being disbarred in California ]
Mr. Clark and Mr. Vought are promoting a legal rationale that would fundamentally change the way presidents interact with the Justice Department. They argue that U.S. presidents should not keep federal law enforcement at arm’s length but instead should treat the Justice Department no differently than any other cabinet agency. They are condemning Mr. Biden and Democrats for what they claim is the politicization of the justice system, but at the same time pushing an intellectual framework that a future Republican president might use to justify directing individual law enforcement investigations.
Mr. Clark, who is a favorite of Mr. Trump’s and is likely to be in contention for a senior Justice Department position if Mr. Trump wins re-election in 2024, wrote a constitutional analysis, titled “The U.S. Justice Department is not independent,” that will most likely serve as a blueprint for a second Trump administration.
In statements to The New York Times, both Mr. Clark and Mr. Vought leaned into their battle against the Justice Department, with Mr. Clark framing it as a fight over the survival of America itself. …
Mr. Trump’s top rival for the Republican nomination, Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida, also rejects the norm that the Justice Department should be independent. …
… As the former president addressed his supporters on Tuesday night at his Bedminster club, Fox News displayed a split screen — Mr. Trump on the right and Mr. Biden on the left. The chyron on the bottom of the screen read: “Wannabe dictator speaks at the White House after having his political rival arrested.” … [ The chryon writer, a Tuckercarlson producer, was fired for this ]
As president, Mr. Trump saw his attorney general as simply another one of his personal lawyers. He was infuriated when his first attorney general, Jeff Sessions, recused himself from the Russia investigation — and then refused to reverse that decision to shut down the case.
After firing Mr. Sessions, Mr. Trump believed he had found someone who would do his bidding in William P. Barr, who had been in the role during George H.W. Bush’s presidency. Mr. Barr had an expansive view of a president’s constitutionally prescribed powers, and shared Mr. Trump’s critical views of the origins of the Russia investigation.
Under Mr. Barr, the Justice Department overruled career prosecutors’ recommendations on the length of a sentence for Mr. Trump’s longest-serving political adviser, Roger J. Stone Jr., and sought to shut down a case against Mr. Trump’s first national security adviser, Michael Flynn, who had already pleaded guilty. Both cases stemmed from the Russia investigation.
But when Mr. Trump wanted to use the Justice Department to stay in power after he lost the election, he grew enraged when Mr. Barr refused to comply. Mr. Barr ultimately resigned in late 2020.
🐣 RT @poroshenko [tr] You know, no less important than the power of our Armed Forces and the help of our allies is our internal UNITY. ¤ We have one enemy – Putin. And this should be remembered.
I understand everything. I understand that you are tired, I understand that you are nervous. I understand that sometimes you want to… ¤ But now we have to stop talking. ¤ We must keep unity until our complete VICTORY. And we will deal with everything later.
This is my message, this is the message of our soldiers from the front. Unity and support of the Armed Forces and victory is our priority. ¤ Today, we are working again in the East, we are again transferring equipment, baths and something new — high-explosive fragmentation grenade launchers of 40 mm caliber for dropping from drones on the heads of you know who 😉
🐣 RT @RFERL “I have the feeling we haven’t seen the real offensive yet,” one military expert said. “Yes, they are fighting in many places, but to my mind, not with full capacity. Ukraine hasn’t committed their heavier brigades yet.”
⋙ RFE/RL: You’re Hearing A Lot About Ukraine’s New Counteroffensive. One Week In, It’s Only Getting Started. https://tinyurl.com/3pcsun7d
🐣 RT @AndriyYermak [tr] We highly appreciate the bipartisan and bicameral legislative initiative proposed by US lawmakers to make Russia pay for the war by transferring the assets of the aggressor state to Ukraine. It is necessary to rebuild Ukraine with Russian funds.
🐣 RT @McFaul Excellent! An idea that our international working group on sanctions has been advocating for many months. @AndriyYermak @DmytroKuleba: US senators to launch bill to seize and transfer Russian assets to Ukraine
⋙ FT: US senators launch bill to seize and transfer Russian assets to Ukraine https://tinyurl.com/93atwwh5
// Bipartisan push comes amid debate over how to help Kyiv pay for reconstruction from the war
🐣 RT @NOELreports “Right now, our fighters are facing stiff resistance. But Russia will lose the war if the counteroffensive of the Armed Forces of Ukraine is successful,” Zelenskyi in an interview with NBC News. [
🐣 RT @TreasChest It is important that the water in the pond at the Zaporizhzhya NPP remains at the current level, – Director General of the IAEA, Raphael Grossi.
Today, Grossi visited the Russian-occupied nuclear power plant to assess the impact of the collapse of the Kakhovskaya HPP dam on its safety. ¤ “There is evaporation, there may be a leak, but the water level has to be kept at that level. With the available water reserves, the station can be safe for a period of time. ¤ The station will work to replenish water reserves to ensure the normal functioning of the safety system. And we will carefully monitor this process,” he said. http://ZN.UA
🐣 RT @djrothkopf It’s true. Much of the horrific abuse of our Constitution will be funded by the rich if they feel it can ensure they do not become ever so slightly less rich as a result of paying their fair share of taxes.
⋙ 🐣 RT @HC_Richardson Thread. Personally, I am wondering how much of politics now is only about super rich folks determined to sink Biden because he wants to raise taxes on the extraordinary fortunes they’ve amassed under the low-tax regime of the past 40 years.
💙 ⋙⋙ 🧵 RT @TheRickWilson 1/ Good morning. ¤ If any of you are still bamboozled by Nancy Jacobsen and Mark Penn’s @nolabelsorg’s actual intentions let me hook you up. ¤ They claim to be moderate, centrist problem solvers who are running a 3rd part effort to “give Americans more choices.”
📌 https://twitter.com/TheRickWilson/status/1669327042398261249?s=20
🐣 RT @ChuckPfarrer VELYKA NOVOSILKA AXIS /1430 UTC 15 JUN/ UKR forces advance south of Vuhledar and T-05-09 HWY axis. RU attack on Maryinka repelled. Fire missions target RU HQs and troop concentrations.
🌎 https://twitter.com/ChuckPfarrer/status/1669349279436259328?s=20/photo/1
⭕ 14 Jun 2023
WSJ, Karl Rove: Trump Invited This Indictment https://tinyurl.com/3ppks38w ‘This indictment is devastating in its rigor of evidence and the seriousness of the alleged crimes. The case will further tear our country apart and—wrongly—undermine confidence in our justice system’
// His childish defiance of the law comes at a high cost to him—and to the country.
… [T]his indictment is devastating in its rigor of evidence and the seriousness of the alleged crimes. Even so, the case will further tear our country apart, as it has a heavy impact on the presidential campaign and—wrongly—undermines confidence in our justice system.
The blame for this calamity rests solely on Mr. Trump and his childish impulse to keep mementos from his time in the Oval Office, no matter what the law says.
One of the relevant statutes is the Presidential Records Act, which states that “the United States shall reserve and retain complete ownership, possession, and control of presidential records.” The PRA defines these in the most expansive way imaginable. Essentially every scrap of paper, text or email the president or his staff creates or receives is a presidential record, except his personal diary, private political receives is a presidential record, except his personal diary, private political materials unrelated to the presidency, and campaign papers.
None of that apparently mattered to Mr. Trump. Before he left Washington in January 2021, he ordered a fleet of trucks to carry away hundreds of boxes of letters, reports, memos and other documents he’d received as president. The indictment says these included information about “defense and weapons capabilities” of both the U.S. and foreign countries, American nuclear programs, our and allies’ “potential vulnerabilities . . . to military attack,” and “plans for possible retaliation” to an attack.
Those documents didn’t belong to Mr. Trump, and he surely knew that. The president’s lawyers and staff must have warned him he couldn’t take the files. His top aides with security clearances had been made well aware of classified documents’ sensitivity, having all signed acknowledgments “that the unauthorized disclosure, unauthorized retention, or negligent handling” of classified information “could cause irreparable injury” to the country, for which the government “may seek any remedy available.”
It also had to have been explained to Mr. Trump that the White House Office of Records Management kept a list of the documents he received and the National Security Council maintained a log of the classified documents he saw. He must have known these inventories would be shared with the National Archives and Records Administration, so that NARA would know if he improperly took documents.
That’s why in May 2021 the archives began requesting their return. When Mr. Trump sent some records back in January 2022, NARA knew he had more. When his lawyers said in June 2022 that after a “diligent search,” all remaining “responsive documents” had been returned, the Federal Bureau of Investigation knew that wasn’t true. It took a search warrant two months later to collect the rest of them.
Mr. Trump says there’s no criminal penalty for violating the Presidential Records Act. That’s true, but it only highlights how damning his behavior was. Congress thought a law so simple and clear would be honored by anyone entrusted with the presidency. Instead of living up to his office, Mr. Trump treated it and America’s national security flippantly, taking thousands of presidential records, among them hundreds of highly classified documents. It should have been evident to anyone who once occupied the Oval Office that documents containing some of the nation’s most important secrets shouldn’t be treated as trophies, shared with private guests, discussed with political associates or stored in bathrooms or ballrooms. Any staffer found guilty of doing that would go to prison for breaking the laws protecting the nation’s secrets, as Mr. Trump is now charged.
However Mr. Trump’s trial ends, America is bound for a period of anger, division and recrimination. Some Republicans, searching for ways to undermine Mr. Trump’s indictment, are even turning to one of the far left’s lunacies—calling for law enforcement to be defunded. Eliminating the FBI is no different from scrapping the San Francisco Police Department.
Extreme as this situation is, it could easily have been avoided if Mr. Trump simply followed the law and left behind his precious keepsakes. It’s a shame one of his top aides didn’t have the gumption to make him do so. If then White House chief of staff Mark Meadows ordered the trucks heading south to Mar-a-Lago to detour to drop off records at the archives’ warehouse in Suitland, Md., it might have enraged Mr. Trump when he found out, but it would have spared the country from the ugly months ahead.
No matter the outcome, America will pay a high price for the former president’s reckless petulance. So will he.
YahooNews/RollingStone: Trump’s Advisers Want Tom Fitton to Butt Out: Report https://tinyurl.com/mr3mk6he
Donald Trump can’t stop taking advice from Judicial Watch President (and definitely not a lawyer) Tom Fitton — and it’s driving his attorneys crazy. According to a report from The Washington Post, who spoke to seven Trump advisers familiar with the behind-the-scenes events of Trump’s indictment by the Justice Department, the former president repeatedly ignored the counsel of his lawyers in favor of Fitton’s advice.
According to the report, lawyers for the former president pleaded with him to cooperate with investigators looking to recover the hundreds of classified documents Trump took with him after leaving the White House. Sources told the Post that Fitton’s name was often invoked by Trump in his explanations as to why he was choosing to ignore the legal advice he pays millions of dollars for.
Multiple advisers to the former president told the Post that they believe Trump’s insistence that he could keep the documents without repercussion, and his invocation of the “Clinton Socks” case as justification, are a direct result of Fitton’s advice.
On Tuesday, Trump pleaded not guilty to 37 federal criminal counts brought by the DOJ as a result of Special Counsel Jack Smith’s investigation into the former president’s hoarding of classified documents. The charges include violations of the Espionage Act, conspiracy to obstruct justice, corruptly concealing a record or document, and concealing a document in a federal investigation.
Trump has remained defiant in the face of his second arrest this year and vowed revenge against President Joe Biden and the prosecutors overseeing his case during a speech following his arraignment.
That revenge plot has been aided by Fitton. As reported by Rolling Stone in May, Fitton claims that the DOJ is “stonewalling” him and his organization’s efforts to publicly unmask the names of employees working under Smith. The department has denied Fitton’s request on grounds that it is an “unwarranted invasion of personal privacy” that would also “interfere with enforcement proceedings.” While Fitton’s involvement with the former president is causing headaches for the people trying to keep him out of jail, he is but one block in the teetering Jenga tower that is Trump’s legal team. Sources with knowledge of the matter previously told Rolling Stone that Trump’s legal roster was riddled with internal squabbling and underhanded attempts for dominance over various legal cases. With two of Trump’s attorneys having resigned hours before the former president was indictment was unsealed, Fitton’s free — if unfounded — legal advice might be the best he can get. […]
WaPo: Trump centers campaign on his prosecution, vilifying legal system https://tinyurl.com/35cze6hb “As Trump and fellow Republicans rally around the ‘weaponization’ theme, there are signs that his supporters are already internalizing the message”
// The former president has redefined the stakes of his campaign and has misrepresented facts and law
🐣 RT @RadioFreeTom A party that lost its mind in 2016 and continues to deteriorate.
⋙ 🐣 RT @ MorningConsult Nearly 3 in 5 potential Republican primary (59%) voters back Trump for the GOP’s 2024 presidential nomination, up from 55% last week before news of his indictment on charges related to his handling of classified documents after leaving the White House. https://morningconsult.biz/3OYzNlB
◕ https://twitter.com/RadioFreeTom/status/1669175403888406528?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @NatalkaKyiv Ukraine is reporting that Russians mined a number of dams in the Zaporizhzhia region. ¤ The dams are located on the Tokmachka River in the area of Trudovoye, Snegurevka and Ostrikovka. ¤ The Russian army intends to blow them up when the Ukrainian Forces advance toward Tokmak. ¤ #Ukraine #RussiaUkraineWar #RussiaIsATerroristState #RussianWarCrimes #Russia
🌎 https://twitter.com/NatalkaKyiv/status/1668960492478423046?s=20/photo/1
📋 OccupyDemocrats: CUT OFF: CNN won’t allow Trump on live TV anymore https://tinyurl.com/yc7mmmpu
The news network that just hosted a Town Hall with disgraced former president Donald Trump last month has now refused to air his post-arraignment speech live. ¤ Trump is now complaining that CNN host Jake Tapper — who Trump labels “Fake Tapper” — said the network wouldn’t air his speech live and argues that this could be why the network has been dropping in ratings (although in fact, the ratings dropped after his Town Hall).
Tapper, on the other hand, said that the speech would be covered, with fact-checking, but not aired live, because of Trump’s tendency to lie, and the potential that his words could actually be dangerous. ¤ The latter is evidenced by the frequency of death threats to public officials after he attacks them verbally, as well as by the January 6th attack.
In his Town Hall last month, among other things, Trump again attacked E. Jean Carroll, who had just faced off against him in a court battle that ended in a jury finding Trump liable for sexual assault and defamation, awarding Carroll millions of Trump’s ill-gotten dollars.
Since then, there’s been a shakeup at the network, with the CEO Chris Licht out after viewers largely blamed him for setting up a pro-Trump atmosphere, among other reasons. ¤ The decision not to air Trump’s post-indictment speech live seems to suggest that Licht’s exit is part of a culture change at the network. Tapper said: ¤ “We’re not carrying his remarks live because he says a lot of things that are not true and sometimes potentially dangerous, but we do have some…so you can get a sense of his state of mind and how he’s framing his defense.”
[Trump] posted on TruthSocial, arguing that Tapper didn’t want to cover him because he didn’t want CNN viewers to see “the level of enthusiasm” in Trump’s supporters. ¤ “Fake Tapper just demanded that his broadcast be closed down from Miami because there was far too much enthusiasm on the streets for “Trump.” The good news is, he was the only one to do so, perhaps a good explanation as to why CNN’s ratings are so low!” Trump said.
It’s Trump’s norm to attack networks as having low ratings when they aren’t favorable to him. ¤ In this case, the ratings drop can be directly tied to him, though. OutKick reports: “The primetime hours of CNN, 8-11 pm, have declined 32 percent since the town hall — from 581,000 to 395,000. CNN recorded its lowest primetime average since May 2014 the week following the event.” ¤ Basically, the event didn’t draw conservative viewers to CNN and alienated liberal viewers — equating to a net loss.
Meanwhile, at Fox News, the opposite decision was made — a choice to enhance partisanship and appease the most tantrum-prone former president in U.S. history. ¤ Covering President Joe Biden, they ran a chyron — that’s the little headline that scrolls under the news — declaring Biden a “wannabe dictator.” Specifically, it declared: ¤ “Wannabe dictator speaks at the White House after having his political rival arrested.”
(Biden did not have his political rival arrested; Trump was arrested because the DOJ has evidence indicating that he committed dozens of felonies, though it will remain to be determined in court if he’s guilty.) ¤ The chyron aired near the end of the slot that used to belong to Tucker Carlson, according to the New York Times.
[ Note: Fox stated the chryon was taken down almost immediately and steps have been taken. @avindman is demanding Fox no longer be shown on military bases. (Sources: seen by me on Twitter ]
🐣 RT @ZelenskyyUa Cities with ruins instead of life. Cities with flooded streets. Cities that exist only in fond memories. Cities where explosions now sound instead of children’s laughter. We will never forgive the pain that Russia has brought to our land. And we will expel the Russian evil from all our land, liberate every city and village of ours from the occupier and return justice to our people.
💽 https://twitter.com/ZelenskyyUa/status/1668906224639721474?s=20/photo/1
// moving video
🐣 RT @MeidasTouch Mike Pence: “I had a chance to review the indictment over the weekend. And this indictment contains serious charges and I cannot defend what is alleged. The very prospect that what is alleged here took place…it puts at risk the men and women of our Armed Forces.”
💽 https://twitter.com/MeidasTouch/status/1669077206772097024?s=20/photo/1
NYT: Judge in Trump Documents Case Has Scant Criminal Trial Experience https://tinyurl.com/ycyzhmvt
// Judge Aileen M. Cannon, under scrutiny for past rulings favoring the former president, has presided over only a few criminal cases that went to trial.
WaPo, Karen DeYoung: As Ukraine’s counteroffensive heats up, Washington holds its breath https://tinyurl.com/5f3mpw22
// After 16 months of war, and with tens of billions’ worth of advanced weapons sent, Western backers need Ukraine’s forces to show dramatic gains against Russian occupiers
↥ ↧
⋙ Comment: I recommend the article below as an antidote to the one above:
Comment Link: https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2023/06/14/ukraine-counteroffensive-biden-support/?commentID=a18f64e3-19c3-4e99-860b-bfe3dd71d77e
↥ ↧
⋙ 🐣 RT @Jack_Watling Having kept fairly quiet throughout its preparation I’ve written a piece for @RUSI_org trying to outline the challenges over the next few weeks for the AFU’s offensive. They are beating expectations, but this is going to be a hard fight.
⋙⋙ RUSI, Jack Watling: Ukraine’s Counteroffensive Begins: Shall the Leopards Break Free? https://tinyurl.com/64m3sbus
// Ukrainian forces are making gains, but the offensive is some way from its decisive phase; we must refrain from premature pronouncements of success or failure.
[…] For Ukraine’s international partners, the summer is likely to be deeply uncomfortable. Losses will mount and success will take time. It is vital, however, that there is no diminution in the strengthening of the training programmes allowing Ukraine to continue to generate combat units, or the mobilisation of defence industry to put supply to the Ukrainian military on a sustainable basis. However much territory is liberated in this offensive, the critical variable is convincing the Kremlin that even if its defeat comes in stages, it is coming.
⋙⋙⋙ 🐣 RT @Seathanaich Here’s hoping that this campaign unfolds like Normandy in 1944. A tough break in, fixing enemy reserves, creating a weak point, and then a breakout and enemy collapse. ¤ Until then, impatient voices will be the loudest.
🐣 RT @georgewbarros Good piece from @Jack_Watling. ¤ The Ukrainian campaign design seeks to have the Russians decisively commit their reserves to one sector of the theater so the Ukrainians can then decisively commit to attacking a weak point.
⋙ 🐣 RT @Jack_Watling Having kept fairly quiet throughout its preparation I’ve written a piece for @RUSI_org trying to outline the challenges over the next few weeks for the AFU’s offensive. They are beating expectations, but this is going to be a hard fight.
⋙⋙ RUSI, Jack Watling: Ukraine’s Counteroffensive Begins: Shall the Leopards Break Free? https://tinyurl.com/64m3sbus
// Ukrainian forces are making gains, but the offensive is some way from its decisive phase; we must refrain from premature pronouncements of success or failure.
🐣 RT @ DevanaUkraine Russian soldiers who surrendered today are massively criticizing and saying bad things about their commanders who betrayed them. Look at their emotions. These are not memorized texts, as in the videos of the russians.
💽 https://twitter.com/DevanaUkraine/status/1669046699480735749?s=20/photo/1
// really sad
🔄🔄 🐣 I invite you to follow my curated Twitter Lists on “Ukraine” (~1.2K accts)
and (more technical) “War in Ukraine” (~700 accts) https://twitter.com/i/lists/157259218
✛ War in Ukraine: Battles, Battle Maps, Weapons, Ret. Mil., Milbloggers, Think Tanks https://twitter.com/i/lists/1545071393397784576
🔄 🐣 I read that changing the sensitivity rating helps. I did so and it seems to have improved the situation. ¤ Mostly, though, I use two Twitter Lists: ”Ukraine” & “War in Ukraine.” Feel welcome to follow them. The first follows ~1.2K accounts. The !atter follows ~700 accounts. No ads
🐣 RT @ProjectLincoln .@NoLabelsOrg is funded by the same billionaires that are funding Ron DeSantis. ¤ Don’t be fooled, they don’t want a moderate in office. They’re nothing more than pro-MAGA operatives that want to siphon votes from Biden to get Trump back in office or help DeSantis win in 2024.
💽 https://twitter.com/ProjectLincoln/status/1669034466696650758?s=20/photo/1
😂 RT @AWeissmann_ Trump saying “DOJ is not coming just after me, they are coming after you,” only makes sense if you have intentionally taken nuclear and military secrets and obstructed justice. Unless that applies to you, you can relax!
🐣 RT @sgurmanm “Mr. Smith is a veteran career prosecutor,” Garland said in his first public comments since Trump’s indictment. “He as assembled a group of experienced and talented prosecutors and agents who share his commitment to integrity and the rule of law.”
🐣 RT @NikaMelkozerova with all our criticism of some western journalists, when we see great work we always celebrate it. So many Ukrainians in my feed( including me) shared this story as very accurate, not rosy, objective reporting. Masterful
💙 ⋙ NewYorker, Luke Mogelson: Two Weeks at the Front in Ukraine https://tinyurl.com/yw8yn6ep
// 5/22/2023; In the trenches in the Donbas, infantrymen face unrelenting horrors, from missiles to grenades to helicopter fire.
🐣 RT @ United24media ⚡️ International Criminal Court is investigating potential new charges against Russian President Putin over Kakhovka hydroelectric plant disaster, says lawyer Scott Martin. ICC reps arrive in the Kherson region.
🐣 RT @ChuckPfarrer VELYKA NOVOSILKA AXIS/ 1650 UTC 14 JUN/ UKR forces make gains S of T-05-09 HWY at Novodonetske. UKR forces are engaging in mine-clearance operations and offensive operations against Rivnopil. UKR counter-battery fire destroyed 5 Russian Masta type self-propelled howitzers.
🌎 https://twitter.com/ChuckPfarrer/status/1669021980044009483?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @front_ukrainian ⚡️⚡️At the upcoming summit, NATO will send a clear signal that it is ready to accept 🇺🇦Ukraine into the Alliance — Stoltenberg
🐣 RT @FreudGreyskull Romanov continues his explosive reaction to the commanders incompetence. ¤ Does anyone know his name?
[TextLink:] https://twitter.com/FreudGreyskull/status/1668908022377385984?s=20/photo/1 -4
[Text:] The co-authors of a number of our tragic offensives continue to “advance”. A selection of emergency situations near Kremennaya: –
It was near Kremennaya, a tragic incident occurred in one of the divisions that were going to go on the offensive. For two hours people stood in a crowd in one place and waited for the division commander to say his motivating word. But instead of him, the HIMARS MLRS and enemy artillery had their say. In the Yuzhnodonetsk direction, in a few days there were fewer victims in the battles than from the criminal stupidity of the division commander (c @rybar –
If by the middle of the second year of the war there are commanders that carry columns to the front and build personnel in one big pile, and then wait for the enemy artillery to strike, then such commanders must be shot before the formation, even if they are colonels or even generals (c) @vysokygovorit
– Bitch, you can’t stand in a column for two hours in one place! Well, what are you doing, father commanders, you are commanding people! Will bloggers be looked for again instead of degenerates with high shoulder straps? The Armed Forces of Ukraine have no merit in this war. We are at war with our own stupidity and sloppiness, smeared from above with beautiful reports (c) @dva_majors
Judging by the photo of the PnV https://t.me/voenacher/46645, we are talking about a person on whose topic in November 2022 there was a sensational appeal from the fighters of the 155th Marine Corps Brigade of the Pacific Fleet addressed to the Governor of Primorsky Krai https://t.me/grey_zone/15698
Colleagues here confirm my naive guesses with hints:
https://t.me/romanov_92/39345
https://t.me/milinfolive/102130
As for me, the military prosecutor’s office should rustle with an electric broom. But we are still having a hard time with this, so most likely there will be furious revelations of worthless military correspondents, who again blur the blissful picture of reports with photos.
So it goes.
Eternal remory to the dead.
🐣 RT @Ayei_Eloheichem Strelkov forwards a furious message from Alksnis attacking Putin directly: “I don’t want to give you advice because it’s obviously useless, but try to get a detailed map…Maybe then you will not be disgraced to the whole world by ignorance of the situation at the front?”
[TextLink:] https://twitter.com/Ayei_Eloheichem/status/1668878263882776577?s=20/photo/1 -2
[Text:] What do you mean by “a significant part of Donetsk”? Isn’t the former Donetsk region part of the DPR? But SIXTY PERCENT of its territory is still under the control of the Armed Forces of Ukraine today. And for fifteen months we have not been able to drive the Ukrainian army out of Maryinka and Avdiivka, in fact, the suburbs of Donetsk, from where the capital of Donbass is being shelled every day. But have Slavyansk and Kramatorsk, like hundreds of other settlements of Donbass, already been liberated?
What kind of sanitary belt are you talking about if we were unable to drive the enemy away even from Donetsk, subjecting NINE YEARS to torment, suffering and the threat of death of its inhabitants?
After your words, which I quoted, I once again became convinced that our affairs are bad if the Supreme Commander-in-Chief is absolutely not in control of the situation at the front. And I remembered another Supreme Commander-in-Chief – Joseph Vissarionovich Stalin, to whom the Chief of the General Staff, General Antonov, daily personally reported the situation on the fronts of the Great Patriotic War with the obligatory display on the maps. And Stalin knew this situation by heart.
I don’t want to give you advice because it’s obviously useless, but try to get a detailed map of the fighting in Ukraine on your office wall, where all the changes in the course of the fighting will be noted daily. Which it i advisable to submit to you personally after the daily report of the current Chief of the General Staff. General Gerasimov, or even Minister of Defense Shoigu. Maybe then you will not be disgraced to the whole world byignorance of the situation at the front?
⭕ 13 Jun 2023
CBSNews: What does the Presidential Records Act say, and how does it apply to Trump?https://tinyurl.com/yuxdenu3 “The PRA requires that all records created by Presidents (and Vice-Presidents) be turned over to [NARA] at the end of their administrations,” the Archives said”
✅ NYT: Trump’s Misleading Defenses in the Classified Documents Case https://tinyurl.com/2p93aa46 “Trump repeatedly defied requests to return materials for months and, according to the indictment, played an active role in concealing classified documents from investigators”
// The former president drew misleading comparisons to others, misconstrued the classification process and leveled inaccurate attacks at officials.
🐣 RT @OmarRiverosays BREAKING: Trump is hit with more devastating news as Alan Dershowitz, the lawyer who defended him at his impeachment hearings, betrays him, declaring that Special Counsel Jack Smith’s indictment is like “a gun with Trump’s fingerprints on it.” ¤ But Dershowitz didn’t stop there…
He continued, declaring that this is “by far” the most serious of all of the cases against Trump” — and they when Trump “foolishly waved” top secret documents “about a battle attack plan for Iraq” in front of his staff” and bragged that he “could have declassified this, but didn’t,” it became “an admission that he had material that he knew he had not declassified” — which is “evidentiary gold” for Special Counsel Jack Smith’s case.
Please RT and ❤️ if you think that Trump MUST be found guilty — and consider joining the growing exodus to Tribel, a new Twitter competitor I created that is exploding in popularity because Elon Musk banned Tribel’s Twitter account — but he forgot to ban this link to download the new Tribel app: http://tribel.app.link/okwPIHYCIqb
🐣 RT @Reuters A federal judge said E. Jean Carroll, the New York writer who last month won a $5 million jury verdict against Donald Trump for sexual abuse and defamation, can pursue a related $10 million defamation case against the former US president [link]
🐣 RT @VABVOX #NEW While Trump was being arraigned for 37 counts related to violations of the Espionage Act, a federal judge agreed that E. Jean Carroll could amend her defamation suit to expand damages due to what he said at the CNN Town Hall.
[TextLink:] https://pic.twitter.com/w8h9GJgKsl
Technology[.]org: Five More Patriot Batteries will Arrive in Ukraine https://tinyurl.com/27n7hz8f “The Ukrainian military reportedly managed to improve the systems, allowing them to track and destroy hypersonic missiles twice as fast as they were designed for”
// Raytheon has announced that Ukraine will be receiving additional five batteries of the Patriot air defense system, and the approximate timing has been disclosed.
[…] According to the head of Raytheon, the deadline for delivering these complexes to bolster the Armed Forces of Ukraine is planned for the end of 2024 at the latest. The article also highlights that even Raytheon itself was surprised by the impressive effectiveness of their missile platform in Ukraine, which was demonstrated in actual combat situations.
Furthermore, the article revealed a bit of a “teaser” information by saying that Ukraine has made modifications to the Patriot’s software, enabling it to track and destroy hypersonic missiles that fly at double the speed it was originally designed for.
“The Ukrainian military reportedly managed to improve the systems, allowing them to track and destroy hypersonic missiles twice as fast as they were designed for,” says the original article.
However, as the experts from Defense Express noted, implementing changes to the American military software from the Ukrainian side to enable interception of Russian “hypersonic” missiles, such as the X-47 “Kinzhal,” seems quite a challenging task which could possibly be accomplished only with the help of the colleagues from the U.S. Army.
Meanwhile, Raytheon Technologies is actively working to increase the production of air defense systems and accelerate the technological production cycles, which currently stand at two years. Specifically, the production capacity is being increased to 12 batteries manufactured per single year.
This increase is not only driven by Ukraine’s requirements but also by the growing global demand for the Patriot system (its PAC-3 version), especially following its successful use in real conflicts, facing Russian weaponry.
🐣 RT @TheRickWilson This ad starts airing today in several markets. Will Trump see it in Mar A Lago and Bedminster? ¤ Yes. Yes, he will.
💽 https://twitter.com/TheRickWilson/status/1668276361562316800?s=20/photo/1
// traitor ad @ProjectLincoln The Lincoln Project Espionage Act
🐣 RT @AndriyYermak As President @ZelenskyyUa said, meetings were held with the diplomats of the respective countries, and we are waiting for their reactions. ¤ The sanctions coalition must give a tough response. We need to ensure circumvention of sanctions is impossible.
🔄 ⋙ 🐣 In the House, on the Republican side, make sure to include:
@RepMikeRogersAL, Armed Services: @HASCRepublicans
@RepMcCaul, Foreign Affairs: @HouseForeignGOP
@RepMikeTurner, Intelligence: @HouseIntel
@RepMarkGreen, Homeland Security: @HomelandGOP
// pro-Ukraine GOP pro-Ukraine Republicans in the House
CBSNews: What does the Presidential Records Act say, and how does it apply to Trump?https://tinyurl.com/yuxdenu3 Trump is not charged under the PRA, but under Provision 793 of the Espionage Act which prohibits the retention of national defense information in an unsecured location
🐣 RT @tribelaw Judge Aileen Cannon “and the 11th Circuit owe both Trump and the American people an expertly run trial free from the appearance of bias.” Judge Cannon cannot fulfill that obligation.
⋙ WaPo, Jennifer Rubin: Aileen Cannon should not preside over the Trump trial https://tinyurl.com/yc5mz8xr
[…] Constitutional scholar Laurence H. Tribe told Newsweek: “Judge Cannon’s rulings in favor of Donald Trump’s motion to suspend the criminal investigation … including her appointment of a special master to undertake a review that had no basis in law, certainly fits that test by establishing a strong basis for questioning her impartiality, entirely apart from the aggravating factor that she was appointed to her lifetime position on the federal bench by defendant Donald Trump.”
Other legal scholars agree. (As Stephen Gillers put it, “Now, the fact that a judge’s impartiality might reasonably be questioned doesn’t mean that the judge is partial. The public may simply not trust the impartiality of the judge. Because public trust in the work of the court is a value as important as the work itself, the rule says that the judge should not sit when we can’t fairly ask the public to trust what the judge does.”)
It borders on absurd that an inexperienced judge appointed to the bench by the defendant to whom she threw lifeline would try the case after getting slammed by the circuit court for even touching his civil gambit. This might be the most important criminal trial in U.S. history, with enormous implications for democracy, the rule of law and national security.
WaPo: President Biden huddles with NATO Chief Stoltenberg amid questions on Ukraine, Sweden and NATO’s next secretary general https://tinyurl.com/d3bpt7vh “We’ve strengthened NATO’s eastern flank & made it clear we’ll defend every inch of NATO territory” ~ Biden
🧵 RT @judgeluttig There is not an Attorney General of either party who would not have brought today’s charges against the former president.
📌 https://twitter.com/judgeluttig/status/1668766562210447360?s=20
⋙ 🐣 RT @judgeluttig He has dared, taunted, provoked, and goaded DOJ to prosecute him from the moment it was learned that he had taken these national security documents.
⋙ 🐣 RT @judgeluttig On any given day for the past 18 months — doubtless up to and including the day before the indictment was returned — the former president could have avoided and prevented this prosecution. He would never have been indicted for taking these documents.
⋙ 🐣 RT @judgeluttig But for whatever reason, he decided that he would rather be indicted and prosecuted.
⋙ 🐣 RT @judgeluttig After a year and a half, he finally succeeded in forcing Jack Smith’s appropriately reluctant hand, having left the Department no choice but to bring these charges lest the former president make a mockery of the Constitution and the Rule of Law.
🐣 RT @ChuckPfarrer VELYKA NOVOSILKA/ 2050 UTC 13 UTC/ Front line sources report a major RU counter-attack is in progress against the T-05-18 axis S of Velyka Novosilka. RU forces are reported to have seized high ground to the EWst of the Mokri Yaly River, dominating the T-05-18 approaches.
🌎 https://twitter.com/ChuckPfarrer/status/1668704311805726721?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @ChuckPfarrer ZAPORIZHZHIA AXIS/ 1530 UTC 13 JUN/ Front line sources report that UKR has destroyed more than a dozen RU tanks and numerous BMPs and IFVs in the last 24 hours of combat. UKR SOF directed a strike on Polohy, killing RU Major General Sergei Goryache.
🌎 https://twitter.com/ChuckPfarrer/status/1668642293723680768?s=20/photo/1
🔆 This❗️⋙ WaPo: Trump arraigned, pleads not guilty to 37 classified documents charges https://tinyurl.com/48nsryts “A few hundred people, most of them Trump supporters, had gathered and were waving flags and chanting” outside the Miami federal courthouse
// After scowling through a court hearing, the former president tries to fundraise and hype his candidacy
🐣 RT @ ProjectLincoln .@TheRickWilson points out Trump’s love for media attention has no conditions. There is no such thing as bad press to him. The blitz around the latest indictment is another flood that will drown out lesser known candidates opportunity to present themselves & their campaigns.
💽 https://twitter.com/ProjectLincoln/status/1668758526338953216?s=20/photo/1
🧵 RT @DonbasDIY As Russia preaches denazification, Since 2004 it has covertly partnered & financed Neo Nazi & far-right movements around the world. Following a Neo-Eurasianist strategy popularized by Dugin, these fringe groups are causing division, spreading lies & subverting societies. 1/
📌 🌎 https://twitter.com/DonbasDIY/status/1664000637560934402?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @TreasChest ⚡️Zelensky’s evening address:
🔹The Bakhmut direction, and this, in particular, the soldiers of the 80th separate brigade of the DSHV – there is forward movement in various areas. Thank you for your extraordinary courage!
🔹Tavria OSUV units – in the conditions of extremely brutal battles, in the conditions of aviation and artillery superiority of the occupier, there is forward movement. Thank you, warriors!
🔹Marines of the 35th and 36th separate brigades, 110th separate mechanized brigade, 128th separate mountain assault brigade, paratroopers of our cool “Simdesyatdevyatka”, artillerymen of the 55th separate brigade “Zaporizka Sich”… Thank you for strength!
🔹And I thank everyone in our society who understands that the liberation of our land from such occupiers requires difficult, heroic and intense actions, which day by day, step by step, give the necessary power to our offensive actions. ¤ Channel 24
⭕ 12 Jun 2023
NYT: Hillary Clinton’s Emails: A Nation Struggles to Unsubscribe https://tinyurl.com/4xmdktm8 “The two episodes are vastly different legal matters, and Mrs. Clinton was never found to have systematically or deliberately mishandled classified information”
// As Donald Trump made history by becoming the first former president to face federal charges, many Republicans tried to change the subject by renewing an eight-year-old controversy.
🖼 https://twitter.com/Auriandra/status/1668948331018477572?s=20/photo/1
🔄 Butter Emails
🧵 RT @KremlinTrolls Video appears to show Russian terrorists using anti-retreat detachments (often called ‘barrier’ or ‘blocking’ troops) to fire on their own fleeing soldiers. ¤ Stalin used this method in 1941 to control unruly troop units.
📌 💽 https://twitter.com/KremlinTrolls/status/1668208719618768899?s=20/photo/1 -2
The first use of the barrier trooos by the Red Army occurred in the ate summer and fallof
1918 in the Eastern front during the Russian CivilWar, when People’s Commissar of
Military and Naval Affairs (War Commissar Leon Trotskv of the Communist Bolshevik government authorized Mikhail Tukhachevsky, the commander of the lstArmy, to station blocking detachments behind unreliable Red Army infantry regiments in the 1st Red Army,
with orders to shoot if front-line troops either deserted or retreated without permission.
formation in the Red Army.On 18 December he cabled: ¤ “How do things stand with the blocking units? As far as I am aware they have not been included in our establishment and it appears they have no personnel. It is absolutely essential that we have at least an embryonic network of blocking units and that we work out a procedure for bringing them up to strength and deploying them.”
The barrier troops were also used to enforce Bolshevik control over food supolies in areas
controlled by the Red Army, a role which soon earned them the hatred of the Russian
civilian population. …
🐣 RT @ZelenskyyUa More terrorist missiles, Russian killers continue their war against residential buildings, ordinary cities and people. Unfortunately, there are dead and wounded. The rescue operation in Kryvyi Rih continues. My condolences to all those who have lost their loved ones! 🇷🇺 terrorists will never be forgiven, and they will be held accountable for every missile they launch.
💽 https://twitter.com/ZelenskyyUa/status/1668480633864171521?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @PaulaChertok Such a powerful @BBCSteveR report from Moscow. As its war on Ukraine drags on, Russia sinks deeper into glorifying its militarism, a messianic militarism. Very reminiscent of Nazi Germany, right down to the propaganda language, “We are Russians. God is with us!” h/t @IlvesToomas
⋙ 🐣 RT @BBCSteveR Extraordinary art exhibition across from the Kremlin: “We are Russians. God is with us!” Seems to reflect the official view that somehow God is on Russia’s side. On Russia Day, I ask Muscovites about this, & about Russia’s war in Ukraine & Russia’s future. @BBCNews
💽 https://twitter.com/BBCSteveR/status/1668319910349656066?s=20/photo/1
🧵 RT @mkraju John Thune says of Trump indictment: “They’re very serious allegations.”
Others in GOP downplay it. ¤ Sen. Tommy Tuberville on allegation Trump obstructed probe and tried to hide classified documents.”They obviously got what they wanted,” he said of DOJ.
📌 https://twitter.com/mkraju/status/1668388556799201287?s=20
🐣 RT @KyivIndependent ⚡️Ukrhydroenergo head: Kakhovka dam destruction cut off water supply to Crimea for ‘at least a year’ ¤ “There is no water supply to Crimea because the Kakhovka reservoir’s water level is already much lower than what is needed to go along the Crimean Canal, Ihor Syrota said.
🧵 RT @ChrisO_wiki 1/ Russian Defence Minister Shoigu’s recent bid to control the Wagner Group is reportedly motivated by Russian elites aiming to stop Wagner boss Yevgeny Prigozhin becoming a player in future turmoil. Meanwhile, an apparent leak accuses Wagner of massive theft of military fuel.
📌 https://twitter.com/ChrisO_wiki/status/1668397517292072965?s=20
⋙ 🐣 RT @ […] 14/ It remains to be seen where this will go, but the apparent leak looks like an attempt to prepare the ground for Wagner – and presumably Prigozhin himself – to be prosecuted for corruption and theft. /end
🐣 RT @ RpsAgainstTrump WOW. Mitt Romney isn’t mincing words about Trump’s mishandling of classified documents: ¤ “I’m angry. The country is going to go through tumult as a result of one thing: President Trump didn’t turn over military documents when he was asked to do so.”
🚫 🐣 RT @Carl_Rehnberg2 Defence Minister Shoigu has issued a kill order for all soldiers of the PMC Wagner, it is kill on sight, no captives. ¤ He has also recinded all pardons for any member of PMC Wagner. ¤ Civil War has started in Russia.
⋙ 🐣 RT @Carl_Rehnberg2 Gay Satan did publish it below, but here it is again.
[TextLink:] https://twitter.com/Carl_Rehnberg2/status/1668363527428399105?s=20/photo/1
// letter in Russian: some commenters say letter is FAKE
[TextLink:] [tr] https://twitter.com/JaryloUEch13479/status/1668373933601574915?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @yasminalombaert Russia’s Defence Ministry said on Monday it has signed a contract with the Akhmat group of Chechen special forces, a day after Russia’s powerful mercenary chief Yevgeny Prigozhin refused to do so.
💽 [tr] https://twitter.com/yasminalombaert/status/1668368081876287492?s=20/photo/1
The signing followed an order that all “volunteer units” (mercenaries), should sign contracts by July 1 bringing them under the control of Defence Minister Sergei Shoigu, as Moscow tries to assert its control over private armies fighting on its behalf in Ukraine.
In return, volunteer fighters would get the same benefits and protections as regular troops, including support for them and their families if they are wounded or killed.
Prigozhin, who has waged a running feud with the defence ministry and accused it of failing to provide adequate ammunition supplies to his Wagner mercenaries in Ukraine, said on Sunday he would refuse to sign any such contract. ¤ He said that Shoigu “cannot properly manage military formations”.
🐣 RT @ChuckPfarrer VELYKA NOVOSILKA/1740 UTC 12 JUN/ UKR forces are reported to have liberated Rivnopil. UKR units have united at Starornaiorske with forces now advancing south down the T-05-18 axis. UKR is consolidating gains and is presently reported to be in contact north of Staromlynivka.
🌎 https://twitter.com/ChuckPfarrer/status/1668311079745728519?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @MissionYak https://twitter.com/MissionYak/status/1668312894746787840?s=20/photo/1
◕ [Text:] Confidence in Putin reached record lows in many countries surveyed in 2022
% who have in Russian President Vladimir Putin to do the right thing regarding world affairs
🐣 RT @tribelaw I’ve been arguing this for days. And if our system is too weak to achieve her recusal, at the very least the Chief Justice should direct that the entire trial be televised to ensure vitally needed transparency.
⋙ 🧵 RT @NormEisen Judge Cannon must recuse from Trump’s case under 28 USC 455–or be reassigned by the 11th Circuit ¤ Her lawless pro-Trump rulings that were smacked down on appeal mean her “impartiality might reasonably be questioned” ¤ I explain @Slate & in this thread (1/x)
📌 https://twitter.com/NormEisen/status/1668238931400306691?s=20
⋙⋙ 🐣 RT @NormEisen Under 28 USC 455(a) a judge shall disqualify themselves if their “impartiality might reasonably be questioned.” ¤ Judge Cannon’s situation clearly fits that test ¤ She is obligated to recuse herself & if she doesn’t the 11th circuit will likely reassign sooner or later (3/x) [TextLink:] https://twitter.com/NormEisen/status/1668252110079639555?s=20/photo/1
// [Text:] 28 U.S. Code § 455 – Disqualification of justice, judge, or magistrate judge
Any justice, judge, or magistrate judge of the United States shall disqualify himself in any proceeding in which his impartiality might reasonably be questioned.
🐣 📋 RT @ SIPRIorg At the start of 2023, the 9 nuclear-armed states possessed an estimated 12 512 nuclear weapons:
USA 🇺🇸 5 244
Russia 🇷🇺 5 889
UK 🇬🇧 225
France 🇫🇷 290
China 🇨🇳 410
India 🇮🇳 164
Pakistan 🇵🇰 170
North Korea 🇰🇵 30
Israel 🇮🇱 90
Read more in #SIPRIYearbook 2023 ➡️ http://bit.ly/3MYIDxd
[TextLink:] ◕ https://twitter.com/SIPRIorg/status/1668133114730749952?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @RonFilipkowski The rantings of a deranged madman with autocratic dreams who continues to become more unstable and unraveled with every passing day.
[TextLink:] https://twitter.com/RonFilipkowski/status/1668291671820312577?s=20/photo/1
[Text:] 🐣 RT @realDonaldTrump NOW THAT THE “SEAL” IS BROKEN, IN ADDITION TO CLOSING THE BORDER & REMOVING ALL OF THE “CRIMINAL” ELEMENTS THAT HAVE ILLEGALLY INVADED OUR COUNTRY, MAKING AMERICA ENERGY INDEPENDENT, & EVEN DOMINANT AGAIN, & IMMEDIATELY ENDING THE WAR BETWEEN RUSSIA & UKRAINE, I WILL APPOINT A REAL SPECIAL “PROSECUTOR” TO GO AFTER THE MOST CORRUPT PRESIDENT IN THE HISTORY OF THE USA, JOE BIDEN, THE ENTIRE BIDEN CRIME FAMILY, & ALL OTHERS INVOLVED WITH THE DESTRUCTION OF OUR ELECTIONS, BORDERS, & COUNTRY ITSELF!
CEPA, Ben Hodges: Think Ukraine’s Offensive Has Started? Wait for the Heavy Brigades https://tinyurl.com/nz8twyu8 “When we see two or three of those brigades … focused on a narrow frontt, it will then be possible to say that the main attack has probably started”
// There’s fighting underway across frontline Ukraine, says Lt-Gen (rtd.) Ben Hodges, but the decisive moment will come when we see hundreds of armored vehicles hitting Russian lines.
… There is a big difference between starting an offensive, and the main attack or main effort of the operation. The offensive has clearly started, but not I think the main attack.
When we see large, armored formations join the assault, then I think we’ll know the main attack has really begun. To date, I don’t think we’ve witnessed this concentration of several hundred tanks and infantry fighting vehicles (IFVs) in the attack.
A Ukrainian tank battalion normally has 31 tanks. An armored infantry battalion would have about the same number. Add in armored vehicles carrying engineers, air defense, logistics, and so on. An armored brigade would likely have three tank battalions and one or two mechanized infantry battalions. In total, then, an armored brigade is going to have 250-plus armored vehicles of different types.
I estimate that the Ukrainians have put together anywhere from seven to 12 armored brigades. Some may have only Ukrainian or captured Russian equipment, and others will have a mix of Western-provided kit.
When we see two or three of those brigades (around 500-750 armored vehicles) focused on a narrow front, it will then be possible to say that the main attack has probably started and where it’s happening.
If the West provides everything the Ukrainian Armed Forces (UAF) need, especially long-range precision weapons, then I still anticipate that Ukraine can liberate Crimea, the decisive terrain of this war, by the end of this summer, that is to say, by the end of August. This is one of the aims of the offensive, I believe. At that point, the UAF’s long-range precision weapons could reach Sevastopol, Saky, Dzankoy, and other key Crimean targets, and that would allow them to make the peninsula untenable for Russian forces. That’s why the UK’s delivery of Storm Shadow air-launched cruise missiles with a range of 155-plus miles, was such an important contribution.
I hope the Biden Administration will finally relent and give short-range (up to 300km or 186 miles) ground-to-ground ATACMS ballistic missiles to Ukraine. That would mark a decisive contribution to what Ukrainian forces can achieve on the ground by giving the offensive an enormous boost. …
Lined up in defensive positions before the UAF assault units are the Russians, sitting behind hundreds of miles of trenches with bunkers, minefields, anti-tank ditches, and “Dragons Teeth” obstacle belts. But these defenses are only as good as the soldiers occupying them and covering those obstacles. I’m not impressed with the fighting capabilities of the Russians in most places, and the vicious in-fighting we see between the various Russian leaders, (e.g., warlords like Prigozhin and Kadyrov) highlights the lack of cohesion on the Russian side. I imagine the UAF will exploit this. …
🐣 RT @ GlasnostGone Work has already started in an investigation by the International Criminal Court over the breach of the Kakhovka dam in #Ukraine & the vast flood it triggered, president Zelensky said – adding representatives of the court have visited the Kherson region.
⋙ PresidentUA: It is very important that representatives of international justice have seen with their own eyes the consequences of the Russian act of terrorism at the Kakhovka hydroelectric power plant https://tinyurl.com/2t2nvftz Address by the President of Ukraine
AP: Trump allies cite Clinton email probe to attack classified records case. There are big differences https://tinyurl.com/42nfv63n The “two important differences are in willfulness and obstruction”
🐣 RT @JayinKyiv Ukrainian intelligence warns that Russians, have just mined the Crimean Titan chemical plant in Armyansk to release 200 tons of ammonia, ¤ This will environmentally devastate a huge area. ¤ Ukraine warned about the Kakhovka Dam and no one listened. ¤ Let’s hope this time is different.
🌎 https://twitter.com/JayinKyiv/status/1668174163599654913?s=20/photo/1
⭕ 11 Jun 2023
NewVoiceUkraine: Hacker drains Russian special services wallets, transfers funds to Ukraine https://tinyurl.com/8kde3jkt
// A hacker gained access to hundreds of cryptocurrency wallets belonging to the Russian special services, and may have transferred stolen bitcoins to Ukrainian aid organizations, cryptocurrency experts now believe.
🐣 RT @davidgura “What he was stockpiling were the materials of treason. He may not have known how and when he would cash in this currency, but there can be little doubt that he was determined to retain the ability to do just that.”
💙 ⋙ NYRB (@nybooks), Fintan O’Toole: The Ultimate Deal https://tinyurl.com/4bpfvpcu
// Trump’s hoarding of official secrets is both breathtakingly careless and utterly calculated.
Secrets are a kind of currency. They can be hoarded, but if kept for too long they lose their value. Like all currencies, they must, sooner or later, be used in a transaction—sold to the highest bidder or bartered as a favor for which another favor will be returned. To see the full scale of Donald Trump’s betrayal of his country, it is necessary to start with this reality. He kept intelligence documents because, at some point, those secrets could be used in a transaction. What he was stockpiling were the materials of treason. He may not have known how and when he would cash in this currency, but there can be little doubt that he was determined to retain the ability to do just that.
Before the publication of the grand jury’s indictment, it was possible to believe that Trump’s retention of classified documents was reckless and stupid. The indictment reveals that recklessness and stupidity are the least of his sins. With Trump, it’s always a mistake to equate anarchy with purposelessness or to think that the farce is not deadly serious. Trump’s hoarding of official secrets is both breathtakingly careless and utterly calculated. At the heart of that calculation is a cold resolve to not give up the power that access to highly restricted information had given him. …
🚫 WaPo: Trump’s Miami court date brings fears of violence, rally plans https://tinyurl.com/3wtuytuj “Escalating violent rhetoric in online forums, coupled with defiant statements from the former president and his political allies, have put law enforcement officials on alert”
// Law enforcement officials are monitoring online threats and potential gatherings of far-right extremists and marshaling more officers
🐣 RT @abigaildisney My grandfather is spinning in his grave.
⋙ 🧵. RT @AnnaForFlorida Nazis outside of Walt Disney World right now — absolutely disgusting.
📌 💽 https://twitter.com/AnnaForFlorida/status/1667583474276990976?s=20/photo/1
⋙ 🐣 Yanukovich ran promising to bring Ukraine closer to the EU. Then, under compulsion from Putin, he reversed course, resulting in the Maidan and the exposure of flagrant corruption. It was Russia’s intervention that is to blame for 2014, NOT the West.
🌎 😅 https://twitter.com/Auriandra/status/1668117926920978432?s=20/photo/1
// Not Russia map
CNN: Wagner chief rejects Russian Defense Ministry efforts to rein in his force https://tinyurl.com/ysb8s5ks “Yevgeny Prigozhin’s comments follow an announcement by the Russian Ministry of Defense Saturday that ‘volunteer units’ and private military groups would be required to sign a contract with the ministry.”
🐣 RT @ yasminalombaert President Zelensky’s evening address. “Even beasts are more moral than you, Russian state.”
💽 [tr] https://twitter.com/yasminalombaert/status/1667995037043392513?s=20/photo/1
“Russian terrorists continue to shell evacuation routes, evacuation points, boats that take people away… Today, as a result of one of these attacks, three people were killed. Ten more people were injured, including two police officers. It was an evacuation from Kardashynka, an occupied village on the left bank of Kherson region… The occupiers created this disaster by blowing up the dam, leaving people to their fate in flooded towns and villages, and then shelling the boats that are trying to take people away… Even beasts are more moral than you, Russian state.”
🐣 RT @atrupar Former Trump AG Bill Barr on Trump’s federal indictment: “If even half of it is true, then he’s toast. I mean, it’s a very detailed indictment, and it’s very, very damning. This idea of presenting Trump as a victim here — a victim of a witch hunt — is ridiculous.”
💽 https://twitter.com/atrupar/status/1667896395804622848?s=20/photo/1
// FoxNews Sunday
⋙ 🐣 RT @atrupar Bill Barr: “We can’t forget here that this entire thing came about because of reckless conduct of the president. If he had just turned over the documents, which I think every other person in the country would have done … ”
💽 https://twitter.com/atrupar/status/1667897349132173313?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @tomiahonen Republican Opinions on Trump
Kilmeade: Trump’s insane
Priebus: an idiot
McMaster: dope
Mnuchin: idiot
Kelly: unhinged & an idiot
Mattis: 5th grader
Christie: a child
Coulter: moron
Barr: detached from reality
DeSantis: moron
Bolton: a Putin-loving moron
Tillerson: fucking moron
🐣 RT @HerrDr8 #UkrOffensive2023ZAP #1PageAssessUKRWar Context for ZAP traction (ex: JUNO sector). War lost by Putin 3 weeks in. Since then, brilliant Ukrainian strategy (they channel BH Liddell Hart), true grit,arsenals of democracy pumping kit in. Now, liberation of #TheOrcTriangle time.
🌎 ◕ https://twitter.com/HerrDr8/status/1667979469502439431?s=20/photo/1 -3
🐣 RT @ ChuckPfarrer [6/10] KAMIANSKE CITY AXIS /1625 UTC 10 JUN/ RU media indicates that UKR forces are advancing in the vicinity of Zherebianky & Piatykhatky. It is assessed that UKR forces have made progress on the O-081349 HWY axis in the vicinity of Nesterianka and may be advancing toward Hrozove.
🌎 https://twitter.com/ChuckPfarrer/status/1667565677526351875?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @ ChuckPfarrer VELYKA NOVOSILKA /2110 UTC 11 JUN/ During the day of 11 JUN, sources report that UKR forces have staged advances in the Velyka Novosilka area of operations. The villages of Storozhove, Blahdonte, Makarivka, Starornnaiorske are reported to have been liberated
🌎 https://twitter.com/ChuckPfarrer/status/1667998833769345024?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @ChuckPfarrer BAKHMUT AXIS /1745 UTC 11 JUN/ Sources report that UKR forces have advanced S toward Soledar, penetrating RU lines by as much as 2000 meters. The same sources report UKR advances on a widening front between Vasiukivka & Orikhovo-Vasylivka.
🌎 https://twitter.com/ChuckPfarrer/status/1667946649153335299?s=20/photo/1
💙 🐣 RT @peterpomeranzev ‘Russia is a culture where you have crime without punishment and punishment without crime’. The Ukrainian scholars Tetiana Ogarkova and @yermolenko_v helps me understand what lies behind Russia’s acts of extreme violence
⋙ TheGuardian, Peter Pomerantsev: What lies behind Russia’s acts of extreme violence? Freudian analysis offers an answer https://tinyurl.com/p7f8jza2
// The blowing up of a Ukrainian dam echoes a traditional cycle of destruction and self-destruction marking the country’s history
⋙⋙ 🐣 RT @DTAH22 I truly think that Russians are the remanence of pre-historic mankind, where they were isolated from the general human race development process, and kept the basic primitive man instincts and behavior. They never developed beyond that
⋙⋙ 🐣 RT @The_Fit_Gourmet That’s an astute analysis. I would also add that violence permeates the russian society at all levels. From family violence and drunkenness that children witness at a very young age to “dedovschina” in the army… there’s a sense of normalcy and indifference when violence happens.
🐣 RT @GlasnostGone We all know that if #Ukraine liberates #Crimea, then Putin’s in BIG trouble. Its lose would make huge world headlines & he’d be unable to hide the humiliating defeat from the Russian people. So it’s unsurprising Putin blew the Nova Kakhovka dam to delay any advance on Crimea.
¤ https://twitter.com/GlasnostGone/status/1667866607404580865?s=20
⋙ 🐣 RT @DenesTorteli Ukrainian deputy defence minister Hanna Maliar: “According to available information, it has become known that the enemy is moving its most combat-ready units from the Kherson direction, primarily marines, airborne troops and the 49th Army. Therefore, the purpose of the Russians’ explosion of the Kakhovka hydroelectric power plant becomes obvious. Thus, taking into account its own losses and limited reserves, thus realizing the inability to deter the Ukrainian offensive in different directions, the command of the Russian occupation forces decided to ‘narrow’ the possible geography of the Armed Forces’ active actions. The explosion of the Kakhovka hydroelectric power plant was obviously carried out in order to prevent the Ukrainian Defense Forces from launching an offensive in the Kherson sector and to free up the necessary reserves for their deployment to the Zaporizhzhia and Bakhmut sectors. Also, by destroying the Kakhovka hydroelectric power plant, the Russian leadership is trying to divert some of the forces and resources of the Ukrainian Defense Forces to eliminate the man-made disaster, thereby making it impossible to liberate the occupied territories on the left bank of the Kherson region.” https://t.me/annamaliar/837
🐣 RT @@NOELreports Plans love silence. [Budanov]
🐣 RT @NatalkaKyiv Prigozhin’s press services published his response to the following question: “The debate continues on the web about the presidential administration giving you a very loud signal that you have personal ambitions, and you need to remove them in order to unite around a common victory. ¤ What can you say about this and how do you intend to realize these ambitions?” #Prigozhin #Wagner #RussianArmy #Russia #Ukraine #RussiaUkraineWar
💽 [tr] https://twitter.com/NatalkaKyiv/status/1667780718917738496?s=20/photo/1
⋙ 🐣 RT @realblackmonk Let’s see where this his ambition leads him. I think prighozin knows he has crossed the rubicon. A faction must give way for the other. Either Shoigu/Gerasimov led MOD or Prighozin and his backers will have to leave the scene. Sooner than later.
🐣 RT @NOELreports It looks like Putin and Shoigu want to centralize the PMC’s under their command. All voluntary fighters who are fighting for Russia have to sign a contract with the Russian Federation as of 1 July 2023. This also applies to Wagner, led by Prigozhin. ¤ Shoigu pulls the strings.
💽 https://twitter.com/NOELreports/status/1667810365869113344?s=20/photo/1
⭕ 10 Jun 2023
WaPo: Political risks rise for Putin as Ukraine’s counteroffensive begins https://tinyurl.com/4xxyk7y4 ‘Nervousness among the Russian elite over the firepower of Ukraine’s Western weaponry is driving fears that the land bridge to Crimea could be severed’
🧵 RT @atrupar ICYMI, my thread on Trump post-indictment speech earlier today to the Georgia GOP convention begins here
📌 https://twitter.com/atrupar/status/1667650559074074627?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @OhRick4 It makes me sad that HALF our country is siding with a TRAITOR over OUR National Security and Democracy
The UNITED States of America
I’m heartbroken
Is there no true patriotism left
Its like people don’t care
None of this, NONE OF IT should have happened in the first place
⋙ 📋🐣 40% of Americans live in counties that voted for Trump
30% of US GDP comes from those counties (Brookings)
MAGAdonia is a 2nd tier country
SCOTUS just gifted Dems 4 or 5 House seats
Worry less, GOTV more
🐣 RT @ChuckPfarrer SECOND ORDER EFFECT: RU war planners may have forgotten that the dam they destroyed was critical to the supply of fresh water to the Crimean Peninsula.
◕ https://twitter.com/ChuckPfarrer/status/1667708106032259073?s=20/photo/1
🚫NYT: Trump Supporters’ Violent Rhetoric in His Defense Disturbs Experts https://tinyurl.com/3tknxyh7 //➔ poorly sourced (2 experts; typical rw kooks)
// The former president’s allies have portrayed the indictment as an act of war and called for retribution, which political violence experts say increases the risk of action.
// 📋 “The last thing Dems want is for Trump not to run because he is is a flawed candidate who lost to Biden once already: MAGAs are just coddling and cosplaying”
// 📋 Biden-voting counties produce 70% of the US GDP (Brookings) and are home to 198M (60%) vs 130M (40%) people; MAGAmerica is a third world country
// me, fretting with statistics
🐣 RT @ @tomiahonen And from our international desk.. Danni has calculated how many people GLOBALLY were damaged by our Traitor-In-Chief and his tremendous collection of espionage… RT @Daniellahahah18
◕ https://twitter.com/tomiahonen/status/1667692692686491648?s=20/photo/1
// 475.9M in Five Eyes countries
🧵 RT @noclador I looked at the footage of the Ukrainian attack South of Mala Tokmachka… errors were made: one by higher ups & one by the attacking troops.
1) No air defense: at least three russian drones and one helicopter flew above the Ukrainians and walked russian artillery in. 1/15
📌 https://twitter.com/noclador/status/1667266063501873153?s=20
🐣 🐣 RT @HerrDr8 #Kto200Arctic ISW reports: “Russian sources claimed that elements of the 200th Separate Motorized Rifle Brigade (14th Army Corps, Northern Fleet) are defending against Ukrainian counterattacks in the Bakhmut area”. The 200th? If RUS using them again, RUS be short. Real short.
◕ 🌎 https://twitter.com/HerrDr8/status/1667692826866352128?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @Tendar Since both sides are already reporting it, I will release the information I collected, too. There is anyway a delay of this information and therefore does not compromise OPSEC. ¤ Almost the entire forward defense line of the Russian army near Velyka Novosilka – around 20 km long – has been wiped out. Ukrainian forces liberated Neskuchne and Novodonets’ke. ¤ Based on Russian drone footage we know that Ukrainian forces are already operating further south, hammering Russian forces in Storozheve and the little village of Blahodatne, nearby. #Ukraine #Counteroffensive #VelykaNovosilka #Donetsk
🌎 https://twitter.com/Fireblade577/status/1667652666569138176?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @jonflan What every citizen must decide. We’ve about done the groundlings in DC who did the dirty work for Trump and his corrupt overseers; time to get after the really serious wrongdoers – consider the pyramid of guilt –
◕ https://twitter.com/JonFlan/status/1667655201434550274?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @ChuckPfarrer FIGHT’S ON: UKR’s Pres. Volodymyr Zelensky says that the long-awaited counter-offensive against Russia has started. “Counteroffensive & defensive actions are taking place.” But he would not talk in detail about which stage the counter-offensive was in.
⋙ BBC: Ukraine counter-offensive actions have begun, Zelensky says https://tinyurl.com/drtvr9sp
// Ukraine’s president refused to say which stage the counter-offensive against Russian forces was in.
⋙⋙ 🐣 RT @CastleShore In my opinion the counteroffensive will start as a grind, probing for weaknesses getting thrown back in some areas. But when they break through things will start to happen very quickly and the Russians will soon be in full retreat just like last time
🐣 RT @ChuckPfarrer BAKHMUT AXIS/ 2005 UTC 10 JUN/ UKR has consolidated advances made on numerous axes in the Bakhmut (AO). RU attacks at Bohdanivka and Bila Hora were broken up. were registered S of Ivanivske, across the canal west of the rail right-of-way and in the vicinity of Klischiivka.
🌎 https://twitter.com/ChuckPfarrer/status/1667621747359612929?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @TreasChest At the initial stage of the counteroffensive, it will be extremely difficult, but in the end, the Armed Forces will do much more than analysts’ forecasts, — former director of the CIA, General David Petraeus, in an interview with The Washington Post.
¤ https://twitter.com/TreasChest/status/1667616548817719296?s=20/photo/1
“The Ukrainians have begun to carry out an extremely difficult military task. They are attacking prepared defensive positions that are well supported by artillery. And in war, defense always has an advantage over offense,” the general emphasizes.
In addition, the Armed Forces will not have air superiority — the first F-16 aircraft are expected only in the fall. However, according to Petraeus, Russia will not have it either.
According to the general, the battles at the initial stage of the Ukrainian offensive “will be extremely difficult, and then the situation will become easier.”
the Russians will lack the reserves to cover a front of a thousand kilometers, and on the side of the Armed Forces will be Western equipment and foreign-trained, motivated military personnel.
“I believe that the Ukrainian command will organize impressive joint military operations,” the American general is convinced. ¤ #counteroffensive_ukraine http://ZN.UA
🐣 RT @yamane_patricia And he’s added to it #ArrestThemAll
[TextLink:] ◕ https://twitter.com/yamane_patricia/status/1667537901930926080?s=20/
[Text:] 🐣 RT @realDonaldTrump See you in Miami on Tuesday
[Flyer:] ALL HANDS ON DECK!
Trump Document Hoax Rally
400 N Miami Ave.
Miami, FL 33128
Wilkie D. Ferguson Jr. U.S. Courthouse
Tuesday, June 13 10am to 5pm
🖼 https://twitter.com/yamane_patricia/status/1667537901930926080?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @AntiToxicPeople We are numb to how completely & utterly insane this lunatic is.
[TextLink:] https://twitter.com/AntiToxicPeople/status/1667543870589243392?s=20/photo/1
[Text:] @reaDonald Trump AMERICA WENT TO SLEEP LAST NIGHT WITH TEARS IN ITS EYES. SOMEDAY SOON, HOWEVER, IT WILL BE ABLE TO WIPE AWAY THOSE TEARS AND SMILE, BIGGER THAN EVER BEFORE, FOR WE WILL HAVE DEFEATED THE RADICAL LEFT MARXISTS, FASCISTS, COMMUNISTS, LUNATICS, & DERANGED MANIACS, & CLEARED THE PATH TO PUT AMERICA FIRST & THEN,QUICKLY, MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!!!
⭕ 9 Jun 2023
NYT Editorial: Donald Trump Should Never Again Be Trusted With the Nation’s Secrets https://tinyurl.com/yy6mdr7k “Trump’s recklessness in retaining and showing off military secrets is both arrogant and breathtaking. … It put the lives of American soldiers at risk”
CNN, Daniel Dale: Fact check: Seven of Trump’s false or unsupported claims on the documents investigation https://tinyurl.com/2p8u28jk
[TextLink:] https://twitter.com/Auriandra/status/1668208354521481217?s=20/photo/1
🔻False claim: Trump was following the Presidential Records Act by refusing to immediately return documents
🔻False claim: Obama, the Bushes and others took millions of documents home with them after leaving office
🔻False claim: The federal government could have simply asked for the documents back
🔻Unsupported claim: Trump declassified everything
🔻Unsupported claim: The FBI might be wrongly describing empty folders as actual documents
🔻Unsupported claim: The feds might have planted evidence
🔻False claim: Biden has been ‘totally uncooperative’
📊 YahooNews/NVofUA: Over 80% of Ukrainians oppose territorial concessions, even at risk of protracted war — poll https://tinyurl.com/23x733ya
CBSNews: Justice Department unseals Donald Trump indictment—and reveals the charges against him https://tinyurl.com/mrxas2c7
The historic federal indictment filed against former President Donald Trump was made public Friday, detailing the charges the former president is facing related to his handling of sensitive government records after leaving the White House.
The 44-page indictment filed in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Florida alleges that Trump “endeavored to obstruct the FBI and grand jury investigations and conceal retention of classified documents.” The indictment names Walt Nauta, an aide to Trump who served as a White House valet, as a co-conspirator.
The indictment lists 37 felony counts in all against Trump:
31 counts of willful retention of classified documents
1 count of conspiracy to obstruct justice
1 count of withholding a document or record
1 count of corruptly concealing a document or record
1 count of concealing a document in a federal investigation
1 count of scheme to conceal
and one count of making false statements and representations.
At least four of the charges carry a maximum penalty of 20 years in prison.Trump was summoned to appear in federal district court in Miami on Tuesday for an arraignment. He spent Friday at his golf club in Bedminster, New Jersey, golfing with GOP Rep. Carlos Gimenez of Florida, who tweeted a photo with the former president.
Read the full text of the indictment against Trump here https://tinyurl.com/2p94kywd
What information was in the boxes stored by Trump?
“The classified documents Trump stored in his boxes included information regarding defense and weapons capabilities of both the United States and foreign countries; United States nuclear programs; potential vulnerabilities of the United States and its allies to military attack; and plans for possible retaliation in response to a foreign attack,” the indictment states. “The unauthorized disclosure of these classified documents could put at risk the national security of the United States, foreign relations, the safety of the United States military, and human sources and the continued viability of sensitive intelligence collection methods.”
Among 31 records “relating to the national defense” discovered at Mar-a-Lago were White House intelligence briefings from 2018 through 2020 related to foreign countries, documents concerning military capabilities of foreign countries and the U.S., a June 2020 document involving a foreign country’s nuclear capabilities, an undated record about U.S. nuclear weaponry and a document from October 2018 concerning the communications with another country’s leader.
Twenty-one of these documents had a “TOP SECRET” classification marking, while nine were marked “SECRET.” The final document bore no marking, according to a chart included in the indictment.
The 31 documents relate to Trump’s alleged violation of federal law regarding the willful retention of national defense information.
The 38 counts in the indictment — the final count, also of making false statements, is specific to Nauta — stem from special counsel Jack Smith’s investigation into documents recovered from Trump’s South Florida residence, Mar-a-Lago, after he left the White House in January 2021. Roughly 300 documents marked classified in all were retrieved from Mar-a-Lago in the months after the end of Trump’s presidency.
The indictment states that Mar-a-Lago “was not an authorized location for the storage, possession, review, display, or discussion of classified documents” after Trump left office.
“Nevertheless, Trump stored his boxes containing classified documents in various locations at The Mar-a-Lago Club — including in a ballroom, a bathroom and shower, an office space, his bedroom, and a storage room,” according to the filing, which includes photos showing boxes stacked on the ballroom stage and in a bathroom next to a shower and toilet.
Another photograph contained in the indictment shows one box located in the storage room at Mar-a-Lago tipped over on the ground, with materials spilling out from it. The indictment states that on Dec. 7, 2021, Nauta discovered the fallen box and texted an unidentified Trump employee, “I opened the door and found this…” with two photos of the scene. Contained among the items in the box was a document marked “SECRET/REL TO USA, FVEY,” meaning it was releasable only to the “Five Eyes” intelligence alliance of Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the United Kingdom and the U.S., prosecutors said.
Trump allegedly showed classified documents to others
It also alleges Trump showed classified documents to others and notes that on multiple occasions, the former president spoke of the importance of protecting classified information, both as a candidate in 2016 and then as president. The former president did not inform U.S. Secret Service he was storing records with classification markings at Mar-a-Lago.
According to the indictment, there were two occasions in 2021 when Trump showed classified documents to others. The first occurred in July 2021 at his golf club in Bedminster during a recorded meeting with a writer, publisher and two staff members, none of whom had security clearances. Trump “showed and described a ‘plan of attack’ that he said was prepared for him by the Defense Department” and called the plan “highly confidential” and “secret.” He then said, “As president I could have declassified it … Now I can’t, you know, but this is still a secret,” the filing states.
The second occasion took place weeks later, in either August or September 2021, also at the Bedminster property. The indictment states that Trump showed an official with his political action committee who also lacked a security clearance a classified map related to a military operation and “told the representative that he should not be showing it and that the representative should not get too close.”
Trump “caused some of his boxes” to be moved to Trump National Golf Club Bedminster in May 2021, which the indictment notes “was not an authorized location.”
Unlawful retention and obstruction
The indictment lays out the efforts by the National Archives and Records Administration, then the Justice Department, to recover presidential records. Those demands began with the Archives in May 2021 and escalated over the next 15 months, with a federal grand jury issuing a subpoena on May 11, 2022, for all documents with classification markings.
Trump met with two of his lawyers to discuss the response to the subpoena days after it was issued, during which the attorneys said they needed to search for documents that would be responsive to it. Citing comments by Trump memorialized by one of his lawyers, the indictment states the former president said, “I don’t want anybody looking, I don’t want anybody looking through my boxes, I really don’t, I don’t want you looking through my boxes,” and asked, “Wouldn’t it be better if we just told them we don’t have anything here?”
In between the meeting with his lawyers on May 23, 2022, about the subpoena, and June 2, 2022, when one of Trump’s lawyers returned to Mar-a-Lago to sift through boxes kept in the storage room, Nauta moved “at Trump’s direction,” 64 boxes to the former president’s residence, prosecutors claim. Thirty were brought to the storage room, according to the indictment.
In response to the subpoena, a total of 38 documents marked classified were given to Justice Department officials who traveled to Mar-a-Lago to collect them. A third Trump attorney — who did not search the boxes on the property — was present on June 3, 2022, when the records were turned over and signed a certification stating that “[b]ased upon the information that [had] been provided to” her, “a diligent search was conducted of the boxes that were moved from the White House to Florida.”
“These statements were false because, among other reasons, Trump had directed Nauta to move boxes before Trump Attorney 1’s June 2 review, so that many boxes were not searched and many documents responsive to the May 11 Subpoena could not be found — and in fact were not found — by Trump Attorney 1,” the indictment states.
The attempts to recover the records culminated in an extraordinary court-authorized search of Mar-a-Lago by the FBI on Aug. 8, 2022. The indictment notes that “more than 100 documents with classification markings remained at The Mar-a-Lago club” until the FBI’s August search.
The FBI opened its investigation into the alleged unlawful retention of classified documents at Mar-a-Lago at the end of March 2022, and a federal grand jury investigation started the next month.
Prosecutors detailed what they said were the former president’s efforts to obstruct the probe, including suggesting his attorney falsely represent to investigators that Trump didn’t have documents relevant to a grand jury subpoena and directing Nauta to move boxes of records to conceal them from Trump’s lawyer, the FBI and grand jury.
He also suggested his attorney hide or destroy documents covered by the subpoena. Prosecutors allege that Trump directed his attorney to sign a “sworn certification” that all the classified documents had been turned over to the FBI — when Trump knew there were more classified documents at Mar-a-Lago.
The government says Trump knew this because he “had directed that boxes be removed from the Storage Room [at Mar-a-Lago] before Trump Attorney 1 conducted the June 2, 2022 search” for documents with classified markings. As a result, Trump Attorney 1’s search “would not and did not locate” documents responsive to the May 11 Subpoena” — and were not provided to the FBI.
After the June 3, 2022 search, the government says “more than 100 documents with classification markings remained at The Mar-a-Lago club until the FBI search on August 2022.”
The indictment asserts that Trump kept classified documents “originated by, or implicating the equities of” number agencies within the intelligence community, including the CIA, National Geospatial Intelligence Agency, National Reconnaissance Office, and Departments of Energy, Defense and State.
The criminal case brought by federal prosecutors in Florida is unrelated to the state charges leveled against him in April in New York. That indictment entails allegations of falsification of business records.
Smith is also examining efforts to stop the transfer of power after the 2020 presidential election and events surrounding the Jan. 6, 2021, assault on the Capitol, and that investigation remains ongoing.
What happens next with Trump?
Trump is expected to travel to Columbus, Georgia, on Saturday to speak first at the state’s GOP convention and then at the North Carolina Republican convention in Greensboro.
On Monday, two sources with knowledge of the planning told CBS News that Trump will travel from Bedminister to Miami via his private plane, “Trump Force One.” He is expected to spend the night at Trump National Doral Miami before motorcading to the federal courthouse for his scheduled arraignment on Tuesday.
🐣 RT @davidmweissman This is the lord and savior of the Republican Party. Trump is now sending his cult to intimidate Jack Smith and his wife. This does not sound like an innocent man.
[TextLink:] https://twitter.com/davidmweissman/status/1667270993155325955?s=20/photo/1
[Text:] @realDonaldTrump This is the man who caused the Lois Lerner catastrophe with the IRS. He went after Evangelicals and Great Americans of Faith. The United States had to apologize, and pay major damages for what this deranged lunatic did. He had a unanimous loss in the Supreme Court. His wife is a Trump Hater, just as he is a Trump Hater–a deranged “psycho” that shouldn’t be involved in any case having to do with “Justice,” other than to look at Biden as a criminal, which he is!
⋙ 🐣 SCOTUS overturned the Gov McDonnell bribery conviction, ruling the bribes he took weren’t substantial enough. Given the bribes Justice Thomas (and others, like Scalia) accepted, Donnelly’s price-tag must have seemed pretty cheap
⋙ 🐣 Lois Lerner was exonerated. Trump’s own DOJ dropped the case. Her IRS went after as many left-leaning groups as right-leaning groups. Sort of like Benghazi, there was no “there there”
🐣 RT @ChuckPfarrer ZAPORIZHZHIA AXIS / 2115 UTC 9 JUN/ The UKR government has requested media/social media reportage to remain mindful of Operational Security. The UKR Gen’l Staff reported on 9 JUN that on the Zaporizhzhia axis RU forces carried out airstrikes at Olhivskyi, Hulyaipole and Stepove.
🌎 https://twitter.com/ChuckPfarrer/status/1667277673062715397?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @TreasChest Members of the Committee on Foreign Affairs of the US House of Representatives, from the Democratic and Republican parties, introduced a resolution calling on the administration of President Joe Biden to transfer long-range ATACMS missiles to Ukraine, – the co-author of the resolution, the chairman of the Committee on Foreign Affairs of the House of Representatives, Republican Michael McCaul.
“If the USA does not provide Ukraine with all the necessary weapons, it will contribute to the prolongation of the war. ¤ The success of the Ukrainian counteroffensive is directly related to the military assistance provided by the United States and our allies.
Therefore, it is extremely unfortunate that the administration is delaying billions of dollars in military funding that could be immediately transferred to Ukraine and, in turn, help its Armed Forces significantly change the situation on the battlefield.
The United States and its allies jointly possess thousands of ATACMS missiles that could be transferred to Ukraine. ¤ Russia’s advantage in long-range weapons now forces Ukrainian forces to fight in a much more disadvantageous position.
The rapid provision of this extremely important weaponry will provide the Ukrainian military with the necessary ability to strike deep in the enemy’s rear, which they currently do not have, undermining Russia’s ability to wage war,” the resolution reads.
⋙ 🐣 It’s extremely heartening to see this. Although there are certain (loud, uninformed, unserious) voices among the GOP in the House, I’m always relieved to recall that the heads of the key committees (Intelligence, Foreign Affairs etc) stand strongly behind Ukraine
WaPo: Here are the 37 charges against Trump and what they mean https://tinyurl.com/mrsvdnjd Trump is accused of violating seven federal laws but faces 37 separate charges.
◕ https://twitter.com/Auriandra/status/1667251918052245505?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @EricLiptonNYT Here is the full Trump indictment document FYI. Click on link. https://int.nyt.com/data/documenttools/gov-uscourts-flsd-648653-3/ecd27a8d6d1f36ef/full.pdf
📔 Trump Indictment (Documents) https://tinyurl.com/2p8xwkpr 49p
📔 Copyable Version https://tinyurl.com/mry82c9v
📔 ⋙ See under Entire Articles: Indict Docs 6-12-2023
🐣 RT @kaitlancollins Trump indictment says on two occasions in 2021, he showed classified documents to others — one was the July recording CNN reporting referenced and the other was August or September 2021 when he showed people without clearances “a classified map related to a military operation.”
🧵 RT @EliotHiggins One thing I haven’t been able to figure out with the dam destruction is we have local people saying they heard an explosion at about 2:20am, then video footage of the dam supposedly from 2:46am showing a small explosion, and then reports of a large explosion detected after that.
📌 💽 ◕ https://twitter.com/EliotHiggins/status/1667100337453277185?s=20/photo/1
🐣 Quote: “Let a crown be placed thereon, by which the world may know, that so far as we approve of monarchy, that in America the law is King. For as in absolute governments the King is law, so in free countries the law ought to be King; and there ought to be no other” ~ Thomas Paine, Common Sense
PravdaUA: Occupiers admit hydroelectric power plant blown up by Russian sabotage group https://tinyurl.com/3c938kmf Source: press service of the Security Service of Ukraine, citing Russian sources
[TextLink:] https://twitter.com/Auriandra/status/1667117884051447810?s=20/photo/1
Quote from the Security Service: “The invaders wanted to blackmail Ukraine by blowing up the dam and caused a man-made disaster in our country’s south.”
Details: “It’s not them [Ukraine – ed.] who have struck. Our sabotage group is there. They wanted to scare them with this dam. It didn’t go according to plan, it was more than they planned,” says the Russian military.
The occupier goes on to describe the consequences of this disaster, which Russia is trying to hide: rising water levels, flooding and destruction.
🐣 RT @Justlove3332 Spelling is fun. In all seriousness, every sweaty altar boy (Rubio) every base head (Lee) every white boot wearing, Disney hating dingle(Meatball) who still defends this man or talks about “banana republic” can suck it. You unleashed this orange ape on us. Keep feeding the beast.
[TextLink:] https://twitter.com/Justlove3332/status/1667041724366041091?s=20/photo/1
[Text:] 🐣 RT @realDonaldTrump [6/8] CRAZY JACK SMITH AND HIS BAND OF THUGS AT THE JUSTICE DEPARTMENT ARE COMING FOR YOUR FAVORITE PRESIDENT TRYING TO TAKE ME DOWN IN THE GREATEST WHICH HUNT OF ALL TIME. SO UNFAIR! NIXON SAID WHEN A PRESIDENT DOES IT’S NOT ILLEGAL, AND TRUMP IS A MUCH BETTER PRESIDENT THAN NIXON EVER WAS. TOTAL LOSER, HE COULDN’T TAKE DOWN ROE, HE LET THAT HAPPEN AND VIETNAM TOO. VERY SAD. I HAD A PERFECT CALLAND FORGOT TO GIVE BACK SOME PAPERWORK TO THE NATIONAL ARCHIEVES AND SUDDNELY FOR TRUMP IT’S SUCHABIG DEAL. I ALREADY KNOW IN MY MIND I WILL BE PRESIDENT AGAIN IN 2024 SO IT WON’T MATTER. AND JUST WAIT. THEY WILLALL PAY!
⭕ 8 Jun 2023
DailyBeast, David Rothkopf: Trump Case Isn’t About ‘Documents,’ It’s About National Security https://tinyurl.com/yt5tmn6f
// The media needs to stop focusing on the paperwork and make it clear that the former president’s actions posed a serious threat to the country.
[…] … Based on evidence that has already been made public we know that Trump did not mistakenly shift a classified document or two from the White House to Mar-a-Lago. He was briefed repeatedly on the proper handling of classified materials. He has even acknowledged, on tape, that he understood how such sensitive, easily weaponizable documents should be treated.
But he ignored the law. He ignored the advice he was repeatedly given. And, based on reporting to date, he stole scores of items that were not his, to which he had no right, which could put the lives of Americans and our national interests and those of our allies at risk.
When news of his theft was discovered and the U.S. Department of Justice sought the return of those documents, Trump did not cooperate. He lied about them. He concealed documents from the government. He obstructed justice. In fact, if recent reporting is true, he did not just obstruct justice, he went to great lengths to do so. Indeed, the lengths he went to force us to ask another question that is relevant in this case: “Why?”
Why did he go to such great lengths to violate the law and put his future freedom at risk not to mention exposing U.S. intelligence assets to great jeopardy? Was it just to satisfy his admittedly gargantuan ego? To be able to say, “Lookee here, I was president once and I can prove it?” Even for Trump, that would be reckless.
No, it is unlikely he would have committed these alleged crimes unless he had a purpose in mind, an audience for what he had taken in mind, an anticipated return envisioned for the investment of time he had made, and for the risk he had undertaken.
We do not know to whom the documents may have been shown. Perhaps we will learn that in due course. We do not know (and perhaps may never know) to whom he may have contemplated showing them. But it seems safe to assume he did not hang onto them because he possessed some Harlan Crow-like impulse to create a personal museum that paid tribute to historical misdeeds.
We know this, in part, because he had shown a complete contempt for our national security, for the products produced by our intelligence community, for the entire concept of protecting vital national secrets throughout his presidency.
He appointed a national security adviser, Michael Flynn, who lied to the FBI about inappropriate exchanges he had with foreign enemies. He sought to defend that national security adviser after his crimes were clear (and has said he would reappoint him should he be elected again.) In one of his first meetings in the Oval Office with Russia’s foreign minister, he revealed to him and to the Russian ambassador sensitive classified information that put allied intelligence assets at risk.
He ignored the advice of national security professionals and granted his son-in-law and daughter classified clearances they should not have had. He repeatedly attacked and denigrated the intelligence community including one time, while standing alongside Vladimir Putin in Helsinki in 2018.
He put stooges in high places in the intelligence community to ensure that he would be able to control any revelations they might produce that he saw as threatening, and perhaps to enable him to come up with dirt on his enemies. He has said he would fire the professionals in the U.S. government in a clear effort to be able to replace them with those who placed loyalty to him above loyalty to the country or our Constitution.
This is all known. All on the public record. He was a threat to national security long before he stole these classified materials and went to great lengths to illegally retain them.
Indeed, there are not only these facts to provide context but the other major cases against Trump that are looming. What could better illustrate that Trump was something more than a souvenir hunter? He was, after all, impeached for seeking to blackmail Ukraine’s President Zelensky into performing a political hit job on Joe Biden prior to the 2020 campaign. He was again impeached for leading an insurrection against the U.S. government, actions which themselves may lead to a set of indictments from special prosecutor Jack Smith. Part of what Smith may be investigating are the efforts at defrauding the U.S. electorate, and perhaps Trump’s own donors in an effort to illegally maintain the presidency. Fulton County (Georgia) District Attorney Fani Willis may also prosecute him for those crimes. ¤ If Willis does it, let’s be careful not to refer to it as the “Georgia case” or simply as the “fake electors” case.
If Smith goes after Trump for leading an attempted coup against his own government, let’s not call it just the “Jan. 6 case” or be tempted to frame it in a way that makes it look, as some Republicans would have it, as though it were about just another partisan spat on Capitol Hill, albeit one that got a little out of hand.
The stakes in all these cases are much greater.
Take, for example, the reported case of a recording of Trump suggesting he was in possession of a classified war plans memo concerning possible moves we might make against Iran.
It’s not just egregious behavior, whatever the reason for his mentioning it, it also requires we consider what might happen if he shared that with his friends and business partners in Saudi Arabia or how, should the document become more widely available to our enemies, it could in a future conflict put U.S. soldiers lives at risk.
The case against Trump for leading a coup attempt is not about something that happened almost three years ago. He is running for president again. He has repeatedly shown his disregard for the Constitution and his willingness to place his own personal interests above those of the country. …
That is why we must frame the nature of the crimes with which the former president is being charged so carefully. We dare not numb ourselves to why they are important, numb ourselves to the anger and outrage we should be feeling or to the sense of danger that the likely defendant carries with him should the cases prove unsuccessful or, God forbid, their verdicts are subsequently nullified by an American electorate that failed to understand the scale and gravity of the crimes Trump committed repeatedly, often before our very eyes.
Donald Trump is not simply a clown, a fraud, an incompetent, a former game show host, or a sloppy, vulgar, golf-and-fast-food-loving doofus. Yes, he is all those things. But they are not the aspects of his character—or his behavior—that are important here.
He is, above all, a threat. He is a danger. He is tied to our worst international enemies and a threat the FBI director calls the greatest we face (domestic terror).
His trials should not be seen as political spectacles or some new twisted Trumpian reality show. They should be seen as an effort by our system to protect us, to take a dangerous man off the streets, to reduce the threat to our nation, our children, our allies, our values, and our institutions that this one malevolent, profoundly corrupt man poses.
🐣 RT @drdave1999 Political types are all over the air tonight, reminding people that “this is a dark day in American history.” I disagree, and I’ll tell you why. ¤ Trump’s given us more than 6 years of dark days. Now that the legal system is working, today is actually a day to be proud of America.
.🐣 RT @atrupar his face screams FAFO
🖼 https://twitter.com/atrupar/status/1666956936514793472?s=20/photo/1
// bearded Jack Smith
🐣 RT @SkinnerPm Goodnight to most, from all at Skinnerville, where we are thinking about our sweet SweetDog, who loved and was loved, and who was never indicted.
🔆 This❗️⋙ WaPo: Trump charged in Mar-a-Lago classified documents investigation https://tinyurl.com/348nncvk “The charges include illegal retention of government secrets, obstruction of justice and conspiracy, according to people familiar with the matter.”
// Former president, first ever to face federal criminal charges, posts on social media that he must appear in court in Miami on Tuesday
‼️🐣 RT @oneunderscore__ Donald Trump: “I have been summoned to appear at the Federal Courthouse in Miami on Tuesday, at 3 PM.”
[TextLink:] https://twitter.com/oneunderscore__/status/1666952332884561920?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @realDonaldTrump Page 1: The corrupt Biden Administration has informed my attorneys that I have been Indicted, seemingly over the Boxes Hoax, even though Joe Biden has 1850 Boxes at the University of Delaware, additional Boxes in Chinatown, D.C., with even more Boxes at the University of Pennsylvania, and documents strewn all over his garage floor where he parks his Corvette, and which is “secured” by only a garage door that is paper thin, and open much of the time.
🐣 RT @realDonaldTrump Page 2: | have been summoned to appear at the Federal Courthouse in Miami on Tuesday, at 3 PM. I never thought it possible that such a thing could happen to a former President of the United States, who received far more votes than any sitting President in the History of our Country, and is currently leading, by far, all Candidates, both Democrat and Republican, in Polls of the 2024 Presidential Election. I AM AN INNOCENT MAN!
🐣 RT @RpsAgainstTrump Russian state TV hosts have openly endorsed Donald Trump for president: “Our beloved Trump, in whom we place all of our hope… As always, our candidate doesn’t let us down. We need to support him.” #TBT #DonaldTrumpIsARussianAsset #TraitorTrump [via JuliaDavis]
💽 https://twitter.com/RpsAgainstTrump/status/1666824113460060160?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @Ayei_Eloheichem Israeli Foreign Minister Eli Cohen says Israel assesses Russia blew up the Kakhovka dam and Israel is looking into how to provide humanitarian aid
NBCNews: Ukraine launches counteroffensive against Russia https://tinyurl.com/3jch6b8x “This new phase of the war, which many see as crucial to persuading Western allies to renew their support, comes as Ukraine grapples with the fallout from the destruction of a critical dam in the region.”
🐣 RT @marceelias 🚨🚨🚨 BREAKING: Supreme Court AFFRIMS lower court victory in Alabama redistricting case. Follow @DemocracyDocket for details….
⋙ 🐣 RT @marceelias In addition to adding an additional minority opportunity district in Alabama, this will also add one in Louisiana (a case from there was held pending this decision). It will also result in least one more in GA and likely several in Texas.
🐣 RT @JuliaDavisNews Meanwhile in Russia: military expert Evgeny Buzhinsky proposes destroying Kyiv dam and razing the city to the ground.
💽 [YT] https://twitter.com/JuliaDavisNews/status/1666792560004677634?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @KyivIndependent UN agrees to conduct evacuations from flooded occupied areas. ¤ Ukraine and the UN agreed that the UN would deploy personnel to the flood-affected left bank of the Dnipro River, occupied by Russia, to provide aid and conduct evacuations, Ukraine’s Foreign Ministry announced.
⭕ 7 Jun 2023
TheIndependent [UK]: Prosecutors ready to ask for Trump indictment on obstruction and Espionage Act charges https://tinyurl.com/ycnbacvn “[P]rosecutors intend to ask grand jurors to vote on the indictment on Thursday, but that vote could be delayed as much as a week”
// The Independent has learned that prosecutors are prepared to ask grand jurors to vote on charges as early as Thursday
🐣 RT @Faytuks A group of Nato countries may be willing to put troops on the ground in Ukraine if member states do not provide tangible security guarantees to Ukraine at NATO’s summit in Vilnius, former Nato secretary general Anders Rasmussen says – The Guardian
⋙ TheGuardian: Nato members may send troops to Ukraine, warns former alliance chief https://tinyurl.com/3pkebe3f
// Security guarantees and membership path needed at Nato summit to avoid escalation, says Anders Rasmussen
🐣 RT @Sytheruk Ukrainians are dying every single day, including children. Russia have well and truly shown their hand. The dam confirms it. ¤ Everything in wests power toHelp Ukraine needs to be done now! ¤ Send Ukraine everything! F-16, f-18. Typhoons etc and send loads more tanks! Do more!
💽 https://twitter.com/Sytheruk/status/1666600335463395330?s=20/photo/1
.// caution: scenes of death and devastation
TheHill: House cancels votes for rest of week amid floor ‘chaos’ https://tinyurl.com/jkzutt3a “A group of 11 conservatives sunk a procedural rule vote Tuesday in a stunning rebuke to GOP leadership, fueled by anger over the debt limit bill negotiated by McCarthy and President Biden”
🔆 This❗️⋙ NYT: Prosecutors Tell Trump’s Legal Team He Is a Target of Investigation https://tinyurl.com/ycdebkt6 ‘Notifying a potential defendant that he or she is a target indicates that the person is a direct focus of a criminal investigation and often precedes the filing of charges’
// The notice from the office of the special counsel Jack Smith suggested that an indictment was on the horizon in the investigation into the former president’s handling of classified documents.
WaPo: Trump special counsel shifts focus of possible indictment in documents case to S. Florida https://tinyurl.com/2z72hptv
// People familiar with the matter said prosecutors want to base much of the case where most of alleged misconduct happened
🐣 RT @SykesCharlie Ranty McRant has some thoughts. DOJ, FBI,NEW YORK A.G., NEW YORK D.A., ATLANTA D.A., FASCISTS ALL!
[TextLink:] https://twitter.com/SykesCharlie/status/1666516273465794589?s=20/photo/1
[Text:] 🐣 RT @realDonaldTrump Wow, this is turning out to be the greatest & most vicious instance of ELECTION INTERFERENCE in the history of our Country. Remember, I’m leading DeSanctimonious BIG in the Polls but, more importantly, I’m leading Biden by a lot. Also, & perhaps most importantly, they are launching all of the many Fake Investigations against me RIGHT SMACK IN THE MIDDLE OF MY CAMPAIGN, something which is unheard of & not supposed to happen. DOJ, FBI, NEW YORK A.G., NEW YORK D.A., ATLANTA D.A. FASCISTS ALL!
🐣 RT @yamane_patricia Ha! https://tinyurl.com/2zk6wddh Man just can’t stop lying 😡
[TextLink:] https://twitter.com/yamane_patricia/status/1666584890723237888?s=20/photo/1
[Text:] 🐣 RT @realDonaldTrump No one has told me I’m being indicted, and I shouldn’t be because I’ve done NOTHING wrong, but I have assumed for years that I am a Target of the WEAPONIZED DOJ & FBI, starting with the Russia, Russia, Russia HOAX, the “No Collusion” Mueller Report, Impeachment HOAX #1, Impeachment HOAX #2, the PERFECT Ukraine phone call, and various other SCAMS & WITCH HUNTS. A TRAVESTY OF JUSTICE & ELECTION INTERFERENCE AT A LEVEL NEVER SEEN BEFORE. REPUBLICANS IN CONGRESS MUST
MAKE THIS THEIR # 1 ISSUE!!!
🐣 RT @syadoz1 Washington post says the first stage of the counter offensive is doing well
⋙ WaPo, David Ignatius (June 6): D-Day dawns for Ukraine https://tinyurl.com/mt3y7mj9 “Military campaigns are rarely all or nothing, but this one comes close. If Ukraine can drive back an already shaky Russian army, it stands a chance of forcing Moscow to bargain for an end of its failed invasion.”
🐣 RT @wartranslated [2am Ukr] Several Russian sources are noticing a dramatic increase in fire and assault on their positions tonight in Zaporizhzhia direction. They say tanks are attacking their positions and shelling is non-stop:
Zapiski Veterana:
“I think now we can already talk about the beginning of the offensive announced by Ukraine for so long. There hasn’t been such movement at the front for a long time. And on the part of the Armed Forces of Ukraine, it never happened at all. ¤ It’s happening. Good luck to all.”Sladkov:
“The offensive has begun. We have numbers. Wishing steadfastness to men in trenches. We’re not sleeping.”Romanov believes this is still probing of defence:
“Not yet. ¤ There are active probes of our defense. In different areas, at different times of the day. ¤ Naturally, if the enemy manages to achieve success somewhere, he will try to consolidate and develop it.”
🐣 RT @reedgalen Is this real? I mean, even for him this is 🍌
[TextLink:] https://twitter.com/reedgalen/status/1666578254332035073?s=20/photo/1
[Text:] 🐣 RT @realDonaldTrump WHEN MARK MEADOWS CAME CRAWLING TO ME WITH TEARS IN HIS EYES, SAYING SIR I NEED A JOB PLEASE HELP ME, I FELT VERY SORRY FOR HIM. I KNEW HE WAS STRONGLY HATED BY MOST OF HIS FELLOW CONGRESSIONAL REPUBLICANS, BUT I HAD JUST FIRED MY PREVIOUS CHIEF OF STAFF, LIKE A DOG, SO I DECIDED TO HAVE MARK AUDITION FOR THE JOB, APPRENTICE STYLE. HOW DID HE THANK ME? BY HIRING VISCOUS RINOS & RATS WHO TURNED AND THROUGH ME UNDER THE BUS WITH THE RADICAL COMMUNISTS OF THE J6 COMMITTEE AND THEN A MAD DOG LEFTIST PROSECUTOR. I WAS GOING TO FIRE MARK IN 2021 BUT THE ELECTION WAS STOLLEN FROM ME!
🐣 The @UN or @NATO needs to go in immediately and estsblish a Safe Zone and rescue these people‼️ ¤ This is an 🚨EMERGENCY🚨
@StateDept @DeptofDefense @SecBlinken @POTUS
⋙ 🐣 RT @ZelenskyyUa The situation in the occupied part of Kherson region is absolutely catastrophic.
¤ https://twitter.com/ZelenskyyUa/status/1666551447243182081?s=20
The occupiers simply abandoned people in these terrible conditions. Without rescue, without water, just on the rooftops in flooded communities. And this is another deliberate crime of Russia: after the terrorist state has caused a disaster, it also maximizes the damage from it.
Now we need a clear and quick response from the world to what is happening. It is even impossible to establish for sure how many people in the temporarily occupied territory of Kherson region may die without rescue, without drinking water, without food, without medical care. Our military and special services are rescuing people as much as it is possible, despite the shelling.
But large-scale efforts are needed. ¤ We need international organizations, such as the International Committee of the Red Cross, to immediately join the rescue operation and help people in the occupied part of Kherson region. Each person who dies there is a verdict on the existing international architecture and international organizations that have forgotten how to save lives. If there is no international organization in the area of this disaster now, it means that it does not exist at all, that it is incapable of functioning. All the relevant appeals from Ukraine and our government are in place.
🐣 RT @JayinKyiv Will tell you why my tweets may be a little more vitriolic than normal the past few days (aside from the obvious).
Met a woman from Lisychansk traveling alone. Her 14 year old daughter was gangraped by Russians a year ago while they took over her home, left her pregnant, later got abortion. Daughter committed suicide in Poland 2 months ago.
This is what Russians bring to Ukraine, and to hear these western fucks like Musk and the rest promote Russian PR without having ever lived under the Russian system and its barbarism, is infuriating.
Getting on Twitter now is like entering an alternate universe run by naive western kids that’ve never experienced life outside mom’s house. ¤ Is this what living in the safety of the West does to one’s brain now? So soft and easily manipulated?
🧵 RT @KofmanMichael A few thoughts on the dam’s destruction and its implications for Ukraine’s offensive. In brief, I doubt it will have a significant impact on UA mil operations. The Khakovka dam is at least 100 miles from where much of the activity might take place at its closest point. […]
📌 https://twitter.com/KofmanMichael/status/1666477698607087616?s=20/photo/1
⋙ 🐣 RT @KofmanMichael This is an ecological and humanitarian catastrophe, with long term economic implications for the region, for which Russia is responsible, but I’m skeptical that Ukraine’s military prospects in the short term will be negatively affected in a meaningful way.
🐣 RT @walter_report Evacuation of civilians and animals on the right (west) bank of Dnipro river continues after russians blew up Kakhovka dam on Dnipro river. ¤ Those who are on the east bank (under russian occupation) are left on their own. ¤ Serhii Korovayny
🖼 https://twitter.com/walter_report/status/1666432939347918851?s=20/photo/1
// rescued dog clings to rescuers leg
🐣 RT @Tendar Ukrainian drones delivering water to the citizens of Russian-occupied Oleshky. The Russian occupation neither helps nor would it allow any SAR helicopters to be deployed. The Ukrainian army tries its best to help. #Ukraine #Kherson #Oleshky
⭕ 6 Jun 2023
CNN: Twitter’s own lawyers refute Elon Musk’s claim that the ‘Twitter Files’ exposed US government censorship https://tinyurl.com/2spn689z
🐣 RT @ChuckPfarrer RUSSIAN WAR CRIME: The circumstances of the failure of the Kakhovka hydroelectric dam indicate that it was an overt act of the RU occupation forces. On or about 1 JUN, RU forces emplaced explosives adjacent to the south bank of the hydroelectric complex– which they control.
◕ https://twitter.com/ChuckPfarrer/status/1666216915058958337?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @drosha69 205th Separate Motor Rifle Brigade of ru warned that the Nova Kakhovka dam is rigged to blow by ruzzians in Fall of 2022
[TextLink:] https://twitter.com/drosha69/status/1666038445284950016?s=20/photo/1 -2
🐣 RT @ChuckPfarrer BAKHMUT AXIS/1915 UTC 6 JUN/ On 5 JUN UKR air defense intercepted 10 recon UAVs 6 other RU UAVs of various types. UKR Missile and artillery units hit 2 command posts, 12 concentrations of RU troops, weapons and military equipment, 1 anti-aircraft missile system.
🌎 https://twitter.com/ChuckPfarrer/status/1666159135388205074?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @Euan_MacDonald Water level in reservoir behind Kakhovka dam was at historic max before it was destroyed. There’s speculation in Ukraine that Russia, which controlled the sluices on the east bank at the hydropower plant, raised the water deliberately to maximise destruction – a long-planned act.
◕ https://twitter.com/Euan_MacDonald/status/1666025231113244673?s=20/photo/1
⋙ 🐣 RT @ind_prop is there a plausible explanation why the water level dropped so significantly to begin with?
⋙⋙ 🐣 RT @Euan_MacDonald The Russians may have been experimenting to see what effect lowering the reservoir level would have on the cooling ponds at Zaporizhzhya nuclear power plant – but that’s just speculation on my part.
🐣 RT @RusMission_EU The Commission has proven that #Washington set up a vast network of extra-territorial biological laboratories around the world and in #Ukraine. ¤ We hope that this document will not go unnoticed by the EU. ¤ https://tinyurl.com/ydf7pzv4
⋙ 🐣 This is not a scientific or legal paper. Many claims but no footnotes ~ seriously⁉️ When I got to “military biological projects in Ukraine, which were partially supervised by Hunter Biden,” I laughed out loud. I’ve written papers for IBM. UChicago and Mayo Clinic. This report is a joke.
p19 In 2009, Hunter Biden, the son of the current U.S. President Joe Biden, Christopher Heinz, the stepson of former US Secretary of State John Kerry, and Devon Archer, founded the investment company Rosemont Seneca Partners. Close connection of this fund with principal contractors of the Pentagon, including Metabiota, can be traced.
p40 Not so long ago, the U.S. non-governmental organization Judicial Watch decided to conduct its own investigation in the context of incessant news about U.S. involvement in military biological projects in Ukraine, which were partially supervised by Hunter Biden. To do this, journalists initiated a request to the DTRA.
🐣 RT @gtconway3d everyone should retweet this as many times as humanly and technologically possible
⋙ 🐣 RT @AccountableGOPm Bill Barr on the classified documents investigation: “This is not a case of the DOJ conducting a witch hunt…This would have gone nowhere had the president just returned the documents, but he jerked them around for a year and a half…There is no excuse for what he did here.”
🐣 RT @Faytuks The US government has intelligence that is leaning towards Russia being behind the Nova Kakhovka attack, two US officials & one Western official says – NBC ¤ The US is working to declassify some of the intelligence & share it as early as Tuesday afternoon
[TextLink:] https://twitter.com/Faytuks/status/1666125145679753216?s=20/photo/1
⋙ NBCNews: Ukraine and Russia accuse each other of blowing up Nova Kakhovka dam https://tinyurl.com/3a3ub9xe
//: The critical Kakhovka dam was destroyed, according to video verified by NBC News and local officials on both sides.
🐣 RT @ChuckPfarrer VELYKA NOVOSILKA /1600 UTC 6 JUN/ UKR Gen’l Staff reports on 6 JUN indicate a RU assault on Velyka Novosilka was broken up; in this engagement a Russian Ka-52 attack helicopter was shot down.
🌎 https://twitter.com/ChuckPfarrer/status/1666112098756116481?s=20/photo/1
🐣 [pdf:] 🐣 RT @lijukic Great map showing soil quality across Europe. You can see whyUkraine is the breadbasket of Europe.
🌎 https://twitter.com/Auriandra/status/1666131859498053646?s=20/photo/1
🐣 “The destruction of the Nova Kakhovka dam in southern Ukraine could imperil the supply of fresh water to the Russian-occupied Crimea” Newsweek: https://tinyurl.com/yaj7mpsa
🌎 https://twitter.com/Auriandra/status/1666134326411505672?s=20/photo/1
// Map: “THE NORTH CRIMEAN CANAL: CRIMEA’S WATER LIFELINE” from .EuromaidanPress
🐣 RT @PointlessWar The peak of the Dnieper water leakage is probably observed right now. [11:45amCT] This comes from an interview with the head of Ukrhydroenergo Ihor Syrota for Forbes ¤ A few points, according to the head of “Ukrhydroenergo”
🔺 Restoration of the Kakhovskaya HPP will cost $1 billion and may last 5 years.
🔺 The reservoir will be activated to the “dead point”, when the leak will stop, in about 4 days. 🔺 Regarding the Zaporizhzhya NPP, the situation is under control, catastrophic consequences are not expected.
🔺 Most of the three regions, Kherson, Mykolaiv, and Zaporizhzhya, will remain without water.
🔺 According to approximate estimates, 35-37 villages will be flooded. [of 80]
🔺 According to calculations, in 7-10 days all the water that arrived will go further into the sea.
🖼 https://twitter.com/PointlessWar/status/1666124340134281220?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @Kasparov63 I said in 2014 that Putin would try to destroy Ukraine if he could not control it. He is losing and lashing out, but allowing him to win would be far worse. The only response is to help Ukraine achieve victory and territorial integrity asap.
⋙ 🐣 RT @Gerashchenko_en Russia blowing up Kakhovka NPP is an act of terrorism that will have long-lasting negative effects not just on Ukraine but the whole world.
The South of Ukraine is one of the main global agricultural areas. The destruction of the HPP will flood the lands, destroy the irrigation system – less food will be grown, and exported, deepening the global food crisis. Russia will be able to continue blackmailing the world with food terrorism as one of the leading food exporters.
This could have devastating effects on Ukrainian economy – food is one of our main exports. The costs of restoration will be enormous. Tens of thousands more people will become IDPs.
The North-Crimean canal will dry out, leaving Crimea without drinking water. This means that when Crimea returns to Ukraine, it will be a disaster zone, just like Donbas. ¤ Terrorist state is committing genocide right before our eyes. The consequences will be felt for decades.
The world must acknowledge Russia as a terrorist state. Ukrainian Armed Forces must receive everything and anything to ensure a sustainable Ukrainian victory and stopping Russia as a global threat to humanity.
🐣 RT @IuliiaMendel @ZelenskyyUa told about the Kakhovska HPP blow up by Russians at the B-9 Summit in Slovakia. The Bucharest Nine is a Polish-Romanian initiative launched in 2015 that aims to help exchange views and coordinate positions on the security of NATO’s eastern-flank countries. ¤ It brings together Poland, Romania, Lithuania, Bulgaria, Estonia, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Latvia, and Slovakia. @jensstoltenberg @ZuzanaCaputova @AndrzejDuda @prezidentpavel @GitanasNauseda @KlausWe47855967
💽 [tr] https://twitter.com/IuliiaMendel/status/1666055171179266050?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @Maks_NAFO_FELLA October 20, 2022. ¤ Zelensky warns that the invaders are mining the units and the dam of the Kakhovska hydroelectric power station and asks to send an international observation mission there..Thank you UN and all the other wonderful organizations…
🐣 RT @mfa_russia Russian MFA Spox Maria #Zakharova: On October 21, 2022, Russia’s Ambassador to the UN sent a letter to the UN Secretary General regarding Kiev regime’s plans to destroy the Kakhovskaya hydroelectric dam. ¤ Here is a question for @antonioguterres: what has been done?
[TextLink:] https://twitter.com/mfa_russia/status/1666038487546560514?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @Faytuks Russian sources don’t seem that sad that the Nova Kakhovka dam is destroyed. ¤ Fighterbomber: “The more problems crests have, the easier it is for us. In general, the collapse of the dam from a military point of view suggests that for some time downstream there will be no offensive operations and we can spend this time eliminating the counterattack” https://t.me/fighter_bomber/12620
[TextLink:] https://twitter.com/Faytuks/status/1665965984560164865?s=20/photo/1
It is clear that the main news today will be Kakhovskaya HPP. It is clear that crests [“khokols”] will blame us for its destruction without bothering with any proofs. But. Personally, Iam in favor of demolishing everything that is needed there.
Hydroelectric power station, nuclear power plant, thermal power plant, Chernihiv, Bankovaya, pipelines and other dry cargo ships and in general everything that we can hit today with conventional weapons. For tomorrow it will all have to be beaten with a nuclear.
The more problems crests have, the easier it is for us. In general, the collapse of the dam from a military point of view suggests that there will be no offensive actions downstream for some time and we can spend this time eliminating the counterattack, which has finally begun and calmly burn the Leopards, than, in fact, aviation is now busy. And aviation is there to hu me.
The crests spent the night as planned, in air alerts, while the work of the Kyiv “Patriota” was not noted by subscribers.
The so far unfinished “Patriot” in Zhuliany worked on long-range targets with an incomprehensible result, but it is clear that at least one rocket went off right at the exit from the launcher, I hope with a good result.
In general, while enjoying morning coffee, we are enjoying the hysteria of crests at the hydroelectric power station and are waiting for a video of the work of a couple of dozen UMPCs in only one fortified area
🐣 RT @KateGoesTech As a result of today’s terrorist act Crimea will have water access problems for decades ¤ Why is that interesting? ¤ Because Nazis know they won’t be able to hold Crimea another year
🌎 https://twitter.com/KateGoesTech/status/1666008488701485065?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @tvtoront Zelenskyy after the NSDC meeting: ¤ This night at 02:50 🇷🇺 terrorists carried out an internal detonation of the Kakhovska HPP structures. About 80 settlements are in the flooding zone. ¤ 1/2
⋙ 🐣 RT @tvtoront It was authorized to carry out evacuation from risk areas and to provide drinking 💧 to all cities and villages that were supplied from the Kakhovka reservoir. ¤ 💬We do everything to save people. All services, military, Government, Office are involved – President Zelenskyy. 2/2
🐣 RT @AlexBondODUA What ruzzia did with Nova Kakhovka is comparable in scale to the use of nuclear weapons. ¤ I don’t understand what moscow has to do to make the world community realize that this cancer needs to be strangled. ¤ Need a complete embargo on all Russian goods!
💽 🌎 https://twitter.com/AlexBondODUA/status/1666000391383703552?s=20/photo/1
// model of flooding from Nova Kakhovka dam
🐣 RT @kromark Not only important what happens to the areas down the stream, but up the stream too – and not because of the ZNPP, which reactors are shut down for months now and cold, but for agriculture and economy first and foremost with water levels going low. To be short, it’s a disaster.
🐣 RT @BasedWarszawa A reminder that the russians have a history of destroying dams. In August 1941 the NKVD blew up a dam in Zaporizhzhya, killing tens of thousands of innocent Ukrainian civilians. For decades the tragedy was hidden and unacknowledged.
⋙ 🐣 RFERL (2013): Ukrainian Activists Draw Attention To Little-Known WWII Tragedy https://tinyurl.com/5n7n94nn
// 8/23/2023
🐣 RT @AleksandrX13 People from the russian-occupied areas hit by the flood say that in many places the orcs are sitting on trees and screaming as the waters rise. ¤ It seems they underestimated the scale of the disaster they caused. Their fortifications are underwater. And I wonder just how much, in terms of supplies, arms, and heavy guns, they have lost.
⋙ 🐣 RT @AleksandrX13 The russians in the flooded areas are in a complete panic, being much more hit by the disaster than even Ukrainians in these areas – it seems they had no idea, when they destroyed the dam, of the forces they were unleashing!
NYT: Poland Isn’t the Friend the West Thinks It Is https://tinyurl.com/ha43f5s5 “[T]he countries most muscular in their defense of Ukraine are those affected by the 1939 Nazi-Soviet pact …. Theirs is a solidarity based on the trauma of Russian imperialism”
[…] That fear is what undergirds the country’s response to the war. Poland’s modern history — annexed, subordinated and occupied — is one of a recurrent loss of independence. This tragic inheritance, never far away, explains the government’s energetic response to the war in Ukraine: The future must not repeat the past. And it’s not just Poland. A glance at the map is enough to see that the countries most muscular in their defense of Ukraine are those affected by the 1939 Nazi-Soviet pact, which exposed Finland, the Baltic States and Romania, along with Poland, to the depredations of conquering armies. Theirs is a solidarity based on the trauma of Russian imperialism.
The United States should take note. In February, on the anniversary of the invasion, President Biden spoke in front of the Royal Castle in Warsaw. After praising Poland as one of the United States’ “great allies,” Mr. Biden stressed the importance of defending freedom and democracy. It was a powerful speech. But freedom and democracy do not, in this part of the world, necessarily go hand in hand. Just look at the fact that the Law and Justice party, despite government scandals and sky-high inflation, sits comfortably at around 35 percent in the polls.
The party’s newly burnished international image as steadfast friend to Ukraine only helps to entrench such support. The government can plausibly present itself as the guarantor of security, both at home and abroad, underwritten by Western backing. Along with countries like India, Turkey and Rwanda, Poland may become part of the jigsaw of not-so-liberal friends of the West, helping to consolidate opposition to Russia and China. This process is happening for the convenience of the West — but not in adherence to its values.
It doesn’t have to be this way. The United States, for one, exerts considerable influence in Poland. If Mr. Biden, whose two visits to the country in the past year were major events, spoke out against the government’s domestic behavior, it would send a powerful message to party leaders. What’s more, Washington could make financial assistance — last year, the United States invested $288.6 million in Poland’s military — conditional on compliance with democratic standards and the rule of law. It might not work immediately: The European Union’s withholding of post-pandemic recovery funds to protest the government’s violation of judicial independence hasn’t reversed that slide. But it would show Poland’s illiberals that they can’t just do as they please.
🔆 This❗️⋙ WaPo: Major Ukrainian dam damaged, threatening southern areas with flooding https://tinyurl.com/ypprt2d7 “Both Russia and Ukraine have previously accused each other of plotting to destroy the dam, without providing evidence”
🌎 https://twitter.com/Auriandra/status/1665985565345325059?s=20/photo/1
⭕ 5 Jun 2023
Remember this? ➔ Reuters (Oct 21, 2022): Factbox: Is the Kakhovka dam in Ukraine about to be blown? https://tinyurl.com/32bpxzts
// 10/21/2022
🐣 RT @TimothyDSnyder “Russia issues an unending stream of nuclear threats. In the West today… these are discussed in psychological rather than strategic terms… When Russians talk about nuclear war, the safest response is to ensure their very conventional defeat.”
⋙ NYT, Timothy Snyder: Putin Is Fighting, and Losing, His Last War https://tinyurl.com/5n6ew795
🐣 RT @ AntiToxicPeople LOL
[TextLink:] https://twitter.com/AntiToxicPeople/status/1665878518692220929?s=20/photo/1
[Text:] @realDonaldTrump Ty Cobb is a disgruntled former Lawyer, who represented me long ago, and knows absolutely nothing about the Boxes Hoax being perpetrated upon me by the DOJ for purposes of interfering with the upcoming 2024 Presidential Election, where I am substantially leading all “comers, including Republicans and Democrats. His words are angry, nasty, and libelous, only because I did not continue using him (and paying him), and for good reason. He will be held legally responsible for his false statements!
🐣 RT @Maks_NAFO_FELLA Prigozhin attack Konashenkov 👀👀👀🐸🤜🏻🐍
[TextLink:] /https://twitter.com/Maks_NAFO_FELLA/status/1665863388507914245?s=20photo/1
Viktorovich Prigozhin commented on the MoD report: <<| think Baron Munchausen is resting. And judging by what is written here, we will soon get to the aliens with such losses. To destroy one and a half thousand people, it must be such a massacre, per day, over 150 kilometers, that motherdo not grieve. Therefore, I think that this is just fromthe realm of wild, sloppy fantasy. In general, you need to add up all the numbers that Konashenkov gives. ¤ I think that we have just destroyed the entire planet Earth 5 timess.>>
↥ ↧
🐣 RT @NOELreports Russian state media RIA Novosti about the events in Donetsk region. ¤ “The total losses of Ukrainian troops amounted to more than 1,500 personnel, 28 tanks, including 8 Leopards made in Germany, 3 wheeled tanks AMX-10 made in France and 109 armored fighting vehicles”.
NYT, Paul Krugman: The Eyes of the World Are Upon Ukraine https://tinyurl.com/2tseysrn ‘If Ukraine’s counteroffensive succeeds, the forces of democracy will be strengthened around the world, not least in America. If it fails, it will be a disaster for Ukraine and for the world’
// entire: “If Ukraine’s counteroffensive succeeds, the forces of democracy will be strengthened around the world, not least in America. If it fails, it will be a disaster not just for Ukraine but for the world”
🧵 RT @TimInHonolulu 1. When #45 met with Russian spies in the Oval Office it was reported he burned an Israeli asset in Raqqa, a city that at the time was a focus of my reporting. I then took the time to examine the facts and the issue of whether POTUS had the power to declassify the Israeli asset.
📌 🖼 https://twitter.com/TimInHonolulu/status/1665840725014216705?s=20
// photo of Trump with Russians in office
WaPo: Trump-funded studies disputing election fraud are focus in two probes https://tinyurl.com/7h2vs6ps “The research is likely to be used as the prosecutors try to build a broader case, alleging racketeering, according to the three people”
// The then-president’s campaign hired two firms to prove voter fraud, but none was ever found
WaPo: Ukrainian forces claim advances along front line; Russia says it repelled attack in Donetsk https://tinyurl.com/2xby9zbs
🧵 RT @TheStudyofWar Russian and Ukrainian officials are signaling the start of the Ukrainian #counteroffensive. ISW has observed increased combat activity in different sectors of the frontline and assesses that Ukrainian forces are making territorial gains despite Russian claims to the contrary.⬇️
📌 https://twitter.com/TheStudyofWar/status/1665763741407772672?s=20
[ThreadReader:] https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1665763741407772672.html
2/ The signals include Russian MoD claims that Ukrainian forces launched an unsuccessful “large-scale offensive” on June 4 & Ukrainian Deputy Defense Minister Hanna Malyar’s June 5 statement that Ukrainian forces are “transferring to offensive actions” in some unspecified areas.
3/ Russian officials have historically immediately claimed that Ukrainian counter-offensives failed even when the counter-offensives ultimately succeed.
4/ @TheStudyofWar has indeed observed an increase in combat activity in different sectors of the frontline but will not speculate about or forecast the intent, weighting, or focus of Ukrainian counter-offensive operations.
5/ ISW will assess the outcome of Ukrainian counter-offensive operations when it can do so without compromising Ukrainian operational security, in accordance with ISW policy.
6/ A successful counteroffensive operation may take days, weeks, or even months before its outcome becomes fully clear, during which time Russian sources may falsely claim to have defeated it
.
🐣 RT @ZelenskyyUa Although the global trend is clear – Russia will lose this war, Russia’s rulers continue to deny reality. […]
💽 https://twitter.com/ZelenskyyUa/status/1665813669865742336?s=20/photo/1
They continue to try to deceive the world, to circumvent sanctions, to produce more weapons, to ensure more resources and people are spent on this aggression… We are preparing our steps, new steps to further limit Russia’s military potential. Everyone in the world who helps the terrorist state circumvent sanctions in one way or another, everyone in the world whom Russia uses for the supply of weapons, components, equipment… Each such entity must feel the full force of the free world. And we will ensure this. It is a common task of the world to stop terror. And the main prerequisite for fulfilling this task is to stop any ways in which terrorists are still trying to get something for themselves. More news to come soon.
FactCheck[.]org (2022): The Facts on ‘De-Nazifying’ Ukraine https://tinyurl.com/342ec3b7 “A statement signed by more than 300 historians who study genocide, Nazism & World War II said Putin’s rhetoric about de-Nazifying fascists among Ukraine’s elected leadership is ‘propaganda’”
WaPo: Trump lawyers ask Justice Dept. not to charge Trump in classified docs case https://tinyurl.com/5utzc6x8
// High-stakes meeting included special counsel Jack Smith, who is leading probe of Trump’s conduct, possible obstruction
🐣 RT @ChuckPfarrer BAKHMUT AXIS /1920 UTC 5 JUN/UKR forces have initiated multi-pronged offensive actions in the Bakhmut AO. UKR states it troops have advanced 200-1600 meters at Orikhovo-Vasylivka and Paraskoviivka, approximately 100-meters at Ivanivske, and 700 meters at Klischiivka.
🌎 https://twitter.com/ChuckPfarrer/status/1665798504545918982?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @LucasADWebber The White House said on Monday that actions by China in the Taiwan Strait and South China Sea reflect a “growing aggressiveness” by Beijing’s military that raises the risk of an error where someone gets hurt https://tinyurl.com/2s3kabv4
🐣 RT @nytimes The decision by some Ukrainian soldiers to wear patches with Nazi icons threatens to reinforce Russian propaganda used to justify the invasion. It also could give the symbols mainstream life after the West’s decades-long efforts to eliminate them.
⋙ NYT: Nazi Symbols on Ukraine’s Front Lines Highlight Thorny Issues of History https://tinyurl.com/3xu7m6pn
// Troops’ use of patches bearing Nazi emblems risks fueling Russian propaganda and spreading imagery that the West has spent a half-century trying to eliminate.
⋙⋙ 🐣 This article is ignorant of Ukrainian history and culture and much more concerned about the ADL than Jews living in Ukraine. Ukraine is multi-cultural and diverse with a painful history it has only been free to explore for 25 years. They are also fighting for their existence.
⋙⋙ 🐣 If you want to learn how bafflingly complex and horrible the 19th & 20th were in Eastern Europe, read ”Bloodlands” by Timothy Snyder and realize most memories of these horrors were suppressed by the USSR, only coming to light with Glastnost
🐣 RT @EeldenDen Ukrainians fight to be part of Europe instead of Russia.. They fight for the European way of life. It sorts the wheat from the chaff, the true from the traitor. It unites liberals, nationalists, progressives and conservatives. All fighting for Europe
🐣 RT @ChuckPfarrer VELYKA NOVOSILKA/ 1820 UTC 5 JUN/ UKR has likely initiated its long-awaited offensive. Despite early RU claims of rebuffing a Ukrainian attack, it is assessed that UKR units have now consolidated a lodgment in the village of Novodonetske. Developing. https://archive.ph/hCZ5k
🌎 https://twitter.com/ChuckPfarrer/status/1665787457734836234?s=20/photo/1
CREW (Msy 26): Donald Trump is likely to be indicted soon related to classified documents at Mar-a-Lago. Here’s what he may be charged with. https://tinyurl.com/2p833jww
🐣 RT @ AntiToxicPeople Oh my god. Full meltdown mode 🫢🤪🍿
[TextLink:] https://twitter.com/AntiToxicPeople/status/1665759493832216576?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @realDonaldTrump HOW CAN DOJ POSSIBLY CHARGE ME, WHO DID NOTHING WRONG, WHEN NO OTHER PRESIDENT’S WERE CHARGED, WHEN JOE BIDEN WON’T BE CHARGED FOR ANYTHING, INCLUDING THE FACT THAT HE HAS 1,850 BOXES, MUCH OF IT CLASSIFIED, AND SOME DATING BACK TO HIS SENATE DAY WHEN EVEN DEMOCRAT SENATORS ARE SHOCKED. ALSO, PRESIDENT CLINTON HAD DOCUMENTS, AND WON IN COURT. CROOKED HILLARY DELETED 33,000 EMAILS, MANY CLASSIFIED, AND WASN’T EVEN CLOSE TO BEING CHARGED! ONLY TRUMP – THE GREATEST WITCH HUNT OF ALL TIME!
🐣 RT @SecBlinken The Kremlin continues covert efforts to destabilize democratic countries via malign influence operations. Today, we are designating seven members of a Russian intelligence-linked group, and one entity, for their role in destabilization operations in Moldova.
🐣 RT @trajaykay 🇬🇧🇺🇦🔱 President Zelensky meets with foreign secretary of the United Kingdom, in Kyiv today. ¤ Very touching words from James Cleverly 🔱 Zelensky official I had a meeting with Secretary of State for Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Affairs of the United Kingdom James Cleverly
⋙ 🐣 RT @trajaykay During the meeting, we discussed important topical issues: Ukraine’s expectations from the NATO Summit in Vilnius, promotion of the Ukrainian Peace Formula and preparation of the Global Summit on its implementation, as well as the London International Conference on the
⋙ 🐣 RT @trajaykay Reconstruction of Ukraine. ¤ We are very grateful for the support that the UK has provided and continues to provide to Ukraine. In recent weeks, we have held talks with the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom. There was a direct dialogue and very important agreements were reached
🐣 RT @costareports BREAKING: Trump’s lawyers just spotted by @CBSNews entering the Justice Department, per @RobLegare who is on site… comes as sources tell me the special counsel is moving toward a charging decision in the classified documents case
⋙ 🐣 RT @costareports Sources tell @CBSNews that Trump’s lawyers are expected to raise concerns about how prosecutors have handled atty-client questions during the grand jury but there is no sign the special counsel is going to waver from how he and his team have handled the crime-fraud exception…
🐣 RT @RALee85 Khodakovsky and other Russian channels said that Russian communications went down before Ukraine’s assault yesterday. Kots also posted about Ukrainian EW jamming Russian comms. …
🐣 RT @ ivanastradner Several Russian radio stations were hacked and played a fake President Vladimir Putin speech announcing an invasion from Kyiv’s troops and emergency measures in three regions bordering Ukraine. [link]
🐣 RT @WarFrontline 🚨#Breaking, Chystopillia, Zaporizhzhya. Ukrainian soldiers behind enemy lines.👀‼️💪🏼 ¤ North of Tokmak ¤ Follow for more🍿
🐣 RT @FP #BREAKING US won’t let Iran get nuclear weapons, Sec. of State Blinken reiterates at pro-Israel lobby
🐣 RT @DenesTorteli Ukrainian deputy defence minister Hanna Maliar: [Bakhmut] “What is happening now? We are continuing the defense that we started on February 24, 2022. The defense operation includes everything, including counteroffensive actions. Therefore, in some areas we are moving to offensive actions. In particular, the Bakhmut direction remains the epicenter of hostilities. We are moving on a fairly broad front there. We are making progress. We occupy the dominant heights. The enemy is on the defensive, trying to hold their positions. In the south, the enemy is on the defensive. Local battles continue. Why are the Russians actively launching information about a counteroffensive? Because they need to divert attention from their defeat in the Bakhmut sector.” https://t.me/annamaliar/813
🐣 RT @michaeldweiss Already the whirr of the back pedal, after months of anonymous quotes to major news outlets stating the exact opposite: “American and European military officials advising Ukraine say that Russia’s defensive lines could be more fragile than thought”:
⋙ 🐣 RT @michaeldweiss Also significant: “But although the 23rd and 31st brigades have benefited from Western equipment, they are not among the nine Western-supplied and trained brigades that Ukraine has built up over the last six months for the purposes of spearheading an offensive.”
// so Russians are falling to regular troops, not the special brigades
@McFaul @ Arestovich clearly has vision for Ukraine. He has a revolutionary spirit that reminds me of our Founders in those heady days. He recently worked for Zelensky. He seems like a person who might need a mentor (to avoid pitfalls) & friends. You know best 🙂
🐣 RT @arestovych In the end we have five tasks (2+3):
¤ https://twitter.com/arestovych/status/1665690214197493763?s=20/
[Translated from Ukrainian by Google]
1. During the thirty years of independence, the most immoral types managed to form a System that is used for non-market exploitation of the country and people.
Scum won in Ukraine. ¤ They set the rules and seized most of the assets.
This System must be destroyed. ¤ Honest people must win. ¤ Morality must return to politics.
We have to destroy not only the deep state of circular bail, where judges can beat people with impunity, sons “decided” to rape female classmates, and law enforcement officers – make business a nightmare, but also the very possibility of its reproduction anew.
To build a new System that will support, strengthen and raise human creativity, entrepreneurship, and potential. ¤ This is the key to our survival. ¤ The old system, in the face of a foreign policy threat, will kill Ukraine, because it not only raped our past, not only drains the present, but also takes away resources for the future, destroys it.
2. Defend Freedom and approve it as a national idea and practice.
Any decision at any level should be selected according to the criterion – does it expand the rights and opportunities of citizens or not?
Restrictions are allowed only temporarily and exclusively in the interests of national security.
Freedom is a basic condition. ¤ Only freedom can unleash true Ukrainian potential, and when we provide the conditions for its growth, the world will gasp. ¤ I am sure that even we still do not know the full strength of our potential. ¤ But the deep state kills him every day.
3. Return the state to the state.
You do not own the state today. ¤ The state does not perform state functions properly. ¤ The state does not guarantee a citizen development and future, protection and opportunities. Moreover, she often takes them away or destroys them.
The state is stretched across political beds, corrupt, corrupt, ineffective. ¤ Instead of protecting and promoting national interests and creating conditions for the prosperity of the citizen, the state is mainly geared to pumping out money, black money.
The state must be cleansed and saved. ¤ It must gain independence from any influence other than the collective will of its citizens. ¤ This is a huge task and it must be done.
4. Return the state to the people.
The state rarely helps a person today. ¤ The main feeling of a citizen from communicating with the state is, for the most part, humiliation. ¤ The state mainly subverts, exploits and uses a person. ¤ Or remains indifferent.
To overthrow the state of the people means to make the state a friend of man. ¤ The main assistant of a citizen in his affairs.
The state should work for the protection, support and development of people, people, society, culture, economy. ¤ Special services and law enforcement officers should not mock business, but work to promote its economic interests – in the country and abroad. ¤ A person should go to the state as a reliable assistant and deputy. ¤ This is what it means to “return the state to the people.”
5. Return the people of history.
God has partially completed this task for us. ¤ He pulled us into the Great History by the hair, despite (perhaps) our desire. ¤ Our task is to be worthy of it.
The alpha sign of a Ukrainian in the world should be freedom and dignity. ¤ Dignity and freedom should flow from us, we should distribute this Wi-Fi to others. ¤ We have to go beyond local consciousness and start playing games on a global scale, making moves across the entire chessboard.
The Ukrainian victory shocked the world. ¤ Ukrainian culture, our civilization heritage should impress him. ¤ The world has lost its way today, new light, a new future and a new way of the world are the work of Ukrainians. ¤ Our business.
But the world will not believe us until we can accomplish this task for ourselves.
⋙ 🐣 magnificent vision for Ukraine — and the free world ¤ I envy your opportunity to start afresh, despite the high price you must pay ¤ do the work, don’t let your vision be dimmed, but treat weakness with gentleness and failures as opportunities ¤ and bring the world along with you: teach us!
🐣 RT @wartranslated Khodakovsky claims Ukraine is stepping up efforts in the Vuhledar area, says first Leopards were sighted:
“The situation on Novodonets’ke and to the left towards Velika Novosilka is difficult – the enemy, having felt our weak points, is stepping up his efforts. For the first time we saw leopards in our tactical area. As I expected yesterday – having a sense of success, the enemy will throw additional forces into the battle. Only in the area of Novodonets’ke recorded up to thirty units of armored vehicles.”
🐣 RT @Gerashchenko_en A Russian media claims: ¤ “Putin stopped receiving bad news reports, especially about the war, because of his “extremely irritated” reaction to those reports.
¤ https://twitter.com/Gerashchenko_en/status/1665676212516057089?s=20
According to an insider familiar with the situation, Putin reacted to reports containing the actual situation in the following manner: he irritatedly told the reporter that he [reporter] was currently under the influence of “Western propaganda” and was “thickening the clouds” in its wake, while Putin himself had more reliable information from other sources which did not coincide with the information provided by the rapporteurs. The journalist then would be dropped out of the list of people who have access to the Russian president for a long time. But those who reported only successes had permanent access, and defeats and failures were reduced to petty nuisances of no significance.
The source says that at this point Putin simply stopped receiving “bad news” because the president does not want to hear it.”
🐣 RT @Gerashchenko_en “Troops are withdrawing slowly, it’s a shame! Shoigu, Gerasimov, I urge you, come to the front, raise the army with pistols, so that they can march forward. Come on, you can do it! And if you can’t, you’ll die as heroes!” – terrorist Prigozhin blames Russian military leadership for new defeats near Bakhmut.
💽 https://twitter.com/Gerashchenko_en/status/1665663582887968768?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @EuromaidanPress Ukraine managed to retake back territory in southern Bakhmut and secure two settlements on the southern front. As well, Russia loses 200 square kilometers of territory in the Belgorod Oblast to pro-Ukrainian insurgents.
⋙ EuromaidanPress: Frontline report: Ukrainians secure foothold in Bakhmut and on the southern front https://tinyurl.com/yc56wt9w “So far, this was merely a reconnaissance-in-force operation, as the assault units were very light”
CNN: Exclusive: Ukraine has cultivated sabotage agents inside Russia and is giving them drones to stage attacks, sources say https://tinyurl.com/yckpmusc
🐣 RT @KadirHama #russia planned massive disinformation campaigns and prepared old combat videos for this purpose. ¤ A reminder for everyone to be on their guard not to amplify any nonsense about a counteroffensive until there’s official confirmation, or you risk spreading russian fakes. #fellas
[TextLink:] https://twitter.com/KadirHama/status/1665620587866193920?s=20/photo/1
[Text:] STRATCOM of the Armed Forces of Ukraine / AFU StratCom
! WARNING! The Armed Forces of Ukraine warns of a loss. The Russian occupying forces are intensifying their informational and psychological operations.
Russian telegram channels and social networks are planning to intensify the spread of unreliable information about the combat operations of the Armed Forces of Ukraine. And of their own formations. In order to demoralize Ukrainians and introduce delusion of the community (including one’s own population) Russian propagandists will spread unreliable information about the counteroffensive, its directions and losses of the Ukrainian army. Even if there is no counterattack. For this, old videos and photos have been prepared, which show damaged vehicles, dead and captured. And also other fake materials.
! We remind you that reliable information can be obtained only from the operational reports of the General Staff, strategic communications structures and from designated official speakers of the Defense Forces and the Armed Forces of Ukraine.
🐣 RT @JayinKyiv Russian Defense Ministry says Ukrainian counter offensive has begun. ¤ Judging from the panic I’m seeing on Russian military channels, they are right. ¤ This will be an absolute massacre.
⭕ 4 Jun 2023
🐣 RT @WarFrontline 🚨Several 🇷🇺 Z military channels, such as 🇷🇺 channel RVvoenkor here, are now also reporting several AFU 🇺🇦 breakthroughs at the front lines, and that the attacks and advance continue. The signs of the current success of the AFU 🇺🇦 offensive are becoming clearer and clearer.‼️🔥👀
🐣 RT @SuperCola_3 I made a small video showing Ukraine from more peaceful times, you know, before the rushistZ came. ¤ I don’t really know how to edit, but Ukraine is so f*cking beautiful I think it turned out kinda okay. ¤ Hope you enjoy it.
💽 🖼 https://twitter.com/SuperCola_3/status/1665414203371397120?s=20/photo/1
🐣📋 RT @KyivIndependent Danilov: Ukraine lost 7.5 times fewer troops than Russia in Bakhmut. ¤ Ukraine’s losses in the Battle of Bakhmut were lower than Russia’s by a factor of 7.5, National Security and Defense Council chief Oleksiy Danilov told Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera.
🐣 RT @Faytuks Pro-Russian Wargonzo is reporting a new Ukrainian attack near Velyka Novosilka, Donetsk oblast ¤ “This time the news is much more disturbing. The Armed Forces of Ukraine managed to form a much more serious armored fist” ¤ https://t.me/wargonzo/12962
🌎 https://twitter.com/Faytuks/status/1665584036654243841?s=20/photo/1 -2
[Text:] ⚡️ Urgently ⚡️ The Armed Forces of Ukraine went on the attack again near Velika
Novoselovka ⚡️
This time the news is much more disturbing. ¤ Unlike yesterday’s attack on our positions, which was deployed almost closer to lunch (the enemy began the main offensive operations at about 11:00, this time the neo-Nazis lined up in battle formations around 4:00 in the morning.
The Armed Forces of Ukraine managed to form a much more serious armored fist. Much more equipment is involved than the day before. Only from the Golden Niva about 30 pieces of equipment (mostly NATO-style) advanced to our positions.
The main direction of the strike is the settlement of Novodonetskoye (it stands on the line just somewhere in the middle between Velika Novoselovka and Vugledara). There is evidence that the enemy is trying to enter the village.
There is a tough fight going on. As we wrote earlier, yesterday there was only the first wave. Today’s roll is clearly more powerful. @wargonzo * our project is funded by subscribers, help card 4279 3806 9842 9521
🐣 RT @MuellerSheWrote The grand jury is meeting again this week. His lawyers may meet with DoJ officials this week. LFG!!!
[TextLink:] https://twitter.com/MuellerSheWrote/status/1665522574741102597?s=20/photo/1
[Text:] 🐣 RT @realDonald Trump
Reports are the Marxist Special Prosecutor, DOJ, & FBI, want to Indict me on the BOXES HOAX, despite all of the wrongdoing that they have done for SEVEN YEARS, including SPYING ON MY CAMPAIGN. Biden Crimes go unpunished, including that he had Boxes in Chinatown, in his garage by the “Corvette,” & 1,850 Boxes in Delaware that he won’t allow anyone to see. That is real OBSTRUCTION! They seek retribution for Republicans looking into Biden’s CRIMES!I HAVE DONE NOTHING WRONG. ELECTION INTERFERENCE!
🐣 📋 RT @FellaNafo “Ukraine has now more than twice (!) the number of brigades the US Army had at the end of the Cold War.”
⋙ 🐣 RT @noclador As there seems to be some confusion: ¤ Ukraine’s offensive force is 35 combat brigades, 2 special forces regiments, 1 air assault regiment, 52 rifle battalions, 2 pontoon regiments, 6 artillery brigades, whole bunch of air defense, engineer, reconnaissance, drone, and logistic 1/2
⋙⋙ 🐣 RT @noclador units… while another 86 (!) brigades hold the rest of the front. These 86 brigades are backed by 9 artillery brigades and lots and lots of combat support units. ¤ Ukraine has now more than twice (!) the number of brigades the US Army had at the end of the Cold War. 2/2
⋙⋙⋙ 🐣 RT @DisruptivePoltx What’s the actual difference between a brigade, a battalion, a regiment & a unit?
⋙⋙⋙⋙ 🐣 RT @rltone22 Regiment is a specialized unit about half of a brigade. Brigade is 3-4 battalions. Battalion is 6-8 companies iirc. Company is 100 men
⋙⋙⋙⋙🐣 RT @gr1mrea9er By NATO standards a battalion is about (700-1000 troops), one third to a fifth of a Brigade (3-5000). Two battalions usually counts as a regiment.
A unit is a group having a prescribed size and a specific combat or support role within a larger military organization.
⋙⋙⋙⋙🐣 RT @liberalurbanite A unit can be any size, it’s just a way to call a group or formation of soldiers.
A battalion can consists anywhere between 400-1000 soldiers (3-7 Companies).
A brigade consists of 3-6 battalions and is roughly 3000-5000 in size.
A regiment is an outdated way of organizing 1/2.
⋙⋙⋙⋙⋙ 🐣 RT @liberalurbanite Companies make up battalion, battalions make up regiments, regiments make up brigades (usually). Nowadays a brigade can be made up of multiple battalions (it was the case for US in mid-late Cold War), whilst regiment is just a smaller brigade made up of fewer battalions.
⋙⋙⋙⋙🐣 RT @DannyPunton A unit is any independent group. Generally squad/section->platoon->company->battalion->(regiment or brigade)->division->army.
Sov regiment is smaller than brigade. US only has regiments historically where UK they are one or more permanent battalions and brigade is a task group.
⋙⋙⋙⋙🐣 RT @DmytroVan
Numbers, equipment, capabilities
Battalions have 300 to 900 people, they form regiments, reinforced and better equipped regiment is brigade and has 5000+ personnel
Some brigades in Ukraine now have the amount of personnel of division 9000 or so people
⋙⋙⋙⋙🐣 RT @CrimsonShadowMK
I see a lot of answers about numbers, but the key difference as it pertains to these armies is functional. Brigades have the necessary support elements to operate as an independent unit in a given area. Soviet regiments mostly lack that support internally, and need their ..
⋙⋙⋙⋙ 🐣 RT @NAFOWhiteMouse
Understand all the numbers you are seeing are paper strength. Many 🇷🇺 units started the war under strength esp on infantry. Plus losses erode units unless replacements are sent and if the fighting is hard, there won’t be enough replacements
⋙⋙⋙⋙ 🐣 RT @zappaterrologo
A battalion usually consist of 500-800 soldiers (range: 300-1000). Two or more battallions make a brigad/regiment). The choice between “regiment” and brigade is merely dependent on naming conventions. “Unit” is a very generic term who does not detail the size of the formation.
[TextLink:] https://twitter.com/zappaterrologo/status/1665421809913561091?s=20/photo/1
⋙⋙⋙⋙ 🐣 RT @Victor_Tovikrov Honest answer is it massively differs from army to army and in different time periods.
Brigades / regiments difference is not so much in size, but purpose, for example. Both comprise battalions, but a brigade has a fuller package making it more capable of acting independently.
⋙⋙⋙⋙ 🐣 RT @RedDave14 There is an old rule of thumb:
3 Sections = 1 Platoon
3 Platoons = 1 Company
3 Companies = 1 Battalion
3 Battalions = 1 Regiment
3 Regiments = 1 Brigade
3 Brigades = 1 Division
3 Divisions = 1 Corps
3 Corps = 1 Army
(Armies, eras, locations, all differ)
🐣 RT @TrentTelenko So, Wagner PMC is ambushed by the Russian Army 72nd Brigade. ¤ The Russian Army unit loses the minefield- ambush & it’s 72nd Brigade has a battalion commander captured, beatened, and give a POW confession video. 🤯 ¤ I can’t imagine a story that absurd, let alone write it.
⋙ 🐣 RT @wartranslated PMC Wagner detained and interrogated no other but the commander of the 72nd Brigade, Roman Venevitin. Wagner and the 72nd Brigade shared positions in Bakhmut.
💽 [tr] https://twitter.com/wartranslated/status/1665472757696528386?s=20/photo/1
They detained the man, beat him, broke his nose, and forced to record a video admitting to firing at a car of PMC Wagner due to “personal animosity” towards them.
They accuse him of being drunk while doing so, speaking to him as if he is a subordinate. This is a complete demoralisation of the Russian Armed Forces who should not be any close to tolerating such behaviour of a PMC.
TheHill (2020): The Hill’s review of John Solomon’s columns on Ukraine https://tinyurl.com/yc975m2x
// 2/19/2020; article is a muddle; tags: Russia, election interference, impeachment; Burisma, Giuliani, Shokin, Lutsenko, Yanukovich, Parnas, Firtash, Hunter Biden
The columns focused on a controversy surrounding the Bidens and Ukraine that initially surfaced during the Obama administration. Specifically, the columns raised questions about Hunter Biden working on the board of a Ukrainian energy company called Burisma. When Hunter Biden joined Burisma, Joe Biden was the vice president and point person for U.S. policies on Ukraine. Joe Biden is currently a candidate for the Democratic Party’s 2020 presidential nomination.
President Trump seized on this issue, commenting on it on many occasions. The president asked the government of Ukraine to investigate the Bidens as his administration delayed $391 million of U.S. military aid to the country. Trump has said he was interested in rooting out corruption and that he did not expect nor request any quid pro quo. …
Contradicting assertions in Solomon’s columns, in Politico and in some other media reports, State Department officials, U.S. national security agencies and the Senate Intelligence Committee have concluded that Ukraine did not meddle in the 2016 U.S. presidential election. Russian government officials, who have denied meddling in the 2016 election, have pushed the narrative that Ukraine interfered in that U.S. election. …
The column suggests that Joe Biden was protecting Hunter Biden because Burisma was the subject of a “wide-ranging corruption probe.” That account has been disputed by officials in both Kyiv and Washington and others who maintain the investigation had grown dormant, and that Joe Biden was pushing for Shokin’s removal, not because he was investigating corruption allegations, but because he was neglecting to do so. British officials investigating fraud at Burisma backed this account, dropping a case against the company in early 2015 — months before Joe Biden’s push to remove Shokin — citing a lack of cooperation from the prosecutor general’s office in Kyiv. Furthermore, seeking Shokin’s ouster was the official position of the U.S. and the European Union. The Ukrainian Parliament voted to remove Shokin in 2016. Like Lutsenko, Shokin’s reliability as a source is in question. Shokin was among the figures Solomon interviewed during his research.
Hunter Biden, who had little to no energy expertise at the time he was hired by Burisma, has said it was “poor judgment” to accept the position on Burisma’s board, acknowledging that he likely received the job offer because of his last name. State Department officials also said in impeachment inquiry testimony that they were concerned with Hunter Biden sitting on the company board while Joe Biden was overseeing the U.S. government’s Ukraine policies. …
There has never been any proof of legal wrongdoing by the Bidens. Pressed on the matter in a recent interview, Joe Biden said the Bidens’ dual roles in Ukraine led some to say it set “a bad image.” …
Lutsenko himself in May 2019 said there was no evidence of legal wrongdoing. At the time of Lutsenko’s initial interviews with Solomon in March 2019, there was tension between Lutsenko and Yovanovitch amid official U.S. concerns about Lutsenko’s commitment to anti-corruption efforts.
Aside from Solomon, diGenova and Toensing had other clients with interest in Ukraine. According to Bloomberg, diGenova and Toensing were paid $1 million by a Ukrainian oligarch, Dmitry Firtash, to find negative information on the Bidens. Firtash is fighting extradition to the U.S. on conspiracy charges, and the effort was designed to help win Giuliani’s help in the case, Bloomberg reported. They have also met with Lutsenko, according to The New York Times.
Salon, Sophia McClennon (2022): Why Zelenskyy’s background in comedy really matters https://tinyurl.com/mvkh8drt “The goal of satire is to get the audience to think, to recognize the flaws in the status quo and to see that the sorts of narratives offered by those in power can be changed”
// 3/12/2022; Forget about Paddington for a minute. The comedy that made Zelenskyy famous was also political
[…] Satire is a unique form of comedy, one that relies on creative irony. Here the comedian isn’t getting laughs because they fall down or make someone look silly; they get laughs because they hold up a creative mirror to the absurdities, injustices and abuses of power that govern the world. The goal of satire is to get the audience to think, to recognize the flaws in the status quo and to see that the sorts of narratives offered by those in power can be changed. Using satire to coax the public to think differently is even more essential when the public is being ruled by fear and repression. As Stephen Colbert explains, satire “alleviates fog off of the mind, because when you’re laughing you can’t be afraid. And, when you’re not afraid, you think better. Laughter leads to thinking.
But today’s satire is often not just a comment on the flaws and follies of the world and a call to rethink them. Today’s satirists aren’t simply court jesters. As I’ve explained in relation to the rise of satirists as political actors in the Trump era, there has been a steady increase in satire playing a direct role in political action. Today’s satirists inform and educate the public, run for office, propose legislation and engage in all sorts of political activities.
Earlier, I made the comparison between Kvartal 95’s comedy troupe and The Smothers Brothers. Interestingly, one of the regulars on The Smothers Brothers, Pat Paulsen, also ran for president. But, unlike Zelenskyy, Paulsen’s campaigns were entirely satirical. For example, he ironically would answer any criticism with the catchphrase: “Picky, picky, picky.”
In contrast, Zelenskyy’s campaign might have included plenty of stunts, but it was always sincere. Again, as a point of comparison, we might think of Jon Stewart’s actions to support war veterans, John Oliver’s attack on the coal industry, Samantha Bee’s activism for women’s reproductive rights or Michael Moore’s advocacy for clean water in Flint, Michigan. These are satirical comedians who are very serious about social issues. For them, satire isn’t a distraction from politics; it is politics.
Zelenskyy’s satire is in this same family of using ironic wit to foster political change and using the charisma of comedy to help defend and advance democracy. When asked about the overlaps between his character on “Servant of the People” and his campaign, Zelenskyy explained, “I didn’t invent all this [the show]—I felt all this, I am really feeling all this…It would have been impossible to create it all simply because I am a good actor and because someone wrote it well. We wrote it together, we all lived it together.”
Zelenskyy’s experience traveling across Ukraine as part of the Kvartal 95 troupe meant that he would also have gained a wide understanding of the issues that mattered to the people. Ladygina notes, “Zelenskyy is not performing sincerity because sincerity has been part of his connection with Ukrainians since the late ’90s.” Well before launching the Servant of the People political party, Kvartal 95, for example, had launched a number of social programs, including a campaign to encourage women to get mammograms, and also contributed funds for the Ukrainian military.
The main character of the “Servant of the People” is named Vasily Petrovich Goloborodko. His last name, Goloborodko, offers insight into the satirical wit of the show. Ladygina, a native speaker of Ukrainian and Russian, explains that Goloborodko means “beardless” and symbolizes a man without experience. Choosing that name, then, was an early and obvious sign that the show wanted to position the protagonist — someone from outside the political elite, who could be honest, sincere and committed to a better Ukraine — as what the country needed. But they also knew that having honest outsiders try to fight the Goliaths of corruption, oligarchy, Russian imperialism and international pressures would never be easy.
When we see that Zelenskyy’s comedy repertoire wasn’t just entertaining — it also posed creative ways to think about how to improve the future of Ukraine, and offered a funny look at how hard those changes might be to make — then Zelenskyy’s unwavering commitment to his people makes perfect sense. Just because he is witty, media savvy and pretty good at dancing, doesn’t mean he isn’t serious.
🐣 RT @Apex_WW The United States believes the highly anticipated Ukrainian counteroffensive will result in Kyiv taking back “strategically significant territory,” Jake Sullivan, US President Joe Biden’s national security adviser, said Sunday.
⋙ 🐣 RT @Apex_WW “Exactly how much, in what places, that will be up to developments on the ground as the Ukrainians get this counteroffensive underway,” Sullivan said. “But we believe that the Ukrainians will meet with success in this counteroffensive.”
🐣 RT @Maks_NAFO_FELLA Update : “#Sweden 🇸🇪 complied with Turkey’s demands and has the right to join NATO” – Stoltenberg
Stoltenberg following a meeting with Erdogan, said that he had reached an agreement on a meeting with the participation of Sweden, Turkey and NATO. It is scheduled for June 12th.
💙 🐣 RT @EuromaidanPR The Plans need the Silence, – General Staff of the Armed Forces of Ukraine.
💽 https://twitter.com/EuromaidanPR/status/1665290411399688193?s=20/photo/1
// video of individual troops all giving the “shhhh” sign 🤫
⭕ 3 Jun 2023
🐣 RT @tassagency_en Russian President Vladimir Putin remains open to any contact that would allow meeting the goals of the special military operation through peaceful means, but the West does not provide such a chance, Kremlin Spokesman Dmitry Peskov said: https://bit.ly/43DENAi
⋙ 🐣please define ”the goals of the special military operation” as they stand today ¤ thanks
⋙⋙ 🐣 RT @colinsmith50 Regime change & keeping hold of territory already taken. It’s the equivalent of a burglar offering to stop burgling as long as the householders agree to give away the deeds, permits the thief to keep everything he’s stolen & pays burglar for his time & loss of equipment.
🐣 RT @albafella1 Head of PMC “Wagner” terrorist Prigozhin promised to avenge the dead residents of the Belgorod People’s Republic:
“Why did we take Bakhmut and rename it Artemovsk? Why are tens of thousands of people, our Russian guys, dying, moving towards the West? In order for us to start giving away, step by step, pieces of the Belgorod region, our primordially Russian land? Why is everyone silent about the death of these civilians? Where is General Lapin? Where is Shoigu? Where is Gerasimov? Where are their explanations to the Russian people? Tell us their names and surnames, tell us the place and date where the burial will be, so that we can take off our hats and honor their memory, and then decide how and when we will take revenge,” — he says
🐣 RT @TreasChest The counteroffensive of the Armed Forces will be impressive and will reach its climax in the first three to four days, — former director of the CIA, General David Petraeus, on BBC Radio 4.
“I have a feeling that they will achieve the effect of a combination of different types of weapons, that is, they will successfully conduct a combined operation, when there are sappers who overcome obstacles and neutralize minefields, moving forward; armored vehicles that follow them are protected by infantry from anti-tank missiles; anti-aircraft defenses that keep Russian aircraft as far away as possible; electronic warfare equipment that jams their radio networks; logistics that follow directly behind them; artillery and mortars that precede them. This will inevitably lead to a culmination of forward unit attacks in the first 72-96 hours.” Petraeus said.
He also noted that Ukraine will eventually block Russia’s land access to Crimea and begin the “process of isolation” of the peninsula. Despite this, Petraeus expressed doubt that the liberation of Crimea will take place in this counteroffensive.
“But if the Ukrainians can start isolating Crimea, I think it will very, very significantly change the dynamics of the war,” the American general added. #counteroffensive_ukraine http://ZN.UA
🐣 RT @ SamRamani2 The Wagner Group says it is ready to defend Belgorod if the Russian Defence Ministry doesn’t do its duty ¤ Yevgeny Prigozhin claims Wagner will enter Belgorod even without an official Kremlin invitation
😅 RT @PaulaChertok DeSantis is the Joke of “Woke” warrior now – actually channeling Churchill who (checks note) fought an actual war, and *against* fascists not for them. #DeJokeOfWoke #DeFascist #NoThanks
⋙ 🐣 RT @Acyn DeSantis: As president, I recognize that the woke mind virus represents a war on the truth so we will wage a war on the woke. We will fight the woke in education, we will fight the woke in corporations, we will fight the woke in the halls of congress.
💽 https://twitter.com/Acyn/status/1665086349483835392?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @igorsushko Some weeks ago Putin’s Kremlin propaganda ‘killed’ Ukraine’s top general, Zaluzhny, now they ‘killed’ general Budanov, head of Ukraine’s Defense Intelligence Agency, GUR. ¤ The situation is certainly unraveling for Russia both in the information space and on the ground.
🐣 RT @Mollyploofkins Magadonians?
[TextLink:] https://twitter.com/Mollyploofkins/status/1664740480431579137?s=20/photo/1
[Text:] 🐣 RT @realDonaldTrump WE ARE MAGADONIANS, WE ARE VERY SMART, WE STICK TOGETHER AS ONE, WE FOLLOW TRUTH SOCIAL, WE PUT “AMERICA FIRST,” AND WE WILL “MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!”
🐣 RT @realDonaldTrump FOX SHOULD EMBRACE MAGA. THEIR PRIMETIME VIEWERSHIP IS DOWN 37% FROM JUST A YEAR AGO, ALL BECAUSE THE VERY SMART, EVEN BRILLIANT, MAGADONIANS KNOW THAT, DESPITE ALL THE FAKE LIP SERVICE, FOXNEWS IS PUSHING RON DESANCTUS, OR ANYONE ELSE FOR THAT MATTER, BECAUSE THEY HATE THE GREATEST “AMERICA FIRST” PRESIDENT TO EVER PUT ON A SUIT AND TIE, ME. THEY ARE ALL GLOBALISTS, AND GLOBALISTS WILL NEVER, MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!!!
🐣 RT @nexta_tv Russia has failed to achieve any of the goals that Putin set at the beginning of the “Special Military Operation. This was stated by First Deputy Chairman of the State Duma Committee on CIS Affairs, Eurasian Integration and Relations with Compatriots Konstantin Zatulin.
“What were our goals officially declared at the beginning of the Special Military Operation? Denazification, demilitarization, neutrality of Ukraine and protection of the citizens of the Donetsk and Luhansk People’s Republics, who suffered all this time. On which of these points have we achieved results? None of them.
Moreover, some of them are no longer meaningful. For example, the neutrality of Ukraine. What is the sense of making this demand? None at the moment,” said the deputy of Putin’s “United Russia” party.
🐣 RT @S1epanS Some interesting key points from Igor “Strelkov” Girkin’s stream yesterday. Includes his usual pessimism and begging for mobilizations as well as commentary on Transnistria’s fate and the events in Belgorod.
[TextLink:] https://twitter.com/S1epanS/status/1664941308635500544?s=20/photo/1 -2
[ Errors of sofware in reading text, but here’s what it picked up: see linked pdfs if necc ]
[Text:] 1. The raids on Belgorod Oblast are meant to draw away Russian reserves which would otherwise be used to defend against a Ukrainian offensive, most likely to happen in the Zaporozhye direction in the south. Ukraine has not committed large forces to these raids, at most a battalion sized unit. It few brigades, they would easily reach the outskirts of Belgorod. These raids will continue.
2. The only way to prevent these raids, and the incessant artillery bombardment of our border areas, is to go on the offensive and create a Sokm buffer zone on the Ukrainian part of the border, A 30km zone w not be enough due to the range of Ukrainian artillery. However, with our current military capabilities, such an offensive is impossible. That is why Russia should never have retreated fron the Susy and Chernihiv oblasts. the retreat from Kyiv itselt was correct. our forces there would have been encircled and destroyed after the ground froze in spring, similar to our experiences during the 1939 Winter war.
3. the Russian army nas fully ceded the initiative to Ukraine, and are only passively responding to wha[t] Ukraine does. Girkin: “no one has ever won a war o passively responding to the enesy’s actions. The only way co regain chas anaclacive, and therefore win the war, as a cocas nacional mobilizacion, both of soldiers and of industry. However, this is impossible due to
Feudalise” within the armed forces. what as Victory>4. Girkin belloves that “this war w continue unt koy as biberated from lazise and Zelenskyy flees to Jerusalem and his administration to Canada”. He reiterates that this sort of victory w only de possable wach a full nacional mobalazacion, and does now believe chac chas as possiole. hars are not won by cruise missiles. They are won by the boot of the infantryman occupying the enemy’s airfields, artillery posicions and cities
5. The feudalism mentioned earlier is the fact that the RU AF are split into 3 competing factions, each with their own political and military power base: The Ministry of Defense, wagner, and kadyrov. tach represent theanterescs of cafferenc offgarcns, and chear “aging tzar” cripples the time when Russia is losing.
6. Girkin says that Prigozhyn is lying when he says that roads out of Bakhmut were mined in front of him. he admits to disking him. out admits that he and hagner had the “only successes of the winter and soring campaign” when they cook baknmut. aloesc wich large casuaacies. Me says chac baknmuc, aachougn a viccory, was a waste of the resource that is Wagner, and that the PHC should have been committed elsewhere on the front. The rest of the Kussian spring campaign was a costly failure, especially in Avdaivka and Martinka, where no gains were made but heavy losses taken in “meat-wave /cannon fodder assaults with Mobiks and LONR troops.
7. The Ukrainians now enfoy an overall numerical supremacy in terms of troops. They have built up a large for the upcoming counteroffensive due to continuous mobilizations, while on the other hand Russianforces are dangerously depleted. Girkin says “I know I am repeating myself. but we need another [mobilization]
8. Transnistria. Girkin says that Transnistria is doomed, the “Ukrainian Nazis and Moldovan- excuse me. Romanian, nationalists can and will take it. Transnistria could have been taken as far back as last Summer, but [Gi]rkin be heves that the Ukrainians refrained -rom attacking at as blackma[il] to ensure the grain deal. however, an the long cerm, Transastrad and the russian garrason chere are doomed.
🐣 RT @NOELreports “We are ready for the counter offensive. We would like to have more equipment, but we can’t wait any longer. I strongly believe we will win,” Zelenskyi said in an interview with WSJ.
⋙ WSJ: Ukraine’s Zelensky: We Are Ready for Counteroffensive https://tinyurl.com/yn65m5fs
// Ukrainian president also discusses U.S. elections, NATO and China in wide-ranging interview
“I don’t know how long it will take,” he told The Wall Street Journal. “To be honest, it can go a variety of ways, completely different. But we are going to do it, and we are ready.”
In a wide-ranging, hourlong discussion, Zelensky, 45 years old, said he feared U.S. elections next year could bring a less-supportive administration to power and called on the North Atlantic Treaty Organization to offer a clear path to membership for Kyiv.
He also urged China to try to restrain Russia and said Ukraine urgently needed more U.S.-made Patriot missile-defense systems to protect citizens from aerial bombardments and to shield front-line troops.
Zelensky acknowledged Russian air superiority on the front lines and said a lack of protection from Russian air power means “a large number of soldiers will die” in the counteroffensive.
Ukraine would have liked to have more Western-supplied weapons for the coming campaign, he said. Still, Ukraine is ready to move. “We would like to have certain things, but we can’t wait for months,” he said.
Zelensky said Ukraine’s ground forces were “stronger and more motivated” than the dug-in Russian troops trying to hold on to the roughly 20% of Ukraine they control in the country’s east and south.
The counteroffensive is a pivotal moment for Zelensky, a former actor and comedian whose leadership during the war has propelled him to global prominence. The outcome will shape the contours of Western military backing and diplomatic jockeying over Ukraine’s future.
Ukraine’s backers have provided billions in military and financial support that has been essential to Kyiv’s war effort, and calls for Zelensky to seek a peace deal could grow if the counteroffensive fails to deliver a significant breakthrough.
Zelensky veered from expressions of gratitude to Western supporters for weapons deliveries to words of frustration over their reluctance to give Ukraine greater quantities of powerful arms to fend off the Russians.
His statements reflected the balance he must find between pressing to get what he needs to retain Ukraine’s independence and domestic political support while not pushing allies too far and eroding their backing.
Zelensky said he was aware that Western leaders sometimes take offense at his harsh tone, but couldn’t understand why, in his view, they were drip-feeding more-advanced arms that they know would protect lives and help Ukraine win. ¤ If Ukraine isn’t able to withstand Russia, Zelensky said, “that animal, that beast will develop a taste” for conquest and go further.
“Let’s not compare who should be grateful to whom,” he said.
Zelensky spoke at a government residence after a day visiting wounded soldiers, meeting military commanders and visiting the port to discuss how to increase exports. Wearing a black T-shirt emblazoned with his country’s name, he looked a touch weary, but perked up when asked how he keeps his spirits up.
“There is no place for weakness,” he said. …
Biden has an emotional attachment to Ukraine that has underpinned his administration’s support for the country, Zelensky said. Trump’s presidency came before the full-scale invasion, and “I’m not sure how Trump would have acted,” he said.
Still, Ukraine’s president said he was encouraged by bipartisan support in the U.S. and the backing of ordinary citizens, and hoped that both parties and Congress would continue to support Ukraine and pressure any new administration to keep up flows of assistance.
A more immediate concern for Zelensky is to secure a clear path to NATO membership at a summit in Vilnius, Lithuania, in July. … …
🐣 RT @wartranslated Russian reporter Sladkov, who is known for his reassuring posts, says the Russian army is completely lacking counter-battery fire, and notifies of “unpleasant events” in Zaporizhzhia direction, a place where an important Ukrainian strike might occur during the counter-offensive. He says Ukrainian artillery is better than the Russian.
[TextLink:] https://twitter.com/wartranslated/status/1664922561400938496?s=20/photo/1
[Text:] ZAPORIZHIA DIRECTION. THE SITUATION IS UNPLEASANT.
Our positions are under heavy artillery fire. I know a lot of bad details, but I won’t reveal them. The trend: they shell us – we don’t respond, and there are very bad reasons for this, there are several of them and all of them do not depend on the battalions, regiments, divisions in combat. Hundreds of shells are flying at us, zero in response.
What kind of war is this? Counter-battery fire, as the primary, constantly used method of countering enemy artillery, is absent in our SMO. It doesn’texist, no matter what anyone says. This is nothing new to the enemy, nor to any of us, so don’t stick your own head in the sand. We waste people because of our own shortcomings. Yes, I agree, we are causing serious damage to the enemy with our rear missile strikes. But the front line also needs to be protected, our people are standing there.
From the Book for Young Commanders: “Counter-battery firing is considered successful if the enemy’sfirepower and their crews are suppressed or destroyed. Suppression implies the further inability of the enemy’s firepower to continue firing. ¤ Adult big commanders probably read other books. And they don’t say that in reality the Ukrainian artillery beats the Russian one, which no one could even imagine to be the case a year ago.
🐣 RT @Fireblade577 Russia having to deploy their former elite (now depleted but still some of their best units) to the Bakhmut front, will further reduce the capabilities of the operational reserve they have to counter the upcomming Ukrainian offensive [via @DefenceHQ]
[TextLink:] https://twitter.com/Fireblade577/status/1664924507360972800?s=20/photo/1
● Russia has continued to redeploy regular units to the Bakhmut sector, as Wagner Group assault detachmentcomplete their withdrawal to rear areas.
● Russian VDV (airborne forces) have assumed an increasingly important role in Bakhmut: elements of the76th and 106th divisions and two additional separateVDV brigades are now deployed to the sector.
● The VDV is much degraded from its pre-invasion ‘elite’ status. However, Russian commanders have likely attempted to maintain some of these still relatively capable units as an uncommitted reserve. Because they have instead been forced to deploy them to hold the front line in Bakhmut, the whole Russian force is likely tobe less flexible in reacting to operational challenges.
⭕ 2 Jun 2023
TheAtlantic, Tim Alberta: Inside the Meltdown at CNN https://tinyurl.com/46uhjtbj #longread
// CEO Chris Licht felt he was on a mission to restore the network’s reputation for serious journalism. How did it all go wrong?
🐣 RT @ukrainiansquad It’s time to fight and to kick the occupiers out of Ukraine . God will be with you guys every step of the way, soldiers.
💽 https://twitter.com/ukrainiansquad/status/1664981570501988353?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @DefMon3 This is a great read. It addresses a lot of the issues regarding the training and command structure of Ukrainian armed forces. There are some great suggestions on how to improve things in the article
⋙ War on the Rocks, Erik Kramer and Paul Schneider: What the Ukrainian Armed Forces Need to Do to Win https://tinyurl.com/4ck3ptxw
💙 WaPo, Dana Milbank: McCarthy got rolled. But it’s good for him — and America. https://tinyurl.com/4nmh5h42 “This week provided Republicans with a road map to escape from Trumpism. The only excuse not to use it is cowardice — or complicity”
But this time, McCarthy didn’t cower and cave. He made these vulgarians clean their plates. He told the right-wing hooligans to stuff it, and he took his debt compromise to the House floor — where something remarkable happened Wednesday night.
More than two thirds of Republicans stuck with McCarthy, leaving the 71 GOP holdouts isolated. At the same time, nearly 80 percent of Democrats voted for the package, putting more D’s than R’s in the yes column and lifting the bill to passage by a lopsided 314-117.
Watching from the gallery, I felt more hopeful about our politics than I had in some time. For a brief, glorious (and probably fleeting) moment, the madness had stopped.
McCarthy discovered that, if he’s willing to be reasonable, Democrats will lend him their support. He also proved that the Trumpian forces within his party can be sidelined — if sensible Republicans would only show some courage.
All of the usual forces of destruction on the right were aligned against the debt-and-budget deal and, by logical extension, in favor of default: Sean Hannity, Laura Ingraham and the rest of the Fox Industrial Complex; Ron DeSantis; the House Freedom Caucus; Heritage Action; and the Club for Growth; former Trump aides Stephen Bannon, Peter Navarro and Russell Vought. Donald Trump himself, though he went quiet as the vote neared, told Republicans they should default rather than budge from their original absurd demands for $4.8 trillion in deficit reduction and the repeal of much of Biden’s agenda.
Instead, McCarthy accepted a modest $1.5 trillion in projected savings over 10 years and left Biden’s agenda intact while agreeing that there would be no more debt limit hostage-taking before the next elections. Most Republicans tolerated the compromise, and Democrats leaped at it.
“This is fabulous,” McCarthy replied at a post-vote news conference when The Post’s Leigh Ann Caldwell asked him to square the overwhelming Democratic support with his claims that Democrats got “nothing” in the negotiations. “This is one of the best nights I’ve ever been here,” he went on with exaggerated cheer. “I thought it would be hard. I thought it would be almost impossible just to get to 218 [votes]. Now, I found there’s a whole new day here.” …
McCarthy faced a choice in the debt ceiling negotiations: save the country from economic calamity or protect his own job. It’s not clear whether he made a conscious decision or whether, as Democrats and House Freedom Caucus members suspect, he simply got bested in the negotiations. Whatever the motive, he did the right thing for the country.
And now, sure enough, the MAGA crowd wants to hobble, if not terminate, his speakership. … ¤ The hard-liners called for reinforcements, but the cavalry never came.…
To answer his critics, McCarthy had a ready approach: He would make stuff up. ¤ He gathered the rank and file for a closed-door caucus meeting Tuesday night, fed them cartloads of We the Pizza pies, and told them, “I’m going to go on record and vote for the biggest spending cuts in history!” ¤ This wasn’t remotely true, but McCarthy repeated it endlessly over the following days. …
But if McCarthy didn’t have the facts, he did have the votes.
During Wednesday night’s debate, Jeffries gloated a bit about saving McCarthy from his MAGA hard-liners. “Earlier today, 29 House Republicans voted to default on our nation’s debt and against an agreement that you negotiated,” he needled, later adding: “Extreme MAGA Republicans attempted to take control of the House floor. Democrats took it back for the American people, and we will continue to do what is necessary.”
McCarthy’s allies evidently didn’t appreciate the taunt. The presiding officer, Rep. Brad Wenstrup (Ohio), took the extraordinary step of gaveling down the Democratic leader midspeech — on dubious grounds. But in the end, Democrats bailed out McCarthy again. In the final tally, most of the no votes came from Republicans; most of the yes votes came from Democrats. …
… This week provided Republicans with a road map to escape from Trumpism. The only excuse not to use it is cowardice — or complicity.
🧵 RT @SquireDigital 1/ Urazovo – Verigovka thread.
This short message from WarGonzo could be the start of something big. ¤ Even if this turns out to be nothing, this thread will look at an action that can be what a major feint would look like, before the main counter offensive in the south.
📌 🌎 https://twitter.com/SquireDigital/status/1664608927265308672?s=20
NYT: In Finland, Blinken Calls Russia’s War ‘Strategic Failure’ https://tinyurl.com/4k3dejxc “Mr. Blinken argued … that Mr. Putin had unwittingly exposed and compounded the weakness of Russia’s military, hobbled its economy and inspired NATO to become more united, and even larger”
🐣 RT @ @BlogUkraine #464dayofwar ¤ ⚡The US will help #Ukraine build the “army of the future”, – Antony Blinken, US Secretary of State ¤ #UkraineWar#UkraineRussiaWar
🐣 📋 RT @POTUS Folks, today is a good day for our economy. ¤ We learned the economy created 339,000 jobs last month – bringing us to over 13 million jobs since I took office. ¤ That’s more jobs in 28 months than any President has created in a four-year term. The Biden economic plan is working.
KyivPost: Trump’s Plan to Stop Russia’s War on Ukraine ‘in 24 Hours’ is as Terrible as You’d Expect https://tinyurl.com/4c38krza (what an embarrassment)
// The former president launched into a largely nonsensical tirade on Thursday evening, even claiming Kyiv is covering up the true numbers of people killed by Russian missile strikes
⭕ 1 Jun 2023
😅 RT @ProjectLincoln Bet Biden couldn’t do any of this. Thankfully.
💽 https://twitter.com/ProjectLincoln/status/1664421707107520513?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @igorsushko While in Moldova, Ukraine’s President Zelensky warned Russian troops occupying Transnistria in Moldova to leave if they want to survive. A joint operation between Moldova and Ukraine to liberate the territory may be on the horizon.
🐣 RT @ChuckPfarrer PUTIN’s WÜNDER-WEAPON DUDS: With much hype and bluster, Russia threatened the world with the Kinzhal ‘hypersonic’ missile, the Su-57 ‘super fighter’ the T-14 Armata and the BMPT ‘Terminator’– all weapons that severely underperformed on the battlefield.
⋙ ModernWarInstitute: Hypersonic Hype? Russia’s Kinzhal Missiles and the Lessons for Air Defense https://tinyurl.com/57m75aw4 “In terms of maneuverability, the Kinzhal is more akin to a giant lawn dart loaded with explosives”
🐣 RT @GlasnostGone Unlucky Putin, #Brazil not sharing the love anymore. Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva reiterated his position in favor of #Ukraine’s territorial integrity, condemning Russia’s invasion. As trade with the EU is more profitable than with Mordor.
⋙ TheGuardian: The Brazilian president, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, reiterated his position in favor of Ukraine’s territorial integrity, condemning Russia’s invasion. https://tinyurl.com/yswhr8fb
//. The comments came after a meeting in Brasília with Finland’s president, Sauli Niinistö, who is making an official visit to Brazil on 1-2 June 2023. ¤ The Brazilian leader said he also hoped for a “balaced” trade agreement between Mercosur and the EU that could support Brazil’s push for reindustrialisation and sustainable development.
TheHill, Jonathan Sweet and Mark Toth: In Ukraine, Russia is nearly down to its nukes https://tinyurl.com/yezk2bs4 “The head games continue — real and imagined, including action, reaction, counteraction — only this time, it is Ukraine dictating the conditions”
[…] The Kremlin, in the absence of a sustained conventional offensive capability, was increasingly resorting to propagandists selling Putin’s retaliation strikes against Ukrainian civilians as though they were decisive battlefield successes. Yet as Russian missile and drone strikes lose effectiveness against a U.S. and NATO supplied integrated air defense network, Putin is shifting back to implied threats of nuclear escalation and Chernobyl-like environmental disasters.
This past week, Putin signed two documents designed to send one nuclear message to the U.S. and NATO. The first provided for the deployment of tactical nuclear weapons to Belarus, although control is solely retained by the Kremlin. Belarus President Alexander Lukashenko claimed that the “tactical nuclear weapons were already on the move.”
Then, on Monday, Putin signed legislation into law withdrawing Russia from the Treaty on Conventional Armed Forces in Europe. Both decrees are creating an ominous new dimension in regard to the four Ukrainian regions Moscow illegally annexed — Donetsk, Luhansk, Kherson, and Zaporizhzhia. In the past, Putin has vowed to defend Russia territories, “including the annexed regions, with any means at his military’s disposal, including nuclear weapons.” …
New reports from the Ukraine Defense Ministry on May 26 also suggest Russia is planning a major accident at Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant in a ‘false flag’ operation to “thwart Ukraine’s imminently expected counteroffensive.” In faking a Ukrainian attack on the plant and causing “the leakage of the radioactive substances,” the Kremlin is apparently anticipating it can “trigger an international investigation which would require a ceasefire, allowing Russia to use the break in fighting to better prepare for Ukraine’s counteroffensive.”
Ukraine, however, remains undeterred and unwilling to give in to Russian nuclear blackmail. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky defiantly announced on May 29 that a decision had been made concerning the timing of Ukraine’s counteroffensive. The head games continue — real and imagined, including action, reaction, counteraction — only this time, it is Ukraine dictating the conditions.
Deep strikes, raids, reconnaissance in force, supporting efforts, main effort — Gerasimov must now prepare for all contingencies along a 900-mile front. Meanwhile, the Ukrainian army gets stronger and the Russian soldier in his foxhole is left to wonder.
Putin, essentially, is down to his nukes in Ukraine. And even he likely knows that they are not a viable or winning option. The question is no longer whether Russia conventionally loses in Ukraine, but when.
🐣 RT @AntiToxicPeople The terror filled rants are getting longer as more info leaks out🍿
[TextLink:] https://twitter.com/AntiToxicPeople/status/1664342678572789761?s=20/photo/1
[Text:] @realDonald Trump Just like the Democrat inspired Fake Dossier, RUSSIA, RUSSIA, RUSSIA, UKRAINE, UKRAINE, UKRAINE, Impeachment Hoax #1, Impeachment Hoax #2, the “No Collusion” Mueller Report, and so much else, the illegally leaked, by the DOJ, FBI, and Special “Prosecutor,” Document story is a continuation of the greatest Witch Hunt of all time and, like all of the others, Fake News! I did nothing wrong, they did, and have been doing so for a long time. GREAT POLL NUMBERS – ELECTION INTERFERENCE!!!
🐣 RT @ZelenskyyUa Today, and every time we prepare and make decisions for the sake of our Europe, for the sake of our values, we must remember that every doubt we show here in Europe is a trench that 🇷🇺 will definitely try to occupy. I said this at the second meeting of the European Political Community, which is taking place today in Moldova.
💽 [tr] https://twitter.com/ZelenskyyUa/status/1664260023592054784?s=20/photo/1
Since February 24 last year, the limits of security in Europe have in fact been the limits of our determination, our ability to act together for the sake of the interests of our peoples and the whole Europe. As much as we can reject doubts, we can reject the evil of aggression.
This year – is for decisions. In summer – in Vilnius, at the @NATO summit – the clear invitation to membership for 🇺🇦 is needed, and the security guarantees on the way to NATO membership are needed. In fall, on our accession to the 🇪🇺 – clear positive decision is needed. And we are also preparing the Peace Summit, which will guide the world majority to implement the joint #PeaceFormula, and it is a global need. The time has come, and the doubts must vanish. We openly say that only a strong air defense, namely the coalition of “Patriots”, namely the coalition of modern fighter jets can defeat 🇷🇺 terror. ¤ We are offering appropriate decisions and promoting appropriate decisions. 🇺🇦🇺🇦🇺🇦
🐣 RT @Tendar Germany has also increased the military aid package for Ukraine. Following positions have been added:
– 2x truck tractor trains 8×8 HX81, plus 3x semi-trailer
– 66x APC (probably Fuchs)
– 64x tracked all-terrain vehicles Bandvagn 206 (BV206)
– 7x tracked and remote controlled infantry vehicles TheMIS UGV systems
– Leopard 1 ammunition
Source: https://bundesregierung.de/breg-en/news/military-support-ukraine-2054992
#Germany #Ukraine
🐣 RT @ChuckPfarrer DEFENDERS OF KYIV: During last night’s sustained attacks, Ukrainian air defense is reported to have intercepted 10 out of 10 Russian Iskander short range ballistic missiles. This was a ‘type against target’ interception rate of 100%.
◕ https://twitter.com/ChuckPfarrer/status/1664223311369236481?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @GresselGustav 1/ Some noteworthy stuff here. First AIM-7 for air defence. They will be launched from Buk-M1 launchers. Integrating Sparrows in Buks was a bumpy ride, took longer than expected. But finally solves an ammo issue for a prolific system in 🇺🇦.
⋙ 🐣 RT @GresselGustav 2/ 105mm tank rounds. That ends the discussions on where to get ammo for Leopard 1 tanks.
⋙ 🐣 RT @GresselGustav A Soviet aircraft only needs to launch, but not guide a Storm Shaddow. ¤ A Buk launcher needs to provide a radar signal for a Sparrow, one that works under adverse EW conditions.
🚫 🐣 RT @Maks_NAFO_FELLA There is unconfirmed information from several Russian sources that Putin has decided to remove Shoigu from his post. 🤔🤔🤔🤔🤔
🐣 RT @ NatalkaKyiv I don’t know who put the footage of the destroyed Ukrainian cities and intercepted conversations of Russian soldiers together, but I can’t think of a better illustration of ‘Russki Mir’.
💽 https://twitter.com/NatalkaKyiv/status/1664161632350502913?s=20/photo/1
It’s hard to watch and hard to listen to, but it’s important to do both so that none of this will ever be repeated in the future.
The world had already said ‘never again’ on multiple occasions. ¤ This time we must mean it and make it so. ¤ Never again!!!
#StandWithUkraine #Russia #Ukraine #RussiaUkraineWar #RussianWarCrimes #RussiaIsATerroristState
🚫 🧵 RT @generalsvr_en Details of the #China Peace Plan and #Putin’s Reaction ¤ #Russian President Vladimir Putin yesterday held a meeting via video call with several trusted people from the country’s leadership. Putin holds meetings in this format and composition very rarely and only to… 1/9
📌 https://twitter.com/generalsvr_en/status/1664197204083367937?s=20
⋙ discuss issues that require immediate decisions and on which the fate of the country’s leadership depends. Thus, yesterday they discussed a proposal from the #Chinese comrades that had arrived the day before. The gist of the proposal is as follows: 2/9
⋙ #Russia withdraws its troops to the borders as of February 23, 2022. The “Luhansk and Donetsk People’s Republics” remain within the borders as of February 23, 2022, for a transitional period of up to five years, after which they return to… 3/9
⋙ #Ukraine on terms of limited autonomy. […]The #Crimea issue is a topic for negotiations, which will start in five years. Until then, Crimea is effectively under Russian control. According to the #Chinese comrades, if the #Russian leadership is prepared to… 4/9
⋙ end the conflict on such terms, this package would include the removal of most of the sanctions imposed after February 24, 2022. The #Chinese comrades practically explicitly promise in such a case to help restore and increase #Russia’s military capacity within… 5/9
⋙ two to three years and “create better conditions for further negotiations”.The proposal was not presented to #Ukraine. The #Russian leadership has to make a decision first. However, the plan was ALLEGEDLY presented to a number of politicians from… 6/9
⋙ #European countries actively supporting #Ukraine and was met with a cautiously positive response. If #Putin agrees, the #Chinese comrades are ready to start active negotiations to put these plans into practice, but they demand an immediate response from… 7/9
⋙ the #Russian president. […]Participants in the meeting praised such “peace initiatives” and asked the president what he thought of them. #Putin irritatedly replied that he “does not have two or three fucking years” and just “gets fucked” with such proposals. 8/9
⋙ Those taking part in the meeting tried to persuade the president to think about it and perhaps discuss better terms but without much success. The president said he was not yet ready for such solutions and, promising to think about it further, closed the meeting. 9/9
🐣 RT @ZMiST_Ua NATO Secretary General Stoltenberg, commenting on the latest series of attacks on Russian territory, said that Ukraine has every right to defend itself. ¤ He added that the allies are determined to support Ukraine as long as necessary, and this does not make NATO a party to the conflict. ¤ “NATO has two tasks in this situation: to support Ukraine, which we are doing, and to prevent Russia’s aggressive war from going beyond the borders of Ukraine,” added the Secretary General
🐣 RT @rshereme Support for russia has fallen to historic lows, and now in no region of the world does it rise above 35% of the population. Even in the post-Soviet Eurasia and Africa, where russia held significant support, most people view russia unfavorably.
📊 https://twitter.com/rshereme/status/1664181633941897218?s=20/photo/1
// Gallup poll
🐣 RT @, GlasnostGone Today attending the European Political Community summit, it’s good to see president Zelensky in #Moldova with president @sandumaiamd. Zelensky said #Ukraine’s ready to be in the #NATO & that Kyiv was waiting for the bloc to be ready to admit his country [Guardian] https://tinyurl.com/5frfsn8w
⭕ 31 May 2023
PravdaUA: White House: We are against strikes on Russian territory, but it’s up to Ukraine to decide https://tinyurl.com/2j6ajwbn
🧵 RT @DonbasDIY As Russia preaches denazification, Since 2004 it has covertly partnered & financed Neo Nazi & far-right movements around the world. Following a Neo-Eurasianist strategy popularized by Dugin, these fringe groups are causing division, spreading lies & subverting societies. 1/
📌🌎 ◕ https://twitter.com/DonbasDIY/status/1664000637560934402?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @ChuckPfarrer BAKHMUT AXIS /2130 UTC 31 MAY/ RU forces in the N area of operations conducted a failed attack at Orikhovo-Vasylivka. This comes as Wagner Group continues phased withdrawals from its contiguous positions. In the S area of operations, UKR forces broke up an attack at Bila Hora.
🌎 https://twitter.com/ChuckPfarrer/status/1664018461796753409?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @petestrzok Lordy there are tapes
CNN: EXCLUSIVE: Trump captured on tape talking about classified document he kept after leaving the White House https://tinyurl.com/ydkadptf Trump “acknowledges he held onto a classified Pentagon document … , undercutting his argument that he declassified everything”
Federal prosecutors have obtained an audio recording of a summer 2021 meeting in which former President Donald Trump acknowledges he held onto a classified Pentagon document about a potential attack on Iran, multiple sources told CNN, undercutting his argument that he declassified everything.
The recording indicates Trump understood he retained classified material after leaving the White House, according to multiple sources familiar with the investigation. On the recording, Trump’s comments suggest he would like to share the information but he’s aware of limitations on his ability post-presidency to declassify records, two of the sources said.
Special counsel Jack Smith, who is leading the Justice Department investigation into Trump, has focused on the meeting as part of the criminal investigation into Trump’s handling of national security secrets. Sources describe the recording as an “important” piece of evidence in a possible case against Trump, who has repeatedly asserted he could retain presidential records and “automatically” declassify documents.
Prosecutors have asked witnesses about the recording and the document before a federal grand jury. The episode has generated enough interest for investigators to have questioned Gen. Mark Milley, one of the highest-ranking Trump-era national security officials, about the incident. …
NYT: Trump White House Aides Subpoenaed in Firing of Election Security Expert https://tinyurl.com/zs36rvwe “Mr. Krebs’s assessment that the election was secure was at odds with Mr. Trump’s baseless assertions that it was a ‘fraud on the American public’”
// The special counsel is scrutinizing the dismissal of Christopher Krebs, who contradicted baseless claims by the former president that the 2020 election was marred by fraud.
The special counsel investigating former President Donald J. Trump’s efforts to cling to power after he lost the 2020 election has subpoenaed staff members from the Trump White House who may have been involved in firing the government cybersecurity official whose agency judged the election “the most secure in American history,” according to two people briefed on the matter.
The team led by the special counsel, Jack Smith, has been asking witnesses about the events surrounding the firing of Christopher Krebs, who was the Trump administration’s top cybersecurity official during the 2020 election. Mr. Krebs’s assessment that the election was secure was at odds with Mr. Trump’s baseless assertions that it was a “fraud on the American public.”
Mr. Smith’s team is also seeking information about how White House officials, including in the Presidential Personnel Office, approached the Justice Department, which Mr. Trump turned to after his election loss as a way to try to stay in power, people familiar with the questions said.
The investigators appear focused on Mr. Trump’s state of mind around the firing of Mr. Krebs, as well as on establishing a timeline of events leading up to the attack on the Capitol by a pro-Trump mob on Jan. 6, 2021. The latest subpoenas, issued roughly two weeks ago, went to officials in the personnel office, according to the two people familiar with the matter. …
WaPo: Biden suggests using 14th Amendment to stop future debt ceiling standoffs https://tinyurl.com/5n6j6yd2 “The idea, as expressed by the president, would be to test the novel legal interpretation that holds that the debt ceiling is incompatible with the Constitution”
// The president has suggested invoking the Constitution after the current impasse. It is unclear whether a court would take up the case.
NYT, Thomas Edsall: The Politics of Delusion Have Taken Hold https://tinyurl.com/3mtsnzef Hyper-partisanship is self-reinforcing and possibly exaggerated, but is stuck until Republicans are able to reject the delusion that Trump won the 2020 election
PravdaUA/LondonTimes: Freedom of Russia Legion is recruiting Russians to storm Moscow – The Times https://tinyurl.com/yhmj9bks
A fighter of the Freedom of Russia Legion with the call sign Caesar said that the Russian partisans, who attacked the Kremlin’s forces from the territory of Ukraine, have “thousands” of people willing to join their ranks and will continue to raid the border until their forces are large enough to storm Moscow. Source: The Times
Quote: “We have serious capabilities. We have mortars, armoured vehicles, stinger manpads, portable anti-tank systems and a highly effective drone reconnaissance unit.”
Details: He said the Freedom of Russia Legion is the size of a battalion but plans to expand as an increasing number of Russians realise they can fight Russian dictator Vladimir Putin and prevail. ¤ A battalion typically consists of 500-1,000 soldiers.
Quote: “We will keep performing these harassment raids to the point we have our own piece of Russian territory, so that real Russian sons and daughters, real patriots, will be able to join us. Once that happens we will quickly grow our force and numbers and it will end with the Kremlin campaign.”
Details: Caesar joked that the weapons for his military formation were purchased from AliExpress and eBay, as well as from Russian military stores.
He emphasised that all of the members of his Legion were Russian citizens but admitted that they had served in the Ukrainian Armed Forces: “We are not a band of criminals or a private military company like Wagner. We fight within the structure of Ukrainian forces. Our main goal and task is the defence of Ukraine and de-occupation of its territories. After that we will go to free our home”.
He added that the raid on Russian territory was intended to support Ukraine’s planned counter-offensive while also acting as a recruitment campaign and encouraging Russians to overthrow Putin before the war comes to them.
According to him, Russians enter Ukraine through certain neutral border states. “We have a steady flow of incoming recruits and it grows. More and more Russian people understand that this war is criminal and it should be stopped”.
Alexei Baranovsky, a spokesman for the Legion’s political wing, told The Times that the Legion is “a politically neutral organisation with no ideological stance. [Its] only task is to overthrow Putin’s regime.” ¤ As he stated, the legion is biding its time: “We aren’t saying we will get to Moscow tomorrow. This will happen when the Ukrainian armed forces liberate Crimea. Putin’s political system will be paralysed by defeat in Crimea. This is when we will need to strike a devastating blow against Moscow. This is what we are preparing for.” …
🐣 RT @ Apex_WW The U.S. and its NATO allies haven’t acted on lessons learned from the war in Ukraine and aren’t prepared enough to defend Europe from a Russian attack, the Army’s former top commander on the Continent told an audience this week at a major security forum.
⋙ Stars&Stripes: ‘We’re not ready’ to defeat Russian attack on NATO, retired US general says https://tinyurl.com/287sz93t
The U.S. and its NATO allies haven’t acted on lessons learned from the war in Ukraine and aren’t prepared enough to defend Europe from a Russian attack, the Army’s former top commander on the Continent told an audience this week at a major security forum.
Transporting troops swiftly to the front lines, producing enough ammunition and communicating with allied armies remain challenges for NATO in defending against Russia, retired Lt. Gen. Ben Hodges, former commander of U.S. Army Europe, said Tuesday at the Globsec conference in Bratislava, Slovakia.
🐣 RT @ ChuckPfarrer ATACMS: Though many consider it likely that UKR has 𝘢𝘭𝘳𝘦𝘢𝘥𝘺 used US-made ATACMs missiles against the Kerch Bridge & the Saki airbase in Crimea, the Biden administration has definitely left the door open to overt US provision of the ATACMS to
UKR. https://tinyurl.com/2xe8jbbh
◕ https://twitter.com/ChuckPfarrer/status/1663980123442298893?s=20/photo/1
// (mainly, Chuck thinks this)
🐣 RT @front_ukrainian ⚡️The 🇺🇸USA announced a new $300 million military aid package for 🇺🇦Ukraine, — Kirby.
It will include:
● ammunition for the “Patriot” air defense system;
● ammunition for artillery and HIMARS;
● aircraft missiles “Zuni”
● SAM “Avenger”;
● MANPADS “Stinger”.
// Defense budget
🧵 RT @ChuckPfarrer BURN RATE: @ukraine_map reports that Russia continues to expend its supplies of long range precision strike missiles. Putin is estimated to have less than 194 Kalibr, Kh 101/Kh-555, Iskander and Kinzhal missiles remaining in stock.
📌 ◕ https://twitter.com/ChuckPfarrer/status/1663965385442377734?s=20/photo/1 -4
⋙ 🐣 RT @ukraine_map Russia’s Long Range Missile Stocks based on Ukraine’s reporting as of May 31, 2023 ¤ Russia is currently estimated to have 194 Kalibr, X-101/Kh-555, Iskander, and Kinzhal missiles in stock
◕ https://twitter.com/ukraine_map/status/1663953650467602445?s=20/photo/1
// 96 of 950 Kalibr, 50 of 900 Iskander, 48of 53 Kinzhal
⋙⋙ 🐣 RT @juha_remes It’s almost as if Putin regime gangs are using Shahed-136 drones as poor man’s replacement system for missiles such as Iskander or Kalibr.
🧵 RT @sentdefender According to Photos which were recently released, the Headquarters of the Main Directorate of Intelligence for the Ukrainian Armed Forces (GUR) appears to have suffered multiple “Direct Hits” from Russian Cruise Missiles and/or Shahed-136 Drone Strikes over the last few days; this seems to align with earlier claims by the Russian Ministry of Defense and President Putin that the Russian Military had Targeted “Decision Making Centers” in Kyiv alongside Buildings related to Ukrainian Military Intelligence.
📌 🖼 https://twitter.com/sentdefender/status/1663940375596212225?s=20/photo/1 -2
🐣 RT @JuliaDavisNews Meanwhile in Russia: truth bombs are landing on Russian state TV, as experts struggle to define what Russia’s victory in Ukraine would look like. More in my latest article for @thedailybeast, linked below⤵️ [ytube link]
⋙ 🐣 RT @JuliaDavisNews Putin’s propagandists insist Russia has to win. Trouble is, none of them seem to know what victory would look like, or whether it’s even achievable. Exasperated panelists drop truth bombs on state TV: “In some Russian cities, they are running out of men!”
⋙⋙ DailyBeast, Julia Davis: Team Putin Spars Over Baffling Russian ‘Victory Plan’ in War https://tinyurl.com/bpat26ts
// The Kremlin’s communication problems are triggering awkward moments and fiery clashes between Russian state television’s biggest stars.
🐣 RT @ Gerashchenko_en Prigozhin praised the Ukrainian Army and blamed Russia for concealing the real bad state of things from its population. ¤ Interesting choice of floor mat colors behind him, by the way.
💽 https://twitter.com/Gerashchenko_en/status/1663831169614458880?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @ChuckPfarrer BAKHMUT AXIS/ 1535 UTC 31 MAY/ RU sources indicate that units of the Wagner Group are conducting a phased withdrawal from positions in the northern portions of the Bakhmut Area of Operations (AO). Their stations are being turned over to Russian MoD forces.
🌎 https://twitter.com/ChuckPfarrer/status/1663929579478609925?s=20/photo/1
🧵 RT @ This was a small part of a very enjoyable conversation with @IAPonomarenko. ¤ The article is a good description of the challenges with fielding, maintaining & integrating the M1-series of tanks (and some other equipment). ¤ Ilia didn’t mention how the conversation started. 1/15 [link]
📌 https://twitter.com/MarkHertling/status/1663920394724679681?s=20
// how allies decide what equipment to provide and when
🐣 RT @USNATO The brutality with which Putin is conducting this full-blown assault against Ukraine is incomprehensible. In response, the United States continues to do all we can to strengthen Ukraine’s ability to defend itself, including coordinating support with our NATO Allies. ¤ Allied Ministers of Foreign Affairs will discuss practical and political support to Ukraine at tomorrow’s informal #ForMin in Oslo.
💽 https://twitter.com/USNATO/status/1663884613725331461?s=20/photo/1
// video of destruction
🧵RT @rshereme There is no neutrality in the face of evil. The russian war and genocide against Ukrainians have changed me. The russians killed three of my friends; they have beheaded, tortured, raped, and castrated thousands of my countrymen; they have destroyed the livelihood of millions. 1/n
📌 🖼 https://twitter.com/rshereme/status/1663803169288122369?s=20/photo/1
[ThreadReader:] https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1663803169288122369.html
2/ I used to be much more tolerant and accepting of different points of view. But now, my vision is more black and white. The war became personal. The pain became personal.
3/ When you are bombed almost every night for 1.5 years straight and have your country invaded, it is personal. I think everyone of us has lost someone, either on the battlefield or when rockets or Iranian drones bombed civilian infrastructure.
4/ Almost every day and night, you hear explosions in the sky. You start your day by reading reports about the next few people hospitalized or dead because Iranian drones or russian rockets crashed into one more building. And that might be the building where your loved ones live.
5/ So when I meet a person who claims to be neutral regarding the russian war and genocide against Ukrainian people, I hold them responsible for the atrocities committed by russians. There cannot be neutrality in the face of evil.
6/ A Ukrainian is judged because he or she didn’t shake the hand of a russian, belarusian, or iranian athlete, and some people dare to cast a judgment? How morally bankrupt do you have to be to judge a victim who doesn’t want to shake hands with the aggressor?
7/ Oh, but maybe these athletes don’t support their governments. Well, if they don’t support their governments, then speak up! Put on a shirt condemning the actions of their government. But no, they are silent. Morally bankrupt.
8/ Oh, but their government would put them in prison for their position. Give me a break! We, Ukrainians, at the cost of many lives, have overthrown several political regimes that wanted to become dictatorships. We stood up. We are free people!
9/ We paid the price and will continue to pay the price. Because freedom is not free. It comes with a price. For us Ukrainians, the price is especially high. But we are willing to pay it. Because it is better to die than to live as a slave.
10/ If you choose to remain neutral and silent, it’s your choice. But that choice defines who you are. You are a coward, a silent supporter, a “good russian,” and history will judge you as such.
11/ To end, I want to quote some people who understood very well that there is no neutrality in the face of evil.
12/ Dietrich Bonhoeffer: “Silence in the face of evil is itself evil; God will not hold us guiltless. To not speak is to speak. Not to act is to act.”
13/ Elie Wiesel: “We must always take sides. Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented.”
14/ Dante Alighieri (paraphrased): “The hottest places in hell are reserved for those who, in times of great moral crisis, maintain their neutrality”
🚫🐣 RT @IuliiaMendel Usually Zelenskyy’s schedule is not revealed due to security concerns. The information about possible arrival of Zelenskyy and Putin in Turkey could benefit Turkey who wants to be a mediator for peace. Or Russia to use it in propaganda later, trying to show Putin as someone who wants peace. Many try to put Putin and Zelenskyy at negotiations table
⭕ 30 May 2023
🐣 RT @anno1540 230530 Time: 22.00 @ZelenskyyUa[:]
Now, in Ukraine, on our land, in our sky, it is being decided whether freedom and civilization will retain global leadership in this century. Decided by us, together with America, together with Europe, together with all our allies and partners. I thank everyone in the world who helps us!
And, of course, today, as always, I thank our warriors. All those who are now fighting for Ukraine. All those who are on combat missions. At combat posts. The Avdiivka sector, Bakhmut, Maryinka, Shakhtarsk sector. I thank everyone who defends our positions in Luhansk and Kharkiv regions. I am grateful to each and every one who defends Zaporizhzhia and Kherson region. I thank everyone who keeps our border strong.
Our brigades that are fighting. Our brigades that are ready to move forward. And our intelligence. Our security forces. On all fronts and at all levels, the enemy must feel that Ukraine has become stronger.
Glory to our heroes! ¤ Glory to Ukraine!
🐣 RT @KateGoesTech How many F-16s are gathering dust in each country:
🇺🇸 USA: 2,256
🇮🇱 Israel: 362
🇹🇷 Turkey: 270
🇪🇬 Egypt: 220
🇳🇱 Netherlands: 213
🇰🇷 South Korea: 180
🇬🇷 Greece: 170
🇹🇼 Taiwan: 150
🇵🇰 Pakistan: 111
🇦🇪 UAE: 80
🇩🇰 Denmark: 77
🇯🇴 Jordan: 64
🇸🇬 Singapore: 62
🇧🇪 Belgium: 54
TheGuardian: Trump lawyer said to have been waved off searching office for secret records https://tinyurl.com/yj23rzsd “… as the special counsel Jack Smith examines whether his incomplete search was actually a ploy by Trump to retain classified documents”
// Exclusive: Evan Corcoran said he was steered away from Trump’s office, where the FBI later found the most sensitive materials
Donald Trump’s lawyer tasked with searching for classified documents at Mar-a-Lago after the justice department issued a subpoena told associates that he was waved off from searching the former president’s office, where the FBI later found the most sensitive materials anywhere on the property. ¤ The lawyer, Evan Corcoran, recounted that several Trump aides had told him to search the storage room because that was where all the materials that had been brought from the White House at the end of Trump’s presidency ended up being deposited.
Corcoran found 38 classified documents in the storage room. He then asked whether he should search anywhere else, like Trump’s office, but was steered away, he told associates. Corcoran never searched the office and told prosecutors the 38 papers were the extent of the material at Mar-a-Lago.
The assertion that there were no classified documents elsewhere at the property proved to be wrong when the FBI seized 101 classified documents months afterwards, including from the office, which was found to be where the most highly classified documents had been located. ¤ Corcoran’s previously unreported account, as relayed to the Guardian by two people familiar with the matter, suggests he was materially misled as the special counsel Jack Smith examines whether his incomplete search was actually a ploy by Trump to retain classified documents. ¤ It was not clear who waved off Corcoran from searching elsewhere at Mar-a-Lago – whether it was Trump himself or Trump employees …
A Trump spokesperson said: “This is completely false and rooted in pure fantasy. The real story is the illegal weaponization of the justice department and their witch-hunts targeted to influence an election in order to try and prevent President Trump from returning to the White House.”
The criminal investigation, which appears to be nearing its end, has recently focused on why the subpoena was not complied with, including whether Trump might have arranged for boxes of classified documents to be moved out of the storage room so he could retain them.
In particular, prosecutors have examined why Trump ordered his valet, Walt Nauta, to move certain boxes out of the storage room before and after the subpoena was issued – as Nauta later told the justice department – and crucially where the boxes might have been taken. ¤ The movement of boxes has taken on added significance for prosecutors after they saw on surveillance tapes that boxes were returned to the storage room on 2 June 2022, the day before the justice department travelled to Mar-a-Lago to collect what Corcoran had found, the Washington Post reported.
It was also not clear when Corcoran was waved off from searching other parts of Mar-a-Lago; it could be notable if it came before the boxes were brought back to the storage room, as it would raise questions as to whether he was held off while classified documents were moved back. ¤ The Guardian has previously reported that prosecutors determined Trump and Nauta knew when and where Corcoran intended to search because Corcoran needed Nauta to unlock the storage room, according to Corcoran’s roughly 50 pages of notes that were turned over to the grand jury in the case.
Corcoran also memorialized how he told Trump he could not retain any classified documents at Mar-a-Lago when Trump asked what he was allowed to keep, as well as when he took breaks during the search by walking out to the pool deck nearby, and therefore leaving the storage room unattended.
To obtain Corcoran’s account, otherwise off-limits because of attorney-client privilege, prosecutors persuaded a US appeals court to pierce the protection because Trump may have used Corcoran’s legal advice in furtherance of a crime, according to another lawyer briefed on the case.
While Corcoran testified that Trump did not personally mislead him about where to search at Mar-a-Lago, he also acknowledged that Trump did not suggest he look anywhere else. The New York Times earlier reported a summary of his testimony. ¤ Corcoran appears to have been told the prevailing belief among Trump aides and employees at the time: that any classified documents would probably be in the storage room with the rest of the material brought from the White House at the end of Trump’s presidency. ¤ Before he could start his search, Corcoran ended up telling Nauta about the subpoena, where at Mar-a-Lago he was searching and when he was searching, because Corcoran needed Nauta to unlock the storage room so he could gain access.
Once he gained entry, Corcoran realized he needed a deadline extension because he was the only Trump lawyer dealing with the subpoena and had underestimated the number of boxes there. The justice department agreed to a shorter extension that he wanted, and pushed the reply date to June. ¤ As the new subpoena deadline approached, Corcoran asked around whether there were other locations at Mar-a-Lago that he should search to ensure the response would be complete. Corcoran was told just searching the storage room should be sufficient and he did not look anywhere else.
Corcoran completed his search of just the storage room and told the justice department on 2 June 2022 to collect some documents the next morning. When prosecutors arrived, he provided a certification letter signed – and caveated – by another Trump lawyer, Christina Bobb, which attested to a “diligent search”.
The subpoena had been issued to Trump’s political office, and Corcoran treated it as an administrative subpoena and assumed he would be in recurring contact with the justice department about the documents matter, he has told associates.
When Corcoran turned over the 38 classified documents, according to court filings, he told the department the “records that came from the White House were stored within one location at Mar-a-Lago, the storage room … [and] he was not advised there were any records in any private office space”.
But that advice turned out to be wrong. When the FBI returned with a warrant months later, agents found in Trump’s desk drawer two classified documents mixed together with three other documents dated after Trump left the presidency, the Guardian has reported.,
😅 RT @jackryan212 I don’t know what this is. I found it on a Ukrainian telegram page but I almost cried laughing
💽 https://twitter.com/jackryan212/status/1663402529894309889?s=20/photo/1
// Ukraine Nato dancing
⭕ 29 May 2023
🐣 RT @maria_drutska We have approved the terms for the movement of our troops, decisions have been made – Zelensky in the evening address. ¤ So it begins.
⋙ 🐣 RT @HR_Attorney “You are about to embark upon the Great Crusade, toward which we have striven these many months. The eyes of the world are upon you. The hope and prayers of liberty-loving people everywhere march with you.” Eisenhower, June 1944
🐣 RT @ officejjsmart PRES. ZELENSKY 🇺🇦 TO AMERICANS 🇺🇸
Pres. Volodymyr Zelenskyy 🇺🇦 has published an address to Americans on the occasion of Memorial Day in the United States 🇺🇸.
💽 https://twitter.com/officejjsmart/status/1663262786003124230?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @ZelenskyyUa The world needs to see that terror is losing.
When Patriots in the hands of Ukrainians ensure one hundred percent downing of any Russian missiles, terror is losing. When the world increases pressure on Russia, including sanctions, when the terrorist’s isolation grows, when its former partners are ashamed of any closeness with Moscow, terror is losing. And of course, there is no greater humiliation for terrorist state than the success of our warriors.
No one else in the world uses weapons against evil more effectively than Ukrainians. And this is a common global task – to prevent Russia from making terror something usual to the world so that it leads to someone else catching this evil virus.
🐣 RT @ yasminalombaert President Volodymyr Zelensky said a decision had been made on the timing of Ukraine’s counteroffensive in his nightly address yesterday.
“As usual, the Commander-in-Chief and the commanders of the operational directions reported to the Staff.
Not only the supply of ammunition, not only the training of new brigades, not only our tactics.
But also the timing. This is what is most important. The timing of how we will move forward. We will. The decisions have been made.
I thank every soldier and sergeant, officer and general, and every prepared brigade.”
🐣 RT @RadioFreeTom GOPers figured out that just pandering to the most retrograde voters was easier than fighting for ideas. A big part of it is that nutball right-wing donors decided that they’d waited long enough and wanted a new right-wing Valhalla on earth *right now*, and democracy be damned.
⋙ 🐣 RT @MiaMcCall18 Why did it happen? Why is everything GOP-connected suddenly mad as a hatter?
🐣 RT @Maks_NAFO_FELLA BREAKING ¤ “All those who tried to intimidate us – our answer will not be long in coming, you will regret it very soon” – the address of the head of the GUR Budanov. [Uk 💽]
⭕ 28 May 2023
ABC/AP (May): Jan. 6 rioters are raking in thousands in donations. Now the US is coming after their haul https://tinyurl.com/3u7c2mxs
// 5/28/2023; A growing number of Capitol rioters are facing hefty fines on top of prison sentences at their sentencing hearings
💙 🐣 RT @Sytheruk Absolutely one of the greatest leaders of all time
💽 https://twitter.com/Sytheruk/status/1662998505638580224?s=20/photo/1
// Zelensky video
WaPo: Ukrainians fighting outside Bakhmut see Russian mercenaries withdrawing https://tinyurl.com/2taxx464 “Moving regular Russian units to defend Bakhmut could create vulnerabilities at other locations along the front, which stretches hundreds of miles”
🐣 RT @POTUS Speaker McCarthy and I reached a bipartisan budget agreement that will prevent the worst possible crisis – a default for the first time in our nation’s history. ¤ This deal is good news for the American people. ¤ I strongly urge Congress to pass the agreement right away.
🐣 RT @Victorshi2020 Watching President Biden right now gives me comfort. He is strong. He is steady. He & his team know exactly what they’re doing. Don’t even try to tell me that Donald Trump could’ve pulled this off. Joe Biden was made for this moment & he has delivered for all of us.
⋙ 🐣 RT @Victorshi2020 President Biden opened by saying there is good news. He then emphasized the fact that not everyone will be pleased but that this is what the job of the government is & that the alternative would’ve been much worse. Reiterates to Dems that he didn’t concede much. Strong address.
💙 🐣 RT @RabbiUkraine Today is a holiday in Ukraine – Kyiv Day! I recently recorded the song “Kyiv Heroy” and today I gave it to all Ukrainian people! https://youtu.be/7VwvPC60vys
♫ https://twitter.com/RabbiUkraine/status/1662826053973278722?s=20/photo/1
💙 EuromaidanPress, Paul Goble (2015): Ukrainian conflict is between ‘heirs of Kyivan Rus’ and ‘heirs of Golden Horde’ https://tinyurl.com/4sn43drv
// “The Ukrainian-Russian conflict is to a significant degree a conflict between the heirs of Kyivan Rus [Ukraine] and the heirs of the Golden Horde” [Moscow], according to Andrey Piontkovsky, and one of its key results will be “an intensification of the swallowing of Russia by China.”
In the course of a wide-ranging interview yesterday with Artem Dekhtyarenko of Ukraine’s Apostrophe news agency, the Russian commentator argues that it is a mistake to see what is taking place in Moscow as “a strengthening of the ties of Russia and China.”
Instead, he argues, it is part of a long ongoing process that has accelerated in the course of the Ukrainian crisis of “the swallowing of Russia by China.” At the recent Victory Day parade in Moscow, something “symbolic” happened that had never occurred “in the thousand year history of Russia:” three units of the Chinese military took part. …
The Chinese had never permitted themselves to express such notions so boldly, the Russian analyst continues; but it is clear that they now have “complete confidence that having cut itself off from Western civilization, Putin’s Russia will become an easy catch” for Beijing.
That is all the more so, Piontkovsky continues, because there are influential people in Russia itself who “welcome this process” because they “consider the Golden Horde to have been the golden age of Russian history.” Thus, “the swallowing of Russia by China is a return to its deepest historical roots.”
Those who think in this way have a certain measure of truth on their side, the Russian commentator concludes, and that in turn meansthat the current conflict between Ukraine and Russia is “to a significant degree” a conflict between the two states these two countries emerged from, Kyivan Rus in the case of Ukraine and the Golden Horde in the case of Russia.
💙 EuromaidanPress, Yaroslav Dashkevychm (2014): How Moscow hijacked the history of Kyivan Rus’ https://tinyurl.com/mr2d27nz “Moscow was created in 1277 as a subservient vassal region … to the Golden Horde …. By that time, Kyivan Rus had existed for more than 300 years”
[…] At the time of the Kyivan Empire there was no mention of a Moscow nation. It is well known that Moscow was created in 1277 as a subservient vassal region or ‘ulus’ to the Golden Horde, established by the Khan Mengu-Timur. By that time, Kyivan Rus had existed for more than 300 years.
There are no indications of any connection of Kyivan Rus with the Finnish ethnic groups in the land of ‘Moksel’ or later of the Moscow principality with the Principality of Kyivan Rus up until the XVI century. At the time when Kyivan Rus had officially accepted Christianity, the Finn tribes in ‘Moksel’ lived in a semi-primitive state.
How can anyone speak of ‘an older brother’ when that ‘older brother’ did not first appear until centuries after Rus-Ukrainians? He has no moral right to call himself an ‘older brother’, nor to dictate how people are to live, nor to force his culture, language, and world views. It is clear that until the end of the XV century, there was no Russian nation, there was no older brother ‘Great Russian’, nor were there any Russian people. Instead, there was the land of Suzdal: the land of Moksel, later the Moscow princedom, which entered into the role of the Golden Horde, the nation of Genghis Khan. From the end of the XIII to the beginning of the XVIII century, the people in this land were called Moskovites. And Moscow historians are silent about this question of their national origins.
During the IX to the XII cent. the large area of Tula, Ryazan, and today’s Moscow region – all this was inhabited by the people called ‘Moksel,’ including the tribes of Muromians, Merya, Vepsians, Mokshas, Chudes, Maris and others. These tribes eventually became the foundation of the nation who now call themselves ‘Great Russians’.
In 1137, sixth son of the Kyivan prince Volodymyr Monomakh, Yurii Dolgorukii (who had been left without a princedom in the Kyivan empire) arrived in this land. ¤ Yurii Dolgorukii began the rule of the ‘Riurykovyches’ in ‘Moksel’, becoming prince of Suzdal. To him and a local Finnish woman was born a son Andrei, called ‘Bogoliubskii’. Born and raised in the forest wilderness among the half savage Finnish tribes, prince Andrey cut all ties with his father’s entourage and with their old Kyivan customs.
In 1169 Andrei Bogoliubskii sacked and destroyed Kyiv. He destroyed all the churches and religious artifacts, something unheard of in those times. ¤ Andrei was a barbarian who did not feel any familial ties with Kyiv, the holy city of Slavs. …
… Up until the XII century, only Finn tribes lived in the land of ‘Moksel’ … And the anthropological investigations of human skulls by A. P. Bohdanov and F. K. Vovk support the differentiated characteristics of the Finnish and Slavic ethnoses.
In 1237 the Tatar-Mongols entered the lands of Suzdal. … The princes of Vladimir, Yurii and Yaroslav Vsevolodovich accepted subservience to Khan Batey. In this manner, the land of ‘Moksel’ entered the ranks of the Golden Horde Empire of Genghis Khan. …
Living with the Horde of Batey from 1238 to 1252, Alexander, only much later named “Nevsky,” adopted all the customs and organizational ideas of the Golden Horde. …
The big lie was introduced: that Moscow was founded in 1147 by Yuri Dolgoruky. This is a myth with no supportive evidence. Moscow was established as a settlement in 1272. That same year the Golden Horde conducted their third census of the populations in their domain. Both in the first census (1237-1238) and in the second census (1254-1259) there is no mention of any Moscow at all. … Thus for over 270 years, Moscow was ruled solely by khans of the Genghis dynasty. …
Based on these facts, it becomes clear that Moscow is the direct inheritor of the Golden Horde Empire of Genghis and that actually the Tatar-Mongols were the ‘godfathers’ of Moscow statehood. The Moscow princedom (and tsardom from 1547) up until the XVI century had no ties or relationships with the princedoms of the lands of Kyivan Rus.
The tribe of Great Russians, or the Russian people as known today, appeared around the XV to XVII centuries from among the Finn tribes: Muroma, Mer, Ves and others. This was when their history started. There is no history of Great Russians on Kyivan lands!
The history of Great Russians starts with the ‘Beyond the Forests Land’ in Moscow, which was never Kyivan Rus. The Tatar-Mongols who entered these lands were a big element in the formulation of ‘Great Russians’. The Great Russian psychology absorbed many characteristics – the Tatar-Mongol instincts of a conqueror and despot, with the ultimate aim: world domination.
Thus by the XVI cent. was established the type of a conqueror who was horrible in his lack of education, rage and cruelty. These people had no use for European culture and literacy. All such things like morality, honesty, shame, justice, human dignity and historical awareness were absolutely foreign to them. A significant amount of Tatar-Mongols entered the makeup of Great Russians from the XIII to XVI centuries and they accounted for the genealogy of over 25% of Russian nobility. …
In order to appropriate the history of Kyiv lands and to immortalize this theft, the Great Russians had to squash the Ukrainian people, drive them into slavery, deprive them of their true name, exterminate them via famine, etc.
Ukrainians had emerged as a nation in the XI to XII centuries, and probably, even earlier. Later they were labeled ‘Little Russians’ when Russians began to brainwash the world with their ‘version’ of history. For the smallest deviation from this official version, people were tortured, killed, and sent off to the GULAG. The Soviet period was especially brutal and vicious. During that time, Ukraine lost over 25 million of her sons and daughters, who perished in wars for Russian interests, and during collectivization, tortures, and forced relocations. ¤ This is the way the ‘older brother’ forced the ‘younger brother’, the ‘Little Russian’, to live in the savage ’embraces of love’. […]
⭕ 27 May 2023
WaPo: Russians snitch on Russians who oppose war with Soviet-style denunciations https://tinyurl.com/4nme296d “As Russian President Vladimir Putin’s regime cracks down on critics of the war and other political dissenters, citizens are policing one another”
// … “in an echo of the darkest years of Joseph Stalin’s repression”
🐣 RT @snno1540 Attacks on Russia must be deterred: GUR ambitions are beginning to worry Western intelligence – The Times
Western special services note the professionalism of Ukrainian spies. At the same time, the growing ambitions of Ukrainian military intelligence somewhat worries Western partners, so in some places they even try to restrain the Main Intelligence Directorate of the Ministry of Defense of Ukraine from some attacks on Russia.
Journalists claim that the “treasury” of the GUR MOU contains a number of very ambitious operations on the territory of the Russian Federation, some representatives of Western intelligence even refer to the military intelligence of Ukraine as the “Ukrainian Mossad” [link in Ukr]
🐣 RT @officejjsmart BIG WIN FOR UKRAINE 🇺🇦
In the largest drone strike since the war began, tonight Kyiv successfully shot down 40 drones. ¤ This is the security that Europe 🇪🇺 and USA 🇺🇸 give Ukraine 🇺🇦 through air defense systems. Thank you! Everyday closer is 🇺🇦 victory over evil 🇷🇺!
🇺🇦 🇺🇦 🇺🇦!
🐣 RT @DefMon3 You know you are winning when your enemy spend all their cruise missiles and long range drones attacking your capital city, instead of military targets which make sense. On top of that, most of them are being shot down.
🐣 RT @JayinKyiv Never ending barrage of Iranian drones tonight on Kyiv.
WaPo: What’s in the McCarthy-Biden deal to lift the debt ceiling? Here are 6 takeaways. https://tinyurl.com/z2ybkpaj
// The president and House speaker can claim a victory that appeared elusive just days earlier
[TextLink:] https://twitter.com/Auriandra/status/1662653979833122816?s=20/photo/1
● Raises the debt ceiling beyond the 2024 election
● Largely holds funding flat for domestic programs
● Claws back some money for the IRS
● Slight funding boosts for the military, veterans affairs
● New work requirements on federal programs [but not Medicaid]
● Out of the deal: Closing tax loopholes, cutting student debt relief
🔆 This❗️⋙ WaPo: Biden, McCarthy reach ‘agreement in principle’ to raise debt ceiling as default looms https://tinyurl.com/2h72kpff
🧵 RT @ChrisO_wiki 1/ The Russian Army is holding public show trials of soldiers accused of refusing to fight in Ukraine. Soldiers in Vladikavkaz and Yekaterinburg have been given lengthy sentences after being tried in front of their comrades by military courts.
📌 https://twitter.com/ChrisO_wiki/status/1662486514498936836?s=20
🧵 RT @RALee85 Russia achieved limited tactical gains at high cost over the winter. Ukraine correctly held back resources and spent time regenerating offensive potential to give itself a better chance of achieving operational-strategic level gains this summer.
📌 https://twitter.com/RALee85/status/1662585307269570560?s=20
⋙⋙ 19fortyfive: Sad Reality: The Ukraine War Is Now Going Russia’s Way https://tinyurl.com/2p98m2zu
// Recent evidence indicates the Russian side has made tactical and operational improvements that are having an impact on the ground in Ukraine.
⋙ 🐣 RT @RALee85 If Ukraine had committed all of its resources to the front over the winter, Russia likely wouldn’t have made any gains but Ukraine would have reduced its chances for achieving a breakthrough this summer.
⋙ 🐣 RT @RALee85 I think some people assume that both sides commit all of their resources to the front line at all times and that wars are linear, but that isn’t how it works. Ukraine has a much better chance of making serious gains this summer than Russia had over the winter.
⋙ 🐣 RT @RALee85 I think the focus on Bakhmut has given some people the wrong perception of the war, conflating a tactical-level battle (Bakhmut) with the strategic level. There were several other battles over the winter and none were successes for Russia.
⋙ 🐣 RT @RALee85 There are still important long-term questions about ammunition availability and other variables, but I’m more optimistic about Ukraine’ chances after Russia’s failed winter offensive and recent announcements of more capable weapons’ deliveries from NATO members.
⋙ 🐣 RT @RALee85 Russia made some slow and costly gains last spring before that offensive culminated. Similar arguments were made then about the war’s trajectory favoring Moscow, but the attrition Russia sustained set the conditions for Ukraine’s successful offensives in Kherson and Kharkiv.
⋙ 🐣 RT @RALee85 Russian equipment issues are growing, and they are increasingly relying on convicts to fight/hold their lines. I’m skeptical that Russia can restore sufficient offensive potential to make serious gains. The question is whether they can defend the territory they currently control.
🐣 RT @ZelenskyyUa When Russia started this aggression, they looked at the world as if they were looking at themselves in a mirror. They thought that supposedly everyone in the world was cynical and despised people in the same way as the owners of Russia do. But the world is different – the world helps us protect life. And anyone who goes against the world will become marginal. Russia will gain nothing and lose everything. Glory to all who defend our state! Glory to all who help! 🇺🇦
🐣 RT @maxseddon Talk of a “time of troubles” among warring Russian elites has been strong behind closed doors since the war effort really began sputtering last fall, but it’s still quite something for it to spill out into the open like this
⋙ 🐣 RT @wartranslated Girkin accuses Prigozhin of preparing for a coup in Russia. He says the insults towards the Russian army by Putin’s cook are unacceptable, and signal a rift in the elites which Prigozhin will take advantage of with his private army that is being withdrawn from Bakhmut. Girkin adds that if Russia misses the upcoming counter-offensive, the political situation in the country may become unrecongisable by the end of summer. ¤ Watch an excerpt from a longer video posted today.
💽 https://twitter.com/wartranslated/status/1662429293719298049?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @Podolyak_M [tr] Regarding conditions, requirements, statements… One must call a spade a spade. The civilized world must recognize that the accused of war crimes #Путін and his clique are no longer the legitimate representatives of Russia in the world, and therefore there is nothing to talk about with them. Today’s Russian government must lose its place in all international institutions, including in the Security Council #ООН . There will be a regime change – let’s talk with the successors. In particular, about compensation payments and the nuclear disarmament program.
🐣 RT @CinC_AFU The time has come to take back what belongs to us.
⋙🐣 RT @lamatzzi For I set to defeat the enemies of my homeland
The killers of my Brothers
The rapists of my Sisters
Let my hand be firm
To destroy my enemies
Let my weapons serve well
To destroy my enemies
Let my will be of steel
To destroy the enemies
Your blessing
For our sacred revenge
🐣 RT @s_hnizdovskyi Russian society is polarised between the “elite” and the regular people, says Prigozhin. With the number of Russia’s war losses (btw, he names a bigger number than 🇷🇺 MoD), he predicts the repeat of the 1917 revolution in Russia and the execution of the elites.
💽 [tr] https://twitter.com/s_hnizdovskyi/status/1662454451720929280?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @Hromadske Russia has named new requirements for “achieving peace” with Ukraine, including Ukraine’s refusal to join NATO and the EU. The Ukrainian President’s Office has already responded.
⋙ 🐣 RT @Podolyak_M “Demands of #Russia” told through the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the RF rather confirm the legal and factual incapacity of the Russian leadership. Therefore, only “the conditions of #Ukraine” are realistic…
Immediate withdrawal of all troops from the sovereign territory of Ukraine. Final recognition of the collapse of the #USSR and full sovereignty of the post-Soviet countries. Extradition of war criminals and authors of war. Fixing the demilitarization zone (buffer zone) on the territory of the #RF. Reduction of offensive weapons (missiles with extended range). International conference to organize control over the nuclear arsenal of the RF. A legally fixed program of reparation payments, including a voluntary renunciation of Russian assets seized in other countries in favor of Ukraine…,
🐣 RT @ZelenskyyUa It’s peace that we will pass on to our children and grandchildren as an inheritance of the present generation. We don’t have and don’t want other alternatives. But to pass on peace as the inheritance, we must get to the day when we can say that we are ending this war with our victory.
🐣 RT @EuromaidanPress PMC Wagner owner Prigozhin’s revelations expose the extensive losses and failure of Wagner Group in Bakhmut, demonstrating Ukraine’s success in destroying capable Russian army elements – Frontline report
⋙ Euromaidanpress: Frontline report: Prigozhin’s video exposes high losses and failure of Wagner Group in battle for Bakhmut https://tinyurl.com/55kxyc4k
// Wagner Group owner Prigozhin’s revelations expose the extensive losses and failure of Wagner Group in Bakhmut, demonstrating Ukraine’s success in destroying capable Russian army elements.
🐣 RT @EuromaidanPress Commander-in-Chief Valerii Zaluzhnyi’s Telegram channel published a post saying “It’s time to get back what’s ours” with Ukraine Army’s enlistment ad video ¤ Media are speculating whether it may mean the beginning of the long-expected counter-offensive ¤ https://t.me/CinCAFU/505
💽 https://twitter.com/EuromaidanPress/status/1662332269162381313?s=20/photo/1
💽 [tr] https://twitter.com/DenesTorteli/status/1662318450172108801?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @ Gerashchenko_en For the first time on Russian TV, propagandists said that Putin and the country’s leaders must resign and others need to be elected.
💽 [tr] https://twitter.com/Gerashchenko_en/status/1662352521858252800?s=20/photo/1
⭕ 26 May 2023
🐣 RT @ChuckPfarrer IT’S NOT A WIN WHEN YOU RUN: Yevgeny Prigozhin, head of the Wagner mercenary group, announces that his forces are withdrawing from Bakhmut. RU’s Pyrrhic ‘victory’ in the city is estimated to have cost its forces as many as 40,000 dead and tens of thousands wounded.
🐣 RT @ ChuckPfarrer BAKHMUT AXIS /1420 UTC 26 MAY/ RU sources indicate that Wagner Group forces have initiated withdrawal from the N areas of the Bakhmut Aera of Operations (AO). RU MoD forces including elements of the 9th, 200th, 6th and 123rd Motor rifles are now operational N of Bakhmut.
🌎 https://twitter.com/ChuckPfarrer/status/1662099611958345728?s=20/photo/1
Politico: Yushchenko: ‘Putin has Putin-nized Europe’ https://tinyurl.com/yckd5c48 “[]efore the war, Russia was still a major trade partner … [W]ith Russia no longer being a trade partner, a lot of sources of corruption have disappeared” ~ Former Ukraine President Yushchenko
[…] The real change in Putin, in how he behaves, in how he talks, in how he looks at other countries, I first noticed when he spoke in the Munich security conference in 2007. That speech was so undiplomatic and arrogant. Even how his voice sounded changed. He was trying to sound tough, like a thug, while lecturing the world on how he believes the world should be. How he thinks the security arrangements in Europe should be organized.
I really felt ashamed when I watched him speaking. It was so striking. I remember sitting next to Chancellor [Angela] Merkel, and she kept turning to me, and she said, “I cannot believe he is saying all that.” …
Putin has Putin-ized Europe. The highest level politicians in Europe serve on the board of his companies, and make money in Russia. We see how former chancellors, ministers, vice chancellors of different countries, become members of supervisory boards of Russian state companies. The political corruption, or as I call it, Punitization, has been so deep in all aspects of political and business life in prominent European countries.
Europe, divided by Putin, failed to really build effective security systems and arrangements.
We need to go back and reflect very thoroughly and seriously on what we did wrong to allow this fascist regime in the 21st century, after all the lessons that we were supposed to learn from the 20th century. I think additionally that political leaders of Russia, and the military leadership should be eventually brought to court and tried. For that we need to have a consolidated foreign policy related to these matters. …
Whatever happens with the current situation is pretty much dependent on two countries, China and the United States. … Russia now, is just the vessel, just a subordinate component to Chinese foreign policy. Russia has no say anymore in how to run the world.
Of course, a lot of agreements need to be reached by China and the United States on many matters. But I think that every day, when we talk about the United States, senators and congressmen, more and more people are thinking in the following way: Russia is a gas station.
Q: You’ve talked about how Russia shouldn’t be a permanent member of the U.N. Security Council. Is there a path to remove Russia from that position?
As of now, there is a team of lawyers from different countries looking for mechanisms. They are putting a list of all the instruments that could be used to take that right from Russia to be a permanent member of the council. Once that system is in place, by the end of the summer, we will come up with a list of people who will be contacted and who could be the voices of this initiative, who could actually influence, and bring this into the agenda of the United Nations. …
… [K]eep in mind that before the war, Russia was still a major trade partner. And they were the ones who were imposing and profiting and arranging these corruption schemes in the way they liked, in the dirtiest and most improper way. So this is why, with Russia no longer being a trade partner, a lot of sources of corruption have disappeared. …
What I see is that the people of the United States are more consolidated than ever when it comes to providing Ukraine with military and other assistance. Most of the people — I’m not saying 100 percent — but most people speak in support of Ukraine.
President [Joe] Biden came to Ukraine, and I don’t remember a case when the president of the U.S. or any other important country would come into a war zone.
That was the most important support, expressed in a very courageous way. And that meant so much to every citizen and soldier in Ukraine. Biden walked through downtown Kyiv, at the same time, there were air raid sirens going on, and the president was not being pulled into some shelter or basement. He behaved like every American with dignity, with a sense of freedom and respect to those who fight for freedom.
🐣 RT @Heroiam_Slava ❗️ Ukrainian counteroffensive will be the biggest battle in Europe since World War II, – former German Foreign Minister
🐣 RT @Suomiperkele7 Ukraine, my country will support you until the end, so will 50 countries. Ukraine you are in our hearts, you are in our soul. We don’t get tired, we don’t get sick, we don’t give up, but we fight until the end. We are from all over the world, but our hearts are yellow and blue, ¤ Russia will not wi!! Justice, Caring, equality, friendship, union and humanity. Ukraine Will Win🇺🇦❤️
🐣 RT @ChuckPfarrer. NUCLEAR ROULETTE: The official account Ukraine’s Defense Intelligence (@DI_Ukraine) released a statement at 1503 PM CST indicating that it had information of a planned Russian provocation at the occupied Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Plant.
🌎 https://twitter.com/ChuckPfarrer/status/1662230302754734081?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @DI_Ukraine ‼️ Russians are preparing massive provocation and imitation of the accident at the Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant in the nearest hours. ¤ They are planning to attack the territory of the ZNPP. After that, they will announce the leakage of the radioactive substances.
⋙ 🐣 RT @DI_Ukraine They obviously will blame Ukraine. Russians sabotaged today’s planned rotation of the staff of the IAEA monitoring mission. They aim to provoke the international community and conduct a detailed investigation requiring a ceasefire.
⋙ 🐣 RT @DI_Ukraine Russians are going to use this so desirable pause for the regrouping of the occupational personnel and to stop the Ukrainian counteroffensive.
PravdaUA: Russians prepare large-scale provocation at Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant https://tinyurl.com/bdef63bc “[T]he invaders will announce an emergency leak of radioactive substances [at the ZNPP]. Ukraine will, as ever, be blamed for the incident” ~ Ukraine’s Defence Intelligence
Ukraine’s Defence Intelligence has reported that in the coming hours, Russian invaders are preparing a large-scale provocation to simulate an accident at the Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant (ZNPP). ¤ Source: press service of Ukraine’s Defence Intelligence
Details: According to Defence Intelligence, it will be carried out directly on the territory of the ZNPP. After that, the invaders will announce an emergency leak of radioactive substances. Ukraine will, as ever, be blamed for the incident. ¤ In order to conceal what they are doing as much as possible, the Russians have disrupted the IAEA permanent monitoring mission personnel rotation scheduled for 26 May, Defence Intelligence notes.
The purpose of this action is to provoke the international community into conducting a detailed investigation during which all hostilities will be suspended. In this way, the invaders hope to gain a much-desired pause, which they will use to regroup their ranks and stop the Ukrainian counteroffensive, the intelligence officers summed up.
PravdaUA: Zelenskyy’s office responds to Chinese envoy’s call for occupied territories to be given to Russia https://tinyurl.com/s2fpbp2a Would be “the defeat of democracy, the victory of Russia, the preservation of Putin’s regime &…the sharp increase in conflicts in global politics”
Quote from Podoliak: “Any ‘compromise scenario’ envisaging the liberation of NOT all territories of Ukraine, which ‘anonymous sources’ in the European and American elites periodically talk about, is tantamount to admitting the defeat of democracy, the victory of Russia, the preservation of Putin’s regime and as a consequence the sharp increase in conflicts in global politics.”
DailyBeast, Wajahat Ali: CNN Can Never Wash Away the Trump Disaster Stench https://tinyurl.com/2rwhfrw4 “CNN viewers might not be leaving their ‘silo’ but they’re definitely leaving CNN, whose ratings have plummeted since the Trump town hall”
UACrisis: “It’s either victory and the birth of a new world, or annihilation” -Russian Propagandist Dugin https://tinyurl.com/ax3daueu “Dugin contends that Russia has no choice but to join forces with other nations labelled ‘nomads’ by the West”
[…] Dugin contends that Russia has no choice but to join forces with other nations labelled “nomads” by the West in order to forge a new world order free of Western dominance.
According to Dugin, Russia has two options: complete isolation from the rest of the world, which would strengthen Russian identity and beliefs, leading to victory and a promising tomorrow, or opening up to other civilizations while keeping the West out. He harshly criticises the West, comparing it to hell in terms of lies, double standards, and hostile values.
Dugin emphasises the importance of Russia taking a different path, one of which centred around Africa, the Islamic world, China, Iran, and Latin America. He says that the West has attempted to marginalise Russia, but claims that Russia has risen above this and is moving forward. “The west has indeed swept us on the western map, but we have risen up, gathered ourselves, and stayed put – instead, we are developing.”
“We will never return to our previous course. It’s either victory and the birth of a new world, or annihilation, as our President has repeatedly warned.” ¤ Dugin’s thoughts reflect his desire for Russia to assert its independence and pursue alliances outside of Western influence, implying a shift in Russia’s global perspective, however instead comes across as delusional and desperate.
WSJ: Did Merkel Pave the Way for the War in Ukraine? https://tinyurl.com/29pwcvy7 “Putin had told her that he wanted to destroy the European Union. But she still forged ahead with plans to build the Nord Stream 2 pipeline linking Germany directly to Siberia’s natural gas fields”
// The former German chancellor is unapologetic as critics reexamine her deals with Putin and reluctance to punish his previous aggressions.
[…] Merkel was a key architect of the agreements that made the economies of Germany and its neighbors dependent on Russian energy imports. Putin’s invasion of Ukraine has destroyed that strategic partnership, forcing Germany to find its oil and natural gas elsewhere at huge costs to business, government and households. Berlin was able to secure enough natural gas to carry its economy through last winter, but it is unclear how Germany will meet its long-term supply needs. …
Most controversially, former allies of Merkel and other experts say that her refusal to stop buying energy from Putin after he seized Crimea from Ukraine in 2014—she instead worked to double gas imports from Russia—emboldened him to finish the job eight years later. …
At an event last year, Merkel recalled that after annexing Crimea, Putin had told her that he wanted to destroy the European Union. But she still forged ahead with plans to build the Nord Stream 2 pipeline, linking Germany directly to Siberia’s natural gas fields, in the face of protests from the U.S. Merkel’s government also approved the sale of Germany’s largest gas storage facilities to Russia’s state-controlled gas giant Gazprom.
The Nord Stream 2 pipeline was set to double Russian gas exports to Germany at a time when the country already depended on Putin for 55% of its gas supply. The pipeline was built but never came online, and it was later scrapped by Merkel’s successor because of the war in Ukraine.
Since leaving office, Merkel has defended the pipeline project as a purely commercial decision. She had to choose, she said, between importing cheap Russian gas or liquefied natural gas, which she said was a third more expensive. …
⭕ 25 May 2023
🐣 RT @djrothkopf This is roughly what I said I expected the other day. If it happens this way and they get it through both houses, it will be another example of Biden’s really remarkable ability to work with difficult situations on the Hill.
¤ https://twitter.com/djrothkopf/status/1661926915643432962?s=20
⋙ 🐣 RT @JStein_WaPo Can confirm @jimtankersley‘s scoop tn If it holds – big if – we are looking at essentially flat funding for domestic programs like anti poverty, rental aid, transit, science, etc ¤ I had been expecting a major cut based on everything in the prior few days
⋙⋙ 🐣 RT @TomBlock_FS Deal will require bipartisan vote and moving new deadline until 2025 is a big get for Ds. R House bill had end date of 3/31/24. This is worth a lot for Ds to get.
🐣 RT @goterrands2 The Food and Drug Administration is advising consumers and healthcare providers to stop using certain lots of recalled SD Biosensor, Inc. Pilot COVID-19 At-Home Tests distributed by Roche Diagnostics. ¤ The product recall is due to significant concerns of bacterial contamination in the Pilot COVID-19 At-Home Test liquid solution provided in the test kit.
// COVID-19 test recall
🐣 RT @FBI Today two Oath Keepers leaders were sentenced for seditious conspiracy and other charges related to the breach of the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. Read more at: https://tinyurl.com/3y5bx33w
[TextLink:] https://twitter.com/FBI/status/1661898741731794944?s=20/photo/1
[Text:] Today’s sentencings reflect the FBI’s commitment to do our part to hold accountable individuals who committed criminal acts on January 6, 2021, as well as those who plotted to interfere with the lawful transfer of power. We will continue to work with our partners to bring to justice those who violated our laws in connection with the siege on the U.S. Capitol.
FBI DIRECTOR CHRISTOPHER WRAY
🐣 RT @TheRickWilson If only there was a phrase to encapsulate this effect…
⋙ 🐣 RT @brianstelter “In the weeks after the former president appeared on CNN, the network’s ratings have plummeted. In fact, its ratings last week were the worst the network has posted since June 2015.”
⋙⋙ 🐣 RT @newrepublic The Trump town hall earned CNN no end of mockery on the day of the event. Weeks later, however, we’re seeing knock-on effects in the form of staggeringly low ratings. https://trib.al/4eaaed0
NYT: Mar-a-Lago Worker Provided Prosecutors New Details in Trump Documents Case https://tinyurl.com/2kd38bae “Prosecutors have been trying to determine whether Mr. Trump had documents moved around Mar-a-Lago or sought to conceal some of them after the subpoena”
// A maintenance worker for the former president recounted helping to move boxes into a storage room a day before a Justice Department official came seeking the return of classified material
🔆 This❗️⋙ NYT: Oath Keepers Leader Is Sentenced to 18 Years in Jan. 6 Sedition Case https://tinyurl.com/32mayx5d “The sentence … was the most severe penalty so far in any of the more than 1,000 criminal cases stemming from the Capitol attack” and the first for terrorism
// The sentence for Stewart Rhodes was the longest so far in the federal investigation of the Capitol attack and the first issued to a defendant convicted of sedition.
Stewart Rhodes, the leader of the far-right Oath Keepers militia, was sentenced on Thursday to 18 years in prison for his conviction on seditious conspiracy charges for the role he played in helping to mobilize the pro-Trump attack on the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. ¤ The sentence, handed down in Federal District Court in Washington, was the most severe penalty so far in any of the more than 1,000 criminal cases stemming from the Capitol attack — and the first to be increased for fitting the legal definition of terrorism.
It was also the first to have been given to any of the 10 members of the Oath Keepers and another far-right group, the Proud Boys, who were convicted of sedition in connection with the events of Jan. 6. ¤
For Mr. Rhodes, 58, the sentence was the end of a tumultuous and unusual career that included Army service, a stint on Capitol Hill and a law degree from Yale. His role as the Oath Keepers’ founder and leader thrust him into the spotlight and will now send him to prison for what is likely to be the better part of his remaining days.At a dramatic, nearly four-hour hearing, Judge Amit P. Mehta chided Mr. Rhodes for seeking for years through his leadership of the Oath Keepers to have American democracy “devolve into violence.” ¤ As the hearing opened, prosecutors urged Judge Mehta to sentence Mr. Rhodes to 25 years in prison, arguing that accountability was needed for the violence at the Capitol and that American democracy was on the line.
Kathryn L. Rakoczy, one of the lead prosecutors in the case, told Judge Mehta that Mr. Rhodes had been calling for attacks against the government for more than a decade and that his role in the Jan. 6 attack was part of a longstanding pattern.
The Oath Keepers leader, Ms. Rakoczy said, exploited his talents and influence to goad his followers into rejecting the results of the 2020 election and ultimately mobilized them into storming the Capitol in two separate military-style “stacks” in a violent effort to keep President Donald J. Trump in office. ¤ “It is conduct that threatened — and continues to threaten — the rule of law in the United States,” she said. ¤ Ms. Rakoczy also noted that Mr. Rhodes had shown no remorse for undermining the lawful transition of power and continued to advocate for political violence. Just four days ago, she said, Mr. Rhodes gave an interview from jail, repeating the lie that the election had been marred by fraud and asserting that the government was “coming after those on the political right.”
“It’s not going to stop until it’s stopped,” Mr. Rhodes said during the interview, adding that the country needed “regime change.” ¤ As if to prove the government’s point, Mr. Rhodes — in an orange prison smock and his trademark black eye patch — gave a defiant address to the court, blaming the news media for demonizing the Oath Keepers for leading the Capitol attack. He also compared himself to the Soviet-era dissident Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and to the beleaguered main character in Kafka novel “The Trial.” ¤ “I am a political prisoner,” Mr. Rhodes said. …
In court papers filed this month, prosecutors dwelled on the importance of severely punishing Mr. Rhodes and his subordinates, stating that the acceptance of political violence was on the rise in the United States and that lengthy prison terms were needed to serve as a deterrent against future unrest. ¤ “As this court is well aware, the justice system’s reaction to Jan. 6 bears the weighty responsibility of impacting whether Jan. 6 becomes an outlier or a watershed moment,” the prosecutors wrote. “Left unchecked, this impulse threatens our democracy.” …
In the end, Judge Mehta said he had imposed a harsh sentence because seditious conspiracy was “among the most serious crimes an individual in America can commit.” ¤ He also scolded Mr. Rhodes, telling him that he had not been prosecuted because of his political beliefs but rather because he had “prepared to take up arms and foment revolution” simply because he did not like the results of an election. …
🐣 RT @Flash_news_ua ⚡️Thanks to the most modern air defense systems, such as Patriot and other systems transferred by European partners, Ukrainian forces are successful in repelling missile attacks, – the head of the Pentagon, Lloyd Austin.
🐣 RT @alanfeuer JUST IN: A federal judge has agreed to apply a terrorism enhancement in the sentencing of Oath Keepers’ leader Stewart Rhodes–the first time in more than 1,000 Jan. 6 criminal cases that the terrorism penalty provision has been approved.
⋙ 🐣 RT @alanfeuer Prosecutors argued for the enhancement by saying Rhodes set up an armed force outside DC on Jan. 6 and repeatedly called for violence vs the govt. ¤ “This wasn’t blowing up a building,” prosecutors said. But “organizing an armed force” and advocating “civil war” came close.
🐣 RT @Podolyak_M Once again about the #counteroffensive. Without further questions.
1. This is not a “single event” that will begin at a specific hour of a specific day with a solemn cutting of the red ribbon.
2. These are dozens of different actions to destroy the #Russian occupation forces in different directions, which have already been taking place yesterday, are taking place today and will continue tomorrow.
🐣 RT @pravda_eng Official of Ukrainian President’s Office @Podolyak_M states Ukraine’s counter-offensive already began
⋙ Pravda: Official of Ukrainian President’s Office states Ukraine’s counter-offensive already began https://tinyurl.com/4zfp8zu4
⭕ 24 May 2023
🐣 RT @apmassaro3 John McCain had russia exactly right. russia is provoked by weakness. You have to show strength. If only we’d listened
💽 https://twitter.com/apmassaro3/status/1661321152235536384?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @ZelenskaUA Nowadays of 🇺🇦 and 🇵🇱 are already a subject of historical books. International Book Fair in Warsaw attended by 45 🇺🇦 publishers, is yet another confirmation of this closeness. I had the honor to personally express gratitude to organizers for a honorable reception of Ukraine. 1/2
⋙ 🐣 RT @ZelenskaUA This book fair is possible due to the help of my colleague, the First Lady of 🇵🇱 Agata Kornhauser-Duda, the Ukrainian and Polish Book Institutes, and the Embassies and Governments of our countries. Unity across cultural lines gives us a power that will defeat any evil. 2/2
🐣 RT @jamiedupree I’m not sure I’ve ever seen the occupant of the Chair openly mocked like this before.
// MTG calls for “decorum”
🐣 RT @TheTweetOfJohn “Glitchy. Tech issues. Uncomfortable silences. A complete failure to launch,” Trump campaign spokesman Steven Cheung said. “And that’s just the candidate.”
⋙ NBCNews: A glass of wine and a laughing-crying emoji: Trump team trolls Ron DeSantis launch https://tinyurl.com/5tajm3us
// The former president’s aides and allies mocked the Florida governor after his technology-challenged 2024 presidential launch
🐣 RT @JuliaDavisNews Yevgeny Prigozhin told Russia’s elites to retrieve their kids from foreign countries and send them to the frontlines. He says that only when the rich and powerful start burying their children like everyday folk, people will believe that all is fair.
💙 😅 RT @fireman452a THIS is PURE GENIUS!! Wait for it!!
💽 https://twitter.com/fireman452a/status/1353906078774403075?s=20/photo/1
// 2021, from @jimmykimmel; dancing iconic patriotic statues
🐣 RT @pravda_eng Putin is afraid he will be killed, and we are getting closer – Ukraine’s Defence Intelligence
⋙ Pravda [UA]: Putin is afraid he will be killed, and we are getting closer – Ukraine’s Defence Intelligence https://tinyurl.com/2pm426ff
🐣 RT @OlgaNYC1211 As a symbol of Russia’s military, the Russian Defense Ministry in Moscow is on fire 🔥
💽 https://twitter.com/OlgaNYC1211/status/1661514143428378624?s=20/photo/1
😅 RT @ProjectLincoln Lincoln Project co-founders @TheRickWilson and @ReedGalen with a brief message for #RonDeSaster on his dumpster fire campaign rollout.
💽 https://twitter.com/ProjectLincoln/status/1661505275625349123?s=20/photo/1
📋 NYT: Jan. 6 Rioter Who Reclined in Pelosi’s Office Given Sentence of More Than 4 Years https://tinyurl.com/274u3r8e “More than 480 people have been sentenced so far in connection with the Capitol attack, and about 275 are serving at least some time in prison, DOJ officials say”
// Richard “Bigo” Barnett, who was pictured with his foot on a desk in the speaker’s office, had been convicted of eight crimes for his role in the attack on the Capitol by Trump supporters.
WaPo: Prigozhin says war in Ukraine has backfired, warns of Russian revolution https://tinyurl.com/2n4cj8yc “Prigozhin professed to be guided by love for his motherland and loyalty to Putin. But he also delivered blistering criticism of the war”
Pravda [UA]: Prigozhin believes Ukraine has one of world’s strongest armies https://tinyurl.com/yckj25z5
We barged in and stomped all over the place in search of Nazis. While we were looking for the Nazis, we beat up everyone we could, then we went to Kyiv, then we f**ked up and moved on. Then on to Kherson. F**ked up and moved on. After that or before that? At times I get confused – Izium, Lyman… And somehow nothing works out for us.
The special operation [the war in Ukraine – ed.] was carried out for denazification and demilitarisation. The Ukrainians were just a former republic of the USSR. They had the Ukrainian language, and everyone respected it, including those in the USSR.
So as far as denazification goes… we have made Ukraine a nation that’s known to everyone worldwide. Ukraine has become a country that is known absolutely everywhere. It’s like the Greeks during the heyday of Greece. We have legitimised Ukraine.
Now, as for demilitarisation… they had, say, 500 tanks at the start of the special operation, now they have 5,000 tanks. They had 20,000 people who could fight back then, now 400,000 can. In what way have we demilitarised it [Ukraine]? It turns out we did the opposite – we f**king militarised it.
We’ve fought in a lot of places, with a lot of people. We know how the Americans fight, the French, the cowardly UN troops, African tribes. Today, the Wagner PMC is the best army in the world. We beat everyone, always. But after it [Wagner]… I think that the Ukrainians today are one of the strongest armies. They have a high level of organisation, training, weapons, and intelligence. They use Soviet and NATO [weapons] equally successfully. They’re philosophical about the losses they suffer. Everything they do is to achieve the supreme goal, like we did during the Second World War. But with more technology and more precision.
If the system is built on the fact that you have to kiss someone’s ass, then the Wagner PMC will not do this. The main problem is Shoigu and Gerasimov. These two people blocked everything for us by their decisions, even though the president said ammo was available.s If [Colonel General Mikhail] Mizintsev became defence minister today and Surovikin became the chief of the General Staff, then it would be a decent structure. [Mizintsev is deputy commander of the Wagner PMC – ed.]
My political creed is: I love my homeland, I listen to Putin, Shoigu should be fired, we will keep fighting.
WaPo: The deepening radicalization of Donald J. Trump https://tinyurl.com/34f42vp5 “To experts who have reviewed his proposals, Trump is sketching out the contours of a second term potentially more dangerous and chaotic than his first”
// Watch how the former president’s positions and rhetoric have grown more confrontational and extreme as he seeks a second term
⭕ 23 May 2023
🐣 RT @atrupar Rep. Dan Goldman demolishes a lot of the spin surrounding the Durham report in short order
💽 https://twitter.com/atrupar/status/1661099791051268108?s=20/photo/1
⋙ 🐣 RT @atrupar Rep. Goldman: “So why are my colleagues trying to undermine the FBI? Why are they asking to defund the FBI? … if you can undermine the investigator … then you can undermine our entire system of democracy. That is the authoritarian playbook 101.”
💽 https://twitter.com/atrupar/status/1661100628725096449?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @JohnWDean This is poster-boy authoritarian personality behavior. I witnessed it first with G. Gordon Liddy. Trump, like Liddy, cannot obey the law. Being law abiding is being weak in their minds.
⋙ 🐣 RT @OccupyDemocrats BREAKING: Donald Trump melts down after E. Jean Caroll announces that she is amending her successful defamation lawsuit to seek at least another $10 million in damages due to the smears he lobbed at her during his CNN interview. […]
¤ https://twitter.com/JohnWDean/status/1661218910430199809?s=20
🐣 RT @albafella1 There is Ukraine on the map shown to Putin: photo fact.
🌎 https://twitter.com/albafella1/status/1661187337739554816?s=20/photo/1 -4
The map was compiled in the 17th century by the French cartographer Guillaume Sanson. On it, Ukraine is designated as the “land of the Cossacks,” and Crimea as a separate state called the Crimean Khanate.
Ukraine is marked on a French map from the time of Louis XIV, although the President of Russia and the head of the Constitutional Court argued otherwise. A snapshot of the map is published on the website of the digital library of the National Library of France and its partners Gallica. ¤ The map was created by cartographer Guillaume Sanson in the 17th century.
If you look at the picture, you can see that the lands that are part of modern Ukraine are designated there as ‘Ukraine pays des cosaques’ ( Ukraine is the land of the Cossacks.). At that time it was part of the Commonwealth.
Moreover, Crimea, annexed by the Russian Federation in 2014, was designated by the cartographer as a separate state – the Crimean Khanate, which, in alliance with the Ottoman Empire, fought against the Russian kingdom.
And the area where Emperor Peter I will erect Petersburg – the city in which Vladimir Putin was born – is designated as Ingria and belongs to Sweden.
Recall that on May 23, Vladimir Putin launched a new fake about Ukraine. The Russian President believes that before the creation of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic (Ukrainian SSR) in 1919, Ukrainians never had their own state. Putin also insisted that the territory of modern Ukraine at one time was part of the Commonwealth, and then the population of this territory allegedly “asked to be part of the Muscovite kingdom.”
In addition, on December 21, 2021, Vladimir Putin said at a press conference that Ukraine was created by the Soviet statesman Vladimir Lenin. According to the President of the Russian Federation, for this (creation of Ukraine), the Bolsheviks used “primordially Russian lands.”
🐣 RT @PaulaChertok Putin’s 17th Century map not only shows Ukraine existed. It’s called “PAYS”—literally “country” in French, making Putin’s map fiasco even more farcical. ¤ Don’t be surprised if eminent Constitutional Court Chairman Valery Zorkin has a date with a window in the coming days.
🐣 RT @PaulaChertok Putin can’t read French? The 17th Century map he dug up w/o Ukraine (checks map) HAS UKRAINE! ¤ VKRAINE ou PAYS DES COSAQUES=Ukraine or Land of the Cossacks ¤ 15 months & the pathetic war criminal is still trying—& failing—to justify his catastrophic blunder of a genocidal war.
🌎 https://twitter.com/PaulaChertok/status/1661167989368954882?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @UaNews_online Ukrainian Intelligence Chief: Kyiv has the minimum number of weapons required to begin counteroffensive
¤ https://twitter.com/UaNews_online/status/1661183174813073411?s=20
💙 🐣 RT @NatalkaKyiv Did Prigozhin switch sides or is he talking like this in preparation for the upcoming military coup? ¤ My money is on the latter. I think all will be blamed on ‘happy grandpa’ and he will be forced out of the Kremlin shortly. ¤ #Russia #Prigozhin #RussiaUkraineWar #Ukraine #UkrainianArmy
💽 [tr] https://twitter.com/NatalkaKyiv/status/1661144879450161158?s=20/photo/1
// praise for Ukraine and their war capabilities; blame for Russian MOD war effort and military leadership
🐣 RT @TimothyDSnyder Russia’s leading propagandist Solovyov portrays the invasion of Ukraine as a struggle of traditional values against Satanic America. The same man sent his lover to the U.S. so that their children could have American citizenship.
🐣 RT @ChuckPfarrer BAKHMUT AXIS /1215 UTC 23 MAY/ Russian Wagner Group forces are consolidating positions in Bakhmut and the NW urban area of Khromove. During the last 24 hours, RU has resumed widespread artillery strikes in the Bakhmut Area of Operations (AO).
🌎 https://twitter.com/ChuckPfarrer/status/1660982408500375552?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @ChuckPfarrer AVDIIVKA AXIS / 1915 UTC 23 MAY/ This TACMAP reflects information promulgated in the 1800 (Kyiv) 23 May briefing of the UKR Gen’l Staff. It is reported that RU conducted no offensive operations in the last 24 hrs.
🌎 https://twitter.com/ChuckPfarrer/status/1661088097268842515?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @ZelenskyyUa The strength of our state now, the strength of our defense now, is the basis of the strength of the rules-based international order. That is why the key task of our country and the purpose of virtually every international communication of ours is to strengthen, to bolster our defense, to increase the capabilities of our warriors and our country as a whole. Every foreign visit and almost every negotiation allows to become stronger. ¤ We will win together!
NYT: The Kremlin blames ‘Ukrainian militants’ amid a rare cross-border assault https://tinyurl.com/2pwwwpdy “The Free Russia Legion, a group of Russian volunteers who have taken up arms to fight for Ukraine, claimed responsibility for the incursion”
WaPo: Anti-Putin militias mount cross-border incursion in western Russia https://tinyurl.com/yeynu7sj “Putin ordered officials to tighten security in regions adjacent to Ukraine, but the new attack shows that Russia is still unable to protect the border zone”
🐣 RT @igorsushko Lightly armed Russian revolutionaries now control close to double the area of Bakhmut in Russia’s Belgorod region after 2 more successful incursions from Ukraine today.
🌎 https://twitter.com/igorsushko/status/1661080819853840386?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @SpencerGuard Russia will not “win” in Ukraine. They also cannot “lose” because nothing in Ukraine is theirs to lose. They can and will be defeated.
WSJ: Special Counsel Is Wrapping Up Trump Mar-a-Lago Probe https://tinyurl.com/3evcx4hr
// Some Trump associates anticipate an indictment—and raising funds off it
🧵 RT @ wartranslated Self-proclaimed “fighter against nazis”, the president of the so-called Russian Federation had a lackey bring him a 17th-century map to show that no Ukraine existed back then. Typically, this is enough grounds for him to kill several hundred thousand of foreign and own people in the 21st century. After over a year of getting beaten, having ran his country into the ground, and leaving it with no future, the accused child kidnapper continues pushing the line he made up just to stay in power for the rest of his life.
📌 💽 🌎 https://twitter.com/wartranslated/status/1661043248402399238?s=20/photo/1
⋙ 🐣 RT @ wartranslated Notice the words “quasi-state developments” he used: he is not just talking about Ukraine, he is also talking about the Baltic countries, perhaps Finland, Central Asia, and other nations and territories that were fully or partially annexed by the Russian Empire. For this individual, none of these states should exist, they should be eliminated and annexed back to Russia.
💙🐣 RT @Heroiam_Slava In a time of severe trials, when the deadly darkness came upon us, swallowing up our native lands, every Ukrainian had to make a choice: to submit or to become a hero. And a country of heroes emerged, defending their homeland, living, working and dreaming for it!
💽 https://twitter.com/Heroiam_Slava/status/1660901266057314306?s=20/photo/1
// inspiring
TechnologyReview (Apr), Masha Borak: How Russia killed its tech industry https://tinyurl.com/3fzca4fn
// 4/4/2023; The invasion of Ukraine supercharged the decline of the country’s already struggling tech sector—and undercut its biggest success story, Yandex.
🧵 RT @ general_ben A very good thread by @bctallis on the strategic considerations for winning the war against Russia and what the post-War conditions should be. Also, excellent point about improving our “nuclear IQ”. We talk about the threat of ‘nukes’ without understanding nuclear deterrence.
⋙ 🐣 RT @bctallis How to deal with #Russia – Short thread based on my talk at #LennartMeriConference 2023. #NeoIdealism
1. Ukraine’s war is our war – & must be won.
That means restoring UA’s 1991 borders & ensuring UA’s ability to defend them – & the people within them.
📌 https://twitter.com/bctallis/status/1660896948897869825?s=20
[ThreadReader:] https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1660896948897869825.html
2. After victory we have to get #Ukraine into #NATO & the #EU as fast as possible.
– As @SwedishPM has said:
This should be merit based but cannot again be an excuse for going soft or going slow on UA’s accession.
– we have to institutionally tie our future to UA’s.3. We have to overcome any residual fears of #Ukraine’s victory and #Russia’s defeat.
As @EliotACohen said in Warsaw – RU must lose & know it has lost:
on the battlefield, its offensive military capability for 10 years & has lost Ukraine for good.4. We should not be afraid to embrace the systemic competition against autocratic regimes
– but we have to equip democratic societies to win: militarily, economically, but also ideationally. We have to have the right mentality & ensure the substance behind our claimed superiority5. We must focus resolutely on deterring & containing #Russia.
– over time this *may* spur change in RU but this is not our priority.
– we must focus on stopping RU from doing harm beyond its current borders.6. To properly deter & contain #Russia we have to improve our deterrence & nuclear IQ
– too many western societies lack understanding of how effective deterrence works
– we strengthen our deterrence by boosting our will & ability to fight – precisely so that we don’t have to.7. Boosting capabilities & communicating our effective effective deterrence will also help counter nuclear blackmail.
– we have effective nuclear deterrence with Russia and China & need to explain that more clearly to our populations, taking lessons from e.g. UK, US & NCEE.8. If we do think about #Russia we must stop valorising illiberal elements within the so-called Russian opposition (eg Navalny).
– & stop the endless hunt for ‘good Russians’ which obscures the fact that we have a Russia problem not a Putin problem.9. – BUT, we also need to stop buying into BS Russian exceptionalism: there’s no reason why, over time, RU *cannot* become a democratic, liberal state
To claim otherwise fuels the dangerous exceptionalism that lets Russians think they can get away with especially awful things.10. We also need to drop any lingering great power exceptionalism of our own – we need to drop the great power lenses that see CEE thru the prism of Russia & Inso-Pacific thru prism of China.
– We need to arm ourselves like great powers but see the world like smaller states.11a. Lastly, we need to fix our own roof- & more than that, do some serious home improvement.
– #Russia works in the cracks in our societies that we made. We need to fix those – but more generally build societies that are politically, economically &environmentally sustainable.11b. We rightly claim that liberal democracy is a superior system – but we have to make its benefits more tangible to more of our people.
– we have to offer meaningful hope of progress to turn the costs of geopolitical, tech & green transitions into investments in a better future
And that’s how we deal with #Russia
– by prioritising #Ukraine’s victory & equipping ourselves to win the systemic competition against autocratic regimes.
Its fundamentally about ensuring free societies can not only survive but thrive. #NeoIdealism
🐣 RT @ Rail_splitter1 This is not Ukraine. Don’t play into the hands of Putin’s propagandists. These are Russians fighting against the Putin regime. Knowing what kind of Russians they are, I fear this is nothing but an ongoing FSB project. I do not trust them and don’t think Ukraine should, either.
⋙ 🐣 RT @TheWarMonitor The Belgorod event is even bigger than it seems. Russia, already low on troops, fearing a counteroffensive, now is forced to recall from occupied towns to secure their entire western border. Expecting it in the south, RU was completely caught off guard. Genius strategy by UA.
🐣 RT @DefenceHQ Latest Defence Intelligence update on the situation in Ukraine
23 May 2023. ¤ Find out more about Defence Intelligence’s use of language: http://ow.ly/aoQP50OtWCp ¤ 🇺🇦 #StandWithUkraine 🇺🇦
[TextLink:] https://twitter.com/DefenceHQ/status/1660884230174560256?s=20/photo/1
● Between 19 and 22 May 2023, Russian security forces highly likely clashed with partisans in at least three locations within Russia’s Belgorod Oblast, near the Ukrainian border. The identity of the partisans remains unconfirmed, but Russian anti-regime groups claimed responsibility.
● The most serious incident took place near the town of Grayvoran. As well as small-arms fire fights, there was an uptick in drone or indirect fire attacks near the incidents. Russia has evacuated several villages and has deployed extra security forces to the area.
● Russia is facing an increasingly serious multi-domain security threat in its border regions, with losses of combat aircraft, improvised explosive device attacks on rail lines, and now direct partisan action. Russia will almost certainly use these incidents to support the official narrative that it is the victim in the war.
,
🐣 Bilhorod (Belgorod) is Ukraine
🌎 https://twitter.com/Auriandra/status/1660898833797201921?s=20/photo/1-4
// 4 maps four maps
⭕ 22 May 2023
NewYorker, Luke Mogelson: Two Weeks at the Front in Ukraine https://tinyurl.com/yw8yn6ep
// 5/22/2023; In the trenches in the Donbas, infantrymen face unrelenting horrors, from missiles to grenades to helicopter fire.
🌎 BBC: Ukraine war: Satellite images reveal Russian defences before major assault https://tinyurl.com/46zw2rer
// Russian fortifications
🐣 RT @officejjsmart PRIGOZHIN (of course) BLAMES SHOIGU[:] Wagner founder, Prigozhin, blames 🇷🇺 Minister of Defense Shoigu for the invasion of Russia 🇷🇺 today by Russians seeking to topple the Putin Government.
The head of PMC “Wagner” Prigozhin believes that the Ministry of Defense is unable to protect Russia ¤ “As far as I know, the 🇷🇺 military is not doing anything to strengthen our borders… the Ukrainian Army can just come in.
The 🇷🇺 Army is obliged to secure the border: it is its direct responsibility. ¤ The 🇷🇺 Army cannot attack – they’re not the Ministry of Offensive – but the Ministry of Defense. ¤ Therefore they are obliged to defend their country.” ¤ Essentially, the 🇷🇺 Army is the definition of failure according to Prigozhin.
🐣 RT @Ayei_Eloheichem HUR: “Today the Russian Volunteer Corps and the Freedom of Russia Legion…have launched an operation to liberate these territories of the Belgorod region from the so-called Putin regime…in order to create a…security zone.”
⋙ TheGuardian: Anti-Putin militia claims to have overrun village in Russia border region of Belgorod https://tinyurl.com/33kuctzc
// Self-described partisans the Freedom of Russia Legion say they launched cross-border raid from Ukraine
🐣 RT @anno1540 NATO Parliamentary Assembly recognized Russia’s crimes against Ukraine as genocide, and the regime in Russia as racism ¤ This was announced by the head of the permanent delegation of Ukraine to the NATO Parliamentary Assembly Yegor Chernev. ¤ #NATO
[TextLink:] https://twitter.com/anno1540/status/1660863149593993217?s=20/photo/1 -2
🐣 RT @Ayei_Eloheichem Tangentially, the other unit, the Freedom of Russia Legion, was the last time I checked a nebulous affair, and it’s unclear how many fighters it has, where it’s fought, or whether it even exists. ¤ Unless @IAPonomarenko has updated information since then?
⋙ MoscowTimes (2022) [UA]: Switching Sides: The Elusive ‘Russian Legion’ Fighting With Ukraine https://tinyurl.com/37zf4p9r
// 8/8/2022
The Kremlin’s war against Ukraine is one many Russians don’t want to fight. ¤ And some are so vehemently opposed that they are apparently prepared to take up arms against their country and fight alongside the Ukrainian army.
The Freedom of Russia Legion claims it was formed in March, when over 100 Russian soldiers gave themselves up to Kyiv’s forces.
“I ended up in this war anyway. I thought I would either die as an occupier and murderer or die with a good conscience. So I switched sides,” said a 26-year-old former Russian soldier turned legion member who asked to be referred to by his nom de guerre of Arni.
Along with ex-soldiers, the legion is apparently also made up of Russians who traveled to Ukraine alongside other foreigners to fight with the Ukrainian army in the months after the invasion. It is one of many units — from Georgians to Belarusians — operating as part of the International Legion for the Defense of Ukraine set up by Kyiv at the start of the war. …
🐣 RT @saintjavelin The Ukrainian government is concerned about the civil conflict erupting across its border in Bilhorod ¤ Ukrainian authorities suggest a referendum to be held in full compliance with democratic procedures and international norms
🧵 RT @NOELreports SitRep – 22/05/23 – Bilhorod People’s Republic ¤ An overview of the daily events in the war between Russia and Ukraine. Today the Belgorod region (now called BPR) was attacked by Russian anti-government units of the Russian Volunteer Corps and Freedom Legion of Russia.1/X
📌 https://twitter.com/NOELreports/status/1660762093790851074?s=20
🐣 RT @AntiToxicPeople siren 🚨🚨🚨 BREAKING: Jack Smith’s prosecutors investigating Trump’s handling of classified docs issued a subpoena for information about Trump’s business dealings in SEVEN countries since he took office—China, France, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, the UAE & Oman
⋙ NYT: Prosecutors Sought Records on Trump’s Foreign Business Deals Since 2017 https://tinyurl.com/29m92wk4
// The special counsel scrutinizing the former president’s handling of classified documents issued a subpoena to the Trump Organization seeking records related to seven countries.
🐣 RT @ChuckPfarrer BAD DAY IN BELGOROD: The FSB building in the Russian city has been torn by explosions. The blasts come amid numerous reports that an armed anti-Putin group has conducted a cross-border operation against the city.
⋙⋙ BBC: Russia battles armed group in border region https://tinyurl.com/mc5eeczm
⋙ 🐣 RT @Tendar Explosions reported from Bilhorod/Belgorod. It says that the local FSB building and the interior ministry got hit. ¤ Source: https://t.me/box_of_pandora/29315 #Ukraine #Russia #Bilhorod #Belgorod
🐣 RT @ChuckPfarrer BAKHMUT CITY /1315 UTC 22 MAY/ Wagner forces have consolidated gains in Khromove district, securing the remaining contiguous urban areas of Bakhmut. UKR maintains Lines of Communication and Supply (LOCS); its positions at Chasiv Yar prevent RU advances beyond the city.
🌎 https://twitter.com/ChuckPfarrer/status/1660633437047345153?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @ChuckPfarrer WHO KNEW? Turns out Vladimir Soloviov, Putin’s pet and virulent anti-US propagandist, and his mistress, basketball star Svetlana Abrosimova, have 2 children– both born in the US. Soloviov (who’s already married) has 8 kids from different marriages.
⋙ YahooNews/Ukrainska Pravda: Investigators find secret family of Russian propagandist with children born in the US https://tinyurl.com/2uee9z4w
🐣 RT @ ForeignAffairs “For Putin, Wagner has become a crucial means to rein in the military, which he has long viewed as a potential threat to his power.”
⋙ ForeignAffairs: Why Putin Needs Wagner https://tinyurl.com/2chzdvcy
// The hidden power struggle sustaining Russia’s brutal militia.
🧵 RT @MarkHertling What’s going on in Belgorod? ¤ I’d suggest it may be continuance of shaping operations, prior to Ukraines’ offensive. ¤ Some things we may see in the near future are types of “strikes” or deception operations like raids, feints or demonstrations. Here’s some info on each. 1/6
📌 https://twitter.com/MarkHertling/status/1660640657218629639?s=20
😅 RT @Teoyaomiquu Breaking! A biolab operated by russians is discovered in Belgorod! ¤ According to an informant, they have run multiple bio experiments and tests, including those with viruses, human blood, and genes
🐣 RT @Biz_Ukraine_Mag The Belgorod People’s Republic may be the greatest example of geopolitical trolling in world history. Ukraine appears to be mirroring Russia’s own hybrid war tactics while denying all involvement and deploying the Kremlin’s own cynical lexicon of civil war and internal conflict
🌎 https://twitter.com/Biz_Ukraine_Mag/status/1660723559008706568?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @JayinKyiv With armed Russian opposition to Putin’s regime now getting a foothold in Russia, the western weapons pouring into Ukraine will allow the Ukrainians to increasingly pass Russian weapons to the hands of Russian rebels. ¤ This is going to be wild.
🐣 RT @maria_drutska 90% of russia’s military is in Ukraine preparing for the AFU counter-offensive ¤ Meanwhile, the Free Russia Legion has moved in to positions around Belgorod ¤ Either russia loses Belgorod, or moves their exhausted soldiers from the front
🐣 RT @officejjsmart US RESPONSE “We have made it very clear to Ukrainians that we do not encourage attacks outside Ukrainian borders. But I think it’s important to remind the world that Russia started this war. ¤ Ukraine has the right to decide how it wants to conduct its military operations. ¤ But the aggressor in this war is Russia.” Matthew Miller, US State Department Spokesman on the situation in the Belgorod
🐣 RT @Faytuks Igor Girkin on the situation in Belgorod region: Russian volunteer corps has advanced hundreds of meters into Belgorod region with tank and artillery support from AFU. Russian helicopters and artillery engaged. There are several wounded russians. ¤ https://t.me/strelkovii/4982
[TextLink:] https://twitter.com/Faytuks/status/1660606734946189314?s=20/photo/1
[Text:] In the Belgorod region, punishers from the “Kraken” battalion and Nazi traitors from the “RDK” (“Russian Volunteer Corps”, by force in an incomplete platoon) raided the border crossing with the support of tanks and artillery of the Armed Forces of Ukraine. As a result, they managed to advance several hundreds of meters deep into the territory of the “old” Russian Federation. The border guards and reinforcement units took the fight, attack aircraft (helicopters) and artillery came to the rescue. Our side had several wounded, that one also had losses. In its purely military essence, insignificant hassle.
However, such raids were PREDICTED BY ME earlier as likely signs of an imminent enemy offensive on other fronts – in order to divert the forces and means of the RF Armed Forces to more reliable security of the “old state border”. How much this attack is connected with the upcoming offensive of the enemy – time will tell. But what can be absolutely certain is that the raid has a pronounced “propaganda effect – the enemy seeks to understand the morale of his troops and the population after the withdrawal from Bakhmut. “Cheap and cheerful” – as they say in such cases. In general, it worked. Resource costs are “cheap”, the media effect is loud
🐣 RT @KarinaVinnikova “Maybe something is happening, maybe not” – the official comment of Ukrainian Ministry of Defence.
🐣 RT @officejjsmart LIBERATION FOR BELGOROD
“⚡️The Legion “Freedom of Russia” and the RDK report that they have completely taken the settlement of Kozinka, Belgorod Region.”
🇷🇺 actively supported the “liberation” of🇺🇦 – let’s return the favor: Time to liberate 🇷🇺.
Bye bye, fascist Putin Regime! 👋
🌎 https://twitter.com/officejjsmart/status/1660618900986294274?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @officejjsmart LIBERATION FOR BELGOROD
“⚡️The Legion “Freedom of Russia” and the RDK report that they have completely taken the settlement of Kozinka, Belgorod Region.”
🇷🇺 actively supported the “liberation” of🇺🇦 – let’s return the favor: Time to liberate 🇷🇺.
Bye bye, fascist Putin Regime! 👋
🐣 RT @officejjsmart ALL GOING WELL IN BELGOROD 🇷🇺
Russians, who are fighting on the side of Ukraine 🇺🇦, are invading Belgorod 🇷🇺.
In this video from Belgorod 🇷🇺, you note some building burning off to left, you hear air raid sirens wailing & the driver saying on the phone: “Stay home – don’t go anywhere right now.”
Three days to capture Kyiv isn’t working as planned 😂 😂 😂
🐣 RT @ZelenskyyUa It is our historic task to bring justice to all our people, to guarantee freedom for our entire country without any exceptions. The task of all those who defend freedom, all those who chose Ukraine and, therefore, will win.
🐣 RT @nafoprospect BREAKING: little green dogs with no tags have been spotted all around Belgorod oblast.
🖼 https://twitter.com/nafoprospect/status/1660588444702089218?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @wartranslated Same time as the unexplained incident in Belgorod is taking place, Ukrainian GUR head Kyrylo Budanov published an appeal, in Russian, to all Russian servicemen to surrender via the “I want to live” project to save their lives from the “upcoming meatgrinder”. “It will get worse”, says Budanov.
🐣 RT @NOELreports “It will get worse. You have a choice – to die or save your life,” Major General Kirill Budanov addressed the Russian military
🚫🐣 RT @wartranslated While the situation is still developing, the incursion into the Belgorod territory today reminds me of the raids a few months back, but with several major differences.
¤ https://twitter.com/wartranslated/status/1660601786921623553?s=20
The attack is much more brazen, a larger number of combat vehicles are being used this time, with much heavier artillery and mortar support. It is also being conducted in broad daylight, and drone footage is immediately being published online, to reach the maximum psychological effect.
In the previous incident, we began finding out details when forces were already withdrawn, and the attack began early in the morning when it was still dark.
What is also interesting is that both “Russian Volunteer Corps” and “Free Russia Legion” have left their marks today, they could potentially be operating in two separate areas (Legion in Dronivka, RDK in Grayvoron).
🚫 🐣 RT @Gerashchenko_en Another organization, calling themselves “Russian Volunteer Corps”, published videos showing the organization’s members by different village signs in Bryansk and Belgorod regions of Russia. ¤ “RVC is back to the motherland. We’re home. The time to fight for Russia’s freedom has come.” – one of them said.
🚫 🐣 RT @officejjsmart FREE RUSSIA LEGION ¤ Allegedly the Free Russia Legion, which fights on the side of Ukraine but is composed of Russians, is invading southern Belgorod, Russia.
💽 https://twitter.com/officejjsmart/status/1660598094847696896?s=20/photo/1
🚫🐣 RT @JayinKyiv All signs point to Ukrainian tanks having crossed the Russian border into Belgorod within the past 2 hours.
🚫🐣 RT @ officejjsmart 🇷🇺 NEARING A CIVIL WAR? “It is reported that Russian volunteers, who are fighting for Ukraine 🇺🇦, destroyed the border checkpoint with the 🇷🇺 Belgorod region. The number of killed and wounded is dozens of people.”
🚫🧵 RT @albafella1 The “Liberty of Russia” Legion @legion_svoboda also says it is returning home to end the Kremlin’s dictatorship.
📌 https://twitter.com/albafella1/status/1660558086052929538?s=20
// my guess it’s a diversion or excuse for Ru to escalate; if not, it’s a suicide mission
“We are Russians just like you. We are people just like you. We want our children to grow up in piece and be free people, so that they can travel, study and just be happy in a free country.
But this has no place in today’s Putin’s Russia, rotten from corruption, lies, censorship, restrictions on freedoms, repressions. In that Russia where a person’s life means less than an official’s wallet. In that Russia where a separate railway is being laid to the residence of the bunker grandfather instead of repairing roads in the regions. In a dictatorial country where children are separated from their parents for calling for peace, and teenagers are given life sentences.
It’s time to put an end to the Kremlin’s dictatorship. Thanks to all those who support us. To everyone who sends us donations and smokes where necessary. Your support is what every day reminds us of our final goal on Red Square [in Moscow]. Be brave and don’t be afraid, because we are coming home. Russia will be free!” — he says
⭕ 21 May 2023
NYT, David French: Why Ukraine Needs F-16s https://tinyurl.com/5n6nb259 “Providing Ukraine with advanced fighters [is] a sign the Biden administration is ready to turn the page from helping Ukraine simply avoid defeat. Now we are starting to help Ukraine achieve victory”
🐣 RT @ yasminalombaert Finally!
💽 https://twitter.com/yasminalombaert/status/1660371472127279104?s=20/photo/1
António Guterres backed the reform of the U.N. Security Council and the international financial system to align them with the “realities of today’s world.”
Both the U.N. body and the financial architecture reflect the power relations of 1945 and need to be updated, Guterres told a press conference on the margins of the G7 summit in Hiroshima, Japan.
“It’s my deep believe that the Security Council not longer respond to the realities of today’s world. ¤ I think it is important to have the possibility of new members, namely new permanent members. ¤ And I think, it is also important a renewal of the working methods in order to make it more affective in guaranteeing peace all over the world.” he said.
It’s a shame that Russia is still permanent member of the Security Council and Russian Vladimir Voronkov, Under Secretary General for Counter-Terrorism. ¤ It’s about time that rogue states can’t dominate the agenda and the functioning of the UN Security Council anymore.
WaPo: As hold on Bakhmut slips, Ukrainian forces push to encircle city https://tinyurl.com/yhmmm2dp “[T]he Russian side has been riven with internal differences … Ukrainian forces have been able to exploit these differences to hold off an enemy that greatly outnumbers them”
🐣 RT @cepa “China now finds the way clear for a push into Central Asia, to become its dominant power and to set its primary strategic direction.” @emilavdaliani
⋙ CEPA: China Walks Unopposed into Central Asia https://tinyurl.com/4xreknnx
// 5/17/2023; China’s growing power and Russia’s declining strength mean a new era for Central Asia.
🧵 RT @ BrynnTannehill Lot of virtual ink being spilled on F-16s to Ukraine over the past few days. It’s looking like it will become a reality. So, let’s discuss some of the capabilities, challenges, limitations, and best potential uses of the aircraft. 1/n
📌 https://twitter.com/BrynnTannehill/status/1660261077026762753?s=20
🐣 RT @DenesTorteli “The enemy failed to surround Bakhmut and lost some of the dominant heights around the city. That is, the advance of our troops in the suburbs on the flanks, which is still ongoing, makes it very difficult for the enemy to be in Bakhmut. Our troops have semi-encircled the city, which gives us the opportunity to destroy the enemy. Therefore, the enemy has to defend itself in the part of the city it controls. Our defenders retain control over industrial and infrastructure facilities and the private sector of Bakhmut in the ‘Airplane’ district,” said Hanna Maliar on Telegram. https://t.me/annamaliar/772
🐣 RT @trajaykay
🇺🇦🔱 President Zelenskys Evening Address with English subtitles ¤ Tonight he is on a plane on the way home from the G7 in Japan
🇺🇦🔱 Zelensky. We are finishing this very difficult yet very important week. On Friday, we had the Arab League. On Saturday and Sunday – G7 plus Ukraine
💽 https://twitter.com/trajaykay/status/1660414361628803073?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @POTUS Let me be clear. ¤ I will not agree to a deal with House Republicans that protects billions in subsidies for Big Oil while putting the health care of 21 million Americans at risk.Or that protects wealthy tax cheats while putting food assistance at risk for 1 million Americans.
🐣 RT @RepDanGoldman Two things to consider re 14th Am:
1) anyone challenging the 14th Am is going to court to make America default on its debts.
2) there is no good argument for an injunction. Courts would likely allow us to pay our debts until a decision is made.
We must not be held hostage.
🐣 RT @KyivIndependent ⚡️Land Forces chief says Ukrainian troops may soon encircle Bakhmut. ¤ Ukrainian troops keep advancing on the flanks and are approaching a “tactical encirclement” of Bakhmut in Donetsk Oblast, Oleksandr Syrskyi, commander of Ukraine’s Land Forces, reported on May 21.
🐣 RT @EuromaidanPress Ukraine can strike Crimea using US-made weapons, Jake Sullivan, the US national security advisor to President Joe Biden, tells CNN ¤ “We’ve said we won’t allow Ukraine to use US-made weapons to strike Russia. And we believe Crimea is Ukraine,” Sullivan said.
KyivPost: Clandestine Russian Intelligence Ring in Europe Uncovered, OSINT Group Claims https://tinyurl.com/mkk47mhs
// The cover of 167 Russian intelligence officers across Europe has apparently been blown. The best part? It was accomplished by using open-source intelligence (OSINT).
🐣 RT @RonFilipkowski Biden is president for at least another 20 months. And Trump has been saying this for a year. Presumably, this World War would happen during that time. But he refuses to tell us his secret plan on how to prevent it. So I guess we will all die – including Trump.
[TextLink:] https://twitter.com/RonFilipkowski/status/1660276882615463936?s=20/photo/1
[Text:] 🐣 RT @realDonaldTrump Biden continues to bring the world ever closer to nuclear war. I alone am the candidate who can prevent World War 3. I will end the killing and bloodshed and bring peace to Europe and the World!
🐣 RT @AntiToxicPeople Happy Sunday morning from a deranged lunatic:
[TextLink:] https://twitter.com/AntiToxicPeople/status/1660257241973555200?s=20/photo/1
[Text:] 🐣 RT @realDonaldTrump They Spied on my campaign, Rigged the 2020 Presidential Election, Weaponized the DOJ & FBI, and yet they continue to go after me instead of the criminals that did all of these things, because I am fighting for you, and leading Biden, and everyone else, in the polls. It’s called Election Interference, and it is totally ILLEGAL!
🐣 RT @wartranslated Girkin [aka Strelkov] says the Bakhmut battle was unnecessary and turned out to be Phyrric (longread). He notes that all Russian forces are now exhausted while trying to achieve at least some sort of victory for propaganda purposes, and Ukraine is now in a position to deal several strikes where it wants, most likely to be met by weak Russian resistance.
[TextLink:] https://twitter.com/wartranslated/status/1660273337744982023?s=20/photo/1 -3
[Text:] [I] already briefly expressed my opinion on the conclusion of the assault on Bakhmut in Telegram. But, reading the strainedly joyful comments on VKontakte, I thought that it would be necessary to calmly and in detail once again go through this operation here too, which is now being iflated in every possible way (in order to stick “victorious laurels” on the bald head of “Cook”).
So, in a nutshell.
1. After the humiliating and almost catastrophic autumn defeats in the Kharkiv region, first the reduction of the Kherson bridgehead under the onslaught of the enemy, and then its complete abandonment, the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation, having carried out a partial “under-mobilisation” since its legal status turned out to be completely incomprehensible and it was limited only by conscripting 250-300 thousand men into the army and nothing more), they tried during the winter campaian (gradually turning into spring) to “take revenge” on the Donbas front. Precisely and only in the Donbas Donetsk-Lugansk). Because ever earlier (in the spring of last year, after the “de-escalation”), the Kremlin adopted (and remained unchanged to this day) a course towards “freezing the conflict through a compromise agreement with partners.” And within the tramework of achieving this agreement,” no offensives deep into the so-called “Ukraine” are considered at all – no matter what strategic prospects they promise. Therefore, only “smashing in the battle of attrition” into the position of the enemy in the Donbas in the hope that “sooner or later the partners will mature [for negitations]. The cretinism of this concept and its stillbirth are exceptional. But it is being implemented with the same gloomy-idiotic stubbornness with which they have been trying to implement exactly the same “non-alternative Minsk agreements” for 8 years. Starting from the end of April last year, all offensive operations of the RF Armed Forces were carried out ONLY in the Donbass. Even having occupied part of the Kharkiv region along the line of the Siversky Donets – they were not going to advance west of it, they were exclusively driven south – to the most heavily fortified Sloviansk-Kramatorsk agglomeration. With the corresponding result…
2. Thus, starting an offensive in the Donbas in the late autumn of last year, our “military strategists” again tried to solve for the political leadership the task that our elderly cretins “drew” in their heads: “Completely liberate the Donbas and start bargaining with Kiyy and dear Western partners in order to impose on them the “status quo: Crimea, Donbas and the orridor to Crimea stay with us, we do not pretend to be more. As we can see, this task has not been solved even to a small extent in seven months of bloody battles (which in many areas – near Avdeevka and Maryinka, for example, ore dimost continuous And the fact that “Wagner supplied and replenished until the middle of winter this year on “lux standard” at the cost of almost complete loss of their own infantry, managed to *get “in two towns of Soledar and Bakhmut during the months-long meat grinder is the only tactical victory. And in connection with the complete failure of the strategic task – the capture of Bakhmut is presented as “the crown of military leadership” and “an epoch-making battle of world-historical significance.”
3. Meanwhile – as already noted above – on the whole, the operation ended in a strategic failure of our troops. The enemy has NOT been ousted from the Donbas in all the main directions, in most directions – has not been moved at all. During the offensive, the RF Armed Forces used up a lot of trained manpower, exhausted almost to the bottom the stocks of weapons, equipment and ammunition necessary for further offensive operations. Therefore, increased attention has been paid to Bakhmut’s “capture” for the past 2 months – it was necessary to achieve at least some result “for propaganda” in order to “take a breath” later … Look, we “won* … And yesterday they stopped immediately at outskirts of Bakhmut, as soon as they crawled to it, there is no strength to go further …
4. Now we should be waiting for the “return move” from the enemy. Similar to the one that was made by the enemy in September, right after our valiant generals “finished” the tiny town of Peski on the outskirts of Donetsk throughout a month. Why do I think the enemy will attack soon? – precisely because now he has the best chance of success. The best strike units of the RF Armed Forces are exhausted by many months of battles. The stock of ammunition is minimal. If, for example, the enemy chooses the Donetsk front for attack (for example, the Mariupol direction), then he will be met by units and subunits badly battered and “thinned” by the transfer of reserves to Bakhmut. And if he decides to attack on the Zaporizhzhia front, then he may not worry about the stability of his defense in the Sloviansk-Kramatorsk direction and near Avdiivka.
5. Therefore – I consider the victory near Bakhmut: a) Initially unnecessary (“distraction to an unusable object”, I wrote about this many times); b) Pyrrhic. It was not worth the effort and money spent on it, even approximately. ¤ HOPE TO BE WRONG.
🐣 RT @AntiToxicPeople Every word of this is completely insane & delusional.
[TextLink:] https://twitter.com/AntiToxicPeople/status/1660261577743011844?s=20/photo/1
[Text:] @reaDonaldTrump Joe Biden REFUSES to give the 1,850 Boxes in Delaware, or the 4 Boxes that were discovered in CHINATOWN, and then sent to his lawyers in Boston to clean them up. Maybe that’s why all of that money from China has gone into his pockets, but I hope not? I went by the Presidential Records Act – Things done correctly!
🐣 RT @ ChuckPfarrer BAKHMUT CITY /1145 UTC 21 MAY/ RU control of the urban area will not materially change the tactical situation. UKR maintains Lines of Communication and Supply (LOCS), and its nearly impregnable positions at Chasiv Yar still deter RU advances on either the M-03 or H-32 HWY.
🌎 https://twitter.com/ChuckPfarrer/status/1660247983726686211?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @AndriyYermak Mr. President @POTUS, when we met in Kyiv you said you would do everything for pilots to train and then get fighter jets. And you did it along with your allies. ¤ Thank you, and the Congress, and all the people for your unwavering support
⋙ 🐣 Despite some loud contrarian GOP members of the House, most have supported this move for some time, especially the Chairmen of the key committees. And the Senate stands firmly behind you. Just wish things moved more quickly. ¤ Slava Ukraini 🇺🇦 🇺🇸
🐣 RT @markomihkelson Kissinger has changed his mind, follow him. Strong NATO is the best peace dividend for the democratic nations.
⋙⋙ TheEconomist: Kissinger: for the safety of Europe, get Ukraine into NATO https://tinyurl.com/3a5n3rv3
// 5/17/2023; Highlights from our conversation with Henry Kissinger; $paywall
⋙ 🐣 RT @grammoflot Kissinger’s happy with Russia keeping Crimea. He also says Nato membership ensures that Ukraine won’t make territorial claims on Russia. Very odd. Marko, you sure about jumping on the Kissinger train?
⋙ 🐣 RT @Estonian01 I could not read all article but I understood from someones tweet- he wants to take to NATO Ukraine in current boarders without occupied areas…
🐣 RT @twitter_dude Pyotr Aleksandrovich, Russia’s Minister of Science and Higher Education has died during a flight from Cuba back to Russia, at the age of 47. ¤ What is the scientific odds a minister of science dies on a 13-ish hour flight at the age of 47?
¤ https://twitter.com/witter_dude/status/1660189178741551104?s=20
[Clarification:] 🐣 RT @maria_drutska The question about Bakhmut was:
– Russians said they have taken Bakhmut.
– I think no. ¤
“We must understand that this does not mean anything. They (the russian soldiers) destroyed everything! There is not a single building left. This is a tragedy for today. But Bakhmut is in our hearts. There are only ruins and many dead russians. But they came to us. Our defenders in Bakhmut did a serious strong job. And of course we appreciate their great work!”
💽 https://twitter.com/maria_drutska/status/1660189833971613696?s=20/photo/1
↥ ↧
🐣 RT @ pravda_eng 💔Answering the journalist’s question if Bakhmut is still in Ukraine’s hands, President @ZelenskyyUa said that, “I think no. But you have to understand that there is nothing, they destroyed everything, there are no buildings.” And added that, “Bakhmut is only in our hearts”
// Interviewer asked “Russians say they have taken Bakhmut” acc another tweet
💽 [Full video] https://twitter.com/anno1540/status/1660181236554383378?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @ front_ukrainian ⚡️The 🇺🇸USA announced a new package of military aid to 🇺🇦Ukraine in the amount of $375 million:
● additional ammunition for HIMARS systems;
● artillery shells, thermal imaging and bridge systems;
● TOW anti-tank guided missiles;
● Javelin and AT-4 anti-tank systems
// Defense budget
⭕ 20 May 202
🐣 RT @MattBoxer94 A sad day for Ukraine but the fact that it took the Russians 10 months to advance on a small city no one knew abt 15 months ago is an indictment of their armed forces and simultaneously Ukraine took back Kherson and Moscow is increasingly getting desperate
⋙ 🐣 RT @WarMonitor3 Bakhmut has been captured by Russian forces. ¤ However the picture is not as sweet as they make out, to the outskirt SW districts fighting still rages and on the flanks they are struggling to advance. ¤ A battle of attrition over 10 months which has served its military purpose.
🐣 RT @SophiePerrin18 Fellas: This is a brilliant write up by Michael Podolyak. It stamps a hearty “BS” to all the amplified crying, moaning, & posturing we’re see from Russian quarters on social media yesterday & today. Feel free to copy it & use it just like a meme!
// Note: “Mykhailo Mykhailovych Podolyak[1] (Ukrainian: Михайло Михайлович Подоляк; born February 16, 1972)[2] is a Ukrainian politician, journalist and negotiator, serving as the adviser to the head of Office of the President of Ukraine” ~ Wikipedia
[TextLink:] https://twitter.com/SophiePerrin18/status/1659974559712391168?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @Podolyak_M [Михайло Подоляк] There are few pleasures in the world greater than watching Moscow’s reactions to President Zelenskyy’s visits. Like a demon sprinkled with holy water, the Kremlin is convulsing, using a network of decades-old agents, corrupt media, and agents of influence. It tries to scream, shout, sabotage – and every time in vain, facing humiliation again and again, even in those regions that it imperially considered “its own” or tried to convince the rest of the world of this. In every corner of the globe, President Zelenskyy is being hailed as a strong leader of the free world, paying tribute to the courage and bravery of the Ukrainian people. Such respect cannot be bought with money; it can only be earned. This is true power – greater than a gas pipe or corrupt kickbacks. This is true agency. Ukraine has forced to respect our word and opinion, to reckon with ourselves. At every meeting, it is said directly or signaled indirectly: the time of Putin and his clique of criminals is over; even where they are not considered bad guys, they are considered pathetic. Russia will suffer a military defeat – and it is inevitable. International law will be put back on the agenda. It is time to discuss the post-war world order.
🐣 RT @ front_ukrainian ⚡️The 🇺🇸USA announced a new package of military aid to 🇺🇦Ukraine in the amount of $375 million:
● additional ammunition for HIMARS systems;
● artillery shells, thermal imaging and bridge systems;
● TOW anti-tank guided missiles;
● Javelin and AT-4 anti-tank systems
// Defense budget
🐣 RT @Gerashchenko_en President @ZelenskyyUa at the G7 meeting. ¤ Congratulations to the great geopolitical strategist Putin (Russia used to be a part of G8, but was excluded after invading Crimea in 2014).
🖼 https://twitter.com/Gerashchenko_en/status/1660165187603660803?s=20/photo/1
// group photo
🐣 RT @ChristopherJM Zelensky, wrapping up his big G7 appearance in Hiroshima, says Ukraine “proposed its Peace Formula to the world.”
⋙ 🐣 RT @ZelenskyyUa Our world is vast, but we are all in it together. And this is our shared cause – peace.
🇺🇦 proposed its Peace Formula to the world. As long as invaders remain on our land, no one will sit down at the negotiating table with 🇷🇺. The colonizer must get out. And the world has enough power to force 🇷🇺 to restore peace step by step.
We have developed the Peace Formula in a way that ensures each of its points is backed by @UN 🇺🇳 resolutions. And in a way that everyone in the world can choose the track they can contribute to. From Japan to the Arab countries, from Europe to Latin America, we find support for our Formula. And we continue this work.
⋙ 🐣 Ukraine’s Proposed Peace Plan via Reuters (12/28/2022) https://tinyurl.com/yndknb7m
The plan calls for:
[TextLink:] https://twitter.com/Auriandra/status/1660168197100777472?s=20/photo/1 .
Ukraine’s 10-Point Peace Plan
1. Radiation and nuclear safety, focusing on restoring safety around Europe’s largest nuclear power plant, Zaporizhzhia in Ukraine, which is now-Russian occupied.
2. Food security, including protecting and ensuring Ukraine’s grain exports to the world’s poorest nations.
3. Energy security, with focus on price restrictions on Russian energy resources, as well as aiding Ukraine with restoring its power infrastructure, half of which has been damaged by Russian attacks.
4. Release of all prisoners and deportees, including war prisoners and children deported to Russia.
5. Restoring Ukraine’s territorial integrity and Russia reaffirming it according the U.N. Charter, which Zelenskiy said is “not up to negotiations”.
6. Withdrawal of Russian troops and cessation of hostilities, restoration of Ukraine’s state borders with Russia.
7. Justice, including the establishment of a special tribunal to prosecute Russian war crimes.
8. Prevention of ecocide, need for protection of environment, with focus on demining and restoring water treatment facilities.
9. Prevention of escalation of conflict, and building security architecture in the Euro-Atlantic space, including guarantees for Ukraine.
10. Confirmation of the war’s end, including a document signed by the involved parties.
🐣 RT @AntiToxicPeople Lunatic.
[TextLink:] https://twitter.com/AntiToxicPeople/status/1660114768492101632?s=20/photo/1
[Text:] 🐣 RT @realDonald Trump FoxNews: “Durham Report Slams FBI for Trump-Russia Probe.” So why isn’t DOJ doing something about this, a part of the Crime of the Century, the greatest Witch Hunt in history? Instead they are viciously investigating me about “the Boxes Hoax,” even though Biden is guilty and I am not – I did nothing wrong! They spied on my campaign and Rigged an Election, and these Trump Haters go after me. Congress should make REFERRALSto DOJ, and demand they stop the Witch Hunt against “TRUMP.” MAGA!
🐣 RT @DerekJGrossman No apology for nuking Japan from Biden while in Hiroshima.
🖼 https://twitter.com/DerekJGrossman/status/1660064126645981184?s=20/photo/1
// caption: Prime Minister Fumio Kishida of Japan and with U.S. President Joe Biden, right, react after laying a wreath at the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Park in Hiroshima, Japan, Friday, May 19, 2023, during the G7 Summit. (AP Photo/Susan Walsh,Pool)
⋙ LATimes: Hiroshima attack’s last survivors watch as Biden pays tribute, but makes no apologies https://tinyurl.com/47stsnt6
// Group of 7 leaders convened in Hiroshima and honored victims of the atomic bomb. But they have no new plans to reduce the threat […?] $paywall
🧵 RT @mhmck Battles for the city of Bakhmut do not stop. The Russian fascist invaders conducted unsuccessful offensive actions in the direction of Bila Hora.
Source: General Staff of the Armed Forces of Ukraine operational information at 06:00 on 21 May 2023 1/3
📌 🌎 https://twitter.com/mhmck/status/1660138700079071233?s=20/photo/1
WaPo: Russia claims victory in Bakhmut, but Ukraine says fight is still on https://tinyurl.com/2xs9rtsn
🐣 RT @TreasChest Volodymyr Zelensky was inaugurated four years ago. ¤ I remember well how it all began. People wanted change. The “elites” were very afraid of them. But we understood that this was our last chance. Either someone will unite the country and lead it forward, or we will lose everything.
Zelenskyi’s presidency was the most difficult period of independence. But he was able to make it so that difficulties did not break us, but made us stronger.
Ukraine became the leader of the free world under Zelenskyi’s presidency. Our country destroyed the myth of the invincible Russian army. We suffer losses, but we grow stronger every day. Respect for Ukraine in the world is higher than at any time in recent history.
Because for the first time in a long time, we have a President who never lacked determination and courage. Therefore, in February 2022, the “second army of the world” received a blow. That’s why we got weapons from the West, not worries. Therefore, we will win and build a country that our children will be proud of. ¤ We thank the President in whom we believed then, and in whom we never once doubted!
// TIME cover: How Zelensky Leads
🐣 RT @Erdbeerdampfe Sad Solovyov “Nobody takes us serious anymore” ¤ Watch the full video
💽 https://twitter.com/Erdbeerdampfe/status/1660087646436089857?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @McFaul In a few years, Ukraine will be armed with F16s, Patriots & hopefully THAAD missile defense systems, HIMARs & ATACMS and Abrams tanks. Russia will still have MiG29s, S-300s/400s, and T72s. The balance of military power is shifting in Ukraine’s direction.
🐣 RT @Keysfins May 24th: NARA/Archives will hand over 16 presidential records to Special Counsel that demonstrate sad dfg had knowledge of correct declassification process. ¤ Delish.
🐣 RT @RonFilipkowski The only thing I can’t believe is that it took this long.
🐣 RT @IndictmentTime Called it! He definitely got a target letter from the DOJ.
⋙ 🐣 RT @MuellerSheWrote Interesting.
[TextLink:] https://twitter.com/MuellerSheWrote/status/1660072595092574208?s=20/photo/1
[Text:] @realDonaldTrump Can you believe? They Rigged the Election, and want to
prosecute me!
🐣 RT @sentdefender Russian News Agency TASS, reported today that the Russian Foreign Ministry has Notified the United States and other European Countries that if they decide to follow through with their Plan to provide F-16s to Ukraine it will carry “Colossal” Risk to the West.
🐣 RT @yasminalombaert Words of an increasingly isolated, paranoid, dictator of a sinking ship. ¤ Putin desperately struggles to escape the disastrous trap he set for himself.
💽 https://twitter.com/yasminalombaert/status/1659844831206596615?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @DAlperovitch This is what’s left of Bakhmut after Russian so called “liberation”
💽 https://twitter.com/DAlperovitch/status/1659950022522183681?s=20/photo/1
// drone footage
🐣 RT @yasminalombaert A real bad weekend for pariah Putin.
● The Saudis invited President Zelensky as a guest of honour at the Arab League summit on Friday. Putin was not invited.
● On Friday the China-Central Asia Summit was successfully held in Xi’an. Putin was not invited and he desperately send them greetings.
● Saturday, President Volodymyr Zelenskyy is taking his pitch for support beyond his western allies with a scene-stealing appearance at the G7 summit, confronting the leaders of India and Brazil after they chose not to back sanctions against Russia.
● The US has approved sending F-16 fighter jets to Ukraine to enhance the country’s air defence.
● Putin’s effort to shore up more friends in the South Caucasus by scrapping visa requirements for Georgian nationals and lifting a four-year ban on direct flights to the country also didn’t appear to go as smoothly as Putin may has hoped. The first flight that landed Friday in Georgia was met with protests.
🐣 RT @insidermildef Russia adapted to the game-changing HIMARS, but Ukraine’s new Storm Shadow missiles could put the fear back into its commanders, warfare experts say
⋙ BI: Russia adapted to the game-changing HIMARS, but Ukraine’s new Storm Shadow missiles could put the fear back into its commanders https://tinyurl.com/5n87c88z
// Ukraine has pushed Western partners for long-range missiles so it can strike Russian positions deep behind the lines. And now it’s got them.
🐣 RT @FridaGhitis Zelensky meets with Indian PM Modi on the sidelines of the G7. (Not a happy moment for Putin.)
💽 https://twitter.com/FridaGhitis/status/1659953848075665415?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @sentdefender So far the Russian Army has “Struggled” with Defensive Operations to the North and South of Bakhmut so if Wagner is planning to Withdraw and allow Ground Forces to take their Positions the Russian MoD needs to Rethink their entire Strategy for Defensive Operations in the Region.
↥ ↧
🐣 RT @sentdefender The Wagner PMC has announced that beginning May 25th they will begin to Withdraw their Forces from Eastern Ukraine in order for them to be Deployed to other “Hotspots” across the World including Sudan and Syria; their Previous Positions in Ukraine specifically across the Bakhmut Front will be replaced by Soldiers and Equipment from the Russian Ground Forces.
🐣 RT @officejjsmart THE FIGHT FOR BAKHMUT CONTINUES
Armed Forces of Ukraine 🇺🇦 are conducting an operation to encircle Bakhmut.
– Spokesman of the Eastern Group of Forces of the Armed Forces of Ukraine
🚫🐣 RT @mfa_russia ⚡️ Russia’s Defence Ministry: ¤ As a result of offensive actions by the Wagner assault units, supported by artillery and aviation of the Yug Group of Forces, the liberation of #Artyomovsk [Bakhmut] has been completed ✅
// Ukr has not yet confirmed
🐣 RT @AntiToxicPeople 🚨🚨 Trump’s lawyer Parlatore who quit this week throws Trump’s other lawyer under the bigliest bus imaginable 😳
⋙ 🐣 RT @Acyn Reid: You said that Boris [Epshteyn?] tried to prevent you from conducting searches. What searches?
💽 https://twitter.com/AntiToxicPeople/status/1660025084789268480?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @ChuckPfarrer BAKHMUT CITY /2000 UTC 20 MAY/ Heavy urban combat continues in Bakhmut, with RU /Wagner forces consolidating lodgments in the vicinity of Khromove. UKR broke up a VDV attack again S of the H-32 HWY at Ivanivske. UKR refutes claims that Bakhmut city has been captured by RU forces.
🌎 https://twitter.com/ChuckPfarrer/status/1660011200594231297?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @SenWhitehouse This is a long deep dive into the secretive democracy-killing creepshow we are up against. You may want an airsick bag handy when you read it.
⋙ NewRepublic, Nina Burleigh: Who Is Leonard Leo’s Mysterious Dark Money King? https://tinyurl.com/2m28h53y
// America needs to know who Barre Seid is, what kind of country he wants, and just how massive an impact his $1.6 billion gift can have on our political discourse.
🐣 RT @sumlenny Every time I visit Kyiv, I try to manage visiting St.Sofiia cathedral – a UNESCO world heritage site, and one of the most beautiful sacred places I have ever seen in my life. Join me and share my passion for Sofiia!
💽 https://twitter.com/sumlenny/status/1659895722869751809?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @officejjsmart C5 is a new military bloc of China 🇨🇳, with Kyrgyzstan 🇰🇬, Uzbekistan 🇺🇿, Tajikistan 🇹🇯, Kazakhstan 🇰🇿and Turkmenistan. Russia 🇷🇺 was not invited
🧵 RT @WriterJackWhite So did the Russians interfere in the 2016 EU referendum to help Leave get the winning 1.9% margin? Yes – Russian spies Udod & Nalobin befriended the organisers of the Leave Campaign including Banks,Boris Johnson, Elliott of Vote Leave. RT & Prigozhin’s IRA
📌 https://twitter.com/WriterJackWhite/status/1659607117119078401?s=20
⋙⋙ TheGuardian (2017): Russia used hundreds of fake accounts to tweet about Brexit, data shows (This article is more than 5 years old) https://tinyurl.com/2e5za938
// 11/14/2017; Researchers find that accounts run from a St Petersburg troll farm tried to sow discord between Britons over the referendum
⋙ 🐣 Prigozhin and his hacking group were indicted by the US in connection with interference in our 2016 election that gave us Trump. You likely are familiar with our story as I am with yours. Russia has been a malign actor for decades. But we were asleep post-1991.
🐣 RT @maxseddon Take with a grain of salt. Prigozhin says Wagner’s forces have established full control over Bakhmut after a bloody siege that all but destroyed the city. ¤ His declaration of triumph is a long rant about how Shoigu and Gerasimov were no help and Wagner mostly did it on their own
⋙ 🐣 Leave it to Zelensky for this to come at the moment he shows up at both the meetings of the Arab League and the G-7 (where he secures a deal for F-16 fighter jets and more sanctions against Russia)
⋙ 🐣 RT @saabj35 That’s nice but they’re about to be outflanked.
🐣 RT @maxseddon Take with a grain of salt. Prigozhin says Wagner’s forces have established full control over Bakhmut after a bloody siege that all but destroyed the city. ¤ His declaration of triumph is a long rant about how Shoigu and Gerasimov were no help and Wagner mostly did it on their own
🐣 RT @ col_luka Just to summarize this week alone.
G7 Summit in Hiroshima, Japan
–> no Russia
Arab League Summit in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia
–> no Russia
Central Asian Summit in Xian, China
–> no Russia
This is how a former power disappears from the world stage. ¤ But sending greetings.
⋙ 🐣 Russia won’t be selling arms to many of these countries either. The world now knows Ru mil equipment sucks
🐣 After Zelensky showed up there, did he have a choice?
⋙ 🐣 RT @ mfa_russia ✍️ President #Putin sent greetings to participants in the 32nd #ArabLeague Summit: ¤ Russia has always attached great importance to the development of friendly relations & constructive partner interaction with countries in the Middle East & North Africa ¤ 🔗 https://is.gd/qbTkgA
🐣 RT @Gerashchenko_en Congratulations to the great geopolitical strategist Putin. ¤ The China-Central Asia summit, to which China invited representatives of Kazakhstan, Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan – but did not invite Russia – is a very important signal. ¤ This shows that China created a new Central-Asian C5, which China will lead. And Russia has lost its influence in the region where it historically had a lot of impact.
🐣 RT @djrothkopf With more strong support for Ukraine, a unified G7 front against Chinese economic coercion, steady leadership to calm concerns on default and productive meetings w/allies, ¤ @POTUS has had a successful G7 trip and once again shown how he’s restored US leadership worldwide.
⋙ 🐣 RT @djrothkopf It was not long his disgraced predecessor fought with our friends, shoved them aside to get into photo ops, kowtowed to our enemies, and put us global interests and security at risk every time he opened his mouth. We can’t afford to go back to that. The world can’t.
WaPo: Zelensky makes dramatic G-7 visit as Biden mobilizes allies over China https://tinyurl.com/ydtaaew2
// Leaders focus on supporting Ukraine and countering China’s economic rise
🔄 🧵 RT @VolodyaTretyak Important announcement ¤ Today I will start a thread series #RussiaDecolonized. I will write about each republic and estimate their chances of becoming free. ¤ There are nations that fought for their freedom against Moscow and even declared independence in 1991.
📌 🌎 https://twitter.com/VolodyaTretyak/status/1659634998440239105?s=20/photo/1
KyivPost, John Bryson: Kaliningrad, Königsberg or Królewiec? Putin’s Distorted Definition of the Russian Motherland https://tinyurl.com/26jz38fe
// Putin is being reminded that irredentism works both ways.
🐣 RT @oleksiireznikov Looks like Santa Claus does exists. A new jet coalition was born today! Thank you for the decision my colleagues @SecDef @BWallaceMP @DefensieMin @DedonderLudivin @troelslundp ¤ Ukrainian pilots are looking forward to starting their training on F-16 fighter jets. They will now be able to support their brothers and sisters-in-arms on land and on sea to win this war. F-16 were crafted to beat the bad guys. Their time is now!
⋙ 🐣 RT @oleksiireznikov [Dec 31, 2022] 2023 should be the victorious year. ¤ My official address to Santa Claus.
⭕ 19 May 2023
Newsweek: Ex-Trump White House Lawyer Predicts Bad News for Former President https://tinyurl.com/bdepm5dx
Former White House lawyer Ty Cobb believes the “feds are coming fast” for Donald Trump, predicting that the investigation into the former president’s alleged mishandling of classified documents will land him in prison. ¤ Cobb, a former U.S. assistant attorney and member of the Trump legal team between July 2017 and May 2018, told CNN’s Erin Burnett on Thursday that a plethora of evidence exists to convict the former president. …
Investigations include Smith looking into Trump’s potential wrongdoing regarding the U.S. Capitol riot on January 6, 2021; whether he attempted to overturn the 2020 president election results in Georgia; as well as the indictment already handed down against Trump by Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg’s office for an alleged $130,000 hush-money payment to adult film actress Stormy Daniels via Trump’s ex-lawyer Michael Cohen during the 2016 campaign; and New York Attorney General Letitia James’ tax fraud suit filed in September against Trump and three of his children: Ivanka, Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump.
CNN reported Thursday that the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) informed Trump that 16 records would be handed over to Smith, purportedly showing that the former president and his top advisers had knowledge of the correct declassification process while he was president—which Cobb said would not be “much of a legal hurdle” for Smith should Trump challenge it in court.
“I would not necessarily expand the case to try to prove the Espionage Act piece of it because there is so much evidence of guilty knowledge on the espionage piece that all they really have to do is show that Trump moved these documents at various times when DOJ was either demanding them or actually present, that he filed falsely with the Justice Department, had his lawyers file falsely with the Justice Department, an affidavit to the effect that none existed—which was shattered by the documents that they then discovered after the search—and the many other misrepresentations that he and others have made on his behalf with regard to his possession of classified documents,” Cobb said. ¤ It’s a “tight case” and Trump “will go to jail” because of it, Cobb said …
Title 18, Section 1519 of U.S. Code states: “Whoever knowingly alters, destroys, mutilates, conceals, covers up, falsifies, or makes a false entry in any record, document, or tangible object with the intent to impede, obstruct, or influence the investigation or proper administration of any matter within the jurisdiction of any department or agency of the United States or any case filed under title 11, or in relation to or contemplation of any such matter or case, shall be fined under this title, imprisoned not more than 20 years, or both.” …
Former U.S. Attorney General Bill Barr, who served in the Trump administration, also forecast Thursday that the classified documents case will be the former president’s biggest legal pitfall.
“It’s very clear that he had no business having those documents,” Barr told CBS News’ Catherine Herridge. “He was given a long time to send them back and he was—they were subpoenaed. And if there’s any games being played there, he’s going to be very exposed.”
Clark Cunningham, law professor at Georgia State University, told Newsweek that he agrees with Cobb and Barr—that Trump’s most urgent risk of prosecution and conviction might be greatest in the Mar-a-Lago classified documents case.
A sworn certification document dated June 3, 2022, and signed by Trump’s records custodian was a response to a subpoena sent to testify before a grand jury. ¤ “I understand that this certification is made to comply with the subpoena, in lieu of a personal appearance and testimony,” said the custodian, whose name was redacted. …
“The sworn certification given by Trump’s lawyers to the Department of Justice at Mar-a-Lago last June that ‘all documents responsive to the [grand jury] subpoena’ were being handed over was clearly a false statement,” Cunningham said. “That document by itself is powerful evidence that the federal obstruction of justice statute was being violated—which carries a 20-year sentence. ¤ “The decision who to prosecute turns on who knew the certification was false: the lawyers who gave it to the DOJ, or—as seems increasingly likely—their client, Donald Trump.”
WaPo: U.S. won’t block transfer of F-16s to Kyiv, officials say https://tinyurl.com/yckztwx3 “While top GOP contenders for the presidency such as Donald Trump have criticized the scale of US aid for Ukraine, senior Republican leaders in Congress have been supportive of it”
The Biden administration has informed European allies that Washington will not block their export of F-16 fighter jets to Ukraine, U.S. officials familiar with the decision told The Washington Post. Biden has ruled out U.S. deliveries of F-16s to Ukraine, but will train Ukrainian pilots.
The decision follows Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky’s repeated requests for fighter jets, including from the Netherlands. In February, Ukrainian officials said they had made significant progress in persuading Dutch officials to send F-16s, but Washington’s approval is necessary because of third-party transfer agreements associated with the purchase of the U.S.-made jets.
A transfer would require the sign-off of the chairs and ranking minority-party members of relevant U.S. congressional committees. While top GOP contenders for the presidency such as Donald Trump have criticized the scale of U.S. aid for Ukraine, senior Republican leaders in Congress have been supportive of it throughout the war.
● Secretary of State Antony Blinken was a major force within the administration in pushing to allow U.S. allies to make the transfers and had also worked extensively with countries within NATO to move the policy forward, said U.S. officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss a sensitive matter.
● Blinken played a similar role when NATO was at an impasse over whether to provide sophisticated tanks to Ukraine. At the time, Germany was hesitant to approve the transfer of Leopard 2 tanks — a roadblock overcome when Blinken pushed for the United States to approve the transfer of M1 Abrams tanks, making sure allies on both sides of the Atlantic were making major commitments to the war effort in tandem.
The U.S. said it will join efforts to provide fighter jet training to Ukrainian pilots, national security adviser Jake Sullivan said, adding that it would be “a safe bet President Biden will meet” Zelensky.
TheAtlantic, Eliot Cohen: It’s Not Enough for Ukraine to Win. Russia Has to Lose. https://tinyurl.com/yc3rx6vt “A Russia that prevails would be a Russia even further empowered to meddle in Europe and to expand its influence with unlimited violence”
// Anything less will encourage Russian imperialism and embolden autocrats around the world.
The United States has suffered from a deliberate fuzziness in formulating its objectives in the Russian war in Ukraine. … Bureaucratic mental fog is masquerading as artful policy, and it is dangerous. Strategy is the matching of means to ends. In war it is easy to become obsessed with action rather than purpose, and thereby to fall into Nietzsche’s famous description of the most common human stupidity: forgetting what one intended to do in the first place.
Ukraine knows how it defines victory: the pre-2014 borders cleansed of the invader, its exiles and refugees returned, its society and economy rebuilt, membership in the European Union and NATO attained, and some measure of justice for Russian rapists, torturers, and murderers secured. Similarly, we know how the Russians define victory: a Ukraine broken and severed from the West, much of its territory annexed; a Europe in disarray that resumes its addiction to cheap natural resources and business opportunities in Moscow; and the reconstruction of much of the old Russian imperial state.
We should want victory as Ukraine defines it. But to achieve it, the West must not only aid in the defeat of Russia—it must convince Russia that it has been defeated. ¤ A Russia that prevails would be a Russia even further empowered to meddle in Europe and to expand its influence with unlimited violence; a Russia that will have learned that it can commit slaughter and atrocities with impunity; a Russia whose ambitions will grow with success. A Russian victory would, as well, teach the world that the West—including the United States—lacks the resolve, despite its wealth, to follow through on its commitments, offering Beijing an encouraging lesson.
Conversely, Russian defeat would put Beijing—already somewhat nervous about its partner’s incompetence and wild statements—on the defensive, consolidate the Western alliance, and help preserve some of the essential norms of decent behavior in those parts of the world most important to us. Above all, it would block the Russian imperial project for good, because without Ukraine, as the historian Dominic Lieven has noted, Russia cannot be an empire.
… Russia must be convinced that the military instrument, and its deployment in large-scale war, will inevitably fail, and it must realize that Ukraine is permanently and completely lost.
… Ukraine must not only achieve battlefield success in its upcoming counteroffensives; it must secure more than orderly Russian withdrawals following cease-fire negotiations. To be brutal about it, we need to see masses of Russians fleeing, deserting, shooting their officers, taken captive, or dead. The Russian defeat must be an unmistakably big, bloody shambles.
Russia’s theories of victory in Ukraine have collapsed one by one. Putin began by believing that the country would fall in a week; then that it would succumb to a month or two of hard fighting; then that Europe would abandon it during a cold winter without Russian gas; then that Ukraine could be bludgeoned into submission by attacking its cities. The final theory of victory—that the West does not have the heart to pour vast resources into Ukraine indefinitely—needs to be disproved as well, because there is nothing beyond that.
To that end, with the utmost urgency, the West should give everything that Ukraine could possibly use, including long-range missiles to break for good the 11-mile Kerch bridge between the mainland and Crimea, and cluster munitions to devastate Russian fighting vehicles and infantry. Breaking the Russian army, as we have, by spending only a small fraction of our defense budget and none of our blood is an astounding strategic bargain.
Russians must, moreover, conclude that Ukraine—formerly, in their view, a pseudo-state containing “cousins” or “little brothers”—is gone forever. That means speedy accession to the EU and NATO, but also a deep Western commitment to rebuilding Ukraine economically and, most important, arming it to the teeth for years to come.
The paltering of the administration about giving our superabundant F-16s to Ukraine is foolish and shortsighted. These jets might not make a difference on the battlefield two months from now, but the knowledge that several hundred of them are in the pipeline for the next five years would have profound symbolic importance. We should be talking about how we will rebuild Ukraine’s armed forces, the West’s largest, most combat-tested, and in some ways most determined army.
The West needs an aggressive information campaign to drive home the reality of Russian defeat. Russians need to be reminded that their faltering economy is only a tenth the size of the EU’s; that they cannot build and deploy a modern tank; that their latest high-performance jet, the Su-57, will be outnumbered by the F-35s of the four small Nordic states; that their generals are superannuated and incompetent; that their high command is indifferent to their men’s lives; that their equipment is inferior to that of Ukraine; and that their logistics are rotted by graft and corruption.
Russia must be isolated politically and psychologically as well, thereby playing on the country’s historical ambivalence about the West, represented in its two capitals: St. Petersburg, facing Europe, and Moscow, facing Asia. But Russian literature, art, culture, and political practice are rooted in its relationship with Europe. The time may come—years or, more likely, decades from now—when a postimperial Russia will turn westward again.,…
The key to this strategy is courage. We must conquer our fears of Russian threats and escalation, of its nuclear bravado, and even of Russian collapse. We must be strategic and shrewd, but nothing can be accomplished without courage. In the words of John Paul II—the unarmed, lone old man who did so much to bring Soviet communism to its knees—“Never doubt, never tire, and never become discouraged. Be not afraid.”
🐣 RT @Kasparov63 We must be honest about the violent, imperialist nature of Russia past and present. Putin is the villain of this chapter, not the whole story. Russians must face the future humbled, either as part of the civilized world or as a hollowed-out Chinese supply depot.
⋙ 🐣 RT @Kasparov63 Russia defeated completely in Ukraine is the first essential matter. But if Ukraine and the rest of the world are to know real peace, Russia must undergo a transformation. Unstable is better than a rogue gangster state, but we must plan for more.
⋙⋙ Newsweek: Kasparov Predicts Collapse of Russian ‘Empire’ https://tinyurl.com/ykpa8jts
🐣 RT @ZelenskyyUa I welcome the historic decision of the United States and @POTUS to support an international fighter jet coalition. This will greatly enhance our army in the sky. I count on discussing the practical implementation of this decision at the #G7 summit in Hiroshima.
🐣 RT @uarealitynow Zelensky, on surprise Saudi visit, seeks Arab League support in war. ¤ In a surprise personal appearance at an Arab League meeting in Jiddah, Saudi Arabia, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky on Friday delivered an emotional appeal for support from leaders who have voiced only muted criticism of Russia’s invasion and from some, like Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, who have maintained strong ties to Moscow despite the war. ¤ Washington Post
🖼 https://twitter.com/uarealitynow/status/1659629221642158089?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @NadjaUruski
🖼 https://twitter.com/NadjaUruski/status/1659530760812998659?s=20/photo/1
[Text:] This is the guy that Trump tried to bribe into blackmailing Biden and Putin tried to bully into giving up his country. He was a comedian who became a leader in an age where leaders everywhere became clowns. What a fucking champion. #Zelenskiy
🐣 RT @Maks_NAFO_FELLA “Joe Biden agrees to joint international support to train Ukrainian pilots on modern fighter jets, including F-16” – Politico
Training will take place outside #Ukraine at one of the European training grounds. It will last several months, and will begin in the coming weeks.
🐣 RT @benshapiro At what point does our civilization’s decline hit terminal velocity?
⋙ 🐣 when you’re in a moving train, you still are walking 3 miles an hour to get to the dining car ¤ address what issues confront you, with your knowledge and values, the best you can
🐣 RT @ChuckPfarrer BAKHMUT CITY/ 1300 UTC 19 MAY/ Heavy urban combat continues in Bakhmut, with RU /Wagner forces consolidating lodgments in the district of Khromove. UKR again broke up a VDV attack S of the H-32 HWY at Ivanivske.
🌎 https://twitter.com/ChuckPfarrer/status/1659543183565504513?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @peterbakernyt Biden and other G7 leaders vow to crack down on sanctions evasion. “We will starve Russia of G7 technology, industrial equipment and services that support its war machine,” they say in joint statement.
⭕ 18 May 2023
AboveTheLaw, Liz Dye: Trump Claims Magical Declassification Powers As Archives Discloses Contradictory Docs To Special Counsel https://tinyurl.com/2zm4s7ae
// Don’t you hate it when they come with receipts?
🐣 RT @Chris_D_Steele The Durham report’s failure to redact the names of alleged Russian sources is reprehensible. Some are based in Russia, others co-operated with the USG. Putin’s regime is renowned for brutal retribution. But Durham still threw them to the wolves to propagate his partisan theories.
🐣 RT @peaceandteachin Jim Jordan’s FBI whistleblowers turn out to be disgruntled FBI employees who lost security clearance when they espoused conspiracy theories and refused to investigate #Jan6 rioters. ¤ Oh and did I mention they were paid by Kash Patel.?! ¤ #FreshResists #OneV1 [link]
🐣 RT @JuliaDavisNews Meanwhile on Russian state TV: propagandist declares that Russia is the savior of humanity and demands for all critics to be silent. He also claims that Stalin’s repressions were based on love and so is Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. [Ru vid]
🐣 RT @Heroiam_Slava ❗️ Ukraine has everything to liberate Russian-occupied territories ¤ NATO member states have provided an unprecedented level of support. I am confident that Ukrainian troops have all the means necessary to regain the occupied lands,” – Stoltenberg
🐣 RT @ general_ben Great thread. @ChrisO_wiki One of the reasons I overestimated Russian capabilities was that I failed to appreciate the depth and impact of corruption in the Russian MoD. A liberal democratic government with proper oversight and transparency will defeat an autocracy every time.
⋙ 🧵 RT @ChrisO_wiki 1/ A major corruption scandal is reported to be unfolding in the Russian Ministry of Defence that implicates several generals and ministers, concerning the hugely expensive construction of Russia’s National Defence Control Centre (NDCC) in 2014. ⬇️
📌 https://twitter.com/ChrisO_wiki/status/1659251593890365474?s=20
🐣 RT @FlaDems Florida Democratic Party Chair Nikki Fried Statement on Disney Pulling Plug on $1 Billion Development in Florida
[TextLink:] https://twitter.com/FlaDems/status/1659290435641122816?s=20/photo/1
[Text:] “Florida just lost 2,000 jobs and millions in additional revenue because of Ron DeSantis’ unhinged personal vendetta against Disney. DeSantis has single-handedly and decidedly made Florida an anti-business state, not only with his continued attacks on companies that dare challenge his fascist policies, but also by forcing draconian laws that will decimate the workforce of the backbone industries of our state’s economy. Unfortunately, today’s news isn’t a shock for those of us who have been living through his reign of terror, and Floridians are already paying a high price,” said FDP Chair Nikki Fried.
🐣 RT @TreasChest The Patriot complex has been “targeted” at hypersonic targets since the 1990s, says Julian Röpke, Bild’s military columnist.
“Since the 1990s, the American Patriot air defense system has been sharpened specifically to shoot down hypersonic Chinese, Iranian, and Russian missiles,” Röpke writes.
“While the Russians exaggerate the characteristics of their weapons, the Americans always give too low estimates of its true striking ability to deprive the adversaries of information,” notes Italian gunsmith Thomas Tyner.
Since the Dagger can carry a projectile with a nuclear warhead, successful countermeasures against these missiles indicate NATO’s readiness to repel Russia’s attempts to use nuclear warheads.
“We have received proof that the Western air defense system is capable of intercepting 100% of tactical nuclear weapons delivery systems even under a time-coordinated attack from several directions,” emphasizes weapons expert Fabian Hoffmann from the University of Oslo. ¤ http://ZN.UA
🐣 RT @VictorKanyense Vladimir Putin’s hype of Russia’s hypersonic missiles have been proved to be false. I kept asking myself how did Russia beat the U.S. in developing hypersonic missiles? It didn’t. Russia has no hypersonic missiles. Putin lied 😂🤣😂
⋙ Newsweek: Russian state TV issues stark warning over threat of defeat https://tinyurl.com/2p932t7a
// “If we lose, we’re taking the whole world with us,” Vladimir Solovyov said on the Russia 1 channel.
🐣 RT @front_ukrainian ⚡️Due to an accounting error, the 🇺🇸Pentagon overestimated the value of weapons provided to 🇺🇦Ukraine by $3 billion – Reuters
The revaluation means that the US has more money to help Ukraine. This opens the possibility for the transfer of additional weapons.
💙 🐣 RT @michaeldweiss Scoop: @YahooNews has obtained a U.S. Air Force assessment of how two Ukrainian pilots did in a 3-week course on F-16s at Morris Air National Guard Base in Feb/March. Conclusion: it’ll take 4 months to train them, not 18, as the Pentagon has said:
⋙ YahooNews: Exclusive: U.S. could train Ukrainian pilots to fly F-16s in 4 months https://tinyurl.com/mr247msh
// Yahoo News has obtained a U.S. Air Force assessment of two Ukrainian pilots who outperformed stated Pentagon expectations over two weeks in a flight simulator at a U.S. air base.
TheHill: The collapse of Russian influence is widening https://tinyurl.com/yc44t5yh “If Russia cannot keep its occupied territories in line, what would it mean for the Russian-led CSTO, which currently includes Belarus, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Armenia, and Tajikistan?”
🐣 RT @wartranslated Prigozhin’s mouthpiece channel admin GREY ZONE watches a video by the 3rd Assault brigade assaulting a Russian defensive position near Bakhmut which resulted in 300m of progress in 16 minutes. Unable to understand how the enemy [Ukrainians] can calmly send vehicles and infantry to walk along the woodline, meanwhile if Russians tried the same anywhere, they’d be burned on the approach.
[TextLink:] https://twitter.com/wartranslated/status/1659197340111220738?s=20/photo/1 -2
[Text:] 1/2 Every day for a week I wanted to post this video, but each time I missed the opportunity. Today for the first time I saw another boring video on the channel of the Ministry of Defense of the Russian Federation from Bakhmut, it tells how army units hold the flanks, and how they have everything PERFECT. Perhaps, they decided to take over the agenda Once again, just in case, I’ll say that the Russian Armed Forces are mostly good fighters, but what’s the use to recruit 300, 500, or at least 900 thousand of them, when, in view of the almost complete absence of a built-in combat control system in the troops, coherence of actions, communications, reconnaissance complex, fire support, training, etc., etc., they will simply be crushed as below in the video. Below in the video is how a week ago the 3rd Assault Brigade “Azov” of the Armed Forces of Ukraine took the platoon-strongpoint (48°29’13″N 37°54’57″E) of the Russian Armed Forces, which is located 2.5 km south of those positions that they had taken a little earlier (that footage with the 72nd brigade infantry fleeing from an enemy tank).
2/2 The assault itself lasts about 16 minutes, filmed in one shot. During this time, the enemy crosses 305 meters. Where are the hand-held anti-tank weapons? Where are the anti-tank firing points with ATMs? Where is the minefield with TMs? Where is the fire support from the flanks (from perpendicular woodlines) on the left and right? WHY THE FUCK DOES THE BMP RIDE SLOWLY IN OPEN SPACE FOR 15 MINUTES? What did they say in that video by the Ministry of Defense of the Russian Federation? “We’re burning enemy vehicles as they approach”?
Why were our servicemen simply crushed, on foot? Probably, the “Wagnerites” are to blame for this again, and not the commanders of the RF Armed Forces on the ground. I’ll just say for myself that I can’t imagine that we could go like this along the woodline, hiding behind vehicles, where the enemy is on the defensive. Most likely, we would not even have had time to dismount from the vehicles, we would have been burned on the way. The enemy placed TM mines at all approaches. The BMD could not even go to the line to pick up the wounded, so they were dragged through one more woodline. And when a group of VDV was withdrawn (only 300m) to occupy a site in the “gray zone” they were immediately cut off from the neighboring wood line by enemy fire, preventing us from leaving and gaining a foothold at a previously set point.
🐣 If I were the parent of a trans child, I would move to a Blue state. ¤ However, most Americans do NOT support trans women in women’s sports or gender-affirming care for trans youth. That’s why MAGAts have seized on this, to divide us. ¤ Dems must tread carefully here.
↥ ↧
WaPo: Texas lawmakers vote to ban gender-affirming care for trans children https://tinyurl.com/muhzx9e9 //➔ most Americans oppose gender-affirming care for trans youth per a WaPo/KFF poll, but medical orgs support (see below)
✛ Although ~75% of Americans oppose discrimination against trans individuals in housing, hiring etc, ~65% OPPOSE trans women competing in women’s sports, and most OPPOSE puberty blockers for youth ages 10-14 (68%) and hormone therapy for 15-18 (58%)
WaPo poll (May 6) https://tinyurl.com/44cajbd2
✛ But medical groups SUPPORT gender-affirming care:
SciAm (May 2020): What the Science on Gender-Affirming Care for Transgender Kids Really Shows https://tinyurl.com/59eutf9e
// Laws that ban gender-affirming treatment ignore the wealth of research demonstrating its benefits for trans people’s health
NYT: Ukraine intercepts Russian missiles fired at Kyiv overnight https://tinyurl.com/mux4xehe “Air defenses intercepted 29 of 30 missiles fired at Ukraine overnight, the country’s military said” ~ not stated if any of these were the same as the 7 hypersonic missiles shot down Tuesday
🐣 RT @front_ukrainian The US Department of Defense is not against the transfer of F-16 fighters to Ukraine, – Politico. ¤ The publication, citing a Pentagon representative, writes that Biden is now under strong pressure to agree to send fighter jets.
⇈ ⇊
🐣 This is the article, I assume, but it’s ambiguous, saying “all types of jets” are under consideration. But here’s the rub: training takes a while, so that can start.
Politico: Pressure campaign on Biden to send F-16s to Ukraine goes into overdrive https://tinyurl.com/44ndy8h6
// Officials signal they’re still open to allowing other countries to send their U.S.-made jets.
While the administration has crossed several other red lines in military aid — approving everything from guided rockets to drones to Abrams tanks they once claimed would provoke Russia — the Biden administration is holding the line for now on the Lockheed Martin-made F-16s.
But momentum may be building for Washington to do the next best thing: allow other countries that fly the F-16 to send their own jets to Ukraine.
A new wrinkle appeared on Tuesday when the U.K. announced the kickoff of an international coalition of countries focused on procuring F-16s for Ukraine. Under the agreement, the U.K. said it would soon start training Ukrainian pilots to fly modern fighter jets; Belgium quickly followed suit, saying it could also train the pilots.
Appearing virtually in front of a gathering of leaders in Reykjavik on Tuesday, Zelenskyy said that given his country’s vast size, “we need additional air defense systems and missiles. We also need modern fighter jets, without which no air defense system will be perfect. And I am sure we will get there.”
The F-16 issue is expected to loom over the G-7 gathering in Japan this week, a preview of the public campaign Ukraine and other world leaders are expected to continue at NATO’s annual leaders summit in Lithuania in July.
“There’s an ongoing discussion about also other types of jets,” said NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg, speaking to reporters on the sidelines of last month’s meeting of the Ukraine Defense Contact Group at Ramstein Air Base, Germany.
A spokesperson for Ukrainian Defense Minister Oleksii Reznikov said that “jets are the only thing still missing from Reznikov’s wishlist.”
🐣 RT @ZelenskyyUa This year, the two meanings are united by one date, May 18.
🖼 https://twitter.com/ZelenskyyUa/status/1659091740538576896?s=20/photo/1
79 years ago on this day, the Soviet regime began deporting the Crimean Tatar people. A people they wanted to erase. Deprive of their homes, deprive of the right to life. ¤ But the people survived. And they will live freely! ¤ Today,
I am wearing a special vyshyvanka with ornaments that symbolize the unity of the Ukrainian and Crimean Tatar peoples. Symbols of our strength and our desire to live in our home. ¤ Let this year’s Vyshyvanka Day in 🇺🇦 be a reminder of what our people have been through and how strong our culture is. ¤ We honor our peoples, their strength and culture!
🐣 RT @DefenceHQ [UK] Latest Defence Intelligence update on the situation in Ukraine – 18 May 2023.
Find out more about Defence Intelligence’s use of language: http://ow.ly/CuNR50OqKhQ ¤ 🇺🇦 #StandWithUkraine 🇺🇦
[TextLink:] https://twitter.com/DefenceHQ/status/1659073859411144711?s=20/photo/1
● The Russian state is likely effectively banning senior officials from resigning from their jobs while the Special Military Operation’ continues. The measures likely extend to at least regional leaders, security officials and members of the powerful Presidential Administration.
● In private, many officials are likely highly sceptical about the war, as well as often experiencing work stress within the dysfunctional wartime apparatus. The ban is likely enforced with strong hints that resignees will face trumped up
criminal charges.● As well as being concerned about capability gaps resignees would leave, the authorities are likely also attempting to prevent any impression of defeatism, and to bolster a sense of collective responsibility for the war.
NewStatesman, Michael Lind (Oct 2022): The Anglosphere Needs a Customs Union https://tinyurl.com/bddhbrbr Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the UK and the US have a combined population of about half a billion people and a combined GDP of $30Tr
// 10/8/2022; The five “core Anglosphere” nations on their own would add up to a very impressive economic bloc.
Ausl 1.5T, Can 2T, NZea .25T, UK 3.1: TOT 7Tr; US 23.3 ALL 30Tr
⭕ 17 May 2023
WaPo: Russian scientists, experts in hypersonic technology, arrested for treason https://tinyurl.com/4j26hxu2 “The noise around the scientists’ case follows Ukraine’s claims to have struck down six of Russia’s Kinzhal hypersonic missiles during a barrage of missile strikes on Kyiv”
TheAtlantic, David Frum: A Sinister Flop https://tinyurl.com/2ns38jn8 “As a legal text, the Durham report is limp and meager. As a history of recent events, it is misleading. … [But it] is already proving to be a huge success as a prop and support for the bitterest partisan rancor”
// Special Counsel John Durham served up not an investigation, but an excuse for future partisan abuses.
WaPo, Anna Nemtsova: I’ve never seen the Kremlin so rattled https://tinyurl.com/yss85m8b “[T]he three principal Russian forces in Bakhmut — the Wagner Group, Kadyrov’s Chechen militias and the regular army — are openly feuding with each other as Ukrainian troops advance”
A mysterious drone attack on the Kremlin. A car bombing that wounded a key advocate of the invasion of Ukraine. Four military aircraft shot down in a single day — inside Russia’s borders. ¤ If the Ukrainians and their allies wanted to rattle the Russian leadership, it’s working.
Never, in more than two decades of covering Vladimir Putin’s regime, have I seen it in such an obvious state of chaos and disarray. These days, Kremlin-watchers don’t have to read tea leaves or decode cryptic utterances from the leadership to spot the signs of intrigue — it’s all out in the open, thanks to Putin confidant Yevgeniy Prigozhin.
In one of several recent videos, Prigozhin, founder of the mercenary army known as the Wagner Group, stood over dead Russians in a field and cursed the Russian military leadership, demanding punishment for Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu as well as for Chief of the General Staff Valery Gerasimov. He blamed the two men — both close Putin associates he accused of neglecting supplies for his troops — for “tens of thousands of Wagner dead and injured.” …
Top officials in Kyiv must have been rubbing their hands in glee. While the Kremlin is primarily to blame for its own troubles, given its obvious corruption and incompetence, the Ukrainians have been doing everything they can to undermine morale and exacerbate divisions among their enemies. A constant drumbeat of drone attacks on military bases, oil refineries and fuel depots has added to the sense of unraveling. (Officially, Kyiv does not acknowledge striking targets inside Russia. It’s also hard to determine whether some of the most mysterious attacks — such as the one on the Kremlin — were actually launched by Ukrainian forces.) …
Another Prigozhin tirade echoed that earlier disaster when he accused soldiers from the regular army of “fleeing” from the front in Bakhmut in eastern Ukraine, blaming the military command for “betraying the motherland.” (Meanwhile, Prigozhin himself is being accused of betrayal after a Post report revealed that he tried to trade information with Ukrainian authorities earlier in the war — for reasons that remain murky.) Moscow propagandists can’t even begin to address the stunning losses they’ve incurred since Putin launched his full-scale invasion last year. U.S. analysts recently estimated that the Russians have incurred 100,000 casualties since December alone. …
Putin’s own Victory Day celebration stood out for its subdued tone and the presence of only a single tank — a fact that gave the Ukrainians a welcome opening for mockery.
Russian political insiders are increasingly questioning the rationale for the war. Sen. Lyudmila Narusova, the widow of Putin’s political mentor Anatoly Sobchak, recently went public with her concerns. ¤ “Nobody has explained how victory is supposed to look,” she told an interviewer. “If we think of the originally declared goals, ‘denazification’ and ‘demilitarization,’ the entire Ukrainian army must have been already destroyed by now.” Noting that Russian forces now face Ukrainian troops armed and equipped by the West, she went on: “Does that mean we are demilitarizing NATO? That goal is unattainable.” ¤ If Narusova does not understand Putin’s plan for victory, then no one else does, either.
The sense of confusion at the highest ranks of the Kremlin is boosting the chances that Kyiv’s counteroffensive will succeed. Chechen leader Ramzan Kadyrov, a longtime Prigozhin ally, has now appeared to break with the Wagner chief, harshly criticizing his threats to withdraw from the front. As a result, the three principal Russian forces in Bakhmut — the Wagner Group, Kadyrov’s Chechen militias and the regular army — are openly feuding with each other as Ukrainian troops advance.
Meanwhile, Putin has conspicuously failed to explain to the public how his security forces failed to prevent two drones from reaching the Kremlin and neglected to thwart the car-bomb attack on a key Russian warmonger, Zakhar Prilepin. ¤ Former Putin speechwriter Abbas Gallyamov told me the Kremlin is “shaking.”
None of this, of course, guarantees that Ukraine’s counteroffensive will be a success. For the time being, though, Kyiv has every right to congratulate itself on the effectiveness of its psychological war against Putin’s regime.
WaPo: Senate Democrats ask Biden to ready 14th Amendment, bypass GOP on debt limit https://tinyurl.com/yh9jdwx6 House Democrats are have also taken steps toward a “discharge petition,” which would force a floor vote without McCarthy putting it forward
// House Democrats also begin a long-shot attempt to force a vote on a debt ceiling increase without other spending cuts
NYT: Gains Near Bakhmut Raise Ukraine’s Hopes of a Turning Tide https://tinyurl.com/4xaztnnf “‘Wagner’s men have entered Bakhmut like rats into a mousetrap,’ the commander of all Ukrainian ground forces, Col. Gen. Oleksandr Syrskyi, told soldiers during a visit to the front”
// The advances have been small, and Russians still hold most of the city, but Ukrainians say they see a meaningful shift in momentum.
NYT, Charlie Savage: After Years of Political Hype, the Durham Inquiry Failed to Deliver https://tinyurl.com/56xb9hz7 After four years, the investigation led to just two failed prosecutions, but many insinuations and disingenuous claims of triumph by Trump acolytes
// A dysfunctional investigation led by a Trump-era special counsel illustrates a dilemma about prosecutorial independence and accountability in politically sensitive matters.
At a time when special counsels are proliferating — there have been four since 2017, two of whom are still at work — the much-hyped investigation by Mr. Durham, a special counsel, into the Russia inquiry ended with a whimper that stood in contrast to the countless hours of political furor that spun off from it.
Mr. Durham delivered a report that scolded the F.B.I. but failed to live up to the expectations of supporters of Donald J. Trump that he would uncover a politically motivated “deep state” conspiracy. He charged no high-level F.B.I. or intelligence official with a crime and acknowledged in a footnote that Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign did nothing prosecutable, either.
Predictably, the report’s actual content — it contained no major new revelations, and it accused the F.B.I. of “confirmation bias” rather than making a more explosive conclusion of political bias — made scant difference in parts of the political arena. Mr. Trump and many of his loyalists issued statements treating it as vindication of their claims that the Russia inquiry involved far more extravagant wrongdoing.
“The Durham Report spells out in great detail the Democrat Hoax that was perpetrated upon me and the American people,” Mr. Trump insisted on social media. “This is 2020 Presidential Election Fraud, just like ‘stuffing’ the ballot boxes, only more so. This totally illegal act had a huge impact on the Election.”
Mr. Trump’s comparison was unintentionally striking. Just as his and his supporters’ wild and invented claims of election fraud floundered in court (Fox News also agreed to pay a $787.5 million settlement for amplifying lies about Dominion Voting Systems), the political noise surrounding Mr. Durham’s efforts ultimately ran up against reality.
🐣 RT @RonFilipkowski He woke up and went straight to the all-caps. Usually he has to warm up with a few posts first before going full crazy.
[TextLink:] https://twitter.com/RonFilipkowski/status/1658808346659504129?s=20/photo/1
[Text:] @realDonaldTrump I WAS BEING FRAMED BY THE FBI AND THE DOJ. NOW IT CONTINUES WITH THE BOXES HOAX, THE “PERFECT” PHONE CALL IN ATLANTA, THE MANHATTAN D.A., AND THE NEW YORK STATE A.G. SCAM. WHAT A GROUP, BUT ALL REPORT TO THE DOJ IN WASHINGTON. IT’S JAMES COMEY AND THE SLEAZEBAGS ALL OVER AGAIN.THEY ARE PLAYING ELECTION INTERFERENCE IN 2024 THROUGH ILLEGAL LAW ENFORCEMENT AGAINST REPUBLICANS, IN PARTICULAR YOUR FAVORITE PRESIDENT, ME. THESE ARE CHEATING LOWLIFES, BUT WE WILL WIN. OUR COUNTRY IS GOING TO HELL!
⭕ 16 May 2023
🐣 RT @DavidCayJ The Durham Report misleads by commission and omission, not to mention obfuscations. ¤ Marcy Wheeler of @emptywheel does a great job of showing the sins of omission:
⋙ EmptyWheel, Marcy Wheeler: Eight Things Not Mentioned in the Durham Report https://tinyurl.com/3jjxhztw
1. All mention of the Italian referral on Trump.
2. All mention of the conspiracy theories Durham and Barr chased in Europe.
3. Durham’s own investigative failures.
4. The Trump Tower Moscow deal.
5. Konstantin Kilimnik’s name.
6. Description of Guccifer 2.0’s initial releases.
7. The biased FBI Agent running the Clinton Foundation informant.
8.The response to Mike Flynn’s lies about Sergey Kislyak.
WaPo Editorial: Durham’s investigation reveals nothing except a broken process https://tinyurl.com/2bska88t “Barr’s handpicked special counsel confirmed only what the public already learned in a previous report from Justice Department Inspector General Michael E. Horowitz”
[…] When then-Attorney General William P. Barr appointed Mr. Durham to investigate the investigators of Trump-Russia ties, Mr. Barr appeared determined to uncover a vast plot on the part of government officials who could be criminally prosecuted for their misdeeds. Instead, Mr. Barr’s handpicked special counsel confirmed only what the public already learned in a previous report from Justice Department Inspector General Michael E. Horowitz.
The upshot: There were flaws in the FBI’s handling of the matter, especially involving dubious Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) applications to surveil 2016 Trump adviser Carter Page, but they flowed from confirmation bias rather than politically motivated misconduct. Though Mr. Durham continues to disagree that it was appropriate for the FBI to open a full investigation, rather than a preliminary one, he makes no finding that doing so was prohibited under agency rules. There was no involvement by the CIA, National Security Agency or any other snoops. And there is no reason to send anyone to prison. Indeed, the special counsel faced two acquittals in the cases he developed and a guilty plea resulting from a referral by the Justice Department’s inspector general.
So what has this $6.5 million process accomplished? Plenty — but none of it good. Even now, conservatives are seizing on Mr. Durham’s report, which contains indignant rhetoric that suggests dramatically more wrongdoing than its substance backs up, to assert a deep-state plot. The probe’s very existence during an election cycle already served as a talking point for Mr. Trump’s allies, who promised time and time again that Mr. Durham was going to lay bare the “crime of the century.”
This story could have been even worse: The New York Times reported in January that Mr. Barr pressured Mr. Durham to deliver an interim report centered on the Clinton campaign ahead of the 2020 election.
The special counsel’s only recommendation for reform is narrow — to create a sort of devil’s advocate role within the FBI to challenge investigators’ assumptions in politically sensitive investigations. And even this suggestion does less to address flaws in the FISA process and in high-profile FBI investigations more generally than others that were in the Horowitz report, many of which the agency has already implemented. The best way to ensure investigating agents’ claims are appropriately scrutinized before the government takes them to court, for instance, might be to further empower prosecutors by ensuring they get all the information, both exculpatory and inculpatory, that they need. Further reforms to make the FISA adjudication process more adversarial would also help.
But all this speaks to a bigger problem: Matters such as these shouldn’t even be in the purview of a special counsel, whose role is to decide whether to bring charges, then pack up and go home. These individuals operating under the Justice Department’s purview yet imbued with extra independence have a history of overspending resources and reaching beyond their mandates. The attorney general, technically still in charge, has some power to constrain them — yet this case shows clearly what happens when he does the opposite instead. ¤ The current attorney general, Merrick Garland, overseeing two separate special counsel investigations into Mr. Trump and President Biden, should take note.
🐣 RT @JackFought_1 Dmitry Medvedev claimed Poland and the Baltics as part of Russia today.
Please tell me more about how no one needs to Join NATO again, because Russia never invades its neighbors, Russian trolls.
#Ukraine #Poland #Estonia #Lithuania #Latvia #Russia #NATO #War
[TextLink:] https://twitter.com/JackFought_1/status/1658611527627444224?s=20/photo/1
[Text:] 🐣 RT @MedvedevRussiaE A certain person calling himself the president of France said that Russia had already lost geopolitically, and was transforming into the othercountries’ vassal. ¤ The president of the Republic was obviously harmed by socializing withthe Kiev junkie. ¤ He inhaled too much of the warm Paris air mixed with Ukrainian cocaine waste, that his guest was emitting.
A geopolitical loss?
It was back in 2022 that NATO was lazily shooing us away when the matter concerned the security guarantees. Like, leave us alone, no time for you. And now, all of the NATO member states go to bed at night, and wake up in the morning thinking of Russia. Moreover, some of the especially cowardly and suffering from phantom pains, like temporarily occupied Poland and our Baltic provinces, have well soiled themselves. So, if there has indeed been a loss, it is that of the primitive NATO politics, with its underlying ambition to play the exceptional role in the 21st century.Speaking of vassal dependence… Look who’s talking! Europe the beauty, including France, has turned into an elderly wench who is especially thoroughly satisfying all of the most perverted whims of Americans. And in the process, it is hurting its own economy and ordinary Europeans with masochistic lust. ¤ As they put it, tel maître, tel valet.
🐣 [Re: Trump says he’ll release JFK files ]
… and he’ll make Mexico pay for the wall
and pass a better healthcare plan than Obamacare
and rebuild America’s infrastructure
and pay off the National Debt
and lock up Hillary Clinton etc etc etc
😂 😆 😂
🔊 BulwarkPodcast: Anne Applebaum: The Case for a Complete Ukrainian Victory https://tinyurl.com/49m6pk7 “Ukraine’s freedom is on the line, but America’s role in the world is also at stake. And if a democratic Ukraine can win against autocratic Russia, the world’s geopolitics could be altered for a generation”
🐣 RT @noclador Weapon systems that impressed the world in the last year:
🇺🇸HIMARS / GMLRS
🇺🇸Patriot PAC-3
🇩🇪IRIS-T
🇸🇪🇬🇧NLAW
🇺🇸Javelin
🇫🇷CAESAR
🇩🇪PzH 2000
Weapon systems that made the world laugh:
🇷🇺Su-34
🇷🇺Su-35
🇷🇺Iskander
🇷🇺Kinzhal
🇷🇺Pantsir
🇷🇺T-90
🇷🇺S-400
🐣 Once could have been a fluke. ¤ Six? Russia’s “unstoppable” hypersonic missiles were ALL shot down over Kyiv by the US’s Patriot air defense system. ¤ “What air defense doing?” ~ Killing the Kinzhal 🇺🇦🇺🇸
🐣 RT @ChristopherJM Ukrainian commander-in-chief Zaluzhny says Russia attacked Ukraine from “north, south & east with 18 air, sea, & land-based missiles.” 6 Kinzhals launched from MiG-31K aircraft; 9 Kalibr cruise missiles launched from ships in Black Sea; 3 S-400 land-based missiles. All shot down.
🐣 RT @Gerashchenko_en Yet another massive Russian air attack on Ukraine last night.
Ukrainian Air defense shot down all of them:
– 6 aeroballistic Kinzhal rockets; [“hypersonic”]
– 9 Kalibr cruise missiles;
– 3 ballistic/anti-aircraft rockets (being confirmed);
– 6 strike Shahed drones;
– 3 drones.
Glory to Ukrainian Air Defenders! ¤ Thankful to Allies who provide Ukraine with air defense!
Source: Air Forces of Ukraine
◕ https://twitter.com/Gerashchenko_en/status/1658349478192054272?s=20/photo/1
🐣 📋 RT @PStyle0ne1 It seems all of this, if not all, was fired at Kyiv, the most protected area of Ukraine. ¤ 9 ballistic missiles, 6 of them hypersonic, that without Patriots and SAMPT Ukraine is uncapable to intercept. ¤ With 100% interception rate, it is a humiliation for Russia.
⭕ 15 May 2023
🐣 RT @SenatorRomney Putin’s aspirations look beyond Ukraine—he is seeking to reestablish the old boundaries of the Soviet Union and bring more nations under his control. Ukraine must win the war in order to shed Russia’s imperial ambitions and halt the rise of autocracy’s sway on the global order.
// We must stop Putin from rebuilding the old Soviet Union. ¤ At a SFRC hearing to discuss what comes next for U.S. policy towards Russia, Senator Romney recalled the success of our Soviet Union strategy.
💽 https://twitter.com/SenatorRomney/status/1658528138584809483?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @sumlenny Without NATO countries’ support, peaceful Kyiv would have been devastated tonight with the Russian missiles. Hundreds of people would have been killed. I don’t mention what consequences for millions of Ukrainians Russian occupation would have (Bucha). NATO is peace, NATO is life.
🐣 RT @davidfrum
Mueller: indictments and convictions
Durham: vibes
⋙ 🐣 RT @davidfrum [Feb 3]
Russia helped Trump win the 2016 presidential election.
Trump welcomed Russian help.
Trump’s intimates sought even more help.
Trump’s campaign manager shared information.
All repeatedly lied about it.
In office, Trump supported Russian policy goals
Saved you 24,000 words.
⇈ ⇊
🐣 RT @davidfrum Mueller: hard news
Durham: opinion column
🐣 RT @SpencerGuard “the war in Ukraine is a fight not over territory but over the country’s future. Russia is determined to control Ukraine’s political destiny…Ukraine’s security lies with — and in — the West, and the conflict cannot end until Ukraine is part of it.”
⋙ Politico [EU]: The conflict cannot end until Ukraine is part of the West https://tinyurl.com/599vvtdy
// The question is not whether Ukraine should become a part of the Euro-Atlantic institutions, but when and how.
🐣 RT @danielsgoldman The Durham Report is a political hatchet job. The only thing more pathetic is the outcome of his prosecutions. ¤ It retreads the same material that both Mueller and the IG found to justify the opening of the 2016 Russia investigation. ¤ Why the different outcome? 2 main reasons:
⋙ 🐣 RT @danielsgoldman 1) it ignores that Wikileaks had just made its first dump of DNC emails — which corroborated the FBI’s info — when the investig was opened; and
2) tries to lump in the Steele Dossier even though it came much later and had nothing to do with the opening of the Russia investig.
Axios (2020): All the Trump associates convicted or sentenced in the Mueller investigation https://tinyurl.com/3smyh9d4
// 2/20/2020
NYT: In Final Report, Trump-Era Special Counsel Denounces Russia Investigation https://tinyurl.com/2p82eyze //➔ Indictments in Durham probe: 2 (BOTH found Not Guilty); Indictments, Convictions/Guilty Pleas in Mueller Investigation ⬇️ via Axios (2020); Pardons do not expunge Guilt
◕ https://twitter.com/Auriandra/status/1658219145744326656?s=20/photo/1
// After four years of investigating the Russia inquiry, John Durham turned in a report that was made public on Monday.
Mr. Durham’s 306-page report appeared to show little substantial new information about the F.B.I.’s handling of the Russia investigation, known as Crossfire Hurricane, and it failed to produce the kinds of blockbuster revelations impugning the bureau that former President Donald J. Trump and his allies had once suggested that Mr. Durham would find.
Instead, the report — released without substantive comment or redactions by Attorney General Merrick B. Garland — repeated previously exposed flaws in the inquiry, including from a 2019 inspector general report, while concluding that the F.B.I. suffered from a confirmation bias as it pursued leads about Mr. Trump’s ties to Russia.
WaPo: Durham report sharply criticizes FBI’s 2016 probe of Trump campaign https://tinyurl.com/scba86yf
// Special counsel says “extremely troublesome” failures appear to stem from bias
⋙ [Doc:] https://www.justice.gov/storage/durhamreport.pdf 316p
🐣 RT @LuisMorenolg Bakhmut will become, (if it hasn’t already) a legendary, iconic battle in the world’s military history. It’s an inspiration for the invaded, the outnumbered and people fighting for a just cause. It’s also the harbinger of Putin’s much deserved end. Superb analysis here.
⋙ KyivPost, Jonathan Sweet & Mark Toth: Bakhmut Rising https://tinyurl.com/yfrstdwr “The main event – Ukraine’s full-throttled counteroffensive – has yet to come. However, it is rapidly building … while many on both sides are ready for it to happen ¤ Rise Bakhmut, rise” 🇺🇦
// Is the ongoing battle for Bakhmut, to quote Churchill, the beginning of the end or the end of the beginning?
The rapidly deteriorating situation in Bakhmut is becoming increasingly bleak, if not tactically hopeless, for Russian President Vladimir Putin. May 9 has come and gone, and General Valery Gerasimov has still failed to capture the city, as ordered. Routed Russian troops have been captured on video as they fled fighting positions, abandoned weapons, and surrendered, as Ukrainian forces begin to aggressively capitalize on a growing military and psychological edge.
Bakhmut is rising up again, much like an ancient Greek Phoenix and Yevgeny Prigozhin has reduced himself to that of the chorus in a Greek tragedy. Repeatedly, over the last few days, the founder of the Wagner Group has popped up on Telegram to detail every strategic blunder by Gerasimov and Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu in Bakhmut, blaming the hapless duo for the reasons why Russian “troops were fleeing” and for the overall “stupidity of Russian army commanders.”
Things seem to be only getting worse for the Kremlin. Putin’s house of cards is teetering on collapse. His grand design, of holding a celebratory Victory Day Parade in Red Square to mark the fall of Bakhmut, has now, humiliatingly, given way to Russian soldiers parading as fast as they can to get out of the Ukrainian salt mining town and surrounding area. All well-deserved but, it is important to remember: one rout does not win a war.
And still the plot thickens. The Washington Post reports that the leaked U.S. intel documents indicated that Prigozhin allegedly offered to reveal the locations of regular Russian troop formations in the Donbass, in January, if Kyiv would withdraw its own forces from the Bakhmut frontline. The report seemed to be confirmed by two Ukrainian officials who said that Prigozhin “has spoken several times to the Ukrainian intelligence directorate, known as HUR. Whether a Russian trick or Ukrainian disinformation, it seems that Prigozhin’s relationship with the Kremlin continues to deteriorate.
The primary challenge now, for Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, is to quickly identify and remove that one remaining elusive card which could bring Putin’s house down. The decisive blow has yet to be struck by Zelensky’s Generals. Although, in the global media’s eyes, Bakhmut is the focal point of the war and they have zoomed in on Ukrainian success there, the challenge Ukraine faces is bigger than just that one city. …
… At the beginning of the war, Putin’s army “consisted of professional soldiers; was largely equipped with reasonably modern vehicles; and had been regularly exercised, aspiring to complex, joint operations.” That was then, this is now. Today, it assesses Putin’s forces to be “mostly poorly trained mobilized reservists” who are “increasingly reliant on antiquated equipment.” More succinctly as we wrote last month in these pages, Putin’s army is running on empty.
In what was already a bad week for Putin and Gerasimov, the UK announced it had recently delivered the precision deep strike capability Ukraine needs to help win the war – the Storm Shadow air launched cruise missile, extending its operational reach beyond 250 kilometers, bringing Crimea squarely into play.
As a result, the strategy of making Crimea “untenable,” as advocated by retired Army Lieutenant General Ben Hodges, is fast becoming possible. Storm Shadow also puts Russian cruise missile and drone launch sites, as well as staging areas for Russian troops beyond Ukraine’s border, ‘at risk’ – negating the arbitrary sanctuary Russian territory has so far offered. In essence, it helps levels the playing field in favor of Ukraine, much as HIMARS did; a new reality that is driving Russian propagandists into full crisis mode. The despondent head of RT, Margarita Simonyan, who, as Russian media expert and Daily Beast columnist Julia Davis reported, “now wonders whether Russia can protects its territories.”
Even Russia’s much vaunted Kh-47M2 ‘Kinzhal’ hypersonic missile system is now a casualty of Putin’s Ukrainian ‘special military operation’. On May 4, a U.S.-supplied Patriot missile battery, manned by Ukrainian troops, shot down Putin’s declared “Wunderwaffe.” Rubbing salt in Putin’s wounds, Ukrainian Air Force spokesman Yurii Ihnat commented: “They were saying that the Patriot is an outdated American weapon and Russian weapons are the best in the world. Well, there is confirmation that it effectively works against even a super-hypersonic missile.” He added “successfully intercepting the Kinzhal was a slap in the face for Russia.”
Putin is now also faced with his own ‘Mussolini moment’. Not only was his Victory Day Parade embarrassingly small, just a solitary WWII-era T-34 tank to symbolize Russia’s much-vaunted armor, it may have also marked the loss of a key Putin ally. During the parade, Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko seemed to be ill and was forced to return immediately to Minsk. Rumors are flying that Lukashenko is dead. Jason Jay Smart reported a Russian Dassault Falcon business jet landed in the Belarusian capital on Saturday on board of which were several senior Russian officials. Dead or not, a key Russian ally is now in domestic turmoil and potentially paralyzed by uncertainty.
For now, at least, Bakhmut is rising, from which, a Phoenix is resiliently and boldly sporting yellow and blue Ukrainian colors. Putin’s red Phoenix is on the run and is increasingly under attack by Prigozhin. The Institute for the Study of War in its May 13 report, assessed that “Ukrainian forces had liberated 16.85 square kilometers in the Bakhmut area during recent counterattacks” and that even more “significant” gains might be possible in the short-term, if “Russian forces fail to stabilize the frontline.”
The main event – Ukraine’s full-throttled counteroffensive – has yet to come. However, it is rapidly building and while many on both sides are ready for it to happen, Zelensky and his generals will not be rushed. Zelensky has made it clear he wants more time and weaponry to ensure its success. Meanwhile, Prigozhin continues his war of words with the Kremlin while Ukraine begins to raise its flag over more and more of once Russian-occupied parts of Bakhmut and the surrounding region that forms Russia’s flanks.
Rise Bakhmut, rise. 🇺🇦
🐣 RT @OlgaNYC1211 Putin will hold an unscheduled Security Council meet after the flight of the army from Bakhmut, several downed fighter jets/helicopters, and a few dead colonels over the weekend. Things are going according to plan
🐣 RT @officejjsmart PUTIN PANICKING ¤ “⚡️Putin urgently convened the Security Council after the “flight” of the 🇷🇺 Army from Bakhmut. Putin decided not to wait until the scheduled meeting this Friday and will instead hold a video conference today, says the Kremlin.” ¤ Putin: Soon you’ll lose it ALL.
🐣 RT @ChuckPfarrer BAKHMUT AXIS /1245 UTC 15 MAY/ RU & Wagner Group forces continue ineffective offensive operations. UKR broke up RU offensive actions at Bohdanivka, Bakhmut, and Stochney. RU air strikes were conducted against Ivanivske and Stupochky. Combat within the W urban area is ongoing.
🌎 https://twitter.com/ChuckPfarrer/status/1658087843544150016?s=20/photo/1
⭕ 14 May 2023
🐣 RT @tribelaw If McCarthy and the members who pull his strings keep throwing a tantrum and invoking the ceiling they could easily lift to threaten the nation with a disaster of their own making, the 14th Amendment’s command that we pay all our debts will have to take priority over the ceiling
🐣 RT @ChuckPfarrer TRAITOR: The Washington Post reports that Wagner chief Yevgeniy Prigozhin offered to give Russian troop locations to Ukraine if it pulled its own forces back from the beleaguered city of Bakhmut, where Wagner mercenaries were taking heavy losses.
🐣 RT @ michaeldweiss Whether HUR has cultivated and manipulated Prigozhin or it just wants the world (read: the Kremlin) to think it has, this is an absolutely banger psyop.
🐣 RT @JuliaDavisNews Ukrainian officials confirmed that Prigozhin has spoken several times to the Ukrainian intelligence directorate and extended the offer regarding Bakhmut more than once. Kyiv rejected it because officials don’t trust Prigozhin.
‼️ ⋙⋙ WaPo: Wagner chief offered to give Russian troop locations to Ukraine, leak says https://tinyurl.com/ydprs3vp
// THE DISCORD LEAKS | Yevgeniy Prigozhin said he would tell Ukraine’s military where to attack Russian troops if they pulled their own forces back from the beleaguered city of Bakhmut, where Wagner mercenaries were taking heavy losses
In late January, with his mercenary forces dying by the thousands in a fight for the ruined city of Bakhmut, Wagner Group owner Yevgeniy Prigozhin made Ukraine an extraordinary offer. ¤ Prigozhin said that if Ukraine’s commanders withdrew their soldiers from the area around Bakhmut, he would give Kyiv information on Russian troop positions, which Ukraine could use to attack them. Prigozhin conveyed the proposal to his contacts in Ukraine’s military intelligence directorate, with whom he has maintained secret communications during the course of the war, according to previously unreported U.S. intelligence documents leaked on the group-chat platform Discord.
Prigozhin has publicly feuded with Russian military commanders, who he furiously claims have failed to equip and resupply his forces, which have provided vital support to Moscow’s war effort. But he is also an ally of Russian President Vladimir Putin, who might well regard Prigozhin’s offer to trade the lives of Wagner fighters for Russian soldiers as a treasonous betrayal. ¤ The leaked document does not make clear which Russian troop positions Prigozhin offered to disclose.
But there is no debating Prigozhin’s bitter frustration with the grinding fight in Bakhmut. He has complained, publicly and privately, that the Russian Defense Ministry has not given his fighters the ammunition and other resources they need to succeed. Bakhmut, in eastern Ukraine, has seen some of the bloodiest fighting of the war. Over the past few months, in a grinding back and forth measured by city blocks, Ukrainian and Russian forces have taken steep casualties. …
Prigozhin, who promised to take control of the city by May 9, in time for Russia’s Victory Day celebrations, has recently threatened publicly to pull his forces out of the fight.
Other leaked documents reveal Russian Defense Ministry officials privately wondering how to respond to Prigozhin’s criticism of the military’s performance and his demands for more resources, which they apparently conceded were not illegitimate grievances. The documents also speak to a power struggle between Prigozhin and top officials, including Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu. …
The documents also suggest that Kyiv suspects, or may know, that the Kremlin is aware of Prigozhin’s communications with Ukrainian intelligence, if not his secret negotiations over Bakhmut. ¤ One document, based on “sigint” — or intercepted communications — states that Ukraine’s military intelligence chief, Kyrylo Budanov, “expected the Russians to use details of Prigozhin’s secret talks with the HUR and his meetings with their officers in Africa to make him appear to be a Ukrainian agent.” It doesn’t specify whether Budanov suspects Moscow may already know that Prigozhin is talking to HUR officers. …
⋙ 🐣 RT @PStyle0ne1 ‼️The Russian Ministry of Defense confirms the death of 2 colonels near Klishchiivka, Makarov and Brovko, one commanded the 4th motorized rifle brigade (as I mentioned yesterday), and the other one was the commander of the army corps for military political work. ¤ The rumor goes that Wagner gave out their location to the Ukrainians🤣
⋙⋙ 🐣 RT @PStyle0ne1 On a separate note, the photo illustrating yesterday’s tweet is not from Klishchiivka as @GeoConfirmed indicated to me privately but from a village 30 km south. My apologies for this mistake. ¤ Nonetheless, the Russian command has been decapitated as confirmed by the Russian Ministry of Defense
🐣 RT @JuliaDavisNews Ukrainian officials confirmed that Prigozhin has spoken several times to the Ukrainian intelligence directorate and extended the offer regarding Bakhmut more than once. Kyiv rejected it because officials don’t trust Prigozhin.
‼️ ⋙ WaPo: Wagner chief offered to give Russian troop locations to Ukraine, leak says https://tinyurl.com/ydprs3vp
// THE DISCORD LEAKS | Yevgeniy Prigozhin said he would tell Ukraine’s military where to attack Russian troops if they pulled their own forces back from the beleaguered city of Bakhmut, where Wagner mercenaries were taking heavy losses
RawStory: ‘We can’t track down the informant’: James Comer says he lost top witness in Biden investigation https://tinyurl.com/5epbet5 The informants are “either currently in court, they’re currently in jail, or they’re currently missing” ~ Rep. Comer
[…] “The nine of the ten people that we’ve identified that have very good knowledge with respect to the Bidens,” he added, “they’re one of three things, Maria, they’re either currently in court, they’re currently in jail, or they’re currently missing.”
🐣 RT @KyivIndependent Moscow says 2 Russian colonels killed in battle for Bakhmut. ¤ Russia’s Defense Ministry said that Colonel Vyacheslav Makarov, the commander of Russia’s 4th Motorized Rifle Brigade, and Colonel Yevgeny Brovko, deputy commander of an unspecified army corps for political work, had been killed in the Bakhmut area.
🐣 RT @ wartranslated Russian volunteer Murz posted another long update last night on the battle situation in and around Bakhmut: he says the Ukrainians have massive superiority in air recon and “unlimited shell supply”, softening targets before any infantry advances. He confirms officer kills in the 4th Brigade of the DPR yesterday. The defensive lines built by Russia are too weak and shallow, and unlike regular forces, Wagners have been bullshitting their way out of holding these positions.
[TextLink: https://twitter.com/wartranslated/status/1657675029813796866?s=20/photo/1 -4
🐣 RT @ Heroiam_Slava 🇩🇪🤝🇺🇦 €2.7 billion military aid for Ukraine:
– 20 Marder infantry fighting vehicles
– 30 Leopard tanks
– 4 IRIS-T-SLM air defense systems
– 200 reconnaissance UAVs
– 100 armored vehicles
– 100 logistics vehicles
– 15 Gepards
– a large amount of ammunition.
// Zelensky is in Berlin: what a haul!
⭕ 13 May 2023
🐣 RT @TreasChest The Armed Forces continue to carry out successful counterattacks at once in several directions near Bakhmut — Institute for the Study of War (ISW).
Citing reports from Russian military personnel and satellite images of the area, analysts write that Ukrainian troops established new positions on the outskirts of Kurdyumivka (14 km southwest of Bakhmut) and pushed back the Russian forces behind the Siverskyi Donets-Donbas channel in this area.
Also, the defense forces probably advanced towards Klishchiivka (7 km southwest of Bakhmut) from the direction of Predtechyny (16 km southwest of Bakhmut). As of May 13, ISW calculated that during the latest counterattacks, Ukrainian troops liberated 16.85 square kilometers in the Bakhmut area, which actually confirms the words of Serhiy Cherevaty, the spokesman of the Eastern Group of Forces of the Ukrainian Armed Forces, said the day before.
ISW notes that the retreat of occupying troops in relatively small areas of the front line has a negative impact on their defensive ability in the Bakhmut area and believes that these “regroupings” may become more significant if Russian forces are unable to stabilize the front line in the near future. ¤ #counteroffensive_ukraine http://ZN.UA
🐣 RT @Tendar Just to summarize the most important developments of the last 48h:
– Russian lines at Bakhmut crumbling
– Losing 2 jets and 3 choppers
– Rear bases in Russian-occupied Luhansk getting eliminated
– Russians deploying T-54/55
– Panic and chaos among Russian pilots/troops
– Prigozhin calling for rebellion
And the Ukrainian counteroffensive hasn’t even started, yet.
🐣 RT @KyivIndependent Russia’s colonial view of history is used to justify its imperial conquest of Ukraine. They falsely claim to be Kyivan Rus’ legitimate successor. We’re dispelling these misconceptions in #UkrainesTrueHistory.
💽 https://twitter.com/KyivIndependent/status/1657536206719303682?s=20/photo/1
// subscribed
🐣 RT @mhmck Ukrainian defenders are making small advances and gaining tactical advantage against the Russian fascist invaders in the direction of Svatove in Luhansk region, on the flanks of Bakhmut and around Vuhledar in Donetsk region, and towards Polohy in Zaporizhzhya region.
🐣 RT @TrentTelenko This is a very interesting Russian translation 🧵 by @wartranslated on how screwed, blued and tattooed a Russian volunteer thinks Russian ground forces in Ukraine are. ¤ Check it out ⬇️
⋙ 🐣 RT @wartranslated Really interesting but long post from Murz (Russian volunteer) on the upcoming Ukrainian offensive. This is in two tweets because there’s just so much text, so scroll down. He essentially explains how Ru army is depleted and is going to struggle to defend.
[TextLink:] https://twitter.com/wartranslated/status/1657297370722312192?s=20/photo/1 -4
⋙⋙ 🐣 RT @wartranslated Continuation of the post, with some conclusions on how it may all end – not very well at all, and by end of summer Ukrainians might be already near Crimea, Mariupol, and in Donetsk.
[TextLink:] https://twitter.com/wartranslated/status/1657297373318586368?s=20/photo/1 -2
🐣 RT @carlbildt What’s happening? Rumors are circulating all around on the health status of Lukashenko. And if it’s really serious we can expect a serious contest and crisis over the future of Belarus – with undoubtedly aiming for a complete and quick takeover.
⋙ 🐣 RT @HannaLiubakova #Belarus Lukashenka’s motorcade reportedly went to a hospital but left after two hours. The secrecy around his health is not new yet they don’t even try to calm down the elites or the Kremlin. If they don’t reveal any information about his health, it might be really serious.
🐣 RT @SamRamani2 BREAKING: Zelensky says the “first important steps” of Ukraine’s counter-offensive “will be taken soon”
🐣 RT @pravda_eng ⚪️🔴⚪️ @ZelenskyyUa: 70% of Belarusians oppose Russia’s war and support Ukraine
¤ https://twitter.com/pravda_eng/status/1657521105400389633?s=20
🐣 RT @anno1540 The entire area must be liberated. But this is not enough: Valeriy Zaluzhny on the victory of Ukraine
According to the Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces of Ukraine, after the liberation of all the occupied territories, Ukraine must do everything to ensure that what happened and began on February 24, 2022 never happens again.
“Victory for us is a liberated territory and powerful ultra-modern and, perhaps, very large Armed Forces, combat-ready, which will not allow the Russian Federation to repeat what happened and what is happening now. This is what victory is. ¤ And world history knows states that live and always show by their behavior that “it is better not to touch”. The state of Ukraine should become just like that,” said Valery Zaluzhny in Dmitry Komarov’s special project “Rik. Behind the scenes”.
WaPo: Alleged leaker fixated on guns and envisioned ‘race war’ https://tinyurl.com/bdfkje99
// Videos and chat logs reveal Jack Teixeira’s preparations for a violent social conflict, his racist thinking and a deep suspicion of the government he served
PravdaUA: Armed Forces moving forward on Bakhmut front – Ukraine Ground Forces Commander Oleksandr Syrskyi https://tinyurl.com/mrx4x9wu
🐣 RT @ChuckPfarrer BAKHMUT AXIS /1345 UTC 13 MAY/ UKR forces have continued a series of successful counter-attacks south of the city of Bakhmut. RU attacks were broken up at Orikhovo-Vasylivka, Hyrhorivka, & Stupochky during the day of May 12. RU conducted air strikes on Bohdanivka and Bakhmut.
🌎 https://twitter.com/ChuckPfarrer/status/1657378250950078466?s=20/photo/1
⭕ 12 May 2023
🐣 RT @tribelaw “The debt limit — created during World War I to free up the U.S. Treasury to issue new debt without needing a congressional vote every time — is now a deeply stupid and dangerous weapon of mass destruction.” — POLITICO Nightly (5/12/23)
🐣 RT @officejjsmart ABANDONED BY THEIR OFFICERS ¤ The order of the Russian troops is breaking down, and Russian soldiers are surrendering. ¤ There is mayhem and chaos on the Russian side as the Kremlin abandons its troops.
EuromaidanPress: Ukraine liberates 17.5 km² near Bakhmut, unblocks supply route https://tinyurl.com/27enmbbp “After Ukrainians saw how Russian troops from the 9th Motorized Rifle Brigade started to abandon their positions, it was decided to maintain the momentum”
WaPo: How Ukrainian forces denied Russia victory in Bakhmut by Victory Day https://tinyurl.com/cyfb6hvh “Ukrainian forces scored a rare advance this week south of the city and held fast in the city center”
◕ 📊 WaPo, Philip Bump: Trump supporters are neither underrecognized nor half the country https://tinyurl.com/mr427hzt //➔ good charts, but moot with revelation of instructions given to participants in “town hall,” which resulted in amplifying proTrump sentiments
// media attention given to individual candidates
NYT: Ukraine’s Advances Near Bakhmut Expose Rifts in Russian Forces https://tinyurl.com/mwv2rhj9 “Ukrainian advances this week have … erased what Moscow’s forces had painstakingly achieved over several months”
// Russia’s pro-war bloggers were quick to claim that Ukraine’s long-anticipated counteroffensive had begun, but Ukrainian officials downplayed the advances.
NYT: Ukraine’s Advances Near Bakhmut Expose Rifts in Russian Forces https://tinyurl.com/mwv2rhj9 “Ukrainian advances this week have … erased what Moscow’s forces had painstakingly achieved over several months”
// Russia’s pro-war bloggers were quick to claim that Ukraine’s long-anticipated counteroffensive had begun, but Ukrainian officials downplayed the advances.
🐣 RT @Victorshi2020 NEW: we polled 18-29-year-olds & found not only do the majority of them SUPPORT President Biden but they also prefer Joe Biden over Donald Trump by 28 points & Joe Biden over Ron DeSantis by 34 points. Republicans, you should be terrified. We are not taking any of your BS.
⋙ 🐣 RT @Victorshi2020 More on the poll we at @VotersTomorrow conducted below. Alarming statistics for the GOP & encouraging signs for President Biden. Among them 1.) the majority of young people support Biden & 2.) would vote Biden more than ANY other Republican by a long run.
⋙⋙ 📊 New Poll by Voters of Tomorrow Shows Joe Biden with Strong Support Among Gen Z, leading GOP Challenger https://tinyurl.com/4jdmj47b
◕ https://twitter.com/EdKrassen/status/1657144109998436356?s=20/photo/1
// Overall 53, Dems 75, Indy 43, GOP 20
🐣 RT @DeadlineWH “I think former President Trump can actually end this war today. All he needs to do is pick up the phone call Putin and tell him that he is not running for President, because that is the only thing that Putin is hoping for.” @igornovikov w/ @NicolleDWallace
🐣 RT @ChuckPfarrer BAKHMUT CITY /2030 UTC 12 MAY/ RU sources indicate Ukraine carried more than 26 attacks on the Bakhmut axis. RU army and Wagner forces were reported to have been driven back NW of the urban area and S of the H-32 HWY at Ivanivske.
🌎 https://twitter.com/ChuckPfarrer/status/1657121948965523470?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @DonLew87 EPIC FAIL. Mark Pomerantz testified to Jim Jordan’s committee today. Basically said that Jordan is conducting a clown show while licking Trump’s boots. Another failure for Jim. Details here…
⋙ Law&Crime: ‘This deposition is for show’: Manhattan DA’s ex-deputy scorches Jim Jordan’s ‘cynical histrionics’ in Trump probe, pleads Fifth https://tinyurl.com/5n86exxp
Scorching the committee’s chairman Rep. Jim Jordan, ex-Assistant District Attorney Mark Pomerantz flatly declared in his opening remarks: “This deposition is for show,” later labeling it “political theater” and “cynical histrionics.”
“I do not believe for a moment that I am here to assist a genuine effort to enact legislation or conduct legislative ‘oversight,’” Pomerantz said in a three-page statement. “We are gathered here because Donald Trump’s supporters would like to use these proceedings to attempt to obstruct and undermine the criminal case pending against him, and to harass, intimidate, and discredit anyone who investigates or charges him.”
Jordan, a Trump loyalist from Ohio, says he’s investigating whether Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg’s prosecution of the former president is politically motivated. In early 2022, Pomerantz and his then-colleague Carey Dunne resigned from the probe, believing that Bragg was too reluctant to charge Trump with tax crimes. Dunne faded to the sidelines, but Pomerantz went on to write a tell-all memoir of his time inside the DA’s office titled “People v. Trump,” named at the time for the case that wasn’t. …
Bragg and Pomerantz now view the House GOP’s actions as attempted interference with the judicial process. ¤ “The charges against Mr. Trump should be heard and decided by a judge and a jury before politicians second-guess their merits or the decision to bring them,” Pomerantz wrote. “That’s how our system works. Those who claim that they respect the rule of law should wait for the courts to do their work.” …
BoingBoing/Mediaite: Town hall audience was “disgusted” and “bewildered” by Trump, but CNN told them not to boo, only to applaud https://tinyurl.com/yvxk2jzr
Republican political consultant Matthew Bartlett says CNN’s town hall with Trump was rigged to make it look like everyone in the audience was in agreement with Trump, even though many in attendance were “disgusted” and “bewildered,” reports Mediaite.
“The floor manager came out ahead of time and said, Please do not boo, please be respectful. You were allowed to applaud,” Bartlett told Puck News senior political correspondent Tara Palmeri. ¤ From Mediaite:
Bartlett claimed that, while many in the audience applauded and cheered the former president, “there were also people that sat there quietly disgusted or bewildered.” He estimated that while around half of the audience expressed vocal support for Trump, the other half sat in silence. Bartlett also alleged that Trump repeatedly “lost the audience” when he spoke about topics like January 6 or the results of the 2020 election, despite the appearance on CNN that the audience was consistently on his side.
“In a TV setting, you hear the applause, but you don’t see the disgust,” Bartlett told Palmeri. “So Trump did not have the entire room on his side, make no mistake, even if it certainly came across that way on TV.”
🐣 RT @atrupar “Fascism is a mass movement … And, yes, millions of neighbors, relatives, and good, pure people can participate in the rituals of victimization, bigotry, and blood. Who is fascism for, after all, if not the good, pure people?” — @nberlat
⋙ PublicNotice, Noah Berlatsky: CNN’s Trump town hall was a fascist ritual https://tinyurl.com/2dn557fz
// Trump calls his supporters to their worst selves.
🐣 RT @PhillipsPOBrien If this is true, and it is plausible if terrible, then Ukrainian losses in the whole war on all fronts are a little less than US intelligence estimates of what Russia has lost trying to take just Bakhmut in the last 5 months
⋙ 🐣 RT @KyivIndependent
⚡️Euractiv: Internal EU memo puts Ukrainian troop losses at 13,000.
An internal EU memo suggests that Ukraine has lost 13,000 troops since the start of the full-scale Russian invasion, Euractiv reported on May 12.
The memo also says 35,000 Ukrainian servicemembers were wounded.
🐣 RT @StateOfUkraine Prigozhin’s statements today:
🇷🇺 units fled from the flanks (video👇), front collapsing
🇷🇺 losses today: 5 sq. km.
🇺🇦 controls Chasiv Yar-Bakhmut road
🇺🇦 has gained strategic territories, inc. tactical heights
🇺🇦 forces entering Berkhivka will initiate the encirclement of Bakhmut
🐣 RT @parrot_soldier A whole russian squad surrendered to the AFU in the outskirts of Bakhmut. ¤ The panic among muscovite ranks is growing each passing day.
🐣 RT @Flash_news_ua ⚡️For three days of counteroffensive actions of the Ukrainian Armed Forces in the Bakhmut direction, 17.3 km² were liberated, — the speaker of the Eastern Forces Group, Cherevatyi reports.
🐣 RT @ 🐣 RT @GlasnostGone #Ukraine says its recaptured ground in Bakhmut. Deputy Defence Minister Hanna Malyar said 🇺🇦 forces advanced 2km in a week. Said for Russia Bakhmut has an “almost sacred” importance. Accused Kremlin of claiming false victories & lying about ammo shortages.
⋙ BBC: Ukraine claims gains in Bakhmut after Russia denials https://tinyurl.com/25atjyt3
🐣 RT @Gerashchenko_en “Capturing Bakhmut means nothing because flanks are crumbling, the front is failing…it will lead to global tragedy for Russia” – Prigozhin continues blaming the Russian army for fleeing and leaving 5 km near Bakhmut.
💽 https://twitter.com/Gerashchenko_en/status/1657054335270830080?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @ChuckPfarrer BAKHMUT AXIS /1230 UTC 12 MAY/ Over the past 48 hours, UKR forces have mounted a series of successful counter-attacks N and S of the city of Bakhmut. UKR forces advanced in the vicinity of Orikhovo-Vasylivka, Hyrhorivka, Bohdanivka, Khromove, Ivanivske and Stupochky.
🌎 https://twitter.com/ChuckPfarrer/status/1656998826580869122?s=20/photo/1
🔄 📋 📊 WaPo, Philip Bump (Feb 28): Underrecognized: Extremist murders are usually from right-wing actors https://tinyurl.com/3kt9vbem Data for 2013 to 2022 from the Anti-Defamation League (Jewish hate-monitoring organization)
// 2/28/2023
◕ https://twitter.com/Auriandra/status/1656944250142040066?s=20/photo/1 -3
The first chart shows the ideologies of politically motivated murders.
● 90% of incidents and 75% of deaths were by rightwing extremists.
● About 5% of inclidents and 20% of deaths were by Islamic radicals.
● About 5% of inclidents and 5% of deaths were by leftwing extremists (like “antifa”)
The second chart shows the that during the last 7 or so years (since Trump), almost all incidents and deaths were by right wingers.
This last chart shows who people think is responsible, leftwing or rightwing. It is msybe not surprising that Democrats blame the rightwing and Republicans blame the leftwing. But it’s the Republicans who are wrong.
⭕ 11 May 2023
🧵 RT @ThreshedThought Ukraine counteroffensive thread ¤ This may be a long thread. …
Here is a round up of where we are so far. [edited for clarity]
📌 https://twitter.com/ThreshedThought/status/1656727045076819969?s=20
[ThreadReader:] https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1656727045076819969.html
Ukraine has been conducting ‘shaping operations’ for the last few weeks or so.
These have had many strands:
– Information
– Attacks on logistics and command
– Dislocating operations on Russian territory
– Probing operations / establishing of bridgeheadsThe aim of all of these elements of the shaping operations is to create lots of ambiguity in the Russian military command about:
– where exactly the major blows of the Ukrainian counteroffensive will fall
– when exactly it will startThe continual activity by Ukraine – blowing up oil dumps in Crimea here, flying drones over Moscow there, hitting logistics behind the Zaporizhzhia front etc. – is designed to raise, and keep maintained, levels of anxiety among the Russian command, and Russian soldiers.
Exhausted and anxious soldiers do not make good decisionsNow there are several basic premises that underlie the Ukrainian counteroffensive
1) The aim is not to kill every last Russian in Ukraine, but to affect the minds of decision makers in Moscow. This requires some sort of battlefield spectacular, localised defeat, major encirclement of Russian forces, or serious momentum to be generated by the Ukrainians.
2) This diagram is still pertinent. Ukrainians have interior lines; Russians have exterior lines (in hostile territory). This means the Ukrainians can move troops, equipment and supplies backwards and forwards along the font line much easier than the Russians can.
3) The Ukrainians probably don’t have a developed plan about where their main blow will fall. Eventually they probably want to strike south from Zaporizhzhia to cut the Russian forces in two. See here (the X is knocking out the Kerch bridge which isolates the Russian troops in…
but until that point they should just probe in one area, see if the Russians respond, if they do, fine, head to another area, if they don’t respond, then exploit that axis. ¤ They can just move up and down the front line to keep the Russians moving resources up and down…
but until that point they should just probe in one area, see if the Russians respond, if they do, fine, head to another area, if they don’t respond, then exploit that axis.They can just move up and down the front line to keep the Russians moving resources up and down… And we are already staring to see these probes. …
Here is probably the most interesting thing. There are early reports of a Ukrainian assault on the Russian flanks at Bahkmut, which if they collapse will enable the Ukrainians to encircle the Russian forces that are currently themselves encircling Bahkmut. This is called a double… [map]
There’s also lots of activity on other areas of the front – and depending on how the Russians respond, will determine how which the Ukrainians reinforce. ¤ It’s all about creating dilemmas for the Russians. …
🧵 RT @MarkHertling In discussing the upcoming Ukrainian offensive yesterday with a group of govt officials, one asked me “when will it start?” ¤ I said: “in the attack, it starts when the commander feels it’s the right time…that’s an advantages of the offensive.” ¤ I then explained RSOI. 1/10
📌 https://twitter.com/MarkHertling/status/1656800463461785601?s=20
RSOI is Reception, Staging, Onward Movement & Integration. ¤ When units enter a combat zone, they are “received” in country, “staged” to move forward, then “moved” to the combat area, and then integrated into a larger unit. ¤ How is this related to Ukraine, you ask? 2/
Remember that Ukraine’s army has been receiving all kinds of different equipment from many different countries, and they are training at different EU training areas on new skills with that equipment. ¤ Some training takes longer than other, depending on the kit. 3/
When finished in, say, Germany, Poland, Estonia or other countries, they travel back to Ukraine & are “received” & “staged” with other types of partner units. ¤ Once all together, they “move” forward, closer to the front lines, & are “integrated” into even larger units. 4/
Now, multiply this by the estimated 9 Brigades – armor, engineers, artillery, logistics, staff & commanders, etc. (many of whom are coming together for the first time) – and it’s easy to understand why…it takes as long as it takes. ¤ Commanders assess when they’re ready. 5/
I once heard a Sergeant Major say “RSOI is converting piles of puzzle pieces into combat ready units.” ¤ Spot on. ¤ BTW, these “puzzle pieces” are being put together all across the 400+ km front lines, at points of Ukrainian general’s plan. 6/
A few days ago, Czech President Pavel publicly told Zelenskyy “don’t be pushed, attack when you’re ready.” ¤ I’m sure others have said the same to Gen Zaluzhnyi, chief of Ukraine’s Army. ¤ A mentor once told me (as I prepared a division for combat) “go slow to go fast!” 7/
Ukraine’s army will attack when they’re ready, at time and place(s) of their choosing, & they will be successful in their operation to regain sovereign territory, transitioning to offense takes significant preparation, coordination & synchronization. ¤ This ain’t a video game. 8/
In 2007, I had the honor of commanding the Germany-based @1stArmoredDiv. ¤ We were the first “plug & play” division…we deployed with our division staff but all our combat brigades came from 7 different divisions in the US & our support units came from 13 different states. 9/
Each unit’s RSOI execution during this “surge” was critical to getting forces into the fight. ¤ This execution is what the Ukrainian Army is doing now. ¤ Those wanting the offensive to start need to be patient. ¤ It will go slow, then it will go fast. 10/10
TheBulwark, Charlie Sykes: The Moment That You Knew https://tinyurl.com/ydjf4363
// What CNN’s disastrous town hall showed us.
Critics had worried that giving the indicted, twice-impeached, coup-plotting, chronically lying sexual predator an unedited, live television forum might turn out badly. ¤ The reality, however, was far ghastlier: a sh*tshow for the ages, and a moment that captured the thorough degradation of both our politics and the media. ‘It was a f**king nightmare,’ remarked one savvy observer, ‘and it was programmed to BE a f**king nightmare.’”
TheAtlantic, Tom Nichols: CNN Went Full Jerry Springer https://tinyurl.com/mwpbc82h //➔ the “town hall” was a MAGA “event”, not journalism; it energized the MAGA base and left the rest of us feeling helpless and unrepresented
// The network’s president made an indefensible decision in airing an episode of Trump’s ongoing reality show.
… CNN’s decision to run a town hall with the former president enabled that behavior and managed to harm journalism, the network’s reputation, and the American political process all at once.
I have long argued that Americans need to see more, rather than less, of Donald Trump. Because I believe that Trump is an existential menace to American democracy, I have encouraged covering Trump as closely as possible. … Trump built a following over the years by being on television, and his base can’t get enough of him, so why should the media encourage more adoration? But for ordinary Americans who did not join the cultish following that congealed around Trump in 2016—many of whom are the independent voters who will decide the next election—“Trump exhaustion” is a real thing, and the more of it, the better.
Watching Trump for any extended period of time is enervating and deeply uncomfortable. The man is a quivering bag of weird verbal and physical tics. And when he gets rolling, listening to a Trump speech is like standing nearby while someone throws a match into a box of cheap bottle rockets: When the fusillade of annoying noise, misfires, duds, and smoke is over, all that’s left is a general stink in the air.
This discomfort is exactly my point: If you want to stop Donald Trump from returning to power, putting him on TV is the way to go. But doing so requires either that you hand him a microphone and let him immolate himself, or that you sit him down with a reporter who will not let up on calling out his lies and fantasies until he melts down.
Last night, however, CNN chose one of the worst possible options. Instead of a candidate interview, CNN Chairman Chris Licht apparently thought it would be a great idea to cast Trump in a remake of The Jerry Springer Show, complete with vulgar jokes, hooting fans, and a mild-mannered host—in this case, the CNN correspondent Kaitlan Collins—stuck with the thankless of job of trying to intervene in the shouting and angry finger-pointing. Instead of an important one-on-one interview with a dangerous and malevolent demagogue, CNN presented another episode of Trump’s ongoing reality show.
The result was a disaster that was not only foreseeable but also as predictable as the laws of physics, a cringe-inducing display that damaged CNN’s reputation, put one of its rising stars in a no-win situation, cheapened journalism, and undermined our political process—all in the span of little more than an hour.
… But “covering” Trump does not mean packing an audience with supporters and then setting the resolutely misogynist Trump against a young female reporter in a situation that practically could have been designed by the Trump campaign itself.
Indeed, Licht and his producers seemed determined to place Trump right in his comfort zone. Although Collins tried repeatedly to contradict Trump, Licht had to know—perhaps was even expecting—that Trump would simply steamroll her, as he did. (She also missed several opportunities—particularly on abortion—to stop Trump as he rocketed beyond the Van Allen belts, but I accept that correcting him is basically impossible.) Only once did she finally manage to get under his skin with repeated questioning, and in response, he pulled out his standard insult of calling her “nasty.” …,
[ Audience: ] Whoever they were, Trump was jazzed by their support. Every slimy comment got a laugh or applause, including many about E. Jean Carroll, the woman who successfully sued Trump for sexual abuse and defamation this week. (Trump was so vile, Carroll says, that she is reportedly thinking of suing him again.) Collins had to ask about Carroll, of course, but after that, the plan—if one existed—seemed to be for her to stand there and take it while Trump talked over her, made dirty jokes, and basked in audience laughter. Trump’s sleaziness, like everything else in this train wreck, was completely foreordained—and, again, Licht and his producers had to know it. …
How anyone—especially the head of a news network—can believe that this group of people has been ignored is astonishing. Perhaps he missed the many years of journalists conducting ritual pilgrimages to America’s diners and asking every angry old guy in a red hat to please, please tell us what he wants.
Perhaps what Licht really meant is that CNN should see MAGA world as an underserved community that is up for grabs while Fox News reels from its scandals. It seems an odd strategy, however, to push Collins onstage as the blood sacrifice for an hour, and then follow that up with Jake Tapper and other CNN hosts wrestling with the cognitive dissonance of talking about what a miserable fiasco their own network just splattered across the nation’s screens.
As many observers have noted, CNN has learned nothing since 2016. Or maybe CNN has learned everything since 2016, and intends to do it all over again.
🐣 RT @NOELreports Ukrainian troops have increased their local activities in Bakhmut. A barrage of 4 full MLRS was recorded.
⋙ 🐣 RT @NOELreports Ukrainian troops comply with Prigozhin’s request. More ammunition.
💽 🔥https://twitter.com/NOELreports/status/1656778065920311298?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @wartranslated Russian Aleksandr Kots says Ukrainians are putting pressure on Wagner flanks in Bakhmut in order to encircle them.
[TextLink:] https://twitter.com/wartranslated/status/1656736681280536608?s=20/photo/1
[Text:] The enemy continues to put pressure on the flanks of Artemovsk [Bakhmut]. Unfortunately, in some areas they managed to take the frontiers which we took were with considerable bloodshed. Actually, after Zelensky said that they would not leave Bakhmut under any circumstances, it became clear that an operation was being prepared to de-block the city. When the retreating Ukrainian units began to undermine high-rise buildings behind them, an upcoming attempt of revanche became obvious.
They destroy the dominant heights in Artemovsk. To deprive us of the advantage in the coming
defense. While fighting was going on in the city, the enemy formed strike groups, which should bypass Bakhmut on the flanks, encircling the Wagners. Only coordinated actions can stop the enemy now, without division into us and them. Guys, hold on!
🐣 RT @mhmck On May 11th, Ukrainian defenders made small, tactical gains on the flanks of Bakhmut. ¤ This is not the counter-offensive. This is the Armed Forces of Ukraine effectively counter-attacking and the Russian invaders failing to adopt a sound, defensive posture.
🌎 https://twitter.com/mhmck/status/1656788527323938816?s=20/photo/1
WaPo: CNN leadership under fire after ‘disastrous’ Trump town hall https://tinyurl.com/5fd9ykr2
// A furious backlash raised questions about the future of chief executive Chris Licht and the larger challenges facing the news media going into the 2024 election
CNN’s prime-time broadcast of a raucous town hall with Donald Trump propelled a tsunami of criticism from inside and outside the network Thursday — and renewed questions about how the news media will handle the challenge of covering the serial falsehoods of the Republican Party’s leading candidate going into the 2024 election.
The former president repeatedly dodged or sneered at questions from CNN’s moderator, Kaitlan Collins, during the live, 70-minute forum at St. Anselm College in New Hampshire on Wednesday night. He doubled down on false claims that “a rigged election” led to his 2020 ouster and referred to writer E. Jean Carroll, who just prevailed in her lawsuit against him for defamation and battery, as a “whack job,” to cheers and laughter from the audience, made up of local Republican voters. ¤ And when Collins pressed him on why he removed classified documents from the White House, he replied: “You are a nasty person.”
“Predictably disastrous,” wrote former network TV news executive Mark Lukasiewicz, part of a chorus of media critics and political observers who bemoaned the on-air spectacle. “Live lying works. A friendly MAGA crowd consistently laughs, claps at Trump’s punchlines … and the moderator cannot begin to keep up with the AR-15 pace of lies.”
At a time when CNN has been struggling to turn around viewership decline, the telecast proved to be a ratings disappointment, with Nielsen reporting just 3.1 million viewers overall. That was a big boost over CNN’s typical 8 p.m. telecast, but a smaller audience than CNN’s town hall with President Biden last summer (3.7 million) and six previous Trump town halls carried by Fox News — calling into question both CNN and Trump’s drawing power.
The more profound impact, however, may be the damage done to the reputation of the network that has long promoted itself as “the most trusted name in news.” It also raised questions about the future prospects of chief executive Chris Licht, who replaced Trump-friend-turned critic Jeff Zucker last year and is charged with striking a more neutral tone at a cable channel that exploded with impassioned commentary during the Trump years.
Journalists at CNN and others outside the organization called the town hall a “debacle,” a “disaster” and “CNN’s lowest moment.” On Twitter, the hashtags and phrases BoycottCNN, DoneWithCNN and ByeCNN trended late Wednesday.
The thrust of the criticism is that CNN’s format, which it has used for other candidates over the years, enabled Trump’s filibustering and thwarted real-time fact checking, allowing him to present a dishonest rehashing of his record. “In terms of sheer control of the stage and WWE-style platform dynamics, the horrible truth is that this outcome was preordained,” tweeted veteran political writer James Fallows. Some compared the program to a modified Trump campaign rally — the kind that CNN sometimes aired live during the 2015-16 campaign cycle, which Zucker later said he regretted.
Licht defended the decision to host Trump in this format during his regular morning meeting with network staff on Thursday. ¤ “I am aware that there have been people with opinions [and] backlash, and that is absolutely expected,” he said, according to an audio recording. “And I’ll say this as clearly as I possibly can: You do not have to like the former president’s answers, but you can’t say we didn’t get them. … America was served very well by what we did last night. People woke up and they know what the stakes are in this election in a way they didn’t the day before.”
Licht also hailed Collins’s “masterful performance” as moderator and called her “a rock star.”
Licht, however, was hammered by his own journalists. “We did it wrong,” said an on-air personality. “We treated him like a normal politician who could be fact-checked. We ended up dancing around a demagogue.” ¤ “It should have been a taped interview where you could fact-check him,” said one CNN correspondent who, like the on-air personality spoke on the condition of anonymity to preserve relationships and careers. “The audience was laughing at his comments about Jean Carroll. Disgraceful.”In his meeting with staff, Licht defended the decisions that led to a cheering, partisan audience: “That was also an important part of the story because the people in that audience represent a large swath of America. And the mistake the media made in the past is ignoring those people exist.” ¤ Another staffer, also speaking on background to avoid retaliation, suggested Licht and other executives who approved the event should resign. …
[T]he Trump town hall is shaping up as another disappointment under Licht’s watch. Despite his tinkering with CNN’s daily lineup and a mandate to reposition the network as a neutral purveyor of news, Licht has been unable to stop its ratings from sliding to historic lows. …
CNN’s daily media newsletter, Reliable Sources, was blunt in its assessment of Wednesday’s event. “It’s hard to see how America was served by the spectacle of lies that aired on CNN Wednesday evening,” reporter Oliver Darcy wrote Wednesday night.
But the squadron of analysts and commentators that CNN put on the air late Wednesday to assess Trump’s performance in the town hall (“We don’t have enough time to fact-check every lie he told,” said anchor Jake Tapper) said nothing about the network’s own decision to host the forum.
At least one of the network’s paid commentators went public with his objections before the Trump special aired. Michael Fanone, a U.S. Capitol Police officer who was injured while defending the Capitol during the Jan. 6, 2021, riot, wrote an essay published by Rolling Stone that indicted the programming decision. ¤ “Putting him onstage, having him answer questions like a normal candidate who didn’t get people killed in the process of trying to end the democracy he’s attempting to once again run, normalizes what Trump did,” Fanone wrote. “It sends a message that attempting a coup is just part of the process; that accepting election results is a choice; and that there are no consequences, in the media or in politics or anywhere else, for rejecting them.” …
[I]nside CNN, the mood was dark. ¤ “I can’t believe anyone thought this was a good idea,” said one staffer, who also spoke on the condition of anonymity to avoid career repercussions. “I’ve been a CNN journalist for many years. I’ve always been so proud to say that. I’ve never, ever been ashamed of CNN until tonight.”
🐣 RT @wartranslated Numerous reports in Russian channels about Ukrainian forces having begun a larger offensive in several directions. This follows reports of Wagner struggling in Bakhmut in the recent days. Current reports are very conflicting, some mention Ukrainians moving towards Russian border. We still have to see if any of this is real, but the situation is rather similar to September and November regroupings.
⋙ 🐣 RT @wartranslated So far, I’m seeing the following: Ukrainian advances in Bakhmut and Soledar area, as well as some vehicle movement in Kharkiv Oblast. No info on south – Crimea etc. All of this is obviously only coming from Russian mouths.
TheDrive: Ukraine’s Storm Shadow Missiles Are A Big Problem For Russia https://tinyurl.com/3mfwbzxa “[T]he Storm Shadow should give Ukraine a powerful new ability to hit key targets, including command nodes, supply dumps and bridges, deep behind the front lines”
// Britain confirmed that Ukraine is getting advanced air-launched Storm Shadow cruise missiles, some of which may already have been delivered.
NYT, Frank Bruni: Trump’s ‘Stupid,’ ‘Stupid’ Town Hall https://tinyurl.com/2p887td9
NYMag: CNN Staffers Pissed After Trump Trashes Their Town Hall https://tinyurl.com/yns3mdsj
🐣 RT @justicedems 1.1 million people died from COVID in the US due to policy failure. ¤ We need a healthcare and economic system built on keeping everyone safe and healthy, not on shareholder profits. [?]
🌎 https://twitter.com/justicedems/status/1656706323872989196?s=20/photo/1
⋙ NYT: As Emergency Ends, a Look at Covid’s U.S. Death Toll https://tinyurl.com/c92bpfhh
🐣 RT @brianstelter Just in: CNN’s town hall with Donald Trump averaged 3.1 million total viewers. The event outrated Fox and MSNBC, as expected, but these are not 2015/16 level numbers for Trump — not even close.
🐣 RT @ 🐣 RT @mlcalderone “I don’t know anyone who was happy with last night,” says one CNN journalist. “The mood is absolutely the lowest it’s been in the Licht tenure, and that’s saying a lot.”
⋙ VanityFair: CNN’s Donald Trump Town Hall Was Essentially a Campaign Rally https://tinyurl.com/mscztn28
// The network gave Trump a platform to spout lies and insults—and a cheering section! Network boss Chris Licht is defending the debacle, but inside, says one CNN journalist, “the mood is absolutely the lowest.”
🐣 RT @ChuckPfarrer SUNDAY PUNCH: The UK has confirmed it’s supplying UKR with long-range Storm Shadow cruise missiles. The Stormshadow has a range of over 250km (155 miles), giving UKR new capabilities as it prepares a counter-offensive against Russia.
◕ https://twitter.com/ChuckPfarrer/status/1656636182027984896?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @ChuckPfarrer PERFECT TIMING: Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky has said his country needs more time to prepare a much-anticipated counter-offensive against Russian forces, as the military awaits the delivery of promised aid.
⋙ BBC: Zelensky says Ukraine needs more time for counter-offensive https://tinyurl.com/mvsp9bbr
🐣 RT @ChuckPfarrer BAKHMUT AXIS /1230 UTC 11 MAY/ UKR forces have mounted a series of successful counter-attacks in the urban area and south of the city of Bakhmut. RU air strike reports indicate that UKR forces pushed back an earlier VDV thrust and are in contact at Klishchiyivka.
🌎 https://twitter.com/ChuckPfarrer/status/1656634137686470656?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @ DecodingFoxNews This is an annotated version of Trump’s Town Hall on CNN broken down to 2 minutes. You won’t have to listen to his voice. I break it down for you. It’s Trump without Trump. Trump only neutered.
💽 https://twitter.com/DecodingFoxNews/status/1656527299959832578?s=20/photo/1
⭕ 10 May 2023
NYT: House Republican Report Finds No Evidence of Wrongdoing by President Biden https://tinyurl.com/4wypw7tv
// After months of investigation and many public accusations of corruption against Mr. Biden and his family, the first report of the premier House G.O.P. inquiry showed no proof of such misconduct.
🐣 RT @NeverTrumpTexan “Either let us destroy the economy with draconian cuts or we will destroy the economy with a needless default.” ¤ That is what Republicans call negotiating.
🐣 RT @ Morning_Joe “As long as the end is Donald Trump ends up in power, the rules don’t matter,” says @ChrisMurphyCT on GOP’s defense of former President’s legal issues
🧵 RT @ MarkHarrisNYC Update: The proper thing for Chris Licht to do now is resign.
📌 https://twitter.com/MarkHarrisNYC/status/1656458551982710786?s=20
⋙ If I were Chris Licht right now, I would be mulling over the fact that my tenure at CNN is going to be completely defined by what happens in the next 36 hours.
⋙ A failure this immense happens when you forget that journalism’s only allegiance is to the truth, and decide instead that your highest priorities are to have no opinion about anything and to platform lies by calling them “newsworthy” or saying, “But a lot of people believe him.”
⋙ There were so many mistakes here. 1) Agreeing to an entirely partisan audience as a condition of the interview. 2) Deciding that someone could serve as moderator, host, interviewer and corrector of the record simultaneously. 3) Ignoring Trump’s history of lying in your planning.>
⋙ 4) Deciding that it’s your job to normalize a profoundly abnormal candidate via placing him a “normal” format. 5) Not having a separate set of on-set (literally) fact-checkers who could keep up with him in real time. 6) Not pivoting after yesterday and saying that because.. >
⋙ of the verdict, the show would now have to begin with a 15-minute one-on-one interview with no live audience. 7) Ignoring the many people, including in your own organization, who made ALL these points in advance. This isn’t “Who could have known?” People knew, and they said so.
🐣 RT @BruceRFeldman Who in their right mind thinks it would go any other way. Either @CNN wanted exactly this or they wasted millions on the Chris Licht hire. Where was their board on this? They’re supposed to be the adults in the room. If this creates a CNN meltdown, the board has abandoned its fiduciary responsibility.
🐣 RT @ruthbenghiat CNN became a party to Trump’s need to psychologically “undo” his defeat by getting the audience to applaud him *for being an assaulter.* The more approval authoritarians get, the more they feel emboldened to be even more lawless. This is why this “town hall” was so dangerous.
⋙ 🐣 RT @SIfill_ I hate that @CNN allowed E. Jean Carroll’s name to be dragged through the mud again by this terrible man. Sure she could sue him for defamation again. That doesn’t change the hurt & humiliation at the laughter, and at the knowledge that CNN was willing to expose her to this.
🐣 RT @DavidJollyFL Despite the melting down about tonight, this is a GOP train wreck. ¤ Trump is not picking up a single new general election voter. And every voter who came out in 18, 20 & 22 to stop him now remembers why. ¤ Strong night for Trump’s GOP primary. Terrible night for his general.
🐣 RT @TheDeadDistrict Katheryn Winnick ‘Vikings’ actress who played Lagertha visits #Ukraine “I was overwhelmed by the destruction in Irpin, Ukriane, while visiting the area. Seeing it with my own eyes made me realize how many families are suffering. All lives matter.”
🖼 https://twitter.com/TheDeadDistrict/status/1656513595709046784?s=20/photo/1 -4
🐣 RT @RadioFreeTom Also, unrelated to CNN or Collins, Donald Trump is not sane.
🐣 RT @benshapiro This townhall hits everybody’s pleasure centers: CNN gets to broadcast outrage over the oh-so-troubling Trump; Trump gets to shellack a CNN host. The only people who lose out are those who were hoping for, you know, some serious answers to serious questions.
🐣 RT @BradMossEsq All three ongoing criminal cases got new evidence tonight against Trump. He is confessing on live television.
🐣 .@msnbc could cash in on people unhappy w @cnn’s rightward turn if they could lessen the wall-to-wall coverage of shootings, crt-lite and trans (really?); focus on Biden’s winners: middle class/kitchen table/fair shot ✛ Ukraine agenda (@Morning_Joe @DeadlineWH, @AriMelber fine)
🐣 RT @DavidShuster Whether CNN gave Trump the infomercial by design or through sheer incompetence, let’s be clear. This was a humiliating and infuriating night for anybody who still cares about basic integrity and civic responsibility. @CNN deserves all the venom and contempt tonight.
⋙ 🐣 RT @DavidShuster The irony is that @CNN has some tough. Informed, experienced journalists in @jaketapper @andersoncooper who would have held Trump accountable in a credible and compelling manner. But they were benched by design. What a mistake. t
🐣 RT @mikememoli A Biden campaign adviser’s summary of tonight’s town hall: “Weeks worth of damning content in one hour. … It was quite efficient.”
🐣 RT @MichaelRWear Whether Trump is helping or harming his campaign right now should not be our primary concern. What’s clear now, as it has been for a very, very long time, is the harm he does to the spirit of this country. “A corrupt heart elicits in an hour all that is bad in us” -F.W. Peterson
🐣 RT @richsignorelli Adolf Hitler is no longer around to do a @cnn town hall before Nazi party members, “fortunately or unfortunately.”
🐣 RT @harrisonjaime This was a key clip of the night: Trump bragging about overturning Roe and paving the way for a national abortion ban.
💽 https://twitter.com/harrisonjaime/status/1656478259700195328?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @ananavarro .@JoeBiden is the winner of tonight’s town-hall. ¤ Trump showed he commands the GOP base. ¤ Hopefully, it reminds D’s of the awful human & existential threat to democracy Biden’s up against, and they stop fretting about his age & get behind the guy who’s proven he can beat Trump.
🧵 RT @djrothkopf Hard to say what was the worst part of the CNN debacle: Trump repeating the Big Lie, promising to pardon Jan 6 insurgents, further victimizing E. Jean Carroll, not promising to honor the 2024 election result, not calling Vladimir Putin a war criminal…
📌 https://twitter.com/djrothkopf/status/1656476896350068737?s=20
…or condemning his invasion of Ukraine, implying that there was equivalency between Russia and Ukraine, attacking our allies yet again, promising to double down on many of his worst policies, taking credit for the abomination that was the Dobbs decision…
…the lies upon lies upon lies, the clear message he sent that if elected again would could face even worse than his disastrous, scandal-ridden, failed first term, his insults to Kaitlan Collins for doing her job, the way the audience was constituted…
…the fact that giving him this platform normalized him, allowed him to spread his disinformation & will help him raise $? Each of those was terrible, each chilling in light of the past 7 years. But no, worst of all was CNN’s decision to air this in the first place. Disastrous.
🐣 RT @brianstelter THIS is the 2024 Republican presidential primary. Look away if you choose, but this is what it’s going to be like. Should news outlets sanitize it or stare it in the face?
⋙ 🐣 it’s bad for the reputation of the US at a critical time for diplomacy, especially when staged in such an irresponsible format ¤ it also bad for the mental health of the unbalanced and, to a certain extent, for all citizens ¤ was it really worth it @cnn?
🐣 RT @SykesCharlie Who could possibly have predicted this would be such an epic clusterf?
⋙ 🐣 RT @JuddLegum The audience for the CNN townhall w/Trump will be 400 Republicans & GOP-leaning independents ¤ Allowing Trump to appear in front of an audience exclusively comprised of people who are likely sympathetic to Trump — and then turn over the questions to that group — is irresponsible
🐣 RT @RadioFreeTom Will you commit to accepting the results of the election? ¤ Trump: If I think it’s honest
⋙ 🐣 RT @BecuJeanne He was claiming the election was rigged BEFORE the election. BOTH TIMES. Before the election. Both times.
🐣 RT @RadioFreeTom Will you commit to accepting the results of the election? ¤ Trump: If I think it’s honest
🐣 RT @ krassenstein BREAKING: Kaitlan Collins just asked Trump during the CNN Town Hall if he shared the classified documents seized at Mar-a-lago with anyone. ¤ Trump’s incredibly scary answer: ¤ “Not really”. ¤ He then said “it doesn’t matter”. ¤ When Collins continued to push him on what he meant by “not really” he refused to give a straight answer and eventually called Collins “a nasty woman”. ¤ How can anyone support this?
🐣 RT @ruthbenghiat His campaign is traditional if the tradition we are talking about includes Mussolini Hitler Duterte Bolsonaro etc
🐣 RT @MFA_Ukraine The world needs #RealPeaceNotAppeasement. Real Peace means:
– restoring internationally recognized borders of 🇺🇦
– a safe homeland for the Tatar people in Ukrainian Crimea
– grainships in the Black Sea, not warships
– a world under the rule of international law rather than force
🐣 RT @hilaryluros Uncle @TheRickWilson has spoken. Pay attention, y’all.
⋙ 🐣 RT @TheRickWilson I have words.
💽 https://twitter.com/TheRickWilson/status/1656460186184298496?s=20
🐣 RT @newrepublic A 65-page report, a press conference, and nothing to show for it.
⋙ NewRepublic: Republicans Finally Admit They Have No Incriminating Evidence on Joe Biden https://tinyurl.com/3rywn9y3
// A 65-page report, a press conference, and nothing to show for it
During a press conference explaining the investigation, Comer was asked if he had evidence directly linking Biden to corruption. The Kentucky Republican hemmed and hawed but ultimately admitted he didn’t.
The memo accuses the Biden family of involvement in a “scheme to peddle influence” in Romania from 2015 to 2017, as well as financial dealings with individuals in China. Hunter Biden’s name comes up repeatedly. But the memo contains scant details of all of these alleged dealings, nor does it contain any evidence that any laws were broken or that Biden was involved in his son’s Chinese business.
Representative Jamie Raskin, the ranking member of the Oversight Committee, slammed Comer for having “failed to provide factual evidence to support his wild accusations about the president.” ¤ “He continues to bombard the public with innuendo, misrepresentations, and outright lies, recycling baseless claims from stories that were debunked years ago,” Raskin said in a statement.
🧵 RT @atrupar My thread about Trump’s CNN town hall starts here
📌 💽 https://twitter.com/atrupar/status/1656441717665538051?s=20/photo/1
OpenSecrets: Trump made more than $200 million from foreign business interests since 2016 https://tinyurl.com/2p9h2cr3
// 10/8/2020
s 🐣 📊 RT @ianbremmer brazilian public: not in line with lula on russia war
// Brazilians Overwhelmingly Blame Russia for Starting War in Ukraine: 62%/17%
🐣 RT @RFERL Enerhoatom, the operator of Ukraine’s Zaporizhzhya Nuclear Power Plant, has warned that Russia plans to forcibly “evacuate” about 3,100 employees of plant.
⋙ RFE/RL: Zaporizhzhya Nuclear Plant Warns Of ‘Catastrophic Lack’ Of Workers Amid Russian Evacuation Plans https://tinyurl.com/bdxx2cb5
🐣 RT @mhmck On the flanks of Bakhmut, Ukrainian defenders made gains of up to 2 km on the Russian fascist invaders:
–away from the 0505 road near Khromove
–away from the H-32 highway near Ivanivs’ke, in the direction of Klishchiyivka
–away from Stupochky
🐣 RT @NOELreports U.S. attorney general Garland allowed the transfer of forfeited funds from Russia oligarch for use in Ukraine. ¤ “While this represents the US’ first transfer of forfeited Russian funds for the rebuilding of Ukraine, it will not be the last,” he said.
⋙ Reuters: U.S. attorney general OKs transfer of forfeited funds from Russia oligarch for use in Ukraine https://tinyurl.com/2p99esmz
🐣 RT @Maks_NAFO_FELLA “There is a serious risk of encirclement of the Wagner PMC in Bakhmut as a result of the collapse of the flanks. The flanks are already cracking and falling.” – Prigozhin
NYT, David French: A Guilty Ex-President https://tinyurl.com/4x44z6bm “Donald Trump had his day in court. He lost. Now the GOP faces a very different kind of trial. … [A]nd it is a great tragedy of our time that no one can presume that it’s a test the party will pass”
🐣 RT @IanSams46 Absolutely brutal for @JamesComer ¤ POLITICO: “Comer fails to link president in Biden family probe” ¤ Comer “doesn’t show any way Biden’s decisions were influenced” or “that he had direct knowledge” ¤ “No link has publicly emerged, and that didn’t change”
⋙ Politico: Comer releases Biden family probe update without showing link to president https://tinyurl.com/yckfp677
// nothing here; The Oversight panel chair revealed Wednesday that Biden family members, business associates or related companies received more than $10 million from companies run by foreign nationals.
🐣 RT @ChuckPfarrer BAKHMUT AXIS /1300 UTC 10 MAY/ Missing Putin’s 9 May ‘Victory-Day deadline’ to capture the city of Bakhmut, RU forces continue failed attacks N and S of the urban area. UKR counter attacked Russian VDV and Motor Rifle troops who had reached the H-32 HWY S and W of Ivanivske.
🌎 https://twitter.com/ChuckPfarrer/status/1656280137330032641?s=20/photo/1
⭕ 9 May 2023
NYT, Timothy Snyder: Putin Is Fighting, and Losing, His Last War https://tinyurl.com/23tk8bt3 “Russia failed to achieve the explicit aim of the ‘special military operation’ to overthrow Ukraine’s democratic government. There will be no greater humiliation than that”
🐣 RT @KvotheTheArcane Downfall: Tankie and Gopnik edition 2.0
💽 https://twitter.com/KvotheTheArcane/status/1656119092837773312?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @RingoBridge Actually, it is thanks to the USA that the Soviet Union still exists. In the 1930s, it was the USA that industrialised the country. Without their support, they would not have been able to defend themselves against Nazi Germany.
[TextLink:] https://twitter.com/RingoBridge/status/1655984654053146665?s=20/photo/1
// lend lease to Russia lend-lease WW2
🐣 RT @anders_aslund Something appears to have broken on the Russian front.
1. Prigozhin’s aggressive complaints against Shoigu, but also Putin.
2. The bizarre drone fireworks over the Kremlin.
3. Putin’s pathetic one-tank parade today.
4. Ukraine’s apparent breakthrough in Bakhmut.
Out of control?
🐣 RT @anders_aslund If Ukraine really has taken a substantial part of Bakhmut, that is a significant breakthrough on the Donbass front.
⋙ 🐣 RT @wartranslated Leader of the Azov movement, Andriy Biletskiy, states that Ukrainian forces of the 3rd Assault Brigade liberated a 3 x 2.6km strip of land in Bakhmut, destroying 2 companies of the 72nd Brigade, as well as one of Wagner’s assault units.
🐣 RT @wartranslated Footage from earlier today showing 3rd Assault Brigade engaging the Russian 72nd Brigade in Bakhmut, with Prigozhin’s commentary. Explicit content warning ¤ Video courtesy of the 3rd Assault Brigade.
💽 https://twitter.com/wartranslated/status/1656064355539058688?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @Maks_NAFO_FELLA YEEEEEEESSSSSS #Bakhmut 🇺🇦
“The Armed Forces of Ukraine stormed the front line 3 km wide and 2.6 km deep. The 72nd brigade of the Russian Federation was defeated, the 6th and 8th companies of this brigade, military equipment were actually destroyed, many invaders were captured”
⋙ 🐣 RT @Maks_NAFO_FELLA “Wagner suffered heavy losses” – ex-commander of the Azov Biletsky about the successes of the Third Assault Brigade of the Armed Forces of Ukraine
📋 WaPo: What is the future of the war in Ukraine? NATO’s leader offers insight https://tinyurl.com/ye37rasx Also: Stoltenberg’s response to Macron’s (latest) “modest proposal” for “European strategic autonomy,” noting 80% of NATO funding comes from non-EU countries
[…] Hockstader: Tell me, please, your assessment of French President Emmanuel Macron’s ambitions for European strategic autonomy.
Stoltenberg: We welcome European Union efforts on defense. What we must avoid is duplication and competition, partly because the E.U. cannot defend Europe. Eighty percent of NATO’s defense expenditure comes from non-E.U. allies. It’s also about geography. If you look at the NATO map, Norway in the north, and Turkey in the south, but also of course the U.S., Canada and the United Kingdom, they are critical for the defense of Europe. …
And then politically, any attempt to weaken the bond between North America and Europe will not only divide NATO; it will divide Europe. If there’s anything we have learned from the war in Ukraine, it is that North America and Europe have to stand together. Non-E.U. NATO allies like the United States, Canada and the United Kingdom have trained Ukrainian forces since 2014. And, of course, they’re providing a substantial part — 78 percent of the support to Ukraine comes from non-E.U. NATO allies. …
No other major power has 30 friends and allies as the United States has in NATO. Neither Russia nor China has anything similar. And together, NATO allies represent 50 percent of the world’s military might and 50 percent of the world’s economic might. So even the United States, which is of course by far the biggest ally, needs friends. If President Putin wins, it’s a tragedy for Ukrainians and dangerous for all of us, including the United States.
WaPo Editorial: The E. Jean Carroll suit brought an astonishing moment of accountability https://tinyurl.com/4k8x8sjr
WaPo: Jury in civil trial finds Trump sexually abused, defamed E. Jean Carroll https://tinyurl.com/msu578j3
// Jurors award $5 million to E. Jean Carroll, who accused Donald Trump of raping her at Bergdorf Goodman in the 1990s
🐣 RT @KyivIndependent ⚡️ Russian brigade flees Bakhmut. ¤ Ukraine’s Third Assault Brigade confirmed on May 9 that the 72nd Separate Motorized Rifle Brigade of the Russian Armed Forces has fled Bakhmut.
⋙ 🐣 RT @KyivIndependent The news, prior to the confirmation, was originally announced by Wagner mercenary group founder Yevgeny Prigozhin.
⋙ 🐣 RT @timinhonolulu 2. If it’s confirmed 72nd redeployed away from Bakhmut, it’s possible 72nd’s command was fearful of the coming offensive because there are three Ukrainian tank units near the line of contact with the 72nd. A rapid assault could cut the 72nd off in short order. #RunForrest
🐣 RT @RonFilipkowski Trump never loses, because everything is rigged.
[TextLink:] https://twitter.com/RonFilipkowski/status/1656062699506216961?s=20/photo/1
[Text:] 🐣 RT @realDonaldTrump WHAT ELSE CAN YOU EXPECT FROM A TRUMP HATING, CLINTON APPOINTED JUDGE, WHO WENT OUT OF HIS WAY TO MAKE SURE THAT THE RESULT WAS AS NEGATIVE AS IT COULD POSSIBLY BE, SPEAKING TO, AND IN CONTROL OF, A JURY FROM AN ANTI-TRUMP AREA WHICH IS PROBABLY THE WORST PLACE IN THE U.S. FOR ME TO GET A FAIR “TRIAL.!
🐣 RT @gamelin_m
[TextLink:] https://twitter.com/gamelin_m/status/1656047657377251351?s=20
[Text:] @FordJohnathan5 Here is what Donald Trump was found liable of in a civil rape case.
● Sexual Abuse
● Forcible Touching
● Injury of E. Jean Carrol
● Willful and Wanton Negligence
● Defamation
● False Statements
● Malicious Intent
● Injury for Defamation
● Acting Maliciously
This is the front runner for the GOP nomination for president of the United States.
// $5M in damages awarded
🐣 RT @CalltoActivism Dear MAGA: ¤ “He wasn’t found guilty of rape, only found liable for sexual assault because E. Jean Carroll couldn’t tell if it was his penis or his finger… ¤ …isn’t the win you think it is.
⋙ 🐣 🍄
🐣 📊 RT @themaxburns Fox News is taking this moment to get in a few swings of their own against Donald Trump:
// WaPo/ABC Poll (Apr 28-May 3) Should Trump face criminal charges in investigations trying to … Illegally overturn the 2020 elections? Should 56%, Should not 38%
◕ https://twitter.com/themaxburns/status/1656016891788369943?s=20/photo/1
🧵 RT @emoltzen BREAKING: Smartmatic has issued a subpoena to the Trump 2020 campaign as part of its defamation lawsuit against Fox News, seeking a broad array of documents and information. 1/
📌 [TextLink:] https://twitter.com/emoltzen/status/1656011319894499329?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @ KyivPost ⚡️Putin failed the deadline for the capture of Bakhmut, President Zelensky said during a press conference. ¤ “The increase in missile attacks in recent weeks is explained by the fact that the Russian leadership needs “something to sell to its people because there are no victories”
🐣 RT @DefenceU We watched russia’s “Victory Day” parade today with great interest. Our tribute:
💽 https://twitter.com/DefenceU/status/1656009079830061075?s=20/photo/1
// tune: “All by myself” ~ one tank, first produced in 1940
NBCNews: 14th Amendment option on the debt ceiling would need to overcome DOJ concerns https://tinyurl.com/3f7msx5f
// The Office of Legal Counsel advised President Obama about whether he could raise the government’s borrowing limit unilaterally, but its opinion has never been made public.
Ultimately, the Obama administration ruled the 14th Amendment out. Former White House spokesman Jay Carney, in late 2012, said the administration “does not believe that the 14th Amendment gives the President the power to ignore the debt ceiling — period.” Obama, in early 2013, took it off the table.
🐣 RT @ChuckPfarrer BAKHMUT CITY / 1210 UTC 9 MAY/ Despite coordinated attacks and air strikes, RU forces have failed to deliver Bakhmut by Putin’s 9 May “Victory Day” deadline. Russian morale is likely to be negatively affected by heavy looses and minimal gains.
🌎 https://twitter.com/ChuckPfarrer/status/1655903273885265922?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @Gerashchenko_en I think this might be the top-news for today. ¤ While Putin was speaking about “Russian greatness” in Moscow, Russian troops were fleeing in Bakhmut. ¤ Prigozhin said the 72nd brigade and Gazprom “Torch” PMC abandoned their positions after 500 Wagner members died to get them – the true face of “Russian might”. ¤ Please consider sharing this.
💽 [tr] https://twitter.com/Gerashchenko_en/status/1655903508636348419?s=20/photo/1
📊 WaPo: Most U.S. adults say the abortion pill mifepristone should stay on the market, Post-ABC poll finds https://tinyurl.com/mr2khup7
// The survey finds that 66 percent of U.S. adults say mifepristone should remain on the market, while 24 percent say it should be taken off the market
WaPo: Putin says ‘real war’ being waged against Russia on lower-key Victory Day https://tinyurl.com/bddhuc9c
Russian President Vladimir Putin warned that a “real war” was being waged against Russia amid muted Victory Day celebrations on Tuesday, with many mass events canceled over security concerns after last week’s drone attack on the Kremlin and a looming Ukrainian counteroffensive.
“A real war has once again been waged against our homeland. Today, civilization is at a critical juncture,” Putin said at the ceremony marking the end of World War II. “We want to see a future of peace, freedom and stability,” added the leader who more than a year ago ordered what he calls “the special military operation” in Ukraine that has resulted in hundreds of thousands of deaths.
In his speech, Putin quickly pivoted to blaming the war on the “Western elites.” ¤ “We believe that any ideology of superiority is inherently disgusting, criminal and deadly,” he said. “However, Western globalists and elites still talk about their exclusivity, pit people and split society, provoke bloody conflicts and upheavals, sow hatred, Russophobia, aggressive nationalism, and destroy traditional family values that make a person a person.”
Putin then reiterated his claim that Ukraine had become “hostage to a coup d’etat and the criminal regime formed by its Western masters” and “a bargaining chip in the implementation of their cruel, selfish plans.” …
⭕ 8 May 2023
WaPo: Britain prepares to send long-range missiles to Ukraine https://tinyurl.com/ynv7dtnn Several options are being considered
// The U.K. is pushing the Biden administration into providing Ukraine with weapons that can reach further into Russian-held territory
🐣 RT @ChuckPfarrer BAKHMUT AXIS /1320 UTC 8 MAY/ Facing an impending 9 May ‘deadline’ to capture the city of Bakhmut, RU forces have pressed failed attacks N and S of the urban area. Russian VDV and Motor Rifle troops carried out attacks against the H-32 HWY S & W of Ivanivske.
🌎 https://twitter.com/ChuckPfarrer/status/1655560768866099202?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @Azovsouth Putin wanted #Bakhmut as gift for the 9th May parade 🙄 ¤ He was wrong! ¤ The 🇺🇦 armed forces counterattacked & recaptured 1.3km terrain within hours. ¤ Typically it took months & heavy orc casualties for them to make control of such areas. ¤ Victory is coming ¤ The clock is ticking 🇺🇦 🇺🇦
⭕ 7 May 2023
🐣 RT @ BruceBartlett Free article. Really outstanding analysis of the the debt limit by Harvard law professor @tribelaw. Makes the essential point that if the debt limit is binding then other laws will be broken. Violating the limit is the least unconstitutional option.
⋙ NYT, Lawrence Tribe: Why I Changed My Mind on the Debt Limit https://tinyurl.com/w5yew99n
The theory builds on Section 4 of the 14th Amendment to argue that Congress, without realizing it, set itself on a path that would violate the Constitution when, in 1917, it capped the size of the federal debt. Over the years, Congress has raised the debt ceiling scores of times, most recently two years ago, when it set the cap at $31.4 trillion. We hit that amount on Jan. 19 and are being told that the “extraordinary measures” Treasury has available to get around it are about to run out. When that happens, all hell will break loose.
Taking advantage of that prospect, congressional Republicans are threatening to do nothing unless the administration agrees to slash lots of government programs that their party has had in its sights. If the president caves in to their demands, they will agree to raise the cap — until this crisis occurs again. Then, they will surely pursue the same game of chicken or, maybe more accurately, Russian roulette. It’s a complicated situation, but a solution is staring us in the face.
Section 4 of the 14th Amendment says the “validity” of the public debt “shall not be questioned” — ever. Proponents of the unconstitutionality argument say that when Congress enacted the debt limit, effectively forcing the United States to stop borrowing to honor its debts when that limit was reached, it built a violation of that constitutional command into our fiscal structure, and that as a result, that limit and all that followed are invalid. …
The right question is whether Congress — after passing the spending bills that created these debts in the first place — can invoke an arbitrary dollar limit to force the president and his administration to do its bidding.
There is only one right answer to that question, and it is no.
And there is only one person with the power to give Congress that answer: the president of the United States. As a practical matter, what that means is this: Mr. Biden must tell Congress in no uncertain terms — and as soon as possible, before it’s too late to avert a financial crisis — that the United States will pay all its bills as they come due, even if the Treasury Department must borrow more than Congress has said it can.
The president should remind Congress and the nation, “I’m bound by my oath to preserve and protect the Constitution to prevent the country from defaulting on its debts for the first time in our entire history.” Above all, the president should say with clarity, “My duty faithfully to execute the laws extends to all the spending laws Congress has enacted, laws that bind whoever sits in this office — laws that Congress enacted without worrying about the statute capping the amount we can borrow.”
By taking that position, the president would not be usurping Congress’s lawmaking power or its power of the purse. Nor would he be usurping the Supreme Court’s power to “say what the law is,” as Chief Justice John Marshall once put it. Mr. Biden would simply be doing his duty to “take care that the laws be faithfully executed” even if doing so leaves one law — the borrowing limit first enacted in 1917 — temporarily on the cutting room floor.
Ignoring one law in order to uphold every other has compelling historical precedent. It’s precisely what Abraham Lincoln did when he briefly overrode the habeas corpus law in 1861 to save the Union, later saying to Congress, “Are all the laws, but one, to go unexecuted, and the government itself go to pieces, lest that one be violated?”
For a president to pick the lesser of two evils when no other option exists is the essence of constitutional leadership, not the action of a tyrant. And there is no doubt that ignoring the debt ceiling until Congress either raises or abolishes it is a lesser evil than leaving those with lawful claims against the Treasury out in the cold.
… What I propose would in truth give the president a lot less power than entrusting him to decide which of the government’s promises to honor and which creditors to stiff — a power that the Supreme Court denied him when it handed down a 1998 decision that prevented him from vetoing line items within a budget. …
🧵 RT @MarkGaleotti Hah, when I recorded this, I said that I thought Prigozhin would be walking back his threat to pull Wagner out of Bakhmut, before his deadline. I just hadn’t appreciate just how quickly he would! A couple of thoughts 1/ [link]
📌 https://twitter.com/MarkGaleotti/status/1655257664471945218?s=20
🐣 RT @DavidAFrench Tucker’s daily example demonstrated that honesty and grace — indispensable qualities in every sphere of life — have no place in the politics of the new religious right, a right full of religious zeal but lacking in fundamental Christian virtues.
⋙ NYT, David French: Tucker Carlson’s Dark and Malign Influence Over the Christian Right https://tinyurl.com/559435zw “If you infuse an issue or set of issues with religious intensity but drain a movement of religious virtue, then profound religious conflict … is the inevitable result”
🐣 Child: Mommy, what does GOP mean?
Mother: It means “Guns Over People,“ dear.
🐣 📋 RT @robdewijk Volgens de Britten [Defense Intelligence of Britain]:
[TextLink:] https://twitter.com/robdewijk/status/1655110445823320065?s=20/photo/1
[Text:] Russia is almost certainly facing its worst labour shortage in decades. The Russian Central Bank surveyed 14,000 employers and found that the number of available employees was at its lowest level since 1998.
Over the last three years, Russia’s population has reportedly decreased by two million more people than expected due to the impacts of COVID-19 and the war in Ukraine. Russia saw up to 1.3 million people leave the country in 2022, including many younger and well-educated people in high-value industries. The Russian Ministry of Communications said that about 10% (100,000] of the IT workforce left the country in 2022 and did not return.
Mobilisation, historically high emigration, and an ageing and shrinking population is limiting the labour supply. ¤ This will likely lead to a reduction in the potential growth of the Russian economy and risks stoking inflation.
🧵 RT @ RYP__ [Robert Young Pelton] The forces being sent to Bakhmut are Kadyrovites aka TikTok soldiers aka Pointy Beardy YouTube Warriors who have displayed great courage in the making of videos. Disclaimer: No Trees Were Harmed In the Making of This Film
📌 💽 https://twitter.com/RYP__/status/1655224970749022208?s=20/photo/1
⋙ 🐣 RT @ RYP__ Kadyrovites make videos and die in large numbers. Watch PMC Convoy which is being ramped up in Crimea. There may be other PMCs/ militias used to create a network of insurgent groups when Ukraine slices through. [link]
⋙ 🐣 RT @ RYP__ We are seeing that war for Russia is a zero sum game. What works on paper in Putin’s office doesn’t translate to those notional numbers in fielded gear or manpower. I wish Ukraine luck in chainsawing their way to the Black Sea. #ThunderRun [link]
⋙ 🐣 RT @ RYP__ Russia has troops in perilous positions. There are two weak points to be exploited. Donetsk/Luhansk and Crimea. So far depots in Crimea are being attrited. But isolating Russian troops is a good starting point for negotiations. On when the rest leave.
⋙⋙ BeyondHorizon, Jannis Figura (Jan): The potential directions of the Ukraine War in spring 2023 https://tinyurl.com/2rhyuuws
🌎 https://twitter.com/RYP__/status/1655229594189045760?s=20/photo/1
// 1/25/2023
🐣 RT @anneapplebaum “No publicly traded company would consider naming Trump to an executive position… None of his billionaire friends would trust him with their money.” He couldn’t work in a school or a lawfirm. And yet we might elect him president, @SykesCharlie
writes:
⋙ TheAtlantic, Charlie Sykes: America’s Lowest Standard https://tinyurl.com/vmnr96kw
// Try to imagine anyone like Trump surviving in any other segment of our society—business, entertainment, sports, the military
[…] There is, of course, a lot more evidence that suggests that Trump is not a character of preeminent virtue. The twice-impeached, defeated former president has been indicted on multiple felony charges and may face more. He is a chronic liar and fraudster. He also played a role in fomenting the January 6 insurrection. Trump has called for the suspension of the Constitution and dined with a white supremacist, and he traffics in racist invective and conspiracy theories.
And yet, Trump has already been elected to the presidency once and is now poised to seize his party’s nomination for a return to office. An NBC poll last month found that two-thirds of Republican voters stood behind Trump. Given the mathematics of the Electoral College in which Alexander Hamilton invested such high hopes, Trump has a good chance of winning the presidency again.
Hamilton thought that he had fireproofed the presidency from mountebanks and charlatans because we would seek out only the best and the brightest among us. Instead, we have apparently saved our lowest standards for the presidency.
At this point, the Senate would be unlikely to confirm Trump’s appointment to any other position of trust. Someone with Trump’s character would not be granted a security clearance at any level of government. We wouldn’t let the man babysit our children or even walk the dog. We would definitely not buy a used car from the guy. But we might give him back the nuclear codes and control over the military, the FBI, the CIA, the IRS, and the Department of Justice. Americans might make him, once again, the face of America. …
After the release of the Access Hollywood tape, the GOP decided that character did not, after all, matter. Seven years later, neither the indictments for paying hush money to a porn star nor the accusations of assault—and rape—are disqualifying for Republican voters. In the 2024 contest for the presidency, they hardly even register.
🐣 RT @ VolodyaTretyak Igor Girkin is very pessimistic today. He says it is time to start thinking about preventing Russia from falling apart because military defeat is near. ¤ Translation:
¤ https://twitter.com/VolodyaTretyak/status/1655186960577703941?s=20
Regular readers and listeners should remember the assessment of the situation that I laid out (and expressed) last winter. One of the theses was: “If the necessary national measures for the successful conduct of the war are not taken before May, we will not be able to win this war.
I state: NO MEASURES HAVE BEEN TAKEN. Neither organizational nor personnel. The goals of the war have not been determined, and the inhabitants of the Planet of the Pink Ponies(PRP) have not understood that “this war will be fought until one side is victorious. Accordingly, since there is no goal, there is no strategy. No strategy – no conscious work on its implementation. But the enemy has a strategy from the beginning and is being implemented with all its might. More and more successfully since the Kremlin is “playing giveaway” with an inexplicable enthusiasm and childlike confidence in the ultimate “contract” that is comfortable for the elderly Ponies, Elephants, and Unicorns.
Now we have to think about how to preserve the state, the country and the people in a situation of impending military defeat. ¤ And, yes – even for a “worthy non-fatal defeat” (in which our enemies will be forced to abandon their plans for the complete fragmentation of Russia and the elimination of its sovereignty) we will have to fight long and hard. Harder and longer than it would have been if we had fought to win decisively from the outset. And the longer the occupants of the PRP will linger in the “sweet languor” of confidence in their peaceful and happy old age (which has long come for most of the VIPs) – the less chance that in the end the Russian ship will manage to get out of the military storm and systemic crisis, without sinking (after a long and bloody Troubles) into History.
🐣 RT @Biz_Ukraine_Mag Putin’s passive response to Finland joining NATO debunks the myth that NATO expansion caused the war in Ukraine. In reality, Putin has always known NATO poses no security threat to Russia but used the issue as a smokescreen for his invasion of Ukraine
⋙ AtlanticCouncil, Peter Dickinson (Apr): NATO poses a threat to Russian imperialism not Russian security https://tinyurl.com/2yn5m73h
// 4/6/2023
🐣 RT @EuromaidanPress Russia-Ukraine war “has seen drones go from next frontier of parcel delivery to cutting edge of warfare technology, with the rapid development of AI set to accelerate things even faster.”
⋙ SkyNews, Sean Bell: Ukraine has set the stage for a new era of war – and AI could supercharge it https://tinyurl.com/45da6sza
// The Ukraine war has seen drones go from next frontier of parcel delivery to cutting edge of warfare technology, with the rapid development of AI set to accelerate things even faster.
🐣 RT @dcjohnson It used to be illegal for a company to purchase its own stock. It is price manipulation & brings no value to society. ¤ The Reagan era brought in misunderstanding of what a corporation legally is. ¤ Ask yourself WHY a democracy would let corporations harm the public interest?
⋙ 🐣 RT @dcjohnson Prior to 1982, stock buybacks were considered stock manipulation. It was Reagan’s SEC that opened the floodgates to their abuse. ¤ Stock buybacks don’t create more jobs. They don’t increase wages. They don’t grow the economy. ¤ They make corporate execs richer. Hello?
⭕ 6 May 2023 👑 Coronation Charles III
🧵 RT @MuellerSheWrote THREAD: DOJ SENTENCING RECOMMENDATIONS FOR SEDITIOUS CONSPIRACY: ¤ Just finished reading the 183-page sentencing memo and motion for upward departure for the Oath Keepers convicted of Seditious Conspiracy over two trials in November and January, and WOW, the DOJ MEANS BUSINESS 1/
[CourtDoc:] https://tinyurl.com/44can7ku
📌 https://twitter.com/MuellerSheWrote/status/1654940362480439296?s=20
WaPo: Senior Ukrainian officials fear counterattack may not live up to hype https://tinyurl.com/38y6uhzu “Offensive military operations typically require overwhelming advantage, & with Russian forces dug into heavily fortified defenses…, it is hard to gauge how far Ukraine will get”
Reuters: Biden says not yet ready to invoke 14th Amendment to avoid debt default https://tinyurl.com/mtkuzvab “Section Four of the amendment, adopted after the 1861-1865 Civil War, states that the ‘validity of the public debt of the United States … shall not be questioned’”
🐣 RT @USAmbOSCE [Michael Carpenter] Honored to meet President @ZelenskyyUa and underscore the resolute support of the United States for an independent, sovereign, and democratic Ukraine within its internationally recognized borders.
🖼 https://twitter.com/USAmbOSCE/status/1654871381723557892?s=20/photo/1
// Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe: “The OSCE has a comprehensive approach to security that encompasses politico-military, economic and environmental, and human aspects. It therefore addresses a wide range of security-related concerns, including arms control, confidence- and security-building measures, human rights, national minorities, democratization, policing strategies, counter-terrorism and economic and environmental activities. All 57 participating States enjoy equal status, and decisions are taken by consensus on a politically, but not legally binding basis.”
🐣 RT @EuromaidanPress US and Ukraine top military chiefs discuss Ukrainian counteroffensive ¤ During the phone call, the Commander-in-Chief of Armed Forces, Gen. Zaluzhnyi, told the US Chairman of Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Milley, about preparations for the future counteroffensive. https://tinyurl.com/bdz8a4xt
🐣 RT @ ChrisFlaherty8 In regards to the 1990 Saddam Line: “Just because the enemy fortifies its positions using WWI-era defenses doesn’t mean attackers have to use WWI-era tactics to defeat them.” A core-out strategy deeply inverted the battle, and then there is armour circumventing defences:
◕ [TextLink:] https://twitter.com/ChrisFlaherty8/status/1654437185008070657?s=20/photo/1
⋙ 🐣 RT @ChrisFlaherty8 A fortification-barrier-fence line is used to direct an opponent to an apparent gap, or weak point. Which is a trap. A common WW1 Turkish defence, was locking-up a landscape using many strongpoints covering each other, creating mutually supporting defence that absorbed an attack.
[TextLink:] https://twitter.com/ChrisFlaherty8/status/1654473863433187328?s=20/photo/1
⋙ 🐣 RT @ChrisFlaherty8 The Saddam Line takedown in 1990, following core-out strategy deeply inverting the battle, had massed armour circumventing defences, and directly punching-through in a ‘Bulldozer Assault’; this also saw the US Army opt out of Trench Warfare’
⋙⋙ Military[.]com: The ‘Bulldozer Assault’ of Desert Storm Saw the US Army Opt Out of Trench Warfare https://tinyurl.com/37czcy5k
🚫 🐣 RT @Gerashchenko_en Kadyrov confirmed that his people are getting ready to go to Bakhmut to replace Wagner PMC. He said they are already developing a strategy with the ministry of defense.
💽 [tr] https://twitter.com/Gerashchenko_en/status/1654903986808315904?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @ZelenskaUA I was honored to speak to the Princess of Wales @KensingtonRoyal and the First Lady of 🇺🇸 Jill Biden @FLOTUS at the official reception for the coronation of His Majesty Charles the III. A real pleasure to meet these exquisite ladies with open hearts and the great friends of 🇺🇦.
🖼 https://twitter.com/ZelenskaUA/status/1654568648692887558?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @f_o_r_Ukraine This isn’t an animation, this is #Bakhmut shelled by the incendiary ammunitions. Hell on Earth. #UkraineWar
💽 https://twitter.com/f_o_r_Ukraine/status/1654907266603024388?s=20/photo/1
WaPo: Ukraine says it shot down hypersonic Russian missile with Patriot system https://tinyurl.com/2xfzy6w2 “The destruction of the missile, reported to be a Kh-47 fired by a Russian MiG-31K fighter jet, demonstrated the potentially game-changing role of the Patriot system”
Michael Kofman, a military expert at CNA, a U.S.-based policy institute, said that too much was being made of the Kinzhal and that it was not particularly different from other ballistic missiles. The Kinzhal is a variant of Russia’s Iskander-M. ¤ “Don’t understand the interest in Russian use of Kinzhal. There’s nothing special or particularly exciting about this system,” Kofman tweeted. ¤ “Iskander-M is a long standing system. Hundreds have been fired. Kinzhal is an air launched variant of this system,” he wrote. “It uses the aircraft for added range and initial velocity. Otherwise it seems unremarkable. It is ‘hypersonic’ in the same way as many other ballistic missiles.”
🐣 RT @ @brit_engr BBC posted a photo of the US First Lady and her granddaughter on their way to the coronation wearing complementary blue and yellow outfits in support of Ukraine. #Ukraine #Coronation
⭕ 5 May 2023
🐣 RT @TheStudyofWar NEW: The Russian Ministry of Defense appears to have deprioritized the #Bakhmut offensive in favor of preparing to defend against an anticipated Ukrainian counteroffensive, putting #WagnerGroup & its financier #Prigozhin in a potentially difficult position http://isw.pub/UkrWar050523
🌎 https://twitter.com/TheStudyofWar/status/1654635589302403073?s=20/photo/1 -4
🐣 RT @igorsushko Prigozhin audio: May 6 2023 12:00. He’s been ignored by Ministry of Defence, so he is transferring Bakhmut to Dob Don Kadyrov. He is starting the transition (retreat) without delay and on May 10 00:00 Kadyrov will have control of positions in Bakhmut.
⋙ 🐣 RT @igorsushko The target audience of Prigozhin’s speech appears to be the Russian public, and it’s an ominous one: ¤ “We will be waiting until we are again needed by the people of Russia – I think that’s about to happen.” ¤ It’s intentionally ambiguous to not exclude an insurrection against the current Russian government.
⋙ His theme throughout:
⋙ 1. I am not a traitor to the motherland.
⋙ 2. I am a hero of the people.
⋙ 3. Shoigu and Gerasimov do not deserve to be in their positions (well, who put them there? Putin!)”
⋙ 🐣 RT @igorsushko [cont.] Prigozhin announced Wagner PMC’s Bakhmut withdrawal for May 10, so as not to “rob the people” of the pride for the May 9 Soviet Victory Parade. He says they’re low on munitions. One may have a gut instinct that he is lying to entrap the Ukrainians by attacking now. However, the trap would never work because of Ukrainian and Western intelligence on the ground. Ukraine knows exactly what they’d face if they were to attack now. ¤ (Subtitles by Dmitri @WarTranslated)
💽 https://twitter.com/igorsushko/status/1654519828231880704?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @INNAfo2023 Bakhmut – now. Russian invaders want to burn the city to the ground. #RussiaIsATerroristState #RussiaIsCollapsing #NAFOExpansionIsNonNegotiable #NAFO #NAFOCatsDivision #NAFOfellas
💽 https://twitter.com/INNAfo2023/status/1654603004450881537?s=20/photo/1
// incendiary 🔥
🐣 RT @DFENS3000
🖼 https://twitter.com/DFENS3000/status/1654592042738098179?s=20/photo/1
// Prighozhin with dead soldier in body bag ⇈ ⇊
⋙ 🐣 “Ivan the Terrible and His Son Ivan on 16 November 1581 is a painting by Russian realist artist Ilya Repin made between 1883 and 1885” ~ Wikipedia
🖼 https://twitter.com/Auriandra/status/1654616373153394689?s=20/photo/1
🚫 WaPo: At least eight Trump electors have accepted immunity in Georgia investigation https://tinyurl.com/y5t6pr4c “‘[T]hey continue to say they have done nothing wrong and they are not aware of anyone else doing anything wrong, much less criminal’” [meh]
// In a new filing, the lawyer for the eight electors accused prosecutors of knowingly making false accusations in an effort to have her removed from the case.
… The electors who accepted immunity did so without any promise that they would offer incriminating evidence in return, and they all have stated that they remain unified in their innocence and are not aware of any criminal activity among any of the electors, Debrow said. ¤ “In telling the truth they continue to say they have done nothing wrong and they are not aware of anyone else doing anything wrong, much less criminal,” said an individual familiar with the investigation who requested anonymity to discuss the case.
Among the electors who appear to remain targets are David Shafer, the chairman of the Georgia Republican Party who presided over the gathering, and Shawn Still, a state senator who at the time was state finance chair for the party and who told congressional investigators he played a role confirming electors’ identities and admitting them into the room at the Georgia Capitol where they convened. …
Under federal law, electors for the winning presidential candidate in each of the states must meet on the first Monday after the second Wednesday of December to cast their votes. The Republican electors said that if they had not met and voted, and if Trump had prevailed in his lawsuit, Biden’s electoral votes would have been invalidated but there would have been no Trump votes to replace them. …
HudsonInstitute, Luke Coffey (Oct 2022): Ten Myths about US Aid to Ukraine and Why They’re Wrong https://tinyurl.com/s7z5b4km “It is in America’s interest that Ukraine wins the war, and that Russia is decisively defeated”
// 10/20/2022
As the war continues, Congress will likely pass additional spending. It is in America’s interest that Ukraine wins the war, and that Russia is decisively defeated. Even though polling overwhelmingly shows broad and bipartisan support for Ukraine, some in Congress are against further US aid for Ukraine ¤ Here are the top ten myths and misconceptions about US aid for Ukraine and why they are wrong:
Myth 1: There is not enough oversight of US aid to Ukraine.
Myth 2: We have written more than $66 billion worth of “blank checks” for Ukraine.
Myth 3: Congress hasn’t had “enough time to debate” US aid to Ukraine or “read the bill.”
Myth 4: This money to Ukraine would be better spent on “the wall” or “baby formula.”
Myth 5: Europe needs to “spend more” before America does.
Myth 6: The US should only give “military aid.”
Myth 7: US weapons are ending up on the black market or are not getting to the front lines.
Myth 8: Ukraine is too corrupt to receive aid responsibly.
Myth 9: Russia is a distraction. US focus must be on China.
Myth 10: Aid to Ukraine puts “America last.”
🐣 RT @NoahBookbinder Georgia Republicans passing legislation allowing statewide officials to remove local, elected prosecutors from office, just as one of those prosecutors is preparing to potentially indict Donald Trump, is dangerous to democracy.
⋙ WaPo: Kemp poised to sign bill that allows ouster of local Georgia prosecutors https://tinyurl.com/mtjrwssf
Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp (R) is poised to sign legislation as early as Friday that would create a commission with the power to remove local prosecutors from office, a move Democrats in the state have decried as a power grab that usurps the will of local voters.
Atlanta-area prosecutor Fani Willis, who is considering bringing charges against former president Donald Trump and his allies over 2020 election interference, has been one of the most outspoken opponents of the legislation, suggesting she is among those being targeted by its Republican sponsors.
The bill, which Democrats have vowed to challenge in court, would create an oversight panel that could recall any of the state’s elected district attorneys or solicitors general for several reasons, including “willful misconduct” or “persistent failure to perform his or her duties.”
The bill’s sponsors have not focused on Willis’s investigation of Trump but say they are seeking to rein in reform-minded prosecutors and crack down on crime. They have raised concerns about prosecutors in liberal areas who won’t seek charges against low-level drug offenders or those who violate Georgia’s abortion law banning the procedure at six weeks.
Kemp voiced support for the measure ahead of this year’s legislative session, saying it was needed because “far-left local prosecutors are failing their constituents and making our communities less safe.” ¤ Still, some Democrats have said the bill appears to be retaliation for Willis’s investigation of the former president.
🐣 RT @KensingtonRoyal [The Prince and Princess of Wales] Lovely to see @FLOTUS and
@ZelenskaUA this evening 🇺🇸🇺🇦 #Coronation
🖼 https://twitter.com/KensingtonRoyal/status/1654552726611849217?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @SamRamani2 Ramzan Kadyrov says his forces will enter Bakhmut if Wagner leaves ¤ Kadyrov plans to create a PMC in the future that could compete with Wagner but he recently met with Prigozhin to show solidarity against Western sanctions
🐣 📊 RT @ @daveweigel 70% support for the original version of Florida’s Parental Rights bill policy (which opponents successfully branded as “Don’t Say Gay”). Just 36% for expanding it through grade 12, as DeSantis now wants.
◕ https://twitter.com/daveweigel/status/1654561011725115392?s=20/photo/1
🧵 RT @SenWhitehouse With Leonard Leo’s Judicial Education Project resurfacing, it’s worth taking a minute to understand how this slimy group works. Here you see how the Judicial Education Project goes about lobbying SCOTUS on behalf of the far-right Bradley Foundation – via Leo. Watch:
📌 💽 https://twitter.com/SenWhitehouse/status/1654564155360268291?s=20/photo/1
⋙ 🐣 RT @SenWhitehouse In Bradley’s own words, the right-wing foundation funds the Judicial Education Project to “orchestrate high-caliber amicus efforts” that support “Bradley’s previous philanthropic investments in the actual, underlying legal actions.”
⋙ 🐣 RT @SenWhitehouse Translation: creepy right-wing outfit pays Leonard Leo’s Judicial Education Project to lobby SCOTUS in the very same cases creepy right-wing outfit is paying to get before SCOTUS.
🐣 RT @therecount Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas speaking in Texas on the lifting of Title 42: ¤ “The border is not open, it has not been open, and it will not be open subsequent to May 11th.”
💽 https://twitter.com/therecount/status/1654564482574700547?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @mbk_center [Khodorkovsky] The Putin state has lost control over creating and enforcing rules, violence, and the delivery of justice. Without these things, a state turns into a gang, where the strong with no moral limitations rule. The “address” by Prigozhin is a vivid exemplification of this
💽 https://twitter.com/mbk_center/status/1654565480563355648?s=20/photo/1
// Khodorkovsky gloss of Prigozhin rant
🐣 RT @atrupar holy crap Trump mistook E Jean Carroll for his ex-wife Marla Maples during his deposition
💽 https://twitter.com/atrupar/status/1654552867972214786?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @trajaykay President Zelensky[:] I met with a delegation of U.S. congressmen Such visits to Ukraine are a powerful signal of support from the United States for our state and the entire Ukrainian people. ¤ We appreciate the strong bicameral and bipartisan support. Thank you for the comprehensive […] assistance provided by the United States to Ukraine in our struggle for our own future and for the future of our common values – freedom and democracy. ¤ Continued assistance is a guarantee of Ukraine’s success in the fight against Russian aggression.
💽 https://twitter.com/trajaykay/status/1654548542998863873?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @BisforBerkshire Thanks @ThePlumLineGS for reporting on the growing move to chill classroom discussions of current events. Agree with @Malinowski: *Undermining the civic education of future adult citizens is itself the goal*
⋙ WaPo, Greg Sargent: A nasty development in the culture wars invades an affluent N.J. suburb https://tinyurl.com/2p8unk2y //➔ the White-washing of high school civics education
By now, many of the goals of the reactionary culture-warriors working to reshape American education are sickeningly familiar. They are attempting to restrict classroom discussion of sex and gender, to sanitize the teaching of our white-supremacist past and to purge schools of anodyne romance novels under the guise of targeting pornography.
But there’s another story threaded throughout all this that has been overlooked: These campaigns appear increasingly designed to chill critical perspectives on current events in a way that undermines public education’s core goal of developing civically informed democratic citizens. …
Another objection: The book’s description of antifa didn’t mention its supposed role in the “2020 riots.” The book already describes antifa as “far left” and “extreme,” but apparently kids must also be taught wildly absurd right-wing agitprop suggesting that America is overrun with violent leftist terrorism.
Yet another objection faulted the book’s claim that research shows voter fraud is “rare and that when it does occur it is often perpetuated by Republicans.” That statement is true. But the member objected to the book’s citation of reports from The Post and Reuters to back them up, even though they rely on academic and official sources.
Such offenses led objectors to absurdly label the book as “factually destitute” and “trash.” One even preposterously argued that material such as this is why conservative students feel ostracized.
In the meeting, some board members aggressively defended the book. They noted that nixing it would deprive other parents of the choice of having their kids learn the book’s lessons. They said overriding educators who had approved the book — which is used in other New Jersey districts — devalued those educators’ professionalism.
To some liberal parents in this district west of New York City, all this offends their values. They see it as a violation of school district policy that seeks to encourage kids’ exposure to controversial, challenging issues — which, believe it or not, these parents take pride in.
“The sense of outrage and frustration is palpable,” Neslihan Montag, a local parent, told me. “The whole point of the sociology curriculum is to promote critical thinking and debate,” she added, noting that the decision “leaves our entire community in a horrible position.” …
There’s another side to this story, as the parental backlash to this New Jersey decision shows. Surprising outbreaks of local resistance are challenging this sort of reactionary culture-warring all over the country. That’s likely to escalate.
“So long as normal Americans get organized at the local level against this nonsense,” Malinowski told me, “I’m convinced the extremists are going to fail.” As the right attacks one of public education’s most cherished missions, that resistance will only intensify.
🐣 📋 RT @atrupar Biden: “My predecessor, in the 4 years he was president, increased that total debt by 40 percent.”
🐣 RT @nytimes Month after month, the U.S. unemployment rate for Black workers continues to hit record lows. But Black workers, on average, are out of work at a rate that is more than one and a half times higher than their white counterparts. https://nyti.ms/426YEat
◕ https://twitter.com/nytimes/status/1654554363208036352?s=20/photo/1
PravdaUA: HIMARS systems less effective due to Russian electronic jamming – CNN https://tinyurl.com/4pnsk56v
🐣 📋 RT @ABlackPolitical President Joe Biden has been the most successful job creator in our nations history. His record 12.7 million jobs since January of 2021 is historic. ¤ We added 253,000 new jobs in April and hit a 54 year low unemployment rate of 3.4%. Wages are up, pandemic induced inflation is coming down and we are clearly not in a recession.
[TextLink:] https://twitter.com/ABlackPolitical/status/1654504154998489094?s=20/photo/1
// “Average jobs created per month by party since 1939:
GOP presidents: 67,192
Dem presidents: 175,748”
🐣 RT @ProjectLincoln Trump this morning referred to the criminals convicted of seditious conspiracy yesterday as “Great American Patriots”. He has zero remorse for what he did on January 6th, and if given the opportunity, he would do it all again.
[TextLink:] https://twitter.com/ProjectLincoln/status/1654497426634579968?s=20/photo/1
[Text:] 🐣 RT @realDonaldTrump [ts] Back in the USA, but sadly I see so many really bad things happening to our Country. The DOJ and FBI are destroying the lives of so many Great American Patriots, right before our very eyes. The Court System is a RUBBER STAMP for their conviction and imprisonment. All this while the Radical Left protects and coddles extremists and murderers at a level, and with intensity, never seen before. GET SMART AMERICA, THEY ARE COMING AFTER YOU!!!
🐣 RT @olliecarroll Wagner seemed to be on the way out of Bakhmut in any case. And if they leave Bakhmut, where are they headed next?
⋙ 🐣 RT @wartranslated Evgeniy Prigozhin declares in a video that he will be ordering the withdrawal of Wagner mercenaries from Bakhmut due to an acute shortage of ammunition allegedly ordered by the Russian General Staff. He says Wagner will stay in the city until 9 May to avoid shame on this day. He appears to require a military order from Gerasimov for the withdrawal, however, to carry out the withdrawal.
💽 [tr] https://twitter.com/wartranslated/status/1654412610069037057?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @faineg Reactions to the Prigozhin/Wagner pullout from Russian milblogger Swodki:
[TextLink:] https://twitter.com/faineg/status/1654438117351235585?s=20/photo/1 -4
🐣 RT @igorsushko Mikhail Mizintsev was fired from his role as Deputy Defence Minister responsible for Logistics recently. He was fired by Shoigu because he was diverting munitions to Wagner. He now holds an official position at Wagner PMC under Prigozhin.
🐣 RT @saintjavelin A new video by Prigozhin has just emerged on the Internet. It’s pretty long, so here’s the summary of what he’s saying:
💽 [tr] https://twitter.com/saintjavelin/status/1654403598724345856?s=20/photo/1
⋙ 🐣 RT @saintjavelin “I declare on behalf of the Wagner fighters, on behalf of the Wagner command, that on 10 May, 2023, we are obliged to transfer positions in the settlement of Bakhmut to units of the defence ministry and withdraw the remains of Wagner to logistics camps to lick our wounds.”
⋙ 🐣 RT @saintjavelin “I’m pulling Wagner units out of Bakhmut because in the absence of ammunition they’re doomed to perish senselessly.”
🐣 RT @nycjim BIG: Leader of Wagner mercenary force says he’ll pull his fighters out of the Ukrainian city of Bakhmut because of heavy losses and inadequate ammunition supplies from Moscow. ¤ *It’s time to “lick our wounds,” he says
⭕ 4 May 2023
🧵 RT @Jack_Mrgln Prigozhin shares graphic video of Wagner fighters killed today, with the most furious message he has yet directed personally at Shoigu and Gerasimov. “Shoigu! Gerasimov! Where are the fucking shells!”
📌 💽 https://twitter.com/Jack_Mrgln/status/1654254614114344962?s=20/photo/1
↥ ↧
🐣 RT @DenysDavydovUA I’ve took some effort to translate the Prygozhyn’s emotional speech …
💽 https://twitter.com/DenysDavydovUA/status/1654269880726609921?s=20/photo/1
// Prigozhin’s explicative-laden tirade demanding more ammunition (dead bodies)
WaPo: Judicial activist directed fees to Clarence Thomas’s wife, urged ‘no mention of Ginni’ https://tinyurl.com/2p8t37vd //➔ “I prefer the Walmart parking lots to the beaches and things like that. There’s something normal to me about it,” Thomas said. “… I prefer that”
// Leonard Leo told GOP pollster Kellyanne Conway to bill nonprofit, then use money to pay spouse of Supreme Court justice
📊 WaPo: Trump is inviting Dems to make 2024 about Jan 6. They’re obliging. https://tinyurl.com/yzrwbp7p “In an Economist/YouGov poll last month, 53% of independents said they strongly disapproved of the Jan. 6 participants, and 67% at least somewhat disapproved”; only 13% approved
// 📊 multiple polls; The day has featured prominently in campaign launches by Biden and Senate candidates. Here’s how it might play, relative to 2022.
🐣 RT @KyivIndependent President Volodymyr Zelensky calls for a special tribunal to prosecute Russian officials during a speech at the Hague on May 4; at least one drone shot down over Kyiv, with debris causing a fire; and more.
⋙ KyivIndependent: Ukraine war latest: Zelensky in The Hague calls for special tribunal; Drone shot down over Kyiv https://tinyurl.com/3x9xx94n “Zelensky: We all want to see Putin in The Hague”
🐣 RT @SenSchumer 7 former Secretaries of Defense from Republican and Democratic administrations are not mincing words: ¤ They’re saying GOP Senator Tuberville’s blanket holds on the nominations of senior military leaders are “harming military readiness and risks damaging US national security”
[TextLink:] https://twitter.com/SenSchumer/status/1654192302372409348?s=20/photo/1 -2
🐣 RT @ProjectLincoln It’s a bad day for the bad guys and @TheRickWilson couldn’t be happier… but wait, there’s more! There’s a layer of people, from Roger Stone to Alex Jones to Steve Bannon, who were giving these street thugs their orders. Next up, Donald J. Trump.
💽 https://twitter.com/ProjectLincoln/status/1654206866619002881?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @ChuckPfarrer BAKHMUT CITY /1930 UTC 4 MAY/ UKR forces have initiated offensive action in the vicinity of Heologiv Street, west of the H-32 HWY loop. UKR Lines of Communication & Supply assessed as secure; UKR will continue urban operations.
🌎 https://twitter.com/ChuckPfarrer/status/1654204051259621376?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @SimonWDC Want to see why Democrats should launch a heavily funded national voter registration drive this year? Here you go, via the @WashingtonPost (h/t @Markos)
◕ https://twitter.com/SimonWDC/status/1654191457496977426?s=20/photo/1
⋙ WaPo: New data shows how little the electorate looks like the population https://tinyurl.com/4u7v2ph7
🐣 RT @JoyceWhiteVance Among the reasons you don’t want Trump on the witness stand, he has no self control. It will be interesting to see how the judge reacts to this.
⋙ 🐣 RT @SMurphyTV Breaking: Donald Trump rails against rape accuser E Jean Carroll’s “false accusations”, and tells us he will “probably” attend the trial in New York, which he calls a “scam” and a “political attack” – he says he will “confront” the claims, which he denies #Trump #Doonbeg
💽 https://twitter.com/JoyceWhiteVance/status/1654167505064034315?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @ jjabbott Holy $#!% — this clip is a nightmare for @HouseGOP. What a gift. ¤ “90% of this bill has been written by the House Freedom Caucus. We are driving and pulling our entire conference — and with this, the entire Congress — to the right.”
⋙ 🐣 RT @AllAboutPA Rep. Scott Perry, leader of the extreme MAGA House Freedom Caucus, says the quiet part about the GOP’s disastrous plan to cut vital programs and put the U.S. at risk of economic catastrophe: ¤ “90% of this bill has been written by the House Freedom Caucus”
💽 https://twitter.com/jjabbott/status/1654164565020557312?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @RonFilipkowski Our foreign and trade policy with respect to Hungary should reflect the fact that their government is actively seeking to tamper with our election. And it should reflect that for the next 5.5 years at a minimum.
⋙ 🐣 RT @nexta_tv Viktor Orban: “I am sure that if Mr. Trump were president of the United States, no war would be any war in Ukraine or in Europe. Mr. President, come back, make America great again and bring us peace again!” 💽
🐣 RT @lawfareblog Here’s a breakdown of the Proud Boys verdict, by charge and defendant:
◕ https://twitter.com/lawfareblog/status/1654172737919647758?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @MarquardtA WH’s John Kirby tells @CNNThisMorning Peskov is “lying” with accusations that the US was pulling the strings behind the Kremlin attack. “Ludicrous claim,” Kirby said, adding that: “we don’t know what happened here.”
🔆 This❗️⋙ WaPo: Proud Boys Enrique Tarrio, 3 others guilty of Jan. 6 seditious conspiracy https://tinyurl.com/mu6hvdk8 ‘Prosecutors alleged that the Proud Boys saw themselves as Trump’s “army,” … inspired by his directive to “stand by” during a presidential debate’
// Prosecutors alleged defendants viewed themselves as Donald Trump’s army, intent on keeping him in power through violence
A jury deliberated for seven days in Washington before finding Tarrio, 29, and other defendants guilty on 31 of 46 counts. The jury returned not guilty verdicts on four counts and continued deliberating on 11 remaining counts. The result was another decisive victory for the Justice Department in the latest of three seditious conspiracy trials held after what it called a historic act of domestic terrorism to prevent the peaceful transfer of power from Donald Trump to Joe Biden after the 2020 presidential election. …
Legal analysts said the convictions on the historically rare and politically weighty crime of seditious conspiracy sent a necessary signal of deterrence to extremists contemplating political violence. The verdict also could pose repercussions for the former president as Special Counsel Jack Smith investigates whether Trump or those around him broke the law in seeking to hold onto power by fanning false and incendiary claims that the election was stolen, pressuring state and federal officials to assist the effort, and sending thousands of supporters who heard him speak at a Jan. 6 rally to march to the Capitol.
“The verdict empowers the special counsel to bring indictments for the efforts to overturn the election,” said New York University law professor Ryan Goodman. “It underscores the enormous stakes in mobilizing Americans to believe the Big Lie and directing an armed crowd to interfere with the congressional proceedings.”
Over nearly 15 weeks of proceedings, prosecutors alleged that the Proud Boys on trial saw themselves as Trump’s “army.” Inspired by his directive to “stand by” during a September 2020 presidential debate and mobilized by his December 2020 call for a “wild” protest, prosecutors said, the men sought to keep Trump in power through violence on the day that Congress met to certify the presidential election results. …
🧵 RT @innercitypress OK – Carroll v. Trump trial resumes, with Trump’s deposition being played for the jury again. Inner City Press is covering the case https://tinyurl.com/463xj9dt & https://tinyurl.com/sssea58j and will live tweet, thread below
📌 https://twitter.com/innercitypress/status/1654126081224626180?s=20
🐣 RT @richsignorelli If Trump takes office in ’25, he will pardon every 1/6 person who didn’t cooperate & others. Don’t think he can get elected again? He’s leading by far for nomination. We could be going into severe recession. He will lie/cheat/crime to win. He won before. He will run as an outlaw.
🐣 RT @AWeissmann_ BREAKING: Proud Boys verdict: huge win for the government and our democracy–domestic terrorism group, unleashed by the former President, held to account. Makes char[g]ing the leader of the seditious conspiracy, one Donald J. Trump, imperative.
🐣 📊 RT @BrennanCenter A new poll shows nearly 1 in 3 election officials has been harassed, abused, or threatened. None of them signed up for this, and many are quitting.
⋙ BrennanCenter: The Great Resignation . . . Of Election Officials https://tinyurl.com/mttwawbm
🐣 RT @kyledcheney There have been *14* convictions to seditious conspiracy stemming from Jan. 6 [list: 9 Oathkeepers (3 plea deals), 5 Proud Boys (1 plea deal)
[List:] https://twitter.com/kyledcheney/status/1654147439744413699?s=20%5D
🔆 This❗️⋙ 🐣 RT @Brandi_Buchman ON THE TOP CHARGE OF SEDITIOUS CONSPIRACY, PROUD BOYS Henry “Enrique” Tarrio, Joseph Biggs, Ethan Nordean and Zachary Rehl have been found GUILTY:
⋙ 🐣 RT @Brandi_Buchman NOW: Jurors have delivered a partial verdict in the Proud Boys seditious conspiracy case.
On Count 1 – SEDITIOUS CONSPIRACY:
Enrico (Henry) Tarrio: GUILTY
Ethan Nordean: GUILTY
Joseph Biggs: GUILTY
Zachary Rehl: GUILTY
[Dominic Pezzola: [NO VERDICT]]
⋙ 🐣 RT @Brandi_Buchman On Obstruction to impede or interfere with law enforcement during a civil disorder: [All 5]
⋙ 🐣 RT @Brandi_Buchman On Conspiracy to prevent an officer from discharging their duties: [All 5]
⋙ 🐣 RT @Brandi_Buchman On Destruction of government property (the black metal fencing bolted into ground): [All 5]
⋙ 🐣 RT @Brandi_Buchman On Destruction of government property (the Senate window that was smashed apart): Pezzola (only): GUILTY
🚫 💽 WaPo: Behind Trump’s musical tribute to some of the most violent Jan. 6 rioters https://tinyurl.com/3h84b95t
🐣 RT @ChuckPfarrer BAKHMUT AXIS /1245 UTC 4 MAY/ Heavy urban fighting resumed in the W urban areas of Bakhmut. RU conducted wide-spread artillery barrages over the entire axis. Russian attacks at Ivanivske and Predtechyne were broken up.
🌎 https://twitter.com/ChuckPfarrer/status/1654100572927139842?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @KyivPost (1/2) President #Zelensky said that Ukraine is actively preparing for a counteroffensive and there are no options for failure ¤ However, according to Zelensky, it is wrong to talk about “success” when losing people. ¤ 🎞️: Office of the President
⋙ 🐣 RT @KyivPost (2/2) “I cannot say that 100% success is guaranteed because no one knows. I think it is wrong to talk about success when you’re losing people. In any case, we are moving forward,” #Zelensky said at a press conference in #Netherlands.
🐣 RT @KyivPost ⚡️CIA Director William #Burns held a closed briefing on the explosions over the #Kremlin. According to the chairman of the US Senate Intelligence Committee, Senator Mark Warner, there is no indication that Ukraine is behind the drone strike on Moscow, CNN reported. 🎞️: AFP
⭕ 3 May 2023
DefenseOne: The Pentagon’s AI Chief Is ‘Scared to Death’ of ChatGPT https://tinyurl.com/5yf2ba67
// But other defense leaders are more eager to deploy new artificial-intelligence tools.
“I’m scared to death,” about how people might use ChatGPT and other consumer-facing AI agents, Craig Martell said Wednesday. ¤ Such tools, which can respond to simple prompts with long text answers, have raised concerns about the end of academic essays and have even been floated as a better way to answer medical patient questions. But they don’t always produce factually sound content, since they pull from human-created sources. Martell, who comes to the job with experience in academia as well as managing machine learning at Lyft, didn’t mince words when asked his opinion on what large language models like ChatGPT mean for society and national security.
“My fear is that we trust it too much without the providers of that service building into it the right safeguards and the ability for us to validate” the information, Martell said. That could mean people rely on answers and content that such engines provide, even if it’s inaccurate. Moreover, he said, adversaries seeking to run influence campaigns targeting Americans could use such tools to great effect for disinformation. In fact, the content such tools produce is so expertly written that it lends itself to that purpose, he said. “This information triggers our own psychology to think ‘of course this thing is authoritative.’” …
The Chief Digital and Artificial Intelligence Office, which Martell heads, is primarily responsible for the Defense Department’s AI efforts and all the computer infrastructure and data organization that goes into those efforts. Martell made his comments during AFCEA’s TechNetCyber event in Baltimore to a room full of software vendors, many of whom were selling AI platforms, tools, and solutions.
“My call to action to industry is: don’t just sell us the generation. Work on detection,” so that users and consumers of content can more easily differentiate AI-generated content from humans, Martell said.
In terms of his own priorities for the Defense Department, Martell said the first is putting in place data sharing infrastructure and policies to allow the military to realize its aspirations for Joint All Domain Command and Control, or JADC2. …
Martell isn’t necessarily opposed to deploying AI even in very high-stakes instances. His concern primarily is that the ease of use of such tools conveys the notion that the user doesn’t need to do the hard work of training and monitoring them. AI, in Martell’s view, is a highly human-driven asset.
“No model ever survives first contact with the world. Every model ever built is already stale, by the time you get it. It was trained on old data, historical data, because that’s what they had to train…. We need to build tools that allow the systems to be monitored to make sure they’re continuing to bring the value that they were paid for in the first place.”
🐣 RT @krassenstein BREAKING: 4 major legal stories regarding Trump are breaking this evening:
1) Special counsel Jack Smith and team are investigating the Trump Organization’s handling of Mar-a-Lago surveillance footage. Trump Organization executives Matthew Calamari Sr. and his son Matthew Calamari Jr. are expected to appear Thursday before the grand jury.
2) Reports indicate that Jack Smith sat in while Mike Pence testified for over five hours last week. The two men interacted in a respectful manner according to reports. Pence was asked to recount his conversations with Trump prior to the January 6th riot at the Capitol Building.
3) Donald Trump has been ordered to pay all legal fees for the New York Times and his niece Mary Trump, after New York Supreme Court Justice Robert Reed said Trump’s claims “fail as a matter of constitutional law.”
4) The only witness for Trump in the E. Jean Carroll defamation/rape case failed to appear today because of “health issues”. Trump will offer NO defense in the case.
Things don’t look good in any of these cases in my opinion. Thoughts?
🐣 RT @ryanjreilly NEW: The ex-FBI official who allegedly urged rioters to kill police at the Capitol on Jan. 6 was on the FBI New York Field Office’s Joint Terrorism Task Force. ¤ His duties? ¤ Supervising the homegrown violent extremism squad. ¤ Story with @jonathan4ny:
⋙ NBCNews: Ex-FBI agent who feds say urged Jan. 6 rioters to kill police worked terrorism task force https://tinyurl.com/3x4wh8kh
// Jared Wise was part of the FBI’s Joint Terrorism Task Force and was supervisory special agent in charge of the Homegrown Violent Extremism unit.
🐣 RT @Gerashchenko_en Russian military have placed explosives in the fourth energy block of Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant – @iaeaorg informed Ukrainian State Atomic Regulation body. ¤ Nuclear terror continues.
🐣 RT @oleksiireznikov Thank you to @SecDef and the people of the United States for your unwavering support! ¤ For more than 9 years, Ukraine has been fighting for its freedom and independence. ¤ And the #UAarmy needs weapons and ammunition to liberate our land and people. I’m grateful to our partners for their understanding of our needs and for the assistance they are providing.
[TextLink:] https://twitter.com/oleksiireznikov/status/1653838836823105552?s=20/photo/1
// Defense Budget
[Text:] S300 MILLION IN ADDITIONAL SECURITY ASSISTANCE FOR UKRAINE
Capabilities in this package include:ADDITIONAL AMMUNITION for High Mobility Artillery Rocket Systems (HIMARS);
155mm HOWITZERS;
155mm ARTILLERY ROUNDS;
120mm, 81mm, and 60mm MORTAR ROUNDS;
AT-4 and CARL GUSTAF anti-armor weapon systems
HYDRA-70 aircraft rockets;
Small arms and small arms ammunition;
Demolition munitions for obstacle clearing;
Trucks and trailers to transport heavy equipment; Testing and diagnostic equipment to support
vehicle maintenance and repair;
Spare parts and other field equipment.
🐣 RT @mehdirhasan So we are seriously expected to believe that the Fox board fired Tucker Carlson for his ‘how white men fight’ text but not for all this stuff that he said in public, on air, on *their* network, for years and years? Seriously?
💽 https://twitter.com/mehdirhasan/status/1653792295433412610?s=20/photo/1
💽 https://twitter.com/mehdirhasan/status/1653598366876459010?s=20/photo/1
USEmbUA: Security Alert: Heightened Threat of Missile Attacks, Including in Kyiv and Kyiv Oblast https://tinyurl.com/4559ck56
🐣 RT @NOELreports Good night, sleep well. ¤ I hope I’m wrong, but my gut tells me that we should expect a Russian attack this night in retaliation for what happened in Moscow today. ¤ Let’s hope we speak tomorrow without any of this!
CNN: Exclusive: Special counsel sat in on Pence’s testimony to federal grand jury https://tinyurl.com/5xau9np8
🐣 RT @justartsndstuff “Advisor to the Head of the Office of the President of Ukraine Podolyak: ¤ The Kremlin’s statement about the drone over the Russian President’s residence points to the Russian leadership’s preparation of a large-scale terrorist attack.”
🧵 RT @Ayei_Eloheichem Strelkov says some are arguing Russia will surrender by Autumn 2023 or latest Spring 2024 in a Khasavyurt accord redux: “The Russian Federation will have to agree to a ‘negotiation’ of such a kind that it will be a poorly disguised capitulation.”
📌 [TextLink:] https://twitter.com/Ayei_Eloheichem/status/1653613914079514625?s=20/photo/1 -3
⋙ 🐣 RT @Ayei_Eloheichem This, however, is not doomer enough for Strelkov, who says “There WILL BE NO ‘Khasavyurt-2.0’…we will be destroyed as a state and as a country, plunging into several regional wars at once, losing half (or more) of the territories and population…”
[TextLink:] https://twitter.com/Ayei_Eloheichem/status/1653614462707068930?s=20/photo/1
⋙ 🐣 RT @Ayei_Eloheichem #pt Strelkov agrees that Russia will lose and surrender soon. His only argument is that it won’t be like Khasavyurt, but that the surrender will lead to the dismemberment and disappearance of Russia.
WSJ: Jeffrey Epstein Documents, Part 2: Dinners With Lawrence Summers and Movie Screenings With Woody Allen https://tinyurl.com/wa7374js
// 5/1/2023; Schedules and emails show deeper relationships between the disgraced financier and a range of prominent people, including the former Treasury secretary and the filmmaker
⇈ ⇊
WSJ: Epstein’s Private Calendar Reveals Prominent Names, Including CIA Chief, Goldman’s Top Lawyer https://tinyurl.com/4bfb4sjn
// 4/30/2023; Schedules and emails detail meetings in the years after he was a convicted sex offender; visitors cite his wealth and connections
🐣 RT @igornovikov This kremlin attack stinks of a false flag operation to justify whatever bloody theatrics they are planning for their victory day. Wonder if they’ll cancel the parade… 😆 ¤ PS the videos are beautiful though
🐣 RT @francis_scarr Astonishing footage of last night’s drone attack on the Kremlin
💽 https://twitter.com/francis_scarr/status/1653734878075142150?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @APonomarenko The Kremlin under a drone attack. Something tells me that Putin’s three-days-long walk in the park to seize Kyiv is not going very well.
💽 https://twitter.com/IAPonomarenko/status/1653731384958017536?s=20/photo/1
💙 NYT, Thomas Edsall: Why Trump Won’t Let Go of His Dream of Domination https://tinyurl.com/2huzr4he Trump “harkens back to an older evolutionary paradigm for achieving status in primate groups. It is the paradigm of brute dominance…a proclivity whose primal appeal never seems to fade”
// tags: social evolution social anthropology language alpha male v beta males egotism coalitions cooperation Declaration of Independence authoritarianism norms polarization
My comment: Trump seems to have hijacked the use of insurrection AGAINST the alpha male by transforming himself into a victim and calling on a coalition of beta & gamma males to defend him. Clever feint, if one accepts the arguments in this piece.
Historically, the closest analogy I can think of would be movements to restore a “rightful” monarch (both alpha and victim). Such movements are powerful and have long memories (the French Dauphin, Bonny Prince Charlie, Anastasia of the Romanovs).
⭕ 2 May 2023
🐣 RT @United24media A massive fail for a Russian propagandist who tried to ask US Speaker of the House a question. We love to see it. ¤ Kevin McCarthy: “I support aid for Ukraine and don’t support what your country is doing to Ukraine, I don’t support your killing of the children either.”
💽 https://twitter.com/United24media/status/1653321129942036480?s=20/photo/1
📋 WaPo: Spike in Russian combat deaths fuels fears of worse carnage to come https://tinyurl.com/58ujavtf
The leaked U.S. intelligence assessment from late February says that American officials believed with “low confidence” that between 35,000 and 42,500 Russian soldiers had been killed at that stage of the war, with another 150,500 to 177,000 wounded. The same assessment listed Ukraine’s losses at between 15,500 and 17,000 dead after a year of war. Another 106,500 to 110,500 were believed to have been wounded.
🐣 RT @highbrow_nobrow 🚨”A text message sent by Tucker Carlson that set off a panic at the highest levels of Fox on the eve of its billion-dollar defamation trial showed its most popular host sharing his private, inflammatory views about violence and race.”
⋙ NYT: Carlson’s Text That Alarmed Fox Leaders: ‘It’s Not How White Men Fight’ https://tinyurl.com/msse9v2b “For years, Mr. Carlson espoused views on his show that amplified the ideology of white nationalism. But the text message revealed more about his views on racial superiority”
// The discovery of the text message contributed to a chain of events that ultimately led to Tucker Carlson’s firing.
WaPo: White House leaves door open to deal that resolves debt ceiling crisis https://tinyurl.com/ysrpwrtz The “wink wink, nudge nudge solution” or
McC: ♪ “Sometimes I think it’s a sin
When I feel like I’m winning, when I’m losing again”
// The president and House speaker could reach an agreement they both claim adheres to their incompatible negotiating positions
🔄 📋 AtlanticCouncil: Russia Sanctions Database https://tinyurl.com/yv9kybrs
🐣 RT @ArmedMaidan Hell ride to Bakhmut: This is what it looks like when democracy makes a stand against fascism and Ukraine fights for its freedom – and yours ¤ #UkraineRussiaWar️ #Bakhmut #Ukraine #Russia
💽 https://twitter.com/ArmedMaidan/status/1653481120640520213?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @KyivIndependent Blinken: Ukraine’s success on battlefield quickest way to ‘just and durable peace.’ ¤ US Secretary of State Antony Blinken told Fox News on May 2 that Washington knew Ukraine was contemplating a counteroffensive “in the coming weeks,” and it was monitoring the course of events.
⋙ .KyivIndependent: Blinken: Ukraine’s success on battlefield quickest way to ‘just and durable peace’ https://tinyurl.com/4jvnubwd
🧵 RT @mbk_center [Khodorovsky] Not all tyrants are plucked from obscurity like Putin. Some, like Hitler, have relied on certain conditions in their rise to power. Paradoxically, while Putin did not come to power under conditions similar to Hitler’s, he is creating them in Russia now ¤ Striking observations >
📌 https://twitter.com/mbk_center/status/1653483208921731072?s=20
🧵 RT @VickerySec [5/29/2022: memes on this]
⋙ 🐣 RT @elonmusk Unless it is stopped, the woke mind virus will destroy civilization and humanity will never reached Mars
📌 https://twitter.com/VickerySec/status/1527477250718740480?s=20
⭕ 1 May 2023
🐣 RT @therecount When a Russian reporter asks him if the U.S. will send more weapons and aid to Ukraine, House Speaker Kevin McCarthy — despite previously saying there should be no “blank check” — says he supports helping Ukraine: ¤ “I support aid for Ukraine … We will continue to support.”
💽 https://twitter.com/therecount/status/1653052864447791105?s=20/photo/1
🧵 RT @MarkHertling I believe Ukraines’ upcoming offensive operation will achieve huge tactical and perhaps large operational success. ¤ But for those who believe it will be represented by large arrows on maps, that will not be indicative of this phase. 1/
📌 https://twitter.com/MarkHertling/status/1653055180433244160?s=20
This will be a tough fight, with newly-formed Ukrainian units conducting (for the first time) large-scale combined arms breeches against prepared Russian defensive positions. ¤ This will be a new phase of the campaign that will be very different. 2/
My belief is that Ukraines’ forces will perform well (even better than before) & the Russian force will continue to perform poorly (though not as bad as they have in the past). ¤ That is partly due to switching roles (attacking vs defending, and time spent by each preparing). 3/
Both sides are now probing each other. ¤ Russia in the air (to determine Ukraine troop location & air defense positioning), Ukraine is starting to conduct Recon in Force (RIF) after months of intelligence prep of the battlefield & waiting for better weather. 4/
Be wary of those who are looking for big moves & huge or fast gains. ¤ That could happen in some areas, but pushing logistics to support the Ukraine offensive will be the big test for each side. ¤ This is where I believe Ukraine will out perform Russia, due to meticulous prep. 5/
Make no mistake, the next phase will likely be the toughest for both sides…and friction, fog & chance – as well as the commanders will & coup d’oeil (as described by Clausewitz) will play a part. ¤ The prepared side will carry the day. 6/6
⋙ 🐣 RT @AndropovPicov Great thread. Brings this to mind:
[TextLink:] https://twitter.com/AndropovPicov/status/1653058347657236481?s=20/photo/1
// Eisenhower’s letter to troops be fore D-Day
🧵 RT @iimstewartson Imagine a bank was robbed 28 months ago and multiple people were murdered during the crime. ¤ What if people had warned the police about the robbery ahead of time and pointed out who the perpetrators would be but nothing was done to prevent it? ¤ That would be weird, right?
📌 https://twitter.com/jimstewartson/status/1653159270861643776?s=20
⋙ 🐣 RT @iimstewartson […] A week before the insurrection, I wrote this thread and submitted numerous FBI tips along with my friends. ¤ Not only was there nothing done to prevent it, nothing has been done since except put a few foot soldiers in jail. ¤ Chris Wray knew. We told him. @POTUS #FireWray
⋙⋙ 🧵 RT @iimstewartson [12/30/2020] OK, guys. I regret to inform you that the QAnon finale appears to have arrived. ¤ Here is the hashtag I will use for this part of our collective nightmare:
#tEhStorm 😑 1/
⋙⋙ 📌 https://twitter.com/jimstewartson/status/1344478680542638081?s=20
🐣 RT @juliaioffe NSC spox John Kirby just told reporters that, according to U.S. intelligence, Russia has suffered 100,000 casualties in Bakhmut *just since December.* That includes over 20,000 killed. Over half of the casualties, Kirby said, were Wagner troops, many of whom are ex-convicts.
🐣 RT @wartranslated Girkin’s update for April: concludes that Wagner is bloodless and unable to finish Bakhmut, but the Ukrainian side achieved its goal of holding out while preparing for an offensive. Practically no achievements by the Russian side during both winter and spring.
[TextLink:] https://twitter.com/wartranslated/status/1652953765836738565?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @RadioFreeTom “Any outcome short of a Ukrainian victory would endanger the rest of the world. There is a reason,” @RadioFreeTom writes, “that so many nations, movements, and individuals are waiting to see what happens.” Read his report on our June cover story:
⋙ TheAtlantic: The World Awaits Ukraine’s Counteroffensive https://tinyurl.com/maxcyjy9
// As the country approaches a battle for its ultimate fate, democracy and Western civilization hang in the balance.
The democracies face a coming year of decision. In the next 12 to 18 months, we will know whether Americans have the collective will to resist yet another attempt to hand power to a would-be autocrat; as astonishing as it seems, one of the likely presidential candidates in the 2024 election is a man who incited a violent attack against the government and the Constitution of the United States. We will also know whether the free world (and yes, it’s long past time to start using that expression again) has the will to resist the onslaught of Russian butchery in Europe.
These two battles are inextricably linked. If America stumbles even deeper into authoritarian darkness than it already has, Ukraine is lost. If Ukraine is lost, Europe and the West face an existential threat not only to our physical security but also to our democratic civilization.
As Jeffrey Goldberg notes in his editor’s introduction to the June issue, The Atlantic went to Ukraine because the war there “is about much more than Ukraine; it is about the very subjects that animate this magazine: democracy, freedom, justice, humanism.” In Kherson, he and Anne were interviewing Ukrainian soldiers when the Russians bombed a nearby supermarket parking lot, the kind of indiscriminate attack that reinforces the stakes for Ukraine and the world. The Russian missile, Jeff writes, “was meant to murder and terrorize; mission accomplished.”
And this is what the Russian war on Ukraine has become: a campaign of revenge by an infuriated despot who is determined to show that democracy will bow to dictatorship, even if he has to bomb every home and kill every Ukrainian.
Russian President Vladimir Putin, of course, is trapped in a vortex of his own grandiose miscalculations and strategic ineptitude. He expected Ukraine to collapse within hours of his first attacks more than a year ago. As the Ukrainian defense minister told Anne and Jeff, so did the U.S. and NATO, who expected a war between “a big Soviet army fighting a small Soviet army” and thought that the “big” Soviet army would win.
I made the same miscalculation in my early analyses of the conflict. As we now know, however, the Russian military had for years managed to hide its shocking incompetence and poor logistics from the world—and especially from Putin, whose small circle of sycophants was too terrified to tell him the truth. … Putin has apparently decided that he must destroy what he once hoped to possess whole. He will rule over whatever is left—and then continue his attempted march westward. …
[W]ithout a powerful counteroffensive and eventual victory, there can be no peace in Ukraine, and no stability in Europe or the world. What does “victory” mean? Obviously, the survival of an independent Ukraine is the immediate goal, but a lasting peace has to mean more than living through successive Russian conquests and partitions. The Ukrainians, who have lost so much already, are unlikely to accept such an unjust truce, even if the Russians had any interest in offering one. If the Ukrainians lose sovereign territory, if they are not safe from Russian attack, and if there is no reckoning with Russian war criminals, then any Ukrainian “victory” is just a temporary respite from another round of Russian aggression. …
🐣 RT @SenWhitehouse Long but important piece about the US and Ukrainian role in the battle for freedom and democracy globally. Ukrainians are dying in this cause; what we’re asked is to get them the weapons to win decisively. “Arsenal of Democracy” is a proud U.S. role.
💙 ⋙ TheAtlantic, Anne Applebaum and Jeffrey Goldberg: THE COUNTEROFFENSIVE https://tinyurl.com/29456hdj
// The future of the democratic world will be determined by whether the Ukrainian military can break a stalemate with Russia and drive the country backwards—perhaps even out of Crimea for good.
[…] But something even deeper is at stake as well. As Zelensky put it, this is a war over a fundamental definition of not just democracy but civilization, a battle “to show everybody else, including Russia, to respect sovereignty, human rights, territorial integrity; and to respect people, not to kill people, not to rape women, not to kill animals, not to take that which is not yours.” If a Ukraine that believes in the rule of law and human rights can achieve victory against a much larger, much more autocratic society, and if it can do so while preserving its own freedoms, then similarly open societies and movements around the world can hope for success too. After the Russian invasion, the Venezuelan opposition movement hung a Ukrainian flag on the front of its country’s embassy hall in Washington. The Taiwanese Parliament gave a rapturous welcome to Ukrainian activists last year. Not everyone in the world cares about this war, but for anyone trying to defeat a dictator, it has profound significance.
America is linked to the war in this deeper sense. The civilization that Ukraine defends has been profoundly shaped by American ideas not just about democracy, but about entrepreneurship, liberty, civil society, and the rule of law. When we asked Zelensky about Ukraine’s tech sector, he happily began talking about his dream of building a university devoted to computer science, and about the projects created by his country’s Ministry of Digital Transformation, among them a unique app that allows Ukrainians to store documents on their phones, a godsend for refugees. He talks more readily about Silicon Valley than he does about Potemkin’s bones, and no wonder: The former defines the world he wants to live in. ¤ Zelensky did not share our preoccupation with the history of Russian imperial desire. “I don’t love the past,” he said. “We have to jump forward, not back.” …
The status of this particular drone workshop might confuse Americans who think that “the military” is a unitary institution, or that “defense production” is something that involves billion-dollar companies. The patron of this project is a former Ukrainian-special-forces commander and current member of Parliament, Colonel Roman Kostenko. The “employees” are all engineers, now mobilized into the army as pilots and designers of drones. The financing is private, and the entire enterprise is based on the belief that if Ukraine can’t compete with Russian quantity, it can exceed Russian quality: “The only way we can win is by being smarter,” Kostenko told us. He said he speaks regularly with the military leadership, though he is no longer in the chain of command. “It’s not Lockheed Martin,” he said, surveying the room. But when we pointed out that Lockheed Martin probably started this way too, he agreed.
… Along with similar teams around the country, the team here also works on new kinds of drones that can do new things, including carrying out sophisticated electronic warfare and underwater attacks, all at relatively low cost. Kostenko described a drone that he said had destroyed 24 pieces of enemy equipment, including tanks.
But this basement-and-garage-based Ukrainian tech army doesn’t just build drones; it also builds the software that coordinates the work of the drones. Sometimes it does so in partnership with NGOs, not companies; an executive at one of these groups described the software it develops as “an invention, not a product”—and, more important, as an invention that is constantly being redesigned. One widely used program collects information and distributes it to the laptops and tablets of ordinary soldiers up and down the front line, providing the situational awareness that has been one of Ukraine’s unexpected advantages. A tiny command post we visited had a bank of screens, each showing a different view of the battlefield.
Several foreign companies cooperate too. The most advanced, such as Palantir, the U.S.-based software and defense company, have software that can draw on multiple data sources—commercial-satellite images, reports from partisans—to identify and prioritize targets. This form of “algorithmic warfare” isn’t new, but the Ukrainians have the incentive to develop and expand it: Lacking warehouses full of spare ammunition, they have to hit the largest number of enemy vehicles with the smallest number of missiles.
Maxwell Adams, an engineer at Helsing, a European defense-tech company working pro bono in Ukraine, told us that the Ukrainians impressed his team with their ability to use everything available, from simple messaging apps to sophisticated artillery, all in unpredictable conditions. Together with their Ukrainian colleagues, his employees work to “get our software to run right on the edge, meaning on tiny little computer chips on the back of a rusty old vehicle, or in the backpack of a soldier, or on the payload of a drone.” The Ukrainians “absolutely get how to make AI operational,” he said.
They also get the need to use whatever they have. Reznikov described the combination of weaponry that the Ukrainians have received from dozens of different countries as a “zoo,” a menagerie of weapons (“We have approximately 10 systems of artillery,” he said, ticking them off on his fingers), and they all have to be made to work together, under conditions of limited ammunition, limited manpower, and sometimes limited satellite connection.
This high-tech world exists alongside and within an extraordinarily diverse citizens’ army, one that includes NATO-trained officers; grandfathers guarding their own villages; and every conceivable level of training, experience, and equipment in between. …
The old Ukrainian army had been shaped by years of negative selection, attracting the least educated and the least ambitious. The new one is now being shaped by the best educated and the most ambitious. In recent months, that army has evolved even further. In training camps in NATO countries, Ukrainian troops are learning to use Western battle tanks, to operate new kinds of artillery, and above all to carry out the combined-arms operations that will be part of the summer offensive—to achieve “interoperability,” as Reznikov put it, at a level the army has never previously attempted.
Sometimes, the war is described as a battle between autocracy and democracy, or between dictatorship and freedom. In truth, the differences between the two opponents are not merely ideological, but also sociological. Ukraine’s struggle against Russia pits a heterarchy against a hierarchy. An open, networked, flexible society—one that is both stronger at the grassroots level and more deeply integrated with Washington, Brussels, and Silicon Valley than anyone realized—is fighting a very large, very corrupt, top-down state. On one side, farmers defend their land and 20‑something engineers build eyes in the sky, using tools that would be familiar to 20‑something engineers anywhere else. On the other side, commanders send waves of poorly armed conscripts to be slaughtered—just as Stalin once sent shtrafbats, penal battalions, against the Nazis—under the leadership of a dictator obsessed with ancient bones. “The choice,” Zelensky told us, “is between freedom and fear.”
Versions of these two civilizations still exist within Ukrainian society too, though the division is not ethnic or linguistic. It is now exceedingly rare to find Ukrainians who describe themselves as “pro-Russian,” even in the Russian-speaking east. The streets in the center of Russian-speaking Odesa are lined with Ukrainian flags; Odesa’s mayor, the Russian-speaking Gennadiy Trukhanov, told us he believes Ukrainians are “the front line of the struggle for the civilized world.” But autocratic, top-down, hierarchical ways of doing things are hard to discard, especially in state institutions. The instinct to control and centralize decision making remains. Citizens’ groups and volunteers have arisen around the military partly to combat the vestiges of Soviet bureaucracy. …
… Some of them have an almost mystical faith that it’s their country’s turn on the world stage. Yermak, Zelensky’s chief of staff, told us that victory is “very near,” that you can “feel it in the atmosphere.” Dmytro Kuleba, the Ukrainian foreign minister, talks about “history turning its wheels,” a process that cannot be stopped. …
But what is “victory”? That’s the question asked repeatedly of every American official, of every pundit, at every public debate dedicated to Ukraine, often in a querulous, demanding tone, as if this were a question difficult to answer. In Ukraine itself—in the office of the president, in the defense ministry, in the foreign ministry, in private apartments, on the front line—the question isn’t perceived to be difficult at all.
Victory means, first, that Ukraine retains sovereign control of all of the territory that lies within its internationally recognized borders, including land taken by Russia since 2014: Donetsk, Luhansk, Melitopol, Mariupol, Crimea. “Every centimeter of our 603,550 square kilometers,” Kuleba says. Ukrainians believe that the de facto ceding of territory to Russia in 2014 gave Putin the idea that he could take more, and they don’t want to repeat the error. Instead of ending the conflict, a cease-fire that leaves large chunks of Ukraine under Russian control could give him an incentive to regroup, rearm, and try again. …
Victory means, second, that Ukrainians are safe. Safe from terrorist attacks, safe from shelling, safe from missiles lobbed at supermarket parking lots. Zelensky talks about safety “for everything. From schools to technologies, for everything in the education sphere, in medicine, in the streets. That is the idea. For energy. For everything.” Safety means that the airports reopen, the refugees return, foreign investment resumes, and buildings can be rebuilt without fear that another Russian missile will knock them down. To achieve this kind of safety, Ukraine, again, will need more than a cease-fire. The country will have to be embedded in some security structure reliable enough to be trusted, something that resembles NATO, if not NATO itself. Ukraine will also have to reconceive itself as a frontline state like Israel or South Korea, with a world-class defense industry and a large standing army. Deterrence is the most important guarantee of peace.
Victory means, third, some kind of justice. Justice for the victims of the war, for the people who lost their homes or limbs, for the children who have been taken from their parents. Justice might be delivered in different ways: through reparations, through the transfer of captured or sanctioned Russian assets, or through the International Criminal Court, which recently issued an arrest warrant for Putin for the crime of kidnapping Ukrainian children and deporting them to Russia. More important than the means of justice is the perception of justice—neither Putin nor Russia can enjoy impunity. Victims need the acknowledgment that they were unfairly targeted. Until this kind of justice is achieved, millions of people will not feel that the war ended, and will not stop trying to seek reparations or revenge.
Victory can be defined. But can it be achieved? Part of the answer is military, technical, logistical. Part of the answer, however, is political and even psychological. The Ukrainian theory of victory includes all of these elements.
In Russian history, military victory has often reinforced autocracy. Potemkin’s conquests reinforced Catherine the Great. Stalin’s defeat of Hitler reinforced his own regime. By contrast, military failure has often inspired political change. Russian losses to Germany during World War I helped launch the Russian Revolution. Russian losses in Afghanistan in the 1980s helped trigger the reforms of the Gorbachev years, which in turn led to the breakup of the Soviet Union. …
Ukrainians need a military success … , one with enough symbolic power to force change in Russia. This might not mean a revolution, or even a change of leadership. Zelensky believes the West spends too much time thinking about Putin, worrying about what’s inside his head. “It’s not about him,” he told us. Kuleba, the foreign minister, says he thinks the future of Russia is unknowable, so there is no point in speculating about what it would or should be. “The capacity of the best analysts to foresee the future under these circumstances is largely overestimated,” he told us. “Will it fall apart?” he asked rhetorically. “Will there be a regime change? Will the regime be forced to focus on its internal problems, meaning that the potential for external aggressive policies will decline?”
Only one thing matters: Russia’s leaders must conclude that the war was a mistake, and Russia must acknowledge Ukraine as an independent country with the right to exist. The Russian elite, in other words, must experience an internal shift of the kind that led the French to end their colonial project in Algeria in the early 1960s—a change that was accompanied by the collapse of the French constitutional order, attempted assassinations, and a failed coup d’état. A slower but equally profound shift took place in Britain in the early 20th century, when the British ruling class was forced to stop talking about the Irish as peasants incapable of running their own state, and let them create one. When that happens in Russia, the war will be over. Not suspended, not delayed for a month or a year—over. …
[T]he strongest symbol is Crimea. The annexation of Crimea in 1783 inspired Putin’s love of Potemkin. Putin’s own occupation and annexation of Crimea, in 2014, rejuvenated his presidency. The slogan “Krym Nash”—“Crimea Is Ours”—spread across Russia in a burst of imperialist emotion and Soviet nostalgia, reproduced on posters and T‑shirts, inspiring a slew of memes. This year Putin marked the anniversary of the annexation by visiting the peninsula, walking stiffly around a children’s center and an art school in the company of local officials.
Crimea became a symbol for Ukrainians too. The 2014 invasion marked the start of the Russian war on Ukraine; the subsequent annexation warned Ukrainians that the international legal system would not protect them. The history of the Crimean Tatars, a Muslim people who constituted the majority of the peninsula’s population before Potemkin arrived, echoes the history of the rest of the country: The Tatars were the targets of repression, intimidation, and ethnic cleansing under both czarist and Soviet rule. In 1944, Stalin deported all of them, some 200,000 people, to Central Asia. They returned only after 1989. …
Knowing that Crimea is being built into a fortress, the Ukrainians talk about the “political military” liberation of Crimea, not a purely military counteroffensive. Once they have cut off the roads, railroads, and waterways to the peninsula, and targeted the military infrastructure with drones, the presumption is that many Russian inhabitants, especially recent immigrants, will become convinced that they would be better off living somewhere else. Some have reportedly fled already, following an explosion on the Kerch Strait Bridge (which connects Crimea to Russia) and other explosions on the peninsula. “Crimea we will take without a fight,” Reznikov told us. …
Regarding Crimea, the difference between the two civilizations is stark. For Russia, Crimea is and always will be a military base. For Ukraine, “Crimea is a place of diversity—our bridge to the global South.” Tasheva wants to build better road connections to Europe, restore destroyed Tatar monuments, and revitalize the use of the Ukrainian and Tatar languages on the peninsula. Plans to reverse environmental damage, reduce the use of fossil fuels, and revive cultural festivals have been drawn up, printed out, translated into English. If set into motion, they would undo not just Putin’s annexation of Crimea in 2014, but Potemkin’s annexation in 1783.
Do Americans share that vision? It is true that the U.S. has supported Ukraine, not a traditional American ally, at a level that was also once unimaginable, comparable only to the Lend-Lease program of World War II. We have provided Ukraine with intelligence and weapons, taken care of Ukrainian refugees, put strict sanctions on Russia. So far, there has been no secondary disaster. Despite a thousand predictions to the contrary, Europeans did not freeze to death last winter when they were compelled to seek alternatives to Russian gas. World War III did not break out. But over the next few months, as the Ukrainians take their best shot at winning the war, the democratic world will have to decide whether to help them do so. Sovereignty, safety, and justice—shouldn’t Americans want the war to end that way too?
Of course. That is what any senior official in the Biden administration, any European foreign minister, would say if asked on the record. Privately, answers are less clear. The support the U.S. has given Ukraine so far has been enough to help its army hold off Russia, enough to take back Kherson and some territory in the Kharkiv region. But America has not yet given Ukraine fighter jets or its most advanced long-range missiles. Nor is it clear that everyone in Washington, Brussels, or Paris believes it is either possible or desirable for Ukraine to take back all of the territory lost since February 2022, let alone territory taken in 2014.…
… [T]he Ukrainians aren’t the only ones hoping that their success can support and sustain a civilizational change. Russia, as it is currently governed, is a source of instability not just in Ukraine but around the world. Russian mercenaries prop up dictatorships in Africa; Russian hackers undermine political debate and elections all across the democratic world. The investments of Russian companies keep dictators in power in Minsk, in Caracas, in Tehran. A Ukrainian victory would immediately inspire people fighting for human rights and the rule of law, wherever they are. In a recent conversation in Washington, a Belarusian activist spoke about his organization’s plans to reactivate the Belarusian opposition movement. For the moment, it is still working in secret, underground. “Everyone is waiting for the counteroffensive,” he said.
And he is right. Ukrainians are waiting for the counteroffensive. Europeans, East and West, are waiting for the counteroffensive. Central Asians are waiting for the counteroffensive. Belarusians, Venezuelans, Iranians, and others around the world whose dictatorships are propped up by the Russians—they are all waiting for the counteroffensive too. This spring, this summer, this autumn, Ukraine gets a chance to alter geopolitics for a generation. And so does the United States.⚜️
⭕ 30 Apr 2023
🐣 RT @GeorgeArtwell Casablanca, Ukraine #NAFO
💽 https://twitter.com/GeorgeArtwell/status/1652761317088940033?s=20/photo/1
💙 WaPo, EJ Dionne: Biden is inviting us to argue about freedom. We should. https://tinyurl.com/44x9m9yj 1) For women to make own health choices, 2) From fear of gun violence, 3) To vote & have that vote counted, 4) For seniors to live in dignity, 5) To have a fair shot at a good life
Biden’s video opened with the word “freedom,” used it four more times and threw in a mention of “bedrock freedoms” for good measure. During a 90-second campaign ad that followed, the word was mentioned six times. In addition, the video declared: “Joe Biden has made defending our basic freedoms the cause of his presidency.”
You can get a feel for where Biden is going when he explains what “basic freedoms” he has in mind: “The freedom for women to make their own health-care decisions, the freedom for our children to be safe from gun violence, the freedom to vote and have your vote counted. For seniors to live with dignity, and to give every American the freedom that comes with a fair shot at building a good life.”
TheAtlantic, Conor Friedersdorf: Ron DeSantis’s Orwellian Redefinition of Freedom https://tinyurl.com/3f7vtnmy “The [Disney] case will subject DeSantis’s understanding of freedom and what protecting it requires to the crucible of constitutional law”
// Disney’s lawsuit will put the Florida governor’s understanding of freedom to the constitutional test. And his position will likely shatter.
Florida Governor Ron DeSantis has long presented himself as a principled champion of “freedom.” In Congress, he was a founding member of the Freedom Caucus. He refers to himself as “governor of the free state of Florida.” And while laying the groundwork for a possible presidential run, he is promoting a book on his approach that he titled The Courage to Be Free. …
On Wednesday, Florida’s biggest employer, Walt Disney Parks and Resorts, filed a lawsuit alleging that DeSantis is violating its First Amendment right to freedom of speech. According to the complaint, “a targeted campaign of government retaliation—orchestrated at every step by Governor DeSantis as punishment for Disney’s protected speech—now threatens Disney’s business operations, jeopardizes its economic future in the region, and violates its constitutional rights.”
The case will subject DeSantis’s understanding of freedom and what protecting it requires to the crucible of constitutional law. And his position is likelier to shatter than to withstand the heat.
“The facts and law in this case are not good for Governor DeSantis,” former Representative Justin Amash, who was also a member of the Freedom Caucus, said on Twitter. “He and his allies took action not to make all companies live by the same rules but instead to target Disney with harsh conditions that apply to Disney alone—all as punishment for constitutionally protected speech.”. …
In Charleston last week, DeSantis questioned the legitimacy of seeking change through civil society rather than elected legislatures, a practice that is inextricable from life in a liberal democracy. According to DeSantis, the “constitutional” way to change policy is, “You run elections and you can put people [in office] to influence policy.” Woke companies, in contrast, “know their policies would never be able to pass muster at the ballot box. So what they’re trying to do is an end run around the constitutional system, use their economic power to impose these policies outside the normal system,” with no electoral recourse. “If you want to preserve freedom in this country,” he said, “we need to be fighting back against woke capital.”
But working for cultural change through nongovernmental institutions and associations is not an end run around the constitutional system––the Constitution explicitly protects our ability to associate with whomever we like and to speak collectively on behalf of or against any policy or practice, whether as Disney or Hobby Lobby, the ACLU or the NRA, Dylan Mulvaney or Matt Walsh. In our constitutional system, politicians who don’t like that cannot lawfully do anything about it. …
WaPo Editorial: Florida’s surgeon general played loose with facts about vaccine risk https://tinyurl.com/3rttwwyv “[T]e analysis was altered by Dr. [Joseph] Ladapo to emphasize the risks. Five previous drafts of the analysis — before he edited it — did not reach such a conclusion”
[…] Dr. Ladapo, appointed in 2021 by Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis, is a well-known vaccine skeptic and critic of the pharmaceutical industry who has also questioned pandemic lockdowns and face masks, and was an advocate for the use of the antimalarial drug hydroxychloroquine to fight covid-19 — a drug that studies showed to be useless against the coronavirus.
The first draft of the Florida analysis concluded there was “no increase” in the risk of cardiac-related deaths from the mRNA vaccine, and by the fifth draft, it still said there was “no increased risk for cardiac mortality following mRNA vaccinations.” But version six, the one edited by Dr. Ladapo and released to the public, warned “covid-19 vaccination was associated with a modestly increased risk for cardiac-related mortality 28 days following vaccination.” The sixth version had a notation that it contained “Dr. L’s edits,” according to Politico.
Moreover, in the second draft of the analysis, the authors attempted to balance the risk of cardiac-related death against the risk of death from coronavirus infection. They found the risk of death was higher from infection than from vaccination for all age groups, including young men. But this text and analysis disappeared from the report in subsequent drafts. The final report also made no mention of a sensitivity analysis performed by the authors which called into question the reliability of the results.
“This is not how science or evidence-based policy is done,” say epidemiologist Katelyn Jetelina and physician Kristen Panthagani, who dissected the changes.
By playing loose with the facts, Dr. Ladapo cast doubt on the safety of the coronavirus vaccines. His misdirection contributed to vaccine hesitancy, and that, in turn, led to a higher pandemic death toll. His actions also underscore how anti-vaccine activists create fear and suspicion. Rather than rely upon scientifically sound research, they traffic in half-truths and unsubstantiated declarations. In so doing, Dr. Ladapo betrayed the trust of the people of Florida and the nation.
⭕ 29 Apr 2023
🧵 RT @igorsushko 🚨#Bakhmut may very well end up being the catalyst for a Russian civil war.
📌 💽 https://twitter.com/igorsushko/status/1652399267179565057?s=20/photo/1
⋙ 1) Putin has ordered that Bakhmut must be taken by May 8th, in time for the Soviet Victory Day parade on May 9th. He has threatened Shoigu and others with dire consequences.
2) Prigozhin has Putin’s blessing as head of Wagner PMC, a mercenary group established and largely controlled by the FSB & GRU (Russian Military Intelligence).
3) Army and intel services famously hate each other. The jockeying for power between the various factions has been ongoing.
4) Expect Wagner PMC to retreat from Bakhmut in the coming days to completely screw over Shoigu and the Russian army. This is a perfect way for Prigozhin to setup Shoigu and other generals.
5) For May 9th, Ukrainians may end up controlling all of Bakhmut, and possibly much, much more. This would have highly unpredictable domino effects domestically in Russia.
6) Right now, the Russian Game of Thrones is just backstabbing, scheming in the shadows, assassinations, and so on. But Bakhmut may turn out to be the catalyst to ignite a ‘hot’ civil war among the factions in Russia.⋙ Just published by Osechkin:
“We are witnessing the process of closing down the Wagner PMC and ending the use of Yevgeny Prigozhin for military purposes. The coming weeks will show a lot. The source reports that dozens of search warrants have already been prepared for Prigozhin’s and his associates’ residences. There is also information about a series of searches of Wagner PMC members, seizures of unregistered weapons and interrogations about Wagner PMC’s war crimes.”It appears the Kremlin and Defence Ministry want to maximally distance themselves from Prigozhin’s war crimes.
This begs the question – why wouldn’t Prigozhin give up Bakhmut and royally screw over Shoigu and the entire MoD for May 9th?
⋙ Just in from Osechkin:
Prigozhin has not been invited to the May 9th Soviet Victory Parade on the Red Square. Wagner PMC will have no presence at the parade in any form whatsoever, including simple attendance.According to Osechkin’s sources, FSB investigators are collecting criminal evidence against Prigozhin and Utkin through interrogations Wagner members. Several Wagner members are already in prison.
Prigozhin claims to have kompromat on Shoigu, Ivanov (deputy Defence Minister), and Tsallikov (deputy Defence Minister) at the Defence Ministry and appears to be blackmailing them.
He has already publicly thrown under the bus several officials who were his accomplices at the MoD , including deputy Defence Minister Mizintsev and Surovikin, former Commander of the Russian forces for invasion of Ukraine demoted back in January 2023.
⋙ On why Prigozhin publicized Putin spokesman Peskov’s son, Nikolai Peskov, as a Wagner PMC mercenary artillerist in Ukraine: ¤ It’s a made up story and not true, but an attempt by Prigozhin to establish leverage with the power players. He is offering a service to Russian politicians to avoid domestic public criticism of hypocrisy about how their own sons are not serving as soldiers in the war by falsifying their participation as Wagner mercenaries.
⭕ 28 Apr 2023
NYT: Prosecutors in Jan. 6 Case Step up Inquiry Into Trump Fund-Raising https://tinyurl.com/3mr5j22k
// The Justice Department has been gathering evidence about whether the former president and his allies solicited donations with claims of election fraud they knew to be false.
As they investigate former President Donald J. Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election, federal prosecutors have also been drilling down on whether Mr. Trump and a range of political aides knew that he had lost the race but still raised money off claims that they were fighting widespread fraud in the vote results, according to three people familiar with the matter.
Led by the special counsel Jack Smith, prosecutors are trying to determine whether Mr. Trump and his aides violated federal wire fraud statutes as they raised as much as $250 million through a political action committee by saying they needed the money to fight to reverse election fraud even though they had been told repeatedly that there was no evidence to back up those fraud claims.
The prosecutors are looking at the inner workings of the committee, Save America PAC, and at the Trump campaign’s efforts to prove its baseless case that Mr. Trump had been cheated out of victory. …
The possibility that the fund-raising efforts might have been criminally fraudulent was first raised last year by the House select committee investigating Mr. Trump’s efforts to retain power. …
… [P]rosecutors have developed more information than the House committee did, having targeted communications between Trump campaign aides and other Republican officials to determine if a barrage of fund-raising solicitations sent out after the election were knowingly misleading, according to the three people familiar with the matter. …
Prosecutors have also been examining the plan to assemble alternate slates of pro-Trump electors from swing states won by Joseph R. Biden Jr., and the broader push by Mr. Trump to block or delay congressional certification of Mr. Biden’s Electoral College victory on Jan. 6, 2021, leading to the storming of the Capitol by Trump supporters.
On Thursday, former Vice President Mike Pence, a key witness to Mr. Trump’s efforts, testified for hours to the grand jury gathering evidence in the investigation. …
Prosecutors have been looking at the nexus between research the Trump campaign commissioned almost immediately after the election to try to prove widespread fraud, public statements that he and his allies made at the time, the fund-raising efforts and the establishment of Save America. ¤ The Washington Post reported earlier on the efforts by the campaign to fund research into claims of fraud and the new round of subpoenas.
The Washington Post reported earlier on the efforts by the campaign to fund research into claims of fraud and the new round of subpoenas. …
Immediately after the election, an adviser to the Trump campaign reached out to Ken Block, the owner of a Rhode Island-based firm, Simpatico Software Systems, to have him evaluate specific allegations of fraud.
Mr. Block ended up researching multiple claims of possible fraud that Mr. Trump’s aides brought to him. He never produced a final report. But each time he investigated a claim, he said in an interview, he found there was nothing to it.
Mr. Block said he had disproved “everything that came in and found no substantive fraud sufficient to overturn an election result.” He said he was isolated from what was taking place within the campaign, as Mr. Trump railed at aides about staying in office and continued to insist he had won an election that he was repeatedly told he had lost.
“I was kept very walled off from all of the insanity,” said Mr. Block, whose firm was paid $735,000, records show. He received a subpoena for documents, but declined in the interview to discuss anything related to the grand jury.
Days after starting to work with Mr. Block and Simpatico, the Trump campaign hired a second firm, the Berkeley Research Group. The federal grand jury has received evidence that Berkeley was hired at the suggestion of Jared Kushner, Mr. Trump’s son-in-law, who was overseeing the political operation.
The grand jury has been asking questions related to whether Mr. Trump was briefed on findings by Berkeley suggesting there had been no widespread fraud.
The company ultimately submitted a report indicating there had been no fraud that would have changed the outcome of the election, and was paid roughly $600,000 for its work. …
During the House Jan. 6 committee’s proceedings last year, several people close to Mr. Trump testified that they had informed him that there had been no fraud sufficient to change the outcome of the voting.Within two weeks of the election, the Trump campaign’s own communications staff drafted an internal report debunking many aspects of a conspiracy theory that voting machines made by Dominion Voting Systems had been hacked and used to flip votes away from Mr. Trump. That report was written before pro-Trump lawyers like Sidney Powell and Rudolph W. Giuliani promoted the false Dominion story at news conferences and on television. …
🐣 RT @RonFilipkowski I swear we had this amazing whistleblower who was going to finally reveal all to the world but we just can’t find him.
[TextLink:] https://twitter.com/RonFilipkowski/status/1651912349035503619?s=20/photo/1
[Text:] 🐣 RT @gatewaypundit Whistleblower Who Was Reportedly About to Reveal “Explosive” Information On the Biden Crime Family’s Corruption Has Disappeared
🐣 RT @alegalnerd As @AWeissmann_ states: Trump’s embracing insurrectionists who violently attacked the Capitol is additional evidence he intended to incite imminent and likely violence–an insurrection–by his speech and tweets on Jan. 6th. 18 USC 2383 beyond a reasonable doubt. [ https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/2383 ]
18 USC 2383: Whoever incites, sets on foot, assists, or engages in any rebellion or insurrection against the authority of the United States or the laws thereof, or gives aid or comfort thereto, shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than ten years, or both; and shall be incapable of holding any office under the United States.
(June 25, 1948, ch. 645, 62 Stat. 808; Pub. L. 103–322, title XXXIII, § 330016(1)(L), Sept. 13, 1994, 108 Stat. 2147.)
⋙ 🐣 RT @DeadlineWH “[Trump’s] own direct actions where he is embracing, literally embracing people who participated, and saying they should be pardoned… he’s making it impossible to come up with any sort of plausible defense to a jury on this” – @AWeissmann_ w/ @NicolleDWallace
WaPo: Republican debt-limit rhetoric isn’t as potent as it used to be https://tinyurl.com/yw4j6yzv The debt limit was never like a spending limit on a credit card. “The money was spent; the question now was whether you were going to obliterate your credit score”
// Americans are increasingly likely to support clean debt-limit hikes
🐣 RT @SpencerGuard The West (and mainly the U.S) should provide Ukraine F-16s, ATACMS, more MLRS and artillery systems, 10x more ammo, more tanks, IFVs, APCs, trucks, and much more.
⋙ 🐣 RT @ @richardbranson As missiles hurtle down on blocks of flats in Kyiv, one thing is so important. As President @ZelenskyyUa said, no one can expect Ukraine to fly and push Russia out with one clipped wing. Give Ukraine whatever wings they need. As quickly as possible.
⋙⋙ TheEconomist: The West should supply Ukraine with F-16s https://tinyurl.com/y3kca8vb
// Or Russian fighter jets may win control of Ukrainian skies
🐣 RT @mbk_center The destruction caused to Mariupol is heartbreaking and infuriating. ¤ There should be no doubt that if Putin is not defeated in Ukraine, he will go further into Europe.
💽 https://twitter.com/mbk_center/status/1652047216360685569?s=20/photo/1
WaPo, George Will: Voters do not want a Biden-Trump rematch. A third option might appeal. https://tinyurl.com/5422evcx
// 4/28/2023;
¤ Link to my comment: https://tinyurl.com/ys5n7zm3
Comment: The 10th Amendment led to the inevitability of two parties as it established the foundation of federalism: the struggle between national versus states’ prerogatives. For a long time, the Republican party was the states’ rights party. That may be in flux now, with Democrats claiming states’ rights to defy national abortion mandates, but the structure is baked in.
Third parties exist mainly as spoilers and helped defeat both Al Gore and Hillary Clinton. No Labels, according to The Lincoln Project, is funded by rich Republicans intending to draw votes away from Biden. The point is this: Third parties don’t win. The question becomes: Who do they cause to lose?
🐣 RT @judgeluttig @tribelaw and I are in complete agreement on Congress’ indisputable constitutional power to legislate ethical standards of conduct that would be binding as to the non-judicial conduct and activities of the Supreme Court.
⋙ 🐣 RT @tribelaw Congress has ample power to enact ethical standards to govern the non-judicial conduct of SCOTUS Justices, derived from the Necessary & Proper Cl of Art I, Sec 8, coupled with Art III, Sec 1’s vesting of the judicial power in one Supreme Court. Such a code would enhance, not erode, the currently endangered independent judiciary.
🐣 RT @ProjectLincoln Desperate times call for desperate measures. Just watch, Fox News isn’t even close to being done wreaking havoc on our democracy. They’ll replace that lying jackass with someone far worse in an effort to get those MAGA ratings back.
⋙ 🐣 RT @BGrueskin The cataclysmic drop in Fox’s 8 pm audience:HALF (not a typo) of the viewers have left in the few days post-Tucker. Via @oliverdarcy https://tinyurl.com/46e5ajnf
◕ https://twitter.com/BGrueskin/status/1651922249241227266?s=20/photo/1
🧵 RT @andrewmichta Since my last post about how democracies need to move urgently to wartime production of weapons and munitions has generated a lot of comments and questions, let me elaborate as to why I believe this should be our top priority, and why every citizen should speak up on this issue.1/7
📌 https://twitter.com/andrewmichta/status/1651984892979281921?s=20
⋙ 🐣 […] RT @andrewmichta I don’t care how much a country spends on defense in GDP percentage terms. I care what it spends it on. If the majority of your country’s defense spending goes to personnel costs, retirement, etc. you are not contributing to allied defense. You bring little to the fight. 5/7
⋙ 🐣 RT @andrewmichta Before it’s too late our gov’ts need to switch to wartime defense production—to build weapons and munitions, not “just-in-time” but “just-in-case.” We must rearm our countries so that should the worst happen democracies will prevail. 7/End
NYT: U.S. Wires Ukraine With Radiation Sensors to Detect Nuclear Blasts https://tinyurl.com/tprzpcss “Public knowledge of such defensive planning, nuclear experts say, can deter Moscow by letting it know that Washington can expose what is called a false-flag operation”
// The federal National Nuclear Security Administration is setting up an advanced network that can verify an attacker’s identity.
🐣 RT @ChuckPfarrer BAKHMUT CITY /1250 UTC 28 APL/ While UKR Lines of Communication & Supply (LOCS) are assessed as secure, heavy fighting is ongoing in the city and adjoining suburbs. RU forces have expanded control of the NW urban area. UKR air defense downed six Russian UAVs of various types.
🌎 https://twitter.com/ChuckPfarrer/status/1651930610099793920?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @ZMiST_Ua Ukraine and the Czech Republic have prepared six projects for the joint production of weapons and ammunition, training aircraft and tank repair with the possibility of full implementation of production works on Ukrainian territory – Petr Pavel
🐣 RT @AdamKinzinger Has anyone noticed the Russia defenders and alt right getting mad when you point out that Russia is losing the war? It’s obviously losing. ¤ Weirdly they are trying to convince us that Russia isn’t losing. There is no metric where Russia is not losing. ¤ Losers like Russia lose.
🧵 RT @generalsvr_en #Putin demands results ¤ Yesterday was a very busy day for a man who resembles the president of #Russia. The Russian president’s double was even used in such a representative international event as the ceremony on the occasion of… 1/11
📌 https://twitter.com/generalsvr_en/status/1651858813400629248?s=20
⋙ 🐣 RT @generalsvr_en The [real] president opened the meeting with the military with the words: “It’s almost midnight, but still no Artemovsk (#Putin calls #Bakhmut like that). Where the fuck is Artemovsk? Has it already been liberated?” Representatives of the military leadership assured him that… 4/11
⋙ 🐣 RT @generalsvr_en all imaginable and unimaginable efforts were being made to ensure that Artemovsk was liberated in the next few days, but that they could “guarantee” its liberation only by May 9. #Putin asked what was happening in other directions and received a vague answer that… 5/11
⋙ 🐣 RT @generalsvr_en This is affecting his perception of reality. He is no longer immersed in the state of affairs at the front but only demands results. The situation in #Russia is of little interest him. All the problems, in his opinion, will soon become a real boon for the country. 11/11
Informatión: Defense confirms: Russia had special vessel near Nord Stream’s detonation point https://tinyurl.com/tm6t5mu4 “The…special craft SS-750, which has a mini-submarine on board, was photographed [4 days before] near the place where the Nord Stream pipes were sabotaged”
// [Tr] The Russian special craft SS-750, which has a mini-submarine on board, was photographed near the place where the Nord Stream pipes were sabotaged, the Defense Command confirms
The Russian special vessel SS-750 was near the Nord Stream pipes four days before the pipes were blown up on September 26 last year. The special vessel is designed to carry out operations under the sea and has a mini submarine of the AS-26 Priz type on board.
The Norwegian Defense Command confirms in a response to a document inspection that 26 photos of the Russian vessel were taken from a Danish patrol boat that was in the area east of Bornholm on 22 September 2022. ¤ “It’s incredibly interesting. The SS-750 is a special vessel that is designed precisely for underwater operations,’ says the Swedish researcher, Russia expert and intelligence expert Joakim von Braun.
🖼 WaPo: Newly released White House photos capture the day bin Laden was killed https://tinyurl.com/45jf5tj5
⭕ 27 Apr 2023
NYT: Joe Biden and the Struggle for America’s Soul https://tinyurl.com/2pauhn4e “The contest between Biden and Trumpism is less Democrat versus Republican or liberal versus conservative than it is between an essentially moral vision and an essentially amoral one”
🐣 RT @harrylitman We’re so close to events that some times it’s hard to see their significance. The former VPOTUS just testified in a criminal investigation of his former POTUS. That is basically breathtaking.
🐣 Narcan should be in every medicine cabinet and widely available free of charge ~ right alongside “Plan B” which is an emergency contraceptive (not an abortifacient), also available free
🐣 RT @ukraine_world The total cost of restoring Ukraine, according to the latest joint estimate with the EU, is 411 billion US dollars, and this figure is growing with each shelling by Russia, — the Head of the Budget Committee Roksolana Pidlasa. #RussianWarCrimes
🐣 RT @BLaw (Bloomberg) US District Judge Mark Walker has previously shown little sympathy for Gov. DeSantis’s policy objectives in the past.
⋙ Bloomberg: Disney Suit Against DeSantis Assigned to Obama-Appointed Judge https://tinyurl.com/45jx869v
// Walt Disney Co.’s lawsuit against Ron DeSantis alleging political retaliation was assigned to a federal judge who has frequently ruled against the [governor?]
🐣 RT @RepAdamSchiff First, Trump’s lawyers ask House Judiciary Republicans to interfere in the NYC prosecution of Trump. ¤ Now, they want House Intel to interfere with DOJ’s investigation of obstruction at Mar-a-Lago. ¤ Both ask Congress to abuse its authority to protect Trump. ¤ Neither will succeed.
🐣 📊 RT @RpsAgainstTrump Most Americans support common-sense gun safety regulations. ¤ Congress MUST act NOW.
// Fox News poll
◕ https://twitter.com/RpsAgainstTrump/status/1651808554641137665?s=20/photo/1
87% BACKGROUND CHECKS FOR GUNS
81% ENFORCE EXISTING GUN LAWS
81% LEGAL AGE 21 TO BUY ALL GUNS
80% REQUIRE MENTAL HEALTH CHECKS
80% FLAG PEOPLE DANGER TO SELF
77% REQUIRE 30-DAY WAITING PERIOD
(APRIL 21:24, 2023; REGISTERED VOTERS)
⋙ 🐣 Wish list: ● Ban assault rifles
● ban high capacity magazines
● ban high caliber ammunition
● require fingerprint tech to assure gun is used only by authorized user(s)
🐣 RT @QuoteDigging “In our nation’s 246 year history there has never been an individual who is a greater threat to our Republic than Donald Trump.” —Dick Cheney
WaPo: Conservative dissenters block abortion limits in Nebraska, South Carolina https://tinyurl.com/yjdfwdpc “A near-total ban on abortion failed in South Carolina, just hours before a six-week ban fizzled in Nebraska. Abortion remains legal in both states until 22 weeks of pregnancy”
🧵 RT @MarkHertling A few folks suggested I’ve been “bold” in some of my predictions accompanying the analysis I’ve provided on @CNN regarding this conflict. ¤ Beyond tactical assessments, there are 2 primary reasons I’ve said Ukraine would win this fight. ¤ Here’s a short on why I say this. 1/17
📌 https://twitter.com/MarkHertling/status/1518604757149143040?s=20
[ThreadReader:] https://tinyurl.com/ym38kfvj
🐣 RT @anno1540 Stoltenberg about Zelensky’s conversation with Xi Jinping ¤ “I welcome the telephone conversation between President Zelenskyi and President Xi. I think it is also important for China to better understand Ukraine’s prospects. This does not change the fact that China failed to condemn Russia’s illegal war, illegal invasion of Ukraine ,” said the general Secretary of NATO. ¤ Details: [Ru:] https://tinyurl.com/nc4yerwu
WaPo: A second firm hired by Trump campaign found no evidence of election fraud https://tinyurl.com/mm2h3e49 The firm, “Simpatico Software Systems, studied more than a dozen voter fraud theories and allegations for Trump’s campaign in late 2020 and found they were ‘all false’”
// The founder of the company has been interviewed by federal prosecutors investigating the former president’s efforts to overturn the 2020 results
Former president Trump’s campaign quietly commissioned a second firm to study election fraud claims in the weeks after the 2020 election, and the founder of the firm was recently questioned by the Justice Department about his work disproving the claims.
Ken Block, founder of the firm Simpatico Software Systems, studied more than a dozen voter fraud theories and allegations for Trump’s campaign in late 2020 and found they were “all false,” he said in an interview with The Washington Post.
“No substantive voter fraud was uncovered in my investigations looking for it, nor was I able to confirm any of the outside claims of voter fraud that I was asked to look at,” he said. “Every fraud claim I was asked to investigate was false.” …
Federal records show the Trump 2020 campaign paid Block’s firm more than $750,000 in six different payments. The first for $390,000 came three days after the election, records show, and the final payment came around Thanksgiving of that year. The payments were labeled “Recount.”
Separately, prosecutors have interviewed multiple employees from the Berkeley Research Group in recent weeks, another Trump-paid firm that produced a 29-page report ultimately undermining many of Trump’s fraud claims, according to three people familiar with the matter. Berkeley’s study contradicted claims made by Trump and his advisers that there were extensive numbers of dead voters and cases of fraud in states such as Georgia and Nevada. …
Prosecutors are trying to show that Trump and his advisers definitively knew — or had good reason to believe — that their myriad fraud claims were false as they continued to spread and fundraise off the claims. The claims ultimately convinced many voters the election was stolen and inspired rioters to storm the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. The falsehoods also brought in more than $250 million to Trump and his allies.
Key to building such a case, experts say, is proving that Trump and other advisers making the claims publicly did not believe them or had evidence to know they were false. …
🐣 📊 RT @accountable_us NEW POLL: 4 out of 5 Americans support raising taxes on the wealthy to reduce the deficit instead of cutting Social Security & Medicare programs. ¤ @SpeakerMcCarthy & @HouseGOP, your MAGA Debt Default Plan isn’t what the American people want. ¤ via @NavigatorSurvey
◕ https://twitter.com/accountable_us/status/1651618503802212354?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @davidfrum It’s not only Biden, down-ballot Ds are headed for big wins in 2024 as well – Trump’s consistent unpopularity plus state GOP surveillance and harassment of women plus strong Biden economy = MAGA doom
⋙ TheAtlantic, David Frum: The Coming Biden Blowout https://tinyurl.com/ydc8s2nb
// Republicans thought about running without Trump in 2024—but lost their nerve. They’re heading for electoral disaster again.
🧵 RT @generalsvr_en #Putin’s health problems ¤ The #Kremlin’s attempts to saturate the information space with news about the hectic work of #Russian President Vladimir Putin continued. Thus, official sources of the Kremlin say that yesterday Putin had two telephone conversations:… 1/10
📌 https://twitter.com/generalsvr_en/status/1651512350590095362?s=20
KyivPost: EXPLAINED: Global Reaction to Zelensky’s Call With China’s President Xi https://tinyurl.com/ydp8rz8w
// The US and the EU lauded the call, but Moscow reacted angrily and accused Kyiv of undermining any peace attempts, more than a year after it launched its illegal invasion.
⭕ 26 Apr 2023
🐣 RT @nytimes Breaking News: The U.S. will cooperate with South Korea on nuclear weapons in return for an agreement that Seoul will not pursue its own nuclear arsenal.
⋙ NYT: In Turn to Deterrence, Biden Vows ‘End’ of North Korean Regime if It Attacks https://tinyurl.com/597h9t84
// During a state visit at the White House, Mr. Biden and President Yoon Suk Yeol of South Korea sought to bolster America’s nuclear umbrella guarding against threats from the North.
🐣 RT @wartranslated Every day, Prigozhin comes up with a new mood for himself, anywhere between victorious and defeatist. Today, he’s once again hysterical: in a 5-minute audio rant he declares that the Ukrainian offensive is inevitable, will start after 2nd May when the soil dries up, and that Wagner will last 2-3 more weeks in the current conditions.
He goes on to accuse the military of holding up ammunition (again) which results in a 5-time increase in casualties among the mercenaries. Prigozhin says those responsible will be answering before the family members of mobiks who will suffer when the AFU start moving. ¤ The transcription of the audio recording is below. …
[TextLink:] https://twitter.com/wartranslated/status/1651306010907115552?s=20/photo/1 -3
1/ What is happening today with the AFU counter-offensive? Today, it’s raining. On 2 May, the last rain should pass. Another week is needed for the wind to dry the soil. After this, the AFU will be ready to move. Whether they will do it on 9 May, in order to “ruin the celebration”, perhaps yes, or not. It’s only in Russia that is accustomed to do everything on 8 March or 9 May. The AFU are fully ready to go and cut the flanks. No one was covering our flanks. All the talks about the prevented attempt of deploying reserves in Bakhmut is complete bollocks. Not a single serviceman made a single shot. No one is giving ammunitions to us, neither to them. The criminal command to not give ammo, the ammo is accumulated in stockpiles in droves, like I said before. The number of people in Wagner PMC is drying up. Dead, wounded, and those who left after the end of contract. We’re preparing the new reserves. We won’t be throwing in new реорle until fully prepare them, until they become the fighters ready to defend the interests of the state.
2/ In general, the Wagner PMC completed its historical mission, but will continue doing so until the last fighter. As I said before, we grinding down the AFU reserves. Today, well-prepared enemy units are thrown to Bakhmut. All day there is Polish speech. If previously I said there were few mercenaries, now there’s a huge number of them. Ukrainian spetsnaz. The bloodiest of battles is ongoing. We are not given shells, and we’re doing everything possible with the minimal amount that we have today. But again. These scumbags making this decision, they must answer before the mothers of the deceased, because instead of one, several people die. Ratio of 1 to 5. Instead of one dying assault a building, five are dying, because there are no shells. We have nothing to destroy the enemy artillery with. The lastnames of these scumbags are on paper. When the time comes, the Russian people will ask this question. I will confidently answer it. Conclusion: the Ukrainian offensive is inevitable. The betrayal within the Russian Federation is taking place. We’re not allowed to create defence and advance further. But! We will advance at any cost, exclusively to drag down the AFU army and disrupt this offensive.
3/ Thanks to our actions, the rest of formations along the whole frontline territory are able entrench, can prepare for this AFU counter-offensive. And they can advance themselves, both on Sloviansk and Kramatorsk. Why they are not doing it, is a question that will be dealt with by military counter-intelligence and the FSB, in their time. What is happening today is a crime before Russia and the Russian people. And this cannot be left unattented. Criminals must take responsibility. Every shell you didn’t give = some fighter has died. And you will have to explain to their wives, mothers and children why you killed them. Because you were sitting like roosters on a perch and held this ammunition in your pockets, not allowing them to the army. And when the Ukrainians will be advancing, the mobilised will also ask you this question: where is our ammunition? And then they’ll ask, where’s our leadership, our commanders? And where is this Rubylovka [street] where they are relaxing all day long? Once again, the question: crime against Russia. Today, a crime against the Russian Federation is taking place. We will last another 2-3 weeks until the last bullet remains in the rifle. And then the machinators must bear responsibility for what is happening on the frontline.
WaPo: Conservative dissenters block abortion limits in Nebraska, South Carolina https://tinyurl.com/yjdfwdpc “A near-total ban on abortion failed in South Carolina, just hours before a six-week ban fizzled in Nebraska. Abortion remains legal in both states until 22 weeks of pregnancy”
WaPo: Pence appears before Jan. 6 grand jury in Trump special counsel probe https://tinyurl.com/34evrtcn “Despite his appearance at court, Pence — a key potential rival to Trump for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination — has positioned himself as a reluctant witness”
// The former vice president received a subpoena in February in special counsel Jack Smith’s probe of Donald Trump’s efforts to overturn 2020 election results
NYT: On Eve of Trial, Discovery of Carlson Texts Set Off Crisis Atop Fox https://tinyurl.com/ycyrvetc “One person briefed on the contents of the redacted material said one of the messages was particularly offensive, adding to the concern at the top of the company”
// Private messages sent by Tucker Carlson that had been redacted in legal filings showed him making highly offensive remarks that went beyond the comments of his prime-time show.
TheGuardian: Trump lawyers say Mar-a-Lago boxes contained foreign leader briefings https://tinyurl.com/mwdap59a
// New letter sent to Congress attempts to paint Trump’s retention of classified-marked documents at Florida home as inadvertent
[Document:] 4/26/2023 letter: https://tinyurl.com/3rtd3wst
[…] But the 10-page letter https://tinyurl.com/3rtd3wst that was sent to the House and Senate intelligence committees also revealed the order in which the documents were placed, as well as their contents, inside 15 boxes the National Archives struggled to retrieve for months and precipitated the criminal investigation.
The investigation into Trump’s potential retention of national defense information and obstruction of justice led by special counsel Jack Smith is ongoing, though it may be near its end given prosecutors have subpoenaed almost everyone who conceivably could have knowledge of the matter.
Trump’s two main lawyers involved in the documents investigation – Tim Parlatore and Jim Trusty – in late December last year formally asked the National Archives for access to the 15 boxes that Trump had returned through the relevant provision in the Presidential Records Act.
The request was granted several weeks later, and Parlatore and Trusty went to one of the top floors in the main National Archives building overlooking the National Mall and started going through the boxes, which they found preserved just as when Trump had sent them up from his Mar-a-Lago resort.
The boxes, according to the letter, contained a mixture of documents from the White House that were grouped by date and included newspapers, magazines, notes, letters and daily presidential schedules.
Where there had been classified documents – which was what prompted the National Archives to first alert the justice department to start an investigation last year – officials had inserted placeholder pages that described the document that had been removed, the letter said.
“That allowed Parlatore and Trusty to discern what the documents were, as well as what other materials in the boxes were in proximity … The vast majority of placeholder inserts refer to briefings for phone calls with foreign leaders that were located near the schedule for those calls.”
The letter then described the ensuing criminal investigation as “misguided” because, in their eyes, the way the boxes were packed was indicative of White House staff pulling all documents into the boxes during a chaotic “pack-out” process at the end of the Trump administration.
Left unsaid was that the criminal investigation has evolved since the initial referral. ¤ The obstruction part of the investigation is centered on Trump’s incomplete compliance with a subpoena last May that demanded the return of any classified-marked documents in his possession. That was after documents he returned earlier to the National Archives included 200 that were classified. Last June, Corcoran searched Mar-a-Lago and produced about 30 documents with classified markings to the justice department, and had another Trump lawyer, Christina Bobb, sign a certification that attested to compliance with the subpoena “based on the information provided to me”. But the justice department developed evidence that more documents that were marked as classified remained at the resort, according to court filings, and when the FBI searched Mar-a-Lago in August they found 101 documents marked as classified in a storage room and in Trump’s office.
Last month, Corcoran was ordered by a senior US judge to testify and hand over his notes to the grand jury hearing evidence in the case, piercing his attorney-client privilege protections through the crime-fraud exception because Trump might have used his advice in furtherance of a crime.
The special counsel is also investigating whether Trump violated the Espionage Act, and prosecutors have recently asked witnesses whether Trump ever showed a map to donors or a book author, a person familiar with the matter said.
🐣 RT @costareports From @FaceTheNation on Sunday
⋙ 🐣 RT @FaceTheNation (Apr 23) “We’ll obey the law, we’ll tell the truth,” fmr. VP Mike Pence says about his expected testimony with the grand jury investigating the Jan 6. attack on the Capitol, which is probing former Pres. Trump’s past pressure campaign on Pence.
💽 https://twitter.com/costareports/status/1651401220983074825?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @TimothyDSnyder Russia’s most important propagandist was deplatformed. And so now Russian platforms are falling over themselves to offer him a job.
🐣 RT @BarbMcQuade With court ruling that Pence just testify at GJ, Jack Smith is inching closer to completing his investigation.
⋙ WaPo: Trump can’t stop Pence from testifying to Jan. 6 grand jury, court rules https://tinyurl.com/42zupc7a
🐣 RT @chrislhayes I mean this quite seriously when I say this is the race the country deserves.
⋙ 🐣 📊 RT @USA_Polling Presidential Polling:
Biden (D): 49%
Trump (I): 26%
DeSantis (R): 25%
Ipsos / Apr 24, 2023 / n=729
🐣 RT @big_cases (Automated) New filing: “U.S. v. Teixeira (pentagon leak)”
Doc #19: Exhibit ¤ PDF: https://tinyurl.com/yeynpfrf
[TextLink:] https://twitter.com/big_cases/status/1651402371032031232?s=20/photo/1 -3
🐣 RT @TheStudyofWar NEW: #Russia appears to be continuing a deliberate depopulation campaign in occupied areas of #Ukraine in order to facilitate the repopulation of Ukrainian territories with Russians. w/ @criticalthreats: https://isw.pub/UkrWar042623
💽 🐣 RT @ DecodingFoxNews This is the full segment from PBS. It’s exceptional. It includes an extended interview with Brian Stelter. Stelter has covered Fox News for years. ¤ What Tucker Carlson’s departure could mean for the future of Fox and the… https://youtu.be/FxDMxk1_vNc via @YouTube
WaPo: For the Murdochs, Tucker Carlson became more trouble than he was worth https://tinyurl.com/y7ae2xrw Murdoch “was disturbed by Carlson’s stance on Ukraine … These stances had made Carlson a star on Russian state-controlled TV”
// Precise reasons for the top-rated host’s dismissal remain clouded, but the move reflected a reversal for the exasperated family that once championed him
These stances had made Carlson a star on Russian state-controlled TV. But they had drawn furious blowback from powerful Republicans who see U.S. support for Ukraine as a bulwark in a fight for freedom and democracy — some of whom had Murdoch’s ear. After one such on-air segment in mid-March, Murdoch joined a Fox newsroom meeting to loudly challenge Carlson’s message, according to people familiar with the meeting, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of newsroom confidentiality policies.
WaPo: Disney sues Gov. Ron DeSantis, alleging political retaliation https://tinyurl.com/2687vm3d “DeSantis’s poll numbers have slipped in recent weeks and Republican opponents are seizing on the feud to cast him as a zealot bent on punishing a private enterprise”
// The Florida governor is working with the legislature to overturn the entertainment giant’s latest oversight agreement
🐣 RT @lyssafella Shocked. Shocked I tell you!
⋙ 🐣 RT @7Smite4 Within hours of his firing, Tucker Carlson was offered a job by Russian TV. ¤ Yesterday, the Russian foreign minister felt compelled to chime in. ¤ The. RUSSIAN. FOREIGN. MINISTER. ¤ (Btw, he didn’t mention Don Lemon) ¤ Tucker Carlson is 💯 a Russian asset.
💽 [tr] https://twitter.com/lyssafella/status/1651223619534745600?s=20/photo/1
💙 🧵 RT @MechINF126 Yesterday @RepJoeWilson R and @RepCohen introduced House Res.322 – Expressing the sense of the House of Rep. on Ukrainian victory. ¤ This thread will help US supporters of understand the leg process and ways to directly help this resolution gain public and political support.
📌 https://twitter.com/MechINF126/status/1651229885103259653?s=20
⋙ 🐣 RT @MechINF126 So first, the steps to pass a simple resolution in the house
1. Introduction
2. Committee on Foreign Affairs-Debate and vote
3. Full House debate and vote
4. House passage-
The link below will allow you to track the process and support of this Resolution
⋙ https://tinyurl.com/3kyhks38
🧵 RT @P_Kallioniemi In today’s #vatniksoup, I’ll discuss Russian online information operations, and how they are perceived around the world. In the West, we often perceive this propaganda only targeted at us, which is far from the truth. 1/17
📌 https://twitter.com/P_Kallioniemi/status/1651208606262390784?s=20
🐣 RT @Gerashchenko_en “This is going to end in hell”: Russian oligarchs believe that Russian authorities are leading the country into abyss. ¤ While the Kremlin pretends that everything is under control, the oligarchs will soon start talking openly about the upcoming catastrophe.
💽 https://twitter.com/Gerashchenko_en/status/1651197159054749696?s=20/photo/1
💙 🐣 RT @ZelenskyyUa I had a long and meaningful phone call with 🇨🇳 President Xi Jinping. I believe that this call, as well as the appointment of Ukraine’s ambassador to China, will give a powerful impetus to the development of our bilateral relations.
🐣 RT @ @jmart Maybe the most significant element of Carlson’s firing, at least if ya talk to GOP hawks and DoD, which @laraseligman did:
⋙ Politico, Lara Seligman: ‘Good riddance’: Pentagon officials cheer Tucker Carlson’s ouster https://tinyurl.com/2t3hfpxu
// The former Fox host ridiculed top DoD leaders over Biden-era policies.
The tension between the former cable host and Pentagon leadership isn’t new. Carlson drew the ire of top DoD officials early in the Biden administration for personal attacks on a number of military leaders, as well as ridiculing the armed forces’ efforts to increase diversity. A slew of conservative leaders quickly followed Carlson’s lead, giving rise to a small but vocal minority that to this day continues to hammer DoD officials, saying they’re focusing personnel policies at the expense of preparing for war. The Pentagon says only a small percentage of troops’ time is spent on diversity training. ¤ Most memorably, Carlson’s remarks disparaging female service members in March 2021 prompted a rare rebuke from then-Pentagon spokesperson John Kirby.
🐣 RT @Gerashchenko_en Prigozhin on the current perception of the future role of PMCs in Russia: (1) they can play some role in domestic politics, (2) someday there will be a struggle for power and everyone needs to have their own private army. [Vid Ru]
🔄 🐣 Biden is 80 and sane. Trump is 76 and nuts. ¤ Imagine knocking a 60 year old vs a 56 year old. ¤ It’s absurd.
NYT, Alexander Baunov: I Wrote a Book About the End of Dictatorships, and It Became a Best Seller in Russia https://tinyurl.com/2srfr693 ‘The book is not about Russia or Vladimir Putin. It’s about how Spain, Portugal and Greece became democracies, returning to the global fold’
⭕ 25 Apr 2023
WaPo Editorial: Biden is right. We’re still fighting a battle for the soul of America. https://tinyurl.com/4jythfsa “More than most, this election will be a referendum on who we are — and who we want to be — as Americans”
DefenseOne: How Tucker Carlson Helped Turn Americans Against the Military https://tinyurl.com/mrx5zawf … and Ukraine
// The partisan firebrand told viewers that uniformed leaders were out to weaken the armed forces and the country itself.
🐣 RT @mcspocky Jack Smith is NOT playing around!
[TextLink:] https://twitter.com/mcspocky/status/1651058169035264000?s=20/photo/1
[Text:] Special Counsel Jack Smith has asked former Fox producer Abby Grossman’s lawyer for recordings – some of which include new audio of Ted Cruz plotting a coup
and Rudy Giuliani admitting there wasn’t any election fraud. This Is Huge!
📊 WaPo, Marc Thiessen (R): If voters choose between Trump and Biden, Republicans won’t like the results https://tinyurl.com/msjk7bja WSJ poll (by a pro-Trump pollster): Among voters who want neither Biden or Trump to run, “Biden leads Trump by a massive 39 points”‼️
As he announces his reelection campaign, President Biden is extremely vulnerable. According to NBC News polling out this week, his disapproval rating is at 54 percent (just two points shy of his all-time high) while a whopping 70 percent of Americans say they don’t want him to run again. With those numbers, his campaign should be politically dead-on-arrival.
But here’s the problem for Republicans: Sixty percent of voters also don’t want Donald Trump to run again. Americans are sending a clear message to both parties: They want new candidates to choose from in 2024. As Republican pollster Bill McInturff, who helped conduct the NBC poll, explains, “people do not want a Biden-Trump rematch.” But it looks increasingly likely the country will get exactly that.
A Wall Street Journal poll (conducted by pro-Trump super PAC pollster Tony Fabrizio) suggests the answer: It found that among voters who disapprove of both Trump and Biden, Biden leads Trump by a massive 39 points: 54 percent to 15 percent. Clearly, swing voters who dislike Biden dislike Trump even more.
To beat Biden, Republicans need the votes of the 54 percent majority who disapprove of his performance in office. And Trump appears to be the one candidate who can’t deliver those votes. If Republicans force these voters to choose between Trump and Biden, they will push these voters into a position they don’t want: picking Biden. ¤ Trump is effectively Biden’s “get out of jail free” card …
YahooNews: Exclusive: House lawmakers to introduce resolution for bold Ukraine victory terms https://tinyurl.com/45vr25pc “[T]he resolution must first be approved by the House Foreign Affairs Committee, … chaired by Rep. Mike McCaul, R-Texas, a strong supporter of helping Ukraine”
At a time when many Americans, and some of the legislators who represent them in Washington, are growing weary of supporting the defense of Ukraine, a new bipartisan House resolution to be introduced Tuesday calls on the United States to support an outright victory over Russia.
“We must not repeat the error of Sept. 1, 1939,” the resolution’s chief sponsor, Rep. Joe Wilson, R-S.C., told Yahoo News, referencing Adolf Hitler’s invasion of Poland, which followed desperate efforts to appease Nazi Germany and prevent a second world war.
Notably, the resolution, which requires review from the House Foreign Affairs Committee before a vote from the full chamber, “affirms that it is the policy of the United States to see Ukraine victorious against the invasion and restored to its internationally recognized 1991 borders.”
The return to that year’s borders is significant because 1991 marked the collapse of the Soviet Union and the emergence of an independent Ukraine that included the Crimean Peninsula.
Russian President Vladimir Putin seized Crimea during an initial invasion of Ukraine in 2014, which the United States and many European nations condemned but did not stop. The Kremlin also backed Russian separatists in Luhansk and Donetsk, two regions in a part of eastern Ukraine known as the Donbas. Russia has since fully annexed those and two other provinces, in a move that has widely been deemed illegal.
Returning to 1991 borders is unrealistic, some experts say, especially since retaking Crimea would likely require an amphibious assault of the sort for which the Ukrainian forces are not equipped.
“They would be pressed to retake all of Donbas; Crimea would take a miracle,” said Ben Friedman, chief analyst at the Washington, D.C., think tank Defense Priorities, which tends to be skeptical of intervention-heavy foreign policy. “It certainly seems unlikely that anything short of a failed offensive will make this clear.”
But for Ukrainians, anything short of a full expulsion of Russian forces is untenable. “All other half measures will lead to the collapse of both international law and the global security system, and the decline of the Western world,” Mykhailo Podolyak, a senior adviser to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, told Yahoo News.
Wilson’s resolution is co-sponsored by Rep. Steve Cohen, D-Tenn. They two men head the Helsinki Commission, a congressional panel founded in 1976 to help keep the Soviet Union abiding by its international agreements. Since the collapse of the USSR, the commission has focused on Russia, which under Putin has sought to expand the so-called Russian world by reclaiming former Soviet regions and republics.
“The only way to maintain peace is through strength,” Wilson said. The phrase represents conservative icon Ronald Reagan’s foreign policy, which most historians credit with helping to end the Cold War. Today, however, the GOP’s isolationist strain is stronger than it was then, and a growing number of Republicans say Ukraine is not worth defending.
In addition to affirming support for victory, the resolution calls for Ukraine to join NATO, a move that Russia would certainly consider a major provocation. In addition, Russia is to pay reparations, and Kremlin officials are to be tried for war crimes.
Podolyak called the resolution “brilliant” and praised the House for calling Russia to account. “Perhaps the most important feature of Western civilizational culture is the ability to analyze past experience and acknowledge mistakes,” he told Yahoo News. ¤ A parallel resolution in the Senate appears to be garnering support.
Skeptics worry that prolonging the war, even if for sound reasons, will result in only more suffering on the battlefield and among Ukraine’s population. Pushing for a full victory, instead of merely a partial one, could extend the war for years. The battle for Crimea could be especially brutal, given the peninsula’s cultural and geopolitical significance for Russia.
“If neither side can win outright — which I think we can all agree is not going to happen — then it’s sort of not clear what the path to ending the war is, absent some change in policy that helps both sides overcome the impediments to negotiation,” RAND Corporation senior defense analyst Miranda Priebe told Yahoo News earlier this year. ¤ The new resolution explicitly counters this line of thinking by both defining victory and tethering the United States to that outcome.
“This bipartisan resolution demonstrates the wide support in Congress for Ukrainian victory. We all need to move beyond ‘as long as it takes’ and embrace ‘Ukrainian victory’ as our rallying cry in order for Ukraine to win the war this year,” a congressional staffer familiar with the contents of the resolution and willing to speak only on the condition of anonymity told Yahoo News. “This is the strategy that experts around D.C. have been calling for. It’s time to stop hedging and get Ukraine what it needs to win.”
When the invasion began, most members of both parties readily agreed to send billions of dollars in weaponry to Ukraine. Lately, however, both progressive Democrats and conservative Republicans have expressed hesitation with the scope of American contributions to the Ukrainian war effort.
A chief figure in stoking anti-Ukraine sentiment has been Tucker Carlson, the primetime Fox News host who was ousted on Monday morning. The program he hosted was watched by 3 million people nightly and served as a frequent stop for Republicans critical of the war; fellow Republicans who did support the effort dreaded being the target of a Carlson segment.
Democrats have generally supported continuing to arm Ukraine, but the House Progressive Caucus sent Biden a letter in October asking him to negotiate a settlement to the war. After heavy criticism from fellow Democrats, the letter was withdrawn and blamed on a staff error.
Last week, a bicameral group of Republicans sent Biden a similar letter. House members, including Reps. Matt Gaetz, R-Fla., and Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga., have vowed to “audit” Ukraine aid while also promulgating conspiracy theories about the conflict that mirror Russian misinformation.
Passage of the new measure is no sure thing. Before a full House vote, the resolution must first be approved by the House Foreign Affairs Committee. The panel is chaired by Rep. Mike McCaul, R-Texas, a strong supporter of helping Ukraine. His office did not respond to a Yahoo News request for comment.
🐣 RT @JoeBiden Every generation has a moment where they have had to stand up for democracy. To stand up for their fundamental freedoms. I believe this is ours. ¤ That’s why I’m running for reelection as President of the United States. Join us. Let’s finish the job. http://JoeBiden.com
💽 https://twitter.com/JoeBiden/status/1650801827728986112?s=20/photo/1
// Biden 2024 announcement video
🐣 RT @MSNBC As Biden eyes a second term, Republicans struggle to find anything wrong with his actual record. Instead, they peddled an attack ad filled with fake images referring to events that haven’t actually occurred. (via MaddowBlog)
💽 ⋙ MSNBC, Steve Benen: RNC accidentally makes an important point in new anti-Biden ad https://tinyurl.com/3mkwsfzc
// Joe Biden’s actual record wasn’t scary, so the RNC found it necessary to peddle literally fake, made-up images referring to events that have not occurred.
💽 // Also, a nice video from Morning Joe about Joe Biden’s calmness
🐣 RT @bfry1981 Joe Biden isn’t just a better candidate than any Republican for president, he’s also better than any other Democrat or independent. Dark Brandon is a historic beast
↥ ↧
🐣 RT @bfry1981 I’m 40. Never in my lifetime has a U.S. president so united the West or faced such a dire foreign policy crisis as Joe Biden, let alone orchestrated our most hostile enemy suffering its worst defeats since 1942. And all astoundingly while facing historic crises at home.
WaPo: Audio of Cruz’s talk with Fox host sheds light on plan to challenge 2020 results https://tinyurl.com/kcayvf4n The recording “sheds new light on the scope of Cruz’s scheming to assist Donald Trump in overturning Biden’s victory”
💽 WaPo: Before Tucker Carlson’s Fox rise, an on-air ‘brawl’ led to his CNN firing https://tinyurl.com/2ajpv5v3 “Here is what I wanted to tell you guys: Stop. Stop, stop, stop hurting America.” Jon Stewart said, “You have a responsibility to the public discourse, and you’ve failed miserably”
📔 CREW (Nov 2022): REPORT: Fulton County, Georgia’s Trump Investigation: An Analysis of the Reported Facts and Applicable Law [pdf] https://tinyurl.com/bde45jzb 304p
// by Norman Eisen, Donald Ayer,Noah Bookbinder, Gwen Keyes Fleming, Colby Galliher, Joshua Matz, Debra Perlin, and Jason Powell
⋙ Intro: https://tinyurl.com/yc3c82y3
[TextLink:] https://twitter.com/Auriandra/status/1650888634143211528?s=20/photo/1
We conclude that Trump’s post-election conduct in Georgia leaves him at substantial risk of possible state charges predicated on multiple crimes. These charges potentially include:
● criminal solicitation to commit election fraud;
● intentional interference with performance of election duties;
● conspiracy to commit election fraud;
● criminal solicitation;
● and state Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (RICO) Act violationsOur conclusions are based entirely on publicly available reporting and evidence, including the recording of Trump’s call to Raffensperger, the false electoral certificates the purported Trump electors issued to Congress and the National Archives, first-hand congressional testimony that Trump and White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows tried to influence the Georgia election, and the voluminous relevant evidence introduced into the public record by the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the U.S. Capitol (the “January 6 Committee”).6 Our view is anchored by a close reading of the relevant portions of Georgia’s legal code, an unpacking of the extant case law defining the stated crimes, and a searching examination of the main likely defenses. The latter pose some serious questions but (based upon what is currently known of the facts) appear to be unavailing.
⭕ 24 Apr 2023
WaPo Editorial: A look at the US pandemic response reached an unsettling conclusion https://tinyurl.com/2fpvevnx “There is no US national public health operational capability — practically all of it is in a patchwork quilt of states & localities, an anachronism from an earlier age”
🧵 RT @lawofruby Folks have been asking me, since this story broke, “Why is Fani Willis waiting until at least July 11 to announce her charging decision?” That’s a reasonable question–and I *think* there’s a logical explanation. 1/
📌 https://twitter.com/lawofruby/status/1650618118174121984?s=20
🐣 RT @gtconway3d If DA Willis is putting out a red-alert all-hands-on-deck memo to law enforcement like this, you can be reasonably confident the caption on the indictment isn’t going to be “State v. Giuliani et al.” or “State v. Meadows et al.” The lead defendant will probably be someone else.
⋙ 🐣 RT @TamarHallerman BREAKING: Fulton County DA Willis say she will announce this summer whether former President Donald Trump and his allies will be charged with crimes related to alleged interference in Georgia’s 2020 election #gapol
⋙⋙ AJC: EXCLUSIVE: DA says indictment announcement coming this summer in Trump probe https://tinyurl.com/45xckspe
🐣 RT @ZelenskyyUa,This is exactly what we are fighting for for the whole of Ukraine – for all our children, all Ukrainian men and women in every part of our country to feel free, enjoy freedom and realize themselves in life as they want. And this will happen. Ukraine will defend its freedom.
🐣 RT @GicAriana Brilliantly done. I only wish it could reach the same audience American audience which lapped up the Kremlin propaganda disinfo narratives and anti-Ukrainian hatred parroted by Carlson for such a long time. He may be finished at Fox, but the damage done isn’t.
⋙ 🐣 RT @AccountableGOP We present one and a half minutes of Tucker Carlson parroting Vladimir Putin. New video from RAP:
💽 https://twitter.com/GicAriana/status/1650688363073093632?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @RonFilipkowski Trump reaction minutes after learning of Tucker’s firing: “I’m shocked, I’m surprised .. That was something, that’s a big one .. Over the last year or so he’s been terrific to me.”
💽 https://twitter.com/RonFilipkowski/status/1650667708097126400?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @kaitlancollins “I’m not a candidate, so we’ll see if and when that changes,” Gov. DeSantis, who is in Japan right now, says when asked about polls that show him falling behind Trump.
💽 https://twitter.com/kaitlancollins/status/1650445614486892547?s=20/photo/1
// DeSantis bobblehead video
↥ ↧
🐣 RT @ProjectLincoln “[DeSantis] does not have the talent. That is, a talent to interact with human beings…. Trump went around the state of Florida this week and got all but one of the congressional endorsements that came out.” – @TheRickWilson on The Breakdown.
💽 https://twitter.com/ProjectLincoln/status/1650632045977128962?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @MuellerSheWrote ¤ This was the propaganda film played at the Ellipse before trump spoke. Remind you of anything?
💽 https://twitter.com/MuellerSheWrote/status/1650353425291571201?s=20/photo/1
// Jan 6 video insurrection
🐣 RT @ProjectLincoln So many lies, so little time. In memoriam of Tucker Carlson & Fox News, 2009-2023.
💽 https://twitter.com/ProjectLincoln/status/1650587143360905216?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @MattGertz It is bad to have to pay out a $787 million settlement.
It is bad to have more legal troubles ahead.
It is bad to lose your most prominent host.
⋙ MMFA: Tucker Carlson’s departure is great news for America (and terrible news for Fox) https://tinyurl.com/yhw53s5t
Tucker Carlson was the engine that made the modern incarnation of Fox News run. And on Monday, suddenly and without warning, that engine was switched off. ¤ “FOX News Media and Tucker Carlson have agreed to part ways,” the network announced in a press release that stunned media observers. Notably, Carlson will not appear again on Fox to say goodbye to his viewers and go out on his own terms. According to the network, his last show was Friday; it concluded without indication that it was his Fox finale.
Carlson’s departure is great news for America. ¤ He was the country’s foremost purveyor of white supremacist talking points, pushing the conspiracy theories that inspired massacres from El Paso, Texas, to Buffalo, New York. He was the nation’s most prominent anti-vaxxer, running a brutally effective campaign against public efforts to vaccinate Americans against COVID-19. And his lies and deceptions following the January 6 insurrection helped foil the potential for a consensus against the violent storming of the U.S. Capitol. He worked to radicalize the Republican Party in the direction of its most dangerous, authoritarian elements.
The country is vastly better off without his demagogic voice reaching through the television screens to millions of Americans every weeknight.
But his unexpected departure leaves his former employer in a difficult position. The move comes just days after Fox received another blow through its massive Dominion settlement, a payout the company hoped to defray by jacking up its cable carrier fees and attracting new advertisers. Now the network goes into those carrier negotiations and advertiser upfronts with a vacancy in what is traditionally its most prominent time slot.
Carlson has been the face of the network since at least the 2020 election, with executives counting on his personal connection to viewers to keep them coming back as former President Donald Trump receded from the national stage. He used that opportunity to focus the network (and through it, the GOP) on his own particular obsessions, like the “great replacement” conspiracy theory, anti-trans invective, and support for authoritarian regimes in Russia and Hungary.
As of this morning, he may have become the most powerful host in Fox’s history: He not only got his own heavily promoted streaming shows and carte blanche to radicalize his viewers, but he also succeeded in driving away network employees who dissented from his dark vision for the network.
Fox has announced that Carlson’s 8 p.m. program will become “an interim show helmed by rotating FOX News personalities until a new host is named.” The content maw must be fed, and there is surely no shortage of right-wing bomb-throwers who will leap at the opportunity to occupy the time slot. But at this particular moment, Fox needs to send two opposing signals at the same time. The network needs viewers to think that it remains committed to the same style of irresponsible bigotry and conspiracy theories that had them tuning in for Carlson’s show. But they also must convince cable carriers and advertisers that Fox is a responsible partner.
With the loss of its top star and still reeling from the blow of the largest known media settlement in history, Fox is weakened and in chaos, vulnerable both to threats to its business model from cable news carriers and to competitors seeking to carve off some of its market share. Time to throw them an anvil.
🐣 RT @MollyJongFast Simply incredible
⋙ 🐣 RT @RT_com Hey @TuckerCarlson, you can always question more with @RT_com
🐣 RT @kurtbardella Jeff Shell, Tucker Carlson & Don Lemon all gone in 24 hours … wow. Just wow.
🐣 RT @lawofruby It remains to be seen precisely why Tucker Carlson is leaving Fox. But my first thought was that it could be related to documents that surfaced in the Dominion litigation, whether or not they were produced to Dominion. Sounds like there might be some there there.
⋙ 🐣 RT @jackmjenkins “…it was Carlson’s comments about Fox management, as revealed in the Dominion case, that played a role in his departure from Fox, a person familiar with the company’s thinking told The Post.”
⋙⋙ WaPo: Tucker Carlson is out at Fox News after Dominion lawsuit disclosures https://tinyurl.com/4um4ees4
// The bombastic conservative was the network’s most-watched prime-time host. Private communications made public in a recent lawsuit revealed his sharp criticism of Fox management.
🐣 RT @oneunderscore__ Recently, Tucker’s A-block was often more extreme than the front page of InfoWars, and I’m not exaggerating. ¤ The path forward here is awfully grim. But at least his Great Replacement lies won’t be aired in America’s waiting rooms or included in basic cable packages anymore.
⋙ 🐣 RT @DecodingFoxNews Tucker Carlson has a full television studio in Maine. Fox News might own it. He could go the InfoWars route and just start producing his own content – which will probably much worse than what he made on Fox News. There’s a number of far right broadcasters he could align with.
🐣 RT @TheRickWilson Tucker Carlson is leaving Fox to spend more time with his fascism.
🐣 RT @Victorshi2020 BREAKING: Fox just announced that Tucker Carlson is LEAVING the network & will no longer host his show. The person who lied & spread the most dangerous conspiracy theories to his audience is now gone & we should all be very glad. Hallelujah.
🐣 RT @brianstelter The biggest “tell” in Fox’s press release about Tucker Carlson’s exit is that he is not getting a final show. No chance to say goodbye on his own terms or point people to his next home. Fox says “Carlson’s last program was Friday April 21st.”
🐣 RT @brianstelter Tucker Carlson is out at Fox News, effective immediately. This is an earth-shaking moment in cable news.
‼️ 🐣 RT @RonFilipkowski Thank you, Dominion.
⋙ TVline: Tucker Carlson Out at Fox News https://tinyurl.com/2p9he639
⭕ 23 Apr 2023
🐣 RT @ ChinaUSFocus The East and West could learn a lot from each other, but current tensions make that type of mutual exchange a lofty ideal. https://tinyurl.com/ykr6c9j7
⋙ 🐣 the “tensions” were the result of China flying a half dozen spy balloons over our territory, preventing international review teams from the WHO from having access to virology labs, and China then cutting off diplomatic channels to discuss the “tensions”
TheGuardian: Baltic states condemn China envoy’s remarks over sovereignty of ex-Soviet nations https://tinyurl.com/2xnd26ud //➔ I’m surprised at the surprise: All you have to do is read China’s “peace plan” to see it weakens NATO and the UN & forges a new Eurasian partnership w no US
// Lu Shaye’s comments raise fresh questions over China’s role in brokering peace in Ukraine
🧵 RT @SariArhoHavren China’s ambassador to France pulled the rug out from under China’s intention of being any sort of mediator between Russia and Ukraine. Not recognising Ukraine as a sovereign state exactly as Russia claims, makes China 100% on Russia’s side. 1/3
📌 https://twitter.com/SariArhoHavren/status/1650032800714706944?s=20
⋙ 🐣 RT @SariArhoHavren If Lu Shaye misspoke, Beijing should withdraw him and apologise. But even so, this incident raises a lot of questions, including how common this view is, even if not official, among the Chinese foreign ministry. 2/3
⋙ 🐣 RT @SariArhoHavren And finally, Lu Shaye’s comments put Xi’s Global Security Initiative in a strange light. Does it now emphasise the security spheres and interests (of the great powers) on the expense of sovereignty of all nations? And where is the much emphasised UN Charter in all this? 3/3
WSJ: China’s Ambassador to France Says Ex-Soviet States Lack Basis for Sovereignty https://tinyurl.com/yc34p2p9 “Mr. Lu’s comments appeared to brush aside the sovereignty of countries … that formally recognized each other after the Soviet Union’s dissolution”
// France and countries across Eastern Europe condemn remarks from Ambassador Lu Shaye
France and countries across Eastern Europe condemned remarks by China’s ambassador in Paris claiming that post-Soviet states lack a firm basis for their sovereignty under international law. ¤ Ambassador Lu Shaye made the comments during an interview late Friday on French TV, in which he was asked whether he considered the peninsula of Crimea, which was annexed by Russia in 2014, part of Ukraine under international law.
“Even these ex-Soviet Union countries do not have effective status, as we say, under international law because there’s no international accord to concretize their status as a sovereign country,” Mr. Lu said.
Mr. Lu’s comments appeared to brush aside the sovereignty of countries, including Russia, that formally recognized each other after the Soviet Union’s dissolution and are represented at the United Nations and in European security organizations. The ambassador’s comments drew a swift reaction in parts of Europe, with the three Baltic states saying they would summon China’s top officials in a coordinated move on Monday for an explanation.
🧵 RT @GicAriana China’s ambassador to France said former Soviet countries “don’t have an effective status in international law” “because there is no int’l agreement that gives substance to their status as a sovereign country.” China is denying existence of Ukraine, Estonia, Lithuania, etc.1/3
📌 https://twitter.com/GicAriana/status/1649965260466421760?s=20
⋙ 🐣 RT @GicAriana China is very clearly pushing Moscow’s narrative of “fake nations,” etc., to advance Russia’s revanchist agenda of capturing the former soviet space under the pretext of “restoring historic Russia.” ¤ THIS is China’s understanding of international law and relations. 2/3
⋙ 🐣 RT @GicAriana This should serve as a stark warning for those who refuse to see it: Beijing and Moscow have genuine partnership in which they intend to completely upend the existing western-led international security order. ¤ Russia & China have THEIR OWN vision, and it’s anathema to ours. ¤ 3/3
⋙⋙ 🐣 China’s “peace plan,” which few have read, calls for a dismantling of Cold War alliances (NATO), the diminishment of the UN (no use of sanctions), and the creation of a Eurasian association of nations instead
🐣 RT @Gerashchenko_en Lu Shaye, China’s ambassador to France, repeated Russian propaganda narratives on LCI channel. He called Crimea “originally Russian” and declared that ex-USSR countries “don’t have an effective status in international law”. ¤ Waiting for Beijing’s official reaction. Is it a…
🐣 RT @ 🐣 RT @ AntoineBondaz 💪🏼👍🏼 Official comment by @francediplo‘s spokesperson:
«We learned with dismay of the remarks of the 🇨🇳 Ambassador to 🇫🇷 concerning the borders of the countries which became independent with the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991. It is up to China to say whether these remarks reflect its position, which we hope not. ¤ We mark our full solidarity with all of our allies and concerned partners, who have won a long-awaited independence after decades of oppression.
Regarding Ukraine specifically, it was internationally recognized within borders including Crimea in 1991 by the entire international community, including China, upon the fall of the USSR as a new member state of the United Nations. The annexation of Crimea by Russia in 2014 is illegal under international law. The Charter of the United Nations, based on the principle of sovereignty and territorial integrity, prohibits the acquisition of territory by force. » (My own translation of the French version)
@OmelchenkoVadym @KZAmbFR @nerijusale @LembitUibo @Gocha_Javakhi @tolmajian @Tsahkna @GLandsbergis @edgarsrinkevics @StuartKLau @PedderSophie @laurnorman @KyivIndependent @ZelenskyyUa
⋙ 🐣 RT @AntoineBondaz China’s ambassador to France unabashedly asserts that the former Soviet republics have « no effective status in international law » as « sovereign states » 🤯 ¤ He denies the very existence of countries like Ukraine, Lithuania, Estonia, Kazakhstan, etc. 😳 WTF?! [link (Fr)]
🐣 RT @LvivJournal Traffic jams at the Chongar border pass between occupied regions of Kherson and Crimea. There is also traffic coming from occupied Zaporizhzhia region. ¤ I wonder what are they fleeing from? 🤔 #lviv
🌎 https://twitter.com/LvivJournal/status/1650081362089476096?s=20/photo/1 -2
🧵 RT @TimInHonolulu 1. Don Jr has gone quiet today after a long Tweet storm of multiple posts daily. He was my contemporaneous pick for who accompanied Boris Epshteyn to Prague. The Steele dossier assumed it was Michael Cohen. I thought it was Epshteyn and that Don Jr would have accompanied him
📌 https://twitter.com/TimInHonolulu/status/1650007616012320768?s=20
⋙ 🧵 RT @TimInHonolulu 1. Only ABC is running this. Both the Post and Times didn’t run anything about the 2nd day. ¤ Top Trump adviser Boris Epshteyn to be questioned for 2nd day by special counsel: Sources
📌 https://twitter.com/TimInHonolulu/status/1649642268566102016?s=20
⋙⋙ ABCNews: Top Trump adviser Boris Epshteyn to be questioned for 2nd day by special counsel: Sources https://tinyurl.com/54msyffu
// Epshteyn met with prosecutors for multiple hours on Thursday, sources say.
🐣 RT @BulwarkOnline “‘To be truly human is to bear the burden of our own mortality,’ Kevin Toolis writes…’How to face your own death, how to teach your children to face their deaths.’ Can you imagine that? I have a feeling Biden can.” ICYMI ¤ @DanMcGraw1:
⋙ TheBulwark, Daniel McGraw: Biden in Ireland: Ancestry and Empathy https://tinyurl.com/388tejbf
// 4/13/2023; As the president marks the anniversary of the Good Friday Agreement, we can glimpse the Irish origins of his famed compassion.
[…] The deceased, whose name was Mrs. Greenhouse, lived in a very small rent-controlled senior housing space; they couldn’t fit the ten mourners in her apartment. So, my friend, Rabbi Michael Beals, then new to the area, decided to move the ritual to the communal laundry room in the basement of the high-rise.
Guess who appeared, unaccompanied and without drawing attention to himself, in the back of the laundry room during prayers for Mrs. Greenhouse? Joe Biden, then a roughly 60-year-old United States senator. ¤ Rabbi Beals continues the story:
At the close of the kaddish, I walked over to him and asked the same question that must have been on everyone else’s mind: “Senator Biden—what are you doing here?”
And he said to me: “Listen, back in 1972, when I first ran for Senate, Mrs. Greenhouse gave $18 to my first campaign. Because that’s what she could afford. And every six years, when I’d run for reelection, she’d give another $18. She did it her whole life. I’m here to show my respect and gratitude.”
There were no news outlets at our service that day—no Jewish reporters or important dignitaries. Just a few elderly mourners in a basement laundry room.
Joe Biden didn’t come to that service for political gain. He came to that service because he has character. He came to that service because he’s a mensch.
There’s something strong and reliable in the character of a mensch—something firmer than empathy by itself, even though empathy is essential to it. This quality, too, is connected to Biden’s heritage—the sense of life that has been tempered through exposure to the reality of death.
The best Irish verse and prose has this sense. Poems by William Butler Yeats and novels by James Joyce and inspirational songs by U2 bespeak the importance of both living and dying.
But Biden’s great literary love is Irish poet Seamus Heaney, who died in 2013. The president often quotes from Heaney’s “The Cure at Troy,” and no doubt the text would be aptly intoned at an Irish wake, or recited into a mic at a political rally.
Consider, finally, the following stanza from “The Cure at Troy”—one more belated gift of the Irish, but to the world.
History says, don’t hope On this side of the grave But then, once in a lifetime The longed-for tidal wave Of justice can rise up, And hope and history rhyme.
NatRev, Madeleine Kearns: The Origins of the Transgender Movement https://tinyurl.com/5aukkex9 The fear and the loathing: A history from very.long.ago ~ (2019)
// 10/14/2019; We must not ignore cultural blind spots that put children at risk of abuse.
⭕ 22 Apr 2023
🧵 RT @Mylovanov Breaking: @TheStudyofWar reports that Ukrainian forces have established positions in east (left) bank of Dnipro in Kherson Oblast as of yesterday. The institute cites textual and geocofirmed graphical evidence by Russian military bloggers. ¤ This is important. 1/
📌 https://twitter.com/Mylovanov/status/1650051320332550144?s=20
🧵 RT @Horbyk 1/ We are currently experiencing a decolonization moment in East European and Eurasian Studies that is becoming a new paradigm in the field. Over the last few months, I have attended several conferences in the area, and here are some of the observations and reflections.
📌 🖼 https://twitter.com/Horbyk/status/1649726244936720384?s=20/photo/1
// DaVinci drawing of bored angel: Melancholia
TheSun [UK]: STORM THE TRENCHES How Ukraine is preparing for a ‘BIG BANG’ strike to retake Crimea, bulldoze the Russians and humiliate Vladimir Putin https://tinyurl.com/ym55fst4
// UKRAINIAN troops are readying to use their shiny new Western weapons in a “big bang-style” onslaught to humiliate Vladimir Putin, according to top military experts.
// The Sun Online spoke to former US General Ben Hodges, retired British Army Brigadier Ben Barry, and ex-Brit Colonel Hamish de Bretton-Gordon about Kyiv’s next steps to defeat Russia.
Behind the frontline, a new wave of troops determined to protect their homeland have been training with Western weapons. ¤ They will be rolling into battle with key new pieces of kit, such as Challenger 2, M1 Abrams, and Leopard 2 main battle tanks, Stryker and Bradley armoured vehicles, and new artillery systems. ¤ With these weapons – in theory should outrange and outmatch the Russians, laying the groundwork for the new offensive.
General Hodges told The Sun Online he believes Ukraine will go big – and concentrate their efforts on finally retaking Crimea, which has been in Russian hands since 2014. ¤ Colonel de Bretton compared a potential Ukrainian strike to “Operation Desert Storm” – with their forces seeking to push up to 200 miles behind the Russian line in a blitzkrieg style assault.
“The key is winning Crimea – that will be the decisive terrain. Once Crimea is liberated, it’s all over, it changes everything. ¤ “Ukraine knows that it will never be safe without taking back Crimea.” ¤ With Hodges’ extensive military experience, he believes that the offensive will focus on isolating the annexed Crimean peninsula by severing the land bridge from partly-Russian controlled areas in Ukraine’s south. ¤ “It will be aimed at breaking this land bridge and more precision weapons to hit targets and make the peninsula untenable for Russian forces,” he explained.
This onslaught he believes will involve hitting Russia’s air bases, ambitious attacks on Russia’s Black Sea Fleet and targeting logistics & command centres deep into enemy-held territory in Crimea. ¤ “When it makes sense to,” Hodges said that they may “again” blow up the Crimean bridge – Putin’s favourite bridge that was attacked last October. scUkrainian commanders are presumed to have blown in the £3.2billion Kerch Bridge – a highly symbolic link between Vlad’s mainland and annexed Crimea. …
General Hodges claims that the offensive will be concentrated in a narrow area to break through the well-dug in Russian lines. ¤ “I think Ukraine will pick one or two places to focus their attack on a narrow front a few miles wide and penetrate through the fortified frontlines using tanks, mechanised infantry, engineers and artillery. ¤ He continued: “They will use their air force to help cover them and there will be activity in Russian rear area by special forces and partisans to stop them reacting [to the attack].”
Colonel de Bretton-Gordon also predicts the Ukrainians will be ambitious in their counter strike – with the key being their new arsenal of Ukrainian maine battle tanks. ¤ He said the Western armour will outmatch the ageing Soviet-era tank fleet currently being used by Putin, punching through tank traps, trenches and barbed wire like the so-called “Saddam Line” in the Operation Desert Storm back in 1991. ¤ Saddam Hussein’s fortifications were breached in a matter of hours by the US forces using M1 Abrams tanks – just as the Ukrainians now have in their arsenal. [?]
The Desert Storm ground offensive lasted just 100 hours and saw an army led by American and British forces make mincemeat of Saddam’s tanks and troops – who ended up surrendering en masse. ¤ Colonel De Bretton-Gordon told The Sun Online: “Over four days [in Desert Storm] we covered a couple of hundred miles. The Ukrainians will probably want to go a bit further but not much further.’ …
The key to Ukrainian victory, Colonel De Bretton-Gordon says, will be putting in place the logistics to maintain such an advance until it can get far enough behind Russian lines to cause maximum devastation. ¤ He added: “The Ukrainians are very canny. I’ve been impressed with the way they operate. ¤ “There isn’t much we can teach them. Obviously we taught them how to use our tanks and artillery but in terms of teaching the generals, they are already very impressive. …
[ A senior fellow for land warfare at International Institute for Strategic Studies]: “The longer they delay it, the more modern weapons and armour they will have in service and train people to operate it.”
Ukraine is known to be forming a network of new “Storm Brigades” – with around 40,000 soldiers. ¤ Named Hurricane, Spartan, Chervona Kalyna, Frontier, Rage, Azov and Kara Dag (a mountain in Crimea), Ukraine’s new units are preparing to play their role in a decisive new offensive to push back Putin’s troops.
War analysts at the Conflict Intelligence Team said the main goal of the fresh counter offensive will be to “unblock” Bakhmut. … War analysts at the Conflict Intelligence Team said the main goal of the fresh counter offensive will be to “unblock” Bakhmut.
“The vehicles are already on the territory of Ukraine at the disposal of its military and may be used in combat in the nearest future,” the team wrote in their situation report on March 28.”We expect that the primary goal of the Ukrainian counter-offensive will be to unblock Bakhmut.” ¤ Commander of Ukrainian land forces, Colonel General Oleksandr Syrskyi, said recently: “Our task is to destroy as many enemies as possible and create the conditions for us to launch an offensive.”
Russian and Eastern Europe security expert Samantha de Bendern said that she is likewise sceptical that a Ukrainian counteroffensive will take place until at least the summer. ¤ The Chatham House Associate Fellow disagrees that Crimea will be Ukraine’s aim as “there is pressure from the Americans not too attack the peninsula, they are not welcoming to Ukrainian ideals of liberating Crimea”. ¤ Instead, de Bendern believes the attack will be focused East and will wholly depend on when the Western weapons sent to Ukraine will become operational. …
Whatever the plan behind the offensive, de Bendern said: “one thing is absolutely sure – Ukraine will never give up. ¤ “They will fight to the last man.”
🐣 RT @ JohnJHarwood is US debt really a GOP priority? ¤ each of the last 5 presidents took office w/his party holding both houses of Congress ¤ check budget data: ¤ under Clinton, Obama and Biden, deficits as share of the economy had gotten smaller 2 years in under Bush and Trump, they’d gotten bigger
⋙ 🐣 Yessir!
◕ https://twitter.com/Auriandra/status/1650007312264724485?s=20/photo/1
TheAtlantic, Phillips O’Brien and Mykola Bielieskov: What the Battle in Bakhmut Has Done for Ukraine https://tinyurl.com/3bej2hft
// Skeptics don’t understand why Kyiv insists on holding a city of modest strategic value.
For many months now, Ukrainian and Russian forces have been waging a bloody battle over what might look like the most insignificant of locations. On tiny patches of land around small cities in the Donbas region—such as Avdiivka, Vuhledar, and, most famously, Bakhmut—the combat has been so intense that many Western commentators and outlets have been second-guessing and criticizing the Ukrainian government’s insistence on continuing to fight in those areas. …
… Ukraine does not have the luxury of choosing where it has to fight, precisely because it is preparing a counteroffensive. … Ukraine needs some time to master a wide variety of new equipment provided by its European allies and the United States, while simultaneously wearing down Russian troops and equipment.
Far from being needlessly destructive, the Ukrainian decision to fight for Bakhmut, Avdiivka, and Vuhledar—in what we are calling the Second Battle of the Donbas—has been, like most of the Ukrainian military’s decisions in this war, grounded in solid strategic understanding. … [R]ather than harming any counteroffensive, the Ukrainian decision to prolong the fighting in these cities has more likely been integral to maximizing the chances of success. …
[E]ven after Russia’s 2022 campaign revealed major deficits in its forces’ leadership and effectiveness, Moscow’s military strategists seemed obsessed with the idea of taking the small communities now in contention in the Donbas. … The Russian effort in Bakhmut was particularly intense because the community had become the target of the infamous Wagner Group … [T]he Russians unleashed a deadly competition within their own side, as the army and Wagner each seemed to go to greater and greater lengths to outdo each other for political purposes.
The fighting in Vuhledar produced one of the most extraordinary sights of the war. In early February, the Russians, desperate to take the town, ordered a column of tanks to advance single file down a road without demining equipment. The Ukrainians destroyed the whole column by scattering mines before and behind, leading to losses so catastrophic that the Russian commander was fired. Similarly, Russian formations failed to bypass and surround Avdiivka, failed to seize Kupyansk, made countless unsuccessful attempts to relieve Ukrainian pressure on Kreminna, and were unable to push Ukrainian formations back to Lyman (which Russia occupied before Ukraine liberated it in early October). Each of these failed operations cost the Russians dearly.
Bakhmut has been an even more grisly example of the Russian willingness to sacrifice soldiers. The Wagner Group has adopted a particularly perverse form of warfare. Raw, inexperienced troops of convicts are sent forward to attack Ukrainian lines with almost no hope of survival. Their role is only to be targets—to make the Ukrainians expose their own positions by opening fire. The apparent hope is that Russian artillery and subsequent assault waves can then advance past the bodies of their dead comrades. By applying these extremely costly “human waves” tactics, Wagner has been repeating a Red Army practice from World War II—one that today’s Western admirers of Soviet operational art typically don’t highlight.
However, even this form of self-destructive warfare has yielded only small territorial gains, and the losses of Russian soldiers, especially at Bakhmut, have been particularly shocking. A NATO official told The Guardian in late March that the Russians were suffering 1,200 to 1,500 casualties a day in the Second Battle of the Donbas, with most occurring in and around Bakhmut.
Ukraine has suffered real losses too. In December, when President Volodymyr Zelensky made his famous visit to Washington, one of the most emotional sections of his address to Congress dwelled on the fighting in Bakhmut. “Every inch of that land is soaked in blood; roaring guns sound every hour,” he said, adding, “The fight for Bakhmut will change the tragic story of our war for independence and of freedom.” In March, when Zelensky visited the Bakhmut front, he thanked soldiers for their heroic efforts while also stressing that the fight must continue until Ukraine wins. He has insisted that if Bakhmut falls, then Putin will smell weakness and use a Russian victory to muster international pressure against Ukrainian interests.
The Second Battle of the Donbas has exposed the terrible strategic choices that modern war forces upon combatants. Zelensky’s decision to prolong and play up the significance of the battle might seem callous, but it is part of a considered attempt to reduce Ukrainian losses in the future and prepare for the counteroffensive. Far better for Ukrainian forces to confront a large, unskilled Russian army when it is doing the attacking and exposing itself to great losses. If the Russian leadership keeps trying to press forward under these circumstances, the Ukrainians have to keep taking advantage.
🐣 RT @Commish_Schmidt This was a *unanimous* ruling by the PA Supreme Court: “Let it be known far and wide that this Court can — and will — exercise the full might of its constitutional authority against those who seek to delegitimize this Commonwealth’s elections, or its judiciary.”
⋙ 🐣 RT @GovernorShapiro Let me be clear: we will not tolerate attacks on our democracy and our voting process. ¤ I’ll continue to stand up to dangerous misinformation and attempts to throw out Pennsylvanians’ votes.
⋙⋙ PhiladelphiaInquirer: Pa. Supreme Court angrily sanctions county for violating order on Dominion voting machines https://tinyurl.com/3yzen568
// The sanctions were a message about the authority of the courts, and they followed more than two years of fighting in the wake of the 2020 election.
NYT, Adam Liptak: In Abortion Pill Ruling, the Supreme Court Trades Ambition for Prudence https://tinyurl.com/2w5k9ac4 ‘Kacsmaryk’s ruling, second-guessing the science buttressing the FDA’s approval and regulation of the pill, would have upended a status quo in place for 23 years’
// The court’s order seemed to vindicate a commitment in last year’s decision in Dobbs: to leave further questions about abortion to the political process.
⭕ 21 Apr 2023
🐣 RT @drosha69 Prigozhin adds another 15 yrs to his prison term by discrediting ru army. He describes a sorry state of Aleksandr Nevskiy battalion: “Everyone is dirty and soaking… No weapons, no devices… Men figure out friendly positions by observing gun fire. It’s a genocide of russians” 💽
🐣 RT @ArmedMaidan Ukraine reportedly counterattacks toward Bakhmut city centre retaking 9-11 blocks, threatening Stalingrad-like trap for orcs ¤ “The largest encirclement for the Russians since the beginning of the war” ¤ #Ukraine #UkraineRussiaWar #RussiaUkraineWar #Bakhmut #ukrainecounteroffensive
[TextLink:] https://twitter.com/ArmedMaidan/status/1649540753750736897?s=20/photo/1
[Text:] “Matryoshka” in Bakhmut and other news According to the Russian and Ukrainian military, MCs really received reinforcements and are trying with all their might to close the encirclement. The battles are heavy, but the APU hold the western outskirts of the city and do not allow the pincers to close. At the same time, in Bakhmut itselt, the pressure and advance of the “Wagnerites” was already stopped two or three davs ago, and in the last two days Ukrainian units have been slowly retaking quarter after quarter, moving trom the west to the city center. We.are talking about moving 9-11 blocks and two streets.
This would be a rather strange tactic for hopelessly surrounded Ukrainians, who would be more logical to go west while there is such an opportunity, rather than break through to the east. and even in urban areas. Then why are the Armed Forces of Ukraine making great ettorts. trying to move towards the center of Bakhmut
According to officers on both sides, the UAF in the city is being attacked because their sitation is tar trom hone ess. While the PaCsand the Kussian Armed Forcos encircle Bakhmut, the Armed Forces of Ukraine are slowly moving north and south of the Russian positions and can at any moment go torward, arranging a cauldron for those who are trving to surround Bakhmut.
Two rings, two ends, and in the middle is Bakhmut. There is matryoshka. We surround them, they surround us. The command insists that the city be completely blocked in the shortest possible time. PaCs have been strengthened, army units have been strengthened by the Airborne Forces, a tank formation, they have been given a weekly ration ot shells, they have not yet arrived, but they should be. I do not understand why this is being done, because the situation for our troops is threatening. By cutting off Bakhmut, we ourselves can find ourselves in the ring, and even with the burning middle which is controlled by the Ukrainians, saws the Russian staff officer.
“The harder they bite into the city, the better for us now. They compactly deploy troops in a small area that can be brpassed trom two sides. moreover. ouckly. won’t talk about plans, but we have a good chance of organizing the largest encirclement for the Russians since the beginning ot the war, explains a Ukrainian staff offcer.
In other directions, the Armed Forces of Ukraine continue to improve their positions. In recent days, 4 settlements in the Zaporozhye region have been liberated and several small bridgeheads have been created on the left bank of the Dnieper in the Kherson region. This is not yet an oftensive, but a clear but a clear preparation for it.
¤ https://t.me/s/volyamedia/623 [Telegram]
🐣 RT @MuellerSheWrote Lol.
⋙ 🐣 📊 RT @TheLeadCNN Poll: Biden leads Trump by nearly 40 points among voters who disapprove of both of their presidential performances @PaulBegala, @SarahAMatthews1, @abbydphillip and @catherine_lucey discuss
💽 https://twitter.com/MuellerSheWrote/status/1649606355488231425?s=20/photo/1
NYT: Testimony Suggests Trump Was at Meeting About Accessing Voting Software https://tinyurl.com/fr9ran6a “The Trump allies … copied elections software used [in Georgia] and uploaded it on the internet, creating the potential for future election manipulation”
// In a letter to federal officials, a liberal-leaning group highlighted testimony to the House Jan. 6 committee that described then-President Trump attending a meeting about the plan in December 2020.
[…] A number of Trump aides and allies have recounted a lengthy and acrimonious meeting in the Oval Office on Dec. 18, 2020, which one member of the House Jan. 6 committee would later call “the craziest meeting of the Trump presidency.” During the meeting, then-President Trump presided as his advisers argued about whether they should seek to have federal agents seize voting machines to analyze them for fraud.
… Giuliani, then Mr. Trump’s personal attorney, opposed seizing voting machines and spoke of how the Trump campaign was instead “going to be able to secure access to voting machines in Georgia through means other than seizure,” and that the access would be “voluntary.”
… Among those involved in the Oval Office discussion were two prominent pro-Trump conspiracy theorists: Michael Flynn, the former national security adviser, and Sidney Powell, a lawyer who spread numerous falsehoods after the 2020 election and who also discussed Mr. Giuliani’s comments in her testimony. …
In its letter, Free Speech for People argued that the testimony and other details that have been made public prove that Mr. Trump “was, at a minimum, aware” of an “unlawful, multistate plot” to access and copy voting system software.
On Jan. 7, 2021, a small group working on behalf of Mr. Trump traveled to rural Coffee County, Ga., some 200 miles southeast of Atlanta, and gained access to sensitive election data; subsequent visits by pro-Trump figures were captured on video surveillance cameras. ¤ … At one point, video footage shows the then-chair of the Coffee County Republican Party, Cathy Latham, appearing to welcome into the building the members of a forensics company hired by Ms. Powell. … ¤ Ms. Latham was also one of the 16 pro-Trump fake electors whom Georgia Republicans had assembled in an effort to reverse the election results there.
… The Trump allies who traveled to Coffee County copied elections software used across the state and uploaded it on the internet, creating the potential for future election manipulation.
WaPo, Ruth Marcus: The justices’ abortion pill ruling is as good as it gets for this court https://tinyurl.com/32af48xv “[I]t is significant — and, under the circumstances, comforting — that none of the three Trump appointees noted disagreement” with the majority opinion
🐣 RT @BradMossEsq Works for me.
⋙ 🐣 RT @kyledcheney DA’s office describes this as a joint motion to dismiss, agreed upon after Judiciary Committee permitted a Bragg attorney to be present for Pomerantz deposition.
[TextLink:] https://twitter.com/BradMossEsq/status/1649568072322170880?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @rgoodlaw “These defendants plotted armed attacks against energy facilities to stoke division in furtherance of white supremacist ideology and now they are being held accountable,” said Assistant Attorney General Matthew G. Olsen.
⋙ DOJ: Two Men Sentenced for Conspiring to Provide Material Support to Plot to Attack Power Grids in the United States https://tinyurl.com/y6frpssj
// Domestic Terrorism Plot was in Furtherance of White Supremacy
🐣 RT @mjs_DC BREAKING: Supreme Court stays order banning mifepristone. This means mifepristone remains 100% legal and accessible in states where it is legal. ¤ Thomas and Alito dissent.
[TextLink:] https://twitter.com/mjs_DC/status/1649544640310198282?s=20/photo/1
≣ [CourtDoc:] https://tinyurl.com/mraemnt4
⋙ 🐣 RT @mjs_DC The fact that Roberts, Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, and Barrett voted to halt the decisions below—and that Alito did not even try to defend Kacsmaryk or the 5th Circuit, on standing or the merits—strongly suggests that the Supreme Court will NOT use this case to ban or limit mifepristone.
🐣 RT @business [Bloomberg] BREAKING: The US Supreme Court is keeping a widely used abortion pill available, blocking a Texas judge’s restrictions while a legal fight goes forward https://trib.al/dsbOcIe
🔆 This❗️⋙ NYT: Supreme Court Ensures, for Now, Broad Access to Abortion Pill https://tinyurl.com/mt3d7mdv
// The order halts a sweeping ruling by a federal judge in Texas as an appeal moves forward in a case that could have profound implications for abortion access and the F.D.A.’s regulatory authority.
🐣 RT @PopovaProf This piece lacks basic understanding of what Ru-Ukr war is abt. It’s not a civil war, a territorial dispute, or a proxy war between NATO and Ru, as implied. It’s a war of conquest by Ru. For a ceasefire to have a chance to hold, free Ukr should be in NATO tomorrow…
¤ https://twitter.com/PopovaProf/status/1649504305777369090?s=20
⋙⋙ 🐣 RT @RichardHaass 25 years later, it turns out the Good Friday Agreement is an unlikely but potentially valuable source of lessons for how to build a diplomatic track that could hasten an end to the war between Russia & Ukraine.
⋙⋙⋙ ProjectSyndicate, Richard Haass. What Northern Ireland Teaches Us About Ending the Ukraine War https://tinyurl.com/4v6p2zkw
“It is essential that any diplomatic path does not ask the parties to abandon their ultimate goals or give up their arms. Ukraine has every right to insist on the full return of its territory going back to its independence in 1991, while Russian President Vladimir Putin is sure to insist that the Ukrainian territories he has illegally annexed are part of Russia. It may well take decades (and new leadership in Moscow) to resolve these differences. So be it. The immediate goal of a cease-fire should not be contingent on reconciling what cannot be reconciled now or for the foreseeable future. ¤ As distasteful as it might be, those responsible for the war and for war crimes, including Putin, will need to be able to participate directly or indirectly in the diplomatic process if it is to have any chance of success. The top priority now must be to end the violence; the quest for justice ultimately must be pursued, but it should be postponed.”
⋙ 🐣 RT @PopovaProf Far fr clear Ukr would go for it, but that’s the only meaningful immediate move. The rest of the peace/diplomacy suggestions all put Ru in an advantageous position and provide no credible mechanisms to guard against a 3rd Ru invasion. Ru goals have only escalated since 2014
🔆 This❗️⋙ WaPo: Trump touts authoritarian vision for second term: ‘I am your justice’ https://tinyurl.com/tvhbv7u3 //➔ This is terrifying stuff, right out of the Hitler playbook, and I’m not going to apologize for the comparison: #MustRead article
// The former president is proposing deploying the military domestically, purging the federal workforce and building futuristic cities from scratch
Mandatory stop-and-frisk. Deploying the military to fight street crime, break up gangs and deport immigrants. Purging the federal workforce and charging leakers.
Former president Donald Trump has steadily begun outlining his vision for a second-term agenda, focusing on unfinished business from his time in the White House and an expansive vision for how he would wield federal power. In online videos and stump speeches, Trump is pledging to pick up where his first term left off and push even further.
Where he earlier changed border policies to reduce refugees and people seeking asylum, he’s now promising to conduct an unprecedented deportation operation. Where he previously moved to make it easier to fire federal workers, he’s now proposing a new civil service exam. After urging state and local officials to take harsher measures on crime and homelessness, Trump says he is now determined to take more direct federal action.
“In 2016, I declared I am your voice,” Trump said in a speech last month at the Conservative Political Action Conference and repeated at his first 2024 campaign rally in Waco a few weeks later. “Today, I add: I am your warrior. I am your justice. And for those who have been wronged and betrayed, I am your retribution.”
Trump’s emerging platform marks a sharp departure from traditional conservative orthodoxy emphasizing small government, which was famously summed up in Ronald Reagan’s first inaugural address: “Government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem.” Trump, by contrast, is proposing to apply government power, centralized under his authority, toward a vast range of issues that have long remained outside the scope of federal control.
Experts called some of Trump’s ideas impractical, reckless, self-defeating, potentially illegal and even dangerous. Some of Trump’s specific proposals are admittedly underdeveloped, such as a plan for building futuristic cities from scratch on unused federal land, which has been compared to projects in repressive regimes such as Saudi Arabia.
But Trump has a track record of floating ideas that stoke widespread outrage or confusion, then roiling government and legal institutions to realize them, such as banning citizens of several majority-Muslim countries from coming to the United States and imposing trade barriers. Trump is currently facing federal and local criminal investigations arising from his unsuccessful efforts to overturn his 2020 election defeat, which ultimately inspired a deadly riot by his supporters at the U.S. Capitol. …
Supporters have cheered Trump’s continued turn away from longtime conservative orthodoxy, such as free trade and foreign interventions, and credited him for ushering in larger shift in the party. In articulating a vision of a more coercive right-wing government, Trump is finding common ground with his leading rival for the 2024 Republican nomination, Ron DeSantis. The Florida governor has laid out his own doctrine of asserting more government power, exemplified by his flagship bills restricting classroom instruction of diversity, gender and sexual orientation; his moves to punish Disney for opposing him; and his suspension of a Democratic prosecutor.
The shared positioning on executive power by Trump and DeSantis, who lead early primary polls, underscores how much Trump has reshaped the Republican base in the mold of his “Make America Great Again” movement.
“The Reagan limited-government conservatism and emphasis on federalism is being displaced by a new muscular, nationalizing cultural conservatism, with a lot of anger,” said Larry Diamond, a senior fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution who studies democracy. “One thing we’ve learned about Trump and authoritarian populists like him is not to dismiss what they’re saying as just idle language and toothless roar. We need to take it very seriously.”
The rise of a more activist view of right-wing governance has sparked a wider debate within the conservative movement. Former New Jersey governor Chris Christie, another potential presidential aspirant, has criticized Trump and DeSantis as not conservative.
“The reality is we have to meet the government where it is presently,” said Paul Dans, director of the Heritage Foundation’s 2025 Presidential Transition Project, an effort by the conservative think tank and other conservative groups to develop policy proposals, personnel recommendations, training and transition plans representing a consensus of the conservative movement. “That’s really where the more activist leaning is coming from in this project, that we need skilled operators to start taking this battleship and pointing it in a new direction.”
The Trump campaign’s policy development is being led by Vince Haley, a former White House aide who previously worked for former House speaker Newt Gingrich. As the current Trump campaign’s policy head, Haley has been coordinating with Heritage and partner organizations the Conservative Partnership Institute and the Center for Renewing America, as well as the America First Policy Institute and Stephen Miller’s America First Legal, to consider policy ideas and potential personnel picks for an administration-in-waiting. …
“I guarantee the stuff we’re putting forward is not going to get thrown in the trash,” said Vought, who contributed the transition project’s chapter on exercising authority through the Executive Office of the President, akin to a playbook for a White House chief of staff. Some of Vought’s ideas have found their way into Trump’s proposals, such as a recent announcement on bringing independent agencies such as the Federal Trade Commission and Federal Communications Commission under White House supervision.
“There’s a glove of power needed to beat back the administrative state or deep state,” he said, “and if you’re not willing to put your hand in that glove you will fail, regardless of how much credibility you have with the base.”
On the campaign trail, Trump has acknowledged the advantage of having more allies to help him prepare to operate the vast expanses of the administration more immediately than after his surprise win in 2016.
“When I went there, I didn’t know a lot of people; I had to rely on, in some cases, RINOs and others to give me some recommendations, but I know them all now,” he said in Iowa last month, referring pejoratively to “Republicans in Name Only.” “I know the good ones, I know the bad ones, I know the weak ones, I know the strong ones.”
‘Freedom Cities’: The new cities proposal consists of a national contest to charter up to 10 D.C.-sized metropolises on undeveloped federal land. Administration officials discussed the concept toward the end of Trump’s term, but he did not campaign on it in 2020. Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner pushed the idea in White House meetings after it was initially brought up by Haley and another speechwriter on Miller’s team, Ross Worthington, who is also now on the 2024 campaign, according to a person familiar with the matter, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe private conversations.
Trump has discussed the new “Freedom Cities” in utopian terms, with flying cars, manufacturing hubs and opportunities for homeownership, promising a “quantum leap in the American standard of living.” The campaign has provided few details on how the plan would work in practice.
Trump acknowledged that the idea needed more work over a Sunday dinner in mid-March, according to economic adviser Stephen Moore. “He said, ‘I’m still trying to figure out how it’s going to work,’ something like that,’” Moore recalled in an interview. “He said, ‘How do you think we should make that work?’ And I’m going to help him with the idea.” …
“I hate this thing,” one outside economic adviser to Trump said, speaking on the condition of anonymity to describe private conversations with campaign officials. “The economic problems facing the nations are so severe, and we’re going to talk make-believe about ‘building new cities’?”
Experts stress that cities have historically grown around natural centers of economic activity rather than state edict. “You can’t just wave a wand and have cities come into being,” said Rick McGahey, an economist at the New School who specializes in urban growth. “This is not where cities come from. The concept does not work.” …
Some Trump allies give him credit for what they see as a bold new idea. One campaign adviser compared the proposal’s ambition to the “Opportunity Zones” economic incentives in Trump’s 2017 tax legislation, scaled up to emulate historic Republican achievements such as Abraham Lincoln’s Homestead Act and Dwight D. Eisenhower’s Interstate Highway System.
“There is this broad recognition that we don’t build enough things in America and that, you know, obviously, we have great American cities, but we haven’t really built a new model city,” said Sen. J.D. Vance (R-Ohio), who has endorsed Trump’s presidential bid. “There are a lot of other countries that are trying different approaches out, and I think it’s fine for us to think about doing that here, too.”
Trump has specified that he wants to define architectural standards in existing cities as well, insisting on classical-style buildings, monuments to “true American heroes,” and schools and streets named “not after communists but patriots.” He has also proposed forcibly removing homeless people to outlying tent cities, wading into an area usually left to local governments and relying on unclear federal authority.
“Violators of these bans will be arrested, but they will be given the option to accept treatment and services if they are willing to be rehabilitated,” Trump said in a recent campaign video.
‘Patriotic education’: Trump said he would reestablish a presidential commission to promote a “patriotic” curriculum that rejects scholarship on systemic racism. His “1776 Commission,” which did not include any professional historians, released a report at the end of his presidency that demonized institutions such as federal agencies and universities.
“What Trump is trying to resurrect is something that was thoroughly discredited by the professional historical community in a totally apolitical context,” said James Grossman, executive director of the American Historical Association. “There’s lots of places to look and see what happens when history education gets stripped of its professional integrity in the interest of a political party.” …
‘Shatter the deep state’: In another form of enforcing loyalty and suppressing dissent, Trump has proposed making it easier to fire federal workers, cracking down on media leaks, and establishing a “truth and reconciliation commission” to publish records on alleged abuses by spy agencies. He said he will require all federal employees to pass a new civil service test covering due-process rights, free speech, religious liberties, and Fourth Amendment protections against unreasonable search and seizure.
“This is how I will shatter the deep state and restore government that is controlled by the people and for the people,” Trump said in a campaign video. In another, he elaborated, “We need to clean house of all of the warmongers and America-Last globalists in the deep state, the Pentagon, the State Department and the national security industrial complex.”
Some of Trump’s proposals for overhauling the merit-based civil service would require congressional action. The result could be to undermine the ability of professional public servants to reliably deliver government services without political interference, warned Max Stier, chief executive of the Partnership for Public Service, a nonpartisan nonprofit that supports federal workforce development.
“He is proposing changes that would create the world that he is objecting to,” Stier said. “It does have real-time consequences in terms of undermining public trust in our government. That’s a real problem because trust in government is a core part of our democracy.”
‘Military resources’: Trump drew widespread criticism as president, especially during the demonstrations against the murder of George Floyd in 2020, for advocating harsh treatment of protesters, clearing peaceful demonstrators outside the White House, and deploying unmarked federal agents in Washington and Portland, Ore. Since leaving office, Trump has said he regrets not going even further to deploy military power domestically and wouldn’t hesitate to do so if he returns to the White House.
“In cities where there has been a complete breakdown of public safety, I will send in federal assets, including the National Guard, until law and order is restored,” Trump said at CPAC. “We will use all necessary state, local, federal and military resources to carry out the largest domestic deportation operation in American history.”
In campaign videos and messages, Trump has specifically proposed requiring police departments to use stop-and-frisk, a tactic that has been widely criticized for discriminating against people of color and that a federal judge in New York found to violate the Constitution’s prohibition on unreasonable searches. Trump also said he would order the Justice Department to investigate charging decisions by local prosecutors, challenging the constitutional division between federal and local authorities. He further proposed using federal law enforcement to dismantle gangs and execute drug dealers and human traffickers.
Trump doesn’t envision a national police force, the campaign adviser said, and in practice his initiatives could be accomplished through federal funding or joint operations with state authorities.
The president has no legal authority over local police or prosecutors, and attempts to attach conditions to federal funding usually face litigation, according to Vladeck, the University of Texas law professor. There are legal limits on using the military for civilian law enforcement but allowances for acting in a support capacity that a Trump administration could try to exploit, Vladeck said.
“Republicans have tried to corner the market on claiming the federal government has been weaponized, but that’s what this is,” he added. “And the only way you can do that is by interjecting federal authority into matters that constitutionally or at least traditionally have been reserved to the states.
🐣 RT @MuellerSheWrote BREAKING: Texts reveal trump allies wanted to use STOLEN voter data to overturn the 2020 election. This involves Rudy, Sidney Powell, Cyber Ninjas, Coffee County election officials, and the trump White House.
⋙ CNN: Exclusive: Text messages reveal Trump operatives considered using breached voting data to decertify Georgia’s Senate runoff in 2021 https://tinyurl.com/5bjfvxa2
“Here’s the plan. Let’s keep this close hold,” Jim Penrose, a former NSA official working with Trump lawyer Sidney Powell to access voting machines in Georgia, wrote in a January 19 text to Doug Logan, CEO of Cyber Ninjas, a firm that purports to run audits of voting systems.
In the text, which was obtained by CNN and has not been previously reported, Penrose references the upcoming certification of Democrat Jon Ossoff’s win over Republican David Perdue.
“We only have until Saturday to decide if we are going to use this report to try to decertify the Senate run-off election or if we hold it for a bigger moment,” Penrose wrote, referring to a potential lawsuit.
The plot to breach voting systems in Coffee County, coordinated by members of Trump’s legal team including Rudy Giuliani and Sidney Powell, is part of a broader criminal investigation into 2020 election interference led by Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis.
Willis’ office is weighing a potential racketeering case against multiple defendants and is actively deciding who to bring charges against, sources tell CNN. Willis has subpoenaed a number of individuals involved in the Coffee County breach, including the two men who carried it out who were in touch with Penrose and Logan.
Willis has also subpoenaed Giuliani and Powell as part of her probe. Giuliani has been told he’s a target in the Fulton County probe, CNN previously reported. The special grand jury convened for the case recommended issuing multiple indictments in its final report completed in February, according to the jury foreperson.
A source familiar with Willis’ investigation tells CNN that Willis and her team have in their possession evidence that Trump allies planned to use the breached voting data from Georgia to try to decertify the state’s senate runoff election. Emails obtained by CNN show Penrose and Powell arranged upfront payment to a cyber forensics firm that sent a team to Coffee County on January 7, 2021.
The Coffee County breach is also under investigation by the Georgia Bureau of Investigation. ¤ Special Counsel Jack Smith also appears to be examining the broader effort to breach or seize voting machines as part of his federal probe into efforts to overturn the 2020 election and the January 6 attack on the US Capitol. It’s unclear what if any evidence he has in his possession related to the Coffee County breach.
Penrose and Logan were also named in a state-level criminal investigation in Michigan alleging they participated in a conspiracy to seize voting machines there.
An attorney for Giuliani declined to comment and referred CNN to his January 6 committee interview transcript. ¤ Powell, Penrose and Logan did not respond to requests for comment.
On January 7, 2021, the day after rioters stormed the US Capitol, two people walked into an elections office in Coffee County, Georgia, a rural part of the state that voted overwhelmingly for Trump in 2020. A local election official helped them gain access to sensitive voting data which they downloaded onto a portable hard drive.
That data was then uploaded to an encrypted server and shared with several Trump allies and operatives, including Logan, Penrose, Powell and Giuliani, according to access logs reviewed by CNN and testimony released by the January 6 committee.
Last year, a former Trump official testified under oath to the House January 6 committee that plans to access voting systems in Georgia were discussed in meetings at the White House, including during a now infamous Oval Office meeting on December 18, 2020, that included Trump.
Derek Lyons, a former deputy White House counsel who was in that meeting, testified to the January 6 committee that Giuliani suggested accessing voting machines in Georgia as an alternative to ordering the military or Department of Homeland Security to seize voting machines.
“His point of view was that in some way the campaign, I believe, was going to be able to secure access to voting machines in Georgia through means other than seizure,” Lyons said about Giuliani, according to a transcript of his deposition.
Lyons told the committee that Giuliani suggested the access would be “voluntary” and examination of those machines would “begin to show evidence of the allegations that were being made.”
“That evidence could then be leveraged to … gain access to additional machines,” Lyons said. “Georgia was the topic of discussion at that time.”
There is no evidence that the Coffee County voting data was used as part of a lawsuit to try to decertify the Senate runoff results. But the fact that the data has yet to be recovered has raised concerns among election security advocates about how it could be used potentially to disrupt future election results.
In a December 2022 letter to the FBI, Susan Greenhalgh, a senior advisor for election security at the advocacy group Free Speech For People, described how copies of the voting data from Coffee County have been “shared covertly with an unknown number of election deniers.” The letter warned that the data “could be used to sow distrust in elections, fabricate evidence to challenge legitimate election results, or even to manipulate election results in the future.”
The advocacy group is among those involved in a civil case focused on election security in Georgia. Greenhalgh has asked the FBI to investigate the Coffee County breach as recently as this week.
🐣 RT @atrupar It really sunk in for me today that Elon is trying to be Trump. A chaos agent with an endless thirst for attention and validation. The grievances. The narcissism. The incessant punching down and bigotry. The shady business connections. It’s the same toxic brew.
⭕ 20 Apr 2023
‼️🐣 RT @RonFilipkowski With Matt Kacsmaryk’s nomination languishing, he makes a contribution to Josh Hawley, who breaks the logjam to get him confirmed. They then file the abortion pill case in front of him, where Josh Hawley’s wife is the attorney arguing the case.
¤ https://twitter.com/RonFilipkowski/status/1649079802429579265?s=20
NYT, Jack Resneck Jr: This Could Be One of the Most Brazen Attacks on Americans’ Health Yet https://tinyurl.com/mkxuz6dw Dr. Resneck is the president of the American Medical Association, one of a dozen or so medical organizations that have filed briefs with the court
[…] In seeking to restrict access to abortion across the United States, the plaintiffs in this case have, intentionally or not, seriously jeopardized our nation’s 85-year-old drug regulatory system. We must be cleareyed; upholding any parts of the district court’s dangerous ruling would in all likelihood almost immediately prompt challenges to other longstanding safe and effective F.D.A.-approved drugs that doctors and patients rely on every day.
After three years of politicization fueled by disinformation, this would surely include challenges to many vaccines, including those that reduce the risks of serious illness from Covid-19. We should expect lawsuits against common types of safe and highly effective hormonal birth control, including emergency contraception. Also at risk: drugs used to treat cancer and arthritis that can incidentally affect unexpected pregnancies, drugs to prevent or treat H.I.V., and medications aimed at providing gender-affirming care.
The threat may ultimately include promising drugs and treatments built around stem cell technology to treat Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s, multiple sclerosis or even more common types of chronic disease, such as diabetes. With ever-growing anti-science aggression, disinformation campaigns and vitriol about all types of medical advancements, there is no telling where the court challenges may lead — perhaps even to widely used drugs now sold over the counter to treat pain, allergies or heartburn that happen to have been studied with fetal stem cells.
This would represent a dangerous and reckless step backward for our country. More people would live sicker, suffer more and die younger while the scientifically proven safe and effective drugs they need remain locked away.
We simply cannot be a country where your access to the care you need is determined by the whims of ideologically driven judges and lawmakers without medical or scientific training. That’s why a dozen of the nation’s leading medical organizations, including the one I head, the American Medical Association, strongly oppose this politically motivated assault on patient and physician autonomy and have filed amicus briefs to make our case.
We cannot allow pseudoscience and speculation to override the substantial weight of scientific evidence from more than 100 studies and millions of patients that confirm the safety and efficacy of a drug or course of treatment.
The legal challenge to mifepristone threatens grave harm to our patients, public health and the shared decision-making at the core of the physician-patient relationship. But there are even broader implications of this case: the integrity of the long-established F.D.A.-approval process and whether we want science — or ideologues — informing decisions about our individual and collective health.
TNR, Michael Tomasky: The (Republican) Party’s Over https://tinyurl.com/2fc4kjzr Group interview by Michael Tomasky with Max Boot, Juleanna Glover, Michael Steele and Nicolle Wallace
// We asked four recovering Republicans if the GOP is salvageable. Hint: They laughed.
New Republic editor Michael Tomasky gathered four close observers of the party’s decline and fall via Zoom in early March to discuss the current and future state of the Republican Party: Michael Steele, the chairman of the Republican National Committee from 2009 to 2011; Juleanna Glover, who worked for Vice President Dick Cheney and Attorney General John Ashcroft; Max Boot, a Washington Post columnist and author of The Corrosion of Conservatism: Why I Left the Right; and Nicolle Wallace, who was President George W. Bush’s communications director and senior adviser to John McCain’s 2008 campaign and now hosts MSNBC’s Deadline: White House.
(📊) WaPo: Abortion divides 2024 candidates and confounds many within the GOP https://tinyurl.com/tn5vuwjt “[RNC] officials plan to argue that the issue was one of the biggest reasons the party did not perform as well as expected in the 2022 midterms”
// Presidential hopefuls have struggled to settle on a position amid warning signs that the party is on the wrong side of public opinion on the issue
When Republican donors arrived at the Four Seasons in Nashville last weekend, they were handed a polling memo written by former Trump aide Kellyanne Conway with a startling statistic: Eighty percent of voters disagreed with the Supreme Court’s ruling in Dobbs v. Jackson last year overturning Roe v. Wade.
… Republican National Committee officials plan to argue that the issue was one of the biggest reasons the party did not perform as well as expected in the 2022 midterms, and some of the party’s leaders are meeting frequently about how to deal with the issue … ¤ … Trump believes the issue should be left up to individual states. “States’ rights,” Trump has said privately when advisers have floated the issue, adding his assessment that they should not talk about it.
In recent weeks, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) signed a bill behind closed doors that would ban abortions after six weeks, when many women don’t know they are pregnant. RNC Chairwoman Ronna McDaniel has privately circulated polling to candidates that shows the American public broadly supports a 15-week ban — and she has privately expressed concerns about a six-week ban.
In elections held since Roe was overturned, Americans have overwhelmingly voted to support abortion rights, including in Republican-led states such as Kansas and Kentucky.
In the 2022 midterms — which by historical standards should have been a rout for the party out of power, the Republicans — Democrats overperformed, driving high turnout among women and in the suburbs that allowed the party to narrowly hold the majority in the U.S. Senate, lose the House by only a handful of seats, win key governors’ races and flip a few state legislatures. Exit polls showed that in several states, voters named abortion as their most important issue.
In an off-year state Supreme Court judicial race in Wisconsin, the Democrats’ choice prevailed in a blowout this month — a victory that may signal that abortion remains salient among voters and is likely to still be top of mind heading into the presidential election year.
🐣 RT @washingtonpost Exclusive: A top Republican legal strategist told a roomful of GOP donors over the weekend that n, according to a copy of her presentation reviewed by The Post. https://wapo.st/41sUw4o
[TextLink:] https://twitter.com/washingtonpost/status/1649074059517231105?s=20
⋙ Cleta Mitchell, a longtime GOP lawyer and fundraiser who worked closely with former president Donald Trump to try to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election, gave the presentation at an RNC donor retreat in Nashville on Saturday
⋙ The presentation offered a window into a strategy that seems designed to reduce voter access and turnout among certain groups, including students and those who vote by mail, both of which tend to skew Democratic.
⋙ Mitchell did not respond to a request for comment, and it is unclear whether she delivered the presentation exactly as it was prepared on her PowerPoint slides.
🐣 RT @washingtonpost Exclusive: Election denier Mike Lindell offered $5 million to anyone who could prove him wrong. An arbitration panel just ruled he must pay.
⋙ WaPo: Mike Lindell’s firm told to pay $5 million in ‘Prove Mike Wrong’ election-fraud challenge https://tinyurl.com/2p83rrez “Asked why he had decided to [seek] a hearing, Zeidman testified that he wanted the money and wanted to push back against stolen-election claims”
MyPillow founder and prominent election denier Mike Lindell made a bold offer ahead of a “cyber symposium” he held in August 2021 in South Dakota: He claimed he had data showing Chinese interference and said he would pay $5 million to anyone who could prove the material was not from the previous year’s U.S. election. ¤ He called the challenge “Prove Mike Wrong.” ¤ On Wednesday, a private arbitration panel ruled that someone had.
The panel said Robert Zeidman, a computer forensics expert and 63-year-old Trump voter from Nevada, was entitled to the $5 million payout. ¤ Zeidman had examined Lindell’s data and concluded that it not only did not prove voter fraud, it had no connection to the 2020 election. ¤ He was the only expert who submitted a claim, arbitration records show. ¤ He turned to the arbitrators after Lindell Management, which created the contest, refused to pay him.
In their 23-page decision, the arbitrators said Zeidman proved that Lindell’s material “unequivocally did not reflect November 2020 election data.” They directed Lindell’s firm to pay Zeidman within 30 days.
In a statement to The Washington Post, Zeidman said he was “really happy” with the arbitrators’ decision. “They clearly saw this as I did — that the data we were given at the symposium was not at all what Mr. Lindell said it was,” he said. “The truth is finally out there.”
Zeidman’s attorney Brian Glasser said that the panel’s decision stood as a warning to others who made wild allegations about election fraud. “I think the arbitrators thought it important that these claims be vetted, because they’ve done great harm to our country,” he said.
Lindell said in a text to The Post, “They made a terribly wrong decision! This will be going to court!” His attorneys did not reply to a request seeking comment.
A copy of contest rules submitted in the arbitration said disputes would be “resolved exclusively by final and binding arbitration” and noted that arbitration “is subject to very limited review by courts.”
Glasser said that the panel’s decision cannot be directly appealed but that Lindell could ask a federal court to quash it on the basis that it represented a “manifest injustice.” The statutory grounds for such a claim are narrow and it is “extremely rare” for such a claim to succeed, according to Glasser. …
Zeidman’s lawyers wrote to the panel that the data presented at the symposium contained “no recognizable data in any known data format.”
Lindell testified at arbitration that he did not share what he had described as his key data to support the foreign intrusion claim during the conference. He held off, he said, after a man seeking a selfie poked him in the side as the symposium was nearing an end — an act that Lindell called an assault and said he took as a signal the government might tamper with his central information if he made it public.
Lindell told the panel that, after the incident, his “red team” advisers warned him against making that inform public. “They said it could be a poison pill put in the data and we really shouldn’t release the China stuff,” he said.
The arbitrators did not address the substance of Lindell’s claims about vote tampering, noting that they were “not asked to decide whether China interfered in the 2020 election.”
TPM: Where Things Stand: Biden Shreds McCarthy’s Performative Debt Limit Bill https://tinyurl.com/3hs9ab3r “Fundamentally, this is still about Republicans wanting to use the debt ceiling to extract political concessions out of Biden that they’d never get through legislative order”
The 320-page document is a panoply of red-meat base messaging and benefits cuts: It would repeal the green energy tax credits passed in the Inflation Reduction Act, add more requirements to benefit programs like SNAP (formerly known as food stamps), cut money allocated to the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) and rescind the Biden administration’s order forgiving student debt. It would also suspend the debt ceiling until 2024.
In short: It is dead on arrival in the Senate. It’s meant to show that House Republicans can all agree on a proposal (which is already in doubt), and to give McCarthy a leg to stand on when he criticizes Biden for refusing to negotiate.
Fundamentally, this is still about Republicans wanting to use the debt ceiling to extract political concessions out of Biden that they’d never get through legislative order. Now, they’ll use this document to bellyache that the White House still won’t negotiate with them, that they’re just being fiscally responsible (ha) and that they have no choice but to conflate the debt ceiling and spending cuts (because a Democrat is in the White House again so it’s time to pretend they care about austerity).
≣ WhiteHouse: Statement from Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre on Speaker McCarthy’s Proposal https://tinyurl.com/ynaeutn5
Yesterday, Speaker McCarthy sided with the extreme MAGA wing of his conference and released a blueprint to devastate hard-working American families. MAGA House Republicans are holding the American economy hostage in order to take a hatchet to programs Americans rely on every day to make ends meet.
Every House Republican who votes for this bill is voting to cut education, veterans medical care, cancer research, meals on wheels, food safety, and law enforcement. To offshore American manufacturing and kill good-paying jobs. To take health care away from millions of Americans and threaten food assistance for hundreds of thousands of older people. To increase energy bills and raise taxes for hard-working families. To slash programs hard-working Americans depend on even as they protect wealthy tax cheats and continue to push tax giveaways for the wealthiest and big corporations.
That stands in stark contrast with President Biden’s Budget, which Invests in America, lowers costs for hardworking families, and cuts the deficit by asking the super-wealthy and largest corporations to pay their fair share. House Republicans must avoid default and stop playing economic brinkmanship with the American people’s livelihoods and retirements. The American people have made clear which economic vision they support.
🐣 RT @SecCardona Speaker McCarthy’s debt ceiling proposal tells us everything we need to know about what he & his allies value—tax cuts for the super-rich, special interests, and big corporations over supporting the 40 million+ working Americans who are eligible for student debt relief.
🐣 RT @saintjavelin Explosion and light in the sky over Kyiv last night, or what the Main Center of Special Control of the Space Agency of Ukraine calls “a high-energy acoustic event,” was caused by “the entry of a cosmic body into the dense layers of the atmosphere.”
⋙ 🐣 in days of yore, such an event was considered a sign, some good, some bad: English history is strewn with them (the Bible, as well) ¤ time will tell⏳
🔄 💙 🐣 💁I’ve studied western civilization for a long time & for me it comes down to a little twinkle in the eye, a playfulness based in freedom of expression, creativity underwritten by a reliable system of justice that is fair & guarantees respect for the uniqueness of each individual
BBC: Mystery white flash lights up skies over Kyiv https://tinyurl.com/3b2xkkry
// Videos from four angles shows the flash in Ukraine’s capital – although it’s not known what caused it.
🖼 https://twitter.com/BBCWorld/status/1648944250346774530?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @DeptofDefense NEWS: @SecDef Hopes @NATO Partnership for Sweden by Summer.
⋙ Defense[.]gov: Austin Hopes NATO Partnership for Sweden by Summer https://tinyurl.com/2bzfdj4r
// Secretary of Defense Lloyd J. Austin III has told his Swedish counterpart he hopes that Sweden will get NATO membership before the summer.
On the first day of a four-day trip to Sweden and Germany, Austin met with Swedish Defense Minister Pal Jonson for a Tuesday morning defense meeting at the headquarters of the Swedish navy on Musko Naval Base near Stockholm.
“Mr. Minister, thanks for the tremendous hospitality. We’re delighted to be here, and I really appreciate the warm welcome from your troops this morning,” Austin told his counterpart. “We look forward to continuing to advocate for your swift admission to NATO, and we’ll work hard to get that done before the summer. I think that’s really, really important.”
🐣 RT @IISS_org “Any attempt to work with China on Ukraine, without full coordination with his European partners and the US will further isolate #France.” – @RymMomtaz via @Telegraph:
⋙ TheTelegraph [UK]: Macron ‘working on secret plan’ with China to end Ukraine war https://tinyurl.com/mw6yypk3
// A potential framework could lead to talks ‘by this summer’, according to reports
[…] Responding to Mr Macron’s reported plans, Mr [Tobias Ellwood, chair of the defence select committee] told The Telegraph: “He may think he’s pursuing a noble cause but he is in fact falling into China’s playbook, bypassing common international practices and the recognised machinery to resolve international disputes.
While Sir Iain said Ukrainians have little faith in the French president. ¤ “When I was in Ukraine I found they do not trust the Chinese and they don’t trust Macron, as he put them in this predicament in the first place when he came up with the disastrous agreement with Merkel in 2014,” he said.
“They certainly don’t trust him since he went to China. They are saying: Macron has only one objective, and that is boosting Macron’s image, and he doesn’t care who he sells down the river to achieve that, when he he facing such a domestic mess. ¤ “His behaviour is really bizarre and redolent of a snake in the grass.”
There was similar disapproval in Brussels over Mr Macron’s stance. ¤ Rym Momtaz, of the International Institute for Strategic Studies, said: “Macron suffers from a trust deficit with his European partners and allies due to his previous statements saying Nato suffers from ‘brain death’, blindsiding them with his dialogue with Russia in 2019 and calling not to ‘humiliate Russia’ and for building ‘an architecture of security with Russia’ even after it had invaded Ukraine. ¤ “Any attempt to work with China on Ukraine, without full coordination with his European partners and the US will further isolate France.”
Justin Crump, of Sibylline, an intelligence and geopolitical risk firm, said: “The biggest problem is that many in Europe and indeed the West just don’t see or believe China can ever be an honest broker for peace, given Beijing’s questionable position in the conflict and close ties with Moscow. ¤ “In this regard Macron is arguably a classical useful idiot, with actions definitely undermining at least the perception – if not the reality – of unity. ¤ This is likely a thin end of a wedge that will open wider debate, and offer opportunity for adversaries to exploit and further divisions.”
According to Le Monde, French diplomats are “tired of picking up the pieces” of Mr Macron’s foreign flights of fancy. “Diplomats then have to slave away to salvage the matter, ” it cited an anonymous source as saying. ¤ Le Monde reported that fatigue over Mr Macron’s go-it-alone habits could explain why Philippe Errera, the foreign ministry’s heavyweight director of political and security affairs, intends to step down this summer after four years.
Many Ukraine allies have dismissed ceasefire proposals that would allow Russia to keep territorial gains, and have warned that Putin would only exploit peace talks to prepare a fresh offensive.
Top diplomats from the G7 nations, including France, this week backed Mr Zelensky’s “peace formula”, which includes the complete withdrawal of all Russian troops from Ukrainian territory.
Mr Macron is keen to discuss future security guarantees for Ukraine with various international partners including China, according to reports. Nato leaders will launch similar talks when they meet for the military alliance’s annual summit in Vilnius, Lithuania in July.
The Telegraph understands internal talks are currently focusing on bringing Kyiv’s armed forces up to a Nato standard in both the short and long term. This is one method Western officials believe is crucial for warding off future Russian aggression once the current war has drawn to a close.
⭕ 19 Apr 2023
TheBulwark, Kimberly Wehle: The Abortion Pill, the FDA, and Supreme Court https://tinyurl.com/y9zw9ayd “Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk, the Trump appointee responsible for the decision, is clearly out of control on a range of issues that he has no business legislating from Amarillo”
// What will happen to Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk’s ruling effectively banning the sale of the drug?
[…] [T]he case raises disturbing questions as a matter of law. ¤ Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk, the Trump appointee responsible for the decision, is clearly out of control on a range of issues that he has no business legislating from Amarillo. …
The stakes are also high because the legal basis for Kacsmaryk’s decision has nothing to do with the underlying rationale in Dobbs. That case held that there is no constitutional right to abortion; Kacsmaryk’s 67-page ruling strikes at the heart of the FDA’s power to regulate drugs. Over 100 scientific studies covering over 124,000 pregnancy terminations across 26 countries over 30 years have confirmed the safety and effectiveness of mifepristone. Over 99 percent of those who took the medication experienced no serious side effects.
… Under a 1946 statute called the Administrative Procedure Act, Congress authorized federal courts to hear lawsuits challenging rules made by agencies under a standard known as “arbitrary and capricious review.” The test is deferential, the rationale being that agencies like the FDA have specialized expertise that federal judges, who are generalists, do not possess. …
… FDA regulations require that drugs such as mifepristone be “studied for . . . safety and effectiveness in treating serious or life-threatening illnesses.” They must also “provide [a] meaningful therapeutic benefit to patients over existing treatments.”
Kacsmaryk ruled that the agency’s approval of the drug back in 2000 was “arbitrary and capricious” in part because pregnancy is not an illness. He admits that “complications can arise during pregnancy, and said complications can be serious or life-threatening.” But for Kacsmaryk, the key flaw in the FDA’s longstanding drug approval decision was its failure to treat pregnancy as a “natural process essential to perpetuating human life.” Even though chemical abortions avoid surgical ones, he added, they somehow provide no “meaningful therapeutic benefit to patients,” so the FDA’s approval of mifepristone violates the FDA’s own drug approval regulations for that additional reason.
Keep in mind, again, that Kacsmaryk’s legal authority here was limited. The FDA is supposed to get deference as a matter of law. The reason for that deference, again, is that Congress tasks certain agencies with making certain regulatory and policy decisions because of their specialized expertise.
Kacsmaryk’s abject power-grab in one of the nation’s most divisive culture wars is an insult to the rule of law and the legitimacy of the judicial branch of the federal government. This much should starkly be evident to at least five members of the right-leaning Court. The FDA regulates over 78 percent of the U.S. food supply and more than 20,000 marketed drugs, putting over 2.7 trillion dollars in the consumption of food, medical products, and tobacco within the FDA’s jurisdiction. Although there are valid arguments for urging Congress to take back its legislative power from executive branch agencies and do the dirty work itself, there is no conceivable logical basis for handing that power off to federal judges.
The justices will have to decide whether to extend Alito’s decision to stay Kacsmaryk’s maneuver until the Supreme Court can thoroughly consider the issue, or instead do what it did pre-Dobbs by enabling Texas’s six-week abortion ban to take effect while it considered what to do with Roe v. Wade. Let’s hope Alito’s decision is a sign of a shift in the Supreme Court’s judiciousness.
🐣 RT @ProjectLincoln Fox News has done unspeakable damage to our democracy by peddling claims they know are false. While the $787 million settlement against them won’t reverse the damage done, it’s certainly a step in the right direction of accountability.
💽 https://twitter.com/ProjectLincoln/status/1648854013465468929?s=20/photo/1
🧵 RT @TimInHonolulu 1. Ukraine’s deputy minister of defense spoke today of the counteroffensive making clear that such actions had already begun but would not disclose the ultimate objectives. The announcement had the effect of causing some movement by Russian forces along
📌 https://twitter.com/TimInHonolulu/status/1648876467085012993?s=20
⋙ 🐣 RT @TimInHonolulu 2. the Zaphorizhzia front that reportedly included the stepping back of Russian front line units in the area adjacent to the Dnieper. These units would be exposed in a rapidly evolving offensive and they pulled back to less exposed positions. The entire
🌎 https://twitter.com/TimInHonolulu/status/1648876471010885632?s=20/photo/1
⋙ 🐣 RT @TimInHonolulu 3. southern front is likely being probed for weaknesses that that can become the focus of a large offensive without much warning depending on how the conditions evolve. It’s also possible that Ukraine will turn its focus elsewhere. But the psychological effect of announcing
⋙ 🐣 RT @TimInHonolulu 4. that Russian units on this front may be attacked by a large force at any time is likely to be exploited in the coming days. Now that Russia has lost momentum in Bakhmut and in the process consumed a large force of regular airborne troops in failed attacks, the stage is being
⋙ 🐣 RT @TimInHonolulu 5. set for another Russian defeat but this time Russian forces may not be able to withdraw in time to save escape disaster. The Russians appear to think there is a large force in the Kherson region waiting to cross the Dnieper. And that thought may work to create the
⋙ 🐣 RT @TimInHonolulu 6. conditions for a rapid disintegration of the southern front as Russian forces, whose officers are all likely facing war crimes tribunals, may decide their chances are better if they fall back on Crimea or escape via the road to Rostov. All other roads may lead to the Hague
🐣 RT @RepDanGoldman The GOP admitted that they came to this hearing to build a case to impeach Sec Mayorkas, but impeachment is reserved for treason, bribery or high crimes – not policy disputes. ¤ Congress must fix our broken immigration system, not use important hearings for political gamesmanship.
💽 https://twitter.com/RepDanGoldman/status/1648841687991500805?s=20/photo/1
🐣📋 Comparing Goodread’s Books to Read Before College https://tinyurl.com/mrxubvpn ¤
with Amazon’s Banned Books List: ✅
https://tinyurl.com/47zkapu7 ¤
[TextLink:] https://twitter.com/Auriandra/status/1648860286340702208?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @EHunterChristie Indeed, that’s all there is to it. Hello, multipolar world.
⋙ 🐣 RT @Marco_UKII The ‘new world order’ advocated by Russia and China appears to be little more than the ‘might is right’ principle that led to colonisation, war between nations and ultimately World War.
🐣 RT @NOELreports The US announced a new package of military aid to Ukraine worth $325 million, the U.S. Department of defense reports. https://tinyurl.com/bp6aph9u
// Defense budget
● Additional ammunition for High Mobility Artillery Rocket Systems (HIMARS);
● 155mm and 105mm artillery rounds;
● Tube-Launched, Optically-Tracked, Wire-Guided (TOW) missiles;
● AT-4 anti-armor weapon systems;
● Anti-tank mines;
● Demolition munitions for obstacle clearing;
● Over 9 million rounds of small arms ammunition;
● Four logistics support vehicles;
● Precision aerial munitions;
● Testing and diagnostic equipment to support vehicle maintenance and repair;
● Port and harbor security equipment;
● Spare parts and other field equipment.
TheAtlantic, Brian Klaas: The Red States Experimenting With Authoritarianism https://tinyurl.com/bde5u34m “American states are now splintering, not just on partisan lines, but on their commitment to the principles of liberal democracy”
// They’ve become laboratories of autocracy.
Democracy requires more than just holding elections. But at a bare minimum, two qualities are nonnegotiable. True democracies must allow voters to determine who governs through elections, and must respect the outcome of those elections. Many Republicans at the state level are undercutting those principles.
Democratic deterioration is not a new problem in red states. Jacob Grumbach, a political-science professor at the University of Washington and the author of Laboratories Against Democracy, measured the democratic quality of American states from 2000 to 2018. He used 51 indicators, including gerrymandering, whether politicians were responsive to public opinion, long wait times to vote, and the availability of postelection audits to verify that the count was accurate. States that had been dominated by Republicans over the previous two decades, Grumbach found, became substantially less democratic. States dominated by Democrats and those with a divided government saw no such drop-off.
🐣 RT @lawofruby NEW: Carroll lawyer Robbie Kaplan caustically responds to Trump’s request that the court tell jurors he is excused from trial because of the burden on the court & NYC. If he’s got time for UFC matches & NRA conventions, she says, he can show up for a trial about rape.
[TextLink:] https://twitter.com/lawofruby/status/1648795085956325376?s=20/photo/1
[Text:] […] Mr. Trump’s position is especially difficult to credit in light of his own recent activity. Over the past few weeks, Mr. Trump attended the Ultimate Fighting Championship 287 event, spoke at the National Rifle Association’s annual meeting,? and appeared for a deposition in the New York Attorney General’s civil case against Mr. Trump, his adult children, and the Trump Organization.’ On Monday, he announced that he has scheduled a New Hampshire campaign event for next Thursday, April 27- in other words, in the middle of the trial in this case.* If Mr Trump can find a way to attend wrestling championships, political conventions, civil depositions, and campaign functions, then surely he could surmount the logistics of attending his own federal trial.
🐣 RT @lawofruby NEW: Carroll lawyer Robbie Kaplan caustically responds to Trump’s request that the court tell jurors he is excused from trial because of the burden on the court & NYC. If he’s got time for UFC matches & NRA conventions, she says, he can show up for a trial about rape.
[TextLink:] https://twitter.com/lawofruby/status/1648795085956325376?s=20/photo/1
WaPo, Monica Hesse: Republicans are digging themselves into a hole on abortion https://tinyurl.com/yc55wnxw “If you find yourself proposing measures that are overwhelmingly disapproved of by the people you represent, you might wonder just whom you are representing at all”
// GOP lawmakers are learning how unpopular severe abortion bans are, but that hasn’t stopped their legal crusade
⭕ 18 Apr 2023
NYT: Torch Carriers in 2017 Charlottesville Rally Are Indicted https://tinyurl.com/4n5p3sha the wheels of justice turn excruciatingly slowly, but they do turn
// The charges came nearly six years after a group marched at the University of Virginia campus, shouting, “You will not replace us,” and “Jews will not replace us.”
🧵 RT @MuellerSheWrote BREAKING: HOLY SHIRTBALLS: Fulton County DA Fani Willis has filed a motion to remove the attorney representing 10 of the Georgia fraudulent electors. The attorney’s name is Kimberly Debrow – a former assistant DA, firm partner, and law professor in Georgia. 1
📌 [TextLink:] https://twitter.com/MuellerSheWrote/status/1648398977417768960?s=20/photo/1
[CourtDoc:] https://tinyurl.com/3raavntk
⋙ 🐣 RT @MuellerSheWrote According to the filing, the court ORDERED Debrow to offer her clients immunity, and Debrow’s associate told the court they had. But recent interviews indicate they NEVER presented that offer to her clients! THAT’S REALLY BAD. 2/ […]
🐣 RT @ .@Jim_Jordan is a hypocrite, a Donald Trump lackey, a political show pony, and an extension of the MAGA machine. He’s supposed to be committed to federalism, yet he’s directly interfering with a state prosecution. @TaraSetmayer on @MSNBC details the absurdity of the current GOP.
💽 https://twitter.com/ProjectLincoln/status/1648438981300989953?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @wartranslated I am somewhat perplexed by Budanov’s words. If by “the war will end very very soon” he implies full liberation of all Ukrainian territory, I am struggling to see how this can be achieved in a brief period. Kharkiv and Kherson operations, as successful as they were, still liberated an arguably small proportion relative to the total occupied area. Thus, from his words, I’m expecting nothing less than a spectacular event that will shock all of us and will be studied for decades.
¤ https://twitter.com/wartranslated/status/1648458299376029697?s=20
⋙ 🐣 RT @wartranslated This is not to say I don’t believe in the Ukrainian capabilities, with Western support, to pull off something amazing on the joke of a country that Russia is. I’m just not sure if what we’re being “sold” if you will, especially Russia’s imminent collapse, could be a certain near-future reality.
⋙ 🐣 RT @ManiatiGeorge Think collapse as in house of cards. Any successful Combined Arms Mechanized offensive will cause unbelievable panic in the undisciplined and poorly trained Russians. They have no capacity to counter an offensive that may involve 300k Ukrainians across a narrow front….
⋙ 🐣 RT @ Curculiunculus There are some numbers that might indicate an imminent collapse. If (hypothetically) the number of Russians crossing the lines to surrender is increasing exponentially from week to week, up 10% one week, 20% the next, 30% the next, that would be significant and easy to count. 1/2
⋙ 🐣 RT @Danger_Rand My take: Russia is exhausted on all fronts. They’re running out of serviceable equipment. Their morale is extremely low. Ukraine is going to exploit their exhaustion with the help of Western weapons and intelligence. I expect for Ukraine to make more than one breakthroug
⋙ 🐣 RT @CrimsonShadowMK Russia is currently running out of train lines by which they can move equipment to major areas of combat. If Ukraine is able to sever the last remaining GLOC to Northeast as well as Zap./Kherson oblasts, their capability to maintain a defense may be drastically diminished.
🐣 RT @DavidAFrench The settlement represents justice for Dominion, but by no means does it cleanse Fox of its corruption. ¤ Liars must be fired. Viewers must be informed. The company must apologize. And then it needs to hire new, honest producers and hosts. ¤ Until then, it’s still corrupt.
🐣 RT @harrylitman Good example of a piece of litigation establishing a social fact: Brown v Board, the fact being separate but equal is not equal. Rare that an important social proposition is in the offing, but Fox v Dominion was one such case. Now it ends inconclusively and Fox can keep on doin’
⋙ 🐣 RT @Teri_Kanefield Bad comparison. NYT v. Sullivan is settled law and that’s the law Dominion relied on. ¤ If Fox lost at trial, all that would happen is the rule in Sullivan would have been affirmed. ¤ Brown overturned a previous Supreme Court ruling. Dominion didn’t need to do that.
⋙ 🐣 RT @HP_DarthMaul Not a legal expert by any remote means but Dominion is a private company. Its lawsuit has never been to seek social justice but to recover financial damages. ¤ So Dominion succeeds. We just pinned our hope on the wrong actor.
🐣 RT @sentdefender The Department of Defense has announced that roughly 200 U.S. Soldiers have arrived in Taiwan over the last few weeks in order to begin Training the Taiwanese Armed Forces on Western Combat Operations and Methodology this includes Guerrilla Tactics to “Resist” a Chinese Invasion.
🐣 RT @PaulaChertok The @FTC should also pursue companies that profit by spreading false & misleading conspiracy theories and disinformation. @Foxnews is a cesspool of deception & discrimination. Even billion $ lawsuits don’t faze them. The 1st Amendment shouldn’t protect toxic propaganda outlets.
⋙ 🐣 RT @NBCNews The FTC will pursue companies who misuse artificial intelligence to violate laws against discrimination or be deceptive, the agency says.
⋙⋙ NBCNews: FTC says it will target AI that is deceptive or violates civil rights https://tinyurl.com/49xfyjv9
// In a congressional hearing, FTC Chair Lina Khan said that the newest versions of AI could be used to turbocharge fraud and scams and that any wrongdoing “should put them on the hook for FTC action.”
🐣 RT @RadioFreeTom As much as I wanted to agree with @nickakerman and his optimism today, I feel closer to what David says in this thread.
⋙ 🧵 RT @djrothkopf Nothing that is broken in our system got fixed today. That is the only meaningful metric of the Fox-Dominion settlement. We seem increasingly incapable of righting wrongs, reversing attacks, reducing threats.
📌 https://twitter.com/djrothkopf/status/1648497859187343363?s=20
⋙⋙ 🐣 RT @djrothkopf It’s not that we never see victories for our people. It is that those who are attacking our values, the rule of law, who seek to assert minority rule, are institutionalizing their power, disabling our checks and balances.
⋙⋙ 🐣 RT @djrothkopf It is a dangerous moment.
🐣 RT @RonFilipkowski I’ve been working very hard on him. Glad he’s finally coming around.
⋙ 🐣 RT @ @neontaster Trump’s transformation into Ron Filipkowski is now complete.
[TextLink:] https://twitter.com/RonFilipkowski/status/1648336529289363458?s=20/photo/1
[Text:] 🐣 RT @realDonaldTrump [ts] DeSanctus is being absolutely destroyed by Disney. His original P.R. plan fizzled, so now he’s going back with a new one in order to save face. Disney’s next move will be the announcement that no more money will be invested in Florida because of the Governor – In fact, they could even announce a slow withdrawal or sale of certain properties, or the whole thing. Watch! That would be a killer. In the meantime, this is all so unnecessary, a political STUNT! Ron should work on the squatter MESS!
🐣 RT @harrylitman I recognize a lot of people I respect greatly don’t share my relative lack of enthusiasm for the settlement. But besides that the good developments already were a given, this was the very rare case that could have gone far to establishing Fox’s atrocious conduct as a social fact.
⋙ 🐣 RT @ No knock on Dominion of course, which has fought a long courageous fight and has to calculate in its own self interest as its lawyers just made clear on @allinwithchris. But Fox can now treat as inconclusive what might well have been conclusive.
WaPo: Fox News still faces $2.7 billion defamation lawsuit from Smartmatic https://tinyurl.com/r3ntrnka “Smartmatic alleges that Fox News knowingly made ‘over 100 false statements and implications’ about the company, amplifying false information from … Trump”
// “from former president Donald Trump and his allies that Smartmatic played a role in his election loss”
🐣 RT @@tribelaw Dominion won a spectacular victory not from what it forced FOX to admit, which was nearly nothing, but from (1) how it collected ~6x its provable damages and from (2) all the amazing evidence of deliberate lies it forced into the open — evidence that FOX was desperate to conceal
⋙ 🐣 Fox will, however, be able to continue to conceal the evidence from the only audience that really matters: it’s own viewers ¤ the rest of us already knew Fox lied about Dominion (and a lot more) ¤ Dominion wins, Fox wins. America loses
NYT: The $787.5 million Dominion deal is one of the largest defamation settlements in U.S. history https://tinyurl.com/4z8956uw “Perhaps the only larger penalty came in November, when a jury ordered the Infowars conspiracy broadcaster Alex Jones to pay more than $1.4 billion”
// “… to families of victims of the Sandy Hook elementary school shooting in Connecticut”
🐣 RT @RachelBitecofer What democracy needed was Dominion to force Carlson, Hannity, Ingraham, & Bartiromo to tell their audiences that they intentionally lied about election fraud, that they knew it was a lie the whole time, and that they did it on purpose to keep them from switching to Newsmax.
🐣 RT @ABC BREAKING: Dominion Voting Systems CEO John Poulos calls settlement with Fox News “historic,” adding: “Fox has admitted to telling lies about Dominion that caused enormous damage to my company… nothing can ever make up for that.” https://abcn.ws/41FoHFm
💽 https://twitter.com/ABC/status/1648423038965411843?s=20/photo/1
WaPo: Fox, Dominion settlement leaves outstanding First Amendment questions https://tinyurl.com/mwh5ayzs
⭕ 17 Apr 2023
WSJ, Gerard Baker: If Western Civilization Dies, Put It Down as a Suicide https://tinyurl.com/3juxpsbz Death by virtue-signaling: “We in the West are in the grip of an ideology that disowns our genius, denounces our success, disdains merit, elevates victimhood.” Preach!
// We are in the grip of an ideology that disowns our genius, denounces our success, disdains merit.
[…] The past 50 years have been marked by the genuine eradication of barriers to opportunity for the underprivileged regardless of ethnicity, sex, sexual orientation or anything else. This is how we were genuinely starting to fulfill the promise of equality.
But the cultural revolution that began in the past decade is re-erecting those barriers and creating new elite power structures, elevated not by talent or hard work, but, curiously, by membership of the self-approved class, signaled by the right luxury beliefs and articulated by the right “inclusive” language.
Adrian Wooldridge, who has written a book on the rise of meritocracy, frames this in a recent article in the Spectator. The left, he says, is “creating a new social order based on virtue, rather than ability.”
Bear with me because I am going to extrapolate from these baneful developments to a much larger worry about the geopolitical conditions we confront.
As we survey the competition between global civilizations in the multipolar world we now inhabit, we see that the West is challenged as it hasn’t been in centuries. It’s axiomatic that a rising China and perhaps other powers look like formidable contenders for global leadership—with implications for our own security and prosperity.
But if we are losing that struggle, it isn’t because of the superiority of authoritarian, communist or autocratic systems. We know that liberal capitalism has done more for human prosperity, health and freedom than any other economic or political system.
If we are losing, it is because we are losing our soul, our sense of purpose as a society, our identity as a civilization. We in the West are in the grip of an ideology that disowns our genius, denounces our success, disdains merit, elevates victimhood, embraces societal self-loathing and enforces it all in a web of exclusionary and authoritarian rules, large and small.
🐣 RT @attn .@SecBlinken shared the powerful story of his stepfather’s survival during the Holocaust. On Yom HaShoah, we remember the 6 million Jewish victims of the Holocaust. #WeRemember ¤ Made in partnership with the @WorldJewishCong.
💽 https://twitter.com/attn/status/1648023528107823105?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @azardey3 Hey @Jim_Jordan these are numbers in your own state !!!
// Rate of homicides in NYC (5.2) vs in major Ohio cities (15-48): MSNBC screenshot
◕ https://twitter.com/azardey3/status/1648194523082760200?s=20/photo/1
🔄 CFR (2019): Inequality and Tax Rates: A Global Comparison https://tinyurl.com/yw35sx85 The level of taxes as a percent of GDP for the US is among the lowest of First World (OECD) countries ~ even though we are the wealthiest country and income inequality (GINI Index) is among the highest
◕ https://twitter.com/Auriandra/status/1648198626680684545?s=20/photo/1 -2
// 3/12/2019; With economic inequality at an all-time high, some U.S. presidential candidates are proposing dramatic shifts to the U.S. tax code. How have similar plans worked elsewhere in the world?
// Link for GINI chart (BI) https://tinyurl.com/bdetjsmp
WaPo: Fiscal crisis nears as McCarthy takes debt ceiling plan to Wall Street https://tinyurl.com/4w2mtwbv //➔ repeal the Trump tax cuts which mostly helped the wealthy and rich corporations; increase taxes on stock buybacks and on those making >$1M/year
// The House speaker outlined the party’s new proposal at the New York Stock Exchange, more than a decade after a similar GOP-led standoff hammered U.S. markets
✅ CNN, Daniel Dale: Fact check: Here’s the truth about crime in Manhattan https://tinyurl.com/m5szsjk4 Fact: Most categories of major crime in Manhattan, though not all, are down so far in 2023; Fact: New York City has a lower murder rate than many other US cities
“The list of US cities with higher murder rates than New York City in 2022 includes New Orleans, St. Louis, Baltimore, Detroit, Denver, Miami, Atlanta, Tampa, Orlando, Jacksonville, Las Vegas, Buffalo, Indianapolis, Milwaukee, Washington DC, Kansas City, Oklahoma City, Tulsa, Memphis, Nashville, Charlotte, Pittsburgh, Minneapolis, St. Paul, Oakland, Sacramento, Albuquerque, Portland, Newark, Cleveland, Columbus and Toledo.
WaPo Editorial: Emmanuel Macron should have stayed home https://tinyurl.com/yc5cvyp2 “[H]e exposed disunity in Europe over Beijing, he handed Chinese President Xi Jinping a propaganda coup, and, for good measure, he threw Taiwan under the bus”
🐣 RT @MeidasTouch Yikes! Kevin McCarthy just got called out to his face live on CNBC over his debt ceiling hypocrisy. The host noted that McCarthy raised the debt ceiling 3 times under Trump and added $2 trillion to the deficit with his tax cuts for the wealthy.
💽 https://twitter.com/MeidasTouch/status/1648033792656031749?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @avalaina The political process over Vladimir Kara-Murza ended today. He was sentenced to 25 years for the truth about the war crimes of the Russian army. We know that Putin’s regime will fall much sooner. But at this moment I want to express my sincere support to his wife Evgenia
🖼 https://twitter.com/avalaina/status/1648074216326025216?s=20/photo/1
// Kara-Murza family photo
🐣 RT @CENTCOM CENTCOM confirms an ISIS Senior Leader was killed in a helicopter raid in northern Syria this morning.
[TextLink:] https://twitter.com/CENTCOM/status/1648037123646267393?s=20/photo/1
[Text:] CENTCOM Confirms ISIS Senior Leader killed in a Helicopter Raid in Northern Syria
Early this morning, April 17, U.S. Central Command forces killed Abd-al-Hadi Mahmud al-Haji Ali, a senior SIS Syria leader and operational planner responsible for planning terror attacks in the Middle East and Europe. This was the ISIS leader who was killed in a unilateral helicopter raid in northern Syria today that was announced this morning. Abd-al-Hadi Mahmud al-Haji Ali was the primary target of the raid. Two other ISIS operatives were killed in the raid.
This operation was launched after intelligence revealed an ISIS plot to kidnap officials abroad as leverage for ISIS initiatives.
“We know ISIS retains the desire to strike beyond the Middle East, said Col. Joe Buccino, a CENTCOM spokesperson. “We are therefore committed to the enduring defeat of ISIS.”
🐣 RT @mjluxmoore “I blame myself for only one thing,” Kara-Murza said in court. “I have not managed to convince enough of my compatriots and enough politicians in democratic countries of the danger that the current regime in the Kremlin poses for Russia and the world.”
⋙ WSJ: Russian Court Sentences Kremlin Critic Vladimir Kara-Murza to 25 Years for Treason https://tinyurl.com/2ca6n4ym
// Dissident says charges were a response to his opposition to Putin’s invasion of Ukraine
🐣 RT @NOELreports “We shot 24 Ukrainian children by the order of Prigozhin himself.” ¤ A former Wagner PMC fighter told http://Gulagu.net that minor Ukrainians (teenagers) in Bakhmut were shot because of tattoos.
⋙ 🐣 RT @NOELreports According to the Vladimir Osechkin, founder of the anti-corruption website http://Gulagu.net, an ex-Wagner PMC fighter testified that Prigozhin personally ordered the execution of prisoners of war. There are more than 20 of such cases. ¤ They will publish it next monday.
⭕ 16 Apr 2023
🐣 RT @KevinMKruse A reminder that Matt Schlapp was literally part of the Brooks Brothers riot in the 2000 election.
◕ 🖼 https://twitter.com/KevinMKruse/status/1647772444394962945?s=20/photo/1
⋙ 🐣 RT @mschlapp Marc Elias helps “legally” steal elections. It’s no longer about being the most popular candidate, but rigging a ballot stuffing operation. ¤ Until we develop a counter to lawfare and election law legal shell games we will only win when our margin is large. ¤ A coup w/o guns.
🐣 RT @MuellerSheWrote I think he just admitted to a campaign violation.
⋙ 🐣 RT @realDonaldTrump [ts] “SO THE DEMOCRATS ARE ALLOWED TO CHEAT ON, AND RIGG, A PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION, AND THEY WANT TO INDICT REPUBLICANS FOR A
CAMPAIGN VIOLATION. THIS IS CLASSIC!!!”
[TextLink:] https://twitter.com/MuellerSheWrote/status/1647754225395568640?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @BradMossEsq I don’t see Dominion doing it without (1) a massive payout and (2) a very public written apology from Fox.
⋙ 🐣 RT @brianstelter Breaking via the @wsj: “Fox has made a late push to settle the dispute out of court, people familiar with the situation said Sunday.”
⋙⋙ WSJ: Fox News, Dominion Prepare for Battle in $1.6 Billion Defamation Trial https://tinyurl.com/mrzsjr6f
// Dominion Voting Systems has been seeking $1.6 billion in damages for false election-fraud broadcasts
🐣 RT @McFaul Transfer the Seized Assets of the Russian Central Bank to Ukraine Now! ¤ This transfer is a morally correct and politically prudent decision. [link]
🐣 RT @business [Bloomberg] JUST IN: A Delaware judge delays the start of Dominion’s defamation trial against Fox News, without citing a reason https://trib.al/wpFN9ey
NYT: Fox News Is on Trial, and So Are Falsehoods About 2020 https://tinyurl.com/k2awh3tp “The evidence against Fox includes … text messages and emails showing that producers, hosts and executives belittled the claims being made on air of hacked voting machines and conspiracy”
// A jury in Delaware will be asked to weigh the limits of the First Amendment. Another question in the case is whether the network will pay a financial penalty for disseminating election lies.
Fox News, one of the most powerful and profitable media companies, will defend itself against extensive evidence suggesting it told its audience a story of conspiracy and fraud in the 2020 election it knew wasn’t true.
The jury will be asked to weigh lofty questions about the limits of the First Amendment and to consider imposing a huge financial penalty against Fox. Some of the most influential names in conservative media — Rupert Murdoch, Sean Hannity, Tucker Carlson — are expected to be called to testify. But there is another fundamental question the case raises: Will there be a price to pay for profiting from the spread of misinformation? …
“Lying to American voters is not actually actionable,” said Andrew Weissmann, the former general counsel of the F.B.I. who was a senior member of the special counsel team under Robert S. Mueller that looked into Mr. Trump’s 2016 campaign.
It’s a quirk of American law that most lies — even ones that destabilize the nation, told by people with enormous power and reach — can’t be prosecuted. Charges can be brought only in limited circumstances, such as if a business executive lies to shareholders or an individual lies to the F.B.I. Politicians can be charged if they lie about a campaign contribution, which is the essence of the criminal case against Mr. Trump by the Manhattan district attorney’s office.
In the Fox News case, the trial is going forward because the law allows companies like Dominion, and people, to seek damages if they can prove their reputations were harmed by lies. ¤ The legal bar that a company like Dominion must meet to prove defamation is known as actual malice. … that the defendants either knew that they were making a false statement or were reckless in deciding to publish the defamatory statement.
But many legal scholars have said that they believed there was ample evidence to support Dominion’s case, in which they argue they were intentionally harmed by the lies broadcast by Fox … John Culhane, professor of law at Delaware Law School at Widener University, [said] “
… “this is about as strong as a case you’re going to get on defamation.” Mr. Culhane added that a Fox victory would only make it harder to rein in the kind of misinformation that’s rampant in pro-Trump media. … ¤ “I think it would embolden them even further,”This case has proved to be extraordinary on many levels, not only for its potential to deliver the kind of judgment that has so far eluded prosecutors like Mr. Weissmann, who have spent years pursuing Mr. Trump and his supporters who they believe bent the American democratic system to a breaking point.
Some experts like Mr. Logan believe the case’s significance could grow beyond its relevance to the current disinformation-plagued political climate. They see an opportunity for the Supreme Court to eventually take the case as a vehicle to revisit libel law and the “actual malice” standard. …
The actual malice standard has been vital for individual journalists and media outlets who make mistakes — as long as they are honest mistakes. But some scholars like Mr. Logan — as well as two conservative Supreme Court justices, Neil M. Gorsuch and Clarence Thomas — have argued that “actual malice” should be reconsidered as too high a standard. Justice Thomas specifically cited as a reason “the proliferation of falsehoods.”
“The nature of this privilege goes to the heart of our democracy, particularly in this case,” said Mr. Logan, whose paper arguing that the courts have made it too difficult for victims of libel to win relief was cited in a dissent by Justice Gorsuch in 2021. …
The evidence against Fox includes copious amounts of text messages and emails showing that producers, hosts and executives belittled the claims being made on air of hacked voting machines and conspiracy, details that Dominion has said prove the network defamed it. …
“A free-flowing, robust American discourse depends on First Amendment protections for the press’ news gathering and reporting,” a network spokeswoman said in a written statement. The statement added that Fox viewers expected the kind of commentary that aired on the network after the election “just as they expect hyperbole, speculation and opinion from a newspaper’s op-ed section.” …
Judge Davis has expressed considerable skepticism toward Fox in the courtroom. He issued a sanction against Fox last week when Dominion disclosed that the company had not revealed details about Mr. Murdoch’s involvement in Fox News’s affairs, ruling that Dominion had a right to conduct further depositions at Fox’s expense.
But he does not have the final say. Twelve men and women from Delaware will ultimately decide the case. And defamation suits so rarely prevail, it’s also reasonable to consider the possibility that Fox does win — and what a 2024 election looks like with an emboldened pro-Trump media.
WaPo: A year ago, Musk asked, ‘Is Twitter dying?’ He may have his answer https://tinyurl.com/476fksxn “Twitter is a shadow of its former self, without anything to replace it, one of the former workers said. ‘There’s no true alternative,’ the person said. ‘Twitter was one of a kind’”
// // Twitter has been dramatically transformed under Musk and few — even among some in the billionaire’s corner — say the changes have been for the better
🧵 RT @duty2warn The FBI searched the Biden collection at the Univ. of Delaware—1,875 boxes and 415 gigabytes of electronic records—and found no classified files. ¤ But the FBI never searched Bedminster or Trump Tower when Trump stole our nuclear plans. ¤ Chris Wray needs to go.
📌 https://twitter.com/duty2warn/status/1626250063490973706?s=20
⋙ WaPo: FBI searched University of Delaware for Biden documents https://tinyurl.com/yckmm6ze
// The action follows searches at the president’s homes in Wilmington and Rehoboth Beach
The FBI recently has searched the University of Delaware, which houses thousands of President Biden’s records, as part of an investigation into Biden’s handling of classified documents, according to a person familiar with the matter.
Agents initially did not find classified information, but the material is still being reviewed, the person said on the condition of anonymity to discuss an ongoing investigation.
The University of Delaware is the fourth location the FBI has searched as part of the Justice Department investigation, which began after one of Biden’s personal lawyers discovered classified documents last November at the Penn Biden Center, an office Biden had used in Washington after leaving the vice presidency.
[…] The collection of documents that Biden donated to his alma mater fills 1,875 boxes in addition to 415 gigabytes of electronic records. It includes committee reports, drafts of legislation and correspondence.
Additional classified documents have been found at Biden’s Wilmington residence, but agents did not find any classified materials after searching Biden’s vacation home in Rehoboth Beach, Del.
The collection of documents that Biden donated to his alma mater fills 1,875 boxes in addition to 415 gigabytes of electronic records. It includes committee reports, drafts of legislation and correspondence. …
Classified documents also have turned up at the Mar-a-Lago home of former president Donald Trump, though unlike Biden, Trump has been defiant and challenged Justice Department efforts to regain the documents.
The Trump and Biden discoveries have prompted other former officials to search their homes, and late last month, a lawyer for former vice president Mike Pence said a small number of documents had been found at Pence’s Indiana home.
⭕ 15 Apr 2023
🐣 RT @djrothkopf The core distinguishing belief of the contemporary Republican Party is that it’s extreme ideology is more important than the Constitution, the law, our national security and the well-being of the American people. It is the most dangerous movement in our history.
🐣 RT @AnonOpsUnited #Anonymous #OpGOP Epstein’s flight logs #Trump flew on Jeffrey Epstein’s private jets six more times than was previously known, according to flight logs ¤ By request from many of you ¤ We do not forgive ¤ We do not forget
[DocCloud] https://tinyurl.com/yr82k8cf
📋 https://twitter.com/AnonOpsUnited/status/1647404825091493893?s=20/photo/1
↥ ↧
🐣 RT @AnonOpsUnited #Anonymous #OpGOP Little black book un reedacted and readily available ¤ Hey @prodbytony2 where did you find this? ;)
⋙ 🐣 RT @prodbytony2 Trump was in Epsteins’s black book, wonder why… ¤ Some people are good at keeping secrets, but secrets always come out of the darkness eventually. ¤ Even more than that “The Donald” is circled in the Black Book, seems interesting. ¤ #Anonymous #OpGOP
📋 [Trump:] https://twitter.com/AnonOpsUnited/status/1647404101250973699?s=20/photo/1
📋 ⋙⋙ 🐣 RT @kelly2277 [VentureCapital] Here’s a link to the unredacted Epstein black book. https://epsteinsblackbook.com/all-names
🐣 RT @MarshallCohen Fox News formally apologized to the judge in the Dominion defamation case, taking responsibility for the “misunderstanding” regarding Rupert Murdoch’s role at the network that led the judge to launch an investigation into potential legal misconduct by Fox
⋙ CNN: Fox News apologizes to judge for ‘misunderstanding’ over Rupert Murdoch’s role that sparked investigation https://tinyurl.com/44s89fu6 “Fox lawyers have repeatedly said he didn’t have an official title at Fox News. But last week, Fox disclosed that he is also an executive officer”
⭕ 14 Apr 2023
📋 “Between 1861 and 1865 c. 200,000 Irishmen fought in the American Civil War: 180,000 in the Union army and 20,000 in the Confederate army.” Tracing the Irish in the American Civil War https://tinyurl.com/25x6rkvd
🖼 https://twitter.com/Auriandra/status/1647415508537409538?s=20/photo/1
// caption: “Detail from Absolution under fire by Paul Wood—Union soldiers of the Irish Brigade after the Battle of Gettysburg, July 1863. (The Snite Museum of Art)”
WaPo, Philip Bump: How toxic are the politics of abortion for Republicans? https://tinyurl.com/mr37n3su //➔ pretty toxic ~ so toxic Trump is urging the GOP to moderate (per Rolling Stone); so far, Red states aren’t listening. Will MAGA follow Trump? What happens to the Evangelicals?
◕ https://twitter.com/Auriandra/status/1647146657446805506?s=20/photo/1
KyivIndependent: AP: China pledges not to sell arms to any party of Russia’s war in Ukraine https://tinyurl.com/2a2puzwx “Chinese Foreign Minister Qin Gang said … Beijing would regulate exports of goods with dual civilian and military use”
🧵 RT @anno1540 Russian spetsnaz lost 90-95% of fighters in Ukraine, recovery will take up to 10 years: The Washington Post ¤ As a rule, special forces are assigned covert and risky missions. But since the beginning of the full-scale invasion, the Russian military leadership has – /1a
📌 https://twitter.com/anno1540/status/1646832539150045185?s=20
⋙ deviated from the norm and ordered the elite forces to engage in direct combat. /1b ¤ The natural result was huge losses. “Estimates show that the 22nd Separate Brigade and two other special forces brigades dropped out by 90-95%,” writes The Washington Post.
⋙ WaPo: Russia’s commando units gutted by Ukraine war, U.S. leak shows https://tinyurl.com/mpcy2ds3
// THE DISCORD LEAKS | Russia’s clandestine spetsnaz forces have been put to use alongside the infantry, suffering massive numbers of dead and wounded⋙ Russian commanders, having destroyed the most trained fighters, have lost the valuable skills that these troops possessed, including intelligence gathering and reconnaissance, from the beginning of the invasion until last autumn, the newspaper writes. /3
⋙ It is noted that spetsnaz soldiers require at least four years of special training, and it may take a whole decade for Moscow to recreate the lost units.#SlavaUkraine 4/4
🐣 RT @TreasChest ❗️Prigozhin called on the Kremlin to end the war against Ukraine. ¤ “Today, the ideal option is to announce the end of the SVO, to inform everyone that the Russian Federation has achieved the results that it planned.” ¤ Beggars, and this counteroffensive has not even begun yet 😈
🐣 RT @POTUS Together, Ireland and the United States will defend the values handed down to us from our ancestors. ¤ And keep the flame of freedom alive – as a beacon to guide our children and grandchildren.
[TextLink:] https://twitter.com/POTUS/status/1646928952827469828?s=20/photo/1
// “In this moment, the world needs Ireland and the United States, and our limitless imaginations.” – PRESIDENT BIDEN
🐣 RT @KellyO Here in Ireland, many folks we have met have called this visit “the Joe show” and tonight the president is speaking to one of the largest crowds he has ever addressed.
🧵 RT @greg_ip India’s population may have surpassed China’s this month, an event heralding a major shift in the global order. “We are on the cusp of maybe the most momentous population transition of the last 200 years.” By @ByShanLi and @QiLiyan
📌 ◕ https://twitter.com/greg_ip/status/1646957126898667527?s=20/photo/1
⋙⋙ WSJ: India’s Population Surpasses China’s, Shifting the World’s ‘Center of Gravity’ https://tinyurl.com/mphhe3s6
// tags: economics demographics population China India Global South; The new global order reflects deep changes in both countries, with economic and geopolitical consequences
⋙ 2/ India’s rising population means it’s likely to keep its economy growing, buy more of the world’s goods and play a bigger role in global affairs, even as it grapples with poverty and a lack of jobs. Meanwhile …
⋙ 3/ …China’s demographic headwinds will make it harder for the country to achieve its economic ambitions, or to supplant the U.S. as the world’s biggest economy, despite its rising wealth and military power.
◕ https://twitter.com/greg_ip/status/1646957479597690882?s=20/photo/1⋙ 4/ China has had the most people since at least 1750, when it had a population of 225 million, or about 28% of the total according to @OurWorldInData. In 1947, India was partitioned, w/ Pakistan and (now) Bangladesh also becoming independent.
⋙ 5/ Whatever happens, the world’s future population will increasingly tilt towards the global south, and south Asia in particular. The three successor states to pre-independence India will have 2.3B people in 2060, versus China’s 1.2 billion.
◕ https://twitter.com/greg_ip/status/1646960946571628563?s=20/photo/1⋙ 6/ How did the reversal take place? Early on Communist China restricted contraception and abortion to encourage more births. “With many people, strength is great,” Mao Zedong proclaimed…
⋙ 7/ … then later later began blaming population growth for shortages of jobs and housing. In 1980, Deng Xiaoping launched the one-child policy. Without it, he said, “our economy cannot be developed well, and people’s lives won’t be improved.
⋙ 8/ China’s fertility rate fell below 2.1 replacement rate in the early 1990s. China allowed 2 children in 2016, then 3, then unlimited numbers. But fertility has kept falling, to 1.2
⋙ 9/ India, under Indira Gandhi, also tried compulsory sterlilization, but people revolted; it contributed to her electoral defeat in 1977. Since then, India has encouraged but not enforced smaller families. Its fertility rate is now 2
⋙ 10/ We shouldn’t understate the challenges still facing India; the population is much more rural than China’s, and female participation remains distressingly low. Creating formal sector jobs, especially for women, will be crucial to achieving middle income status.
◕ https://twitter.com/greg_ip/status/1646965892549431326?s=20/photo/1⋙ 11/ But don’t confuse levels with rates of change. India is poor but it’s the fastest growing country in the G-20 and if it can keep that up, its global clout is bound to grow. Meanwhile, I hear more people whisper: China may already have peaked.
⋙ 12/ Please read the whole story, great reporting & analysis by @ByShanLi& @QiLiyan, it’s well worth your time: WSJ: https://tinyurl.com/mphhe3s6
🐣 RT @michaeldweiss It’s not even that this was the one document doctored by pro-Russian Telegram users, inverting Ukrainian and Russian casualties. (I have the original, which shows Russian losses are greater.) It’s that Carlson’s team knows it and still let him run with this lie.
⋙ 🐣 RT @ColumbiaBugle Tucker Carlson: “The second thing we learned from these slides is that despite direct U.S. involvement, Ukraine is in fact losing the war. Seven Ukrainians are being killed for every Russian. Ukrainian air defenses have been utterly degraded. Ukraine is losing.”
💽 https://twitter.com/michaeldweiss/status/1646902196749910022?s=20/photo/1
⋙⋙ 🐣 so it will appear via Tucker on Russian tv, and Russians get fed back their own propaganda as true
🐣 RT @KyivIndependent ⚡️Reuters: Ukraine allegedly finding more Chinese components in Russian weapons. ¤ Ukraine has allegedly been finding an increasing number of components originating from China in Russian weapons recovered on the battlefield, Reuters reported on April 14.
🐣 RT @ZMiST_Ua Chief of the General Staff of the Russian Armed Forces Gerasimov and Secretary of the Security Council Patrushev tried to sabotage the seizure of Ukraine at the beginning of the war – Tagesspiegel with reference to a secret Pentagon document.
[TextLink:] https://twitter.com/ZMiST_Ua/status/1646941995758125056?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @HerrDr8 #1pageassessukrwar #RussianWinterOffensive2023 #OrcLossRate Book closing on Putin, Shoigu & General G’s 2023 winter offensive debacle. They did a great job further wrecking Russian army in time for Ukraine’s spring/summer offensive.
🌎 https://twitter.com/HerrDr8/status/1646953293472571400?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @RadioFreeTom I see that this member of Congress is doing her best to protect sensitive national security information, by supporting felonies and encouraging more people to be heroes by stealing classified documents. ¤ Nothing ends a career in the modern GOP now – except opposing Donald Trump.
⋙ 🐣 RT @RepMTG Jake Teixeira is white, male, christian, and antiwar. ¤ That makes him an enemy to the Biden regime. ¤ And he told the truth about troops being on the ground in Ukraine and a lot more. ¤ Ask yourself who is the real enemy? ¤ A young low level national guardsmen? ¤ Or the administration that is waging war in Ukraine, a non-NATO nation, against nuclear Russia without war powers?
🐣 RT @FellaNafo The Vikings settled the Kyivian-Rus (Ros-lagen) by Valdemar the Great 988.
⋙ 🐣 RT @RothLindberg Vikings is another topic. Actually Norwegian and Danish Vikings settled in the Baltic states, Poland and Ukraine. But Swedish Vikings went further and settled down in what is now Russia. So I guess it’s weird Sweden is not on Russia’s side. Why fight the offspring our ancestors?
🐣 There are 35.5M Americans of Irish descent in the United States, the third largest ancestry group after German (49M) and African-American (41M). Mexican is 4th (32M), then English (27M). Most Irish Americans know of the potato famine, with residual resentment toward the British…
⋙ 🐣 I am half Irish, 1/4 Scots-Irish. I am old enough to have felt anti Irish Catholic prejudice. My Irish ancestors came from County Mayo, as did Biden’s, where the Hunger hit very hard. I’m proud of him for celebrating our Irish ancestry and for visiting our ancestral homeland
⭕ 13 Apr 2023
WIRED, Emily Mullin and Maryn McKenna: The Abortion Pill Legal Standoff Endangers Access to All Drugs https://tinyurl.com/bdejnej3
// A Fifth Circuit ruling that keeps mifepristone available, but curtails access to it, is the newest front in a battle over the FDA’s power to approve medications.
⋙ “Scorching letter” from biotech and pharmaceutical companies https://tinyurl.com/5cks7e52
// tags scathing letter
📋 CREW: Trump made up to $160 million from foreign countries as president https://tinyurl.com/mud37s4r
🐣 RT @RonFilipkowski In a new statement, Trump vows to get vengeance on “marxist local DAs” who have persecuted him, conservatives, and christians, and says he will launch civil rights investigations against them for racial discrimination, presumably against white people.
💽 https://twitter.com/RonFilipkowski/status/1646562741539176468?s=20/photo/1
🧵 RT @SawyerHackett Holy shit. This is the guy who Greg Abbott has promised to pardon for murder. ¤ This is ONE PAGE of the 76 just released. Here, Daniel Perry says “I will only shoot the [protestors] in front and push the pedal to the metal.”
📌 [TextLink:] https://twitter.com/SawyerHackett/status/1646683812749885440?s=20/photo/1
KyivPost: Sergey Lavrov and Russian UN Delegation Denied US Visas https://tinyurl.com/yfbmxvt9
// The US has refused visas for the Russian delegation and the Russian Foreign Minister to attend a UN Security Council meeting.
🐣 RT @TimInHonolulu Cue the perjury charges. I wonder if the deposition transcript will be sealed?
⋙ 🐣 RT @KaraScannell Trump attorney Chris Kise on today’s deposition.
[TextLink:] https://twitter.com/KaraScannell/status/1646655930837204994?s=20/photo/1
[Text:] “President Trump spent nearly seven hours today describing in detail his extraordinary business success. The transactions at the center of this case were wildly profitable for the banks and for the trump entities. When the facts of this success, and not politically engineered soundbites, are out in the open, everyone will scoff at the notion any fraud took place. This is an exceptional American success story. Last I checked, capitalism is still legal in America!”
🐣 RT @petestrzok who else was just at Waco? ¤ Video with “Teixeira shouting racist and antisemitic slurs before firing a rifle and said he referenced govt raids at Ruby Ridge, ID and in Waco, TX — events with deep resonance among right-wing, anti-govt extremists.” [link]
WaPo, Eric Wemple: Dominion lawsuit pretrial hearings foreshadow a brutal ride for Fox News https://tinyurl.com/ycbnhczc “Fox executives steered programming not according to the facts but for their audience’s thirst for comforting falsehoods”
💙 🐣 RT @patrickdextervc On Eagle’s Wings, US President Joe Biden’s favourite hymn. Welcoming Joe back to his ancestral home here in County Mayo
💽 https://twitter.com/patrickdextervc/status/1646591277864046595?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @RadioFreeTom “evidence pointed to the leaker being a disaffected young man with racist views and a preoccupation with guns” ¤ you don’t say
⋙ 🐣 RT @natsechobbyist Combine that with uniform and civilian leadership who think they are too important to spend time rooting out radicalization in the military and we have a giant problem. Good order and discipline isn’t going to solve this.
🐣 RT @gregpmiller US intelligence is both 1) a global behemoth with astonishing penetrations of nearly every adversary and ally and 2) a sprawling apparatus that can’t seem to keep track of how many 20-somethings who grew up on Minecraft have access to its deepest secrets [link]
🐣 RT @lrozen [1:21pm] Alleged leaker arrested by FBI. ¤ AG Garland scheduled to make brief statement at 2:30pm, per NYT
🧵 RT @bellingcat NEW: Bellingcat’s @AricToler worked with the @nytimes to uncover a trail of digital evidence that appears to identify Jack Teixeira, a 21-year-old Air National Guardsman, as the leader of an online gaming chat group where US intelligence documents leaked
📌 https://twitter.com/bellingcat/status/1646546839045394434?s=20/
⋙ NYT: Leader of Online Group Where Secret Documents Leaked Is Air National Guardsman https://tinyurl.com/4wnaf7j9
// Federal investigators are searching for the person who shared classified documents that revealed government secrets about the Ukraine war.
The national guardsman, whose name is Jack Teixeira, oversaw a private online group named Thug Shaker Central, where about 20 to 30 people, mostly young men and teenagers, came together over a shared love of guns, racist online memes and video games. …
The New York Times spoke with four members of the Thug Shaker Central chat group, one of whom said he has known the person who leaked for at least three years, had met him in person, and referred to him as the O.G. The friends described him as older than most of the group members, who were in their teens, and the undisputed leader. One of the friends said the O.G. had access to intelligence documents through his job.
While the gaming friends would not identify the group’s leader by name, a trail of digital evidence compiled by The Times leads to Airman Teixeira. ¤ The Times has been able to link Airman Teixeira to other members of the Thug Shaker Central group through his online gaming profile and other records. …
WaPo Editorial: ‘A free China’: Why the words of a jailed dissident should be read far and wide https://tinyurl.com/239tfs6x “A democratic China must be realized in our time, we cannot saddle the next generation with this duty” ~ Xu Zhiyong, just sentenced to 14 years in prison
⋙ ChinaChange, Xu Zhiyong: ‘A democratic China must be realized in our time, we cannot saddle the next generation with this duty’ https://tinyurl.com/4akz2nbx
// 4/9/2023; Xu Zhiyong’s Court Statement
🐣 RT @GlasnostGone Person responsible for the leak of hundreds of classified Pentagon documents is reported to be a young, racist gun enthusiast out to impress his friends & who worked on a military base. Number of people in US with top secret clearance is about 1.25 million
⋙ 📋 TheGuardian: Pentagon leaks linked to young gun enthusiast who worked at military base – report https://tinyurl.com/2hym54yt
// Man known online as ‘OG’ is said to have access to large amounts of classified material and to regard intelligence services as repressive
🐣 RT @AWeissmann_ Not great is an understatement. A partial stay on a procedural issue (timeliness) and 2/3 judges leave in place a stay of important FDA approvals post 2016.
⋙ 🐣 RT @kyledcheney NEWS: Three-judge panel *partially* stays the district courts order re: Mifepristone regarding the FDA’s 2000 approval. It denies the stay for the FDA’s post-2016 changes.
[TextLink:] https://twitter.com/kyledcheney/status/1646400564715040768?s=20/photo/1
[Text:] Appeal from the United States District Court for the Northern District of Texas
USDC No. 2:22-CV-223 ¤ UNPUBLISHED ORDER
Before HAYNES,’ ENGELHARDT, and OLDHAM, Circuit Judges.PER CURIAM: For the reasons given below, IT IS ORDERED that defendants’ motions for a stay pending appeal are GRANTED IN PART. At this preliminary stage, and based on our necessarily abbreviated review, it appears that the statute of limitations bars plaintiffs’ challenges to the Food and Drug Administration’s approval of mifepristone in 2000. In the district court, however, plaintiffs brought a series of alternative arguments regarding FDA’s actions in 2016 and subsequent years. And the district court emphasized that its order separately applied to prohibit FDA’s actions in and after 2016 in accordance with plaintiffs’ alternative arguments. As to those alternative arguments, plaintiffs’ claims are timely. Defendants have not shown that plaintiffs are unlikely to succeed on the merits of their timely challenges. For that reason, and as more fully explained below, defendants’ motions for a stay pending appeal are DENIED IN PART. Defendants’ alternative motions for an administrative stay are DENIED AS MOOT. Plaintiffs’ motion to dismiss the appeal is DENIED. The appeal isEXPEDITED to the next available Oral Argument Calendar.
🐣 RT @JoyceWhiteVance DOJ will ask SCOTUS for a full stay now, as the 5th Circuit leaves key provisions of Judge Kacsmaryk’s ruling that unduly restrict access to abortion drug Mifepristone in place
⋙ NBCNews: Appeals court partially blocks ruling that imperils access to key abortion pill https://tinyurl.com/3mx2rvyx
// The 5th Circuit panel put a hold on the part of a federal judge’s ruling that would have paused the FDA’s original 2000 approval of the abortion drug mifepristone.
But the three-judge panel said a separate part of Kacsmaryk’s decision, which suspends changes the FDA made to the drug’s approved use in 2016, could go into effect. The panel also determined that the agency’s finding in 2021 that mifepristone can be distributed by mail would be paused, as well, as Kacsmaryk ordered.
The court’s decision imperils widespread availability of the drug, as it would require patients to make in-person visits to obtain it.
The 2016 changes, among other things, reduced the number of in-person visits that patients are required to make from three to one and allowed the pills to be prescribed to women at up to 10 weeks’ gestation instead of up to seven weeks. …
The appeals court panel was divided 2-1, with Judges Kurt Engelhardt and Andrew Oldham, both appointees of President Donald Trump, in the majority. Judge Catharina Haynes, an appointee of President George W. Bush, said she would have temporarily blocked the ruling in full.
The appeals court concluded that the challengers had waited too long to challenge the 2000 approval in court. But, the court found, the claims against the 2016 revisions and later decisions could be pursued because the government and drug maker Danco Laboratories “have not shown that plaintiffs are unlikely to succeed on the merits of their timely challenges.”
The court also found that a hitherto obscure 19th century law called the Comstock Act, which prohibits the mailing of any drug or medicine that can be used for abortion, factors into its analysis of the 2021 decision to allow mifepristone to be distributed by mail.
“To the extent the Comstock Act introduces uncertainty into the ultimate merits of the case, that uncertainty favors the plaintiffs,” the court said. …
If allowed to take effect, the court’s order would thwart FDA’s scientific judgment and severely harm women, particularly those for whom mifepristone is a medical or practical necessity,” the Justice Department lawyers wrote in the most recent filing. “This harm would be felt throughout the country, given that mifepristone has lawful uses in every State. The order would undermine healthcare systems and the reliance interests of businesses and medical providers.”
Complicating the situation further, a federal judge in Washington state issued a preliminary injunction in a different case Friday barring the FDA from “altering the status quo and rights as it relates to the availability of mifepristone.” ¤ That ruling applies only to the 17 liberal-leaning states and the District of Columbia that filed a lawsuit in February challenging the FDA’s regulations over the drug. The Justice Department has filed a motion in federal district court in Washington state, asking for clarification of Friday’s ruling.
The dueling decisions in Texas and Washington could mean the Supreme Court, which last summer overturned the landmark Roe v. Wade ruling, may soon take up the matter on an accelerated basis.
Kacsmaryk’s ruling, if it is allowed to stand, would not mean access to mifepristone would immediately be cut off nationwide. Instead, anyone involved in manufacturing, distributing or prescribing it would face legal risk, said Greer Donley, a professor at the University of Pittsburgh School of Law who specializes in reproductive rights.
The FDA could help alleviate that risk by announcing it would not take enforcement action against anyone involved in distributing the drug, she added. The agency has broad power to do so, with the Supreme Court in a 1985 ruling saying that such decisions generally cannot be challenged in court. …
🔆 This❗️⋙ NYT (3:26amET): Court Says Abortion Pill Can Remain Available but Imposes Temporary Restrictions https://tinyurl.com/5597c56s “The Justice Department is likely to appeal the order to the Supreme Court”
// The judges blocked the drug from being sent to patients through the mail and rolled back other steps the government had taken to ease access.
NYT: New Leaked Documents Show Broad Infighting Among Russian Officials https://tinyurl.com/56h4mbpb
// The additional documents also suggest the breach of American intelligence agencies could contain far more material than previously believed.
The additional documents, which did not surface in a 53-page set that came to wide public attention online last week, paint a picture of the Russian government feuding over the count of the dead and wounded in the Ukraine war, with the domestic intelligence agency accusing the military of obscuring the scale of casualties that Russia has suffered.
The new batch, which contains 27 pages, reinforces how deeply American spy agencies have penetrated nearly every aspect of the Russian intelligence apparatus and military command structure. It also shows that the breach of American intelligence agencies could contain far more material than previously understood.
In one document, American intelligence officials say that Russia’s main domestic intelligence agency, the Federal Security Service, or F.S.B., has “accused” the country’s Defense Ministry “of obfuscating Russian casualties in Ukraine.” The finding highlights “the continuing reluctance of military officials to convey bad news up the chain of command,” they say. …
Taken together, the documents underscore several of the overarching reasons why, many analysts believe, President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia has failed to secure a military victory in Ukraine after more than 13 months of war.
Among them: infighting and finger-pointing among Russian agencies responsible for different aspects of the war, including the F.S.B. and the Defense Ministry. The leaked entry about the casualty numbers provides little context for the intelligence officials’ finding, but it reports that the F.S.B. is questioning the Defense Ministry’s own casualty count in discussions within the Russian government.
F.S.B. officials, the document says, contend that the ministry’s toll did not include the dead and wounded among the Russian National Guard, the Wagner mercenary force or fighters fielded by Ramzan Kadyrov, the strongman leader of the southern Russian republic of Chechnya. The sundry fighting forces that the Kremlin has deployed in Ukraine have sometimes acted at cross purposes, further complicating Russia’s military effort. ¤ The F.S.B. “calculated the actual number of Russians wounded and killed in action was closer to 110,000,” the document says.
The document does not specify the casualty figures that the Defense Ministry is circulating within the government. The last time that the ministry publicly disclosed a death toll was in September, when the defense minister, Sergei K. Shoigu, said that 5,937 Russian troops had been killed since the war started.
American officials have previously estimated Russian losses at about 200,000 soldiers. Another leaked document reports the Russians had suffered 189,500 to 223,000 casualties as of February, including up to 43,000 killed in action, compared with 124,500 to 131,000 Ukrainian casualties, with up to 17,500 killed in action.
The new documents also provide fresh details about a very public dispute in February in which Yevgeny V. Prigozhin, the business mogul who runs the Wagner force, accused Russian military officials of withholding urgently needed ammunition from his fighters. Mr. Putin attempted to resolve the dispute personally by calling Mr. Prigozhin and Mr. Shoigu into a meeting believed to have taken place on Feb. 22, one document reports. …
The new documents were shared in photos, and some are missing pages. Those shown in full include material from the National Security Agency, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence and the Pentagon’s Joint Staff intelligence directorate. ¤ The material provided to The New York Times was posted on one of the Discord servers where the first set of Pentagon intelligence documents eventually appeared. U.S. officials have said those documents were authentic but cautioned that some had been altered. The documents may also contain outdated or inaccurate information. …
One slide that appears to have been produced by the military’s Joint Staff and dated Feb. 23 concludes that Russia has failed to disrupt the massive flow of Western arms and equipment into Ukraine since the start of the war, and asserts that the Kremlin’s battered military will not be able to change that anytime soon.
“During the next 6 months, Russia’s economic challenges and degraded conventional capabilities very likely will further impede its efforts, creating a mostly permissive environment for continued lethal aid deliveries,” the document said.
⭕ 12 Apr 2023
🐣 RT @AntiToxicPeople [Collected djt tweets 11p-12pCT]
[TextLink:] https://twitter.com/AntiToxicPeople/status/1646371944185593856?s=20
🐣 RT @realDonald Trump The good thing about the A.G. Peekaboo James “persecution” is that I will finally be able to show what a great, profitable, and valuable company I built, actually, some of the greatest real estate assets anywhere in the world. Her effort, in strict coordination and association with the lying, Country killing scum “working” in the White House, and now discredited District Attorney Alvin Bragg, will prove to be FAKE, and even fraudulent. Her only hope is that she “shopped” a judge as bad as her!
🐣 RT @realDonaldTrumpThe Biden Department of Injustice, together with all of the corrupt, TRUMP HATING, puppeteers that surround Joe Biden, and are destroying our Country, are going all out with ELECTION INTERFERENCE through the use of Fake, Partisan, and Corrupt Prosecutors. The people of the United States will not stand for this perversion of our Elections, and Constitution itself. At some point they will say, as our Country is going to Hell, WE’RE NOT GOING TO TAKE IT ANYMORE. MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!!!i’m
🐣 RT @realDonald Trump Just arrived in Manhattan for a deposition in front of New York State’s RACIST, TRUMP HATING Attorney General, Letitia “Peekaboo” James, in another unjust & ridiculous persecution of The 45th President of the United States. I built a GREAT & prosperous company, employed thousands of people, built magnificent structures all over the World, but particularly in New York, & now have to prove it to this LOWLIFE who campaigned on a ” will get Trump” platform, even before knowing anything about me!
🐣 RT @JoyceWhiteVance Concealing damaging info in discovery is good evidence of actual malice in a defamation case-that false statements were made with knowledge of their falsity & that defendant tried to withhold evidence showing that to prevent plaintiffs from proving it.
⋙ NBCRightNow: Fox News sanctioned for withholding evidence in Dominion defamation case https://tinyurl.com/mrx377n6
🐣 RT @atrupar Alex Wagner just broadcast audio of a Trump campaign official acknowledging during a phone call with a Fox News producer in December 2020 that there was no evidence of physical issues with Dominion voting machines
🔊 https://twitter.com/atrupar/status/1646321015276937216?s=20/photo/1
// likely AG not SecState
WaPo, Ellen Francis: Where did leaked U.S. secrets appear? On a chat app popular with gamers. https://tinyurl.com/stdvrme6
NYT, David Wallace-Wells: Let’s Imagine We Knew Exactly How the Pandemic Started https://tinyurl.com/f8kpvztk
// COVID-19
🧵 RT @EliotHiggins [11hrs before WaPo article broke] This is genuinely the most informative conversation about the actual leaks [Bellincat Aric below], because Aric was the one who dug through all the connections and spoke to a lot of people who were members of the communities where the initial documents were shared.
📌 https://twitter.com/EliotHiggins/status/1646140091692195840?s=20
⋙ 🐣 RT @EliotHiggins The fact is, one of the most feasible scenarios based on what we know is a grown man with access to Top Secret documents shared them with a couple of dozen teenage gamer pals on a private Discord server in an attempt to impress them. But just because it’s dumb doesn’t mean it’s not damaging.
⋙ 🐣 RT @EliotHiggins Based on what we know, this wasn’t some Russian op, or some brave whistleblower, it was just some gamer trying to impress his pals in private and it ended up all over the internet. The kicker is it sounds like from the people Aric spoke to they weren’t that impressed and didn’t take it seriously.
⇈ ⇊
🐣 RT @bellingcat Bellingcat’s @AricToler spoke to the @lawfarepodcast about how he tracked down leaked US intelligence documents to a little known Discord server named “Thug Shaker Central”. Listen here: 🔊 https://tinyurl.com/2j6nfhjt
⋙ 🐣 RT @bellingcat You can read Aric’s investigation on the same subject here:
⋙⋙ Bellincat: From Discord to 4chan: The Improbable Journey of a US Defence Leak https://tinyurl.com/4he77744
// A recent leak of sensitive US intelligence documents leads to stranger corners of the internet than initially thought.
🧵 RT @michaeldweiss An emerging consensus among U.S. allies and partners that the Pentagon leaks are sprinkled with misinformation or disinformation — South Korea, UK, Ukraine all have comments to that effect. But they don’t say which bits are false.
📌 https://twitter.com/michaeldweiss/status/1646276042213007360?s=20
⋙ 🐣 RT @KyivIndependent⚡️Reznikov: Intelligence leak contains ‘mix’ of true, false information. ¤ Defense Minister Oleksii Reznikov acknowledged on April 12 that the U.S. intelligence leak contains a “mix” of true and false ¤ ⋙ https://tinyurl.com/yk932mt4
🧵 RT @MuellerSheWrote THOUGHTS ON THE CLASSIFIED DOCUMENTS LEAKS: Russia has a well-documented history of distributing disinformation through stealing documents, doctoring some, and leaving other authentic documents to boost the legitimacy of the falsified documents. 1/
📌 https://twitter.com/MuellerSheWrote/status/1646273427400175616?s=20
🔆 This❗️⋙ WaPo: Leaker of U.S. secret documents worked on military base, friend says https://tinyurl.com/4zx9ha86 (Someone’s in 🔥trouble)
// THE DISCORD LEAKS | The online group that received hundreds of pages of classified material included foreigners, members tell The Post
NYT: Witnesses Asked About Trump’s Handling of Map With Classified Information https://tinyurl.com/3vf5hats “Prosecutors have now interviewed nearly everyone who could offer insight in connection with the documents, according to one person briefed on the range of witnesses”
// The map is just one element of the Justice Department’s inquiry into former President Donald Trump’s possession of sensitive documents and whether he obstructed justice in seeking to hold onto them.
🐣 RT @Morning_Joe .@JoeNBC: “I don’t think much about a large segment of the Republican Party that allows a man to praise Vladimir Putin, Xi, Kim Jong-Un…while trashing the men and women of America’s Armed Forces. It’s really twisted.”
⋙ 💽 MSNBC, Morning_Joe: Joe: Trump and MAGA Republicans trash America constantly https://tinyurl.com/5y25wy2b
// Joe Scarborough notes that while there are many reasons to be hopeful about America and the country’s future, MAGA Republicans are trashing the country.
🐣 📊 RT @sahilkapur Lopsided US support for legal medication abortion across gender, age and race/ethnicity, per new @PewResearch poll.
Exceptions: Conservatives oppose it 47-24%, Republicans split 36-35%.
Women under 30: 71% support it.
Non-religious: 74% support it.
◕ https://twitter.com/sahilkapur/status/1646305283843473408?s=20/photo/1
// Illegal 22%, Legal 53%, Not sure 24%
⋙ PewResearch: By more than two-to-one, Americans say medication abortion should be legal in their state https://tinyurl.com/mk93x9dn
// A majority of Americans say medication abortion should be legal, but there is a stark divide by age, religion and party affiliation.
Salon, Chauncey DeVega: The not-so-hidden message behind Donald Trump’s Easter threats of “World War III” https://tinyurl.com/2p92ph49 //➔ This is not a time to seek “common ground” with a stochastic terrorist like Trump: we must not look away or normalize him
// Trump “gives permission to unstable people to carry out their grievances at a murderous level”
🐣 RT @MorawieckiM The Evil Empire has been reborn in the East. Russian barbarians threaten not only Ukraine. They threaten all of Europe and the whole free world. This is no mere incident, no coincidence, no maniac’s impulse. Putin has been building his Evil Empire for 23 years, in preparation for this conflict.
New Europe understands this. It is time that Old Europe understood it too.
🐣 RT @Faytuks France is blocking the European Union’s unanimous decision to finance the supply of ammunition to Ukraine, a high-ranking EU source tells the Polish Press Agency [Pol link]
Substack, Sarah Ashton-Cirillos: Update: The US Government has found no significant cases of waste, fraud, or abuse related to Ukraine aid https://tinyurl.com/4uvpaxf4
// The DoD, State Department, and USAID OIG[s] compiled an extensive report covering 113 Billion dollars in American support to Ukraine since the February, 2022 full scale invasion.
⋙ ≣ Report: [pdf] https://tinyurl.com/yzyvc6cm 44p
🐣 RT @EllenKnickmeyer Ukraine says it doesn’t see the U.S. intel leak gravely damaging future offensives. A key reason: They have long held back on sharing sensitive operational information, doubting Washington’s ability to keep secrets. w. Hanna Aphirova and @BradPaisley
⋙ AP: US, Ukraine say many war secrets safe from intel leaks https://tinyurl.com/y5hbsxd9
🐣 RT @tribelaw Special Counsel Smith might be closing in on tying the Big Lie to the Big Ripoff in One Massive Wire-fraud Conspiracy . . .
⋙⋙ 🐣 in such cases, does the $ have to be returned?
⋙ WaPo: Special counsel focuses on Trump fundraising off false election claims https://tinyurl.com/2p8c449u
// A new batch of subpoenas seeks to compare public claims of voter fraud after the 2020 election versus private texts and emails
The fundraising prong of the investigation is focused on money raised during the period between Nov. 3, 2020, and the end of Trump’s time in office on Jan. 20, 2o21, and prosecutors are said to be interested in whether anyone associated with the fundraising operation violated wire fraud laws which make it illegal to make false representations over email to swindle people out of money. …
The subpoenas seek more specific types of communications so prosecutors can compare what Trump allies and advisers were telling each other privately about the voter fraud claims to what they were saying publicly in appeals that generated more than $200 million in donations from conservatives, according to people with knowledge of the investigation.
That suggests that investigators are pursuing a legal theory similar to the one used to charge former Trump adviser Stephen K. Bannon and others with fraudulent fundraising to build a wall along the southern border, in which Bannon and others were charged with defrauding donors by lying in email pitches. Bannon’s three co-defendants pleaded guilty or were convicted, while Bannon was pardoned by Trump before he faced trial. Bannon now faces similar charges from the Manhattan district attorney and awaits trial. He has pleaded not guilty. …
Crooks&Liars: Ken Dilanian Barely Keeps Straight Face Reporting Trump’s Latest Lawsuit https://tinyurl.com/bdh378zh The suit is for $500 million, no less 😂 (breach of contract, breach of atty/client privilege, unjust enrichment, violating non disclosure agreement, etc etc etc)
🐣 RT @JoyceCarolOates Trump’s tale of crying Manhattan court employees was ‘absolute BS,’ law enforcement source says
⋙ AOL/YahooNews, Michael Isikoff: Trump’s tale of crying Manhattan court employees was ‘absolute BS,’ law enforcement source says https://tinyurl.com/yw3jb6nv
// Former President Trump’s claim to a Fox News anchor that New York court employees were “crying” and apologizing for his arraignment on felony
Former President Trump’s claim to a Fox News anchor that New York court employees were “crying” and apologizing for his arraignment on felony charges is “absolute BS” and doesn’t remotely resemble what took place, a law enforcement source familiar with the details of what transpired that day told Yahoo News. ¤ “Zero,” said the source when asked how much truth there was to Trump’s colorful account. “There were zero people crying. There were zero people saying ‘I’m sorry.’”
Trump offered his version of events in an interview with the Fox News host Tucker Carlson that aired Tuesday night. ¤ “When I went to the courthouse, which is also a prison in a sense, they signed me in, and I’ll tell you, people were crying,” Trump told Carlson. “People that work there, professionally work there, that have no problems putting in murderers, and they see everybody. It’s a tough, tough place, and they were crying. They were actually crying. They said, ‘I’m sorry.’ They said, ‘2024, sir. 2024.’ And tears were pouring down their eyes.”
In fact, the source said, aside from his lawyers and Secret Service agents, Trump interacted only with a handful of district attorney employees at the courthouse and had extremely limited exposure with others during his arraignment last Tuesday in lower Manhattan.
Upon his arrival, Trump was informed of the charges against him and was booked on 34 felony counts for falsification of business records to conceal hush money payments to a porn star in the waning days of the 2016 presidential election. The former president, looking glum, said little during the booking, as did Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg’s deputies, who were with him throughout the process, the source said. …
Carlson’s friendly interview with Trump was especially ironic given its timing. It comes on the eve of a trial slated to begin next Monday in Delaware, in which Carlson, along with his fellow host Sean Hannity and multiple Fox executives, are slated to be witnesses in a $1.6 billion defamation lawsuit brought by Dominion Voting Systems against Fox News for airing debunked claims of 2020 election fraud by Trump and his surrogates. …
AOL/Reuters: Fox shareholder sues Murdoch, other directors over 2020 election coverage https://tinyurl.com/29pz3p6r
// The lawsuit says the network’s directors failed to stop Fox News from reporting falsehoods about the 2020 U.S. presidential election
🐣 RT @clashreport CIA Director William Burns ¤ Russia risks becoming an “economic colony” of China as its isolation from the West deepens after the invasion of Ukraine.
🐣 RT @NOELreports South Korea will give the US half a million 155-mm shells to replace those that the Americans supply to Ukraine from their own warehouses. The law prohibits South Korea from exporting weapons to countries at war, but such a three-way scheme does not fall under the law, and will allow the United States to supply shells to Ukraine much more freely. [link]
⭕ 11 Apr 2023
Politico [EU]: Europe’s eastern half claps back at Macron: We need the US https://tinyurl.com/39kjjhjc
// tags: European strategic autonomy Eastern Europe NATO Taiwan; The French president’s comments to POLITICO about not being drawn into a US-China conflict rattled easterners who favor closer ties with the Americans.
🧵 RT @atrupar follow along for a video thread on Trump’s interview with Tucker Carlson
📌 💽 https://twitter.com/atrupar/status/1645940484378963968?s=20/photo/1
NYT: From Red Carpet to Doghouse: Macron Returns From China to Allied Dismay https://tinyurl.com/bddnxd83 //➔ Embarrassing at least, damaging at worst, Macron toys with alliances at the most the worst time imaginable, as Xi plays him like a fiddle
// Criticism of the French president’s performance in Beijing has been scathing among some allies, who saw him as cozying up to Beijing.
🐣 RT @nexta_tv President #Zelenskyy commented on the video in which the head of a #Ukrainian defender is cut off.
💽 https://twitter.com/nexta_tv/status/1646064830334353408?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @maria_drutska Ukraine gave up 3000 nuclear warheads because we were promised we would be protected. ¤ Now, our soldiers are castrated, beheaded & burned alive. Their screams will haunt us for eternity. We watch our children kidnapped, we watch our houses bombed. ¤ But remember, we musn’t provoke russia.
DailyBeast, Justin Baragona: Ex-Fox Producer: There Are Secret Rudy Giuliani Recordings About Dominion https://tinyurl.com/2am9xs8b
// In an amended legal complaint, Abby Grossberg said that Fox News failed to provide Dominion with several audio recordings she made featuring Giuliani and other Trump allies.
≣ District Court SDNY: Bragg v Jordan and Pomerantz: Case No.23-cv-3032 https://tinyurl.com/mkz8bsjf 50p //➔ a tour de force in capturing the craziness of djt and followers: very readable
// 4/11/2023 ⋙ See under Entire Articles: Bragg v Jordan 4-11-2023
// 📋 NYC crime stats are down
⭕ 10 Apr 2023
🐣 RT @levparnas A close source is telling me that Donald Trump is really scared and acting out of control that Pence is going to testify in front of the January 6, Grand Jury. He was screaming at his lawyers and demanding that they find a way to shut Pence up. #January6thIndictmentsarecoming
⭕ 9 Apr 2023 🌸🐰🌅
NYT Mag, Jim Rutenberg (Nov 2022): The Untold Story of ‘Russiagate’ and the Road to War in Ukraine https://tinyurl.com/bdhnyt3m
// 11/2/2022: Russia’s meddling in Trump-era politics was more directly connected to the current war than previously understood.
⇈ ⇊ ⇈ ⇊
🐣 RT @HC_Richardson Yes. I am shocked at how little attention this has gotten. See the Senate Report, the Mueller Report, and @jimrutenberg’s terrific piece on this. The deal was for the US to stand aside while Putin took Ukraine, and when Trump lost in 2020, Putin tried to take it fast, militarily.
¤ https://twitter.com/HC_Richardson/status/1645219795854303234?s=20
// ‼️See Comments: contain much info by people who know Mueller,Report
⋙ 🐣 RT @FiringLineShow In his book, former Mueller prosecutor @AWeissmann_ recounts Paul Manafort meeting with a Putin ally over a proposed deal allowing Russia to take control of part of Ukraine with #Trump’s implicit approval. ¤ “It was such a clear indication of what Vladimir Putin was trying to do.”
💽 https://twitter.com/HC_Richardson/status/1645219795854303234?s=20/photo/1
From Weissman’s “Where Law Ends: Inside the Mueller Investigation” (2020) https://tinyurl.com/yrhzud44:
⋙ Included in the draft was a question that outlined a plan for Russia to take control of the eastern portion of Ukraine roughly half the country- along with questions about former president Yanukovych returning from Russia to be the head of that region. When the pollster turned them over to us, he noted that he now could see why they would be of interest. An understatement if there ever was one.
⋙ Their content was startling to me. I had learned a lot about Ukraine since I joined the Special Counsel’s Office. The eastern part of Ukraine is the main economic driver of the country, akin to northern Italy or northern France or, closer to home, Wall Street and Silicon Valley combined. It is a region that is close to Russia, not just geographically but politically, too. Russia had sought for years to control Ukraine, as Putin needed that territory to transmit oil and gas to Europe. But Ukraine needed Russia even more, as it obtained basically all of its energy from that nation. Russia had enjoyed de facto control of Ukraine when Yanukovych was president, funneling him millions of dollars in bribes to curry his favor. But after Yanukovych’s overthrow, Russia no longer had such a willing puppet under its control. Thus, Russia had turned to brute force: its infamous invasion ofCrimea, a region of eastern Ukraine, in 2014-the one that had outraged most Western democracies, but which candidate Trump oddly had regarded as no big deal. The proposal for Russia to take over the eastern half of Ukraine was the Crimea invasion on steroids. Russia would annex half the country, reinstall its favorite figurehead, and thus control the economic heart of the country. Notably, Manafort and Kilimnik’s proposal explained that, for such a move to succeed, it would need the consent of the United States. It called on Trump to give Russia an approving “wink”-the word the proposal used -and, furthermore, to appoint Manafort to negotiate the logistics with Russia on America’s behalf. In a separate email, Kilimnik endorsed Manafort for this role; Manafort would be able to deal with Russia at the “very top level,” Kilimnik explained. Manafort wasn’t aware we’d discovered these emails or the proposal. After the election, when news broke about one Trump adviser after..
⋙ “So,” I went on, “Mr. Manafort, I don’t understand. When I read this, I don’t see Kilimnik anywhere acknowledging that you’d already definitely shut down the idea of working with Yanukovych. He’s talking to you as if you had never rejected that idea, right? And the plan is quite a bit different than what you said: It’s not to have Yanukovych run for president of all of Ukraine; it’s to create a new eastern region of Ukraine that he would head up.” “Well, that is true,” Manafort said. “This plan… this plan was basically the same plan that he told me about in August. I’d told him that it wasn’t the right time, and I wasn’t sure Yanukovych was the right person, either.” “So this plan was a topic at the August 2 meeting?” Omer asked. “Yes,” Manafort said. “This is basically a backdoor way for Russia to take over half of Ukraine,” I said. “Yes,” Manafort said again. “Which is what I told Kilimnik, and why I was so against it when he raised it at the dinner in August. I did not..
⋙ “So your issue was who would lead the region, not the plan itself.” “Right, and I wasn’t sure the time was right.” “But you just insisted to us that you were against Russia,” I went on, “and had previously said you had only been trying to make Ukraine more Western, and less beholden to Russia. So why wouldn’t you be against this plan?” “I was against this plan,” Manafort said. “But if you were so against it—if you didn’t like it because it was pro-Russia—why is Kilimnik still writing to you as if you’re for it?” We kept going back and forth, but Manafort’s story got no more consistent. He had no explanation for why Kilimnik was addressing him as an active partner on a project that Manafort was insisting to us—at least at the times he was not claiming to be against only the timing or leadership of the plan—that he’d never wanted any part of. And there was no document—nothing we had that Manafort had written, or which he could now produce—to indicate he’d been anti-Russia and back up his new story. The facts we’d established, even amid Manafort’s attempts to muddy them, were staggering. On August 2, if not earlier, Russia had clearly revealed to Manafort—and, by extension, to the Trump campaign—what it wanted out of the United States: “a wink,” a nod of approval from a President Donald Trump, as it took over Ukraine’s richest region. It was a tremendous thing for Russia to ask for. It would seem to require significant audacity—or else, leverage—for another nation to even put such a request to a presidential candidate. This made what we didn’t know, and still don’t know to this day, feel monumentally disconcerting: namely, why would Trump ever agree to this? Why would Trump ever agree to this Russian proposal if the candidate were not getting something from Russia in return? Both Manafort and Trump were too transactional to give away something for nothing.
⋙ So when Manafort told the grand jurors that he was against the plan to split Ukraine in two and would not be a part of such a plan, as it would be a “backdoor” way for Russia to take over a swath of Ukraine, we showed him the pollster’s documents. Those documents made clear Manafort was working on the plan even as late as 2018. Manafort’s attempts to get out of that were a classic example of someone who, when he is in trouble, keeps doubling down instead of coming clean. We all had seen that numerous times as investigators. Confronted with the draft polling questions he had worked on with Kilimnik and the pollster, Manafort would claim he was only performing a poll for a particular candidate and it had nothing to do with a plan by Russia to take over part of Ukraine. He claimed the questions about Yanukovych were not because of anything Kilimnik had said to him, but just general testing of ideas. He claimed Kilimnik did not even know the identity of the person he was doing the testing for, even though we then showed Manafort communications with Kilimnik that belied that claim. On and on it went.
From Amazon reviews of Weissman’s “Where Law Ends: Inside the Mueller Investigation”:
Darya Silman’s review: The findings of Team M are even more astonishing in light of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. Paul Manafort, convicted on many cases of bank fraud, money laundering, and tax evasion, testified that on August 2, 2016, he had had a meeting with Konstantin Kilimnik, a Russian intelligence asset. The two discussed Russia’s desire to snip off the piece of Eastern Ukraine, placing Viktor Yanukovych as the head of a new entity. Russians wanted a ‘wink’ from the future president, an assurance that the U.S. would not intervene.
LA’s review: … Or Manafort’s plan, with his Russian Military buddy Kilimnik, to assist Manafort’s former client, the ex-Ukraine president hiding out in Moscow, with his takeover of the eastern half of Ukraine, and then have Trump bless the incursion much as Trump did with Crimea. Weissmann wondered what was the Russian quid for that quo? Or how upset Trump was at Legal Counsel Don McGahn for telling the truth in his interviews with Mueller’s staff.
🐣 RT @ @jojjeols “Xi’s immediate goal is to try and draw Europe away from America, and he sees Macron as a useful tool for that purpose.”
⋙ TheSpectator, Ian Williams: Macron has made a fool of himself in China https://tinyurl.com/4uvt28f9
At least there was no six metre-long table in Beijing separating Emmanuel Macron from Xi Jinping. But their meeting was about as fruitless as the French president’s socially distanced chat with Xi’s ‘best friend’ Vladimir Putin in Moscow last year, shortly before the Russian leader sent his tanks into Ukraine. …
Xi’s China is now a dark and repressive place. His growing international aggression, economic coercion and support for Putin have provoked dismay from much of the western world, forcing them to reassess relations with Beijing. Though on the evidence of his three days in China, this seems to have largely passed Macron by.
The French president said he wanted to ‘relaunch a strategic and global partnership with China’ and spoke about ‘shared responsibility for peace and international stability’. He rejected a policy of economic decoupling from China, overlooking the fact that this is a long standing policy of Beijing, and not something cooked up in Washington. ‘I do not believe, and do not want to believe in this scenario,’ he said.
Macron was trailed by a 50-strong entourage of business leaders, film makers and musicians. Among the gifts he brought for his Chinese counterpart were a French photographer’s pictures of mid-20th-century China and a blue Sèvres porcelain vase decorated with golden fish.
The main reason for the visit was supposedly to urge Xi to put pressure on Russia to end the war in Ukraine. ‘I know I can count on you to bring Russia to its senses and bring everyone to the negotiating table,’ he said to the Chinese president during what was billed as a joint press conference (a not very accurate billing since no questions were allowed). …
That said, Xi enjoys being courted as a potential peacemaker, even if that is totally preposterous. Xi’s priority is Xi, and the Ukraine war suits him just fine right now. It ties up his western adversaries, drawing their attention away from the Indo-Pacific, and provides big economic benefits in terms of cheap hydrocarbons from Russia. It also solidifies China’s role as the senior partner with Putin. Xi is effectively bankrolling Putin’s aggression through massively increased trade, which includes dual-use items (which can be used for both civilian and military purposes) such as chips and consumer drones. While he has avoided crossing western red lines by overtly supplying arms and ammunition, he has gone right up against it.
Beijing’s so-called peace place is no such thing. It is a collection of empty and contradictory platitudes and the ceasefire it advocates would reward Russian aggression. Xi and Putin are too similar, sharing a world view based on building a new order safe for autocrats and restoring mythical notions of imperial greatness, underpinned by grievance and victimhood. Perhaps the closest Xi has come to expressing his true feelings were in unguarded remarks in Moscow, as he bid farewell to Putin after their summit last month. ‘Change is coming that hasn’t happened in 100 years and we are driving this change together,’ he said.
Xi’s immediate goal is to try and draw Europe away from America, and he sees Macron as a useful tool for that purpose. ‘China still sees Europe as an independent pole in a multipolar world, and supports its efforts to achieve strategic autonomy,’ he said at their press conference.
Quite what European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen made of Macron’s performance is harder to tell. … [H]er reception was far cooler. She had a limited itinerary and no invitation to the banquet for Macron. She has taken an increasingly hard line, recently urging Europe to ‘de-risk’ from its over dependency on China, for which Chinese state media have attacked her for being an ‘American puppet’.
She said that Beijing ‘has a big responsibility to use its influence in a friendship that is built on decades with Russia’ and warned against supplying weapons. And she added that Xi had reiterated his willingness to talk to Ukrainian president Zelensky ‘when the time is right’. Unfortunately the time never seems to be right. They have not spoken since the war began, in spite of Zelensky’s desire to do so, and the total absurdity of Xi posing as a mediator while avoiding talking to the victim in the conflict seems lost on credulous European leaders. …
🐣 RT @bctallis
If you think democracy’s fight is not yours.
If you think it’s fine for an autocratic great power to bully it’s neighbour.
Then we have a problem –
And you don’t speak for Europe – You never have – and you will not have a Europe to lead.
⋙ 🧵 RT @shashj Macron: “I note that President Xi Jinping spoke of a European security architecture. But there can be no European security architecture as long as there are invaded countries in Europe or frozen conflicts.” [Fr] https://tinyurl.com/4n36e9kr
📌 https://twitter.com/shashj/status/1645100297730113537?s=20
⋙ Macron: “We show China that we are united and this is the meaning of this joint visit [VDL]. The Chinese are also concerned about their unity and Taiwan, from their point of view, is a component of it. It is important to understand how they reason”
⋙ Macron: “The question for us Europeans is: do we have an interest in accelerating the Taiwan issue? No. The worst thing would be to think that we Europeans should be followers on this issue and adapt to the American pace and to a Chinese overreaction.”
⋙ Macron: “If there is an acceleration of the [US-China] duopoly, we [EU] will not have the time nor the means to finance our strategic autonomy and will become vassals whereas we can be the third pole if we have some years to build it.”
⋙ Macron: “Strategic autonomy means having convergent views with the United States, but whether it is on Ukraine, the relationship with China or sanctions, we have a European strategy. We do not want to enter into a logic of bloc to bloc”
🐣 RT @HerrDr8 [Replying to @JominiW] #1PageAssessUKRWar #OrcWinterOffensive2023 #OrcLossRate Good to have you back @JominiWand toss see your take on the Russian Winter Offensive.
🌎 ◕ https://twitter.com/HerrDr8/status/1644439764945235991?s=20/photo/1 -2
⋙ 🐣 RT @RobertJ09323900 Yay Jomini is back. Look at the state of their reserve units in Kursk, Smolensk and Belorussia, 20 total beat up BTG’s “refitting”. Number of Russian units in combat look impressive but most are understrength, quickly refitted, many/most experienced Non-Coms/Junior Officers gone.
⋙ 🐣 RT @JominiW Exactly, Russian battalions are woefully under strength, even with mobilized conscripts.
⋙ 🐣 RT @RobertJ09323900 POW conscript tanker reports: received 2 weeks of training, 1 on simulator, 2nd driving on a track, Drivers have<10 hrs, Gunners had 5 live shots. Tanks from reserve received off train near front, 3 of 4 broke down in his platoon, at front piecemeal, his tank hit 1st hour combat.
⋙ 🐣 RT @HerrDr8 A recent what if regarding RUS forces in Ukraine...maybe 160k...but those are maybe at 50% capability vs the start of war (kit losses, replaced with non trained/equiped/led/motivate mobiks).
🌎 ◕ https://twitter.com/HerrDr8/status/1645105013071519747?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @HerrDr8 #1PageAssessUkrWar #RussianWinterOffensive2023 2 weeks now of reduced Russian losses/activity as their failed winter offensive putters out.Scattered reports of UKR forces moving into jump off spring/sum offensive positions. Lots of pearl clutching in Kremlin/RUS mil blog space.
🌎 ◕ 📋 https://twitter.com/HerrDr8/status/1645107362775150594?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @azannaphx When do you think that Trumpsters will realize that he is bat$#iT crazy?
⋙ 🐣 RT @RockyMntnMike Speaking on behalf of those trying to destroy our country, Happy Easter to you too!
[TextLink:] https://twitter.com/RockyMntnMike/status/1645063938055208960?s=20/photo/1
[Text:] 🐣 RT @realDonald Trump HAPPY EASTER TO ALL, INCLUDING THOSE THAT DREAM ENDLESSLY OF DESTROYING OUR COUNTRY BECAUSE THEY ARE INCAPABLE OF DREAMING ABOUT ANYTHING ELSE, THOSE THAT ARE SO INCOMPETENT THEY DON’T REALIZE THAT HAVING A BORDER AND POWERFUL WALL IS A GOOD THING, & HAVING VOTER I.D., ALL PAPER BALLOTS, & SAME DAY VOTING WILL QUICKLY END MASSIVE VOTER FRAUD, & TO ALL OF THOSE WEAK & PATHETIC RINOS, RADICAL LEFT DEMOCRATS, SOCIALISTS MARXISTS, & COMMUNISTS WHO ARE KILLING OUR NATION, REMEMBER, WE WILL BE BACK!
🐣 RT @tribelaw Exactly right. Judge Kacsmaryk has shown his true colors as a fanatic theocrat without respect for the limits of the judicial role and without fidelity to the oath he swore to uphold the Constitution’s First Amendment clause forbidding an Establishment of Religion.
⋙ 🐣 RT @harrylitman It is beyond outrageous — the height of judicial arrogance — for a federal judge to repeatedly refer to abortion as “the killing of the unborn human,” as Kacsmaryk does. It takes sides in a deeply religious debate w/ a position that if true would make all abortions homicides.
🐣 RT @Biz_Ukraine_Mag This speaks volumes about today’s Ukraine: President Zelenskyy, the popularly elected Jewish leader of a traditionally Christian nation, has this week initiated a new tradition of hosting an annual Iftar dinner during Ramadan for members of the country’s Muslim community
🖼 https://twitter.com/Biz_Ukraine_Mag/status/1644818701500268547?s=20/photo/1
⋙ 🐣 RT @KylieSpeer Ukraine is fast evolving into the most united, authentically powerful and free nation on earth. It’s so beautiful to watch considering the horrendous circumstances. Imagine what’s to come when the invaders have been fully evicted…
🐣 RT @ZelenskyyUA I congratulate Ukrainians, all Christians celebrating Easter today. At frontline, in our cities & villages. All who celebrate Easter in Europe, the Americas, Africa, Asia, Australia. The world that wants to live freely. World that values life, respect & equality of each person.
⋙ 🐣 RT @ZelenskyyUA Today, is standing guard of our shared values. ¤ Two days ago I shared Iftar together with Muslims of Ukraine. I will soon congratulate the Jews of Ukraine on the end of Pesach. And in exactly one week, I will congratulate everyone who celebrates Easter this year on April 16.
⋙ 🐣 RT @ZelenskyyUA We may have different traditions but one common for all – defense of native land. We celebrate Easter on different days but one will be shared by & the entire free world. The Day of our Victory. The victory of life. All the holiday of Lord’s Resurrection means. HAPPY EASTER!
⭕ 8 Apr 2023
NYT: Leaked Documents Reveal Depth of U.S. Spy Efforts and Russia’s Military Struggles https://tinyurl.com/38kr9umj “The documents portray a battered Russian military that is struggling in its war in Ukraine and a military apparatus that is deeply compromised”
// The information, exposed on social media sites, also shows that U.S. intelligence services are eavesdropping on important allies.
WaPo: Texas abortion pill ruling threatens FDA https://tinyurl.com/2de4ffak “‘If this ruling were to stand, then there will be virtually no prescription, approved by the FDA, that would be safe from these kinds of political, ideological attacks,’ [Biden] said in a statement”
// ‘This opens the door to the courts’ second-guessing any FDA approval — especially for drugs for controversial areas like gender-affirming care,’ expert says
🐣 RT @ZelenskyyUa The values we’re all fighting for in 🇺🇦 fit each nation regardless of whether it’s geographically far from our people. Each values security & protection from terror. The more the world knows about 🇷🇺 aggression the faster the aggressor will lose and calmness will return worldwide
💽 https://twitter.com/ZelenskyyUa/status/1644799069745807360?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @PeteButtigieg If your political agenda repeatedly puts you in various scenarios that involve overthrowing electoral outcomes, there might be a problem with your political agenda.
NYT: Georgia Looms Next After Trump’s Indictment in New York https://tinyurl.com/9by6c7dr “While nothing is certain, there are numerous signs that [Willis] may go big, with a more kaleidoscopic indictment charging not only Mr. Trump, but perhaps a dozen or more of his allies”
// Former President Donald J. Trump now faces a very different legal challenge in the culmination of a more than two-year Atlanta investigation into election interference.
In Georgia, … there is another criminal investigation of Mr. Trump nearing completion, this one also led by a local prosecutor, Fani T. Willis of Fulton County. While nothing is certain, there are numerous signs that she may go big, with a more kaleidoscopic indictment charging not only Mr. Trump, but perhaps a dozen or more of his allies.
Her investigation has targeted a wide range of conduct centered around efforts to subvert the democratic process and overturn Mr. Trump’s 2020 election loss. Nearly 20 people are already known to have been told that they are targets who could face charges, including Rudolph W. Giuliani, Mr. Trump’s former personal lawyer, and David Shafer, the head of the Georgia Republican Party.
For Mr. Trump, the possibility of a second and potentially more complex criminal indictment in another state underscores the blizzard of legal challenges he is facing, even as he emerges as the clear front-runner among Republican presidential candidates.
For Ms. Willis, the choice to pursue a narrowly focused indictment or more a sprawling one — a classic prosecutor’s dilemma — carries with it potential risks and benefits on both sides. And American history offers few examples in which the stakes are so high. …
In Georgia, the investigation is focused on myriad efforts to overturn Mr. Trump’s narrow loss in Georgia after his 2020 election defeat, including his January 2021 phone call to Brad Raffensperger, the Georgia secretary of state, in which he pressed Mr. Raffensperger, a fellow Republican, to recalculate the results and “find” him enough votes to win. …
If Ms. Willis chooses to seek indictments in the Georgia case, she may do so after a new grand jury begins its work in the second week of May, though nothing is set in stone. Typically, presenting such cases to a regular grand jury is a short process that takes a day or two.
The wide scope of the investigation has been evident for months, and Ms. Willis has said that seeking an indictment under the state’s Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations, or RICO, statute is an option that she is considering. Like the similar federal law, the Georgia RICO statute allows prosecutors to bundle what may seem to be unrelated crimes committed by a host of different people if those crimes are perceived to be in support of a common objective. …
Court records show that the special grand jury sought testimony from witnesses including Mark Meadows, who served as White House chief of staff under Mr. Trump; Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, an ally of the former president; and Trevian Kutti, a former self-described publicist for rapper Kanye West who, according to prosecutors, was involved in a plot to force a Fulton County elections worker to give a false confession of election fraud.
Documents also show that prosecutors are following numerous narrative threads in Georgia involving either Mr. Trump or his allies. These include Mr. Trump’s phone calls to Georgia officials, including the one to Mr. Raffensperger; specious statements about election fraud made by Mr. Giuliani and others at state legislative hearings; the convening of pro-Trump electors to the Electoral College at the Georgia State Capitol; Ms. Kutti’s bizarre meeting with the elections worker, Ruby Freeman, two days after Mr. Trump’s phone call to Mr. Raffensperger, in which Mr. Trump falsely accused Ms. Freeman of being a “vote scammer”; and a plot by allies of Mr. Trump involving the copying of sensitive election software in rural Coffee County, Ga. …
🐣 RT @MalcolmNance #UkraineLeaks I’ve Seen ALOT of classified in my time at WAY higher levels. This is a low grade report with some surprising admiration of Russia that looks like it was edited to make Putin happy. As for NATO SOF in Ukraine embassies have them. #NAFO literally has more presence.
⋙ 🧵 RT @ War_cube_ Exclusive / Breaking: ¤ Reports came out a couple of hours ago regarding some leaked documents regarding U.S. battle assessments in #Ukraine. ¤ Here is an image dump of all original documents and there seems to be no edits done to them. They appear to be genuine.
📌 🌎 ◕ https://twitter.com/War_cube_/status/1644369098006994945?s=20/photo/1
🐣 📋 RT @Mylovanov 24% of the USSR forces in WWII were Ukrainians.
⋙ 🧵 RT @MargoGontar If not for Ukrainians, russia wouldn’t been able to talk abt “winning” at all, according to Yana Prymachenko, research scholar at @Princeton . ~7 mln Ukrainians fought in Red Army ranks, ~23% of USSR forces, according to UA historians. On Ukrainian ace pilot Ivan Kozhedub
📌 https://twitter.com/MargoGontar/status/1644285193446998018?s=20
⋙⋙ 🐣 RT @MargoGontar By end of 1941 summer, 3.2 mln soldiers were mobilized from territory of UA to Red Army ranks. Ukrainians made up 50% of so-called South-West Front troops. In 1943-45, 4.5 mln more recruited. From 2nd half of 1943, Ukrainians made up 60-80% of UA fronts units, Prymachenko says
⋙⋙ 🐣 RT @MargoGontar Ukrainians also helped in the rear. ~ 3.5 mln people , 550 industrial enterprises, 70 universities, 40 theaters, dozens of museums were moved from Ukraine deep into peaceful territory, Prymachenko adds. All worked in deep rear for victory. ¤ source: http://localhistory.org.ua
⭕ 7 Apr 2023
🐣 RT @yarotrof It may be one of the worst intelligence breaches in recent decades. DOD investigates the leak of potentially hundreds of highly classified documents about the war in Ukraine and other matters, from Israel to South Korea. My latest with @nancyayoussef
⋙ 🚫 WSJ: Pentagon Investigates More Social-Media Posts Purporting to Include Secret U.S. Documents https://tinyurl.com/24atfw27
// Documents include details on Ukrainian forces, U.S. arms provided to Ukraine
🐣 RT @ImMeme0 Classified Pentagon documents containing information about U.S. & NATO plans for proxy war in Ukrainian have leaked. Biden administration is reportedly demanding they be scrubbed from the internet. ¤ The documents show that there are allegedly British and U.S. soldiers in Ukraine. ¤ Is there a hidden agenda behind the leak?
◕ https://twitter.com/ImMeme0/status/1644428616988520449?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @FrankFigliuzzi1 There is a serious on-going leak of classified US and allied military documents on social media, including on Ukraine – Russia: New Leak of Classified Documents on Social Media Alarms Pentagon – The New York Times
⋙ NYT: New Batch of Classified Documents Appears on Social Media Sites https://tinyurl.com/fwedvbxf It appears some documents have been altered
// Secret documents that appear to detail American national security secrets on Ukraine, the Middle East and China have surfaced online.
A new batch of classified documents that appear to detail American national security secrets from Ukraine to the Middle East to China surfaced on social media sites on Friday, alarming the Pentagon and adding turmoil to a situation that seemed to have caught the Biden administration off guard.
The scale of the leak — analysts say more than 100 documents may have been obtained — along with the sensitivity of the documents themselves, could be hugely damaging, U.S. officials said. A senior intelligence official called the leak “a nightmare for the Five Eyes,” in a reference to the United States, Britain, Australia, New Zealand and Canada, the so-called Five Eyes nations that broadly share intelligence.
The latest documents were found on Twitter and other sites on Friday, a day after senior Biden administration officials said they were investigating a potential leak of classified Ukrainian war plans, include an alarming assessment of Ukraine’s faltering air defense capabilities. One slide, dated Feb. 23, is labeled “Secret/NoForn,” meaning it was not meant to be shared with foreign countries.
The Justice Department said it had opened an investigation into the leaks and was in communication with the Defense Department but declined to comment further.
Mick Mulroy, a former senior Pentagon official, said the leak of the classified documents represents “a significant breach in security” that could hinder Ukrainian military planning. “As many of these were pictures of documents, it appears that it was a deliberate leak done by someone that wished to damage the Ukraine, U.S., and NATO efforts,” he said. …The documents on Ukraine’s military appear as photographs of charts of anticipated weapons deliveries, troop and battalion strengths, and other plans. Pentagon officials acknowledge that they are legitimate Defense Department documents, but the copies appear to have been altered in certain parts from their original format. The modified versions, for example, overstate American estimates of Ukrainian war dead and underestimate estimates of Russian troops killed.
💙 WaPo: Texas judge suspends FDA approval of abortion pill; second judge protects access https://tinyurl.com/2a7ueav5 “The dueling opinions — one from Texas and the other from Washington state — concern access to mifepristone, … used in more than half of all abortions in the US”
// Federal lawsuit by conservative groups followed the Supreme Court’s elimination of the constitutional right to abortion last June
≣ [CourtDoc:] https://tinyurl.com/25f3t8ku
// Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine v FDA Case 2:22-cv-00223-Z Document 137
💽 DailyBeast: MSNBC Host Mehdi Hasan Makes Matt Taibbi Squirm Over His ‘Twitter Files’ Errors https://tinyurl.com/5n9bm6r3
// Hasan came prepared with receipts during his tense interview with the heterodox reporter, repeatedly flashing evidence on-screen as Taibbi flailed.
🐣 RT @AlexSkolnick The moral of the #MattTaibbi #Elon instant breakup of bromance is: The ethically bankrupt will eventually turn their toxicity towards each other. The lesson for the rest of us is: Do not be taken in by the #TwitterFiles or other public provocations of Horseshit-Spewing Douchebags
⋙ 🐣 RT @AlexSkolnickAnd the #Elon plot thickens: Taibbi just announced he’s leaving Twitter. The problem with blending two such toxic personalities is the risk of the bromance turning toxic 🤷♂️
⋙⋙ 🐣 RT @BigTechAlert 👀 @ElonMusk (Account that mostly reposts old memes) is no longer following @mtaibbi
🐣 RT @ddiamond .@RonWyden, who chairs the Senate Finance Committee that oversees FDA, on today’s abortion pill ruling: ¤ “I believe the Food and Drug Administration has the authority to ignore this ruling.”
[TextLink:] https://twitter.com/ddiamond/status/1644491001195634688?s=20/photo/1
[Text:] Wyden to President Biden and FDA after Texas Ruling: Ignore Any Ban, Keep Mifepristone on the Market
Washington, D.C. – U.S. Senator Ron Wyden released the following statement after a right- wing judge today ruled to ban mifepristone nationwide:
“There is no way this decision has a basis in law. It is instead rooted in conservatives’ dangerous and undemocratic takeover of our country’s institutions. No matter what happens in seven days, I believe the Food and Drug Administration has the authority to ignore this ruling, which is why I’m again calling on President Biden and the FDA to do just that. The FDA, doctors, and pharmacies can and must go about their jobs like nothing has changed and keep mifepristone accessible to women across America. If they don’t, the consequences of banning the most common method of abortion in every single state will be devastating.”
🐣 RT @ryanjreilly “The Justice Department strongly disagrees with the decision of the District Court for the Northern District of Texas in Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine v. FDA and will be appealing the court’s decision and seeking a stay pending appeal.”
[TextLink:] https://twitter.com/ryanjreilly/status/1644499857594253312?s=20/photo/1
[Text:] Statement from Attorney General Merrick B. Garland
WASHINGTON – The Justice Department tonight issued the following statement from Attorney General Merrick B. Garland following the district court decisions in Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine v. FDA and Washington et al. v. FDA:
“The Justice Department strongly disagrees with the decision of the District Court for the Northern District of Texas in Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine v. FDA and will be appealing the court’s decision and seeking a stay pending appeal. Today’s decision overturns the FDA’s expert judgment, rendered over two decades ago, that mifepristone is safe and effective. The Department will continue to defend the FDA’s decision.
Separately, the Justice Department is reviewing the decision of the District Court for the Eastern District of Washington in Washington et al. v. FDA.
The Department is committed to protecting Americans’ access to legal reproductive care.”
🐣 Transphobia and “pronouns” hysteria are just there to hide the GOP’s true agenda:
🔥 Anti-WOMAN
🔥 Pro-GUN
🔥 RACIST
🐣 RT @RepJeffries A rogue Judge just suspended FDA approval of mifepristone. ¤ The Extreme MAGA Republican assault on abortion care is spreading across America like a malignant tumor. ¤ We must all speak up, show up and stand up until the far-right uprising is peacefully and democratically crushed.
🐣 RT @chrislhayes As I said on the show last week, the ONLY silver lining in this is that the politics of the anti-abortion zealotry are *atrocious* for conservatives and Republicans and the only way out is to make them may the full price for it, politically.
🐣 So a judge anywhere in the country can override the FDA approval of any drug and impose a nationwide ban on its use? This could include vaccines, birth control, ED drugs (hey guys!) and anything else some political interest finds objectionable. ¤ This is ridiculous and cannot stand.
🐣 RT @RepDanGoldman Republicans hand-picked this judge to get the outcome they wanted, which is a nationwide assault on a woman’s control over her own body. ¤ While DOJ appeals this ruling, I will continue to work with the Biden Administration to provide wide access to mifepristone for all women.
⋙ 🐣 RT @CBSNews BREAKING: A federal judge has halted FDA approval of the abortion pill mifepristone.
⋙⋙ CBSNews: Texas federal judge halts FDA approval of abortion pill mifepristone https://tinyurl.com/5brd4sya
🧵 RT @lawofruby BREAKING: On Good Friday no less, Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk has just ordered the FDA to stay its Sept. 2000 approval of mifepristone and all subsequent actions broadening access thereto. Believe women.
📌 https://twitter.com/lawofruby/status/1644466451544145921?s=20
⋙ 🐣 RT @lawofruby How does tonight’s ruling square with Dobbs, which the majority promised would take abortion out of the courts and return the issue to the people and their elected representatives? It doesn’t. Either states (and their voters) have total control over their own abortion policy….
⋙ 🐣 RT @lawofruby Or they don’t, in which case Congress and federal law matter. And here, despite Kacsmaryk’s tortured undermining of a 23-year-old approval, the FDA’s decision is not only entitled to deference, but it could also be argued to preempt contrary state law.
⋙ 🐣 RT @lawofruby But let’s say you take the Dobbs majority at its word. Aren’t states like New York and California equally entitled to make their own decisions? ¤ 22 state attorneys general thought so–and told Kacsmaryk as much in an amicus brief.
[TextLink:] https://twitter.com/lawofruby/status/1644488834648817665?s=20/photo/1
[Text:] Amici also have a strong interest in safeguarding their decision to protect their residents’ ability to obtain abortions in the wake of the Supreme Court’s decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, 142 S. Ct. 2228 (2022). Although the Supreme Court, reversing
longstanding precedent, concluded that the U.S. Constitution does not protect the right to obtain an abortion, there can be no question that the Court endorsed the States’ authority to promote access to abortion for their residents, explaining that it was “return [ing] the issue of abortion to the people’s elected representatives.” Id. at 2243. Annulling the FDA’s approval of mifepristone would, in effect, eviscerate amici’s sovereign decisions to protect the right to choose to terminate a pregnancy as it could prevent countless persons in amici States from obtaining an abortion.
🐣 RT @findkarma [Adam Rifkin] “Medication abortion accounts for 54% of abortions, so this really puts to the lie the notion that it was going to be enough to send this back to the states. It was never enough.” @Dahlialithwick @NicolleDWallace @DeadlineWH #abortionrights #mifepristone
💽 https://twitter.com/ifindkarma/status/1644484279387439104?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @lawofruby [Jennifer Rubin] Indeed, I invoked @steve_vladeck tonight on air in explaining that DOJ would likely do *exactly* this. The rise in applications by conservatives seeking to leapfrog appeals courts has hopefully taught Biden’s DOJ something.
⋙ 🐣 RT @steve_vladeck If I’m DOJ, I go *right* to #SCOTUS. ¤ File a notice of appeal in the Fifth Circuit, then seek a stay, but don’t wait for a ruling before asking SCOTUS for a stay and cert. before judgment—to resolve the conflict between the TX and WA rulings before the TX ruling goes into effect.
🔆 This❗️⋙ WaPo: Texas judge suspends FDA approval of abortion pill mifepristone https://tinyurl.com/2a7ueav5 “The lawsuit was brought by the legal group Alliance Defending Freedom on behalf of antiabortion medical organizations ”
// Federal lawsuit by conservative groups followed the Supreme Court’s elimination of the constitutional right to abortion last June
🐣 RT @PStyle0ne1 The number of missiles in Russia has fallen to the most critical level – Danilov ¤ The Secretary of the National Security and Defense Council added that Russia does not have the ability to increase missile resources in the amount that it would like. In addition, he stated:
📍Russia has not abandoned its “task” to eliminate President Vladimir Zelensky, both physically and politically.
📍The de-occupation of Crimea can be both military and diplomatic. It all depends on the behavior of the terrorist country.
📍 Part of the Bakhmut area, it is ours, the other part of the territory – the troops of the occupying forces. Prigozhin’s statement that they captured some center is not true. Bakhmut is fighting there. We keep Bakhmut because this is our land. #Ukraine #Wagner #Russia
PravdaUA: Number of Russian soldiers willing to surrender to Ukraine doubles in March https://tinyurl.com/4rwu8pdh
🐣 RT @Ukrainik #RussiaOnFire Yaroslav Motors factory, Russia’s largest mil engines manufacturer, 700 km from Ukraine’s border. Eyewitnesses reported seeing as many as 10 drones in the sky and hearing explosions. Officially, smoking cigarettes was not announced as the cause of fire.
¤ https://twitter.com/Ukrainik/status/1644360195315757057?s=20/photo/1 -2
🧵 RT @JominiW 1/ Ukraine TVD, 20 FEB-07 APR 23. The past 7 weeks saw a continuation of the Russian Winter Offensive as major pushes continued in Kreminna, Bakhmut, and Avdiivka. Russia made important gains, Ukrainian defenses continue to hold. #UkraineRussiaWar #RussianArmy #UkraineFrontLines
📌 🌎 https://twitter.com/JominiW/status/1644436075526463488?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @anders_aslund This seems so appropriate. ¤ Who would offer Trump asylum? Putin’s authoritarian kleptocracy. ¤ Would Putin do it himself? No, he would delegate it to one of his many convicts. ¤ Will Trump accept the offer? Eventually he might.
⋙ 🐣 RT @Billbrowder Russian arms dealer and Lord of War Viktor Bout is filmed here offering Trump political asylum in Russia.
⋙⋙ 🐣 RT @francis_scarr The “merchant of death” Viktor Bout says he has sent a message to Donald Trump offering him political asylum in Russia ¤ He warns that Trump’s life is in danger in the US and calls on the ex-president to lead an “uprising against the globalists” from abroad
💽 https://twitter.com/francis_scarr/status/1644372488606961666?s=20/photo/1
⋙⋙⋙ 🐣 RT @francis_scarr Here’s a copy of the telegram!
🖼 https://twitter.com/francis_scarr/status/1644373284983562240?s=20/photo/1
🧵 RT @MuellerSheWrote BREAKING: THREAD: This is significant. The appellate court has REVERSED judge Nichols ruling that 18 USC 1512(c)(2) Obstructing an Official Proceeding doesn’t apply to January 6. 1/
📌 https://twitter.com/MuellerSheWrote/status/1644354677704904705?s=20
⋙ […] Here’s the ruling. If SCOTUS agrees or refuses to hear, Jack Smith can comfortably charge Donald and his conspirators with 1512c2 without worrying whether the court will toss out his charges or conviction on misinterpretation of the statute. END
[CourtDoc:] https://tinyurl.com/2s3ndv7d
⭕ 6 Apr 2023
🐣 RT @MarkHamill ·@mehdirhasan provides the perfect tutorial to aspiring journalists! Watch as he seeks accountability while fact-checking his subject in real time. Breathtakingly brilliant & one of the reasons I never miss the @MehdiHasanShow
⋙ 🧵 RT @ mehdirhasan Me: “It’s just error after error, Matt?”
@mtaibbi: “Well, that is an error.”
Watch me confront Matt Taibbi with multiple, unacknowledged, and glaring mistakes in his Twitter Files reporting.
Full @MehdiHasanShow interview later tonight. Preview:
📌 💽 https://twitter.com/mehdirhasan/status/1644064242419617803?s=20/photo/1
🧵 RT @AWeissmann_ How do you get a false business filing to be a felony and not a misdemeanor? If it is intended to further or cover up another crime
Issues:
– need the other crime be a felony? NO
– need the state charge and prove the other crime? NO
📌 https://twitter.com/AWeissmann_/status/1644006333279027200?s=20
🐣 RT @Apex_WW Classified war documents detailing secret American and NATO plans for building up the Ukrainian military ahead of a planned offensive against Russia were posted this week on social media channels, senior Biden administration officials said. – NYT
🚫 ⋙ NYT: Ukraine War Plans Leak Prompts Pentagon Investigation https://tinyurl.com/mda6mbzc
// Classified documents detailing secret American and NATO plans have appeared on Twitter and Telegram.
NYT: How Russia’s Offensive Ran Aground https://tinyurl.com/mv6ddf8f “Moscow’s inability to gain substantial ground in the Donbas shows how little its offensive has achieved and how much its military has struggled to efficiently capture urban areas throughout the war”
🌎 https://twitter.com/Auriandra/status/1644100920173637632?s=20/photo/1
// After months of pouring soldiers into eastern Ukraine, Russia’s progress essentially adds up to this: three small settlements and part of the city of Bakhmut, a high-profile battlefield with limited strategic value.
A breakthrough for Russia appears increasingly unlikely. Regardless of the outcome in the fierce battle of Bakhmut, Moscow’s inability to gain substantial ground in the Donbas shows how little its offensive has achieved and how much its military has struggled to efficiently capture urban areas throughout the war.
After mobilizing hundreds of thousands of troops, Russia is no longer severely understaffed, as it was in the fall, when it lost large parts of the northeast in a surprise Ukrainian counteroffensive.
But even with more troops and firepower, Russia has, at best, only managed to inch forward, encountering well-prepared Ukrainian positions, protected by basements and buildings, with defensive lines heavily fortified from nearly a decade of fighting.
🐣 RT @TreasChest The formal owner of PVK “Wagner” Yevgeny Prigozhin “gave it back” and no longer boasts about his “admiration” of Bakhmut.
“It must be said clearly that the enemy is not going anywhere. They have an organized defense inside the city, first along the railway, then in the high-rise area of the western quarter of the city,” Prigozhin was quoted as saying by his press service.
According to Prigozhin, in order for his mercenaries to continue their assault on the Ukrainian city, “reliable flank protection, normally organized command and ammunition” are needed.
“When we solve all these three issues, then we can go anywhere… Someday I will tell you in detail about the problems and their solutions,” he said. http://ZN.UA
🐣 RT @JuliaDavisNews Boris Nadezhdin, who was a close ally of murdered opposition leader Boris Nemtsov, compares Putin to Nicholas I, argues that his regime is coming to an end and says that Russia should stop its war against Ukraine. I worry for Nadezhdin’s safety.
🐣 RT @ChuckPfarrer BAKHMUT CITY /1730 UTC 6 APL/ RU forces have consolidated positions on the W bank of the Bakhmutka River. UKR continues defensive ops to prevent RU form taking full control of the urban area. UKR forces again broke up RU attacks on Bohdanivka and Ivanivske.
🌎 https://twitter.com/ChuckPfarrer/status/1644028807962042386?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @ChuckPfarrer BAKHMUT AXIS/ 1145 UTC 7 APL/ This TACMAP summarizes fire missions and contact reports for the period of the night of 6-7 APL. During that span, Wagner forces were again repulsed along the M-04 HWY. In the urban areas of Bakhmut, heavy fighting reported.
🌎 https://twitter.com/ChuckPfarrer/status/1643940185590337538?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @oleksiireznikov Ukraine should become NATO’s 33rd member, while Sweden will become the 32nd. ¤ Ukrainians are the best at using NATO-style weapons to destroy the russian army. Such expertise is critical for the Alliance.
🐣 RT @AndriyYermak The return of all territories of Ukraine and 10-point Peace Plan of the President @ZelenskyyUa. ¤ This is our agenda. ¤ We will regain our lands and will bring our people back home. And the enemy to be brought to justice.
↥ ↧ ?
🐣 RT @SamRamani2 Ukraine expresses openness to negotiating on the status of Crimea ¤ However, Ukraine does not rule out military action to expel Russia from Crimea and insists that talks will only begin once Donbas and other occupied areas of Ukraine are freed
🐣 RT @KatyaYushchenko “Russia illegally usurped the seat of a defunct country – the Soviet Union. The UN Charter is very clear on this – the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, and not the Russian Federation, is appointed as a permanent member to the UNSC.”
⋙ ApostropheUA: The darkest hour in the United Nations history https://tinyurl.com/4wek8ve6
// Moscow uses its presidency in the UN Security Council for political and legal cover
⭕ 5 Apr 2023
🐣 RT @MarkHertling Last night, I tweeted that I had been assessing & considering the challenges Ukraine’s Army (UA) Commanders were facing in preparing for the “spring offensives. ¤ I said I’d share some thoughts on what I would be thinking if I were among them.This is that 1/
🐣 RT @JChengWSJ China’s EU ambassador Fu Cong to NYT: “I know people are fixated on the presidential call…The fact that President Xi is not speaking to Zelensky does not signify that China is on the side of Russia on the Ukrainian issue.” [NYT:] https://tinyurl.com/jm4pd576
🧵 RT @igorsushko Intrigue in #Russia: Fascist war correspondent Tatarsky was assassinated with a bomb planted in a statue. Daria Trepova is charged with murder because she gifted the statue. In her interrogation, she said was handed the statue & instructed to gift it to the victim. (HINT: FSB)
📌 https://twitter.com/igorsushko/status/1643773560689922048?s=20
// alleged false flag
🐣 RT @MrKovalenko He was the CIA director and the Secretary of State in the Trump Administration.
⋙ 🐣 RT @MikePompeo I’ve just left Ukraine. I’ve seen the damage caused by Putin’s invasion. And I’ve been inspired by the bravery of the Ukrainian people. ¤ One thing is clear: helping Ukraine end this war is in America’s core interest. (1/4)
⋙ Supporting Ukraine isn’t about abstract ideals like “global democracy”: it’s about strengthening OUR national and economic security. (2/4)
⋙ If Putin wins, he’ll control critical exports to the U.S. And he’ll be on the brink of a broader war in Europe. We can’t let that happen. (3/4)
⋙ The Ukrainian people have endured indescribable suffering. But they’re resilient. ¤ They’re not asking for American troops—just our support. ¤ We should give it to them.
🐣 RT @yasminalombaert The Russian Foreign Minister, Sergey Lavrov, claims that the Republic of Moldova follows an “obviously anti-Russian and anti-Transnistrian” policy. ¤ Thus, Putin’s aid launched new veiled threats. Lavrov warned that Russia “bears responsibility for the Russian citizens of Transnistria”. ¤ “As far as I know, 250,000 Russian citizens live in Transnistria. Of course, we are responsible for them,” Lavrov said. ¤ “We have a mandate agreed at the time by all parties,” Lavrov said. “We believe that this mandate is fully up-to-date and we will be guided by it,” he added
🐣 RT @NOELreports Ukraine will join NATO after defeating the Russian Federation, Jens Stoltenberg said. ¤ “We will do everything so that Ukraine wins, and this will ensure its membership in NATO.”
🐣 RT @Billbrowder Russian energy boss dies in Siberian cell in 40th mystery oligarch death. It just goes on and on. Murder, murder, murder in Putin’s Russia [link]
¤ https://twitter.com/Billbrowder/status/1643735370419388416?s=20
🐣 RT @sentdefender The Deputy Head of the Ukrainian Presidential Office; Andrii Sybiha stated in an Interview today that Ukraine will be willing to discuss the “Territorial Integrity of the Crimean Peninsula” with Russia if their upcoming Counteroffensive to the Border with Crimea is Successful.
⋙⋙ 🐣 RT @sentdefender However, he further stated that these “Negotiations” would not Exclude the possibility that Crimea could still be Liberated by the Ukrainian Armed Forces.
⋙ 🐣 RT @Icarus_Rising23 Can’t tell if this is a rope-a-dope to get Russia to divert forces to Kherson for a Luhansk push, or a double rope-a-dope to set up a real push to Crimea.
🐣 RT @Kasparov63 Good, now from Obama about standing down as Putin took Crimea and invaded E Ukraine in 2014. Admitting blunders is a critical part of not repeating them and recognizing the flawed assumptions that lead to them. These were all mistakes of appeasement.
⋙ 🐣 RT @OlenaHalushka Budapest memorandum should teach the world a lesson:
– not helping Ukraine to win is the worst case for any future non-proliferation efforts;
– succumbing to russian nuclear blackmail would only speed up proliferation;
– altogether this would welcome, not deter the nuclear war
💽 https://twitter.com/OlenaHalushka/status/1643502723055206401?s=20/photo/1
// Bill Clinton statement
🐣 RT @KateGoesTech Zelenskyy today: ¤ “LEAVE OR BE DESTROYED”
🖼 https://twitter.com/KateGoesTech/status/1643621332137934852?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @Tendar Military analysts around the globe share the same as I do: ¤ The Russian winter offensive has entirely failed. We can see that in all sectors. No matter whether you look at Vuhledar, Kreminna, Kupyansk, Zaporizhzhia and, yes, even Bakhmut the Russian advances were little or not even existent. Russia wasted huge amount of resources and gained almost nothing in return. In the contrary, they are no more than ever under threat to lose more. But that’s the next episode.
🌎 https://twitter.com/Tendar/status/1643631488854835208?s=20/photo/1 -4
Based on all Russian attempts I have drawn maps of their intention. The operation, indeed, was aimed to take the entire Donbas, as well as all areas east of the Oskil river. I believe that Russians intended to execute this in 4 phases:
PHASE 1:
Strike and breakthrough Ukrainian lines at Kupyansk, Kreminna, Bakhmut, Avidiivka, Marinka and Vuhledar and encircle the cities of the 1st defense linePHASE 2:
Break the resistance of those cities and move deeper into Ukrainian space. Starting to encircle the 2nd line of defense, most notably Kramatorsk and SlovianskPHASE 3:
Break Ukrainian resistance at 2nd line of defense. Take over of Kramatorsk/Sloviansk, clear out all remaining Ukrainian units east of Oskil river and launch attack on Pokrovsk and DobropillyaPHASE 4:
Strike and take over of Pokrovsk and Dobropillya. Clear out all remaining pockets and conquer the rest of Donetsk Oblast. End of all offensive operations and fortify this position.Political Conclusion:
Declare victory and offer cease fire and demand this to be the new border or line of contact. The areas of the Kharkiv Oblast stay under Russian rule, in exchange for Ukraine keeping Kherson and Zaporizhzhia city.If this Russian operation would have succeeded Russia would have not only gained 13,000 km² of land but also would have neutralized the bulk of the Ukrainian army.
Reality: ¤ A bold plan which never made it even over phase 1. Epic disaster for Russia
🐣 RT @ChuckPfarrer AVDIIVKA AXIS /1510 UTC 5 APL/ UKR forces maintain positions N and W of the urban areas. RU forces were rebuffed at Novokalynove, Stepove and Pervomaiske.
🌎 https://twitter.com/ChuckPfarrer/status/1643628932715954180?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @ChuckPfarrer BAHKMUT CITY /2140 UTC 5 APL/ RU forces have escalated efforts to take full control of the urban areas of Bakhmut. UKR forces broke up RU assaults on Bohdanivka and Ivanivske. The General Staff reports that 15 enemy attacks were thwarted in the Bakhmut area of operations.
🌎 https://twitter.com/ChuckPfarrer/status/1643726584661041156?s=20/photo/1
🧵 RT @costareports (thread) This Pence development today is significant and potentially historic. A former vice president is now willing, within certain specified constitutional grounds his lawyers fought to arrange, to testify about potential illegal acts by a president.
📌 https://twitter.com/costareports/status/1643704231860338688?s=20
[ThreadReader:] https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1643704231860338688.html
⋙ CBSNews: Federal judge rules Pence must testify before grand jury about any illegal acts by Trump https://tinyurl.com/bde7pxbm
⋙ […] Think about what this means. The special counsel could now get a first-hand account of what Trump specifically said to Pence in Oval Office meetings ahead of Jan. 6, as long as Pence and his lawyers do not consider those conversations related to his specific constitutional role.
⋙ Pence has long been reluctant to talk at all, even to confidants, about what Trump has said to him in private. Pence has protected his confidence with Trump for years. But he is also someone who knows a subpoena to testify is what it is: a demand to follow the rule of law.
⋙ Pence’s spokesman’s statement today underscores that he will follow the rule of law. A sign of where he stands, how he’ll handle. So as long as special counsel asks questions that are arguably outside realm of “President of Senate” hat Pence wore as VP, testimony seems possible.
⋙ Here are some looming questions… ¤ On Jan. 4, 2021, John Eastman pressured you to act, to your face, in the Oval. What did he say? What did Trump say? How did they follow up? Did you take it as a directive or a suggestion on how to handle your job as vice president?
⋙ A day later, on Jan. 5, 2021, President Trump called you into the Oval Office to talk, one on one. What exactly did he say to you? What did he say about his desire to stay in power? What did he outline as his hopes for Jan. 6? Did he give you any documents?
⋙ Late on Jan. 5, 2021, you return home to dinner. A group dinner, some supporters there. Friends. Did anyone else call you that night? Or reach out to your advisers? The next morning, Jan. 6, you stay home and don’t go to the White House. Take me through that decision and moment.
⋙ On the morning of Jan. 6, you take a call with Trump. What did you say to him when he berated you for not doing his bidding? Who else did you speak with that morning ahead of issuing your letter and going to the Capitol?
⋙ All that is during his time as VP of the United States, not as “president of Senate.” But will be up to a judge to ultimately decide, should Pence testify as now expected, about just how far the special counsel can go in terms of the scope of questions on Trump’s conduct.
⋙ What will matter is whether special counsel can eventually prove criminal intent on Trump’s part (or Eastman, Giuliani, etc.) to conspire to block a congressional proceeding… sources tell me that’s a key focus in the Jan. 6 probe: How did Trump use his power to block Congress?
⋙ This all comes as the special counsel is also, I’m told, digging very deep into whether Trump in any way tried to obstruct the government from securing classified documents, securing testimony from tons of aides, Mar-a-Lago employees and even Trump’s own lawyer…
⋙ So, yes, yesterday in NYC was historic. A surreal American scene. But the real movement, perhaps, is in Washington. In Jack Smith’s special counsel investigations. Fast-moving probes, witnesses being compelled to come in. And a former VP now set to testify under oath. /end
🐣 RT @jedshug “Tuesday was really an indictment of Barr & Garland. If anyone should have brought this case, it was they. And if DOJ should bring a case, there are stronger, more recent & more serious charges to bring.” ¤ (See @ARozenshtein & me on Jan. 6 incitement.)
⋙ 🐣 I am satisfied that the case brings to public knowledge the shady things Trump did to bury stories that could easily have damaged him in 2016. ¤ What is defensible in a court of law at times falls short of what is obvious if laid out to a thinking public.
🐣 RT @KyivIndependent Poland and Ukraine sign joint memorandum on reconstruction and munitions production. ¤ Poland and Ukraine have signed a joint memorandum on both the reconstruction of war-damaged areas of Ukraine and the production of 125mm tank rounds, according to TVN24.
NYT, Charlie Savage: Analysis: A Surprise Accusation Bolsters a Risky Case Against Trump https://tinyurl.com/5f48e442
// The unsealed case against Donald J. Trump accuses him of falsifying records in part to lay the groundwork for planned lies to tax authorities.
🐣 RT @SecBlinken Our @NATO unity is as strong as ever, and the Alliance remains resilient against Putin’s attempts to undermine our solidarity. We remain united in our support to Ukraine and the Ukrainian people, and to advancing the international rules-based order.
WaPo: Democrats cheer contrast between Biden and Trump indictment https://tinyurl.com/4b2wc4hj “Democrats have begun to see evidence that the big statewide wins in key swing states in 2022 were not isolated incidents”
// The party believes Trump’s legal troubles will ultimately damage him if he becomes the Republican nominee next year
⭕ 4 Apr 2023
⋙ TechnologyReview (Apr), Masha Borak: How Russia killed its tech industry https://tinyurl.com/3fzca4fn
// 4/4/2023; The invasion of Ukraine supercharged the decline of the country’s already struggling tech sector—and undercut its biggest success story, Yandex.
WaPo: ‘Frustrated and upset,’ Trump goes silent, then seethes https://tinyurl.com/5axwj8tc
// The splitscreen highlighted the two worlds Trump is spanning as he makes a third straight bid for the presidency: one in which he is a defiant political hero and another in which he is in increasing legal peril
NYT, Karen Agnifilo and Norman Eisen: We Finally Know the Case Against Trump, and It Is Strong https://tinyurl.com/3a6c5dsh “[T]rump cannot persuasively argue he is being singled out for some unprecedented theory of prosecution. He is being treated as any other New Yorker”
Lawfare: And So It Begins: On the First Charges to Drop Against Former President Donald Trump https://tinyurl.com/5cfs9k9s
🧵 RT @atrupar Trump is about to address his indictment in a speech from Mar-a-Lago. Follow along for a video thread. (And yes, that’s the pillow man Mike Lindell.)
📌 💽 https://twitter.com/atrupar/status/1643405715724283908?s=20
🐣 RT @SkinnerPm MeanCat does indeed miss his only friend, SweetDog. MeanCat has slept in bed by my feet every night since we lost SweetDog, and he rarely does that. He’s looking around for his best friend and it’s breaking my heart.
🐣 RT @ProjectLincoln After his indictment, the GOP had the perfect excuse to distance themselves from Trump, yet they doubled down on their support. They are cynical and without a vision for America. The party of Lincoln is dead – it’s been replaced by the party of Trump.
🐣 RT @ PaulaChertok A good day. An historic day.
⚖️Trump is arrested.
🇫🇮Finland joins NATO.
💪🏼Rule of law, democracy, allies kick ass.
👹Russia’s objectives are further out of reach.
Well done, people. Let’s raise a glass, in unity and solidarity, to this day!
🥂💙💛👊
🐣 RT @AshaRangappa_ This is not some outlier case compared to GA or Jan. 6. It was the FIRST IN THE PROGRESSION:
1. Stormy hush money
2. Welcoming Russian interference efforts/obstructing exposure
3. Ukraine phone call/quid pro quo
4. Jan. 6
It’s the same crime getting refined each time
⋙ 🐣 RT @Acyn “They said that Mr. Trump tried to conceal a conspiracy and undermine the 2016 election, to identify and suppress negative information. “
💽 https://twitter.com/Acyn/status/1643328354626715648?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @AVindman Here, Right Matters!
🖼 https://twitter.com/AVindman/status/1643347134073257989?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @MotherJones Here’s @DavidCornDC with the instant-breakdown of the Trump hush money charges, now that we have them in hand. ¤ Big picture story: “There was a conspiracy to break election law.” ¤ “It wasn’t just Stormy Daniels… it was the whole ‘catch-and-kill’ operation. ¤ WATCH:
💽 https://twitter.com/MotherJones/status/1643357923782049792?s=20/photo/1
WaPo: Donald Trump, a tawdry case and a nation left wondering how it came to this https://tinyurl.com/mtyt9ztw “For a few moments, a day perhaps, it was a Donald Trump who was no longer larger than life, and a country left to contemplate how it came to this”
// Tuesday was a day of spectacle, a word so often associated with the name Donald Trump. Yet it had a sad, almost pathetic quality to it.
This is where Trump has brought the country. His first campaign broke so many norms of politics, and he survived controversies that would have brought down most politicians. His presidency brought chaos and turmoil, not to mention lies and hate, again a norm-breaking tenure unlike any other in the history of the country. His post-presidency has been an extension of his presidency.
Throughout his years in the political spotlight, Trump never wavered in his claim that he was being investigated unfairly, that he was being wrongly persecuted by his political opponents. He lashed out at all his rivals, made wild accusations about some of them, attacked the FBI and Justice Department officials, and threatened violence — and when he lost the 2020 election to Biden, he falsely claimed that the election had been stolen and has persisted in those accusations to this day. Every tweet was consumed and amplified by friend and foe. …
But at this moment, all the coverage, all the attention, all the commentary, all the videos and photos were in service to putting Trump in the dock, under arrest, arraigned in court, released of his own recognizant and then back to the future. For a few moments, a day perhaps, it was a Donald Trump who was no longer larger than life, and a country left to contemplate how it came to this.
🐣 RT @NoahBookbinder I think for decades, and particularly as president, Donald Trump got used to the idea that, if you were wealthy and powerful enough, you could do whatever you want without repercussions. It is shocking–and crucial to democracy–to see that pattern broken. #NoOneIsAboveTheLaw
🐣 RT @oleksiireznikov Today, on NATO’s birthday, the US announced another package of security assistance for Ukraine, which, among other things, increases the #UAarmy’s compatibility with the Alliance. ¤ We are determined to fight and win this war. ¤ Thank you, @POTUS @SecDef and the American people.
[TextLink:] https://twitter.com/oleksiireznikov/status/1643364827933417475?s=20/photo/1
// Defense budget
🐣 RT @stuartpstevens Until Republican Party leaders and elected officials say they will not support Donald Trump if he is the nominee, there is no hope the party might again function as an American political party and not an autocratic movement.
🐣 RT @SenWhitehouse The beauty of the American justice system is that the law applies equally to everyone – even former presidents – and everyone has the right to a fair proceeding free of intimidation or outside influence.
🐣 So, the outcome of the 2016 election was driven by a couple of guys named “Pecker” and “Wiener”
🔆 This❗️⋙ WaPo: Trump pleads not guilty to charges of falsifying documents to help him win the 2016 election https://tinyurl.com/a5k3dhef “The defendant DONALD J. TRUMP repeatedly and fraudulently falsified New York business records to conceal criminal conduct” ~ Indictment
WaPo: Finland joins NATO, doubling alliance’s land border with Russia https://tinyurl.com/bd3s8d5b “To justify his unprovoked attack on Ukraine, Putin cited the possibility of NATO expansion. Now, his war has brought a bigger, stronger NATO to his door.”
🐣 RT @ABCpolitics Here is the full transcript of what transpired in the courtroom during former Pres. Trump’s arraignment hearing, according to records that were released.
≣ ⋙ ABCNews: Read the full transcript from Trump’s arraignment https://tinyurl.com/yxsbfkar
// The former president’s court hearing lasted 57 minutes.
🐣 RT @rgoodlaw #TrumpIndictment This looks like @AWeissmann_ and my idea in NYT Op-ed: ¤ “The participants also took steps that mischaracterized, for tax purposes, the true nature of the payments made in furtherance of the scheme.” ¤ Would insulate from legal challenges (preemption etc.)
[TextLink:] https://twitter.com/rgoodlaw/status/1643338701232037888?s=20/photo/1
↥ ↧
Indictment:
● 34 counts [pdf] https://tinyurl.com/4brcdb3c 16p
● Statement of Facts [pdf] https://tinyurl.com/yc6wvu3n 13p
🐣 “The defendant DONALD J. TRUMP repeatedly and fraudulently falsified New York business records to conceal criminal conduct that hid damaging information from the voting public during the 2016 presidential election” https://tinyurl.com/yc6wvu3n 13p
The defendant DONALD J. TRUMP repeatedly and fraudulently falsified New York business records to conceal criminal conduct that hid damaging information from the voting public during the 2016 presidential election.
From August 2015 to December 2017, the Defendant orchestrated a scheme with others to influence the 2016 presidential election by identifying and purchasing negative information about him to suppress its publication and benefit the Defendant’s electoral prospects. In order to execute the unlawful scheme, the participants violated election laws and made and caused false entries in the business records of various entities in New York. The participants also took steps that mischaracterized, for tax purposes, the true nature of the payments made in furtherance of the scheme.
🐣 “Let justice roll down like waters and righteousness like a mighty stream.” – Amos 5:21-24
⭕ 3 Apr 2023
WaPo: As DeSantis seeks Disney probe, Iger accuses him of ‘anti-business’ stance https://tinyurl.com/2r6wsecu “Disney CEO Bob Iger accused [DeSantis] of engaging in retaliation over the company’s opposition to a law restricting school instruction on sexual orientation”
// The CEO accused Florida’s Republican governor of retaliating against the company over its stance on LGBT issues
🐣 RT @trajaykay The President of 🇺🇦 met with the delegation of the 🇺🇸 House of Representatives from the Republican Party led by the Chairman of the Standing Committee on Intelligence Mike Turner ¤ It was a very constructive conversation. I am grateful to our allies for this. ¤ 🇺🇦🇺🇸🤝
💽 https://twitter.com/trajaykay/status/1643001825812000770?s=20/photo/1
⋙ 🐣 RT @trajaykay The President noted during the meeting, bicameral and bipartisan support from the President Biden, & the entire American people played a decisive role in our country’s ability to resist Russia in the war for its freedom and democratic values.
WaPo, Jennifer Rubin: Fox News has been blown to smithereens https://tinyurl.com/yawjh2z2 “The public should now understand that Fox personalities are willing to say things they know are false as part of a business model to keep viewers glued to its propaganda machine”
“Through its extensive proof, Dominion has met its burden of showing there is no genuine issue of material fact as to falsity,” the judge wrote. Since Fox never disputed falsity, Davis concluded: “The evidence developed in this civil proceeding demonstrates that is CRYSTAL clear that none of the Statements relating to Dominion about the 2020 election are true.” Fox’s motion for summary judgment was rejected, meaning the suit will go to trial. ¤ It cannot be repeated enough: Plaintiffs almost never win on the issue of falsity before the trial even begins. Usually, there is some defense that the facts were plausibly true — or at least that the comments were opinion (therefore, not actionable). Not in this case.
🐣 📊 RT @RpsAgainstTrump BREAKING: A new CNN poll finds majority of Americans approve of Trump’s indictment
Democrats: 94%
Independents: 62%
Republicans: 21%
Do Republicans really want to nominate this guy for president again?
⭕ 2 Apr 2023
🐣 RT @ChuckPfarrer BAKHMUT AXIS /1250 UTC 2 APL/ RU forces continue efforts to storm Bakhmut, with UKR forces reported to have repelled 25 attacks. RU is assessed to be registering slow and but costly progress in the N industrial areas. UKR forces broke up RU assaults at Bohdanivka & Predtechyne.
🌎 https://twitter.com/ChuckPfarrer/status/1642508454605598720?s=20/photo/1
WaPo: Justice Dept. said to have more evidence of possible Trump obstruction at Mar-a-Lago https://tinyurl.com/2p83cmx7 “Trump ignored requests from multiple advisers to return the documents to the archives [and] asked advisers and lawyers to release false statements”
// Ex-staffer’s emails, texts are guiding investigators, who increasingly suspect Trump went through boxes after subpoena
On Aug. 8, FBI agents conducted a surprise court-ordered search of Mar-a-Lago and found 103 documents marked classified, including 18 marked top secret, according to court papers. The investigation has recovered documents that describe highly sensitive U.S. intelligence efforts aimed at China, one document describing Iran’s missile program, and material covering other sensitive topics, including nuclear secrets.
🧵 RT @CanadianKobzar FELLAS! STAY AWHILE AND LISTEN! Today we will discuss an integral (but controversial) figure in Ukrainian history. A leader responsible for creating the FIRST Ukrainian state since the fall of the Kingdom of Galicia–Volhynia (or Ruthenia) – Hetman Bohdan Khmelnytskyi. 1/20
📌 https://twitter.com/CanadianKobzar/status/1642571889280262149?s=20
📌 https://twitter.com/CanadianKobzar/status/1642571916387950593?s=20
🐣 RT @ @olex_scherba This wonderful specimen of a human being, an ex-con in Ukraine, and a leading war propagandist in russia, was assassinated today in Saint Petersburg. ¤ Bye, Vladlen. You didn’t live a good life. And didn’t die a good death.#StandWithUkraine
⋙ 🐣 RT @nexta_tv “We will defeat everyone, we will kill everyone, we will rob everyone. Everything will be as we like”: this video was recorded by the pro-Kremlin blogger Vladlen Tatarsky from the Kremlin hall.
💽 https://twitter.com/olex_scherba/status/1642573158870925313?s=20/photo/1
⭕ 1 Apr 2023
TheSun [UK]: KNIVES OUT Putin is a dead man walking – here is why I know he’ll be killed to finally end the war in Ukraine, says ex-CIA chief https://tinyurl.com/3r9yr3ea “Putin is bleeding Russia and he cannot do that forever.” James Olson, former CIA chief of counterintelligence
VLADIMIR Putin is a dead man walking – and he could be killed to finally end the war in Ukraine, a former CIA chief has said. ¤ James Olson, the spy agency’s former chief of counterintelligence, said he believes the sharks are now circling for the tyrant back home in Russia.
Olson told The Sun Online that Putin is now in a “no win” situation – with the war either devolving into a grinding statelemate, or ending with Vlad’s death. ¤ He said if Putin stays in power he will never give up the war – and so the way to end it is for Vlad to be killed or ousted.
Olson, who served for over 30 years in the CIA and won medals for his service, explained that things don’t look good for Putin – with either his oligarch pals, his military, or even his people set to turn on him.
Putin has lost more than 170,000 soldiers, according to Ukraine, since the start of the conflict as his war machine continues to grind forward at a slow pace.
Vlad hasn’t made the gains he or his commanders expected and Russia has found itself bogged down a long, brutal war as humiliating defeats pile up. ¤ The tyrant now seemingly has his future tied to his success or failure in Ukraine.
And for Olson, it appears things are not going to end well for Mad Vlad. ¤ The ex-CIA man explained Putin “miscalculated” – overestimating the power of military and the effectiveness of their leadership.
“If Putin stays in power, there will be a long war because he will not give up – but I do not think that Putin is going to stay in power. I believe that he will be removed from power. ¤ “I believe that there is a strong undercurrent of opposition to Putin in the military, the intelligence services, among the oligarchs.”
Putin is known to live in fear of an uprising or internal coup – allegedly being obsessed with the toppling and subsequent killing of Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi.
Olson went on: “Putin is destroying Russia. I believe there are some good Russians, some patriotic Russians who will decide enough is enough. ¤ “I think Putin will be taken out. I would not rule out assasination. ¤ “I think it is actually likely that some patriotic Russians will decide they need to eliminate Putin. ¤ “And that would be the end of the war. Because the Russian people are suffering and they are losing people. Putin is bleeding Russia and he cannot do that forever.”
Olson drew parallels between the number of Russian losses in the last 13 months, comparing it to how many were killed in Afghanistan. ¤ Russia lost 15,000 soldiers in from 1979 to 1989. ¤ And so Putin’s war disaster is seeing an attrition rate some ten times higher than a campaign wildly regarded as a failure. ¤
“But what they are losing in Ukraine is much worse. And I believe there are generals who are disgusted by that tragic loss of lives and they will be a possible source of the uprising against Putin, said Olson. ¤ “And if they do that I see Putin as a dead-man walking. He would not survive that. I think that it is more likely that Putin will be eliminated than a military defeat.
“I am optimistic because I think the people who will be motivated to elliminate Putin will be doing that for the right reasons, that they want to save Russia, that they want Russia return to the community of nations. ¤ “I think they will be motivated to restore democracy to Russia. I think the future is very bright for Russia once Putin is eliminated.”
🧵 RT @ @tomiahonen With Trump arraignment on Tuesday, news of Trump attorney Corcoran testifying to Grand Jury without pleading the 5th, & rumors that Weisselberg flipped in New York: the rats are scurrying to betray each other. It is time to play America’s fastest growing quiz sensation: #Ratbingo
📌 https://twitter.com/tomiahonen/status/1642345600967385098?s=20
[ThreadReader:] https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1642345600967385098.html
🐣 RT @AntiToxicPeople Deranged maniac/Very Stable Genius 1) attacks the strength of America multiple times 2) attacks the FBI & DOJ while they are investigating him 3) calls OTHER people insurrectionists 4) Spells the word rig, “RIGG” while lying about elections for the 1000th time.
[TextLink:] https://twitter.com/AntiToxicPeople/status/1642310611580383233?s=20/photo/1
[Text:] 🐣 RT @realDonaldTrump I want to thank everybody for the tremendous support you have given me against this assault on our Nation. ¤ Our once beautiful USA is now a Nation in Decline. Radical Left Thugs & Insurrectionists have taken over our Country, & are rapidly destroying it. They are using the levers of Law Enforcement, and have completely Weaponized the FBI & DOJ to Interfere with, Rigg, and Steal our once SACRED ELECTIONS. We are now living in a THIRD WORLD COUNTRY, but we will Come Back & MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!
CNN: Fox News producer files explosive lawsuits against the network, alleging she was coerced into providing misleading Dominion testimony https://tinyurl.com/2trp9dpv
// 3/21/2023
🐣 RT @tribelaw “The evidence developed in this civil proceeding demonstrates that [it is] CRYSTAL clear that none of the statements relating to Dominion about the 2020 election are true,” Judge Davis wrote.
⋙ ABCNews: Dominion case against Fox News will go to trial, judge rules, in loss for network https://tinyurl.com/2685vtxr
// The voting company is suing Fox News for $1.6 billion over election claims.
🐣 RT @RepDanGoldman The Weaponization Subcommittee is apparently no longer focused on the dozens of FBI whistleblowers who were supposedly going to show a massive conspiracy to attack conservatives. ¤ Why won’t @JudiciaryGOP bring them in for a hearing so the American public can see for themselves?
💽 https://twitter.com/RepDanGoldman/status/1641834229637038086?s=20/photo/1
⋙ 🐣 RT @mjcaswell Because they are imaginary. Same reason the chair wouldn’t let any democrats question his “witnesses”. Their stories would have fallen down like sandcastles in the rising tide. Sadly, going on Fox News and lying hasn’t prepared them for the real world.
🐣 RT @AntiToxicPeople As Trump prepares for his court appearance on Tuesday, its interesting to note that 50 years ago this month in April 1973, the Watergate coverup imploded, leading to Nixon’s downfall.
🐣 RT @ @radleybalko Hunter Biden would have to serve on the Burisma board for at least 5,000 years to earn the money Middle East governments have given to Kushner’s firm since Trump took office. Kushner of course had an official White House position, and worked on ME policy.
⋙ NYT: Kushner Firm Got Hundreds of Millions From 2 Persian Gulf Nations https://tinyurl.com/2hd5j9vd
// The infusion of money from interests in the two Persian Gulf monarchies reflects the close ties to Middle Eastern countries established by Jared Kushner, former President Donald Trump’s son-in-law.
🐣 RT @jimstewartson Bill Barr sprung Mike Flynn and Roger Stone, covered up the Mueller report, covered up Iran-Contra, and answers to Opus Dei, not the Constitution. ¤ He says the Trump indictments are “an abomination.” ¤ “TheStormHasArrived17” agrees. ¤ Same people, doing the same thing. Every time.
🐣 RT @TonyHussein4 If no one is above the law, then Jared Kushner’s $2 billion received from the Saudis – 2,000 times the sum Hunter Biden received from foreign sources – must be investigated. Ginni Thomas should also be investigated for her involvement in Trump’s hub-and-spoke coup conspiracy.
🐣 RT @JoyceWhiteVance If “my guy” was indicted, I’d be disappointed in him for committing a crime. I’d be angry at the betrayal of trust. I’d accept prosecutors would only indict a former president if the evidence was compelling but as with Trump, I’d still believe in innocence until proven guilty.
⋙ 🐣 RT @kibblesmith The “what if it was your guy getting indicted” argument gives away the whole game, like the people who think that because they watch Fox all day I must watch CNN all day, and we’re just on opposite sides of a meaningless sports game with no human consequences.
⋙⋙ 🐣 RT @kibblesmith Like that meme going around that said “We survived Obama you’ll survive Trump” and then a million Americans died of Covid and the death toll skewed Republican, likely due to age and vaccine resistance.
🐣 RT @Biz_Ukraine_Mag Why Putin is once again resorting to nuclear threats:
– Winter offensive has failed
– Russian army is demoralized
– Infrastructure bombing campaign has failed
– Western support for Ukraine stronger than ever
– China still reluctant to get involved
⋙ AtlanticCouncil, Peter Dickinson: Putin’s nuclear saber-rattling is a sign of dangerous Russian desperation https://tinyurl.com/mr3y953x “If he finds himself faced with the prospect of decisive military defeat, Putin will almost certainly escalate his nuclear blackmail”
[…] It is not difficult to imagine why Putin is now once again indulging in nuclear saber-rattling. In recent months, military aid to Ukraine has expanded to new levels and crossed multiple Russian red lines in the process. Western countries have agreed to supply Kyiv with state-of-the-art air defense systems, modern battle tanks, and jet fighters. Tellingly, Putin framed his plans for nuclear weapons in Belarus as a response to Britain’s decision to provide Ukraine with anti-tank ammunition that contains depleted uranium.
Meanwhile, Russia’s military fortunes in Ukraine have continued to deteriorate. The six-month campaign to bomb Ukraine into submission by targeting the country’s civilian infrastructure has ended in failure. Along the front lines in southern and eastern Ukraine, a much-hyped Russian offensive has been underway since early 2023 but has failed to make significant progress while suffering disastrous losses. This is leading to the rapid demoralization of Putin’s army in Ukraine, with video appeals regularly posted to social media featuring groups of recently mobilized Russian soldiers complaining of suicidal tactics and high death tolls.
There is also little cause for Russian optimism on the international front, where initial expectations of a weakening in Western support for Ukraine are rapidly evaporating. Indeed, during the early months of 2023, the democratic world’s commitment to Ukraine has looked stronger than ever. In February, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy was given a hero’s welcome during a brief trip to London, Paris, and Brussels. Weeks later, US President Joe Biden arrived in Kyiv to emphasize his resolve to stand with Ukraine.
There was more bad news for Russia in mid-March, when the International Criminal Court issued a warrant for Putin’s arrest on war crimes charges related to the mass abduction of Ukrainian children. While there is no immediate danger of the Russian ruler ending up in court, the indictment is a further humiliation that underlines Putin’s pariah status while weakening his position both at home and abroad.
Even the recent visit of Chinese leader Xi Jinping to Moscow failed to lift the gloom. The summit produced few concrete gains for Putin while confirming his position as junior partner in what is an increasingly unequal bilateral relationship. Interestingly, one of the few security-related outcomes of the visit was a joint statement calling on all nuclear powers to refrain from deploying nuclear weapons beyond their national borders. Putin’s subsequent decision to place nukes in Belarus may well be an indication of his frustration over China’s obvious reluctance to back Russia more forcefully. …
We are likely to see such scare tactics increasingly in the coming months. With the Ukrainian military currently preparing to launch what promises to be their largest offensive of the war, Russia’s position could worsen significantly during spring and summer 2023. If he finds himself faced with the prospect of decisive military defeat, Putin will almost certainly escalate his nuclear blackmail to new levels of danger. At that point, the international community must unite to prevent Russia from dragging the world into catastrophe.
💙 🐣 RT @voteblue8888 Russia is burning out of control on Putin’s watch | The Hill – The Hill, that in 13 months of war RU has lost 3,595 tanks, 7,000 IFVs, 2,638 artillery pieces, 523 multiple rocket launchers, 277 air defense systems, 305 jets, and 291 helicopters.
⋙ TheHill, Mark Toth and Jonathan Sweet: Russia is burning out of control on Putin’s watch https://tinyurl.com/4zdvz3s5 “It is not just Ukraine that is burning. All of Russia is beginning to smolder because of Putin’s myopic fixation on inconsequential cities on a map”
Apocryphal or not, there is no image in recorded history more evocative of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s madness in Ukraine than that of Emperor Nero fiddling during the Great Fire of Rome that left 70 percent of the ancient city in ruins in 64 CE. As Putin’s “special military operation” burns down around him, Russian forces in Bakhmut, Andriivka, Kreminna, Vuhledar and other small towns along the eastern front in the Donbas are nearing culmination. It is not just Ukraine that is burning. All of Russia is beginning to smolder because of Putin’s myopic fixation on inconsequential cities on a map. …
The highest cost is in lives. In February, the United Kingdom’s Ministry of Defense estimated Moscow by then had “suffered” more than 200,000 casualties, including as many as 60,000 dead. Given Russia’s declining population of 146 million, that level of loss is generational. It is only getting worse. The ministry last Saturday estimated Russia has racked up as many as 30,000 casualties trying to conquer the 16 square miles comprising Bakhmut.
The burn rate — be it in men, military equipment, or munitions — in Bakhmut alone is astounding. In nine months, Putin’s forces have advanced only 15 miles “west from Popasna to Bakhmut.” That is a mind-boggling 2,000 Russian casualties per mile. By comparison, it is 440 miles from Bakhmut to Kyiv. Fighting terrain varies, but purely as a hypothetical to demonstrate just how badly Putin is faring in Ukraine, crunching the numbers suggests Putin would incur 880,000 more casualties just to reach Saint-Sophia’s Cathedral in the heart of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky’s capital city.
Bakhmut is just one of four main ongoing battles in the Donbas. Putin — as is documented daily by Chuck Pfarrer, a former U.S. Navy Seal, on his Indications & Warnings Twitter account — is losing men just as rapidly in each of these battles. Six hundred reportedly were killed in action along the Andriivka axis on March 27 alone.
As Pfarrer’s battlefield tactical maps record, Putin’s burn rate of Russian equipment is equally high. On March 24, Pfarrer noted that Russian forces were “repelled in attacks at Serebryansk Forestry and Bilohorvika along the Kreminna battle line.” That singular Ukrainian action resulted in strikes on “Russian HQ elements, air defense sites, and Electronic Warfare equipment.”
This, on top of an “epic” mechanized armor battle in late February at the beginning of Putin’s spring offensive in Vuhledar, which resulted in the loss of 100 Russian tanks. As a war-time commander, Putin has learned nothing in the one-year, one-month-old war. The Kremlin is employing the same strategy as they did in Kyiv by repeatedly “advancing columns into ambushes.”
Taken together, it is not surprising that in 13 months of war, Ukraine estimates Putin has lost 3,595 tanks, nearly 7,000 armored combat vehicles, over 2,638 artillery pieces, 523 multiple rocket launchers, 277 air defense systems, 305 jets, and 291 helicopters.
And for what? A 15-mile eastward advance in the Donbas. At this crawling rate, it will take Putin’s forces nearly 22 years to reach Kyiv from Bakhmut.
Time and lives are not the only costs to Russia. Putin is also torching nearly every aspect of his country in chase of his ego. Russia has been in a recession since November 2022, with annualized GDP dropping nearly 4 percent. Yet even this is somewhat deceiving; non-oil and gas revenues precipitously declined “by 20 percent in October.” The shortfall this caused in GDP was largely backfilled by heavily discounted oil and gas sales to China and India.
That temporary windfall, however, is evaporating as the Brent crude oil benchmark price has dropped over time to $80 a barrel. The impact on Russia’s economy has been immediate. By January 2023, Russian oil export revenues had fallen by 40 percent year-over-year. Absent a global crude price recovery, an even bigger hit to Russia’s GDP is coming.
Meanwhile, Western sanctions continue to severely disrupt Russia’s commercial and military industrial-complex supply chains. … [T]he primary cost of maintaining the country’s supply chain is ever greater economic dependence on Beijing.
Putin is also destroying on a generational basis Russia’s future economic ability to innovate and compete in the post-war global marketplace — not just loss of resources, but brain drain as well. Even if Putin were to miraculously win his war in Ukraine, Russia will have lost economically for decades to come.
Paradoxically, in his desperation to obliterate Ukraine’s national independence, Putin is irrationally selling off his own. As repeatedly evidenced during Chinese President Xi Jinping’s recent visit to Moscow, Beijing is slowly beginning to fully subsume Russia’s independence economically, militarily and diplomatically.
Xi’s demands and stances during the summit should have been humiliating to Putin, who agreed to replace the Russian ruble with the Chinese yuan in trading with the Global South. Despite symbolic gladhanding, Xi offered nothing of military substance that would appreciably change the trajectory of the war in Ukraine. The net effect of Xi’s three days in Moscow, as King’s College professor Sam Greene noted: “China’s domination of Russia is complete.”
Putin blindly believes he has signed on to a multipolar world with Xi as a coequal, but in reality, he is only enabling the world to become a contest of two — Beijing and Washington — while Putin sits on the sidelines with about as much influence as Benito Mussolini had in World War II playing second fiddle to Nazi Germany.
Statesman-like Putin, if he ever really existed, has vanished. Gone are many of his grandiose plans for an economically resurgent Russia: Rapidly expanding the economic value of the Northern Sea Route. Dominating the North Pole. Checking, if not reversing, the growth of NATO in Europe. Diversifying Russia’s economy so Moscow no longer depends on being the world’s “gas station.”
Instead, Putin is ditching it all over a delusional, outsized need to win in Ukraine. Is trying to take Bakhmut and defeating Zelensky in an ego grudge match really worth selling out Moscow to Xi? Putin evidently believes that they are, and like a modern-day Nero, he keeps fiddling away in the Donbas as Russia burns out of control on his watch.
🐣 RT @United24media Russia, an authoritarian dictatorship that invaded Ukraine (and many others before), takes charge of UN Security Council that was created to preserve peace & security. No, it’s not a bad joke. It’s the reality of the situation we’re in. ¤ It’s like giving a burglar a bank to run.
💽 https://twitter.com/United24media/status/1642082445573906435?s=20/photo/1
🧵 RT @generalsvr_en #Russia’s total losses: 238,304 ¤ Saturday, April 1, 2023, in the morning report to the President of Russia Vladimir #Putin, the irretrievable military operational loss of manpower of the #RussianArmy is 174,129 people. Data are as of 6 am Moscow time today.1/3
📌 https://twitter.com/generalsvr_en/status/1642117679459840000?s=20
⋙ This figure excludes the data on the losses of #Russian PMCs that also participate in hostilities on the territory of #Ukraine. As of Friday, March 31, they lost 56,873 dead. 2/3
⋙ The next update on the losses of PMC fighters should be received on Friday, April 7 and will be updated once a week. Losses of the #Russian National Guard since the beginning of hostilities amount to 7,302 killed and missing. 3/3
⋙ [Pinned Tweet:] generalsvr_en [May 19, 2022] ALL #PUTIN’s SECRETS IN ONE PLACE! The materials we publish are prepared by retired & active intelligence agents from several countries who are/were involved, supervised or controlled the operations and who had/have access to reliable info about the events outlined 1/2
⋙ Everything that we publish is true. Soon or later, the info we give gets confirmed by independent journalists and government officials. The aim is to shed light on the darker side of recent events & to draw public attention to the methods used by governments to solve problems 2/2
⋙ 🐣 RT @10_4_Copy_That So if I understand this correctly, the Ruzzkies are admitting they have “lost” 174,129 Ruzzian troops KIA and a total of 238,304 KIA,WIA,MIA not including 56,873 KIA PMC troops. The number for the Lunhansk and Donetsk fighters unknown. Interesting. Please correct me if I’m wrong.
⋙ 🐣 RT @whoismiy “General SVR” telegram channel claim
🐣 RT @KyivIndependent German defense minister: NATO countries to send total of 160 tanks to Ukraine. ¤ NATO countries plan to send two battalions of German Leopard-2 battle tanks and four battalions of Leopard-1 tanks to Ukraine, German Defense Minister Boris Pistorius told Die Welt on April 1.
🐣 RT @BillKristol Republicans don’t claim Trump is innocent under the law.They claim he’s above the law.
🐣 RT @BillPascrell Summary of team trump
Trump: Indicted
Campaign chair: Felon
Deputy campaign chair: Felon
Personal lawyer: Felon
Chief strategist: Felon
Natl Sec Advisor: Felon
Foreign policy advisor: Felon
Campaign fixer: Felon
Company CFO: Felon
🐣 RT @ChuckPfarrer THE BATTLE THAT SAVED UKRAINE: Col John Spenser @SpencerGuard is a world renowned expert on urban warfare, and a frequent guest on @MriyaReport. He’s returned from Ukraine, where he gave this lecture on the APL ’22 battle of Kyiv. Watch it here: https://youtu.be/5eWGH_7mrg8
⋙ 🐣 RT @SpencerGuard What happened at the 2022 Battle of Kyiv? The most decisive battle of the modern era. Check out my lecture on the battle I gave in Ukraine last week. I can’t thank @KyivIndependent enough for hosting the event and recording such a high quality video.
// “How the second most powerful military – on paper – was defeated in the most decisive battle of the modern era”
🐣 RT @ChuckPfarrer BAKHMUT CITY /1315 UTC 1 APL/ The 0600 report : ‘Bakhmut axis: the enemy does not stop storming the city of Bakhmut, trying to take it under complete control”. UKR Lines of Communication & Supply are functioning, but RU is registering gains in heavy and costly urban fighting.
🌎 https://twitter.com/ChuckPfarrer/status/1642152498721968129?s=20/photo/1
KyivPost, Steve Brown: Will Hubris and Sycophancy Lead to Russia’s Ultimate Defeat? https://tinyurl.com/dzzdxn2y “Putin chose to ignore the advice given to him by the head of the [SVR] immediately before the 2022 invasion to postpone the so-called ‘special military operation’”
// A leading UK think tank reports that Putin ignored advice to hold off his invasion until the summer of 2022, a decision that could ultimately lead to Russia’s defeat
⋙ Cited report: https://tinyurl.com/564rbrvu
A 39-page report by the London-based Royal United Services Institute (RUSI), entitled “Preliminary Lessons from Russia’s Unconventional Operations During the Russo-Ukrainian War”, sheds light on the important role that Russian intelligence services played in the build-up to, during and since the February 2022 full-scale invasion.
The report is intended to inform western governments just how Russia uses extensive covert operations to disrupt a target country in advance of its military operations and that Putin still relies heavily on his intelligence agencies to achieve his objectives to subdue and dominate populations in the occupied territories of Ukraine.
And yet, Putin chose to ignore the advice given to him by the head of the Russian Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR), Sergei Naryshkin, immediately before the 2022 invasion to postpone the so-called “special military operation” until the summer of 2022.
Naryshkin’s advice was probably based on both his intelligence assessment, that more needed to be done to prepare his own intelligence assets, recruit additional Ukrainian sympathizers and concerns about how weather conditions in the early part of the year would impact on Russian forces.
As we now know, of course, Naryshkin’s request was denied and the attack went ahead on Feb. 24. His advice was, in hindsight, spot on and it is a good job, from Ukraine’s perspective, that Putin swept it aside.
Naryshkin seems to have been one of very few of Putin’s advisors to have gone against other advice the despot was receiving from the Russian Federal Security Service (FSB) and others. It was undoubtedly Putin’s own own excessive pride and self-confidence combined with the voices in his ear telling him what he wanted to hear, which served to reinforce his own assessment victory in Ukraine would be a simple formality.
The RUSI assessment was reinforced as early as March 2022 as commentators asserted that Putin’s advisors were afraid to tell him the truth. ¤ A particularly pertinent article in “The Atlantic” magazine by Brian Klaas hit the nail on the head. He opined that Putin had fallen into what he calls the “dictator trap.” https://tinyurl.com/4csau9x6
“The strategies they [dictators] use to stay in power [will] trigger their eventual downfall.” They are not “long-term planners, many make catastrophic short-term errors,
“They hear only from sycophants, and get bad advice … they don’t see threats coming until it’s too late. And unlike elected leaders … dictators who miscalculate [often] leave office in a casket, a possibility that makes them even more likely to double down” on bad decisions.
As a side note, the ignoring of his advice by Putin may explain Naryshkin’s apparent reluctance to endorse Putin’s request to recognize the independence of Donetsk and Luhansk during the now infamous televised “Speak clearly!” meeting on Feb. 22 last year, which we now know was a precursor to the invasion. …
Naryshkin’s [recently insistent] loyalty suggests strongly that we have to thank the combination of Putin’s own hubris, his extreme self-belief, and those sycophantic advisors who told him what he wants to hear, which directly led to him “jumping the gun” with his invasion and the resulting disaster his invading force has suffered to date.
🐣 RT @ tomiahonen After you’ve read that Thread about Kompromat, you should read this. There exists or at least existed an ‘extortion file’ that Trump had collected against everybody, including most Republicans in Congress. THIS explains their bewildering loyalty to this serial con artist. Enjoy..
¤ https://twitter.com/tomiahonen/status/1642129752612904960?s=20
⋙ 🧵 RT @tomiahonen [Aug 16, 2022] Trump Mar-A-Lago Extortion Files Thread 1/
Lost in the noise of the parlor game of #RatBingo – who is the Mar-A-Lago informant, and serious national security threats of Trump espionage, is a huge bombshell story:
FBI seized Trump’s extortion files too. This Thread looks at that
📌 https://twitter.com/tomiahonen/status/1559595941866471424?s=20
↥ ↧
🐣 RT @tomiahonen Yesterday I revisited two older Threads that are somewhat related. They have gotten a strong reaction again. If you missed it, this is about Kompromat. It explains why so many Republicans are ‘loyal’ to Trump, and even more bizarrely why they support PUTIN. This explains it
¤ https://twitter.com/tomiahonen/status/1642129304791154689?s=20
⋙ 🧵 RT @tomiahonen [Jul 22, 2021] Kompromat Thread 1/
Trump has clearly been beholden to Czar Vladimir the Smug. We saw the shocking behavior in Helsinki of Putin and his sex slave
Why is Trump behaving like this? ¤ And why are so many OTHER Republicans loving Putin ¤ It is called ‘Kompromat’, a Russian word..
📌 https://twitter.com/tomiahonen/status/1418215040063180806?s=20
🐣 RT @TheDeadDistrict This river saved Kyiv. #Ukraine 1/
💽 https://twitter.com/TheDeadDistrict/status/1642126097541111810?s=20/photo/1
💽 https://twitter.com/TheDeadDistrict/status/1642126594364809217?s=20/photo/1
// flooding of the Irpin River in the first days of the war
🐣 RT @rgoodlaw Yep. I referenced the Federal Election Commission General Counsel’s findings yesterday. ¤ Here’s a link to a document describing the GC’s recommendations: https://fec.gov/files/legal/murs/7313/7313_28.pdf
⋙⋙ 🐣 RT @Acyn [ On Fox: ] Jessica [@JessicaTarlov]: I’ve heard that this isn’t a crime. It is a crime. Trump was an unindicted coconspirator. He was not prosecuted because he was president. I looked at the FEC’s report on this. The general counsel said it explicitly that this was an illegal campaign contribution
⋙🐣 The letter says the commission “did not have votes.” I realize the FEC is pretty much a toothless body, but does this matter, or does Cohen’s conviction and Trump’s being named in that action, override the FEC’s inability to act?
🐣 RT @DefenceHQ [UK] Latest Defence Intelligence update on the situation in Ukraine – 01 April 2023.
Find out more about Defence Intelligence’s use of language: http://ow.ly/1x2C50NxMHl
🇺🇦 #StandWithUkraine 🇺🇦
[TextLink:] https://twitter.com/DefenceHQ/status/1642054869447049216?s=20/photo/1
● On 11 January 2023, Russian Chief of the General Staff (CGS) General Valery Gerasimov took personal command of the ‘special military operation’ in Ukraine.
● Gerasimov’s tenure has been characterised by an effort to launch a general winter offensive with the aim of extending Russian control over the whole of the Donbas region. Eighty days on, it is increasingly apparent that this project has failed.
● On several axes across the Donbas front, Russian forces have made only marginal gains at the cost of tens of thousands of casualties, largely squandering its temporary advantage in personnel gained from the autumn’s ‘partial mobilisation’.
● After ten years as CGS, there is a realistic possibility that Gerasimov is pushing the limits of how far Russia’s political leadership will tolerate failure.
⭕ 31 Mar 2023
🐣 RT @AJCGlobal
🚩”Puppet master”
🚩”Soros’ globalist cabal”
These terms — used in an email from the Trump campaign — are antisemitic tropes.
Especially now, in our superheated political environment, the use of such tropes is dangerous.
AJC’s #TranslateHate explains.👇
https://www.ajc.org/translatehate/Soros
⋙ 🐣 RT @ @jacobkornbluh Here Trump’s email calls Soros a “puppet master”
[TextLink:] https://twitter.com/AJCGlobal/status/1641903770568216576?s=20/photo/1
[Text:] Friend, ¤ With George Soros’ bought-and-paid-for Manhattan D.A. having answered his puppet master’s call to INDICT President Trump for committing NO CRIME, these truly are dark times for our country. But what the radical Left, the Deep State, the Open-Borders Lobby, and Soros’ globalist cabal always underestimate is YOU… The more than 74 MILLION Trump voters who make up our Silent Majority.
⋙⋙ 🐣 RT @SaadiHaeri Given Trump’s huge popularity in Israel & his services rendered to Israel when he was President and the fact that he was bankrolled by Sheldon Adelson on an Israel First ticket, is this a change or something that is ignored because it doesn’t really matter?
🐣 RT @ PaulaChertok [Replying to @mtgreenee) Play “spot the fascist propaganda” from MTG, who seems a bit nervous about more indictments.
🤥fear-mongering lies (“civil war”)
🤡gaslighting lies (“Trump did not break the law”)
🤭projection (“weaponizing govt”)
🥴smears (“deranged” DA)
😵💫anti-Semitism (*2* Soros tropes🥂)[TextLink:]/photo/1
[Text:] 🐣 RT @mtgreenee
Democrats want civil war. They want to push us into reacting so they can use their weaponized
government to lock us all up.
They know Trump did not break the law. They know more than anyone because they’ve been trying for years to find a way to put him in jail and they can’t.
But now they have a complete fool that is deranged enough to trybecause he is backed by Soros.
And Soros wants war to destabilize America and gain full control.
🐣 RT @emptywheel This letter from Bragg to Jordan is really a work of art. Others have noted the strong pushback. Note, too, the suggestion that Jordan et al were “collaborating” in threats of violence with the unlawful attempt to interfere.
[DocCloudLink:] https://tinyurl.com/264v5t5a
[TextLink:] https://twitter.com/emptywheel/status/1641824257503010816?s=20/photo/1
[Text:] Finally, as you are no doubt aware, former President ‘Trump has directed harsh invective against District Attorney Bragg and threatened on social media that his arrest or indictment in New York may unleash “death & destruction.” As Committee Chairmen, you could use the stature of your office to denounce these attacks and urge respect for the fairness of our justice system and for the work of the impartial grand jury. Instead, you and many of your colleagues have chosen to collaborate with Mr. Trump’s efforts to vilify and denigrate the integrity of elected state prosecutors and trial judges and made unfounded allegations that the Office’s investigation, conducted via an independent grand jury of average citizens serving New York State, is politically motivated. See, eg, Annie Grayer et al., Inside the backchannel communications keeping Donald Trump in the loop on Republican investigations, CNN.com (March 28, 2023), https://tinyurl.com/mr3n675p “House GOP Conference Chair Elise Stefanik … and ‘Trump spoke several times last week alone, where she walked him through the GOP’s plans for an aggressive response to Bragg.”). We urge you to refrain from these inflammatory accusations, withdraw your demand for information, and let the criminal justice process proceed without unlawful political interference.
🐣 RT @CalltoActivism JUST IN: A judge just ruled to ALLOW Dominion’s $1.6 billion defamation case against Fox News to go to trial before a jury. ¤ The ruling is a direct blow to Fox News, who tried to stop the trial from moving forward. ¤ The case will now go to trial in mid-April. ¤Fox News is now directly facing the possibility of bankruptcy and they deserve it.
🐣 RT @AntiToxicPeople As he awaits his arraignment on Tuesday, Former President CAPS LOCK spews out two dangerously unhinged mini-rants. One is another call for violence “HOW MUCH MORE ARE AMERICAN PATRIOTS EXPECTED TO TAKE???” & the other attacks both Bragg AND Bragg’s wife.
[TextLink:] https://twitter.com/AntiToxicPeople/status/1641923962623107072?s=20/photo/1
@realDonald Trump
THE RADICAL LEFT DEMOCRATS HAVE LIED, CHEATED, AND STOLEN IN THEIR MANIACAL OBSESSION TO “GET TRUMP,” BUT NOW THEY’VE GONE TOO FAR, INDICTING A TOTALLY INNOCENT MAN IN AN ACT OF OBSTRUCTION AND BLATANT ELECTION INTERFERENCE. HOW MUCH MORE ARE AMERICAN < PATTWeet EXPECTED TO TAKE???..AND ALL OF THIS WHILE OUR COUNTRY IS GOING TO HELL! @realDonald Trump NEW CRIME STATISTICS ARE OUT IN MANHATTAN, THE PLACE REIGNED OVER BY RADICAL LEFT, SOROS BACKED, DISTRICT ATTORNEY-ALVIN BRAGG. THE NUMBERS ARE A COMPLETE AND TOTAL DISASTER...BUT, AT LEAST HE CAN TELL HIS TRUMP HATING WIFE AND FRIENDS THAT HE IS GOING AFTER THE VERY SUCCESSFUL 45TH PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES. MAGA!
🐣 RT @MuellerSheWrote It’s a racket. And Weisselberg’s new, “trumpier” lawyer used to run the racket bureau at the Manhattan DA’s office. I’m not entirely convinced the second crime charged will be campaign finance.
⋙ 🐣 RT @ @kylegriffin1 NBC News confirms: Two sources familiar with the Manhattan grand jury’s work say prosecutors also questioned some witnesses about the 2016 hush money payment involving ex-playboy playmate Karen McDougal. @MSNBC
🐣 RT @vonderleyen What happened in Bucha one year ago was not an isolated episode.
Those executions in cold blood were part of a bigger plan.
The Kremlin’s plan to eliminate Ukrainians.
Their national identity.
Their sense of being.
War criminals will be held accountable.
💽 https://twitter.com/vonderleyen/status/1641748513946992642?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @ChuckPfarrer. BAKHMUT CITY /1210 UTC 31 MAR/ RU continues efforts to size the urban area of Bakhmut. In the last 24 hrs, UKR reports breaking up >22 attacks on the city. At present, UKR Lines of Communication and Supply (LOCS) are secure, but RU is registering gains in costly urban fighting.
🌎 https://twitter.com/ChuckPfarrer/status/1641773052882042883?s=20/photo/1
🧵 📊 RT @accountable_us NEW POLL: 58% of Americans believe former President Donald Trump has committed a crime—including a majority of Independents (53%) and a quarter of Republicans (27%). via @NavigatorSurvey
📌 ◕ https://twitter.com/accountable_us/status/1641798458016145410?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @ RWPUSA It’s legal to have sex with a porn star.
It’s probably legal to pay her $130K to keep her mouth shut.
But if you do that while running for president, that’s a campaign expense and must be reported.
If you falsify business records to avoid reporting it you commit a felony.
🐣 RT @RadioFreeTom Until there’s a GOP leader who doesn’t sound like this, I’ll keep arguing that the GOP is an unreformable toxic waste dump. The American system of government requires parties that believe in the rule of law, and this party, clearly, does not believe in anything like it.
⋙ 🐣 RT @kaitlancollins Pence tells @wolfblitzer that he thinks Trump’s indictment is an “outrage” that is nothing more than a “political prosecution” and another example of a “two-tiered” justice system.
🐣 RT @Victorshi2020 NEW: Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg just sent a letter to House Republicans & doesn’t hold back. He writes, “What neither Mr. Trump nor Congress may do is interfere with the ordinary course of proceedings in New York State.” Bragg is taking off the gloves & it’s incredible.
⋙ 🐣 RT @Victorshi2020 He also adds, “As Committee Chairmen, you could use the stature of your office to denounce these attacks and urge respect for the fairness of our justice system and for the work of the impartial grand jury.” More below 👇
[TextLink:] https://twitter.com/Victorshi2020/status/1641787055893094407?s=20/photo/1 -4
🐣 RT @QasimRashid
DA Bragg’s Manhattan Crime Rates:
Murder: 4
Rape: 13.2
Robbery: 228.3
Assault: 378.4
Burglary: 197.8
Theft: 1,404.6
Car Theft: 88.5
Speaker McCarthy’s Bakersfield Crime Rates:
Murder: 11.3
Rape: 27.3
Robbery: 155.6
Assault: 322.7
Burglary: 807.2
Theft: 2,229.4
Car Theft: 986.2
⋙ 🐣 RT @SpeakerMcCarthy Here we go again – an outrageous abuse of power by a radical DA who lets violent criminals walk as he pursues political vengeance against President Trump.
🐣 RT @abughazalehkat If you don’t watch Fox News, here’s what you missed from last night’s meltdown over Trump’s indictment:
💽 https://twitter.com/abughazalehkat/status/1641768193428520960?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @AntiToxicPeople Attacking his new Judge. He is absolutely insane.
[TextLink:] https://twitter.com/AntiToxicPeople/status/1641801339935285249?s=20/photo/1
[Text:] 🐣 RT @realDonald Trump The Judge “assigned” to my Witch Hunt Case, a “Case” that has NEVER BEEN CHARGED BEFORE, HATES ME. His name is Juan Manuel Marchan, was hand picked by Bragg & the Prosecutors, & is the same person who “railroaded” my 75 year old former CFO, Allen Weisselberg, to take a “plea” deal (Plead GUILTY, even if you are not, 90 DAYS, fight us in Court, 10 years (life!) in jail. He strong armed Allen, which a judge is not allowed to do, & treated my companies, which didn’t “plead,” VICIOUSLY APPEALING!
🧵 RT @NormEisen At last! “No one is above the law” has finally been vindicated & historically so ¤ Now that we know Trump is facing charges from Alvin Bragg, what to make of them? They are strong! ¤ A thread👇
📌 https://twitter.com/NormEisen/status/1641603120961671169?s=20
[ThreadReader:] https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1641603120961671169.html
🐣 RT @PaulaChertok #Bucha🇺🇦, liberated one year ago, suffered 33 days of occupation, 1,400+ deaths, including 37 children, 175+ found in mass graves and torture chambers. 9,000 Russian war crimes. “We will never forgive. We will punish every perpetrator,’’ Zelensky says.
🐣 RT @AWeissmann_ One consequence of the Manhattan criminal case: the teflon is off. It no longer is unthinkable and unheard of to hold any person, regardless of prior station in life, to account for their crimes. ¤ For those who thought this day would never come, the teflon is off Teflon Donald.
⭕ 30 Mar 2023
🧵 RT @MarkHertling Last night, I tweeted that I had been assessing & considering the challenges Ukraine’s Army (UA) Commanders were facing in preparing for the “spring offensives. ¤ I said I’d share some thoughts on what I would be thinking if I were among them.This is that 1/
📌 https://twitter.com/MarkHertling/status/1641470497270509568?s=20
⋙ 🐣 The US (inadvisably, but whatever) went into Iraq, not with full NATO support, but with a “coalition of the willing.” Is there a reason why countries like Poland and the Baltics couldn’t provide troops by such a formula? This could avoid a direct confrontation btwn Ru & the US
🐣 RT @BillKristol OK, I’m sick of all the pretend indignation by Republicans terrified of Trump and/or Trump supporters. ¤ I dare them all: Say you believe Trump is innocent.
🐣 RT @AshaRangappa_ GLOBAL CONTEXT: “Investigations into former leaders are hardly rare around the world. In at least 76 countries, leaders who left office since 2000 have been jailed or prosecuted — including in democracies like France, Israel and South Korea.” https://tinyurl.com/3bwrsnme
🌎 https://twitter.com/AshaRangappa_/status/1641588284189966336?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @Comey It’s been a good day.
🐣 RT @ DeadlineWH “I think that we will see at least one if not more felony charges against the former president… for those people like myself who have been waiting a long time for the first step in terms of legal accountability, this is that first step” @AWeissmann_ w @NicolleDWallace
💽 https://twitter.com/DeadlineWH/status/1641583760939405312?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @KyivIndependent “The Ukrainians are doing a very effective area defense that is proven to be very costly to the Russians. For about the last 20, 21 days, the Russians have not made any progress whatsoever in and around Bakhmut,” said top U.S. General Mark Milley.
⋙ KyivIndependent: Ukraine war latest: Bakhmut is ‘slaughter-fest for Russians,’ says top US general https://tinyurl.com/bd9mny7r
🐣 RT @tedlieu Dear @SpeakerMcCarthy: You don’t know the charges. You don’t know the evidence presented to the grand jury. You don’t know about other evidence the DA may have. ¤ What you are doing is attempted political interference in an ongoing local criminal prosecution and you need to stop.
⋙ 🐣 RT @SpeakerMcCarthy Alvin Bragg has irreparably damaged our country in an attempt to interfere in our Presidential election. ¤ As he routinely frees violent criminals to terrorize the public, he weaponized our sacred system of justice against President Donald Trump. ¤ The American people will not tolerate this injustice, and the House of Representatives will hold Alvin Bragg and his unprecedented abuse of power to account.
🐣 RT @emptywheel Things @peterbakernyt couldn’t fit into his almost 2,000 word “analysis” about how indicting Trump would be unprecedented.
1) The underlying cover-up was FOR THE PURPOSE of cheating to win.
⋙ 🐣 I fail to grasp why media and Dems are tippy-toeing around this
NYT, Peter Baker: A President Faces Prosecution, and a Democracy Is Tested https://tinyurl.com/mrm2ebmr
// For more than two centuries, American presidents were effectively shielded from indictment. But the case against former President Donald J. Trump breaks that taboo and sets a new precedent.
🐣 RT @justinbaragona Lindsey Graham: “They are trying to drain him dry. He’s spent more money on lawyers than most people spent on campaigns. They’re trying to bleed him dry. Donald J. Trump dot com. Go tonight. Give the president some money to fight this bullshit! This is going to destroy America!”
💽 https://twitter.com/justinbaragona/status/1641620245273034756?s=20/photo/1
💽 Gradient: Tucker: ‘It’s Probably Not the Best Time to Give up Your AR-15’ https://tinyurl.com/4jjf98yt
// ‘I think most people know that’
TheAtlantic, Tom Nichols: What Donald Trump’s Indictment Reveals https://tinyurl.com/bp5jeu4w “Every defendant, including Donald Trump, deserves the presumption of innocence. But when it comes to our civic and political innocence, Americans long ago lost whatever is left of ours”
// Win or lose, the charges are an American tragedy.
[…] Trump, like the Republican opportunists who cling to him like remoras under a shark, doesn’t care about shame—he cares about getting away with it. Indeed, rather than leaving the public arena, Trump has reveled in it all, rolling around in the garbage of his own life and grunting happily about how the rules don’t apply to the real elites like him. Forget about Richard Nixon, who publicly resigned; Trump isn’t even Spiro Agnew, a man who seethed with rage at the felony corruption charges against him but had the sense not to brag about them. (Agnew insisted insisted on his innocence for two months and then took a plea of “no contest” to a single tax-evasion charge, after which he mostly vanished from public view.)
No such luck this time. Win or lose in court, Trump is determined to bring us all into a summer-heat dumpster with him for as long as he can. And that leads to the last and most shocking thing about today’s news: Late this afternoon, New York local media reported that security was tightening up in certain areas of the city. That’s how we knew something was coming: The former president had already told us that he fully intended to trigger violence if the institutions of the law tried to touch him.
Tomorrow, all NYPD officers have reportedly been ordered to be in full uniform and ready to deploy. And again, somehow, we’ve just accepted this as the new normal. We no longer even blink when New York, a city scarred by multiple terror attacks against its innocent citizens, has to go on alert just to charge Trump with a crime. That one fact, more than any other, tells you how far down the long slide into vice and venality—and violence—Trump has dragged this country.
Every defendant, including Donald Trump, deserves the presumption of innocence. But when it comes to our civic and political innocence, Americans long ago lost whatever is left of ours. all NYPD officers have reportedly been ordered to be in full uniform and ready to deploy. And again, somehow, we’ve just accepted this as the new normal. We no longer even blink when New York, a city scarred by multiple terror attacks against its innocent citizens, has to go on alert just to charge Trump with a crime. That one fact, more than any other, tells you how far down the long slide into vice and venality—and violence—Trump has dragged this country. ¤ Every defendant, including Donald Trump, deserves the presumption of innocence. But when it comes to our civic and political innocence, Americans long ago lost whatever is left of ours.
🐣 RT @HumanistReport If they can indict Trump over illegal use of campaign funds for hush money payments to a porn star he fucked…
They can indict you over illegal use of campaign funds for hush money payments to a porn star you fucked too. So if you did this shit you should be super worried now.
⋙ 🐣 RT @VivekGRamaswamy If they can do it to Trump, they can do it to you.
💽 https://twitter.com/HumanistReport/status/1641673446903132160?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @DavidCornDC Remember, the GOP establishment had the option of abandoning Trump after the “Access Hollywood” video emerged. It elected to stand by him and declare he was fit to be president.
⋙ 🐣 RT @DavidJollyFL Had the same thought today. There’s a richness that the underlying fact pattern occurred in 2016 when everyone in the GOP chose to insulate and celebrate him. Whether they were dupes, conspirators, or simply without compass, the GOP infrastructure is part of today’s indictment.
🐣 RT @MaryLTrump It’s official: Donald Trump is the:
1st man in the Oval Office to be impeached twice
1st man in the Oval Office to incite an insurrection
1st to lose the popular vote TWICE
and now . . . the first to be INDICTED.
But the media is missing the biggest reason this is so important: For the victims of Donald, this is finally some measure of justice.
It’s been a long time coming, but after everything Donald has put this country through, WE HAVE PREVAILED.
I’ll see you on my substack later (see below👇) with my take on how this impacts our country and me personally, but for now, let’s take a minute to celebrate–we’ve all earned it.
Drink Responsibly 😎
🖼 https://twitter.com/MaryLTrump/status/1641573525478580226?s=20/photo/1
🐣 📋 RT @EconomicPolicy What’s a key ongoing source of inflation? Corporate profits—which have contributed to more than a third of price growth since the second quarter of 2020. ¤ This is unusual. In normal times corporate profits contribute about 13% to prices. https://tinyurl.com/bvxhtsm9
◕ https://twitter.com/EconomicPolicy/status/1641501127588864006?s=20/photo/1
TheAtlantic, David Frum: Where Do You Stand? https://tinyurl.com/5hdkwhx2
// Trump’s indictment presents Republicans, and all Americans, with a clear choice.
🐣 RT @BarbMcQuade As Gov. DeSantis certainly knows, Trump is already negotiating a self-surrender to avoid arrest, so there is no need to extradite him. Just getting free credit with the base by trashing the rule of law. Politics by disinformation.
🐣 RT @BillKristol Understanding this is idiotic performative posturing by DeSantis, I’ll still point out that DeSantis’s threat “not to assist in an extradition request” from NY shows more contempt for the rule of law in the U.S. than Trump himself does, as he seems to intend to turn himself in.
[TextLink:] https://twitter.com/BillKristol/status/1641589394984300544?s=20/photo/1
⋙ 🐣 RT @BillKristol …kind of entering John C. Calhoun “concurrent majorities” territory, no?
🐣 RT @ManhattanDA
[TextLink:] https://twitter.com/ManhattanDA/status/1641579988360019968?s=20/photo/1
[Text:] STATEMENT ATTRIBUTABLE TO A SPOKESPERSON:
“This evening we contacted Mr. Trump’s attorney to coordinate his surrender to the Manhattan D.A.’s Office for arraignment on a Supreme Court indictment, which remains under seal. Guidance will be provided when the arraignment date is selected.”
🐣 RT @AshaRangappa_ All of this “rogue prosecution” nonsense overlooks this: Trump was a resident of New York for most of his life, and enjoyed the benefits and privileges thereof. He also did business there. In doing so, he agreed to subject himself to its laws 1/
⋙ 🐣 RT @AshaRangappa_ This not as if some state with which he has zero connection has ginned up charges, or even charges based on conduct after he basically left the state. These are crimes he committed in NY when he lived there, earned money there, before he ever took office
🐣 RT @MuellerSheWrote DID YOU KNOW: Weisselberg’s new lawyer Seth Rosenberg is a racketeering expert and even ran the Manhattan DA’s rackets bureau?
🐣 RT @TristanSnell BREAKING from CNN: 34 counts in Trump indictment. ¤ This is WAY more than expected. If this is correct, it could mean that the indictment covers FAR more than the Stormy Daniels hush money — like Karen McDougal hush money or other hush money/catch-and-kill cases.
🐣 RT @DavidJollyFL DeSantis: “Florida will not assist in an extradition request given the questionable circumstances at issue with this Soros-backed Manhattan prosecutor and his political agenda.” ¤ The GOP rot is permanent. It doesn’t expire with Trump.
🐣 RT @AntiToxicPeople Yessss. Been waiting for his deranged Truth Social post reacting to the indictment. ¤ Its so unhinged that he spells the word indicted wrong, “INDICATED”
[TextLink:] https://twitter.com/AntiToxicPeople/status/1641571892829245440?s=20/photo/1
[Text:] 🐣 RT @realDonaldTrump These Thugs and Radical Left Monsters have just INDICATED the 45th President of the United States of America, and the leading Republican Candidate, by far, for the 2024 Nomination for President. THIS IS AN ATTACK ON OUR COUNTRY THE LIKES OF WHICH HAS NEVER BEEN SEEN BEFORE. IT IS LIKEWISE A CONTINUING ATTACK ON OUR ONCE FREE AND FAIR ELECTIONS. THE USA IS NOW A THIRD WORLD
NATION, A NATION IN SERIOUS DECLINE. SO SAD!
🐣 RT @AntiToxicPeople *FULL STATEMENT ON HIS INDICTMENT FROM CITRUS CALIGULA*
[TextLink:] https://twitter.com/AntiToxicPeople/status/1641568513260392448?s=20/photo/1
[Text:] “This is Political Persecution and Election Interference at the highest level in history. From the time I came down the golden escalator at Trump Tower, and even before I was sworn in as your President of the United States, the Radical Left Democrats – the enemy of the hard working men and women of this Country – have been engaged in a Witch-Hunt to destroy the Make America Great Again movement. You remember it just like I do: Russia, Russia, Russia; the Mueller Hoax; Ukraine, Ukraine, Ukraine; Impeachment Hoax 1; Impeachment Hoax 2; the illegal and unconstitutional Mar-a-Lago raid; and now this.
“The Democrats have lied, cheated and stolen in their obsession with trying to ‘Get Trump, but now they’ve done the unthinkable – indicting a completely innocent person in an act of blatant Election Interference.
“Never before in our Nation’s history has this been done. The Democrats have cheated countless times over the decades, including spying on my campaign, but weaponizing our justice system to punish a political opponent, who just so happens to be a President of the United States and by far the leading Republican candidate for President, has never happened before. Ever.
“Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg, who was hand- picked and funded by George Soros, is a disgrace. Rather than stopping the unprecedented crime wave taking over New York City, he’s doing Joe Biden’s dirty work, ignoring the murders and burglaries and assaults he should be focused on. This is how Bragg spends his time!
“I believe this Witch-Hunt will backfire massively on Joe Biden. The American people realize exactly what the Radical Left Democrats are doing here. Everyone can see it. So our Movement, and our Party – united and strong – will first defeat Alvin Bragg, and then we will defeat Joe Biden, and we are going to throw every last one of these Crooked Democrats out of office so we can MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!”
🐣 RT @LiftForever67 “The sealed charges contain felonies & I suspect there are more charges than we ever expected. The charges are so strong to take on a former President, & that’s a big deal.” — Joyce Vance #Stormy #TrumpIndictment
🐣 RT @nytimes He will be fingerprinted. He will be photographed. He may even be handcuffed. ¤ Now that a Manhattan grand jury has voted to indict Donald Trump, here’s what will happen when he is arrested.
⋙ NYT: This is what will happen when Trump is arrested in the coming days. https://tinyurl.com/3n3huay5
🐣 RT @washingtonpost Breaking news: Donald Trump indicted by Manhattan grand jury, becoming the first ex-president charged with a crime. The former president was being investigated in connection with hush-money payments to an adult entertainment performer in 2016.
⋙ WaPo: Trump indicted by N.Y. grand jury, first ex-president charged with crime https://tinyurl.com/3c7zjdu5
🐣 RT @BombTastic4747 This aged well 😂 [From yesterday]
[TextLink:] https://twitter.com/BombTastic4747/status/1641555891278303235?s=20/photo/1
[Text:] 🐣 RT @realDonaldTrump I HAVE GAINED SUCH RESPECT FOR THIS GRAND JURY, & PERHAPS EVEN THE GRAND JURY SYSTEM AS A WHOLE. THE EVIDENCE IS SO OVERWHELMING IN MY FAVOR, & SO RIDICULOUSLY BAD FOR THE HIGHLY PARTISAN & HATEFUL DISTRICT ATTORNEY, THAT THE GRAND JURY IS SAYING, HOLD ON, WE ARE NOT A RUBBER STAMP, WHICH MOST GRAND JURIES ARE BRANDED AS BEING, WE ARE NOT GOING TO VOTE AGAINST A PREPONDERANCE OF EVIDENCE OR AGAINST LARGE NUMBERS OF LEGAL SCHOLARS ALL SAYING THERE IS NO CASE HERE. DROP THIS SICK WITCH HUNT, NOW!
🐣 RT @MuellerSheWrote BREAKING: The Manhattan DA has also been investigating the Karen McDougal catch and kill scheme. This bolsters my speculation that he’s investigating a pattern of behavior or conspiracy between Trump, Cohen, Davidson, and Pecker.
⋙ WSJ: Trump Grand Jury Digs Into Hush Money Paid to Second Woman https://tinyurl.com/kntpjc7s
// Manhattan prosecutors have pressed witnesses on money paid to former Playboy model Karen McDougal
Manhattan prosecutors investigating Donald Trump’s role in paying hush money to a porn star also have been examining a $150,000 payment to a former Playboy model who alleged that she had an affair with the former president, according to people familiar with the matter, raising the prospect that Mr. Trump could face charges connected to the silencing of both women.
Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg’s office has been presenting a grand jury with evidence of Mr. Trump’s involvement in a $130,000 payment to porn star Stormy Daniels since January. In those proceedings, the people said, Mr. Bragg’s prosecutors also have questioned grand-jury witnesses extensively about an earlier deal involving Karen McDougal, Playboy Magazine’s Playmate of the Year in 1998, who has said she began a 10-month relationship with Mr. Trump in 2006.
The extent of prosecutors’ interest in Ms. McDougal hasn’t been previously reported. Prosecutors could use any McDougal evidence either to bring charges directly related to the McDougal payment or to establish an alleged pattern of conduct by Mr. Trump, the people said. Participants in the deals with both women allege that Mr. Trump played a central role.
🔆 This❗️⋙ NYT: Grand Jury Votes to Indict Donald Trump in New York https://tinyurl.com/ms9jcsrn “The felony indictment, filed under seal by the Manhattan district attorney’s office, will likely be announced in the coming days”
// Mr. Trump will be the first former president to face criminal charges. The precise charges are not yet known, but the case is focused on a hush-money payment to a porn star during his 2016 campaign.
NYT: Finland Clears Last Hurdle to Join NATO, Reshaping Balance of Power https://tinyurl.com/2cf2hdhp ‘Finland, w its 830 mile border w Russia, offers NATO a much stronger position to deter aggression, offering access to a strong military, as well as airspace, ports and sea lanes’
// Finland’s accession to NATO is a diplomatic and strategic setback for Russia
🐣 RT @Acyn Wallace: There has been a story developing as we’ve been on the air. News has broken over the last 45 minutes out of New York City, three law enforcement sources telling NBC news that additional security measures are once again put in place..
🐣 RT @carlbildt It’s a massive and very revealing leak from the efforts to use cyber to disrupt and destroy civilian and information structures and systems in Western countries. Cyber defense is at least as important as all other forms of defense
⋙ WaPo: Secret trove offers rare look into Russian cyberwar ambitions https://tinyurl.com/hd8e7nb5
// More than 5,000 pages of documents from a Moscow-based contractor offer unusual glimpses into planning and training for security services, including the notorious hacking group Sandworm
🐣 RT @GlasnostGone Bakhmut is first mentioned in 1571 & was once heavily fortified – today Ukrainians describe it as a fortress. Russian atrocities in #Ukraine mirror those of Nazi Germany. During WW2: German troops took 3,000 Jews from Bakhmut & sealed them up in a mine shaft suffocating them all.
🌎 https://twitter.com/GlasnostGone/status/1641466552749891584?s=20/photo/1
// old map of Bakhmut
🐣 RT @ChuckPfarrer BAKHMUT CITY /1245 UTC 30 MAR/ RU troops continue to improve tactical positions in heavy urban fighting. UKR artillery conducted counter-battery activity; RU losses include 12 artillery systems. While UKR maintains LOCS, RU is registering gains in urban fighting.
🌎 https://twitter.com/ChuckPfarrer/status/1641421853385277443?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @GlasnostGone #Ukraine Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba says Russia’s presidency of UN Security Council from April 1 is a “bad joke.” “ usurped its seat; it’s waging a colonial war; its leader is a war criminal wanted by the ICC for kidnapping children.” #BadRussianJoke
NYT: Disney’s Feud With DeSantis Adds Another Wrinkle https://tinyurl.com/4trez55j DeSantis packed the new Disney tax district’s board with conservatives and cronies, but as a parting play, the old board quietly stripped the new one of its powers and handed them to Disney
// The Florida governor’s new Disney World oversight board belatedly realized that the company had quietly sidestepped its control.
WaPo: Disney quietly dodged DeSantis’s oversight board, appointees realize https://tinyurl.com/5ftwfb9e “[I]n a bureaucratic coup, Disney and the previous board signed an agreement on Feb. 8 … that transferred much of the board’s power to Disney”
NYT: Ukrainians Directing Soldiers From a Hidden Hub See Bakhmut Going Their Way https://tinyurl.com/32yzpujp “If the Ukrainians hold their recent gains, the battles of the last month at Bakhmut could prove a turning point in Ukraine’s defense against Russia”
// Ukrainian commanders say they have exhausted Russia’s relentless assaults on the eastern city, though soldiers say the cost in lives has been steep.
WSJ: Russian Security Service Detains Wall Street Journal Reporter https://tinyurl.com/3d36txeu “… for what it described as espionage”
// Evan Gershkovich reports on Russia as part of the Journal’s Moscow bureau
⭕ 29 Mar 2023
WaPo Editorial: How Russia turned America’s helping hand to Ukraine into a vast lie https://tinyurl.com/y3hsd8k9 Russian disinformation and “biolabs”
🐣 RT @ChuckPfarrer BAKHMUT AXIS /1415 UTC 29 MAR/ UKR air defenses downed a Russian Su-24 strike fighter near Bakhmut. Wagner /RU continued attacks along the M-03 HWY axis, and were again defeated at Orikhovo-Vasylivka and Bohdanivka. Russian VDV / units were rebuffed at Ivanivske.
🌎 https://twitter.com/ChuckPfarrer/status/1641079128102248453?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @IlvesToomas After the travesty of the Budapest Memorandum why would Ukrainians accept anything short of NATO?
⋙🧵 RT @andrewmichta About to fly back from #Berlin after our conference commemorating the 75th anniversary of the Marshall Plan. As much of the conversation focused on the postwar reconstruction of #Ukraine, let me share a few thoughts. First, the top priority should be helping #Ukraine win. 1/7
📌 https://twitter.com/andrewmichta/status/1641000774099521536?s=20
⋙ If #Ukraine’s security is not addressed the rest of the conversation is academic, for no private equity will invest in a country constantly under threat of another attack. Hence, instead of talking about #Ukraine joining the #EU we should focus on bringing it into @NATO. 2/7
⋙ I find conversations about some sort of Western guarantee to #Ukraine short of NATO membership to be vacuous. Consider why #Finland and #Sweden have asked to join @NATO. They know very well that nothing short of the Article V guarantee is enough today to make them secure. 3/7
⋙ Also consider the trajectory postcommunist #Europe has travelled: it was @NATO membership followed by #EU membership. Again, not that different from the experience of Western Europe after WWII where US security guarantee created conditions for economic recovery & ECSC/EC/EU. 4/7
⋙ Let’s also remember that with each passing day of this war, #Ukraine is being destroyed ever more, including its human capital, its economy & its critical infrastructure. Ukrainians have been incredibly brave but every nation has a breaking point. So let’s focus on the war. 5/7
⋙ Let’s prioritize giving #Ukraine the weapons, munitions and support it needs to achieve the strategic victory on the battlefield it urgently needs. Then we can begin to talk seriously about the end state and assess the country’s needs when it comes to postwar reconstruction. 6/7
⋙ #Ukraine needs to break out from the current pattern of war of attrition that Russia is trying to impose on it around #Bakhmut. UKR needs to fight on its own terms. For that it needs long-range fires, MBTs and airplanes. Let’s make sure it gets those now. #ArmUkraineNow. 7/End
⭕ 28 Mar 2023
🐣 RT @Yowza. A must-listen conversation between @judgeluttig—a lion of judicial conservatism—with @SykesCharlie about how Americans are in a “catatonic moral stupor” as the rule of law is poised to fall to the rule of politics. Stunning
⋙ TheBulwark: Judge Michael Luttig: A Betrayal of America https://tinyurl.com/yc2r7jac
// 3/28/2023; automated transcription that I edited; errors may renain
Judge Luttig: Charlie, as you know, I got a call from Richard Cullen again on the morning of January fifth. Very early in Mountain Standard Time. And Richard said, judge, we have to do something immediately. … And so once he told me we must do this, and he assured me that that that this was okay because I was skeptical. I went downstairs to my office and figured out how to tweet and tweeted what many commentators and news reports have have called to tweet her around the world.
Charlie Sikes: A seven tweet thread that that clearly was at least heard in the vice president’s office. … What would it have meant for the country, for the constitution, for the rule of law? If in fact, Mike Pence would have stood up and refused to count those electoral votes.
Judge Luttig: And this is what I said to congress and now to to many others that America would have been plunged into what would be tantamount to a revolution within a paralyzing constitutional crisis. Each one of those words I could [diagram], but the bottom line is that it would have been a constitutional crisis in in America unlike any that we have ever seen, or I believe could ever see because of the paralysis of our government that would have resulted and we, you know, we don’t have time to go into all that. But essentially, Charlie, the constitution and therefore, our government doesn’t contemplate anything like happened on January sixth. And therefore, the constitution doesn’t accommodate it. And therefore, our government, the three institutions of our government would not have known what to do with each of them thinking that they might have responsibility, but knowing that the other two branches also had responsibility.
Charlie Sikes: So that’s as a paralyzing constitutional crisis that we avoided on January six two thousand twenty one. So let’s fast forward to today. How do you evaluate the risk? Have we escaped this risk? Do you evaluate the danger looking ahead? ¤ I mean, have we shored up these constitutional principles? Give me your sense of of the danger and the peril that that these principles face right now in late March of two thousand twenty three.
Judge Luttig: We’ve made unsteady progress haltingly in the two plus years since January sixth. The primary progress we’ve made was in reforming the electoral count act, which is the statutory law that the former president and his allies exploited in their effort to overturn that election. There is another feature of the plan known as the independent state legislature theory of interpretation of the electors clause and the election’s clause, which I characterized at the time as the centerpiece of the plan to overturn the election. And we’ve not moved at all on that important centerpiece. …
… And then most importantly, Charlie, is that you know, the former president, his allies, and and and and now the entire Republican party, you know, have circled the wagons around the former president in January sixth and denied that the former president lost that election denied the January sixth and its consequences, all toward the end of that being the Republican platform in twenty twenty four. And all the while, the former president and and the Republicans, frankly, you know, have cause[d] the corrosion, if you will, of our democracy and the rule of law.
Charlie Sikes: … [L]ate last year, when the former president tweeted out that we should terminate elements of the constitution to restore him to power. One would have thought that that statement alone would be disqualifying for any judicial conservative or for the the party of conservative constitutionalism of the Republican Party. Just give me your thoughts on all of that that here you have the former president, very openly saying we should terminate the constitution in order to overturn this election. And yet, the Republican Party’s still looks at him and says, yeah, if he gets the nominee, we’ll we’ll support him again for return to the Oval Office. ¤ What has happened? To conservatives and Republicans that they’re willing to tolerate that kind of thing.
Judge Luttig: In another day, those words spoken by a president or a former president for that matter would be [treason-like], not treason. Treason is a defined term in the constitution. It’s treason-[like] because that statement as well as January six, you know, the events inspired by the former president were a betrayal of America and a betrayal of Americans. [T]he former president and his allies, betrayed the sacred trust that had been [confer?] upon them by the American people. As to the Republicans [writ] large, Charlie, I don’t any longer indulge or even acknowledge the whispers behind the back that they disagree that the former president lost the election and they disagree with with the former president that that January sixth was needed and appropriate.
In my view, Charlie, at this point, and and, frankly, long before now, to not decide to [de]nounce January sixth and the former president’s actions on that day is to decide [t]hat you agree with the former president and with all that occurred on January sixth. [I] don’t have time to, you know, to anymore to to worry about that. That’s that’s my view of the republicans.
Charlie Sikes: And I don’t wanna put words in your mouth, but my sense is that you’re not calling for Trump’s indictment, but you now believe that he will be indicted and you’ve been laying out the factors that you consider that Merrick Garland should be considering. So what should we do about this? And what does it say if the legal system does not hold Donald Trump accountable for his attempts to overturn the election and for his role in January sixth?
Judge Luttig: … The the investigation being conducted now by the Department of Justice in the person of of Jack Smith for the former president’s conduct on January six. Second, the investigation of of the taking and retention of classified documents to more law though, followed closely by the investigation in Georgia by Fannie Willis of the former president’s effort to interfere with the election in Georgia. In twenty twenty. And last and most recently, this expected indictment in Manhattan related to the Stormy Daniels case.
But I would say today, Charlie, that I would have hoped that the first of any prosecutions of of the former president would not have been either the Stormy Daniels matter in Manhattan or, frankly, the classified documents from Mar a Lago and that instead, if there are to be prosecutions of the former president, the first would would be by the Department of Justice and Jack Smith, for January sixth. Yeah. I’ll go even one step further and say that if it happens to be the case, that the Stormy Daniels prosecution and the classified documents investigation are are the only two prosecutions of the former president coming out of all of his antics and that he’s not prosecuted for January sixth. I will believe that that’s a great [dis]service to democracy and to the rule of law in America. …
Judge Luttig: I do believe that the Department of Justice will indict and prosecute the former president for January sixth as to what the [indictments] for what offenses, the best I can do is point you to the offenses that were identified by the January sixth committee when it recommended prosecutions coming out of January sixth, and two of those were among the ones you’ve referenced, which is defrauding the the United States. The others would be obstruction of an official proceeding being the joint session of congress to to count the electoral votes to determine the presidency, then the January sixth committee recommended a false statement prosecutions in connection with the [false electors] plan. And then last, arguably, most consequentialally, the committee urged that the Department of Justice consider prosecution for incitement of an insurrection against the authority of the United States. I’ve not looked at the actual recommendations by the January sixth committee. I would just note for your listeners today that that that offense would exist even if the president did not actually incite the insurrection himself. Although there are facts that would support such a charge, but even if the president merely aided and assisted such an insurrection. So those would be the federal charges coming out of January sixth as I understand it.
Charlie Sikes: … [L]ast week you gave a speech at the University of Georgia Law School, which I have a copy of and have been reading and I’m really struck by the language that you use. You start by noting that we’re just three years shy of the 250th anniversary of the nation’s founding, but your words, the institutions of our democracy and law are under vicious, unsustainable, and unendurable attack from within and you you don’t mince any word, you say that we’re in a perilous crossroads, you point out that Abraham Lincoln speaking in eighteen thirty eight, [the or the?] [Constitition] the rule of law become the political religion of the nation. So, you know, reading your your comments, this is a deeper problem than just Donald Trump, just a few things that we are at a moment where, I mean, you feel that we’re at a tipping point. ¤ What do you mean when you describe it as unsuspid sustainable and unendurable attacks?
Judge Luttig: That that you just read was essentially if not literally what I said to the Congress of the United States. I meant exactly what I said. This is when I speak publicly, I try to speak as if I were still a sitting federal judge. So that’s just factually what we have in America today and where we are in America today, namely that our institutions of democracy and law have been under vicious attack for years now that is from within, not from without the United States.
And these vicious attacks are unsustainable and unendurable. They’ve already taken their toll on American democracy an American law in their impact and consequence of their impact on the institutions of democracy and law. We are at a perilous crossroads. That’s what I said to Congress, and the illusion to congress, and in this speech that you you have now, the illusion was to the civil war. And I I gave a great deal of thought to that before I testified. ¤ I knew what I was saying, of course. And I knew the way in which it would be appreciated and understood. You know, I didn’t say to congress that we were on the verge of a civil war, though many many people at the time believed we were and still believe believe we are now, Charlie.
Charlie Sikes: Do you believe that we are now? Do you think that’s possible? And what would it be like?
Judge Luttig: I would say this. I’ve earlier said that that the former president now presumptive nominee of the Republican Party in twenty twenty four, and his Republican Party and allies are poised to attempt to overturn the twenty twenty four election if if he were to lose that election. If he were to do that, then I believe that we would be on the verge of a civil war. … …
Charlie Sikes: Do you see America right now as being where America was at when Abraham Lincoln spoke in eighteen thirty eight? ¤ Are you on optimist? Are you a pessimist? How do you feel about what’s about to happen over the next decade or decade and a half?
Judge Luttig: I’ve been my entire life in any eternal optimist. But as to what we’re talking about today, at this moment, today, Charlie, I’m not optimistic because of all that we’ve been talking about. I propose the solution to the to the problem to congress, the problem that you just identified that we, you know, we only want to disagree. That is the problem. And I propose the solution and that solution was that a political solution from my years observing and participating in in the political world in Washington, D.C.
I propose that a critical mass of each of the two parties comprised of those members who who have the the moral authority and the patriotic obligation to step forward and say that America’s in peril. And that we must come together to avoid the inevitable war I’m not going to call it civil war, but the inevitable war. And, you know, based on my considerable experience in Washington DC, I do know that that’s the answer. Now, I testified to that six, eight months ago now, and not a single Republican leader.
Charlie Sikes: Not one.
Judge Luttig: Has heeded my call to step forward not one single Republican elected official. I said to Congress, it’s not the the the Democrats’ role at this moment. Because it’s the Republicans who instigated this war on democracy and the rule of law on January sixth. So my point is the Republicans have to step forward. It’s –
Charlie Sikes: gotta come from within them. Yeah. That’s the crucial point. Yeah. It’s gotta –
Judge Luttig: Absolutely. And [not] one of them has. And now, Charlie, it’s obvious to to the country that the Republican Party and Republicans, you know, as a political organization and party, they’ve cast their lot with Donald Trump. And cast their lot with all that he did on January sixth. You know, I don’t do politics, but but I’m not stupid.
That’s incomprehensible to me. And what that is is is nothing more or less than political cowardice. And so as far as I’m concerned, at this point, they get what they deserve. And if they lose every election from now on, that’s fine by me. That’s what they deserve.
WaPo, Karen Tumulty: Donald Trump is promising the apocalypse https://tinyurl.com/3f3c8e69 “[W]hen he ran in 2016, Trump promised to be the miracle worker who ‘alone can fix it.’ This time around, he asks voters to think of him as ‘your retribution’”
🐣 RT @ChuckPfarrer AVDIIVKA AXIS /2000 UTC 28 MAR/ RU troops employed CS/tear gas to support attacks on Lastochkyne. These assaults made gains west of Avdiivka. RU losses for the period include 7 IFVs, 6 tanks and 17 artillery units, indicating strong counter-battery fire by UKR artillery.
🌎 https://twitter.com/ChuckPfarrer/status/1640803731867422722?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @ChuckPfarrer BAKHMUT CITY /1920 UTC 28 MAR/ Heavy urban fighting continues. UKR conducted 9 aviation strike missions including a Suppression of Enemy Air Defense (SEAD) sortie. Russian losses for the period include 7 Infantry Fighting Vehicles (IFVs), 6 tanks and 17 artillery systems.
🌎 https://twitter.com/ChuckPfarrer/status/1640794640034025479?s=20/photo/1
🐣 📊 RT @atrupar doesn’t bode well for him!
[TextLink:] https://twitter.com/atrupar/status/1640706163070074888?s=20/photo/1
// Marist poll (3/20-3/23) “Do you want Donald Trump to be re-elected?) 38% yes, 61% no
⭕ 27 Mar 2023
📊 WaPo: Why do Americans own AR-15s? https://tinyurl.com/yckzwxhf 1 in 20 gun owners own one (16M Americans). They are 74% White, 81% male, 56% 40-65yo Most are from states Trump won; 47% are from the South; 56% have incomes >$100K. Self-defense most cited
// The Washington Post and Ipsos asked nearly 400 AR-15 owners why they own the rifle
🐣 RT @ @NoLieWithBTC Here is Trump and his supporters yesterday in Waco with their hands over their hearts while a pro-January 6 insurrection anthem — NOT the US national anthem — plays. ¤ The screen is playing footage of MAGA insurrectionists attacking the Capitol. ¤ They are EMBRACING violence.
🖼 https://twitter.com/NoLieWithBTC/status/1640028507672653826?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @highbrow_nobrow Chris Miller on Fox News: I “absolutely” told the Jan 6 committee under oath that Donald Trump made an order to deploy the National Guard ahead of Jan 6
Miller Under Oath: “I was never given any direction or order or knew of any plans of that nature.”
💽 https://twitter.com/highbrow_nobrow/status/1640459770632241152?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @RadoFreeTom “Trump has left no doubt that he is a violent authoritarian who intends to reject any election that does not restore him to power… This should be said, every day, in every medium,” @RadioFreeTom writes in The Atlantic Daily.
⋙ TheAtlantic, Tom Nichols: Trump Sings a Song of Sedition https://tinyurl.com/y934t2ct
// The January 6 jail anthem was a shocking addition to his repertoire. But our national attention span is so short that we’ve already moved on.
🐣 RT @petestrzok Outraged how Trump purged govt employees during his first administration? ¤ You have no idea what’s coming. ¤ But wait there’s more – this article doesn’t consider Trump stripping security clearances from thousands of “enemies,” an executive right DOJ argues is nonjusticiable.
[TextLink:] https://twitter.com/petestrzok/status/1640370653759954944?s=20/photo/1
[Text:] Through an executive order, it would give the president the ability to fire tens of thousands of career bureaucrats within the federal government and replace them with loyalists. Trump issued such an executive order late in his presidency, but it was rescinded by President Biden shortly after he took office. DeSantis has also endorsed the idea of utilizing Schedule F. With almost complete control over the bureaucracy, either of these men could become very effective authoritarians.
🐣 RT @ jaynordlinger “Republicans have abandoned the language of morality in response to the political imperatives associated with navigating a movement of which Trump is the head.” To consider, by @NoahCRothman.
⋙ NatRev, Noah Rothman: Trump 2024 Makes Rhetorical Embrace of Political Violence Explicit https://tinyurl.com/3ut27vd5
// The former president no longer bothers to even pretend that he disavows the thuggish behavior he encourages.
🐣 RT @Acyn Trump: I had a rally with tens of thousands of people. The press admitted there were at least 25k-30k. That means you can double it at least. It was like a love fest
💽 https://twitter.com/Acyn/status/1640521132649447424?s=20/photo/1
⋙ 🐣 No more than 5000
🐣 RT @KeithOlbermann “CBS reports Special Counsel Jack Smith is trying to construct THIS charge against Trump: Conspiracy To Obstruct A Congressional Proceeding. ¤ “Penalty under 18 US Code 1512 is up to 20 years. And the possible Document Charges continue. ¤ MONDAY COUNTDOWN: https://tinyurl.com/2p8kv37y
NYT: U.N. Official Heads to Ukrainian Nuclear Plant as Safety Fears Grow https://tinyurl.com/bde6weda
// The official met with President Volodymyr Zelensky to discuss the Zaporizhzhia plant, amid worries that a Ukrainian offensive could raise the already-high risk of disaster.
🐣 RT @AntiToxicPeople Wow. Former head of the National Enquirer. That means there almost for sure are going to be conspiracy charges well beyond the Stormy payment, which the MSM continues to ignore because they adopted Donald’s bullshit “Stormy Stormy Stormy!” nonsense he feeds to the masses.
⋙ 🧵 RT @MuellerSheWrote BREAKING: From @GarrettHaake: An individual has just LEFT the DA’s office that looks a lot like DAVID PECKER. He had already testified before the Grand Jury. The Grand Jury has another hour left. There’s still time for more developments.
📌 https://twitter.com/MuellerSheWrote/status/1640441746667749376?s=20
⋙⋙ 🐣 RT @MuellerSheWrote The Times is reporting that it IS David Pecker that appeared today.
⋙⋙⋙ NYT: Former National Enquirer Publisher Testifies Again in Trump Inquiry https://tinyurl.com/mryaef4n
// The grand jury investigating a hush-money case against the former president met again on Monday, but the timing of any potential indictment remained unclear.
The focus of Mr. Pecker’s testimony was unclear, but it is not unusual for a witness to be called before a grand jury a second time, and he could have provided valuable information for prosecutors. A longtime ally of Mr. Trump, he agreed to keep an eye out for potentially damaging stories about Mr. Trump during the 2016 campaign.
For a brief time in October 2016, Ms. Daniels appeared to have just that kind of story. Her agent and lawyer discussed the possibility of selling exclusive rights to her story of a sexual encounter with Mr. Trump to The National Enquirer, which would then promise to never publish it, a practice known as “catch and kill.”
Mr. Pecker didn’t bite. Instead, he and the tabloid’s editor, Dylan Howard, decided that Mr. Cohen would have to deal with Ms. Daniels’s team directly. ¤ And when Mr. Cohen was slow to pay, Mr. Howard pressed him to get the deal done, to prevent Ms. Daniels from revealing their discussions about suppressing her story. “We have to coordinate something,” Mr. Howard texted Mr. Cohen in late October 2016, “or it could look awfully bad for everyone.” ¤ Two days later, Mr. Cohen transferred the $130,000 to an account held by Ms. Daniels’s attorney.
🐣 RT @AntiToxicPeople Wow. Former head of the National Enquirer. That means there almost for sure are going to be conspiracy charges well beyond the Stormy payment, which the MSM continues to ignore because they adopted Donald’s bullshit “Stormy Stormy Stormy!” nonsense he feeds to the masses.
⋙ 🧵 RT @MuellerSheWrote BREAKING: From @GarrettHaake: An individual has just LEFT the DA’s office that looks a lot like DAVID PECKER. He had already testified before the Grand Jury. The Grand Jury has another hour left. There’s still time for more developments.
📌 https://twitter.com/MuellerSheWrote/status/1640441746667749376?s=20
⭕ 26 Mar 2023
🐣 RT @costareports Sources directly familiar with witnesses and questions asked tell me it’s clear Special Counsel is now “tightening” the Jan. 6 probe around Trump and his inner circle, with focus on infamous 12-18-20 Oval mtg. and efforts to push nat-sec, DOJ officials…
⋙ 💽 CBSNews: Special counsel “tightening” investigation into Trump as he holds rally in Texas https://tinyurl.com/2p8snuua
// Former President Donald Trump held his first official campaign rally of the 2024 campaign in Waco, Texas, on Saturday night. Meanwhile, Special Counsel Jack Smith’s Jan. 6 investigation is “tightening.” Robert Costa has the latest.
🐣 RT @ChuckPfarrer ANDIIVKA AXIS /0000 UTC 26 MAR/ Assaults on the urban area of Avdiivka were repelled, as was a major Russian effort to the west of the city. UKR defenders drove back RU units at Lastochkyne Toneke, Sieverne, Pervomaiske and Natailove.
🌎 https://twitter.com/ChuckPfarrer/status/1639777029464678400?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @ChuckPfarrer BAKHMUT CITY /1820 UTC 26 MAR/ This report is based on the 1800 [Kyiv] reports of the UKR Gen’l Staff. RU attacks on Ivanivske broken up. UKR says RU losses include 11 main battle tanks, 15 infantry fighting vehicles and upwards of 700 Russian troops Killed in Action (KIA).
🌎 https://twitter.com/ChuckPfarrer/status/1640053873489629184?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @RpsAgainstTrump Donald Trump used his campaign rally to praise war criminal dictators Putin and Xi Jinping as “top of his game…smart, very smart people”. He also “predicted” that Russia will conquer all of Ukraine.’ ¤ We’ll never vote for Trump or anyone who refuses to rule out supporting this traitor. #TrumpRally #NeverTrump
🐣 RT @Raymond_LLM Unstoppable, just like their tanks and their battleships. The best thing they have is the air defense which can’t stop anything. ¤ Turns Out Russia Is Overselling Its ‘Unstoppable’ Hypersonic Missile.
⋙ MSN/PopMechanics: Turns Out Russia Is Overselling Its ‘Unstoppable’ Hypersonic Missile https://tinyurl.com/3c792vv4 “[T]he technology still hasn’t found a way to manage the immense amount of heat produced by a system traveling in excess of Mach 5”
🐣 [Me re: nukes] Both China and the US have addressed this with Russia (it’s included in China’s 12-point peace plan)
It’s saber-rattling and a sign of desperation
For us, it’s a simple choice: can we allow a world in which countries with nukes can invade their neighbors with impunity?
// tags: nuclear weapons nuclear war ww3 world war 3
// “a nuclear war cannot be won and must not be fought” ~ joint statement Reagan/Gorbachev
🐣 RT @tkesho3 Clarity of vision, resilience, resolve to fight for whats right – envy for so many around the globe #StandWithUkraine
⋙ 🐣 📊 RT @MattiMaasikas Record high support for NATO in Ukraine – 82%.
91% approve of the activities of President Zelenskyy
97% believe in victory in the war with Russia
74% believe Ukraine will retain all territories within its internationally recognized borders as of 1991. [link] https://tinyurl.com/bcb6sb7d
⭕ 25 Mar 2023
NYT: Trump Puts His Legal Peril at Center of First Big Rally for 2024 https://tinyurl.com/ecsz47cw ‘Mr. Trump notably did not attack the Manhattan DA, Alvin Bragg … He also refrained from echoing his ominous post that “potential death and destruction” might result if he were charged’
// Facing a potential indictment, the former president devoted much of his speech in Waco, Texas, to criticizing the justice system, though his attacks were less personal and caustic than in recent days.
Former President Donald J. Trump spent much of his first major political rally of the 2024 campaign portraying his expected indictment by a New York grand jury as a result of what he claimed was a Democratic conspiracy to persecute him, arguing wildly that the United States was turning into a “banana republic.”
As a crowd in Waco, Texas, waved red-and-white signs with the words “Witch Hunt” behind him, Mr. Trump devoted long stretches of his speech to his own legal jeopardy rather than his vision for a second term, casting himself as a victim of “weaponization” of the justice system.
“The abuses of power that we’re currently witnessing at all levels of government will go down as among the most shameful, corrupt and depraved chapters in all of American history,” he said.
The speech underscored how Mr. Trump tends to frame the nation’s broader political stakes heavily around whatever issues personally affect him the most. Last year, he sought to make his lies about fraud in his 2020 election defeat the most pressing issue of the midterms. On Saturday, he called the “weaponization of our justice system” the “central issue of our time.” …
From the stage, Mr. Trump notably did not attack the Manhattan district attorney, Alvin L. Bragg, in the kind of caustic terms that he had used on social media in recent days. This past week, he had called Mr. Bragg, who is Black, an “animal” and accused him of racism for pursuing a case based on hush-money payments to the porn star Stormy Daniels shortly before the 2016 election. ¤ Mr. Trump also refrained from echoing his ominous post that “potential death and destruction” might result if he were charged.
He did attack one of Mr. Bragg’s senior counsels by name, noting that he came to the office from the Justice Department and describing the move, without evidence, as part of a national conspiracy. “They couldn’t get it done in Washington, so they said, ‘Let’s use local offices,’” Mr. Trump said. …
Mr. Trump reserved some fire for his leading rival in the polls for the 2024 Republican nomination, Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida, who has not announced a campaign yet. “He’s dropping like a rock,” Mr. Trump said, pointing to his increased edge over Mr. DeSantis in recent surveys.
He also argued that the greatest threat to the United States was not China or Russia but top American politicians, among them President Biden, Senator Mitch McConnell, the minority leader, and former Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who Mr. Trump said were “poisoning” the nation. …
The rally featured one new twist: the playing of “Justice for All,” a song featuring the J6 Prison Choir, which is made up of men who were imprisoned for their part in the Capitol riot on Jan. 6, 2021. ¤ The song, which topped some iTunes download charts, is part of a broader attempt by Mr. Trump and his allies to reframe the riot and the effort to overturn the election as patriotic. The track features the men singing “The Star-Spangled Banner” while Mr. Trump recites the Pledge of Allegiance.
🧵 RT @atrupar Just catching up on the Trump rally in Waco and lol
📌 💽 https://twitter.com/atrupar/status/1639829292581367808?s=20/photo/1
🧵 RT @kajakallas On 25 March 1949 my family was among the 20 000 Estonians deported to Siberia by the Soviets. ¤ Russia uses the same terror tactics in Ukraine. We must end this cycle of aggression. Ukraine must win. Russia must be held accountable for all crimes committed.
📌 https://twitter.com/kajakallas/status/1639688110530342913?s=20
🐣 RT @PaulNiland Trump thinks Putin is going to take all of Ukraine, and then he calls that war criminal “smart” too. In an earlier video I watched he said he’d impose a solution to the war in 24 hours because from the White House he’d be able to control $ aid. As in, cut it off and reward Putin.
⋙ 🐣 RT @AccountableGOP Donald Trump on Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine: “He wanted to get a piece. Now it looks like he’ll end up probably getting the whole thing.”
💽 https://twitter.com/AccountableGOP/status/1639783968496144384?s=20/photo/1
// Trump rally in Waco TX
NYT: Donald Trump, and the Sordid Tradition of Suppressing October Surprises https://tinyurl.com/26cw5ttw ‘The scandal that has ensnared Donald Trump, the payoff to Stormy Daniels, is in a rare class: an attempt not to bring to light an election-altering event, but to suppress one’
// The payoff to Stormy Daniels that has a Manhattan grand jury weighing criminal charges against Mr. Trump can trace its lineage to political skulduggery in 1968 and 1980.
🐣 RT @DavidCayJ Bravo to Barnes & Noble @BNBuzz, which in Florida stores highlights books that the sanctimonious and freedom-hating Governor Ron DeSantis and his crew seek to ban in public schools. h/t Lisa Green Dewberry @Green1966
🖼 https://twitter.com/DavidCayJ/status/1639672931574861825?s=20/photo/1
🧵 RT @jentaub Hooboy— I’m watching this so you don’t have to
📌 https://twitter.com/jentaub/status/1639763771399761920?s=20
[ThreadReader:] https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1639763771399761920.html
Hooboy—
I’m watching this so you don’t have to
Globalists and Marxists. Fake news media.
“2024 is the final battle. Their reign will be over and America will be a free nation one again.”
He praises MAGA and refers to the movement also as America First
He claims Biden is using government against his political opponent. “Banana Republic is what we’ve become.”
“You will be vindicated and proud” when I win in 2024.
Calls his opponents criminals. Mentions Schiff and Hillary
Whining says his life has been “dissected and They even got the United States Supreme Court to give them my tax returns, and that was never supposed to happen.”
And then he said so much for loyalty as he appointed several of them
He says “lawyers go before a grand jury is all over this place” and they are treated like criminals.
He claims that an election weapon is criminally investigated.
Donald said the “case gets adjudicated in the press and people say it’s bullshit”
He claims the DOJ controls state and local prosecutors
Now he’s insulting Stormy. “That wouldn’t be the one. There isn’t a one. We have a great First Lady.”
Here’s the deep irony. Merrick Garland, who has done everything he can not to come near, Donald Trump, who ignored the Mueller report is now still being blamed and Donald is claiming that Garland sent a top official to the Manhattan DAs office to go after him.
Lots of lies now. Plus saying hello to Marjorie Taylor Greene and Matt Gaetz. Said she should run for Senate and said they made up charges against him.
Now Donald is going after Michael Cohen. He conveniently ignores the fact that Michael was his lawyer and was convicted in part for the crime related to paying off Stormy for him.
Calls two prosecutors from DAs office “absolute human scum.”
Now he’s complaining about the book by Pomerantz.
“This is really prosecutorial misconduct” by maniac Democrats.
He said he thinks this is worse than ballot stuffing.
He’s lying again
Donald is calling the criminal cases against him election cheating.
Here we go. He’s blaming Hillary Clinton
This man is a monster and NO ONE in the Republican Party can beat him. So listen up conservatives, the ONLY way to beat him is to vote for Democrats
Lots of sniffing. Greatest hits “no quid pro quo” says phone call with Ukrainian president was a perfect call.
Now he’s showing poll numbers.
“I rebuilt our entire military and gave you the largest tax cuts…and regulation cut”
“When they go after me, they go after you.” He claims he is only being prosecuted because he’s doing well in the polls.
Now he says that the people standing behind him can only see “his powerful shoulders”
He earlier described Ron DeSantis begging for a support and then cut him down
He claims he is being attacked by everybody because there are a lot of people who don’t want our country to be great again.
Crowd is enthusiastically cheering. We love Trump. We love Trump.
He said “if we do it in 2024 it’s bigger.”
He says DOJ and FBI are terrorists.
Chants of “lock her up” after he says Hillary Clinton was spying on his campaign
Oh, how can he be talking about “low regulation” after these bank failures?
Now he’s attacking Don Lemon and said CNN should hire Matt Gaetz instead.
He is trying to boast about his relationship with China, but says he doesn’t like to brag because then there was Covid
He said “these sick people“ like “crazy Nancy Pelosi“ are more dangerous than China.
He is just talking and talking and talking and talking and talking and it’s boring and he is angry and egotistical and a disgusting coward
“No one laughed at our country when I ran it.”
He saying he wishes he had more powerful attorneys general.
He’s trying to equate the people who are “after“ him to people who open “throw open the borders” to illegal aliens.
“They are mutilating your children”
“Justice will only be done when we throw this repulsive political class out of Washington”
Here we go again. Now he saying that Ronny Jackson gave him the cognitive test. “Is there a test I can take to prove how smart I am”. He said he took it at Walter Reed and aced it.
“Other people are very stupid”
“Because of taxes and other things — they’re not doing a very good job —we moved to Florida”
Now he’s reminiscing about winning Texas twice. Now he seems like he has forgotten that he already introduced Matt Gaetz and Marjorie Taylor Greene.
He’s name checking all of his high profile supporters in the audience
Big applause for Mr. pillow
Now he’s complaining that the FBI took Mr. Pillow’s phones.
He doesn’t remember the “head of Canada’s” name.
It’s been over an hour and it’s really getting boring
Now he’s running through all the things he claimed he accomplished as president. A lot of them are exaggerations or out right lies.
He says we are laying out a bold vision for what he will do when he takes office as a 47th President of the United States.
Crowd is thrilled
Talking about the border. He claims that two years ago the border was completely secure. He said he build hundreds of miles of wall. He said it would have taken only three more weeks to finish it.
Now we back to his greatest hits. Walls and wheels being better than computers and so on.
He can’t even hear the irony. Donald Trump is saying other leaders are sending their criminals to America. My god this man needs to look in the mirror.
He is using the murder of two girls in Long Island to make political points.
He is promising a giant domestic deportation effort. And he is pushing the remain in Mexico policy again.
Not a lot of due process in his plan to round up, anyone accused of being in a gang and deporting them to the country of origin.
“I get along well with Putin” and he said it never would’ve happened with him, implying he would’ve let Putin get some kind of “peace” (perhaps he means forcing Ukraine to relinquish territory,) and now he will get everything Trump says
He says he can get “a settlement”within… twitter.com/i/web/status/1…
Donald Trump claims it is the Biden banking crisis, ignoring the fact that he was the one who deregulated the banks.
Trump also claims he is the only candidate who can prevent World War III
Now he claims that we’re going to be a bigger oil based energy superpower than Saudi Arabia when he becomes president.
More on China and blocking imports and holding them accountable for the virus.
Wants to stop schools from teaching, any racial, sexual or political content and have principles be elected by parents.
He wants to declare that God created two genders, male and female
Lots of cheers for keeping “men“ out of women’s sports.
he says he is supporting freedom of speech
he wants a constitutional amendment to put term limits on members of Congress.
wants only same-day voting with paper ballots
It sounds like this speech is reading off the Teleprompter at this point is coming to an end. At least one can hope
he’s going to tear down homeless camps get rid of ugly buildings and only wants buildings that are classic style of western civilization
“Our MAGA movement . .is taking on vicious forces. . . Remember. This nation does not belong to them. It belongs to you.”
Praising the people of Texas. I think this is about to end.
Said Texans help build this country to what it was.
“We are going to bring it back. It’s not there now
The dramatic walk off music is playing and he’s talking about how America is a nation in decline. He’s hitting again on the Banks crisis.
Said the green new deal will lead to our destruction.
Music is playing and he’s claiming that oil is it at all time high, because we ended oil exploration, ignoring the fact that real prices are extremely low at the pump right now. Should have given Biden credit for that.
The music is swelling and he is saying a bunch of stuff that’s not true
We have Hunter Biden’s laptop for the third time.
And more false claims about the DOJ not investigating election fraud
Claims Joe Biden doesn’t know what he’s talking about
Music keeps swelling, and he keeps reading the lines that begin with “we are a nation that . .
I’m hoping this ends soon because I am pacing in the living room and I’m really done with it
Yet again, that old authoritarian play, claiming the nation is falling apart, and only I can fix it
somehow, he is complaining about people looting. Not sure how this fits
This music is really terrible. Though it would be good for a Saturday night live skit.
He loves hearing himself talk so much that it seems like he is slowing down, so he does not have to get to the end of the speech
Here’s the deal. I’m done at 8:30 whether he is or not.
“Together we will obliterate the deep state. We will banish the war mongers . . RINOS. . . Democrats. .We will liberate America from these villains and tyrants”. We will never give in. He seems to be quoting Winston Churchill a bit. How dare he
oh good. He’s done.
This blew up. For more commentary on Orange Collar Crime and other corruption, you can find me here: @JenTaub
🐣 RT @RadioFreeTom This is an incredible amount of Trump whining; I think that this video should be played far and wide. Even the people who love him will wince a tad, and the applause is distinctly muted. (Of course, they’ve been out there all day waiting for him.)
⋙ 🐣 RT @joevc70 This is his Achilles heel. He can’t help but riff on how he’s been “wronged”. It’s a different message from the past and will hurt him going forward as people pay more attention.
🐣 RT @mmpadellan LMFAO, what a boring, low-energy whiner. Can’t believe people still going to these things. ¤ Pathetic.
💽 https://twitter.com/mmpadellan/status/1639820949376704513?s=20/photo/1
🐣 📊 RT @OpinionToday More Americans oppose than favor seven out of eight signature policies put forward by Gov. Ron DeSantis in Florida. (@andrewromano Yahoo News) Details: https://tinyurl.com/28c9shz7
◕ https://twitter.com/OpinionToday/status/1639740970727276544?s=20/photo/1
// support: banning trans females from playing on girls/women’s teams 52/31%
🐣 RT @SpiroAgnewGhost Another direct threat against Bragg & other prosecutors closing in on him. ¤ “We must stop them cold!” ¤. The man is completely unhinged.
[TextLink:] https://twitter.com/SpiroAgnewGhost/status/1639807312192995329?s=20/photo/1
[Text:] 🐣 RT @realDonaldTrump The new weapon being used by the Democrats to cheat on Elections is criminally investigating a candidate, bad publicity and all, by the DOJ and their local henchmen at A.G. & D.A. OFFICES. They make lives miserable, destroy their families and friends, regardless of their innocence, which makes little difference to these Radical Left Maniacs. It is worse than ballot stuffing and media manipulation. We must stop them cold!
🐣 RT @Jano14Toga Billionaire #Deripaska announced that Russia would turn into a country of baboons ¤ In his telegram channel, billionaire Oleg Deripaska compared Russia to an “East African baboon country” that “barely makes ends meet.”
// He stated that in #Russia for 12 years there has been neither significant economic growth nor an increase in the income of the main groups of the population. “We live on oil and gas rents,” writes Deripaska. ¤ With the fact that gas is record-low and there is no #NordStream, the #Chinese buy it at cost. Oil, on the other hand, must now be sold below the cost of production. #Russland
💙 🧵 RT @atrupar Ted Nugent kicks off the Trump rally in Waco by calling Zelenskyy a “homosexual weirdo” to cheers
📌 https://twitter.com/atrupar/status/1639706546492899329?s=20
🐣 RT @SpiroAgnewGhost Completely. Utterly. Deranged.
[TextLink:] https://twitter.com/SpiroAgnewGhost/status/1639707604393005056?s=20/photo/1
[Text:] 🐣 RT @realDonaldTrump The Manhattan D.A. Witch Hunt against me is DEAD, no evidence at all, & it has been conclusively proven that I did nothing wrong! The evidence against their “Star’ witness, however, is overwhelming. An already disbarred lawyer & convicted Felon, the only question left is will the D.A.s Office sue him for lying & fraud. They should! The SDNY already found him guilty on charges unrelated to “TRUMP,” & wrote a scathing report. He is responsible for time taken away from the D.A. on VIOLENT CRIME!
🐣 RT @uarealitynow Commander-in-chief Valerii #Zaluzhnyi: ¤ “Thanks to the titanic efforts of the Defense Forces, the situation has been stabilized in #Bakhmut”.
🖼 https://twitter.com/uarealitynow/status/1639559075116597248?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @MichaelCohen212 This is Bob Costello in a nutshell; the loser who questions my credibility! “Our issue is to get Cohen on the right page without giving him the appearance that we are following instructions from Giuliani or the President,” Costello told his law partner.
⋙ DailyBeast: Inside the Failed Plan by MAGA World Lawyers to Keep Michael Cohen on the ‘Right Page’ With Trump https://tinyurl.com/mw4nnhbd
// The Daily Beast obtained hundreds of emails and internal documents showing how Cohen went from a Trump confidant to the lead witness against him for paying off a porn star.
🐣 RT @EdKrassen BREAKING: As it turns out, per The DailyBeast and NY Times, Robert Costello’s 330 emails that he said the Manhattan DA never showed to the Grand Jury, are not actually exculpatory or beneficial to Trump. Instead they help prove that Costello and Giuliani were trying to get Michael Cohen to keep quiet and not give Trump up. They show that Costello and Rudy Giuliani were desperately trying to keep communication open with Cohen as Cohen was being investigated for the Hush money payments. ¤ Costello even came up with a plan he called Cohen’s”escape hatch” to get Cohen a pardon from Trump, and Cohen got angry when Rudy Giuliani went on Fox News and admitted that Trump had reimbursed the money to Cohen. ¤ In one email from Costello to his law partners he ominously said, “Our issue is to get Cohen on the right page without giving him the appearance that we are following instructions from Giuliani or the President.” ¤ Another GOP bombshell explodes in their faces. More on this on @thedailybeast and @nytimes.
🧵 RT @JillWineBanks 1/This is a week that could be the end of the beginning of accountability for Trump. Atty/client privilege was once again ruled inapplicable bec of crime/fraud exception resulting in atty Evan Corcoran testifying at Jack Smith’s grand jury about classified documents.
📌 https://twitter.com/JillWineBanks/status/1639540319409643520?s=20
2/Corcoran’s testimony may be key to proving Trump obstructed the investigation. Plus, we learned another atty, Tim Parlatore, testified in Dec. Meanwhile, T said he’d be indicted in NY (but wasn’t) and called on his cult to protest, which is what caused Jan6.
3/He didn’t ask for peaceful protest. Then T threatened death & destruction if he were indicted, & today he is holding a rally in Waco TX, home of the militia movement, which seems like a call to arms & violence to me, much like what led to #Jan6. Watch out because there’s more.
4/Trump’s troubles also include Judge Beryl Howell’s ruling that his chief of staff Mark Meadows & many other top aides must testify before the federal grand jury investigating Trump’s attempt to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election. Meadows is a key witness.
5/Others ordered to testify are former director of national intelligence John Ratcliffe, former top Department of Homeland Security official Ken Cuccinelli, former national security advisor Robert O’Brien, former top aide Stephen Miller, former social media director Dan Scavino,
6/and former Trump aides Nick Luna and John McEntee. But there’s more — showing his realization that GA may be ready to indict, Trump’s attys filed to dismiss the case that hadn’t yet been filed there on clise to frivolous grounds.
7/GA has a strong case & there’s no credible defense. Ditto the 2 pending federal cases (classified documents +obstruction and Jan6). And the E Jean Carroll is set for April. That’s a lot for Trump to worry about, but I’m worrying about
8/Good luck to all of us today.
🐣 RT @PaulaChertok 🤤So even Prigozhin now rejects Putin’s absurd propaganda. He says Russia isn’t fighting a NATO threat in Ukraine & questioned “denazification,” unsure about the “Ukrainian Nazi” thing. He still wants war but w/ narrower goals, not Putin’s maximalist war. [ISW:] https://tinyurl.com/2p99xbcp
[TextLink:] https://twitter.com/PaulaChertok/status/1639514207732527104?s=20/photo/1
[Text:] Prigozhin denied the Kremlin’s claims that Russia is fighting NATO in Ukraine and questioned whether there are actually Nazis in Ukraine as the Kremlin constantly claims. Prigozhin stated that Russia is fighting “exclusively with Ukrainians” who are equipped with NATO-provided equipment and some “russophobic” mercenaries who voluntarily support Ukraine – but not NATO itself. [3] Prigozhin also noted that Russian officials most likely knew that NATO would offer Ukraine military aid, because “it is ridiculous to think that when [Russia] decided to conduct this special military operation it did not account for NATO’s help to Ukraine.”
Prigozhin noted that he is unsure about the “denazification” objectives in Ukraine, because he does not know if there are “Nazis” in Ukraine. Prigozhin also noted that Russia will “demilitarize” Ukraine only when all of the Ukrainian military is destroyed, claiming that this effort is ongoing, but that it is unclear if it will be successful. Prigozhin stated that Russia can avoid an exhausting protracted war by deciding now which borders it wants to capture. Prigozhin also called on the Russian military and media to stop underestimating Ukrainian forces and engaging in internal conflicts.
Prigozhin effectively rejected the Kremlin’s pre-war and post-war claims that Russia needed to defend itself against a NATO threat in Ukraine and undermined the necessity and probability of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s stated maximalist objectives.
🐣 RT @sentdefender Ukrainian President Zelensky stated in an Interview yesterday that the Ukrainian Military is not currently prepared for any Large-Scale Offensive due to Equipment and Ammunition Shortages; however he expects that this will soon be rectified by Aid Deliveries.
🐣 RT @KyivIndependent ⚡️UK Defense Ministry: Russia’s assault on Bakhmut ‘has largely stalled’ ¤ Russia’s downshift in Bakhmut results from extreme attrition of the Russian forces and tensions between the Russian Defense Ministry and the paramilitary Wagner Group, the U.K. Defense Ministry said.
[TextLink:] https://twitter.com/KyivIndependent/status/1639534458029178880?s=20/photo/1
● Russia’s assault on the Donbas town of Bakhmut has largely stalled. This is likely primarily a result of extreme attrition of the Russian force. Ukraine has also suffered heavy casualties during its defence.
● The Russian situation has also likely been made worse by tensions between the Russian Ministry of Defence and Wagner Group, both of whom contribute troops in the sector.
● Russia has likely shifted its operational focus towards Avdiivka, south of Bakhmut, and to the Kremina-Svatove sector in the north, areas where Russia likely only aspires to stabilise its front line. This suggests an overall return to a more defensive operational design after inconclusive results from its attempts to conduct a general offensive since January 2023.
⭕ 24 Mar 2023
💙 🧵 RT @tomiahonen Crooked Lawyer Thread ¤ I am troubled by a pattern. And am stunned this does not get more attention. In the Trumpomob there is a web of crooked attorneys. That is a kind of ‘turbocharging’ of the criming conducted around Trump. This is not NEW. Goes back DECADES ¤ Let’s Thread
📌 https://twitter.com/tomiahonen/status/1639295606815440897?s=20/photo/1
[ThreadReader:] https://tinyurl.com/jxcd5a6a
🐣 RT @ FPWellman Holy shit…it’s called being in jail.
⋙ 🐣 RT @RonFilipkowski Marge continues to complain about treatment of J6 inmates: “Over the past week, the J6 defendants have had to spend their time scrubbing, cleaning, and painting the walls in the area they have to stay in.”
NYT: A Trump Rally, a Right-Wing Cause and the Enduring Legacy of Waco https://tinyurl.com/4p46p29f “Whether or not the historical resonance of his Waco rally was intentional, Mr. Gingrich said, ‘It would certainly fit as a symbol of federal overreach … ‘”
// Thirty years ago, a fiery federal raid on a doomsday sect turned the city into a symbol of government overreach. Donald Trump will speak there on Saturday, and some supporters — and critics — say it’s no accident.
In the chapel at Mount Carmel, the longtime home of the Branch Davidian sect outside Waco, Texas, the pastor preaches about the coming apocalypse, as the sect’s doomed charismatic leader David Koresh did three decades ago.
But the prophecies offered by the pastor, Charles Pace, are different from Mr. Koresh’s. For one thing, they involve Donald J. Trump. ¤ “Donald Trump is the anointed of God,” Mr. Pace said in an interview. “He is the battering ram that God is using to bring down the Deep State of Babylon.”
Mr. Trump, embattled by multiple investigations and publicly predicting an imminent indictment in one, announced last week that he would hold the first rally of his 2024 presidential campaign on Saturday at the regional airport in Waco. ¤ The date falls in the middle of the 30th anniversary of the weekslong standoff involving federal agents and followers of Mr. Koresh that left 82 Branch Davidians and four agents dead at Mount Carmel, the group’s compound east of the city. …
“Waco was an overreach of the government, and today the New York district attorney is practicing an overreach of the government again,” said Sharon Anderson, a retiree from Etowah, Tenn., who is traveling to Waco for Saturday’s event, her 33rd Trump rally.
Mr. Pace said he believed it was “a statement — that he was sieged by the F.B.I. at Mar-a-Lago and that they were accusing him of different things that aren’t really true, just like David Koresh was accused by the F.B.I. when they sieged him.” ¤ “I’m going to the rally, for sure,” he added.
The attention to Mr. Trump’s choice of locale highlights the long political afterlife of the Waco standoff. A polarizing episode in its own time, the deadly raid was invoked in the 1990s by right-wing extremists including Timothy McVeigh, often to the dismay of the surviving Branch Davidians. It has remained a cause for contemporary far-right groups like the Oath Keepers and the Proud Boys. …
Alex Jones, the conspiracy-theorist broadcaster who helped draw crowds of Trump loyalists to Washington on Jan. 6, 2021, rose to prominence promoting wild claims about the Waco standoff. The longtime Trump associate and former campaign adviser Roger Stone dedicated his 2015 book, “The Clintons’ War on Women,” to the Branch Davidians who died at Mount Carmel. ¤ “Waco is a touchstone for the far right,” said Stuart Wright, a professor of sociology at Lamar University in Beaumont, Texas, and an authority on the standoff.
He said Mr. Trump’s decision to begin his campaign there, if intentional in its nod to the siege, would echo Ronald Reagan’s August 1980 speech affirming his support of “states’ rights” at a county fair near Philadelphia, Miss., a town known for the murder of three civil rights activists 16 years earlier. ¤ “There’s some deep symbolism,” Mr. Wright said. …
As state and federal investigations have drawn closer to him in recent months, he has often portrayed himself in embattled or even apocalyptic terms. When F.B.I. agents searched his Mar-a-Lago resort in August looking for classified documents, he issued a statement declaring himself “currently under siege.”
In a speech at the Conservative Political Action Coalition conference this month, he described the 2024 presidential election as “the final battle” and vowed “retribution.” As word circulated this month of a possible indictment from a New York grand jury investigating Mr. Trump’s role in payments made to a porn star during the 2016 presidential campaign, he posted a message to supporters in all-caps to “PROTEST, TAKE OUR NATION BACK!” ¤ Early Friday, still awaiting the grand jury’s action, Mr. Trump posted that the “potential death & destruction in such a false charge could be catastrophic for our Country.”
Newt Gingrich, a prominent critic of the federal government’s handling of the standoff during his time as House speaker, noted a major theme of Mr. Trump’s campaign: “the degree to which the federal government is corrupt and incompetent.” ¤ Whether or not the historical resonance of his Waco rally was intentional, Mr. Gingrich said, “It would certainly fit as a symbol of federal overreach and a symbol of a Justice Department run amok.” …
On Feb. 28, 1993, agents from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms mounted a raid to serve a search and arrest warrant at the compound belonging to the Branch Davidians, a splinter sect of Seventh-day Adventists then under the leadership of Mr. Koresh. Federal investigators suspected Mr. Koresh of possessing illegal weapons. A gunfight erupted, four A.T.F. agents and six Branch Davidians were killed, and a 51-day standoff began. ¤ It ended on April 19, when the Federal Bureau of Investigation broke off negotiations with Mr. Koresh and advanced with tanks. Mr. Koresh and 75 of his followers, many of them children, were killed as a fire consumed the compound. …
An independent inquiry completed in 2000, led by the former Republican senator John Danforth, faulted federal agencies for their lack of transparency regarding the standoff, while also seeking to dispel many of the most lurid conspiracy theories.
But by then, the Branch Davidians had already been embraced as martyrs by the far-right extremists of the era, including many members of a rapidly expanding “patriot” or militia movement and Mr. [Timothy] McVeigh, who visited Waco during the siege of Mount Carmel and bombed the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City on the second anniversary of the burning of the compound. …
Invocations of Waco persisted into the next generation of militias and other extremists that emerged in response to Barack Obama’s presidency and supported Mr. Trump’s. In 2009, the founder of the Three Percenters movement warned of “No More Free Wacos” in an open letter to then-attorney general Eric H. Holder Jr. The Oath Keepers issued a statement warning that the Bundy family could be “Waco’d” in their standoff with the federal government in 2014. …
Mr. Danforth, a Republican, lamented the changes in his party in the Trump years that had brought the conspiracy theories that his report had aimed to dispel into the political mainstream. “It’s the prevailing view of Republicans today that no matter what the facts show, the system is broken, our election system doesn’t work, we shouldn’t have confidence in elections, there’s no finality, it’s all a steal,” he said. ¤ Asked whether his Waco report would be widely accepted today, he said, “No. It’s just a very different time.”
🐣 RT @Azovsouth 🔥👊🏻🔥 ZSU Commander-in-chief Valerii Zaluzhnyi commented about the situation in #Bakhmut ¤ “Thanks to the titanic efforts of the Defense Forces, the situation has been stabilized”. ¤ Bakhmut is Ukraine🇺🇦 Victory is coming👊🏻👊🏻
🐣 RT @AnarchoTerran Putin must be whimpering
⋙ 🐣 RT @AlexandruC4 BREAKING: Xi Jinping invited the leaders of Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan and Tajikistan in May for the “first China-Central Asia Summit” – AFP
⋙⋙ 🐣 RT @AlexandruC4 Update: All 4 leaders confirmed their participation in Beijing
🐣 RT @ tribelaw The Jan 6 prosecutions just came a whole lot closer today with the rejection of these bogus executive privilege claims. Special Counsel Smith will win all the predictable appeals, and that’ll be the end of the road. Indictments in DC to follow swiftly, once these cats must meow.
⋙ 🐣 RT @harrylitman Smith has had to wait on resolving the Meadows exec priv claim brought by Trump. Now that court has rejected it, it’s a major advance in case. He can threaten Meadows w/ prosecution; he (or Garland/Monaco) can decide to offer him immunity. Meadows is the #1 key witness re Jan 6.
🐣 RT @ProjectLincoln “A number of the Florida governor’s donors and allies are worried his recent stumbles suggest he may not be ready for a brutal fight against Donald Trump.” https://nbcnews.to/3TLZl5J”
🐣 RT @SpiroAgnewGhost Deranged person is incapable of shutting his mouth, ever. Amazing.
⋙ 🐣 RT @Acyn Trump: Cohen was lying badly, but he’s known for that.. He was a lawyer who represented other people. And uh, you know, supposed to have certain allegiance to a client. We did nothing wrong. I did nothing wrong. Nothing at all wrong, Not even a little bit wrong
💽 https://twitter.com/SpiroAgnewGhost/status/1639413618612781056?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @DumasAustine201 This is from a friend I have been trying to reach near #Kyiv. After over two months, she wrote me this kind of a message! I feel sad 💔 in my heart reading this knowing that #Russia is causing so much pain to #Ukrainians #UkraineRussiaWar #UkraineInvasion #UkrainianArmy
[TextLink:] https://twitter.com/DumasAustine201/status/1639360750475960335?s=20/photo/1
[Text:] Hello, I am sorry for no reply, it was just hard time, and we had huge problems with electricity and the Internet connection was absent quite often. It’s much better now, we have all the necessary facilities. But we have funerals in my country every day, you know, they are killing us one by one. That’s difficult to accept, but we have to go through it and fight. There is no other option. When they occupy the territory, they kill much more people, and, to tell you the truth, I thought about it, I am not afraid of death, of being killed, maybe, I am afraid of tortures only. But, anyway, we are alive people, and I do think that we are strong, we are not the first generation who faces this violence from moscow.
So we also have some happy moments. We enjoy our lives as far as it is possible. And we hope for the better. I’m not in Kyiv, but I live not so far from Kyiv. And I hope our capital city will never fall, will never be occupied. Thank you a lot for sharing the info our country, I really appreciate that. Hope you are fine. Just be happy!
🐣 RT @ wartranslated Aleksandr Khodakovsky (Russian Vostok battalion) claims that Ukrainians increased shelling by tens of times, he explains it with the availability of ammunition. He also describes the Ukrainian tactic of using several drones in drone attacks where some act as decoys while others drop munitions, which is more difficult to counter.
[TextLink:] https://twitter.com/wartranslated/status/1639355471315324928?s=20/photo/1
[Text:] The enemy is becoming more active, the number of rounds fired per day has increased tens of times. It is pointless to ask the question: what is the reason for this? The answer is obvious – this is due to the war. They have something to strike with, so they do. We too are not subject to any hormonal cycles in combat modulations, the intensity of our military operation depends only on the available capabilities. Same with them: they preserved ammo and fired less; they began firing more often – this means that there is an option to not preserve.
In addition, UAV attacks have intensified. The technique of dropping small explosive devices of industrial or handmade production, which has become widespread for both sides, has recently reached a more advanced level. Now they are attacking in groups of several drones, where some act as a decoy for our counter- drone guns, while others try to break through and strike. Not to say that this leads to increased losses, but it adds to the hassle. These are not the notorious “swarms” in which the drones are connected by a neural network – each drone is controlled by a separate operator, but their ability to operate with a group of operators directly from the contact line is due, first of all, to our low firepower. They become impudent.
🧵 RT @NOELreports SitRep – 24/03/23 – Its starting to change ¤ An overview of the daily events in the war between Russia and Ukraine. The situation around Bakhmut is changing. There is a wish from the general staff to be as quiet as possible, so we accept that. 1/X
📌 https://twitter.com/NOELreports/status/1639399023558684672?s=20
🐣 RT @AccountableGOP Marjorie Taylor Greene outside of the DC jail: “It was not an insurrection…We have to work as hard as possible to defund the two-tiered injustice system.”
💽 https://twitter.com/AccountableGOP/status/1639362018145624099?s=20/photo/1
⋙ 📋 🐣 RT @JoanneIntrator 140 Capitol Police officers were injured on January 6, 2021. Repairs to the Capitol and enhanced security cost $750 million.
⋙ 🐣 RT @ Yes @RepMTG it was a violent insurrection … no matter how many times you lie.
💽 https://twitter.com/Joan_of_Snarc/status/1639367071053266944?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @SpiroAgnewGhost The level of completely delusional lunacy and malignant narcissism here is off the charts. Wowza.
[TextLink:] https://twitter.com/SpiroAgnewGhost/status/1639351373870542849?s=20/photo/1
[Text:] 🐣 RT @realDonald Trump Does Joe Biden understand that the reason NATO exists, loaded up with CASH, is because President Donald J. Trump insisted that “delinquent” Nations, of which there were many, carry their own weight and pay their fair share. If not, I insisted, we WILL NOT PROTECT THEM FROM THE “EVIL EMPIRE.” THE MONEY CAME POURING IN AFTER DECADES OF NONPAYMENT & ABUSE. I HAVEN’T HEARD JOE SAY, “THANK YOU PRESIDENT TRUMP FOR THE GREAT JOB YOU DID.” Perhaps I’m just not listening!
⋙ 🐣 he still doesn’t understand that money doesn’t “pour in” to NATO. The 2% of GDP goal is the amount countries pay toward THEIR OWN defense. Countries have been increasing their defense budgets, but in response to recent Russian aggression
⋙ 🐣 RT @MichaelVadok Trump’s hostility to NATO was an international disgrace that emboldened Putin. And he wants us to THANK him!
⋙ 🐣 RT @kallijo68 He seriously can’t stand when he is not the center of attention and no one is praising him. He is probably stewing because he saw what a warm welcome and the standing ovation President Biden got in Canada.
RCP: President Biden Addresses Canadian Parliament: “There’s No Better Partner Than Canada” https://tinyurl.com/5ehhj8eu “[W]e are American nations, deeply invested in ensuring that the Western Hemisphere is peaceful, prosperous, democratic, and secure”
🐣 RT @PStyle0ne1 “If Russia is afraid of depleted uranium projectiles, they can withdraw their tanks from Ukraine, this is my recommendation to them” – John Kirby. #USA #Ukraine
🐣 RT @MuellerSheWrote BREAKING: ABC NEWS: Judge Beryl Howell ordered MEADOWS, SCAVINO, O’BRIEN, RATCLIFFE, CUCCINELLI, MCENTEE, NICK LUNA, & STEPHEN MILLER to testify in Jack Smith’s 1/6 probe.
⋙ ABCNews: Meadows, other top Trump aides ordered to testify in Jan. 6 probe as judge rejects claims of executive privilege https://tinyurl.com/yany4cwz
// Trump’s attorneys had challenged the subpoenas by asserting executive privilege.
Trump is likely to appeal the ruling, according to sources briefed on the matter. ¤ “The DOJ is continuously stepping far outside the standard norms in attempting to destroy the long accepted, long held, Constitutionally based standards of attorney-client privilege and executive privilege,” a Trump spokesperson said in a statement. “There is no factual or legal basis or substance to any case against President Trump. The deranged Democrats and their comrades in the mainstream media are corrupting the legal process and weaponizing the justice system in order to manipulate public opinion, because they are clearly losing the political battle.”
🐣 RT @RepAdamSchiff Donald Trump is now saying his indictment could lead to “death and destruction.” ¤ Only days after calling for protests to “take our nation back.” ¤ After January 6, we know exactly what he means, and the consequences. ¤ What more will it take for Republicans to stand up to him?
🐣 RT @SpiroAgnewGhost Post #1 of the day from the unhinged lunatic. Many more shall follow.
[TextLink:] https://twitter.com/SpiroAgnewGhost/status/1639258257016643586?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @realDonald Trump PROSECUTORIAL MISCONDUCT!
🐣 RT @kylegriffin1 NBC News: The federal judge set to hear E. Jean Carroll’s defamation trial against Trump will use an anonymous jury — noting Trump’s history of “attack[ing] courts, judges, various law enforcement officials and other public officials, and even individual jurors in other matters.”
📋 EuroNews: ‘At very beginning of very hard work’: Brussels and Warsaw team up to track deported Ukrainian kids https://tinyurl.com/3jb47dd5 “Some 16,200 Ukrainian children are believed to have been deported with only 300 returned so far, according o the Commission.”
🐣 RT @ @mfa_russia 💬 FM #Lavrov: The focus of the global economy continues to shift from the Euro-Atlantic region to Eurasia, and politics is following suit. Even the European Union can no longer claim political, economic or value leadership across Eurasia.
⋙ 🐣 Not “Eur”asia, but rather just Asia, as “European” Russia will lose its Western ties and becomes a vassal state of China. There will be NATO countries and there will be Asia.
⋙⋙ 🧵 RT @Kasparov63 [Mar 22] Emperor Xi Jinping paid a royal visit to Pu Tin, regional governor of the northern Chinese province of Ruxia.
📌 https://twitter.com/Kasparov63/status/1638570114026029057?s=20
🐣 RT @SpiroAgnewGhost At 1:10 a.m, Trump posted another unhinged rant attacking Bragg, this time saying there will be “death & destruction” if he’s indicted. He then calls Bragg a “degenerate psychopath” (amazing projection) & misspells the word truly. ¤ Very Stable Genius being “Modern Presidential”
[TextLink:] https://twitter.com/SpiroAgnewGhost/status/1639147135081025537?s=20/photo/1
[Text:] What kind of person can charge another person, in this case a former President of the United States, who got more votes than any sitting President in history, and leading candidate (by far!) for the Republican Party nomination, with a Crime, when it is known by all that NO Crime has been committed, & also known that potential death & destruction in such a false charge could be catastrophic for our Country? Why & Who would do such a thing? Only a degenerate psychopath that truely hates the USA!
⭕ 23 Mar 2023
💙🧵 RT @Affenpocker Once upon a time ¤ In an enchanted forest, there lived small creatures in harmony with nature there were no vatniks and they bonked each other only with their soft little paws #NAFOfellas #OriginOfNAFO
📌 💽 https://twitter.com/Affenpocker/status/1638806634230104064?s=20/photo/1
// tags: origin of NAFO origins NAFO fairy tale
🐣 RT @davenewworld_2 Far-right extremist Riley June Williams, 24, was sentenced to 3 years in prison for storming the Capitol on January 6th and directing a mob toward Nancy Pelosi’s office.
🖼 https://twitter.com/davenewworld_2/status/1639036577853702149?s=20/photo/1
NatRev, Jim Geraghty: The DeSantis Make-Up Call https://tinyurl.com/2p8vhesd “[W]hen you’re asking for the job of commander in chief, at least in the old days, you were expected to have a coherent and well-defined foreign policy that you could articulate in a clear and direct manner”
🐣 RT @hugobachega The Wagner group, now deprived of key supplies of men and munitions, has failed to capture Bakhmut after a months-long bloody campaign, and Western experts say the offensive could be stalling in the face of the Ukrainian resistance.
⋙ Bloomberg: Putin’s Mercenary Prigozhin Shifts Focus After Ukraine Setbacks https://tinyurl.com/w77zus5
// Yevgeny Prigozhin, the powerful founder of mercenary group Wagner, is preparing to scale back his private army’s operations in Ukraine.
● Wagner founder seen shifting attention to Africa operations
● Prigozhin also hints at political ambitions inside Russia
🐣 RT @mhmck It is incomprehensible how Russia is at war with Western civilization yet the only Western nation in combat with the aggressor is Ukraine.
🐣 RT @HillaryClinton One party is trying to make Americans’ lives better. ¤ The other party is trying to distract Americans from the fact that they’re not even trying.
⋙ 🐣 RT @CAPAction It’s the difference between fighting for universal pre-k and fighting to ban books in classrooms.
◕ https://twitter.com/HillaryClinton/status/1638893843385909248?s=20/photo/1
// chart: what people want: 87% child care, 82% med leave, 73%preschool
🐣 RT @gtconway3d Interestingly, this is exactly the kind of post I would put on social media were I a target in a criminal investigation and I wanted to be denied bail.
🖼 https://twitter.com/gtconway3d/status/1638963593596239872?s=20/photo/1
// Trump with baseball bat / DA Alvin Bragg
🐣 RT @SethAbramson I have no way of knowing if the stunning audio below describes real events or not, but it certainly does seem to me that Lev (who I have written a great deal about) is carefully and earnestly detailing what he was *told* by Rudy Giuliani, Donald Trump’s attorney. ¤ And if so, HFS.
¤ https://twitter.com/SethAbramson/status/1639080670612934658?s=20
⋙⋙ 🚫🧵 RT @SlickRockWeb Well this was a rather STUNNING relevation by Lev Parnas tonight … that Hunter Biden was drugged in kazakhstan in 2019 by the Russian FSB with the cooperation of the CEO of Burisma and his harddrive was copied and possibly manipulated by Russian Intel to be used later as Kompromat. #bidenlaptop
📌 https://twitter.com/SlickRockWeb/status/1638406382532558849?s=20⋙ 🐣 RT @SethAbramson I’ll say this much: the ex-head of Burisma working with the FSB tracks; the FSB using the known addiction of Hunter Biden to try to get kompromat tracks; Giuliani and Trump knowingly working with Russian intelligence to try to destroy a Democratic presidential candidate tracks.
⋙ 🐣 RT @SethAbramson I’ll also say that you can hear in the voice of the deranged Tracey Beanz shock/anger that she was not getting from Lev Parnas what she expected to get—because she has bought all Trump’s lies. What she got certainly explains why Republicans in Congress didn’t want Lev to testify.
// Hunter Biden laptop conspiracy stuff
WaPo, Josh Rogin: Why Xi and Putin pretend they run democracies https://tinyurl.com/5n6eayzj “Putin and Xi are trying to hollow out the very notions of democracy, human rights and the rule of law in the international system”
DailyBeast, Allison Quinn: Private Chat Leaks Show Moscow Officials in State of Panic Over Putin Arrest Warrant https://tinyurl.com/zkjh8z7d “‘On the one hand, it makes you rally around him. On the other hand, it’s as if we really are in complete global isolation’”
🐣 RT @allinwithchris .@gtconway3d on Trump holding his first 2024 campaign rally in Waco, Texas: “He is absolutely trying to gin up the extremists.”
💽 https://twitter.com/allinwithchris/status/1639063711284596736?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @KeithOlbermann Trump has today issued repeated stochastic terrorist calls for his cult to “remove” the “animal” Alvin Bragg – and use a baseball bat. @DHSgov and @TheJusticeDept need to arrest him, today. No perp walk, no bail. ¤ He’s trying to get this man killed. Period. Enough.
[TextLink:] https://twitter.com/KeithOlbermann/status/1639014916114841600?s=20/photo/1 -4
🐣 RT @RadioFreeTom Again, post this far and wide. Make sure that every adult in the United States sees this. Make sure that voters know it, and that Trump’s voters can’t deny it, and that elected Republicans can’t pretend they didn’t see it.
⋙ 🐣 RT @mmpadellan HOLY SHIT, I knew trump was unhinged, but he posted a picture of him with a baseball bat next to the picture of Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg???? ¤ This is straight up threat of violence. ¤ Innocent, law-abiding folks don’t do that. ¤ ARREST HIM ALREADY.
🖼 https://twitter.com/mmpadellan/status/1639025861927006217?s=20/photo/1
NYT: Trump Inquiries Present a Stress Test for Justice in a Polarized Nation https://tinyurl.com/bddafv5d “House Republicans have already made their investigation of the Justice Department a focus of their oversight and political messaging efforts”
// Attorney General Merrick Garland and other prosecutors have sought to demonstrate that politics should not infect the justice system. Those efforts face a steep challenge as the Trump investigations move ahead.
[…] Even in the absence so far of any charges against Mr. Trump, political polarization runs so deep, and mistrust of federal law enforcement is so ingrained on the right, that efforts by Mr. Garland and others to offer assurances that justice is being dispensed without regard to politics are often drowned out by powerful counterforces. Among the strongest of those forces are allies of Mr. Trump who have sought to undercut the legitimacy of the Justice Department in general and the Federal Bureau of Investigation in particular.
The Justice Department “has been a remarkable backstop,” said Lindsay M. Chervinsky, a presidential historian and senior fellow at the Center for Presidential History at Southern Methodist University. “But the department is being given a role that it was never really designed to have — defending American democracy.”
In some ways, the confluence of Trump-focused inquiries is putting the criminal justice system through a public stress test unlike any in American history.
Multiple Trump investigations are marching toward decision points — and potential indictments — starting with the inquiry by the Manhattan district attorney, Alvin L. Bragg, into hush-money payments to a porn actress.
In Georgia, a local prosecutor is moving toward a decision about charges related to efforts by Mr. Trump and his allies to overturn Mr. Trump’s 2020 election loss in that state.
The Justice Department special counsel Jack Smith scored an important legal victory this week that could provide critical evidence in the investigation into Mr. Trump’s handling of classified documents and the possible obstruction of justice. Mr. Smith is also overseeing the parallel investigation into Mr. Trump’s efforts to remain in office after losing the 2020 election and his role in instigating the events of Jan. 6, 2021.
For months, Justice Department officials have been bracing for an all-out attack from the Republican-controlled House, which has launched investigations into what it calls the “weaponization” of the department against the right. …
That apprehension is especially acute inside the F.B.I., which bore the brunt of recrimination following its long probe of the Trump campaign connections to Russia, and in the aftermath of the documents search of the former president’s Florida club and residence, Mar-a-Lago, in August. The F.B.I. remains a popular target for Republicans in Congress.
“It is much easier to break something and undermine it than repair it,” said Peter Strzok, a former senior F.B.I. agent. Mr. Strzok was involved in the investigation into ties between the 2016 Trump campaign and Russia and was the target of repeated attacks by Mr. Trump and his supporters on the right. ¤ The goal of many Trump allies in attacking the bureau, he said, was to “chill” F.B.I. investigators, which would ultimately weaken the Justice Department’s case against Mr. Trump.
Trump supporters have long cast Mr. Strzok as a villain and a central actor in a “deep-state” plot to damage the former president. The former F.B.I. agent has never been accused of a crime by the government, and the department’s inspector general found no “documentary or testimonial evidence that political bias or improper motivation influenced” officials’ decision to open the Russia investigation. …
“All of these steps are about planting the seeds for a potential impeachment of Garland in 2024 during the campaign, which would be their ultimate demonstration that the investigation, and indictment of Trump, were all about partisanship,” said Charles Tiefer, a University of Baltimore law professor, who served as a legal counsel in the House and Senate. …
In a tense meeting before the search [of Mar-a-Lago], Justice Department officials made it clear to F.B.I. agents that they did not care about the optics of the search and did not trust Mr. Trump’s lawyer, according to a former federal law enforcement official familiar with the episode. Agents have been careful to make sure every step is documented, mindful that any mistakes could be exploited for political purposes, the former official said.
NYT: Prosecutor in Trump Hush-Money Case Fires Back at House Republicans https://tinyurl.com/2aprypm9 “‘The letter’s requests are an unlawful incursion into New York’s sovereignty,’ the district attorney’s general counsel, Leslie Dubeck, said”
// The office of the Manhattan district attorney, Alvin L. Bragg, said the committee chairmen’s attempts to intervene in the investigation were “unlawful.”
[…] Representative Glenn Ivey, a Democrat from Maryland and former prosecutor, said that he had been “astonished” to see the letter to Mr. Bragg, “essentially calling on him to violate grand jury secrecy laws in New York.” The letter was sent by Representatives Jim Jordan of Ohio of the Judiciary Committee, James R. Comer of Kentucky of the Oversight and Accountability Committee and Bryan Steil of Wisconsin of the Administration Committee. ¤ “My call was for those three to withdraw the letter immediately, hopefully recognizing the mistake that they had made, but that’s too much to ask I suppose,” Mr. Ivey said.
Representative Jerrold Nadler of New York, an ally of the district attorney, said that Mr. Jordan was “out of control” and was “trying to put his thumb on the scale for his friend Donald Trump.” Mr. Nadler expressed appreciation for Mr. Bragg’s response.
The events that led to the chairmen’s letter began with the Saturday post from Mr. Trump, which, along with saying he would be arrested Tuesday, called on his supporters to protest in charged language reminiscent of his social media posts in the weeks before the attack on the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.
Republicans quickly responded. The speaker of the House, Representative Kevin McCarthy, called for investigations into whether federal funds were being used for “politically motivated prosecutions,” a thinly veiled threat to Mr. Bragg. The former president’s closest competitor in the 2024 Republican primary, Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida, said Mr. Bragg was “weaponizing” his office.
In her letter, Ms. Dubeck, the district attorney’s general counsel, wrote that the committee chairmen’s letter was seemingly prompted by two events: Mr. Trump’s post and one of his lawyers having urged Congress to intervene, according to a New York Times report. “Neither fact is a legitimate basis for congressional inquiry,” she said. …
Stephen Gillers, a professor at New York University’s law school and an expert in legal ethics, said that most of the material the congressmen were seeking was protected by either attorney client-privilege or another form of legal protection known as the attorney work product doctrine and called the demand an extraordinary overreach. ¤ “In their breadth, the letters represent an unprecedented demand for information about traditionally secret government activity, the enforcement of criminal law,” he said.
Mr. Trump, for his own part, used racist language to describe the district attorney on Thursday, referring to Mr. Bragg, who is Black, as an “animal” in a post on his social media platform. Later in the day, he posted a link that included two juxtaposed images — one of him wielding a bat and the other of Mr. Bragg with a hand raised — suggestive of a physical attack on the district attorney. …
WaPo: Biden moves to undo Trump’s political play on the Space Command https://tinyurl.com/3rdp6c6w “President Biden is right to listen to the generals on this one and keep the locus of space operations where it is” ~ in Colorado Springs
// The 11th-hour decision to locate headquarters in Alabama could have weakened the U.S. at a critical time
The White House appears ready to reverse a Trump administration plan to relocate the U.S. Space Command from Colorado Springs to Huntsville, Ala., because it fears the transfer would disrupt operations at a time when space is increasingly important to the military.
The Space Command siting decision has been a political football for the past four years. Trump made the decision on Jan. 11, 2021, five days after the insurrection at the U.S. Capitol. He had said earlier that he wouldn’t decide until he knew the 2020 election results, “to see how it turns out.” Colorado voted against him, while Alabama gave him strong support and its representatives backed his false claim he had won.
Senior military officials argued from the start for remaining in Colorado Springs, where the Space Command and its predecessors have been based for decades, and the Biden administration seems finally to be nearing the same conclusion. “We share the concerns of some military leaders about potential disruption of space operations at a critical moment for our national security,” a White House official said this week.
🐣 RT @glennkirschner2 I look forward to history recording AG James, DA Willis and DA Bragg as the trifecta of Trump accountability.
🖼 https://twitter.com/glennkirschner2/status/1638961235831169024?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @Maks_NAFO_FELLA Zelensky at a meeting of the European Council named five main reasons for the prolongation of the war:
1. Significant delay in deliveries of long-range missiles to Ukraine.
2. Ukraine needs more modern aircraft than MiGs.
3. The delay of the EU with the adoption of new sanctions packages against the Russian Federation.
4. We need a summit on the “peace formula” put forward by Ukraine.
5. Decisions on Ukrainian European integration must not be delayed.
¤ https://twitter.com/Maks_NAFO_FELLA/status/1638995069851127808?s=20
🧵 RT @TheStudyofWar NEW: #Wagner Group financier Yevgeny #Prigozhin has softened his rhetoric towards the #Russian Ministry of Defense (MoD) likely out of fear of completely losing his mercenary force in #Bakhmut. […]
Latest on #Ukraine w/ @criticalthreats: http://isw.pub/UkrWar032323
📌 https://twitter.com/TheStudyofWar/status/1639096124022874112?s=20/photo/1
⋙ 🧵 RT @TheStudyofWar #Prigozhin also denied the #Kremlin’s claims that #Russia is fighting #NATO in #Ukraine and questioned whether there are actually Nazis in Ukraine as the Kremlin constantly claims. http://isw.pub/UkrWar032323
📌 https://twitter.com/TheStudyofWar/status/1639103504932274181?s=20/photo/1
⋙ 2/ #Prigozhin stated that #Russia is fighting “exclusively with #Ukrainians” who are equipped with #NATO-provided equipment and some “russophobic” mercenaries who voluntarily support #Ukraine – but not NATO itself.
⋙ 3/ #Prigozhin also noted that #Russian officials most likely knew that #NATO would offer #Ukraine military aid, because “it is ridiculous to think that when [#Russia] decided to conduct this special military operation it did not account for NATO’s help to Ukraine.”
⋙ 4/ #Prigozhin added that he is unsure about the “denazification” objectives in #Ukraine, because he does not know if there are “Nazis” in Ukraine.
⋙ 5/ #Prigozhin effectively rejected the #Kremlin’s pre-war and post-war claims that #Russia needed to defend itself against a NATO threat in #Ukraine and undermined the necessity and probability of Russian President Vladimir #Putin’s stated maximalist objectives for this invasion.
💙 🐣 RT @Igor_from_Kyiv_ This is our home. These are our people. We have nowhere to go and retreat. We protect what has no price – freedom, kindness and people’s lives. Russian fascists and invaders will never defeat a free people. 🇺🇦⚔️
💽 https://twitter.com/Igor_from_Kyiv_/status/1639110931270574082?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @Tomthescribe This is not the look or words of a man confident of taking Bakhmut any time soon…
⋙ 🐣 RT @wartranslated Prigozhin claims that he knows about the Ukrainian plan to deal 3 blows and liberate the territory to the 1991 borders. He states that Ukraine concentrated 200,000 of reserves in the Donbas, with 80k of them being near Bakhmut. Plans include invading the Belgorod region to be used in exchange, then cutting “L/DPR” into two, and finally, liberating Crimea.
💽 [tr] https://twitter.com/wartranslated/status/1638939229156769792?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @nntaleb “Pacifists” should first ask Putin to stop attacking.” ¤ Meloni does not cluster to aggregated opinions that she, on the “right” is supposed to have. ¤ She knows how to lose her temper facing bullshitters. ¤ She gets reaaaaallly angry at 1:38
⋙ 🐣 RT @pravda_eng [UA] 🇮🇹 Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni delivered an emotional speech in support of Ukraine and explained to local politicians why calls for “peace” at the expense of territorial concessions are unacceptable
💽 [tr] https://twitter.com/pravda_eng/status/1638982217949913088?s=20/photo/1
🔄 💙 TheAtlantic, David Graham: The Cases Against Trump: A Guide https://tinyurl.com/2t2uh363
// The timelines, the issues at stake, and the threat they pose to the former president
● Manhattan: Hush Money
● Department of Justice: Mar-a-Lago Documents
● Fulton County: Election Subversion
● Department of Justice: January 6
WaPo: Explaining the Ties Between Alvin Bragg and George Soros https://tinyurl.com/2pwmceta “Soros, who has backed Democratic candidates and causes as well as democracy and human rights around the world, has for years been a boogeyman to the right”
// Donald Trump’s allies have accused the district attorney bringing a case against him as having been “bought” by Mr. Soros, the philanthropist. That is misleading, though the men do have a financial connection.
🐣 RT @ @ZelenskyyUa We have a result which we have been working on. An Agreement was signed on the Establishment of the Field Office of the @IntlCrimCourt in 🇺🇦. ¤ This step will allow international justice to be even more active in investigating the crimes of the Russian military on Ukrainian soil.
💽 https://twitter.com/ZelenskyyUa/status/1639008415707021312?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @NOELreports “Ukraine is preparing a powerful counteroffensive that will shock the whole world,” said Dan Rice, adviser to the Commander-in-Chief Zaluzhnyi. Rice is an American combat veteran who last spring was appointed special adviser to the Commander-in-Chief Valerii Zaluzhnyi.
🖼 https://twitter.com/NOELreports/status/1638991197782921248?s=20/photo/1
// with “Russian warship” painting
🐣 RT @petestrzok Wasting away in Decompensationville
Searching for his lost packet of ketchup
Some people claim that there’s a Donald to blame
But I know, it’s the deep state’s fault
[TextLink:] https://twitter.com/petestrzok/status/1638987029269585920?s=20/photo/1
[Text:] 🐣 RT @realDonaldTrump • Isn’t it terrible that D.A. Bragg refuses to do the right thing and “call it a day?” He would rather indict an innocent man and create years of hatred, chaos, and turmoil, than give him his well deserved “freedom.” The whole Country sees what is going on, and they’re not going to take it anymore. They’ve had enough! There was no Error made, No Misdemeanor, No Crime and, above all, NO CASE. They spied on my campaign, Rigged the Election, falsely Impeached, cheated and lied. They are HUMAN SCUM!
🐣 RT @ChuckPfarrer BAKHMUT CITY /2020 UTC 23 MAR/ RU forces continue to press round-the-clock attacks on urban areas. UKR reports that Russian losses are mounting in men, materiel and vehicles.
🌎 https://twitter.com/ChuckPfarrer/status/1638998242976321569?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @GlasnostGoneMordor fuck up. Due to Putin’s disastrous invasion of #Ukraine, Russia’s military stocks are so low, it can’t deliver weapons/ammo bought by foreign countries. #Indian Air Force report had planned a “major delivery” this year, that will not take place. https://tinyurl.com/29k78u3e
⋙ 🐣 who would want that junk? tanks are so poorly designed the turret (with gunner) sits on top of the ammo store; Ukrainians have a game comparing how far the turrets fly; Western tanks have ammo store so it blows away from the tank body, sparing crew
🐣 RT @UA_patriot_news 👀 The General Staff stated that the information was published erroneously, the invaders are still in #NovaKakhovka. The General Staff also noted that we will definitely liberate this settlement.
⇈ ⇊
🐣 RT @sumlenny The Ukrainian Army has liberated Nova Kakhovka – a strategically important town on the south bank of the Dnipro river, across Kherson + slightly to the north. With the control over Nova Kakhovka, Ukraine regains control over the its Dnipro dam, and controls every Dnipro dam now.
⋙ 🐣 RT @sumlenny Before the Russians left Nova Kakhovka, they have raided houses of the locals and looted every piece of consumer electronics they could found, as well pieces of cloth, jewellery etc., media report. Russian army is a pathetic gang of rapists and looters.
⋙ 🐣 RT @sumlenny CORRECTION: Ukrainian Army says only that the Russians have LEFT Nova Kakhovka, not that the Ukrainian units have ENTERED it. My fault. But as the Kherson case demonstrated: after the Russians go (being pushed away), Ukrainians enter within 1-2 days (first clearing landmines etc)
🐣 RT @EuromaidanPR All units of the russian army left from occupied Novaya Kakhovka, Kherson region, the General Staff of Ukraine says. ¤ What a news! #SlavaUkraini
🌎 https://twitter.com/EuromaidanPR/status/1638950488547663886?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @gtconway3dg [not @gtconway3rd] holy hell
[TextLink:] https://twitter.com/gtconway3dg/status/1638889367329447936?s=20/photo/1
[Text:] 🐣 RT @realDonaldTrump WHY WON’T BRAGG DROP THIS CASE? EVERYBODY SAYS THERE IS NO CRIME HERE. I DID NOTHING WRONG! IT WAS ALL MADE UP BY A CONVICTED NUT JOB WITH ZERO CREDIBILITY, WHO HAS BEEN DISPUTED BY HIGHLY RESPECTED PROFESSIONALS AT EVERY TURN. BRAGG REFUSES TO STOP DESPITE OVERWHELMING EVIDENCE TO THE CONTRARY. HE IS A SOROS BACKED ANIMAL WHO JUST DOESN’T CARE ABOUT RIGHT OR WRONG NO MATTER HOW MANY PEOPLE ARE HURT. THIS IS NO LEGAL SYSTEM, THIS IS THE GESTAPO, THIS IS RUSSIA AND CHINA, BUT WORSE. DISGRACEFUL!
🐣 RT @SpiroAgnewGhost Oh my god. Running out of words to describe how crazed he is
[TextLink:] https://twitter.com/SpiroAgnewGhost/status/1638929826471088130?s=20/photo/1
[Text:] @realDonald Trump District Attorney Bragg is a danger to our Country, and should be removed immediately, along with Radical Lunatic Bombthrower Jack Smith, who is harassing and intimidating innocent people at levels not seen before, “Get Trump” Letitia James, the worst Attorney General in the United States, and Atlanta D.A. Fani Willis, who is trying to make PERFECT phone calls into a plot to destroy America, but reigns over the most violent Crime Scene in America, and does nothing about it!
🐣 RT @ChuckPfarrer BAKHMUT AXIS/ 1200 UTC 23 MAR/ Wagner continued piecemeal attacks along the North [M-03] axis, where stubborn UKR defense broke up attacks at Bohdanivka. RU forces are reported to have sustained heavy losses in positional fighting in the northern and riverfront areas of Bakhmut.
🌎 https://twitter.com/ChuckPfarrer/status/1638871617408204800?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @front_ukrainian ⚡️Oleksandr Syrskyi, commander of the Ground Forces of Ukraine about #Bakhmut: ¤ PMC “Wagner” is losing considerable strength and is running out of steam. ¤ Very soon we will take advantage of this opportunity, as we did before near Kyiv, Kharkiv, Balaklia and Kupyansk.
🐣 RT @ EuromaidanPR Ukrainian officials and Crimean partisans are urging all ruzzians, collaborators and their family members to leave Crimea now because all escape routes will soon be cut off and all remaining enemies will face death or arrest.
⭕ 22 Mar 2023
🐣 RT @ JohnFugelsang OK Donald Trump attacking somebody for Covid deaths is like Donald Trump attacking somebody for adultery.
[TextLink:] https://twitter.com/JohnFugelsang/status/1638725943979294721?s=20/photo/1
[Text:] Now that Ron DeSanctimonious is finally admitting he’s in the Race by beginning to fight back, and now that his Polls have crashed so he has no other choice, let me explain the facts. He is, for a Republican, an average Governor, he got 1.2 million less Votes in Florida than me, he fought for massive cuts in Social Security and Medicare, and wanted Social Security minimum age to be raised to 70-years-old, or more. He is a disciple of Paul Ryan, and did whatever Ryan told him to do. Florida has been successful for many years, long before I put Ron there-It’s amazing what Ocean and Sunshine will do! Surprise, Ron was a big Lockdown Governor on the China Virus, sealing all beaches and everything else for an extended period of time, was Third Worst in the Nation for COVID-19 Deaths (losing 86,294 People), Third Worst for Total Number of Cases, at 7,516,906. Other Republican Governors did MUCH BETTER than Ron and, because I allowed them this “freedom,” never closed their States. Remember, I left that decision up to the Governors! For COVID Death Rates Per State, Ron, as Governor of Florida, did worse than New York. In Education, Florida ranks among the worst in the Country and on crime statistics, Florida ranked Third Worst in Murder, Third Worst in Rape, and Third Worst in Aggravated Assault. For 2022, Jacksonville was ranked as one of the Top 25 Major Crime Cities in the Country, with Tampa and Orlando not doing much better. On Education, Florida ranks #39 in Health & Safety in the Country, #50 in Affordability, and #30 in Education & Childcare, HARDLY GREATNESS THERE! The fact is, Ron is an average Governor, but the best by far in the Country in one category,Public Relations where he easily ranks Number One. But it is just a Mirage — just look at facts and figures they don’t lie — And we don’t want Ron as our President!
🐣 RT @GlasnostGone Unlike Putin who skulks around in the dark well behind the frontline in embarrassingly staged events, today #Ukraine’s president Zelensky is in the Donetsk region where heavy fighting is taking place. He visited the frontline positions in the Bakhmut area
🖼 https://twitter.com/GlasnostGone/status/1638510720496148481?s=20/photo/1 -3
⋙ PresidentUA: President visited frontline positions in the Donetsk region and awarded the defenders of Bakhmut https://tinyurl.com/msxee55c
🧵 RT @S_R_Anders I don’t feel like people are grasping how strange it is for the D.C. Circuit to have moved at lightning speed on this. ¤ Or what I think it might mean: that DOJ thinks there is still classified information in the wild and Corcoran can lead them to it.
📌 https://twitter.com/S_R_Anders/status/1638674805175074816?s=20
⋙ NYT: Appeals Court Orders Trump Lawyer to Hand Over Records in Documents Inquiry https://tinyurl.com/4uewmk2w
// The ruling compelling the lawyer, M. Evan Corcoran, to turn over documents came after a lightning round of appeals court filings overnight.
WaPo: Ukraine, pumped up by Western weapons, is held back by slow deliveries https://tinyurl.com/4tanr8ky Officials: “[T]he West’s strategy has come at a cost to Ukraine, but … it also reflected the political realities of mustering a broad, international coalition”
🐣 RT @McFaul After the collapse of the USSR, a democratic Russia had the chance to be a major, respected European power. Putin however has pushed Russia a different way, turning Russia (yet again) into a vassal of an Asian autocratic power. Such a wasted opportunity. Oh well.
🐣 RT @TheRickWilson Actual footage of Rob DeSantis changing his position on Vladimir Putin. ¤ One day it’s a mere territorial spat. The next day he’s a war criminal. ¤ What does this tell you? ¤ He’s poll-driven, scared, and Lady McSantis is flensing him for his pathetic opening act.
💽 https://twitter.com/TheRickWilson/status/1638718328075358208?s=20/photo/1
// flipping dolphin
🧵 RT @Kasparov63 Emperor Xi Jinping paid a royal visit to Pu Tin, regional governor of the northern Chinese province of Ruxia.
📌 https://twitter.com/Kasparov63/status/1638570114026029057?s=20
⋙ That’s what it looked like, because that is what is happening. Xi was beaming and Putin looked the servant that he is. This was the greatest humiliation Russia has ever seen.
⋙ This isn’t an alliance, it’s boss and lackey. Xi isn’t talking about fighting NATO or the US. He’ll take Russia first. Putin is trying to buy extra hours in power by selling Russia to China.
⋙ Putin’s insane war on Ukraine is worsening the Russian demographic crisis, depopulating the country. China isn’t doing well and needs space, resources, and victories. Putin’s nationalist supporters see what’s happening.
⋙ China has issued maps that list swaths of Russian border territory with Chinese names and configurations. Putin would give that up to do what, take Bakhmut temporarily? Why not? He doesn’t care about Russia or Russians at all.
⋙ This will be the choice Russia faces when defeated and ejected from Ukraine. To crawl back to Europe with concessions, accountability, and reparations or to become a gas station province of the Chinese dictatorship.
⋙ The US should not make the same mistakes with Xi that it made with Putin. Xi and his gang are self-interested and couldn’t care less about Putin or this supposed friendship. They respect strength and will advance if faced by weakness in Ukraine and elsewhere.
🐣 RT @AlexandruC4 Kirby: Depleted Uranium Is “Commonplace Munition,” If Russia Is Worried About Their Tanks, Move Them Out Of Ukraine
🐣 RT @ChuckPfarrer BAKHMUT CITY /1945 UTC 22 MAR/ President Zelensky visits frontline positions in Bakhmut. Wagner attacks on Bohdanivka and Hyrhorivka repelled. UKR breaks up Russian VDV assaults on Ivanivske.
🌎 https://twitter.com/ChuckPfarrer/status/1638626877995622426?s=20/photo/1
🐣 Many points in China’s plan are based on UN principles & should be universally adopted. ¤ Point #1 is Respect for the Sovereignty of other nations. Russia has FAILED on this point. ¤ The Chinese plan takes issue with alliances like NATO and with sanctions. These are non-starters. [re: https://twitter.com/RusEmbUSA/status/1638547352536457219?s=20 ]
⭕ 21 Mar 2023
CNN: Fox News producer files explosive lawsuits against the network, alleging she was coerced into providing misleading Dominion testimony https://tinyurl.com/2trp9dpv
🐣 RT @McFaul So Putin got the photo-up with Xi. That was very important to him. But what else did he get out of Xi visit? Your thoughts?
⋙ 🐣 RT @vtchakarova Putin got from Xi visit the insurance that China will provide the main lifeline for Moscow to survive the Western sanctions and the key defence-technological cooperation for Moscow to sustain the war of attrition. Putin bet on China when he decided to make a move on Ukraine and his assessment turned to be correct. Now, Russia’s victory (even frozen conflict) over Ukraine is China’s best case scenario to confront the US with two fronts in the upcoming systemic conflict between Washington and Beijing. We’re already living in Cold War 2.0 between the West and the #DragonBear; and the moment when China decides to deliver military aid to Russia, this war will officially turn into a proxy war. This will also be the moment when Russia officially will lose its global power status, which is why Moscow is trying to refrain from potential China’s military aid at an industrial scale as of now. #geopolitics
WaPo: U.S. could sanction Chinese firms if Beijing sends arms to Russia https://tinyurl.com/mr3hrry6 “The United States would likely respond to a stepped-up Chinese military aid effort by punishing the specific Chinese companies and financial institutions involved”
// As Xi meets Putin, American officials have options for targeted financial moves in response to any military support
CNN: White House official emphasizes US support for Ukraine in Bakhmut and anticipated spring offensive https://tinyurl.com/43jsypbd “[W]e’re going do is stay focused on making sure that President [Volodymyr] Zelensky has what he needs, wherever he chooses to fight” ~ Kirby
🧵 RT @HeliosRunner 5/ Now as i talked about Ru army in first place, let’s talk about #Wagner in #Bakhmut (of course with all the arty support of Ru army but, diff approach there) ¤ So there is actually some very good news we have received 2 hours ago & needed some times to check all of it.. let’s go
📌 🌎 https://twitter.com/HeliosRunner/status/1638267364750794752?s=20/photo/1
// rest of thread
🐣 RT @svdate The coup-attempting former president appears to be calming down. Only about half the words in his latest screed are in all caps.
[TextLink:] https://twitter.com/svdate/status/1638317093710864386?s=20/photo/1
[Text:] 🐣 RT @realDonaldTrump Reports, and almost everybody, says, even after in-depth legal study and review, that there was NO CRIME, NO AFFAIR, NO BOOKKEEPING ERROR OR MISDEMEANOR, NO “NOTHING,” OTHER THAN NOW PROVEN LIES BY MICHAEL COHEN, A CONVICTED FELON AND PERJURER, AND THE STRONG LIKELIHOOD OF AN EXTORTION PLOT AGAINST ME. So, after getting CRUSHED yesterday by Cohen’s highly respected attorney, with the case against me FULLY DISPROVEN, why is the D.A. searching for yet another “witness?” TRUMP DERANGEMENT SYNDROME!
🐣 RT @ MeidasTouch 🚨MASSIVE BREAKING: Special counsel Jack Smith presented compelling evidence to a federal court that shows Trump knowingly and deliberately misled his attorneys about classified documents. The judge said there could be indications of criminal violations.
ABCNews: Special counsel claims Trump deliberately misled his attorneys about classified documents https://tinyurl.com/54b99bv4 U.S. Judge Beryl Howell wrote that “Jack Smith’s office had made a “prima facie showing that [Trump] had committed criminal violations”
// The judge said there could be indications of criminal violations, per sources
// Prosecutors have preliminary evidence that Donald Trump misled his own attorneys about his retention of classified materials
WaPo: U.S. will speed transfer of Abrams tanks to Ukraine, Pentagon says https://tinyurl.com/4kz76326 //➔ great to see this response to a strong bipartisan appeal
// The disclosure came as senators urged the Pentagon to review its assumptions about what it needs to counter Russia
NYT, Ryan Goodman and Andrew Weissmann: Make No Mistake, the Investigation of Donald Trump and the Stormy Daniels Scheme Is Serious https://tinyurl.com/mrxrfycu Michael Cohen did prison time for carrying out Trump’s orders; should Trump get off scot-free?
🐣 RT @BillKristol “Rupert Murdoch succeeded where Vladimir Putin failed. He turned Americans against each other, promoting anger, hatred and lies. Murdoch knew Trump’s claim the election was stolen was a lie but Fox News persuaded millions of Americans that it was true.”
⋙ SydneyMorningHerald: Murdoch succeeded where Putin failed. Time for a Fox hunt https://tinyurl.com/dwehy29v
// We believe a royal commission into media concentration is now needed to defend our democracy. For the Coalition parties, this is a crucial moment.
🐣 RT @PhillipsPOBrien A very interesting UkrainIan army update on Bakhmut tonight . Says openly that Russian offensive action in the area seems to be running out of steam because of the large losses they are suffering. Only a little while ago some were saying Ukraine should pull out.
[TextLink:] https://twitter.com/PhillipsPOBrien/status/1638266705548922893?s=20/photo/1
[Text:] Bakhmut axis: the enemy continues its offensive operations, but is losing its offensive potential. The adversary keeps trying to capture the city, suffering major casualties, losing significant amount of weapons and military equipment. Ukrainian defenders are repelling numerous round-the-clock attacks of the occupiers in the vicinities of settlements of Orikhovo-Vasylivka, Hryhorivka, and in the northern part of Bakhmut. Vasyukivka, Min’kivka, Bakhmut, Ivanivske, Stupochky, Predtechyne, Chasiv Yar, Kurdyumivka, Ozarianivka, and Pivnichne (Donetsk oblast), among others, came under enemy fire.
WaPo, David Ignatius: Here’s the real lesson from the showy Xi-Putin meeting https://tinyurl.com/yvnw4cdm “The paradox of the Ukraine war is that Putin’s bid for greater power in Europe has made him weaker. This diminished Russia will fall increasingly under China’s sway”
🐣 RT @ChuckPfarrer AVDIIVKA AXIS /1500 UTC 21 MAR/ RU forces unsuccessfully tried to advance in the vicinities of Berdchi, Avdiivka, Severna, Pervomaiske & Novomykhailivka. RU continues widespread shelling in the Avdiivka Area of Operations (AO).
🌎 https://twitter.com/ChuckPfarrer/status/1638162509809999872?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @ChuckPfarrer BAKHMUT CITY: UKR reports heavy fighting in northern urban area. The 1800 (Kyiv) briefing of the UKR Gen’l Staff noted heavy RU losses and ‘diminished combat potential’ of RU units. UKR Lines of Communication and Supply (LOCS) into Bakhmut remain secure.
🌎 https://twitter.com/ChuckPfarrer/status/1638296408301207554?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @ SpokespersonCHN Did the US really mean it when it said “call for a ceasefire” on Ukraine is going to be “unacceptable”?! Obviously the US is the most reluctant one to see a ceasefire in Ukraine.
⋙ 🐣 Russia needs to abide by: ¤ Point #1 of CHINA’S proposed Peace Plan: “Respecting the sovereignty of all countries” ¤ … by removing all of its troops from inside Ukraine’s internationally recognized borders. ¤ That will make a ceasefire possible.
🐣 RT @general_ben I thought the Leader of the CCP wanted to play the role of peacemaker? Replacing Russian drones used to kill innocent Ukrainian civilians with Chinese drones…in support of the indicted war criminal, Vladimir Putin, won’t win a Nobel Prize for President Xi.
⋙ 🐣 RT @Telegraph 🇨🇳 China has sold more than $12 million in drones and drone parts to Russia since the invasion began, the New York Times has reported, citing official Russian customs data from a third-party data provider ¤ Read more here: https://tinyurl.com/bde6jr23
🐣 I’m on the side of people not paying a porn star hush money to cover up an affair in order to swing an election and then booking the payment as a “business expense.” If the person delivering the payment spends time in prison, seems the person paying should do the same.
🐣 RT @ChuckPfarrer BAKHMUT AXIS /1430 UTC 21 MAR/ RU shelling accompanied failed attacks at Hyrhorivka, Bohdanivka & Ivanivske. A Russian VDV assault on Predtechyne was broken up by UKR forces and artillery. Wagner attacks along the North [M-03] axis thwarted.
🌎 https://twitter.com/ChuckPfarrer/status/1638154734598078464?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @MeidasTouch Trump’s latest video is just an exhaustive breakdown of all of his crimes
💽 https://twitter.com/MeidasTouch/status/1638049610395705345?s=20/photo/1
⭕ 20 Mar 2023
🐣 RT @SpiroAgnewGhost JUST IN: DJT is a fucking desperate lunatic.
[TextLink:] https://twitter.com/SpiroAgnewGhost/status/1637833938923327488?s=20/photo/1
[Text:] 🐣 RT @ @realDonald Trump Just Out: District Attorney Alvin Bragg received in EXCESS OF ONE MILLION DOLLARS from Radical Left Enemy of “TRUMP,” George Soros. Bragg is also very close to the Clinton Campaign. Republicans and Conservatives are more UNITED than they have been in many years. Even Democrats don’t like what’s going on with the Manhattan D.A. This is a continuation of the greatest Witch Hunt of all time!
💙 🐣 RT @AccountableGOP Donald Trump’s new attack ad against New York AG Alvin Bragg
💽 https://twitter.com/AccountableGOP/status/1637905682765692937?s=20/photo/1
// this is really sick
⋙ 🐣 RT @ Antidote4BS Weird that the data tell a different story than Fox and the Republican party are telling. It’s almost as if they’re, I dunno, intentionally deceiving Americans. https://tinyurl.com/396f432p
◕ https://twitter.com/Antidote4BS/status/1637910341530136576?s=20/photo/1
// New York crime statistics
⋙ 🐣 RT @joyhein8 He is playing a risky game here. That is 100% threatening and intimidating a prosecutor and it’s a crime.
🐣 RT @ RadioFreeTom Between the “Reagan tried to stop the hostage release” story and the Iraq retrospectives, I’m starting to see how easy it is to dupe a nation that can’t remember anything that happened more than a week ago. Take that any way you like.
🐣 RT @Laurieluvsmolly BREAKING-In 3rd Oath Keepers trial for J6, 4/6 are found GUILTY of all charges, including Connie Meggs from Florida who’s husband Kelly Meggs was found guilty of seditious conspiracy. Enjoy fed prison w/o each other. Proud Boys are next. #MAGACult #NeverForgetJanuary6th
🖼 https://twitter.com/Laurieluvsmolly/status/1637877604500865024?s=20/photo/1
WaPo, Molly Roberts: The right wing’s ‘woke’ obsession could come back to haunt it https://tinyurl.com/ye28h2h2
🐣 RT @StateDept .@SecBlinken on ending Russia’s unjust war on Ukraine: If China is committed to supporting an end to the war based on the principles of the @UN Charter as called for in Point One of its plan, it can engage with @ZelenskyyUa and Ukraine on this basis.
🐣 RT @wartranslated Girkin, in his typical manner, compares the battle of Bakhmut with the battle of Stalingrad, i.e. hopes by the Russians to “somehow” win over the city, meanwhile the defenders are preparing reserves for a powerful push. Girkin believes the Russian command is intending to surpass the Germans in recklessness.
[TextLink:] https://twitter.com/wartranslated/status/1637903563136401412?s=20/photo/1
[Text:] What is the “battle for Bakhmut”? – In essence (although the scale is much smaller) it is the “battle of Stalingrad in reverse.” In the battle for Stalingrad, our command managed to impose on the Germans a long and hopeless battle of attrition, while preparing reserves for a decisive strategic offensive. Moreover, the German intelligence knew about this, but for a number of reasons (the main one is the contempt for the enemy on the part of Hitler and the Wehrmacht high command) – the OKW did not respond to this preparation properly, confident that “we will fight back anyway.” They didn’t fight back. Now we just have to wait to see whether our amazing (in all respects superior in their amazingness to the strategists of the 3rd Reich) politicians and military leaders will repeat the mistakes made by the Wehrmacht at the end of 1942. So far, I personally believe that (taking into account the smaller scale of the battle, which cannot be said about the possible geo-political consequences), our command intends to surpass their German counterparts.
⋙ 🐣 RT @wartranslated Funny enough, we’ve been hearing doom reports from Girkin for a year now. ¤ But I recently rewatched a few episodes from his livestreams about a year ago, and he was right about a lot of things. While the battle of the Donbas was only beginning, he was already predicting it may take a very long time to conclude, if it ever will. He predicted confidently mobilisation without a declaration of war. This was all before “successful regroupings” and other “gestures of goodwill”.
WaPo: DeSantis criticizes N.Y. prosecutor while invoking Trump’s alleged ‘porn star hush money payments’ https://tinyurl.com/4apd8wsx
💙 🐣 RT @wartranslated Here’s the longer bit of Girkin’s live stream today where he asks Putin to shut up, with more context. Girkin refers to Putin’s words about the lack of hypersonic missiles being the reason why Russia couldn’t invade Ukraine in 2014. And instead of properly taking command of the army, Putin is flying helicopter simulators.
🌎 https://twitter.com/wartranslated/status/1637950468952391681?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @ChuckPfarrer KALIBR KNOCKOUT: A series of explosions have occurred at Dzhankoya in occupied Crimea. It ‘s reported that Ukrainian UAVs targeted a shipment of RU Kalibr cruise missiles– used by the Black Sea fleet to bombard Ukraine.
◕ https://twitter.com/ChuckPfarrer/status/1637930325514031104?s=20/photo/1
🐣 Trump’s ability to summon large crowds and rile them up is his superpower: if he fails now, it could signal (finally) the air starting to leak out of his balloon 🙏
🐣 RT @maggieNYT Trump’s push for protesters is not getting a lot of takers from some of his high-profile supporters
⋙ NYT: Trump’s Call for Protests of Pending Arrest Splits G.O.P. https://tinyurl.com/46r65thb “[S]ome fear mass gatherings could devolve into violence and lead to the prosecution of his supporters just as the Jan. 6 riot at the Capitol did two years ago”
// After Donald Trump urged supporters to protest his looming indictment, some Republicans have heeded the call, while many others have publicly lobbied against it.
🐣 RT @SpiroAgnewGhost SAD! Weak!
⋙ 🐣 RT @oneunderscore__ I’m at the pro-Trump protest put on by the NY Young Republicans Club. Not a joke, there are more reporters here than Trump supporters. ¤ This was supposed to be the big one.
¤ https://twitter.com/SpiroAgnewGhost/status/1637938437214044160?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @ChuckPfarrer BAKHMUT AXIS/1430 UTC 20 MAR/ Gains by RU along the North [M-03] axis, with an uptick in urban fighting & contact near Ivanivske increases pressure on UKR forces. At present, UKR commanders must assess the security of Lines of Communication and Supply (LOCS) into the city.
🌎 https://twitter.com/ChuckPfarrer/status/1637823089152065539?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @SpiroAgnewGhost Oh my god.
[TextLink:] https://twitter.com/SpiroAgnewGhost/status/1637876725618208768?s=20/photo/1
[Text:] @realDonald Trump Ron DeSanctimonious will probably find out about FALSE ACCUSATIONS & FAKE STORIES sometime in the future, as he gets older, wiser, and better known, when he’s unfairly and illegally attacked by a woman, even classmates that are “underage” (or possibly a man!). I’m sure he will want to fight these misfits just like I do!
🐣 RT @Heroiam_Slava Russia and China are “undermining the international order based on the rules that the US and many of our allies and partners have built since the end of WWII. They would like to rewrite the rules of the game around the world.” -Pentagon spokesman John Kirby.
🧵 RT @JoyceWhiteVance 1/ In addition to possible criminal charges in Manhattan, Trump has a lot of other problems. In federal court, a special counsel is investigating his role in election interference, insurrection & obstruction of Congress’ certification of the Electoral College vote on 1-6.
📌 https://twitter.com/JoyceWhiteVance/status/1637767434378571778?s=20
⋙ 2/The special counsel is also investigating concealment of classified documents at Mar-a-Lago & Trump’s role in the false certification the items had been returned. A fed’l judge has ordered a lawyer to testify, using the crime fraud exception to the attorney client privilege.
⋙⋙ 🧵 https://twitter.com/JoyceWhiteVance/status/1637044295889833984?s=20⋙ 3/ In Georgia, Trump is under investigation for election fraud. There is new reporting the Fulton County DA is seriously considering a RICO charge. [CNN link] https://tinyurl.com/2aexkm3k
⋙ 4/ Some of the investigations could expand. Charges in NY are expected to involve false business records created to conceal Trump’s payment of hush money to Stormy Daniels but there are possible charges involving manipulating property values for tax, loan & insurance advantages.
⋙ 5/ Special Counsel Jack Smith seems to be investigating the 1-6 cmte’s “Big Ripoff,” investigating the Save America PAC Trump used to raise millions of dollars by pushing fake claims of election fraud. Smith’s investigation is getting bigger as he follows where the evidence leads.
⋙ 6/That’s just the criminal side of Trump’s problems. He faces multiple serious civil matters including an April trial in the E. Jean Carroll defamation case & an upcoming NY AG matter that may put him out of business in New York.
⋙ 7/ If you want to stay on top of everything, including indictments if they happen, sign up for my newsletter, Civil Discourse. It’s free & we’ll be watching as Trump’s chickens come home to roost.
⭕ 19 Mar 2023
🐣 RT @MaquisVive “As of Nov 2022, Trump has been credibly accused of committing at least 56 criminal offenses since he launched his campaign for president in 2015.” ¤ Either you support the law or not. And you DON’T! ¤ President Trump’s staggering record of uncharged crimes
⋙ CREW: President Trump’s staggering record of uncharged crimes https://tinyurl.com/5cpxn3c9
// 9/22/2022
🐣 RT @JacobRubashkin Trump just sent out a fundraising email saying that if he would only “sell his soul to the globalist power brokers who’ve made a fortune off of destroying our country” then George Soros would call off the prosecution. ¤ All that’s missing are the ((())).
[TextLink:] https://twitter.com/JacobRubashkin/status/1637548085134913536?s=20/photo/1
[Text:] Jacob Rubashkin, ¤ There’s an easy way out of this mess.
I could renounce our America First agenda.
I could say that I’m ending my 2024 presidential campaign.
I could sell my soul to the globalist power brokers who’ve made a fortune off of destroying our country.
And within minutes, George Soros would call up his prosecutor and tell him to “leave Trump alone.”
🐣 RT @harrylitman A couple points about prospective testimony tomorrow from Robert Costello. 1) Team Trump has requested, as is their right under NY law; 2) whether he testifies is up to Grand Jury; 3) he’s the guy who emailed Cohen “sleep well tonight, you have friends in high places.”
🐣 RT @DefenseHQ [UK] In Bakhmut, there has been increasingly harsh criticism from Wagner directed at the government it fights for. ¤ Of the huge Russian casualties in this small sector, the vast majority are Wagner fighters. ¤ #WeStandWithUkraine
💽 https://twitter.com/DefenceHQ/status/1637524194316410881?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @SpiroAgnewGhost The EIGHTH demented rant of the day.
[TextLink:] https://twitter.com/SpiroAgnewGhost/status/1637654572234862593?s=20/photo/1
[Text:] 🐣 RT @realDonaldTrump China, Russia, Iran, North Korea and other Nations of a less than friendly nature, are busy “CARVING UP THE WORLD” as our once great United States of America sits back and watches. We are a Failing Nation, with Open Borders, Fake Elections, and a horrible Inflation Riddled Economy. We no longer set the standard, the standard sets us. Our so-called “Leader” does NOTHING except Eat, Sleep, and S..t! Where have you gone Joe DiMaggio?”
🐣 RT @SpiroAgnewGhost Oh my. Now 7 completely insane rants today. Also threatening Bragg—he clearly wants his cult members to attack him. ¤ Very Stable Genius indeed.
[TextLink:] https://twitter.com/SpiroAgnewGhost/status/1637646838093447168?s=20/photo/1 -2
[Text:] 🐣 RT @realDonaldTrump CAN YOU IMAGINE THE GREAT NEW YORK CITY POLICE DEPARTMENT, CORRECTLY REFERRED TO AS “NEW YORK CITY’S FINEST,” WHO, FOR THE FIRST AND ONLY TIME IN HISTORY, ENDORSED A PRESIDENT, ME, & HONORED ME AS “MAN OF THE YEAR,” HAVING TO DEFEND & PROTECT THE “DEFUNDERS” & “COP HATERS” OF THE RADICAL LEFT THAT WANT TO PUT THEIR GREATEST CHAMPION & FRIEND IN PRISON FOR A CRIME THAT DOESN’T EXIST..ALL THE WHILE THE SOROS BACKED D.A. ALLOWS MURDERERS & OTHER VIOLENT CRIMINALS TO FREELY ROAM THE SIDEWAKS OF N.Y.?
[Text:] 🐣 RT @realDonaldTrump IT IS THE DISTRICT ATTORNEY OF MANHATTAN WHO IS BREAKING THE LAW BY USING THE FAKE AND FULLY DISCREDITED TESTIMONY (EVEN BY THE SDNY!) OF A CONVICTED LIAR, FELON AND JAILBIRD, MICHAEL COHEN, TO INCREDIBLY PERSECUTE, PROSECUTE, AND INDICT A FORMER PRESIDENT, AND NOW LEADING (BY FAR!) PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATE, FOR A CRIME THAT DOESN’T EXIST. ALVIN BRAGG SHOULD BE HELD ACCOUNTABLE FOR THE CRIME OF “INTERFERENCE IN A PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION.”
⋙ 🐣 RT @MuellerSheWrote Donald trump just called on the @NYPDnews to refuse to protect the people of New York from his potentially violent supporters.
WaPo: Biden warns Israeli leader on judicial changes https://tinyurl.com/yc2kwu7z Biden issued “a veiled warning to Netanyahu about his incendiary plan to overhaul the country’s judicial system”
// President tells Netanyahu democratic values “must remain a hallmark” of U.S.-Israel ties
🐣 RT @RonFilipkowski Whatever he has been taking before in pill form is now being used intravenously.
🐣 RT @SpiroAgnewGhost Get a strait jacket. 😬
[TextLink:] https://twitter.com/SpiroAgnewGhost/status/1637615848528678913?s=20/photo/1
[Text:] 🐣 RT @realDonald Trump REMEMBER, THE SAME ANIMALS AND THUGS THAT WOULD DO THIS TO PERHAPS 200 MILLION PEOPLE, BUT ACTUALLY ALL AMERICANS, ARE THE COMMUNISTS, MARXISTS, RINOS, AND LOSERS THAT ARE PURPOSEFULLY DESTROYING OUR COUNTRY!
🐣 RT @Heroiam_Slava “It’s all a lie! It’s for show!” -someone can be heard shouting at the 19th second of the video of Putin’s conversation with the residents of Mariupol.
💽 https://twitter.com/Heroiam_Slava/status/1637574480619765761?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @RepSwalwell It was Donald Trump who broadcasted to the world the FBI raided his home to retrieve top secret documents. And it’s Donald Trump who has broadcasted to the world that he’ll soon be arrested. His goal is acts of violence in his name. And we must be prepared to protect against it.
🐣 RT @JoyceWhiteVance Does Trump ever stop to think he’s admitting he was happy to employ Michael Cohen, the “convicted felon, jailbird & serial fake storyteller & liar” as long as he stuck loyally by his side & operated on his behalf?
[TextLink:] https://twitter.com/JoyceWhiteVance/status/1637588595300085762?s=20/photo/1
[Text:] 🐣 RT @realDonald Trump JUST REPORTED THAT THE MOST IMPORTANT WITNESS TO GO BEFORE THE NEW YORK CITY GRAND JURY, A HIGHLY RESPECTED LAWYER WHO ONCE REPRESENTED CONVICTED FELON, JAILBIRD, AND SERIAL FAKE STORY TELLER AND LIAR, MICHAEL COHEN, WILL BE DOING SO TOMORROW AFTERNOON. THE INFORMATION HE WILL PRESENT WILL SUPPOSEDLY BE CONCLUSIVE AND IRREFUTABLE! WITCH HUNT!!!
🐣 RT @ AVDIIVKA AXIS/1515 UTC 19 MAR/ UKR smashed Russian offensive operations against Kamianka, Avdiivka, Vodiane, Pervomaiske. RU losses were considerable. Enemy casualties numbered in the hundreds, with the loss of numerous vehicles and equipment, including 15 tanks and 9 BMPs.
🌎 https://twitter.com/ChuckPfarrer/status/1637470822901096453?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @ChuckPfarrer BAKHMUT CITY /1600 UTC 19 MAR/ Positional fighting continues in urban area. RU forces have advanced NE from the Korsunskogo Street salient and are now in contact near the city center. UKR repelled RU attacks at Dubovo-Vasylivka, Hyrhorivka & Ivanivske.
🌎 https://twitter.com/ChuckPfarrer/status/1637483722181169154?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @ChuckPfarrer BAKHMUT AXIS /1545 UTC 19 MAR/ Heavy urban combat continues in Bakhmut. The 0600 (Kyiv) briefing of the UKR Gen’l Staff reports that RU forces staged attacks on UKR positions in the N sector of the city. UKR repelled RU attacks at Orikhovo-Vasylivka, Hyrhorivka & Ivanivske.
🌎 https://twitter.com/ChuckPfarrer/status/1637479039915925506?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @SpiroAgnewGhost After 24 hours of silence, we get a new totally deranged rant from Orange Mussolini. Now its all Biden’s fault.
[TextLink:] https://twitter.com/SpiroAgnewGhost/status/1637497294064074752?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @realDonaldTrump Biden wants to pretend he has nothing to do with the Manhattan D.A.’s Assault on Democracy when, in fact, he has “stuffed” the D.A.’s Office with Department of Injustice people, including one top DOJ operative from D.C. who is actually running the “Horseface” Witch Hunt. Bragg is a (Soros) Racist in Reverse, who is taking his orders from D.C. I beat them TWICE, doing much better the second time, and despite their DISINFORMATION campaign, they don’t want to run against “TRUMP” on my Great Record!
UAWire: Kyiv: Russian offensive on Bakhmut is failing https://tinyurl.com/2yt4cfa8
[E]xperts of the American Institute for the Study of War (ISW) argue that the statements of the Russian media that the Russian Armed Forces control most of Bakhmut are not true.
Russian bloggers claim that the sweep operation is currently underway in the territory of the AZOM metal processing plant. However, American military analysts have not found any evidence of this.
“ISW does not find visual evidence and Prigozhin’s words that the “Wagnerians” are allegedly already 600-700 meters away from the Bakhmut administrative center and on the West Bank of the Bakhmutka River. It is also not true that Russia allegedly occupied 70% of the city’s territory. According to ISW estimates, as of March 8, the Russian Federation occupied 50% of Bakhmut and since then the Russian forces have not advanced significantly, “American experts emphasized.
🧵 RT @P_Kallioniemi In today’s #vatniksoup I’ll be talking about genocide, children and national trauma. Throughout the 20th century, both in the Soviet Union and in Russia children have been suffering because of bad politics and structural negligence & now the kidnapped children face the same.1/17
📌 https://twitter.com/P_Kallioniemi/status/1637472561675096065?s=20/photo/1
💙🐣📋 RT @djrothkopf Since 1968, five GOPers have been elected president. Of those five, four were elected under suspicious circumstances, only three won the popular vote, two were impeached (a total of three times), one should’ve been (Reagan for Iran-Contra) & one launched a massive illegal war.
⋙ 🐣 and since 1992, only once (2004) did the GOP win the popular vote
🐣 RT @HarZizn Andriy #Yermak, head of #Zelenskyi’s Office. Defense forces continue to contain the enemy in the East, their (the enemy’s) plans to occupy #Bakhmut are now failing. #War_in_Ukraine
¤ https://twitter.com/HarZizn/status/1637448587222343680?s=20
🐣 RT @Azovsouth 🔥🔥 The russians have already failed the operation to capture #Bakhmut ¤ Yes, there are very active battles there, they still continue to carry out dozens of attacks on inertia, but they are suffering huge losses. Serhiy Cherevatyi, the spokesman of the Eastern Group of 🇺🇦Force
¤ https://twitter.com/Azovsouth/status/1637455516656869376?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @WarMonitor3 Ukrainian forces have conducted successful localised counterattacks in recent days south of Bakhmut around the T0504 road pushing Russian forces back and taking back captured positions. ¤ Heaviest fighting continues as Russian forces attempt to recapture the initiative in the area
🐣 RT @NewsHour Conservative activist Leonard Leo received the largest political donation of all time and now we’re learning how he is using the $1.6 billion.
⋙ PBS: What a conservative activist hopes to achieve with a billion-dollar donation https://tinyurl.com/55vbj26u
// Last August, conservative activist Leonard Leo received the largest political donation of all time, $1.6 billion. Before that, Leo was known for his role in reshaping the Supreme Court. Now, we are learning more about how he is using this massive pot of cash. Lisa Desjardins discussed the latest with Andrea Bernstein of ProPublica.
Andrea Bernstein, ProPublica: So, what is so fascinating about Leonard Leo is, he’s someone who sort of works behind the scenes, but was very much responsible, played a pivotal role in installing the 6-3 supermajority in the U.S. Supreme Court, the court that, of course, recently overturned Roe v. Wade, and made many other consequential decisions. ¤ And Leonard Leo was critical in creating the network that enabled that to happen. Now what he is looking to do is expand that outward, so it’s not just talking about law, but talking about law and politics and culture and media and bringing conservative values to all of those areas, and creating a pipeline of individuals who can go and work in organizations, in government advancing conservative causes.
WaPo: How Elon Musk knocked Tesla’s ‘Full Self-Driving’ off course https://tinyurl.com/2n48f5fr “Musk’s erratic leadership style … forc[ed] them to work at a breakneck pace to develop the technology and to push it out to the public before it was ready”
// Tesla’s campaign to deliver a fully autonomous vehicle has suffered amid mounting safety concerns — and the boss’s Twitter distraction
🐣 RT @NOELreports “I expect that the ICC will quickly approach Interpol and the contracting states and ask them for enforcement. Germany would then be obliged to arrest Putin and hand him over to the ICC if he entered Germany,” Minister of Justice Marco Buschmann said.
🐣 RT @EwangAlain Ukraine is using bakhmut to inflict heavy losses on the russians the ukrainians could still withdraw from bakhmut which is not even strategical but they have their plan which is to occupy Russians while they launch a counter offensive elsewhere
PravdaUA: Prigozhin creates pretexts to justify Wagner Group’s inability to encircle Bakhmut https://tinyurl.com/4davtee8
// Yevgeny Prigozhin, the founder of the Wagner PMC, is trying to create pretexts to explain why his mercenaries cannot complete the encirclement
⭕ 18 Mar 2023
WaPo: The Jan. 6 investigation is the biggest in U.S. history. It’s only half done https://tinyurl.com/2p9cevpu
// Nearly 1,000 people have been charged to date, and a federal courthouse strains to handle what may be years more of trials
[Randall] Eliason, [a former federal prosecutor] said that while the riot cases may be about halfway over, there are indications some of the other branches of the investigation — like the false electors scheme or efforts to use Justice Department officials to undo the election results — appear to be further along, because the witnesses now being subpoenaed include some of the most thorny legal matters and the people closest to former president Donald Trump. Those are generally indicators that an investigation is nearing the end of the fact-gathering phase, he said. ¤ “There are a lot of court fights over privilege, and those take time, and you can’t just plow past them and not try to get critical evidence,” Eliason said. …
[P]rosecutors expect that the total number of people charged with crimes related to Jan. 6 may be somewhere between 1,600 and 2,100 people, according to people familiar with the letter. The letter was first reported by Bloomberg News.
That calculation does not include what, if any, charges result from the federal special counsel investigation into activities surrounding Trump allies’ efforts to use fake electors or other subterfuge to undo Joe Biden’s 2020 presidential victory.
As of Wednesday, judges had sentenced 408 Jan. 6 defendants, but only 88 of those were for felonies, mostly for one of two charges: obstruction of an official proceeding or assault on law enforcement. …
The five Jan. 6 defendants who have been convicted at trial of assaulting police have received an average sentence of more than four and a half years in prison. ¤ Defendants convicted at trial of obstructing an official proceeding have earned an average sentence nearly 19 months higher than those who pleaded guilty to the same charge. …
FBI officials have previously notified Congress that “approximately 2,000 individuals are believed to have been involved with the siege” of the U.S. Capitol, though it was unclear at the time from that statement whether that number of people would face criminal charges. …
🐣 RT @EricssonUlric Russia was believed to be a superpower until early 2022.
2021: second army in the world.
2022: second army in Ukraine.
2023: second army in Bakhmut.
🐣 RT @SqueeBib If one thing is clear is that ukraine had caused Russia massive loses and international ridicule at Bakhmut
🐣 RT @Heroiam_Slava This is the culmination of the “big” offensive on Bakhmut. The Russian enemy has exhausted its combat resources, both in terms of manpower and heavy weapons. All possible remnants of additional units are already being thrown in – desperate last-ditch attempts to take the fortress
⋙ 🐣 RT @BastyBoy975 There is lots of evidence to suggest Russia is beginning to run low on resources and morale. Bakhmut is taking its toll.
🐣 RT @TimothyDSnyder Russia never went through the procedure of joining the UN, and yet it is about to chair its Security Council, even as it fights a war of aggression and commits atrocities. This should be stopped.
⋙ TIME: The Danger of Russia Becoming President of the U.N. https://tinyurl.com/bdu23t2e
// The U.N. is about to allow the fox to guard the chicken coop. Russia must be stopped
TheAtlantic, Tom Nichols: Trump Did It Again https://tinyurl.com/5dkbr6ct “Trump’s message today to the American people has already come through loud and clear: I am too dangerous to arrest”
// If arrested, he’s called on “protesters” to come to his defense.
… This morning, Donald Trump threatened to summon a mob—for the second time in two years—to his defense. The former president of the United States and a leading candidate for the Republican nomination for the White House in 2024, facing a possible indictment in New York, claimed to know the exact day on which he would be arrested and then called on his supporters to “protest.” Trump and his cult know what a call for “protest” means: The last time he rallied his faithful supporters this way, they stormed the U.S. Capitol, which resulted in death and destruction and many, many prison sentences.
… Trump’s message today to the American people has already come through loud and clear: I am too dangerous to arrest.
… Trump himself today upped the ante by saying, in effect, that it doesn’t matter what’s in the indictment. Instead, he is warning all of us, point-blank, that he will violate the law if he wants to, and if you don’t like it, you can take it up with the mob that he can summon at will. This is pure authoritarianism, the flex of a would-be American caudillo who is betting that our fear of his goons is greater than our commitment to the rule of law. Once someone like Trump issues that kind of challenge, it doesn’t matter if the indictment is for murder, campaign-finance violations, or mopery with intent to gawk: The issue is whether our legal institutions can be bullied into paralysis.
… Trump, once again, is stress testing our institutions, and if he can scare off a state indictment by threatening a riot, he’ll do it again. After all, he thinks he got away with it on January 6, 2021—and so far, he has. …
Well, not exactly silence. House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, whose entire career is bound up in a handful of extremist votes in his own caucus, has Trump’s back. “Here we go again,” he tweeted after Trump’s call to action. “An outrageous abuse of power by a radical DA who lets violent criminals walk as he pursues political vengeance against President Trump.” This is the same Kevin McCarthy who once, for a fraction of a second, held Trump responsible for nearly getting him killed. But the amalgam of ambition, fear, and opportunism that holds McCarthy’s skeleton together is, apparently, a powerful epoxy.
I am not so sure that this panicked, all-caps call from Trump will be to his benefit. It’s possible that Trump, finally, is approaching his Joe McCarthy moment, although many of his critics (including me) have seen such moments come and go. Nevertheless, one riot might be explained away. Two riots, with the promise of more to come, might be intolerable. ¤ But if this is what the Republicans want, so be it. If an indictment secures Trump the nomination, it will likely also cost him the election. … What happens next with his case is up to the legal system, but whether this lawless and deranged authoritarian returns to Washington is up to all of us.
🐣 RT @eorden Alvin Bragg: “Our law enforcement partners will ensure that any specific or credible threats against the office will be fully investigated and that the proper safeguards are in place so all 1,600 of us have a secure work environment.”
⋙ Politico: Manhattan DA Bragg privately warns of intimidation after Trump calls for protest https://tinyurl.com/5n7btde2
// Bragg’s office appears poised to bring criminal charges against Trump in connection with a hush-money payment made to a porn actress, Stormy Daniels.
🐣 RT @ highbrow_nobrow Nixon conspired with a foreign power in order to win the 1968 presidential election. @politico
⋙ Politico, John Farrell: It took decades to unravel Nixon’s sabotage of Vietnam peace talks. Now, the full story can be told. https://tinyurl.com/2p9e8u9e
⋙⋙ 🐣 When’s the last time a GOP president won power without cheating? Iran/Contra was swept under the rug. 2004 was marred by dirty trick placing of anti-gay referenda on ballots (by a gay operative, no less): the party plays dirty: it has since Ike ¤ & don’t get me started on pop vote
↥ ↧
🐣 RT @PaulaChertok …that time Republicans won an election by sabotaging a US President working to bring American hostages home from Iran. ¤ Now you know why Republicans didn’t fuss about Russia helping Trump. The GOP’s been lying & cheating so long, they’ve normalized screwing Americans to win.
⋙ 🐣 RT @peterbakernyt More than four decades later, a secret revealed: How a prominent Texas politician says he unwittingly joined a mission to sabotage Jimmy Carter’s 1980 campaign by urging the Iranians to hold 52 American hostages until after the election..
⋙⋙ NYT: A Four-Decade Secret: The Untold Story of Sabotaging Jimmy Carter’s Re-election https://tinyurl.com/4pfs9aem
// Nearly 43 years later, a prominent Texas politician said he unwittingly took part in a Middle East tour with a clandestine agenda.
↥ ↧
🐣 RT @OK_Dumbass It’s almost like Republicans have a long & illustrious history of incredibly dirty tricks that were meant to interfere with free & fair elections right here in the United States of America.
🖼 https://twitter.com/OK_Dumbass/status/1637190077418811397?s=20/photo/1
// Brooks Brothers riot
🐣 RT @Jetson77 Okay. This is today. He doesn’t know that @SpeakerMcCarthy has zero power over Alvin Bragg or Fani Willis or Jack Smith. ¤ Hey Kevin, likely time you get out in front of whatever twice impeached, one-term, criminal, traitor-wretch is threatening you with.
[TextLink:] https://twitter.com/Jetson77/status/1637190331686076416?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @realDonaldTrump IF KEVIN MCCARTHY DOESN’T END THESE INVESTIGATIONS IMMEDIATELY, I WILL DIRECT MY SUPPORTERS IN CONGRESS TO VOTE TO END HIS SPEAKERSHIP AND I WILL HAVE NO CHOICE BUT TO LEAK SOME “INTERESTING VIDEOS” I TOOK OF HIM AT MAR-A-LAGO! END THE WITCH HUNT NOW!
🐣 RT @RachelBitecofer How many people show up to defend the criminal in chief?
[TextLink:] https://twitter.com/RachelBitecofer/status/1637136209939136514?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @realDonaldTrump IT’S TIME!!! WE ARE A NATION IN STEEP DECLINE, BEING LED INTO WORLD WAR III BY A CROOKED POLITICIAN WHO DOESN’T EVEN KNOW HE’S ALIVE, BUT WHO IS SURROUNDED BY EVIL & SINISTER PEOPLE WHO, BASED ON THEIR ACTIONS ON DEFUNDING THE POLICE, DESTROYING OUR MILITARY, OPEN BORDERS, NO VOTER I.D., INFLATION, RAISING TAXES, & MUCH MORE, CAN ONLY HATE OUR NOW FAILING USA. WE JUST CAN’T ALLOW THIS ANYMORE. THEY’RE KILLING OUR NATION AS WE SIT BACK & WATCH. WE MUST SAVE AMERICA! PROTEST, PROTEST, PROTEST!!!
🧵 RT @Kasparov63 Successful crime unpunished leads to escalation. 1/5
📌 https://twitter.com/Kasparov63/status/1637128962596896768?s=20
🐣 RT @Flash_news_ua After the decision of the International Criminal Court to arrest putin, the Kremlin is looking for a successor to the President of the russian federation, — said Andrii Yusov, a representative of the Ministry of Defense of Ukraine.
⋙ 🐣 RT @Flash_news_ua Yusov noted that on March 17, russian propagandists did not air their shows discussing The Hague, because discussing it would be a “strange and too loud” for the population of the russian federation.
[ I doubt this ]
🐣 RT @gtconway3d Retweet if you don’t expect to be arrested this week for concealing and falsely documenting a $130K hush-money payment to a porn star you claim you didn’t have sex with.
🧵 RT @ anders_aslund The ICC indictment of Putin is likely to have far-reaching consequences.
📌 https://twitter.com/anders_aslund/status/1637085934603624450?s=20
1. 123 countries have a priori committed themselves to arrest him – sovereign immunity will not shield him.
2. Putin cannot be invited to any international forum, including the G20 & UN.
3. No decent political leader can have any contact with him. The leaders of Austria, France, Germany & Hungary can no longer even talk to Putin.
4. Scholz & Macron can no longer play mediators between Russia & Ukraine.
5. Orban can no longer thrive on giveaways from Putin.
6. Those who continue seeing Putin will fall into disrepute & lose international standing: ¤ Xi Jingping & Erdogan!
7. Russia can not be a serious international negotiator until Putin is gone.
8. Either Russian leaders may finally hesitate to engage in Putin’s crimes against humanity. Personal sanctions did not suffice with them, but the indictment against Putin shows that he is a deadender
⋙ Sam Greene: “Put bluntly, Putin has no face left to save.”
⋙⋙ CEPA, Sam Greene: Putin Becomes a Global Outlaw https://tinyurl.com/bp9ruxe5
Needless to say, paranoid Putin who almost only travels by armored train now (like Stalin and Kim Il-Sung) will stop traveling abroad altogether out of fear of being arrested.
🐣 RT @MSNBC Andrew Weissman explains why Trump’s rhetoric in his latest Truth Social post could be legally problematic. ¤ “It’s notable that he did not say you should protest ‘peacefully’. It was sort of conspicuous that he left that word out.”
💽 https://twitter.com/MSNBC/status/1637100464079552512?s=20/photo/1
🐣 📋 RT @front_ukrainian Russia is losing up to 1500 people a day during the current offensive, mostly in the town of Bakhmu[t] – The Guardian ¤ “Russia is losing 1200,1300 and even 1500 soldiers a day during the current offensive,mainly in Bakhmut the publication reported, citing a senior NATO official.
🐣 👉 to avoid amplifying tfg, I won’t be tweeting or RTing on that topic …
🧵 RT @U24_gov_ua U24 ambassador @TimothyDSnyder opposes russian propaganda on a regular basis. He recently spoke at a meeting of the @UN Security Council, convened by moscow to discuss “russophobia,” and explained how russia uses this term to justify its genocide against the Ukrainian people
// “The term russophobia” has been exploited during this war as a form of imperial propaganda. It has served this last year as a justification for russian war crimes in Ukraine.”
📌 https://twitter.com/U24_gov_ua/status/1637096429859553282?s=20
🐣 RT @SpeakerMcCarthy Here we go again — an outrageous abuse of power by a radical DA who lets violent criminals walk as he pursues political vengeance against President Trump. ¤ I’m directing relevant committees to immediately investigate if federal funds are being used to subvert our democracy by interfering in elections with politically motivated prosecutions.
⬇️ I’m not retweeting any of these incendiary Trump tweets to not contribute to hysteria ⬇️
🐣 RT @petestrzok This from the man who declared “I am your retribution.” ¤ “Be there. Will be wild!” 2.0
[TextLink:] https://twitter.com/petestrzok/status/1637063597187538944?s=20/photo/1 -2
🐣 RT @realDonaldTrump OUR NATION IS NOW THIRD WORLD & DYING. THE AMERICAN DREAM IS DEAD! THE RADICAL LEFT ANARCHISTS HAVE STOLLEN OUR PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION, AND WITH IT, THE HEART OF OUR OUR COUNTRY. AMERICAN PATRIOTS ARE BEING ARRESTED & HELD IN CAPTIVITY LIKE ANIMALS, WHILE CRIMINALS & LEFTIST THUGS ARE ALLOWED TO ROAM THE STREETS, KILLING & BURNING WITH NO RETRIBUTION. MILLIONS ARE FLOODING THROUGH OUR OPEN BOARDERS, MANY FROM PRISONS & MENTAL INSTITUTIONS. CRIME & INFLATION ARE DESTROYING OUR VERY WAY OF LIFE…
🐣 RT @realDonaldTrump Page 2: NOW ILLEGAL LEAKS FROM A CORRUPT & HIGHLY POLITICAL MANHATTAN DISTRICT ATTORNEYS OFFICE, WHICH HAS ALLOWED NEW RECORDS TO BE SET IN VIOLENT CRIME & WHOSE LEADER IS FUNDED BY GEORGE SOROS, INDICATE THAT, WITH NO CRIME BEING ABLE TO BE PROVEN, & BASED ON AN OLD & FULLY DEBUNKED (BY NUMEROUS OTHER PROSECUTORS!) FAIRYTALE, THE FAR & AWAY LEADING REPUBLICAN CANDIDATE & FORMER PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA, WILL BE ARRESTED ON TUESDAY OF NEXT WEEK. PROTEST, TAKE OUR NATION BACK!
⋙ 🐣 RT @petestrzok So if indicted, law enforcement is worried about violence from the followers of the guy telling his followers two weeks ago, ¤ “This is the final battle, they know it…Either they win or we win. And if they win, we no longer have a country”? ¤ This is the stuff of failed states.
⋙⋙ 🐣 RT @kylegriffin1 New on @MSNBC: Local, state, and federal law enforcement and security agencies are preparing for the possibility that Donald Trump could be indicted as early as next week, according to five senior officials familiar with the preparations. @NBCNews
WaPo, Chris Sununu: Some of my GOP colleagues have lost their moral compass on Ukraine https://tinyurl.com/4y9vdu3u “‘America First’ does not mean ‘America Only.’ It means putting our interests first — and that’s what opposing Russia in Ukraine does.”
🐣 RT @ChuckPfarrer BAKHMUT AXIS /1020 UTC 18 MAR/ Positional combat continues in the urban areas of Bakhmut. S of the city, UKR repelled RU attacks at Ivanivske & Klischiivka; the latter engagement confirms UKR progress east of the canal network. Air defense downs a Russian Su-25 strike aircraft.
🌎 https://twitter.com/ChuckPfarrer/status/1637033985875361792?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @Feher_Junior Zaluzhnyi insisted on #Bakhmut’s protection. The greatest General ever, if he wants victory, he gets it. In this moment all roads lead to Bakhmut. The Rashists will be demilitarized #SlavaUkraïni
💽 https://twitter.com/Feher_Junior/status/1636845889426710532?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @NOELreports Bakhmut situation today. In the southern part, fighting continues around the Mig-17 monument. To the northeast, Russian forces failed to cross the river and retreated. Russian troops have approached the area near the O0506 at Khromove, heaviest fighting going on in that area.
🌎 https://twitter.com/NOELreports/status/1637012856737595393?s=20/photo/1
⭕ 17 Mar 2023
🐣 RT @highbrow_nobrow ⚖️ Members of the Federalist Society, a conservative legal organization, are attempting to manufacture legal justifications for cementing permanent minority rule in the United States.
⋙ Politico: The Federalist Society Isn’t Quite Sure About Democracy Anymore https://tinyurl.com/2rvc3xbt
// After recent Supreme Court wins, the society’s youth arm debates the next stage for the conservative legal movement.
🐣 RT @MikeSington “This is a huge development.” Final preparations being made to arrest Donald Trump next week. Trump will “be fingerprinted and processed like every other defendant”. The Secret Service will make the decision whether to handcuff the former president or not. (Video: Fox News)
💽 https://twitter.com/MikeSington/status/1636849571707092994?s=20/photo/1
🐣 📋 RT @TonyHussein4 Hunter Biden, as a private citizen, has every right to pursue his own business endeavors. Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump were part of the Trump administration when they made $640 million. After leaving the White House, Kushner received $2 billion from Saudi Crown Prince MBS.
NYT: Judge Rules Trump Lawyer Must Testify in Documents Inquiry https://tinyurl.com/3d9ytkpv Lawyer Corcoran had another lawyer draft a statement saying Trump has no more documents; a later search turned up many, including ones marked “classified”
// The ruling found that the government had met the threshold for the crime-fraud exception, which allows prosecutors to get around attorney-client privilege if they believe a crime has been committed.
🐣 RT @apmassaro3 “Historically, Ukraine was unfairly underappreciated and I regret it took bloodshed and a devastating war for the world to realize how cool we are. We were always cool, but it just took you too much time to realize that.” – Kuleba https://pic.twitter.com/7gN6vabyfo
🐣 RT @ChuckPfarrer BAKHMUT CITY TACMAP /2240 UTC 17 MAR/ Urban fighting continues. The line of contact in the north sector of the city conforms with the rail right-of-way. In the south, RU forces are attempting to close the gap between the H-32 and T-05-13 HWYs. #BakhmutMap
🌎 https://twitter.com/ChuckPfarrer/status/1636860067096952833?s=20/photo/1
MSNBC Maddowblog, Steve Benen: Trump sees American foes, not Russia, as ‘the greatest threat’ https://tinyurl.com/2bt4vkpm “As visions go, this is more a weird and paranoid rant than the basis for a major party presidential platform”
// Donald Trump sees the U.S. as a “third-world dictatorship” filled with nefarious villains who are far scarier than Russia. How many Republicans agree?
As Donald Trump’s latest presidential campaign moves forward, he’s taking a step that he didn’t bother with in 2016 or 2020: The Republican keeps releasing brief videos in which he addresses a specific controversy or policy issue. The New York Times reported a couple of months ago, “The videos, in which the former president speaks directly to the camera, are aimed at reassuring supporters that he’s focused on topics other than his 2020 defeat, an issue that flopped with midterm voters.”
As we discussed last month, these clips aren’t real policy proposals. It’s not as if the former president sat down with a bunch of wonks, explored the granular minutiae of governing solutions, and formulated a set of white papers which he’s unveiling episodically in video form. ¤ On the contrary, these videos have all the sophistication of bumper stickers written in crayon.
His newest installment, for example, features the Republican speaking for roughly three-and-a-half minutes about his geopolitical vision — which is ridiculous, but which is very much worth paying attention to.
Trump begins the video by claiming, “We have never been closer to World War III than we are today under Joe Biden,” which isn’t even close to being true. (Tensions were far higher, for example, during the Cuban Missile Crisis.) Moments later, he characterized Russia’s war in Ukraine as a “proxy battle” that needs to end “immediately.”
Closer to home, the former president believes there’s a “globalist neo-con establishment” that is “perpetually dragging us into endless wars,” “pretending” to fight for democracy, and turning the United States into a “third-world dictatorship.” Trump’s solution? “The State Department, the defense bureaucracy, the intelligence services, and all the rest need to be completely overhauled and reconstituted to fire the Deep Staters,” he added.
Evidently, once the United States’ military, intelligence agencies, and diplomatic corps have been remodeled to fit Trump’s wishes, he intends to “reevaluate” our NATO alliance, its purpose, and its mission. This would, of course, be entirely in line with the Kremlin’s dream scenario, though that’s apparently not a consideration the former president is worried about. From the video’s official transcript:
“[T]he greatest threat to Western Civilization today is not Russia. It’s probably, more than anything else, ourselves and some of the horrible, U.S.A.-hating people that represent us. It’s the abolition of our national borders. It’s the failure to police our own cities. It’s the destruction of the rule of law from within. It’s the collapse of the nuclear family and fertility rates, like nobody can believe is happening. It’s the Marxists who would have us become a Godless nation worshipping at the altar of race, and gender, and environment. And it’s the globalist class that has made us totally dependent on China and other foreign countries that basically hate us.”
After downplaying the threat Russia poses, Trump drives the point home once more, concluding that American “globalists” are “doing more damage to America than Russia and China could ever have dreamed,” as these Americans chase “monsters and phantoms overseas.”
As visions go, this is more a weird and paranoid rant than the basis for a major party presidential platform. In fact, if one were to read the transcript, strip it from context, and not realize that it came from Trump’s political operation, a typical person might think it was an unhinged tirade from some random person with a YouTube channel that has four followers.
Or possibly a social media message from someone who seems a little too eager to promote pro-Kremlin propaganda. ¤ After all, most mainstream Americans have no reason to believe the United States is a “third-world dictatorship” filled with nefarious, villainous officials who are far scarier than Russia and China. And yet, Trump not only believes this, he released a video bragging about it.
As a practical matter, it’s likely that Vladimir Putin will celebrate the clip and prepare new efforts to help return the former American president to the White House in order to advance the kind of agenda Moscow desperately wants to see. But as a political matter, I’d also love to know just how many congressional Republicans — and other GOP presidential aspirants — agree with the message Trump trumpeted in this video.
🚫🐣 RT @vinm300 17 March: Kuleba is in demand
Blinken is on the line
Then Qin Gang wants a word
Ukraine holds all the cards – full counter offensive
Xi knows the score on sovereignty
(Gradual disengagement, demilitarised zone, timeline-which is key. All likely discussed – Putin is pulling out)
🐣 RT @PaulaChertok Of course the criminals say the law doesn’t apply to them. But the ICC arrest warrants are a BFD. No more dreams of Davos or travel to Dubai. Putin—AND his war criminal co-conspirators (only one named so far)—have doomed themselves by their own catastrophic aggression in Ukraine.
⋙ 🐣 RT @nexta_tv Maria Zakharova commented on the issuance of an arrest warrant for Putin by the International Criminal Court in The Hague. ¤ “The decisions of the International Criminal Court have no significance for our country, including from the legal point of view. ¤ Russia is not a participant of the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court and has no obligations under it. Russia is not cooperating with this body, and possible arrest ‘prescriptions’ coming from the International Court of Justice will be legally null and void for us.”
ICC: Situation in Ukraine: ICC judges issue arrest warrants against Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin and Maria Alekseyevna Lvova-Belova https://tinyurl.com/y78fnwe9 “… allegedly responsible for the war crime of unlawful deportation of population (children) … ”
Today, 17 March 2023, Pre-Trial Chamber II of the International Criminal Court (“ICC” or “the Court”) issued warrants of arrest for two individuals in the context of the situation in Ukraine: Mr Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin and Ms Maria Alekseyevna Lvova-Belova.
Mr Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin, born on 7 October 1952, President of the Russian Federation, is allegedly responsible for the war crime of unlawful deportation of population (children) and that of unlawful transfer of population (children) from occupied areas of Ukraine to the Russian Federation (under articles 8(2)(a)(vii) and 8(2)(b)(viii) of the Rome Statute). The crimes were allegedly committed in Ukrainian occupied territory at least from 24 February 2022. There are reasonable grounds to believe that Mr Putin bears individual criminal responsibility for the aforementioned crimes, (i) for having committed the acts directly, jointly with others and/or through others (article 25(3)(a) of the Rome Statute), and (ii) for his failure to exercise control properly over civilian and military subordinates who committed the acts, or allowed for their commission, and who were under his effective authority and control, pursuant to superior responsibility (article 28(b) of the Rome Statute).
Ms Maria Alekseyevna Lvova-Belova, born on 25 October 1984, Commissioner for Children’s Rights in the Office of the President of the Russian Federation, is allegedly responsible for the war crime of unlawful deportation of population (children) and that of unlawful transfer of population (children) from occupied areas of Ukraine to the Russian Federation (under articles 8(2)(a)(vii) and 8(2)(b)(viii) of the Rome Statute). The crimes were allegedly committed in Ukrainian occupied territory at least from 24 February 2022. There are reasonable grounds to believe that Ms Lvova-Belova bears individual criminal responsibility for the aforementioned crimes, for having committed the acts directly, jointly with others and/or through others (article 25(3)(a) of the Rome Statute).
Pre-Trial Chamber II considered, based on the Prosecution’s applications of 22 February 2023, that there are reasonable grounds to believe that each suspect bears responsibility for the war crime of unlawful deportation of population and that of unlawful transfer of population from occupied areas of Ukraine to the Russian Federation, in prejudice of Ukrainian children.
The Chamber considered that the warrants are secret in order to protect victims and witnesses and also to safeguard the investigation. Nevertheless, mindful that the conduct addressed in the present situation is allegedly ongoing, and that the public awareness of the warrants may contribute to the prevention of the further commission of crimes, the Chamber considered that it is in the interests of justice to authorise the Registry to publicly disclose the existence of the warrants, the name of the suspects, the crimes for which the warrants are issued, and the modes of liability as established by the Chamber.
The abovementioned warrants of arrests were issued pursuant to the applications submitted by the Prosecution on 22 February 2023.
🐣 RT @dansabbagh Russia is sustaining “1200, 1300 even 1500” casualties a day in its current offensive, mostly in Bakhmut. Killed to wounded ratio is one to three – senior Nato official, speaking on condition of anonymity.
🐣 RT @ReportWar1 🇺🇦🇧🇾The Ukrainian command is removing the 47th Brigade and part of the National Guard from the Belarusian borders. The soldiers who provoked the Belarusian border guards will be sent to Bakhmut, Kupyansk and Vuhledar. -by UkraineRuNews ¤ #UkraineRussianWar #Russia #Ukraine #Belarus
😅 RT @ heartagram83 “The Wanker group… excuse me. The Wagner group is wanking in Bakhmut for 9 months but can’t finish the job” 🤣🤣
⋙ 🐣 RT @saintjavelin Oh no! Putin’s video diary was LEAKED! 😳
💽 https://twitter.com/heartagram83/status/1636746367325605888?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @BHL From #Kharkiv to #Bakhmut and #Kherson, I traveled all over #Ukraine frontline. And I don’t believe, for 1 minute, the little chatter I feel rising about the exhaustion of the #Ukrainian defenders and the debates about #Zelensky’s strategy. We are the ones who are tired. Not them
WaPo Editorial: Ron DeSantis’s pandering on Ukraine is dangerously wrong https://tinyurl.com/mvsv6tsj “Mr. DeSantis betrays the hollowness of his rhetoric about fighting for ‘freedom’ by turning his back on the most inspiring freedom fighters in the world today”
🐣 RT @BillKristol Just saw Ron DeSantis’s book, “The Courage To Be Free,” at Hudson News. ¤ You know who’s providing THE example of the courage to be free in today’s world? The people of Ukraine. ¤ Whom DeSantis doesn’t support.
WaPo: Hunter Biden sues laptop repair shop owner, citing invasion of privacy https://tinyurl.com/3u27452s
// The lawsuit, a counter-move against John Paul Mac Isaac, escalates the legal battle surrounding the president’s son at a sensitive moment.
🐣 RT @ChuckPfarrer BAKMUT AXIS/1320 UTC 17 MAR/RU maintains important lodgments in the SW urban area of Bakhmut. UKR troops hold defense positions along the rail right-of-way, the H-32 HWY and Korsunskogo Street southern urban area. //Urban TACMAP to follow.// #BakhmutMap
🌎 https://twitter.com/ChuckPfarrer/status/1636717902136057856?s=20/photo/1
⭕ 16 Mar 2023
NewYorker, Susan Glasser: The G.O.P. and the Ghosts of Iraq https://tinyurl.com/y4x58pcn “[I]t’s fair to say that the invasion of Iraq led not so much to a flourishing democracy in that country as it did to a struggling one here at home”
// Ukraine shows that Republicans have moved a long way from the Party of George W. Bush
[…] Much as the Vietnam War did for a previous generation, the failures in Iraq shattered American confidence, shaped future debates over the use of military force, made the concept of democracy promotion itself suspect, distracted from rising threats posed by the revisionist great powers Russia and China, and splintered the previously unquestioned Republican commitment to a robustly internationalist American foreign policy.
Those rifts have been on full display this week, as leading lights of the party that brought us the Iraq War have publicly feuded over the enormous sums of American military assistance provided to Ukraine since Russia’s invasion. Trump, with his oft-stated public admiration for Vladimir Putin, is a longtime skeptic, and, on Monday, the other main contender for the Republican nomination in 2024, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, publicly joined him. In a remarkable statement dismissing the war as little more than a “territorial dispute,” DeSantis seemed to signal how much he thinks Republican sentiment has shifted since the Bush era. You don’t have to support the disastrous invasion of Iraq to acknowledge that Russia’s barbaric war of aggression against its neighbor Ukraine is wrong, and yet that is where both Trump and DeSantis have now landed. DeSantis’s comments to Fox News’ Tucker Carlson—who night after night preaches to his TV audience against foreign entanglements, including in Ukraine—drew strong pushback from the remaining Republican hawks in the old Bush mold. The Wall Street Journal editorial board called it his “first big mistake.” Lindsey Graham called it a “Neville Chamberlain approach” of appeasement. Nikki Haley pointedly observed that DeSantis was just “copying” Trump with his new position.
DeSantis, back in the pre-Trump era of 2015, publicly bashed Obama for not providing enough arms to Ukraine. His flip-flop is so telling. There may still be Bush-style internationalists left in Washington, but it says everything about the trajectory of the Party’s foreign-policy thinking that both of its 2024 front-runners think that’s not where the primary voters they seek stand. Between them, Trump and DeSantis have support from nearly eighty per cent of the Republican electorate, according to the latest Quinnipiac poll.
… In private … Bush has never wavered from his insistence that the Iraq War was the right call. During a February 23rd private reception hosted by the Business Roundtable, held in honor of the publication of “Hand-Off,” a new book edited by the Bush national-security adviser Stephen Hadley containing the declassified transition memos sent by his national-security team to the incoming Obama Administration, Bush made off-the-record remarks defending his decision to invade Iraq. The former President told the crowd that it was the right decision at the time and he has no regrets, one attendee, a veteran of the Bush Administration, told me. He added, “Bush is completely unrepentant. It’s pretty stunning.” Feaver, who also attended, acknowledged Bush’s unchanged views. “I have never heard President Bush say anything different on Iraq than he said in his memoirs,” in which, Feaver recalled, “he made the case for why he made the decisions he made and why he thought they were still the right decision.”
Many officials other than Bush himself, of course, have admitted the invasion was a mistake, “a grave and costly error,” as the former Bush speechwriter David Frum wrote in The Atlantic this week. I believe there is a straight line that leads from that debacle to the political mess we are in today. Twenty years ago this week, I recall sitting in a beachside restaurant at a hotel in Kuwait, waiting for the invasion to begin and wondering if my friend, a journalist who had been through the political battles of the Vietnam era, was right when he warned several young American soldiers sitting near us that another Vietnam-like “quagmire” might be in store.
He turned out to be prescient. But neither of us imagined the consequences here in the United States, where two decades later it’s fair to say that the invasion of Iraq led not so much to a flourishing democracy in that country as it did to a struggling one here at home.
WaPo Editorial: Ron DeSantis’s pandering on Ukraine is dangerously wrong https://tinyurl.com/mvsv6tsj “Mr. DeSantis betrays the hollowness of his rhetoric about fighting for ‘freedom’ by turning his back on the most inspiring freedom fighters in the world today”
🐣 RT @TWMCLtd On a similar point, last night #Ukraine confirmed that it had demoted a Commander who talked about horrific losses. ¤ “Kupol” said of 500 men, 100 died and the rest were wounded. ¤ The Army said his numbers were exaggerated and he wasn’t authorised to speak to the media.
ResoluteSquare, Rick Wilson: Those Are The Screams of Millions of GOP Normie Hearts Breaking https://tinyurl.com/wm7sw2ha
// Since 2015 the persistent magical thinking inside the Republican establishment of Washington operatives, elite donors, and legacy conservative media has failed them repeatedly. DeSantis just did it to them again.
How many times will it take before the gentry conservatives learn their lesson? No one is coming to save them. ¤ Since 2015 the persistent magical thinking inside the Republican establishment of Washington operatives, elite donors, and legacy conservative media has failed them repeatedly. Since the moment Trump slithered down the faux-gold escalator, they’ve consistently managed to set themselves up for disappointment and heartbreak in their awkwardly arranged marriage with the MAGA base.
This week’s lesson came from an unlikely source; Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, the rockstar dreamboat Fox favorite of the Please God Let Trump Die Soon faction of the Republican Party, blew it.
When Fox host Tucker Carlson asked for his position on Ukraine, DeSantis didn’t just lose his status as a savior of the pre-Trump foreign policy and national security GOP. He went all in with the overtly pro-Vladimir Putin Carlson faction of the MAGA base, adopting the position, framing, and rhetoric of the wee Russian warmonger.
For DeSantis, Ukraine is a mere “territorial dispute” between Ukraine and Russia, not a brutal war of aggression launched entirely on orders from the Kremlin. He played down the massive consequences to Europe, NATO, and the world of Putin’s murderous rampage by saying Ukraine was not in America’s vital national interests. He falsely portrayed America’s aid to Ukraine, making it seem unaccountable and unlimited.
Although DeSantis is known for obsessing over the smallest detail of a Disney movie’s content, obscure books in school libraries, or tweets from his critics, he somehow managed to find Russia’s war crimes, targeting of civilians, and overall brutality not worthy of comment.
From Truman to Obama, American Presidents stood against the Russian threat to peace and security in Europe and the world. DeSantis had an easy option and failed. DeSantis could have evoked Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush to claim his place in the long line of GOP stalwarts facing Russian aggression, showing he was more than a Trump clone.
He instead betrayed that long arc of Presidential leadership, currying favor with Putin and Tucker Carlson, today’s Lord Haw Haw. ¤ The shock and pain in Big Conservatism’s social media feeds and writings were glaringly evident. ¤ They had pinned so many hopes on the Governor of Florida. Their lovingly crafted paeans to DeSantis were as frequent as they were gushing, often bordering on restraining-order-I-won’t-be-ignored fanboying. They painted DeSantis as a singular political and legal genius, a rock-solid conservative, and, most importantly, their exit strategy from the hellscape of Trumplandia.
Never mind his manic culture warrior act, his wild government overreach, his embrace of bully-boy authoritarian capitalism, and his snippy, constipated affect. Anyone paying the slightest attention could see the red flags, but D.C. writers and consultants didn’t want to imagine their dream date for 2024 was imperfect.
The heartbreak among the dying faction of the old GOP is on painful display. How could he? He’s supposed to be the smart one. The good one. He’d unite the tribe and bring the populists and conservatives back into accord and harmony. He was going to be the one to end the Trump nightmare.
Even in Florida, a state DeSantis rules with an iron fist, a juvenile temper, and an instinct for instant revenge at the smallest slight, Senator Marco Rubio took aim squarely at DeSantis, saying, “Obviously, he doesn’t deal with foreign policy every day as governor.” Lindsay Graham, John Cornyn, and others expressed their shock and disappointment.
It begs a simple question; do they not know today’s MAGA GOP? ¤ From the moment Trump began his long, parasitic consumption of the Republican Party, conservatives have rationalized, justified, and day-drank away the realities of the moment. Conservatism as an ideology in America is a dead religion where the dying priests hope that someday they’ll return to the people’s hearts.
The grunting populism that replaced it caters to the worst instincts of mankind and rewards transgression, rage, revenge, and the raw exercise of power. National security conservatism in which America stood as a leader in the international order, maintained strong alliances, and engaged in leadership beyond the vulgar transactionalism of Trump’s America-as-a-protection-racket is now actively despised by the MAGA horde. The MAGA base sees Putin as their kind of leader, the tough guy owning the libs by invading a nation whose leader refused to help Trump win in 2020.
It took a near-fatal dose of hopium on the part of the major donors and operatives to stake their hopes on a governor of modest political and interpersonal skills like DeSantis. Their frenzied imagining of DeSantis winning over MAGA, soundly defeating Trump, somehow papering over his radical culture war in Florida, and returning the GOP to business as usual was as lurid as they were absurd.
DeSantis was never going to save the elite GOP from the unwashed masses who run the party now. Set aside the hollow signifiers of his elite Ivy education and stare into the populist void and it’s easy to see; DeSantis isn’t just a captive of the MAGA base; he’s one of its leaders. The National Review set thought DeSantis was fooling the rubes to win the primary when he was fooling them all along to win over the establishment.
Given his prior support for Ukraine while serving in Congress, it’s abundantly clear that DeSantis has adopted the most important ethos of the GOP today; obey the mob, keep Tucker on your side, and when in doubt, side with Putin. ¤ And that’s a party with no room for the conservatives of yesterday.
🐣 RT @ SpiroAgnewGhost Nearly two hours after he posted this on his Truth Social garbage site, it has less than 5000 likes. Even his cult members are getting tired of his endless malignant narcissism and rants.
⋙ 🐣 RT @ SpiroAgnewGhost This is not a parody.
[TextLink:] https://twitter.com/SpiroAgnewGhost/status/1636518612847726594?s=20/photo/1
[Text:] Statement from the Trump Campaign on the Manhattan DA’s Witch-Hunt
*President Donald J. Trump is completely innocent, he did nothing wrong, and even the biggest, most Radical Left Democrats are making that clear. From Russia, Russia, Russia, to the Mueller Hoax, to Impeachment Hoaxes I and 2, and even the Unlawful Mar-a-Lago Raid, Democrats have investigated and attacked President Trump since before he was elected – and they’ve failed every time. Now Democrats are at it again, pushing the “Nuclear Button” and attacking a President because of a disgraced extortionist. This is happening because President Trump is leading in the polls by a large margin against both Democrats and Republicans, and there’s never been anything so blatant in American political history. If the Democrats can do this to President Trump, they can do it to you.
‘The latest Witch-Hunt is being brought on by George Soros-backed Radical Left Democrat prosecutor Alvin Bragg. Bragg has made political donations to fellow Radical Democrats like Raphael Warnock, and now Bragg is making a political donation of a different kind to Joe Biden. Everyone knows it’s a sham. In fact, the Department of Justice stocked the DA’s office with top people from DC to help “Get Trump” at a local level.
“Americans will not tolerate Radical Left Democrats turning our justice system into an injustice system to influence a presidential election, which is all they want to do. Our Country is not going to let this happen. This will backfire massively for the Democrat Party, and end in disgrace for our Nation.” – Steve Cheung, spokesperson
‼️ 🐣 RT @RonFilipkowski Trump says Russia is not a threat, our greatest threat is our American representatives, we need to reevaluate the purpose of NATO, and most of the people in the State Dept, DOD and Intel Services need to be fired so he can put the right people in.
💽 https://twitter.com/RonFilipkowski/status/1636446515471196167?s=20/photo/1
💽 https://twitter.com/CBKNEWS121/status/1636448055216971791?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @stuartpstevens .@TuckerCarlson, we met when you were rejected by CIA, writing for Talk Magazine. Desperate to be taken seriously. You were fired by CNN, then MSNBC. Bitter failues who feel rejected are classic targets for hostile foreign power recruitment. Easy to see why you were targeted
NYT, David French: Reagan Wouldn’t Recognize the G.O.P. Discord Over Ukraine https://tinyurl.com/yckmf9th “Ron DeSantis and Donald Trump … who’ve built their political brands around fighting their domestic political enemies now wilt in the face of inferior Russian arms”
🐣 RT @SpiroAgnewGhost What. A. Fucking. Lunatic.
[TextLink:] https://twitter.com/SpiroAgnewGhost/status/1636438917200367616?s=20/photo/1
[Text:] 🐣 RT @realDonaldTrump There MUST be a complete commitment to dismantling the entire globalist neo-con establishment that is perpetually dragging us into endless wars, pretending to fight for freedom and democracy abroad, while they turn us into a third-world country and a third-world dictatorship right here at home! #AGENDA47
AJConstitution: EXCLUSIVE: Behind the scenes of Trump grand jury; jurors hear 3rd leaked Trump call https://tinyurl.com/3fut8tws
🐣 RT @ Heroiam_Slava ❗️❗️❗️ This is how ruscist planes Su-27 shot down a US reconnaissance UAV MQ-9 Reaper.
🖼 💽 https://twitter.com/Heroiam_Slava/status/1636313137174462465?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @ChuckPfarrer BAKHMUT CITY /1745 UTC 16 MAR/ CRITICAL/ RU forces have made an important advance in the SW urban area. The line of contact now conforms to Korsunskogo Street. The development jeopardizes the S quadrant of the Bakhmut urban area. ¤ NOTE: New street projection of city.
🌎 https://twitter.com/ChuckPfarrer/status/1636424096320765953?s=20/photo/1
🐣 📋 RT @front_ukrainian The Armed Forces of Ukraine use more than 90000 155-mm ammunition per month,— WSJ ¤ Before the war, the US could produce approximately 13000 shells per month. This year, this monthly figure jumped to 20000 shells and the US plans to increase production to 50,000 next year.
🐣 RT @KaivanShroff Fox News has spent the week lying about SVB donating over $70 million to Black Lives Matter. ¤ SVB donated $0 to Black Lives Matter. ¤ More racist propaganda.
NBC: Grand jury heard phone call of Trump pressuring Georgia speaker to overturn Biden’s victory https://tinyurl.com/57b553mv “Trump asked Ralston who would stop him from holding a special session. According to Kohrs, Ralston responded, ‘A federal judge, that’s who’”
// The special grand jury’s foreperson told NBC News that Trump tried to pressure the then-speaker into calling a special legislative session to overturn the results in the battleground state.
The Fulton County special grand jury heard a phone call between former President Donald Trump and Georgia House Speaker David Ralston as part of its investigation into efforts to overturn the 2020 election results in Georgia, the jury’s foreperson, Emily Kohrs, told NBC News on Wednesday.
During the December call, Trump attempted to pressure the then-speaker into calling a special legislative session to overturn President Joe Biden’s victory in the battleground state, Kohrs said. ¤ The call recording, which was first reported by The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, lasted about 10 minutes, Kohrs said. She recalled that Trump asked Ralston who would stop him from holding a special session. According to Kohrs, Ralston responded, “A federal judge, that’s who.”
🐣 RT @ChuckPfarrer BAKHMUT AXIS /1410 UTC 16 MAR/CRITICAL/ Russian forces have registered important gains in the urban areas of Bakhmut. Critically, RU troops are in contact along the rail right-of-way, the H-32 HWY and the Korsunskogo / Ushinskogo Street cut-off in the southern urban area. … It is assessed that UKR will soon have to determine if a retrograde maneuver from the Bakhmut urban area is in order. A Bakhmut City map will be released later this evening (UTC).
🌎 https://twitter.com/ChuckPfarrer/status/1636366921544368129?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @ TreasChest 😔A year ago, on March 16, the occupiers launched an airstrike on the Drama Theater in Mariupol ¤ At that time, more than a thousand residents of the city were in the premises. As a result of the impact, many people died, including children. ¤ In front of the theater was an inscription – “CHILDREN”. It was an attempt to show that peaceful residents of Mariupol were in the building. But this did not stop the bloodthirsty invaders…
It hurts💔 ¤ 📹: Mariupol City Council ¤ Channel 24
💽 https://twitter.com/TreasChest/status/1636127494377025537?s=20/photo/1
⭕ 15 Mar 2023
The Bulwark, Will Saletan: The Ukraine Untruths of Disingenuous DeSantis https://tinyurl.com/2t7tmbj9 “A Democratic president is standing up to Putin. And he’s facing a Republican who would rather attack Mickey Mouse”
// His recent remarks about the war have been cynical and deceptive.
🐣 RT @jrothkopf DeSantis’ comment that the future of Ukraine was not a vital national interest of the US was reckless and proves he’s unfit to be president. But it’s worse. It undermines US & Western goals, helps Russia & will likely cost thousands of lives.
⋙ DailyBeast, David Rothkopf: DeSantis’ Ukraine Comments Show He’s Playing for the Pro-Putin Wing of the GOP https://tinyurl.com/48v8ye2w
// The Florida governor told Tucker Carlson that defending Ukraine was not in the U.S.’ national interest. This is Trump-level toadyism.
🐣 RT @SpiroAgnewGhost Imagine trying to be a lawyer of this deranged lunatic.
[TextLink:] https://twitter.com/SpiroAgnewGhost/status/1636213755347636224?s=20/photo/1
[Text:] 🐣 RT @realDonaldTrump I did NOTHING wrong in the “Horseface” case. I see she showed up in New York today trying to drum up some publicity for herself. I haven’t seen or spoken to her since I took a picture with her on a golf course, in full golf gear including a hat, close to 18 years ago. She knows nothing about me other than her conman lawyer, Avanatti, and convicted liar and felon, jailbird Michael Cohen, may have schemed up. Never had an affair with her, just another false acquisition by a SleazeBag. Witch Hunt!
🧵 RT @AleksandrX13 WHY do russian conscripts allow themselves to be lϵd to the slaυցhtϵr in the hundreds of thοusands? ¤ Why do their parents/wives/girl friends allow this? ¤ WHY DON’T THEY REBEL? ¤ Here are the answers. Thread 😎 ¤ 1/21
📌 https://twitter.com/AleksandrX13/status/1636157695114739713?s=20/photo/1
// Russian education indoctrination propaganda
YahooNews/LATimes Editorial: DeSantis’ Ukraine comment is reckless. It’s an invasion, not a ‘territorial dispute’ https://tinyurl.com/29tee76k His arrogance and laziness on foreign policy are matched only by his arrogance and laziness on domestic policy: “Big hat, no cattle”
🐣 RT @SpencerGuard “Russia invaded the sovereign nation of Ukraine…no threat whatsoever to Russia…this is and remains a Russian frontal assault on the rules based international order that has been in place for 80 years” – General Milley today #RussiaUkraineWar
💽 https://twitter.com/SpencerGuard/status/1636159852807618560?s=20/photo/1
// Milley, Austin speak at Rammstein Group meeting today
⋙ 🐣 RT @SpencerGuard “Putin can end this war and he can end it today and he needs to do so. Free people are not easily conquered and the Ukrainian people are free and they will never give up in their fight to stay free.”
🐣 RT @TheTweetOfJohn Sen. Lindsey Graham told an Atlanta-area grand jury last year that following the 2020 election, “if somebody had told Trump that aliens came down and stole Trump ballots, that Trump would’ve believed it.” https://tinyurl.com/3mpnxy5p
🐣 RT @AWeissmann_ Trump NY defense: I was extorted. That is an admission he paid $ (which he had been denying) and the $ was not for legal fees (the cover story). Because the NY criminal case reportedly focuses on the crime of making false business records — his “defense” is an confession.
🐣 RT @ruthbenghiat Why should the PM of Estonia even have to waste her time considering what the Florida Fascist thinks? He’s gunning to be the face of American autocracy and aligning himself with Putin because that is how he can get ahead.
⋙ 🐣 RT @amanpour Ron DeSantis says getting “further entangled in a territorial dispute between Ukraine & Russia” isn’t in US “vital national interests,” but @kajakallas disagrees: “Would-be aggressors in the world are watching very carefully… If aggression pays off, then there are no limits.”
💽 https://twitter.com/ruthbenghiat/status/1636116001212313601?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @ randymot4 Republicans have fallen in large numbers for Russian disinformation and propaganda. The material focuses on our biases and many people jump right in. This is affecting the party far more than I thought possible. I am ashamed of so many “patriots” fooled by this.
[TextLink:] https://twitter.com/randymot4/status/1635933116995887104?s=20/photo/1
[Text:] It has cost the USA less than 5% of their annual Defense Budget to destroy 50% of the Combat Capability of the 2nd most powerful military on earth. …and not a single American serviceman has so much as broken a fingernail!
A BLOODY EXCELLENT RETURN ON INVESTMENT BY ANY MEASURE!
🐣 RT @SpencerGuard If you’re dumb enough to say/believe US support for Ukraine is not a vital national interest. If you are so ignorant to foreign policy, geopolitics, or the global international order that allows the US to thrive, then you are not deserving of public office, let alone Presidency.
⋙ 🐣 he’s trying to “own the libs,” which itself proves the GOP ~ or at least the MAGA base ~ is utterly unserious and unworthy of national office; most of the serious Republicans left because of Trump: in his cravenness and raw ambition, DeSantis may be worse; he sickens me
🐣 RT @tribelaw “The real story behind the collapse of SVB has much more to do with the political and economic environment of the previous decade than it does with wokeness, a word that signifies nothing other than conservative disdain for anything that seems liberal.”
TheGuardian: Federal investigators examined Trump Media for possible money laundering, sources say https://tinyurl.com/2zk6d5st The money, okayed by Don Jr, “centers on a part-owner of Paxum Bank … who appears to be a relation of Putin ally Aleksandr Smirnov”
// Exclusive: New York prosecutors expanded criminal inquiry of company last year and examined acceptance of $8m with suspected Russian ties
🐣 RT @RFERL Zelenskiy said in his evening video address on March 14 that Ukraine’s top military command unanimously favors defending the sector of eastern Ukraine that includes the besieged city of Bakhmut and inflicting maximum losses on the enemy.
⋙ RFE/RL: Ukraine Says Determined To Defend Bakhmut As Russia Keeps Up Pressure On The City https://tinyurl.com/32evnm4f
🐣 RT @NOELreports ”Heavy fighting awaits Ukraine in the spring and summer. The United States will help solve the problem of lack of ammunition in the Armed Forces of Ukraine,” says Pentagon Speaker Pat Ryder.
🐣 .@mccaffreyr3 @McFaul @AVindman @stavridisj @StateDept @SecDef @ABlinken
⋙ 🐣 RT @NOELreports Officer Leityokha from the 93rd brigade rings the alarm and talks about a ‘catastrophic shortage of shells’ in Bakhmut. He continues: ‘We know 75% of the firing positions, but can’t hit them. The command also forbids using specific weapons because its “unaffordable”.’
⭕ 14 Mar 2023
🐣 RT @mccaffreyr3 MSNBC. NICOLLE WALLACE. 14 March 23. Gov DeSantis statement that freedom of Ukraine not a U.S. vital national security interest has done immeasurable harm to NATO and the US. A gift to Putin and his criminal invasion of Ukraine.
💽 https://twitter.com/mccaffreyr3/status/1635865157548277760?s=20/photo/1
🐣 📊 RT @ McCormackJohn New Gallup poll:
62% of Republicans say Russia-Ukraine conflict is a critical threat to U.S. vital interests
29% say important but not critical
9% say not important threat at all
https://tinyurl.com/2x4sujdk
TheAtlantic, David Frum: Is Ron DeSantis Flaming Out Already? https://tinyurl.com/27kespxm “DeSantis’s statement on Ukraine was everything that Russian President Vladimir Putin and his admirers could have wished for from a presumptive candidate for president.”
// The Florida governor has a plan to win the Fox News primary—and lose everything else.
DeSantis’s statement on Ukraine was everything that Russian President Vladimir Putin and his admirers could have wished for from a presumptive candidate for president. The governor began by listing America’s “vital interests” in a way that explicitly excluded NATO and the defense of Europe. He accepted the present Russian line that Putin’s occupation of Ukraine is a mere “territorial dispute.” He endorsed “peace” as the objective without regard to the terms of that peace, another pro-Russian talking point. He conceded the Russian argument that American aid to Ukraine amounts to direct involvement in the conflict. He endorsed and propagated the fantasy—routinely advanced by pro-Putin guests on Fox talk shows—that the Biden administration is somehow plotting “regime change” in Moscow. He denounced as futile the economic embargo against Russia—and baselessly insinuated that Ukraine is squandering U.S. financial assistance. He ended by flirting with the idea of U.S. military operations against Mexico, an idea that originated on the extreme right but has migrated toward the Republican mainstream. …
Desantis is a machine engineered to win the Republican presidential nomination. The hardware is a lightly updated version of donor-pleasing mechanics from the Paul Ryan era. The software is newer. DeSantis operates on the latest culture-war code: against vaccinations, against the diversity industry, against gay-themed books in school libraries. The packaging is even more up-to-the-minute. Older models—Mitt Romney, Jeb Bush—made some effort to appeal to moderates and independents. None of that from DeSantis. He refuses to even speak to media platforms not owned by Rupert Murdoch. His message to the rest of America is more of the finger-pointing disdain he showed last year for high-school students who wore masks when he visited a college. …
Florida Republicans will soon pass—and DeSantis pledged he would sign—a law banning abortion after six weeks. That bill is opposed by 57 percent of those surveyed even inside Florida. Another poll found that 75 percent of Floridians oppose the ban. It also showed that 77 percent oppose permitless concealed carry, which DeSantis supports, and that 61 percent disapprove of his call to ban the teaching of critical race theory as well as diversity, equity, and inclusion policies on college campuses. As the political strategist Simon Rosenberg noted: “Imagine how these play outside FL.”
But even this understates the DeSantis design flaw. ¤ More dangerous than the unpopular positions DeSantis holds are the popular positions he does not hold. What is DeSantis’s view on health care? He doesn’t seem to have one. President Joe Biden has delivered cheap insulin to U.S. users. Good idea or not? Silence from DeSantis. There’s no DeSantis jobs policy; he hardly speaks about inflation. Homelessness? The environment? Nothing. Even on crime, DeSantis must avoid specifics, because specifics might remind his audience that Florida’s homicide numbers are worse than New York’s or California’s.
DeSantis just doesn’t seem to care much about what most voters care about. And voters in turn do not care much about what DeSantis cares most about. …
[…] His approach to winning the nomination will put the general election beyond his grasp. He must hope that some external catastrophe will defeat his Democratic opponent for him—a recession, maybe—because DeSantis is choosing a path that cannot get him to his goal.
NYT, Jamelle Bouie: The Boys Who Cried ‘Woke!’ https://tinyurl.com/bdzx93ph “[T]here is no evidence that any diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives were responsible for the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank. It is nonsense”
WaPo: U.S. fires back at claim that Tucker Carlson footage was withheld https://tinyurl.com/3t8xzwtz Carlson showed several minutes of 41,000 HOURS of surveillance video in air to imply that the January 6 pro-Trump demonstrators at the Capitol had been peaceful
// Prosecutors say video of Jacob Chansley and other defendants was fully provided to defense in 2021
WaPo: The 72-hour scramble to save the United States from a banking crisis https://tinyurl.com/2uvb8nju It could have been Great Recession 2.0. But it wasn’t.
🐣 RT @WarintheFuture “Putin is motivated by a “fever dream of decline.” The depopulation of Russia, he said, “feeds Putin’s apocalyptic sense of his own grand responsibilities.” Another fine piece from @MaxBoot
⋙ 📋 WaPo, Max Boot: Russia’s population crisis is making Putin more dangerous https://tinyurl.com/4e68eutr
// Vladimir Putin may be seeking military solutions to his country’s demographic decline.
Russia’s population loss is expected to continue — down to 135 million people by 2050 and 126 million by 2100. Currently the world’s ninth-most populous country, it is projected to fall to number 22 by century’s end. Demographics is, to some extent, destiny. Russia’s days as a great power are numbered.
Putin is acutely conscious of the problem and talks about it all the time. In September 2021, he lamented that Russia now would have a population of 500 million were it not for the loss of the Russian empire after the 1917 revolution and the 1991 dissolution of the Soviet Union, which he has called “the largest geopolitical catastrophe of the century.”
🐣 RT @sentdefender U.S. Defense Officials do not believe that the Russian Su-27 running into the MQ-9 Reaper over the Black Sea was meant to happen or any way Intentional; Air Force Officers after seeing the Video from the Drone stated that, “ The Russian Pilots appeared to be Amateurs.”
🖼 https://twitter.com/sentdefender/status/1635772537194856450?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @ukraine_map A US 🇺🇸 MQ-9 Reaper Drone was hit by a Russian Fighter Jet over the Black Sea today, says the US Military ¤ The Su-27 acted recklessly by dumping fuel on the Drone, then hitting its propellor, causing it to crash ¤ This appears to be a purposeful attack by Russia on the US Military
🐣 RT @ChuckPfarrer BAKHMUT CITY /2120 UTC 14 MAR/ RU forces have advanced across the T-05-13 HWY in the northern and southern urban areas of Bakhmut. UKR forces mounted a counterattack at Dubovo-Vasylivka; a RU thrust at Ivanivske was also broken up.
🌎 https://twitter.com/ChuckPfarrer/status/1635752631187521541?s=20/photo/1
⭕ 13 Mar 2023
📊 Gallup Poll: Americans’ Favorable Rating of Russia Sinks to New Low of 9% https://tinyurl.com/2x4sujdk from high of 65% in 2002
◕ https://twitter.com/Auriandra/status/1636296359438426113?s=20/photo/1
SciAm: There’s a Psychological ‘Vaccine’ against Misinformation https://tinyurl.com/5n7kvypm
// A social psychologist found that showing people how manipulative techniques work can create resilience against misinformation
🚫 WaPo: Ukraine short of skilled troops and munitions as losses, pessimism grow https://tinyurl.com/ys98fxeb
// sole identified source call sign Kupol; since demoted (3/16/2023)
WaPo: Trump claims violence he inspired on Jan. 6 was Pence’s fault https://tinyurl.com/54h7vuht T
// The former president suggested the riot could have been avoided if his vice president had cooperated in overturning the results
HuffPo: Trump Blames Mike Pence For Jan. 6 Violence For Not Going Along With His Coup Attempt https://tinyurl.com/bf43tsdr
// Trump was responding to his former vice president’s remarks, who said Saturday that Trump’s words and actions had endangered the lives of his family.
Donald Trump, whose coup attempt on Jan. 6, 2021, put his vice president’s life at risk as a mob of his supporters attacked the U.S. Capitol, on Monday blamed Mike Pence for the violence that day because he didn’t go along with the scheme.s “Had he sent the votes back to the legislators, they wouldn’t have had a problem with Jan. 6,” the former president told reporters on a flight to an Iowa campaign stop. “So in many ways, you can blame him for Jan. 6.” …
Trump’s new comments, reported by CBS Political Director Fin Gomez, who was among the reporters on Trump’s plane, came in response to Pence’s remarks on Saturday, when he said Trump’s words and deeds had nearly gotten his family killed.
🐣 RT @oneunderscore__ I’m telling you, they’re actually running with the “woke banks” thing. They’re already using scary placeholder acronyms ESG and DEI, which to them mean “diversity.” ¤ It serves to obfuscate the reality: there was a panicky bank run, frontrun by some of the GOP’s biggest donors.
// DEI: Diversity, equity, and inclusion; ESG: Environmental, social, and corporate governance
🐣 RT @atrupar Biden: “During the Obama administration, we put in place tough requirements on banks like SVB and Signature Bank, including the Dodd-Frank law to make sure that the crisis we saw in 2008 would not happen again. Unfortunately, the last admin rolled back some of these requirements”
💽 https://twitter.com/atrupar/status/1635269021095297024?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @ChuckPfarrer BAKHMUT/ 2245 UTC 13 MAR/ N of Soledar, UKR forces repelled attacks at Vasiukivka. On the M-03 HWY axis, RU assaults were broken up at Minkivka, Orikhovo-Vasylivka and Hyrhorivka & Berkhivka. The 0600 Gen’l Staff brief provided no follow up regarding UKR contact at Krasna Hora.
🌎 https://twitter.com/ChuckPfarrer/status/1635407957218451457?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @ChuckPfarrer BAKHMUT AXIS /1145 UTC 13 MAR/ RU/Wagner troops have renewed offensive actions. N of Soledar, UKR forces repelled attacks at Vasiukivka. On the M-03 HWY axis, RU assaults were broken up at Minkivka, Orikhovo-Vasylivka, Hyrhorivka and Berkhivka. The 0600 UK Gen’l Staff brief provided no follow up reportage regarding yesterday’s UKR contact at Krasna Hora. Combat continues in the urban area of Bakhmut. RU is assessed to have achieved scattered lodgments along the west bank of the Bakhmutka River. In the past 24 hours UKR conducted 6 aviation strike missions and one Suppression of Enemy Air Defense sortie.
🌎 https://twitter.com/ChuckPfarrer/status/1635243882538766337?s=20/photo/1
KyivIndependent: Commander: Russia’s Wagner forces trying to break into central Bakhmut, but suffering ‘significant losses’ https://tinyurl.com/ph3z8wst
The battlefield situation around Donetsk Oblast’s Bakhmut remains “difficult” as the assault units of the Russian state-backed mercenary group Wagner continue trying to break through the Ukrainian defense and advance to the central areas of the city, Oleksandr Syrskyi, the commander of Ukraine’s Ground Forces, said on March 13.
“In fierce battles, our defenders inflict significant losses on the enemy. All enemy attempts to capture the city are repelled by artillery, tanks, and other firepower,” Syrskyi said, as quoted by the Ukrainian defense ministry’s media center.
He added that Ukraine’s Armed Forces continued the defense of the “fortress,” as the Ukrainian authorities often call the embattled eastern city of Bakhmut, which has been Russia’s main target for over seven months.
Russia’s assault on Bakhmut relies heavily on Wagner Group forces, which have taken control of most of the eastern part of Bakhmut, according to the U.K. Defense Ministry’s daily intelligence update published on March 11. ¤ Wagner troops, however, are facing a new challenge with the Bakhmutka River that divides the city in two and now marks the front line.
President Volodymyr Zelensky told CNN on March 7 that Russian forces would have an “open road” to seize other critical settlements in eastern Ukraine if they capture Bakhmut, defending Kyiv’s decision to continue the city’s defense despite Ukrainian troops also suffering heavy losses.
🐣 RT @Ayei_Eloheichem Austin: “If the Ukrainians decide to reposition in some of the terrain that’s west of Bakhmut, I would not view that as an operational or a strategic setback…It’s more of a symbolic value than it is a strategic and operational value.”
[TextLink:] https://twitter.com/Ayei_Eloheichem/status/1635177613944823810?s=20/photo/1
↥ ↧
🐣 RT @Ayei_Eloheichem Strelkov steps in to stop me dooming over Bakhmut: “[The Ukrainians] already firmly hold half of Bakhmut, but even surrendering the remaining territory to [Wagner] will not change the final situation – during the winter…[Russia] failed to achieve any [strategic] success.”
[TextLink:] https://twitter.com/Ayei_Eloheichem/status/1635167772983570433?s=20/photo/1
[Text:] In Bakhmut, the advancement of Wagner units and PMCs is insignificant. Regarding the widely announced “counteroffensive” of the Armed Forces of Ukraine near the city – I’m almost sure that this is a “misinformation” – otherwise the military leaders would not have voiced it to the whole world. As part of the generally successful (for the enemy) completion of the “battle of attrition and gain of time”, deliberately carried out during the winter campaign by the command of the Armed Forces of Ukraine, no counteroffensives are needed. They already firmly hold half of Bakhmut, but even surrendering the remaining territory to the exhausted “orchestra” will not change the final situation – during the winter campaign, the RF Armed Forces failed to achieve any success went beyond purely tactical ones.
🐣 RT @ukraine_osint Ukrainian ground forces Colonel general Oleksandr Syrskyi: “The situation around Bakhmut remains difficult”. #WagnerPMC mercenaries are attacking from several directions trying to break through the defences of our troops and advance to the central districts of the town.
🐣 RT @AFP #BREAKING Ukraine says ‘fierce fighting’ raging for centre of Bakhmut
🐣 RT @DefenceHQ [UK] Latest Defence Intelligence update on the situation in Ukraine
13 March 2023
Find out more about Defence Intelligence: http://ow.ly/kZLe50Ng7te 🇺🇦 #StandWithUkraine 🇺🇦
[TextLink:] https://twitter.com/DefenceHQ/status/1635161301247840256?s=20/photo/1
● In recent weeks, Wagner Group owner Yevgeny Prigozhin has likely lost access to recruiting in Russian prisons due to his ongoing disputes with the Russian MoD leadership. Prigozhin is highly likely pivoting recruitment efforts towards free Russian citizens.
● Since the start of March 2023, Wagner has set up outreach teams based in sports centres in at least 40 locations across Russia. In recent days, masked Wagner recruiters also gave career talks in Moscow high schools, distributing questionnaires entitled application of a young warrior’ to collect the contact details of interested pupils.
● About half of the prisoners Wagner has already deployed in Ukraine have likely become casualties and the new initiatives are unlikely to make up for the loss of the convict recruit pipeline. If the ban endures, Prigozhin will likely be forced to reduce the scale or intensity of Wagner operations in Ukraine
⭕ 12 Mar 2023
🐣 RT @BillKristol On the politics of the banking announcement: The Administration should go on the offensive. Don’t begin by explaining why it’s not really a bailout. Say: We acted decisively to protect all Americans’ savings, while our critics wanted to do nothing and endanger those savings.
🐣 RT @EricColumbus As Fox debated how to handle Trump’s election lies, Tucker’s then-producer described their audience as “dumb” “cousin-fucking” “terrorists.”
[TextLink:] https://twitter.com/EricColumbus/status/1634928387142864896?s=20/photo/1 -2
⋙ WaPo: Ex-Trump aide at Fox wrestled with election lies, network’s interests https://tinyurl.com/22pykzw7
// Documents show Fox Vice President Raj Shah privately derided the White House’s narrative of a stolen election. But he also pushed back on efforts to dispute the claims.
🐣 RT @lnachman32 Only 1.2% of Taiwanese want unification with the PRC. Public opinion polls across the spectrum all show similarly low numbers. The idea of a “Chinese Commonwealth” is neither resurfacing, nor are any political or civil society leaders taking it seriously.
◕ https://twitter.com/lnachman32/status/1634937934381187073?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @MeidasTouch Whoa! Here it is. The moment in 2018 when Donald Trump removed the Dodd-Frank regulations that would have prevented the Silicon Valley Bank collapse. Don’t let anyone forget this.
💽 https://twitter.com/MeidasTouch/status/1634777100350783489?s=20/photo/1
// on 5/24/2018
🐣 RT @ChuckPfarrer BAKHMUT AXIS /1515 UTC 12 MAR/ UKR forces are reported to be engaged at Berkhivka and Krasna Hora, indicating that RU units have been driven back in the vicinity of the T-05-14 and M-04 junction. Urban combat continues in the city of Bakhmut.
🌎 https://twitter.com/ChuckPfarrer/status/1634938724655173639?s=20/photo/1
⋙ 🐣 RT @ChuckPfarrer EDITORIAL CORRECTION: RU units have been driven back in the vicinity of the T-05-14 and M-03 junction. A typographical error in the Key Developments report erroneously indicated the T-04 HWY.
🐣 RT @ZelenskyyUa I conferred the title of Hero of Ukraine upon Oleksandr Matsiyevsky. A Ukrainian warrior. A man who will be known and remembered forever. For his bravery, for his confidence in Ukraine and for his “Glory to Ukraine!”. Glory to the Hero! Glory to the Heroes! Glory to Ukraine!
WaPo: Biden makes moves foreshadowing campaign to come, angering some liberals https://tinyurl.com/2p998wf3 “He is positioning himself for the general election by taking positions that appeal to swing voters who may have concerns about crime and the border”
// The president is highlighting popular Democratic stances on social programs while also riling progressives on crime and immigration
🐣 RT @Gerashchenko_en How sadly they sigh and roll their eyes! Everything is obvious even with sound off. ¤ Terrorist Girkin-Strelkov says with suffering – we lost everything, we’ll lose Transnistria and won’t be able to take Odesa.
💽 https://twitter.com/Gerashchenko_en/status/1634835914731163651?s=20/photo/1
WaPo: Pence says ‘history will hold Donald Trump accountable’ for Jan. 6th https://tinyurl.com/mrjrahtu //➔ I have an idea! what if the Legal System holds him accountable first?
// ‘Make no mistake about it, what happened that day was a disgrace,’ the former vice president said at Washington’s annual Gridiron Dinner
In a speech Saturday night, former vice president Mike Pence delivered what amounted to his strongest rebuke of Donald Trump, criticizing the former president for his role in the lead-up to the Jan. 6 attack on the United States Capitol as well as attempts to rewrite the history of that day.
“President Trump was wrong,” Pence said. “I had no right to overturn the election. And his reckless words endangered my family and everyone at the Capitol that day. And I know that history will hold Donald Trump accountable.”
The former vice president was speaking at the Gridiron dinner, a white-tie event thrown by journalists in Washington, D.C. that this year featured speeches by Secretary of State Antony Blinken and New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy in addition to Pence. The annual event tends to be a lighthearted affair, with skits and parody songs performed by members of the Washington press corps. …
“The American people have a right to know what took place at the Capitol on January 6th,” he said. “But make no mistake about it, what happened that day was a disgrace, and it mocks decency to portray it in any other way.”
🐣 RT @SarahAshtonLV A video tour of a mobile hospital prototype intended for use by the ZSU. ¤ An engineering marvel with a titanium exterior and full self contained. ¤ 80 KM/H. ¤ Mine proof. ¤ Chemical attack proof. ¤ Ukraine has already won.
💽 https://twitter.com/SarahAshtonLV/status/1634813568016064512?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @IuliiaMendel Yesterday, there were 90 russian attacks on different Ukrainian regions. It’s not the biggest number. Sometimes our army counts 170 shelling! But imagine living in the country at least quarter of each is being shelled every day for 90-170 times? #RussiaIsATerroristState
⋙ 🐣 RT @gpward72 1090 russians liquidated, 2nd highest daily number since daily numbers began to be published
⋙ 🐣 RT @flat300 During WWII London suffered horrific levels of bombing in a much smaller area than the size of Ukraine but remained resolute. Stay strong … “some 25,000 bombs were dropped on the Port of London alone.” https://www.britannica.com/event/the-Blitz
⭕ 11 Mar 2023
🐣 RT @ChuckPfarrer UKRAINIAN PATRIOTS: Russia’s Kinzhal hyper-sonic missiles are difficult to intercept- but the aircraft that launch them can be interdicted by Patriot missiles. Air defense systems are vital for protecting UKR cities. Patriot will be a major upgrade.
◕ https://twitter.com/ChuckPfarrer/status/1634597716822040581?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @DefenseHQ The illegal and unprovoked invasion of Ukraine is continuing. ¤ The map below is the latest Defence Intelligence update on the situation in Ukraine – 11 March 2023. Find out more about Defence Intelligence’s use of language: http://ow.ly/QNCo50Ng5TC
🇺🇦 #StandWithUkraine 🇺🇦
● As Russia continues to suffer extremely heavy casualties, the impact varies dramatically across Russia’s regions. In proportion to the size of their population, the richest cities of Moscow and St Petersburg have been left relatively unscathed. This is especially true for the families of the country’s elite.
● On 21 February 2023, Russian senior officials were photographed making up the front two rows of the audience of President Putin’s state of the nation speech. None of these are known to have children serving in the military.
● In many of the Eastern regions, deaths are likely running, as a percentage of population, at a rate of 30-40 times higher than in Moscow. In many places, ethnic minorities fake the biggest hit; in Astrakhan some 75% of casualties come from the minority Kazakh and Tartar populations. As the Russian MoD seeks to address its continued deficit of combat personnel, insulating the better-off and more influential elements of Russian society will highly likely remain a major consideration.
🐣 RT @svdate To recap the state of the GOP presidential campaign, Ron DeSantis is filling auditoriums in Iowa while the coup-attempting former president is sitting in his country club in Palm Beach whining about it.
[TextLink:] https://twitter.com/svdate/status/1634225946961035265?s=20/photo/1
[Text:] 🐣 RT @realDonaldTrump Why on earth (farmer’s love earth!) would the wonderful people of the GREAT State of lowa vote for Ron DeSanctimonious when he voted and fought to KILL Ethanol (and will definitely do so if given the chance), voted 4 times, as a disciple of Paul Ryan, to decimate Social Security and MediCare, and bring the minimum age on Social Security to at least 70 years old (he wanted higher!). He will be in lowa on Friday to beg for mercy. I supported Ethanol, FIRED NAFTA, & made USMCA & China Trade Deals!
🐣 RT @Bill43111 Trump is flailing. The Tucker Tapes were as big a bust as the Twitter Files. Trump’s army attacked our Capitol and he watched and cheered them on for over 3 hours and didn’t lift a finger to stop it.
[TextLink:] https://twitter.com/Bill43111/status/1634363618123980801?s=20/photo/1
[Text:] @realDonald Trump Congratulations to Tucker Carlson on one of the biggest “scoops” as a reporter in U.S. history. The New Surveillance Footage of the January 6th Events sheds an entirely different light on what actually happened. The Unselect Committee was a giant SCAM, and has now unequivocally been stamped as CRIMINAL FABRICATORS OF THIS MOST IMPORTANT DAY. Pelosi & McConnell failed on security. The Police story is sad and difficult to watch. “Trump” and most others are totally innocent, LET THEM GO FREE, NOW!
🐣 David Jolly just made an important point on @msnbc: Ron DeSantis’s “anti-woke” campaign “is, at its core, racist and homophobic” and it‘s important to call it out for that. He’s absolutely right!
🐣 RT @ChuckPfarrer BAKHMUT AXIS /1550 UTC 11 MAR/ Wagner PMC claimed to have captured the village of Dubovo-Vasylivka; UKR reports that its units are still in contact at that place. Combat ongoing in Bakhmut. UKR engaged the enemy at Paraskoviivka, indicating a penetration of RU lines.
🌎 https://twitter.com/ChuckPfarrer/status/1634577511131512834?s=20/photo/1
🚫 EspresoTV: Bakhmut should have been surrendered three weeks ago – General Kryvonos https://tinyurl.com/2p9ss38v
// Serhiy Kryvonos, General of the Armed Forces of Ukraine, First Deputy Commander of the Armed Forces of Ukraine (2016-2019), former Deputy Secretary of the National Security and Defense Council, believes that Ukrainian military should have abandoned Bakhmut and retreated to prepared lines outside the city.
“From my point of view, Bakhmut should have been surrendered three weeks ago, because we are also losing our strength. Fighting is already taking place on the outskirts of the city. Will there be any benefit in sending the Special Operations Forces there now? I understand that the situation is similar to what happened in Severodonetsk and Lysychansk. We are starting to hammer nails with a microscope. It is better to save the Special Operations Forces for future offensive operations, and it will be much more useful,” noted the Ukrainian Armed Forces General.
Serhiy Kryvonos noted that in this situation we need to draw the right conclusions and improve the training of our infantry. ¤ “Bakhmut should have been abandoned and we should have withdrawn to the prepared lines outside the city. Given the terrain that I know well from the previous years of the war, it was possible to set up an excellent defense line there and keep the enemy at bay to prevent their further offensive outside Bakhmut,” said Kryvonos.
🚫🐣 Just based on things I’ve picked from following this war closely, about Zelensky: He ‘doesn’t like to let people down.’ And, he’s “stubborn,” according to his wife. Good or bad, I can’t help but see these reflected in his aversion to restreating from Bakhmut
NYT: Front Line Shifts in Russia and Ukraine’s Battle for Bakhmut, Analysts Say https://tinyurl.com/7jun3fjx “Despite the Ukrainian military’s assertion that it was holding on in Bakhmut, it was becoming increasingly clear that its grip on the city was tenuous”
// Britain’s defense intelligence agency said that Russian forces had taken control of most of Bakhmut’s east, but advances farther west might be challenging.
YahooNews/Telegraph: Ukraine-Russia war latest: Bakhmut centre now a ‘killing zone’ https://tinyurl.com/bdez95pd “Ukraine’s general staff say Russia is trying to reach the administrative borders of the Donetsk and Luhansk regions” ~ give it control of the entire Donbas region
‼️🐣 RT @APonomarenko I hope the Ukrainian command really, really, really knows what it’s doing in Bakhmut.
¤ https://twitter.com/IAPonomarenko/status/1634472741326802944?s=20
// [Comments]
🐣 RT @EetuSeppnen1 These has been stories about Wagners now holding and waiting for RF forces to continue in Bakhmut. We will see if they sacrifice them now.
[TextLink:] https://twitter.com/EetuSeppnen1/status/1634476843595079680?s=20/photo/1
// DefenceU [UK]
● Over the last four days, Wagner Group forces have taken control of most of eastern part of the Donbas town of Bakhmut. In the town centre, the Bakhmutka River now marks the frontline.
● Ukrainian forces hold the west of the town and have demolished key bridges over the river, which runs through north-south through a strip of open ground 200m-800m wide, between built up areas. With Ukrainian units able to fire from fortified buildings to the west, this area has become a killing zone, likely making it highly challenging for Wagner forces attempting to continue their frontal assault westwards.
● However, the Ukrainian force and their supply lines to the west remain vulnerable to the continued Russian attempts to outflank the defenders from the north and south.
⭕ 10 Mar 2023
Pew: Texas Abortion Ruling Nears, But Blue States Aren’t Waiting to Protect Pill Access https://tinyurl.com/44u5ckw3 The Biden admin likely would appeal any decision against the FDA and it could use its enforcement discretion to allow manufacturers to keep producing the drug
🐣 RT @SenatorRomney In the face of unprovoked Russian aggression, the courage and passion of the Ukrainian people, under the leadership of President @ZelenskyyUa, has far surpassed anyone’s expectation. Their response has been nothing short of praiseworthy, and we will continue to support them.
Politico [EU]: Zelenskyy has no choice but to ask his fighters to hold Bakhmut — for now https://tinyurl.com/4xyhjwv7 The Ukrainians “claim Russia’s losing seven soldiers for each Ukrainian life lost — though NATO military officials put the ratio closer to 5-to-1“
// US generals say the Ukrainian president is right not to disengage from the meat-grinder of a battle.
🐣 RT @rohanpanchigar Wagner group to open recruiting centers across 42 Russian cities. ¤ Evgeny Prigozhin said that after the capture of Bakhmut, PMC Wagner will change and become some kind of “army with an ideology.”
🐣 RT @nytimes Individuals with ties to Russia are “aiming to foment a manufactured insurrection” against Moldova by staging protests against the former Soviet republic’s government, the Biden administration said on Friday.
⋙ NYT: A White House official says pro-Russia individuals are seeking to spark an insurrection in Moldova https://tinyurl.com/34dvyw3t
🐣 RT @BadBradRSR Being a racist POS like Trump is… It has to be driving him insane with three cases against him being conducted by African Americans & two being women, which he even respects less!
🖼 https://twitter.com/BadBradRSR/status/1634406990754594817?s=20/photo/1 -3
🧵 RT @BeschlossDC Congrats to all Americans on the just-released design of the new Air Force One, which fully honors the history of the plane since 1962:
📌 🖼 https://twitter.com/BeschlossDC/status/1634319193964249088?s=20/photo/1
🐣 📊 RT @KyivIndependent ⚡️Survey: Number of Ukrainian speakers increased to 71% amid full-scale war. ¤ The number of Ukrainians who speak Ukrainian in everyday life increased from 64% in 2021 to 71% in 2022, according to a survey conducted by the Democratic Initiatives Foundation.
🧵 RT @shashj Podcast with Michael Kofman reflecting on his recent trip to Bakhmut. Ukraine rationing artillery ammo tightly. Russia using air power more, testing whether has Ukraine has enough stocks of radar-guided air defence missiles.
📌 https://twitter.com/shashj/status/1634219699591323648?s=20
WSJ: Ukraine Commits More Resources to Bakhmut Defense as Russia Advances https://tinyurl.com/ynccrner “Col Gen Oleksandr Syrskiy, commander of Ukraine’s ground forces, said Thursday that holding Bakhmut was buying Ukraine time to prepare reserves and prepare for offensive operations”
// Battle for city has taken on added significance as fighting escalates ahead of spring offensives
🐣 RT @AndyKroll 🚨 I’ve got a juicy story to tell you about Leonard Leo. ¤ Last time we checked in with Leo, we revealed details about a $1.6 BILLION gift he’d received. ¤ That huge donation begged the question: ¤ What will Leo do next? ¤ Answer: “Crush liberal dominance.” ¤ How? ¤ It’s 🧵 time
📌 https://twitter.com/AndyKroll/status/1633865549301071873?s=20
🐣 RT @reshetz Zaluzhny, commander in chief or the Ukrainian armed forces, kneeling to a soldier’s [ Da Vinci’s ] family on his funeral today
🖼 https://twitter.com/reshetz/status/1634316740833210368?s=20/photo/1
WaPo, Dana Milbank: Kevin McCarthy joins the insurrection https://tinyurl.com/yckndtdn Kevin McCarthy’s know-nothingness; Jim Jordan’s shouting match weaponization committee; Republicans’ wars on books and trans kids; and the reason why the Founders separated Church and State
🐣 RT @JamesPorrazzo “We will take Bakhmut… then we will do a reboot. Wagner Group will transform from a PMC – the best army in the world, I emphasize, capable of defending the state – into an army with an ideology, and this ideology is a fight for justice!”- Yevgeny Prigozhin, Wagner Group
💽 https://twitter.com/JamesPorrazzo/status/1634295650694184961?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @igornovikov A field outside Bakhmut six months apart. That’s it. That’s the tweet
🖼 https://twitter.com/igornovikov/status/1634133691512365056?s=20/photo/1
NYT: Satellite images show widespread destruction after heavy fighting in Bakhmut https://tinyurl.com/4v49pt7k “Some of the most severe damage is seen in neighborhoods on the eastern side of the city, which Russia this week said it controlled”
// New satellite pictures of the eastern Ukrainian city, where a brutal battle has been raging for months, showed bridges over a strategically important river had been destroyed.
🐣 RT @ChuckPfarrer BAKHMUT /1550 UTC 10 MAR/ After a sustained and costly series of attacks, Wagner PMC forces report attaining a lodgment in the village of Dubovo-Vasylivka. RU attacks on Orikhovo-Vasylivka were repelled. UKR units are reported to have advanced south-west of Bakhmut.
🌎 https://twitter.com/ChuckPfarrer/status/1634220575039135745?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @jacopo_iacoboni [tr] Perhaps Evgheny Prigozhin is beginning to clearly sense that the High Command of Russia is effectively dismantling his Wagner Group. n
[TextLink:] https://twitter.com/jacopo_iacoboni/status/1634099384316047361?s=20/photo/1
[Text:] “Yes, the fighters and commanders who fight in the Wagner PMC are the most combat ready, but this does not mean that in other military units the commanders are dumber and the fighters are less brave. This is due to the fact that in PMC “Wagner” they do not kill the initiative of the commander, do not humiliate the bravery of the fighter. And in this case, they are able to crush the enemy and carry out the most outstanding victories. This is the difference between PMC “Wagner” and other military units. We treat every fighter and every commander as an individual, as a person who is of great value to the team. Of course, if such a structure ceases to exist, it is not just bad, it is a collapse, it is a catastrophe, it is a direct path to total shameful defeat. About the interview. Today I am thinking over the interview scheme and thinking over with whom (probably with several journalists or opinion leaders) it is necessary to talk in order to jointly understand the pile of existing problems, the series of mistakes and how they need to be corrected. And we have to fix them.
🐣 RT @Hannuska2109 Still massive numbers. Any wonder Rosgvardiya have been sent in to deal with russian discontent among the ranks, 870, another plane. 155th Marine Brigade has now been decimated & rebuilt 7 times since start of the SMO. Mutiny is coming & the end is nigh
[TextLink:] https://twitter.com/Hannuska2109/status/1634083644779159553?s=20/photo/1
// Russian losses 3/10
🐣 RT @gtconway3d Who among us hasn’t secretly paid over $100K through an intermediary in the waning days of a campaign for the presidency to silence a pornographic actress we never had sex with? Let those who have never done this cast the first stone.
[TextLink:] https://twitter.com/gtconway3d/status/1634081031576776704?s=20/photo/1 -4
// checks to Michael Cohen
⭕ 9 Mar 2023
🧵 RT @ ukr_arthistory Today is the birthday of Taras Shevchenko (1814-1861), a great artist and poet, a symbol of the struggle for independence and against russian imperialism. You probably heard about him at least once. Big thread about his life and art. ¤ ‘Kateryna’ (1842)
📌 🖼 https://twitter.com/ukr_arthistory/status/1633778024565833730?s=20/photo/1
🧵 RT @JuddLegum 1. Let’s take a detailed look at @TuckerCarlson’s private text messages, revealed as part of Dominion’s lawsuit, and compare them to what he was telling millions of people on Fox News every night ¤ It’s not news. ¤ It’s not even opinion. ¤ It’s a con.
📌 https://twitter.com/JuddLegum/status/1633829483965984769?s=20
DailyBeast, Will Sommer: Meet the ‘Ghost’ Woman Fox Relied on for Voter Fraud Claims https://tinyurl.com/5n7e88f9 “[I]n Bourne’s telling, the CIA controls the Washington Post, the FBI runs the New York Times, and the State Department runs Politico and CNN”
// “Cactus artist” Marlene Bourne claims she might be a ghost and Antonin Scalia was hunted for sport. Her ideas got airtime on Fox News.
🧵 RT @ Wagner boss Yevgeny Prigozhin is complaining that the Russian Ministry of Defence is ghosting him – it’s not picking up his phone calls and his representatives’ passes have been deactivated, to stop him nagging them for ammunition. ⬇️
📌 https://twitter.com/ChrisO_wiki/status/1633942899179270144?s=20/photo/1
[ThreadReader:] https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1633942899179270144.html
2/ In response to a question from a Russian news outlet about whether Wagner’s ammunition shortages have been resolved, he has posted an audio reply on his official Telegram channel. Translation:
3/ “No, it didn’t get any better with ammunition. Basically, nothing has changed at all. But there are indeed changes.
4/ In order for me to stop asking for ammunition, all special telephones were turned off for me in all offices, in all departments, etc. Another important thing they have done is blocked all passes to all the agencies that have to make decisions.
5/ I will not name them, so as not to discredit them in any way. So now I can only ask through the media. In fact, that’s probably what I’ll be doing. But it’s not all bad. There are positive aspects, of course.
6/ Kudos to the industrialists, Denis Valentinovich Manturov and Igor Nosenko and all those who work with them and rivet these shells. Profuse thanks very much from everyone.” /end
🐣 RT @ anyonewantchips Michael Cohen was sentenced to 3 years in prison, fined $50K & disbarred for paying Stormy Daniels $130K in hush money as directed by & for the benefit of Trump. It’s long past time Trump face the music.
NYT, David French: What Tucker Carlson Really Thinks https://tinyurl.com/44wf9jmt “Trump’s opponents have a new and surprising ally …. His name is Tucker Carlson. Ask him. He’ll tell you. You just need to ask when the camera is off”
[…] Collectively, the text messages, emails and other documents exposed by the [Dominion Voting Systems’s defamation lawsuit] represent one of the great “I told you so” moments in recent American history. From the beginning of the Trump era, conservative Trump critics (notably including my friends and former Fox News contributors Jonah Goldberg and Stephen Hayes) have been telling anyone who will listen that Republican politicians and personalities say one thing about Trump in public and another thing about him in private. In private, they’re scathing. In public, they’re sycophants.
Now we know exactly how true that is, and the person who is revealing that truth more than anyone else also happens to be arguably Fox’s most notorious and dishonest demagogue, Tucker Carlson. Previous document dumps have demonstrated that Carlson, in addition to several other Fox hosts and key senior leaders, knew that the various election-fraud conspiracy theories weren’t just baseless, they were — in the words of Rupert Murdoch — “really crazy stuff.”
But the latest documents go farther. They show that Carlson is capable of telling the truth about more than just the election conspiracy. In private, Carlson will say what the Fox News audience truly doesn’t want to hear — not just that Donald Trump lost, but that he was also a bad president. He was bad for the country. On Jan. 4, 2021, Carlson texted this about Trump’s single term: “We’re all pretending we’ve got a lot to show for it, because admitting what a disaster it’s been is too tough to digest. But come on. There really isn’t an upside to Trump.”
Thank you, Tucker. As Trump runs again, this is the most important truth of all. ¤ To understand why this truth is so important, you have to understand the Trump voter’s case for another term. Yes, there are those who support him because “he fights.” They thrill to the angry and combative rhetoric in his weekend speech at the Conservative Political Action Conference. “I am your warrior,” he said. “I am your justice. And for those who have been wronged and betrayed, I am your retribution.” …
… Politically, Trump has hurt the G.O.P. He handed back control of every elected branch of the federal government to the Democratic Party in four short years. He was fiscally irresponsible. The budget deficit grew every year of his presidency. He passed only one truly meaningful piece of legislation in four years, a tax bill that was far more Paul Ryan’s than Donald Trump’s. He undermined America’s vital military alliances.
His corruption, his eagerness to put millions of dollars of taxpayer money into his resorts and properties and his willingness to let his family accept vast sums from foreign entities is profoundly troubling. We’ll likely be discovering further examples of his outright graft for years, if not decades. There’s considerable evidence that suggests he committed felonies in office.
And yet, that is still a somewhat superficial diagnosis. If you dig deeper, you’ll see that, for all the flaws just enumerated, the Trump years were most disastrous for the social and civic health of the United States of America. The increases in suffering and despair have been profound. Donald Trump’s presidency battered the American spirit. …
… Trump divided America. Partisan polarization hit its modern peak under Trump, and sheer partisan animosity increased as well. American mental health declined. The rate of depression increased even before Covid — it rose from 2015to 2019 — and the pandemic made the trend even worse.
This increase in negative statistics was accompanied by a decline in positive statistics. The marriage rate, for example, which had stabilized during the Obama years, plunged during the Trump years. The American birthrate continued its long decline.
American presidents are not so powerful that they can control all these social factors. Many of the negative trends (drug overdose deaths among the most notable) long predated Trump, but they continued under Trump. Presidents can’t control cultures, but they can help heal or they can further harm, and Trump committed grave harms. …
I’m most struck by the decline in the marriage rate and the increase in the abortion rate. Marriage and birth represent tangible expressions of optimism. Creating a family, welcoming new life into the world — it’s difficult to more concretely express one’s hope for the future. Yet chaos undermines hope, and Trump’s one term was chaotic. It was bitter. And it culminated in an attempted coup.
After almost eight long years writing about Donald Trump, I’m not nearly so naïve as to believe that any single new development will alienate his base. I understand that the right-wing media ecosystem is so protective of both Trump and Fox that millions of listeners and viewers won’t see even a single document from the Dominion case.
Arguments still matter, however — person by person and household by household. The argument that Trump was “bad but good” will be heard in many American homes. Those who held their noses to vote for him twice before will be tempted to do so once again. He is still the front-runner for the Republican nomination. But Trump’s opponents have a new and surprising ally, a person who agrees that the 45th president didn’t just lose the 2020 election, he was also a “disaster” in the White House. His name is Tucker Carlson. Ask him. He’ll tell you. You just need to ask when the camera is off.
🐣 RT @MuellerSheWrote NEW: CONFIRMED: Jack Smith is going after trump for obstruction of Justice in the documents case. 18 USC 1519. 20 year max sentence. That’s what the Corcoran Crime Fraud exception hearing today was about.
⋙ TheGuardian: Prosecutors seek to question Trump lawyer before grand jury in classified papers case https://tinyurl.com/2sb9fjdd “[T]he prosecutors have argued to the federal court that Trump may have used his attorney in furtherance of a crime or fraud”
// Investigators are looking at invoking an exception that can bypass attorney-client privilege if legal advice is used for furthering crime
🐣 RT @Podolyak_M RF is trying to attack Moldova. Methods are obvious.
Stage 1: announcing Ukraine’s “invasion” of Transnistria.
Stage 2: attempt to organize a coup in Chișinău.
Now stage 3: falsely accusing Ukraine of preparing a “terrorist attack” in Transnistria.
Predictable lies in everything.
💽 [tr] https://twitter.com/Podolyak_M/status/1633845017013002242?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @HowardA_AtLaw In honor of Donny’s panic, let’s sing Desperado (thread)!
♪ Desperate Donald
Why don’t you come to your senses?
You’re out of defenses, DA’s closing in
You’re a moron, we know you’re guilty of treason.
We all know the reason: you’re guilty as sin /1♪ I know you say you’re fine, boy.
You’re a genius and you’re stable.
But we all know you’re anything but bright.
Spending all your hours
Watching FOX&Friends on cable.
I doubt you ever learned to read or write /2
CEPA, Julia Davis: Gloom Envelops Putin’s TV Propagandists https://tinyurl.com/yc3e787t ‘The idea that Russia’s victory is far from inevitable and that Russian defeat is a possibility has finally entered the once-impenetrable studios of state media’
DefenseDept: Secretary of Defense Lloyd J. Austin III Holds a Joint Press Conference With Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant https://tinyurl.com/mvvv8f27
// topics: Iran nuclear program, new conservative Israeli govt (protests against changes to judiciary), Palestine, Ukraine
⋙ 🐣 my reading: both Israel and US declare they ‘will not allow’ Iran to have a nuclear weapon; Iran has enriched uranium to 84%; 90% is the line that can’t be crossed ¤ are there other factors involved? constructing an actual weapon; or is enrichment % all needed to trigger response?
🐣 RT @Flash_news_ua ⚡️Israel will launch military operation against Iran soon ¤ US Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin in Israel, after meeting with Prime Minister Netanyahu, said that the United States would not allow Iran to acquire nuclear weapons and confirmed that Israel’s military […] operation against Iran would begin in the very near future.
// say what?
TheAtlantic, Tom Nichols: The Ugly Elitism of the American Right https://tinyurl.com/36n93pe4 Truth, be told.
// No one hates ordinary people like the Republicans and their media enablers do.
It’s time to talk about elitism. ¤ Last month, I wrote that the revelations about Fox News in the Dominion Voting Systems lawsuit showed that Fox personalities, for all their populist bloviation, are actually titanic elitists. This is not the elitism of those who think they are smarter or more capable than others—I’ll get to that in a moment—but a new and gruesome elitism of the American right, a kind of hatred and disgust on the part of right-wing media and political leaders for the people they claim to love and defend. Greed and cynicism and moral poverty can explain only so much of what we’ve learned about Fox; what the Dominion filings show is a staggering, dehumanizing version of elitism among people who have made a living by presenting themselves as the only truth-tellers who can be trusted by ordinary Americans.
I am, to say the least, no stranger to the charge of elitism. When I wrote a book in 2018 titled The Death of Expertise, a study of how people have become so narcissistic and so addled by cable and the internet that they believe themselves to be smarter than doctors and diplomats, I was regularly tagged as an “elitist.” And the truth is: I am an elitist, insofar as I believe that some people are better at things than others. ¤ But even beyond talent and ability, I do in fact firmly believe that some opinions, political views, personal actions, and life choices are better than others. As I wrote in my book at the time:
“Americans now believe that having equal rights in a political system also means that each person’s opinion about anything must be accepted as equal to anyone else’s. This is the credo of a fair number of people despite being obvious nonsense. It is a flat assertion of actual equality that is always illogical, sometimes funny, and often dangerous.”
If that makes me an elitist, so be it. ¤ In this, elitism is the opposite of populism, whose adherents believe that virtue and competence reside in the common wisdom of a nebulous coalition called “the people.” This pernicious and romantic myth is often a danger to liberal democracies and constitutional orders that are founded, first and foremost, on the inherent rights of individuals rather than whatever raw majorities think is right at any given time.
The American right, however, now uses elitist to mean “people who think they’re better than me because they live and work and play differently than I do.” They rage that people—myself included—look down upon them. And again, truth be told, I do look down on Trump voters, not because I am an elitist but because I am an American citizen and I believe that they, as my fellow citizens, have made political choices that have inflicted the greatest harm on our system of government since the Civil War. I refuse to treat their views as just part of the normal left-right axis of American politics. … … I believe that today’s Trump supporters are people who are making a conscious, knowing, and morally flawed choice to continue supporting a sociopath and a party chock-full of seditionists. …
Unlike people such as Tucker Carlson or Sean Hannity or Laura Ingraham, I have never told anyone—including you, readers of The Atlantic—anything I don’t believe. What we’re seeing at Fox, however, is lying on a grand scale, done with a snide loathing for the audience and a cool indifference to the damage being done to the nation. …
Fox’s stars did all of this while privately communicating with one another and rolling their eyes with contempt, admitting without a shred of shame that they were lying through their teeth. From Rupert Murdoch on down, top Fox personalities have admitted that they fed the rubes all of this red, rotting meat to keep them out of the way of the Fox limos headed to Long Island and Connecticut.
You can see this same kind of contemptuous elitism in Republicans such as Ted Cruz, Josh Hawley, and Elise Stefanik. They couldn’t care less about the voters—those hoopleheads back home who have to be placated with idiotic speeches against trans people and “critical race theory.” These politicians were bred to be leaders, you see, and having to gouge some votes out of the hayseeds back home requires a bit of performance art now and then, a small price to pay so that the sons and daughters of Harvard and Yale, Princeton and Stanford, can live in the imperial capital and rule as is their due and their right.
Some years ago, I was at a meeting of one of the committees of the National Academy of Sciences. The conferees asked me how scientists—there were Nobel Laureates in the room—could defend the cause of knowledge. Stand your ground, I told them. Never hesitate to tell people they’re wrong. One panel member shook his head: “Tom, people don’t like to be condescended to.” I said, “I agree, but what they hate even more is to be patronized.” ¤ I believed it then, but we’re now testing that hypothesis on a national scale. I hope I wasn’t wrong.
🐣 RT @usingeo U.S. Embassy Statement on the Ruling Party’s Decision to Withdraw Draft Laws on “Foreign Influence”
⋙ USEmbassyGeorgia: U.S. Embassy Statement on the Ruling Party’s Decision to Withdraw Draft Laws on “Foreign Influence” https://tinyurl.com/2p9c82a5
“The Georgian people have, once again, spoken clearly that the only choice for Georgia is a secure and prosperous European future. We welcome Georgian Dream’s decision to withdraw both draft laws on “foreign influence.” We urge the ruling party to officially retract these bills and not pursue further this type of legislation, which is incompatible with Georgian and European values and the protection of fundamental freedoms. We encourage Georgia’s political leaders to work together in earnest on the reforms urgently needed to obtain the EU candidate status that Georgia’s citizens overwhelmingly desire.”
🐣 RT @SpiroAgnewGhost And..here it is…Trump’s deranged, endless rant just put out on Un-Truth Social. Its just as deranged and epically unhinged as I hoped:
[TextLink:] https://twitter.com/SpiroAgnewGhost/status/1634014619001065472?s=20/photo/1
[Text:] I did absolutely nothing wrong, I never had an affair with Stormy Daniels, nor would I have wanted to have an affair with Stormy Daniels.
This is a political witch-Hunt, trying to take down the leading candidate, by far, in the Republican Party while at the same time also leading all Democrats in the polls, including Joe Biden and Kamala Harris. Congress and numerous Democrat District Attorneys, Attorneys General, and the Department of Injustice itself, which has unprecedentedly placed top DOJ prosecutors into the Manhattan District Attorney’s office in order to “get Trump*, have found,that I did nothing wrong. Now, they fall back on the old, and rebuked case which has been rejected by every prosecutor’s office that has looked at this Stormy “Horseface” Daniels matter, where I relied on counsel in order to resolve this Extortion of me, which took place a long time ago. Since then, I have won lawsuits for hundreds of thousands of dollars against Stormy Daniels, and every prosecutors’ office which has looked at it, which are numerous, including the FEC, have turned this fake case down. This is not a state case, it is a federal case, and they have all passed on it.
Even the previous Manhattan DA, Cyrus Vance, did not bring charges because I am guilty of nothing except for the fact that I am beating all Republicans and Democrats badly in the Presidential race. It is Russia, Russia, Russia, Ukraine, Ukraine, Ukraine, the no- collusion Mueller hoax, and other targeted, false attacks against me all over again. It is a weaponization of our judicial system, and I am shocked that this Soros backed radical left prosecutor, who has allowed violent crime to reach new heights in New York without any retribution, would consider bringing such a charge against the undisputed front runner of one of the two major political parties in our Nation.
Additionally, the statute of limitations has long since ended and, in fact, Radical Left media, one and a half years ago, did a “countdown” on the statute of limitations, which was allowed to expire. The countdown ended and until now nobody had any idea that it was allowed to continue in this one lowball office. It is appalling that the Democrats would play this card and only means that they are certain that they cannot win at the voter booth, so they have to go to a tool that has never been used in such a way in our country, weaponized law enforcement.
I, and hundreds of millions of the American People who are backing me, because they want to see our nation be great again, are the victims of this corrupt, depraved, and weaponized justice system where Hunter Biden and his father can commit horrendous crimes, all accurately documented on his laptop, and nothing happens, but with me, after looking at 11 million pages worth of documents, they go after a hoax that every other prosecutor’s office which reviewed it, and even the U.S. Congress, has long ago dropped. I will not be deterred, I will always continue to be your voice, and I will keep fighting for our great Country.
🐣 RT @ SpiroAgnewGhost Trump is the most dangerous man in America, and @TuckerCarlson is a soulless, sick man for enabling this madman further.
[Link:] https://twitter.com/SpiroAgnewGhost/status/1633137699518554112?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @realDonaldTrump LET THE JANUARY 6 PRISONERS GO. THEY WERE CONVICTED, OR ARE AWAITING TRIAL, BASED ON A GIANT LIE, A RADICAL LEFT CON JOB. THANK YOU TO TUCKER CARLSON AND SPEAKER OF THE HOUSE KEVIN McCARTHY FOR WHAT YOU BOTH HAVE DONE. NEW VIDEO FOOTAGE IS IRREFUTABLE!!!
🐣 RT @AVindman Trump says he would have let Russia ‘take over’ parts of Ukraine. ¤ Does this finally kill the joke that the Russia war wouldn’t happen with Trump 2.0 ¤ Trump thought he could gift Ukraine to Putin! ¤ Trump 2.0 & MAGA are a nightmare scenario for the world.
⋙ DailyBeast (3/7): https://tinyurl.com/3kyz7yyj
NYT: Trump Lawyer Admits to Falsehoods in 2020 Fraud Claims https://tinyurl.com/2p8a8fu3
// Jenna Ellis acknowledged that she knowingly misrepresented the facts about election fraud in a disciplinary procedure by Colorado state bar officials.
According to the sworn statement on Wednesday, some of Ms. Ellis’s lies about election fraud were made during appearances on Fox News, several of whose top hosts and executives were recently shown to have disparaged Mr. Trump’s fraud claims in private even though they supported them in public. The revelations about these discrepancies have emerged in a series of court filings by Dominion Voting Systems, a voting-machine company that filed a $1.6 billion defamation lawsuit against Fox for promoting a conspiracy theory about its role in the election results.
Ms. Ellis, part of the so-called elite strike force of lawyers that took to the air and traveled across the country in support of Mr. Trump’s false claims of fraud, is also embroiled in the Justice Department’s investigation of the former president’s sprawling efforts to reverse his loss to Joseph R. Biden Jr. As part of the investigation — which was taken over in November by a special counsel, Jack Smith — dozens of grand jury subpoenas have been issued, many of which have requested information about Ms. Ellis.
In a message posted on Twitter Thursday morning, Ms. Ellis sought to split hairs concerning her agreement with officials in Colorado, saying that she never admitted to lying about election fraud, which she asserted “requires INTENTIONALLY making a false statement.”
But in her stipulation with bar officials, she agreed that censure was merited when lawyers “knowingly engage” in any “conduct that involves dishonesty, fraud, deceit, or misrepresentation.” ¤ “It appears that Ms. Ellis is continuing in her pattern of knowing misrepresentations and falsehoods,” Michael Teter, the managing director of the 65 Project, said on Thursday. “If she continues down this path, it will not be long before she is subject to further disciplinary action.”
🐣 RT @pravda_eng President’s Office on “terrorist act” in Transnistria: Kremlin creates fakes to attack Moldova
⋙ PravdaUA: President’s Office on “terrorist act” in Transnistria: Kremlin creates fakes to attack Moldova https://tinyurl.com/2te4t7xh
// Mykhailo Podoliak, advisor to the Head of the President’s Office, has said that Ukraine has no motives or intentions to commit a “terrorist attack” in Transnistria, and that the accusations of the occupiers are part of Russia’s plan to attack Moldova.
🐣 Trump says the 2020 election would have been affected if the (error-ridden) NYPost Hunter Biden laptop story hadn’t been shadow-banned for a few hours on Twitter ¤ I think it’s more likely that the 2016 election would have changed if the Stormy Daniels story hadn’t been ”hushed”
NYT: Prosecutors Signal Criminal Charges for Trump Are Likely https://tinyurl.com/mt9xbkuh //➔ For paying hush money to porn star Stormy Daniels to keep the story from the American people prior to the 2016 election
// The former president was told that he could appear before a Manhattan grand jury next week if he wishes to testify, a strong indication that an indictment could soon follow.
🐣 RT @FellaNafo Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces of Ukraine Valerii Zaluzhnyi: ¤ “The Ukrainian military will not accept any negotiations, agreements or compromise solutions. There is only one condition for negotiations – Russia must leave all the occupied territories.”
🐣 Public Health, as opposed to Epidemiology, is focused on promoting public policy to PROTECT the health of the public. It is at its heart interventionist, and an entirely legitimate role is to PROTECT the public from medical disinformation #weaponization
⋙ 🐣 Whether or not to accept that there is a role for experts in Public Health is, I suppose debatable, if you assume government should have no role in protecting the lives of its citizens. But ”to promote the general Welfare” is right there in the Constitution’s Preamble.
🐣 .@danielsgoldman is stellar! Biden was acting in accordance with US policy and the policy of our allies and the IMF in demanding firing the inspector general in Ukraine for NOT investigating corruption, including of companies like Burisma #weaponization
🧵 RT @atrupar I’ll be live-tweeting this morning’s portion of the House “weaponization” hearing featuring testimony from Matt Taibbi
📌 💽 https://twitter.com/atrupar/status/1633846941040668674?s=20/photo/1
🧵 💽 RT @albafella1 Zelensky: « I want to thank everyone who has been holding Ukrainian flags in the squares & streets of Georgia these days. I want to express gratitude for our national anthem that was played in Tbilisi. This is respect for Ukraine & I want to express my sincere respect for Georgia
📌 https://twitter.com/albafella1/status/1633586470089900033?s=20/photo/1
⋙ 🐣 RT @albafella1 There is no Ukrainian who would not wish success to our friendly #Georgia. Democratic success. European success. ¤ We want to be in the European Union and we will be there. We want Georgia to be in the European Union, and I am sure it will be there.
⋙ 🐣 RT @albafella1 We want Moldova to be in the European Union, and I am sure it will be there. All free nations of Europe deserve this. ¤ Glory to all those who are now fighting for Ukraine! Glory to all those who are fighting for their brothers-in-arms! Glory to Ukraine! » — Zelensky
🐣 RT @ @ukraine_world The importance of keeping Bakhmut is only growing – Commander of Ukraine’s Ground Forces Syrskyi. ¤ “Each day allows us to gain time to prepare for future counteroffensive. Meanwhile, the enemy loses the most combat-ready part of their army – the Wagner assault units.”
🐣 RT @ChuckPfarrer BAKHMUT AXIS /1140 UTC 9 MAR/ RU renewed futile attacks on the villages of Orikhovo-Vasylivka & Dubovo-Vasylivka. RU troops consolidated forces on the east bank of the river. UKR has engaged RU soldiers who crossed the Bakhmutka by a damaged footbridge S of the H-32 HWY.
🌎 https://twitter.com/ChuckPfarrer/status/1633794295827243010?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @maxseddon After two nights of major protests, Georgia’s ruling party has dropped its attempt to ram through a Russia-style “foreign agent” law that threatened to derail its EU and NATO hopes. by Salome Pkhaladze in Tbilisi and me
⋙ FT: Georgia withdraws Russia-inspired bill after violent protests https://tinyurl.com/5ty95ama
// US and Brussels say ‘foreign agent’ bill incompatible with country’s efforts to join EU and Nato
🐣 RT @euronewsnext All major social media platforms will have to comply with the EU’s Digital Services Act expected to come into full effect in 2024 — including Elon Musk’s Twitter.
⋙ EuroNews: Twitter told to hire more human content moderators instead of AI https://tinyurl.com/mrynvemx “The largest social media platforms will have until September 1, 2023, to comply with the EU’s Digital Services Act or face a penalty of up to 6 per cent of their yearly revenue”
// The European Commission is worried about Twitter’s goal to use volunteers and artificial intelligence to police content.
Like other critics, Melissa Ingle believes human moderators are essential to intercepting disinformation and hateful content. ¤ “You really need the data scientists because there’s 30 million tweets every hour or 500 million a day. You need humans because as good as I would love to say our algorithms are, there’s still a lot that gets through,” she explained.
Since the mass layoffs, many analysts have noticed a spike in hate speech and disinformation on the platform. ¤ “One of the biggest sources of misinformation were state governments trying to push through political propaganda. So we’re seeing more of that as well as all the hate speech,” she said.
“Number two: we’re seeing an increase in site outages. We’ve seen the site go down. So I’m very concerned with these rises in hate speech and these website problems”.
Other concerns have been raised that Twitter does not have enough volunteer moderators such as Wikipedia and has a poor record when it comes to policing content that’s not in English.
“The lack of human moderators, insufficient training in human rights, and also their content moderation systems that are being predominantly trained for English language or more Western speaking audience in contrast to minority languages or languages of the global South. That’s the prevalent issue that Twitter and other platforms face,” said Elishka Pirkova, a policy analyst at digital rights group Access Now.
What’s next? The largest social media platforms will have until September 1, 2023, to comply with the EU’s Digital Services Act or face a penalty of up to 6 per cent of their yearly revenue.
🧵 RT @MavkaSlavka Ukraine has a large collection of monuments and memorials. From the inception of Kyiv to the Holodomor and the Chornobyl nuclear tragedy, here is a selection of some of most noteworthy.
📌 https://twitter.com/MavkaSlavka/status/1633759144988803072?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @ danielrhamilton A quick information point for journalists that keep referring to #Georgia as an “ex-Soviet state”: sure, it was forced to be part of the Soviet Union for 70 years but, prior to that, was an independent democracy with minority rights & freedom of speech. Russia has never had that.
🐣 RT @Helenkhosh The protest is not just about the bill, but about the Russian nature of the Georgian Dream. There is no trust towards them or their word, and track record serves as the empirical proof. There is no legal mechanism to withdraw the draft. Protests resume at 7 PM. #Georgia 1/2.
⋙ 🐣 RT @Helenkhosh There is no full and clear picture on the demands or the nature of further protest yet, but the public is genuinely done with the Georgian Dream. Patience seems to have exploded big time. Only way to calm #Georgia is regime change, with unlikely odds of fair elections ever. 2/2.
🐣 RT @TheDeadDistrict And not everyone was there, I could not attend, because the road to my village was closed because of the snow on the pass. I’m sure that much more people will come for rally if they don’t withdrawal the Putin’s law.
⋙ 🐣 RT @Helenkhosh This is quite possibly the largest demonstration in the history of #Georgia. And the people coming are angry. Thousands are still marching towards the main crowd. #NoToRussianLaw. No to the government that serves Russia.
🐣 RT @KShoshiashvili #Tbilisi Now: People stand strong and together. The Constitution of Georgia is embodied in the Georgian people. Our national objective is Euro-Atlantic integration and we stand ready to defend it. Our message is clear: Georgia is Europe. Georgia will never be Russia.
🐣 RT @ESK001 Georgia doesn’t sleep. Tbilisi protest against the Russian law. 08/03/23. ¤ I edited this video for you to hear, see and feel the struggle of Georgian people for freedom, dignity and the European choice Georgian people and their allies stand for.
💽 https://twitter.com/ESK001/status/1633613408061857793?s=20/photo/1
🐣 “We in America have learned bitter lessons from two world wars: It is better to be here [in Europe] ready to protect the peace, than to take blind shelter across the sea, rushing to
respond only after freedom is lost. We’ve learned that isolationism never was and never will be an acceptable response to tyrannical governments
with an expansionist intent.” ~ Ronald Reagan
🐣 RT @DmytroKuleba Russia launched a massive missile and drone attack on Ukraine overnight, leading to loss of lives and damaging civilian infrastructure. No military objective, just Russian barbarism. The day will come when Putin and his associates are held accountable by a Special Tribunal.
🐣 RT @Osinttechnical Russian forces appear to be heavily invested in degrading Ukrainian power generation capabilities, expending valuable Kh-47M2 Kinzhal hypersonic missiles to do so.
⋙ 🐣 RT @JayinKyiv Kyiv authorities saying Russia used a hypersonic Kinzhal missle to strike a Kyiv power station. ¤ Assuring about 15% of the city doesnt have electricity for 12 hours must be important as they are considered to only have about 57 of these rare missles.
🐣 RT @NikaMelkozerova 81 missiles. Including 6 hypersonic Kalibr missiles. It is like $600 million on our sleeping heads. For what?? Just to make those ordinary Russians, who are screaming on social media of anger at the fact that we still have electricity and didn’t die of cold?
🐣 RT @ JimmySecUK Large missile strike on Ukraine carried out by Russia overnight consisting of:
– 28 Kh-101/Kh-555 cruise missiles
– 20 Kalibr cruise missiles
– 6 X-22 cruise missiles
– 6 Kh-47 “Kinzhal” cruise missiles
– 8 other guided air missiles
– 13 S-300 missiles
According to the UkAF.
🐣 RT @TWMCLtd #Ukraine’s nuclear energy regulator has issued an urgent warning about Europe’s largest nuclear plant. ¤ Energoatom says the #Zaporizhzhia plant in #Enerhodar has been completely de-energised after Russian shelling. ¤ Here’s the translation of their post: ¤ #RussiaIsATerroristState
[TextLink:] https://twitter.com/TWMCLtd/status/1633741180440653825?s=20/photo/1 -2
[Text:] 🐣 RT @Energyatome !! Zaporizhzhya NPP completely de-energized due to racist shelling Today, March 9, 2023, at 03:53 a.m., as a result of racist missile attacks, the last communication line of the occupied Zaporizhia NPP with the Ukrainian power system was disconnected. Currently, the station is de-energized and has gone into blackout mode for the sixth time during the occupation, the 5th and 6th power units are put into a cold state, 18 diesel generators have been switched on to power the ZNPP’s own needs. Fuel for their work remains for 10 days. The countdown has begun. If it is impossible to renew the external power supply of the station during this time, an accident with radiation consequences for the whole world may occur.
[Text2:] In addition, all domestic nuclear power plants located on the territory controlled by Ukraine have unloaded their capacity due to the threat of missile attacks.
As of 06:30 a.m., all power units provide a total of 4.700 MW to the power system. Due to the occupation of the plant and the interference of Rosatom representatives in its work, the possibilities of the Ukrainian side to maintain the ZNPP in a safe mode are significantly limited.
Currently, the actions of the entire international community are urgently needed to remove racist terrorist groups from the territory of the Zaporizhzhia NPP, transfer it to the full control of a competent legitimate operator – Ukrainian Energoatom – and restore the conditions for maintaining the nuclear, radiation and physical safety of the nuclear facility.
🐣 RT @ Flash_news_ua ⚡️ For the first time, the russians shelled Ukraine with such different types of rockets. They fired six the Kh-47M2 Kinzhal, reports the Speaker of the Air Force Command Yurii Inat. ¤ “[The russians] used, in particular, MiG-31K aircraft. I don’t remember this happening before”.
🐣 RT @Flash_news_ua ⚡️ Volodymyr Zelenskyi reacted to the russian missile attack on Ukraine: “It’s been a difficult night. A massive rocket attack across the country. Kyiv, Kirovohrad, Dnipro, Odesa, Kharkiv, Zaporizhzhia, Lviv, Ivano-Frankivsk, Zhytomyr, Vinnytsia regions.”
🖼 https://twitter.com/Flash_news_ua/status/1633741919485415426?s=20/photo/1
⭕ 8 Mar 2023
🐣 RT @brianstelter It’s an incredibly strange time to work at Fox News. People are gossiping about the Dominion filings and wondering which heads will roll. And “our bosses are acting like nothing is happening.” Here’s what I learned from half a dozen sources inside Fox
⋙ Vanity Fair, Brian Stelter: “We’re All Embarrassed”: Inside Fox News as Dominion Revelations Rattle the Network https://tinyurl.com/48ps3ezs
// Fox producers are getting libel law training, and staffers are (cautiously) gossiping about filings exposing the likes of Rupert Murdoch and Tucker Carlson. “We’re very careful when we’re miked up,” one on-air personality tells Vanity Fair. “And we’re not texting.”
🐣 RT @WorldWarNow_ “It is very difficult to kill 12-20 thousand Ukrainian soldiers by tomorrow morning….Ukrainians die en masse for Bakhmut & surrender only as a last resort. Stop calling them cowards. They are the same as we are & the same blood flows in them.” ¤ -Yevgeny Prigozhin, CEO of Wagner
🐣 RT @SpiroAgnewGhost More completely unhinged and demented every hour. This is strait jacket level
[TextLink:] https://twitter.com/SpiroAgnewGhost/status/1633581883656396800?s=20/photo/1
[Text:] 🐣 RT @realDonaldTrump City, State, and Federal (DOJ) Prosecutors throughout the Country are practicing good ol’ ELECTION INTERFERENCE, at a level that our Country has never seen before. They want to take out the undisputed leader of the Republican Party. The bigger the lead I take, the more CRAZY they become. AT THE SAME TIME, THEY DO NOTHING ABOUT THE BIDEN CRIME FAMILY!
‼️🐣 RT @ChuckPfarrer BAKHMUT CITY/ 2300 UTC 8 MAR/ RU forces have consolidated forces on the E bank of the Bakhmutka. RU infantry effected a crossing of the river via a ruined footbridge in the vicinity of School No. 5. UKR troops are reported in urban combat west of the school. Fighting continues.
🌎 https://twitter.com/ChuckPfarrer/status/1633600912231919643?s=20/photo/1
⋙ 🐣 RT @SKmartinTO Attack from the east was intercepted in the early hours, the stabilization defensive perimeter is underway, the PMC threw the last 17000 homeless into the attack, according to the movement of the advanced lines, it will be a matter of 72 hours #GoHomeIVAN
⋙⋙ 🐣 RT @PaulJawin The artillery of the 14th brigade Chervona Kalina, together with the AFU, destroyed the advancing Wagner group in the Bakhmut direction.
💽 https://twitter.com/PaulJawin/status/1633504175303667712?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @ProjectLincoln “We also agree with what Fox News’s own attorneys and executives have now repeatedly stressed in multiple courts of law: that Tucker Carlson is not credible.” – White House spokesperson. ¤ The MAGA base, with their collective memory being that of a goldfish, may not put 2 and 2 together as they continue to take as gospel everything @tuckercarlson says about the January 6th tapes.
⋙ Politico: White House goes after Tucker Carlson by name over Jan. 6 coverage https://tinyurl.com/ru9earf
// In a rare rebuke of the Fox News ratings leader, the White House said Carlson is “not credible.”
🐣 RT @PaulaChertok Your daily reminder: “Russian-speaking area” does NOT mean pro-Russia. Ukraine is a bilingual country. Many Ukrainians also speak Russian. That’s a relic of colonial history, not political identity. Russian-speaking Ukrainians are Ukrainian no matter what language they use.
⋙ 🐣 RT @Gerashchenko_en “I could’ve made a deal to take over something, there are certain areas that are Russian-speaking areas, frankly, but you could’ve worked a deal.” – Donald Trump. ¤ The perfect idea to inspire dictators all over the world to invade other countries and have never-ending wars.
💽 https://twitter.com/PaulaChertok/status/1633595180761886722?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @peterbakernyt Trump tells Hannity on his radio show that he would have been willing to let Russia “take over” parts of Ukraine while he was president (a comment edited out when later played on Fox News). @justinbaragona
⋙ DailyBeast, Justin Baragona: Fox News Edits Out Trump Saying He Might’ve Let Russia ‘Take Over’ Parts of Ukraine https://tinyurl.com/3kyz7yyj
// While Trump told Hannity on the radio he could’ve prevented war by negotiating a deal with Russia, that portion was curiously edited out when aired on Fox News.
🧵 RT @KlasfeldReports Dominion’s just-released reply brief in its $1.6 billion defamation lawsuit seeking summary judgment starts with a single-word sentence: ¤ “Finally.”
📌 [TextLink:] https://twitter.com/KlasfeldReports/status/1633592925815709698?s=20/photo/1
[Text:] INTRODUCTION
Finally. Fox has conceded what it knew all along. The charges Fox broadcast against Dominion are false. Fox does not spend a word of its brief arguing the truth of any accused statement. Fox has produced no evidence none, zero supporting those lies. This concession should come as no surprise. Discovery into Fox has proven that from the top of the organization to the bottom, Fox always knew the absurdity of the Dominion “stolen election” story. Now, having failed to put in any evidence to the contrary (because no such evidence exists), Fox has conceded the ALT of the Dominion allegations it broadcast.
⋙ 🐣 RT @KlasfeldReports “That concession is no small thing. Thirty percent or more of Americans still believe the lie that the 2020 election was stolen.” ¤ Dominion says their employees still get threats and harassment.
[Text:] That concession is no small thing. Thirty percent or more of Americans still believe the lie that the 2020 election was stolen. The heart of that lie remains the false conspiracy theory that Fox legitimized and mainstreamed starting on November & that Dominion stole the election, using secret algorithms in its software originally designed for a Venezuelan dictator. Because of these lies, Dominion now may be “one of the most demonized brands in the United States or the world.” Ex. 139, Richer 73:9-14. Dominion employees still endure threats and harassment. So it matters that Fox in private ridiculed and never believed the lie. And it matters that Fox has now in this litigation conceded these allegations were false.🐣 RT @KlasfeldReports Fox’s reply: “Dominion litters its opposition brief with cherry-picked statements from people who have nothing to do with the specific statements it challenges as defamatory,” which “might make for interesting headlines” but doesn’t create a “triable issue of fact.”
[Text:] PRELIMINARY STATEMENT
Much like it did in its opening summary judgment motion, Dominion litters its opposition brief with cherry-picked statements from people who have nothing to do with the specific statements it challenges as defamatory. While that might make for interesting headlines, it does not create a triable issue of fact. In reality, Dominion has not even identified any defamatory statement of fact as opposed to newsworthy allegations or opinions attributable to Fox News, let alone identified any such statement published with actual malice. At the very least, its kitchen-sink complaint is wildly overbroad, and it has not even identified sufficient evidence of economic damages, let alone met the very high bar for punitive damages.
🐣 RT @Tendar Prigozhin in eastern Bakhmut and you know what isn’t there? Right, the Russian flag. ¤ It is so revealing to see that those mercenaries are fighting for their oligarch, not for Russia or the Russian army. It is a socio-political mix of an oligarchy, warlordism and feudalism.
🖼 https://twitter.com/Tendar/status/1633563495953301507?s=20/photo/1
TheBulwark, Jonathan Last: Fox Is Worse Than You Thought https://tinyurl.com/2mwwfyaj
// Their business is being the Republican party’s Pravda. Plus: How the GOP hopefuls are being backed into a corner by January 6th.
WaPo: Four takeaways from the new Dominion-Fox lawsuit documents https://tinyurl.com/3u54ztrx
// Fox was a hotbed of backbiting, and its vaunted news division wasn’t as neutral as it claimed to be
Tuesday brought yet more documents in Dominion Voting Systems’ high-stakes lawsuit against Fox News over Fox’s handling of claims that Dominion’s voting machines helped rig the 2020 election.
The documents come after Dominion recently detailed how Fox executives and hosts privately derided the stolen-election claims even as the network chose to air them anyway — often credulously — in the name of appealing to its Trump-supporting viewers.
We’ve learned details from depositions in the case — including that of Fox Chairman Rupert Murdoch, who acknowledged that his hosts endorsed stolen-election claims and expressed regret for that — and additional details from exhibits attached to the filings.
🐣 RT @wartranslated Girkin states that both Prigozhin and Shoigu and anything but good commanders after failing to take Bakhmut, and that the advertised Russian winter offensive failed without bringing any meaningful results. https://t.me/strelkovii/4157
[TextLink:] https://twitter.com/wartranslated/status/1633410034951438339?s=20/photo/1
[Text:] By March 8, Prigozhin and Shoigu happily inform the population of the Russian Federation that they managed to take half of Artemivsk (both non-Russian noviops, of course, do not dare to pronounce the original name of the city, Bakhmut).
Without denying at all the courage and heroism of the Wagner fighters and commanders (as well as the adjacent units of the RF Armed Forces), I will only note that the results of more than 2 months of brutal meat grinder in the form of taking half of the city blocks of a small city testify to anything, but not to the military talents of both of these characters. And, unfortunately, I express confidence that after the final capture of the city, the offensive will “come to naught” in front of the next fortified areas of the enemy, erected during the time Bakhmut and Soledar were assaulted.
I have to state that the winter offensive of the RF Armed Forces was limited to frontal strikes against heavily fortified positions of the Armed Forces of Ukraine and, in general, ended in failure (which is in no way compensated by the insignificant tactical successes of our troops and the heavy losses of the enemy).
NYT: House G.O.P. Prepares to Slash Federal Programs in Coming Budget Showdown https://tinyurl.com/35232de5 “Woke” appears to mean anything that benefits the poor, as well as “America First” cuts to foreign aid and counter-intelligence
// With Social Security and Medicare off the table, conservatives are focusing on a wide range of smaller programs as a clash with President Biden and Democrats looms.
NYT: Biden Is Set to Detail at Least $2 Trillion in Measures to Reduce Deficits https://tinyurl.com/3w3thu8k Biden’s plan includes ‘a new tax on households worth more than $100M that would apply to earned income and the unrealized gains in the value of their liquid assets’
// The president’s proposals, included in the budget he will release on Thursday, are expected to heavily feature tax increases on corporations and high earners
🧵 RT @ @CanadianKobzar FELLAS! STAY AWHILE AND LISTEN! Today is international Women’s day – a very important day that deserves our respect and attention. In honour of this day, today’s thread is focused on one of the most famous Ukrainian women in history – St. Olha of Kyiv! 1/17
📌 https://twitter.com/CanadianKobzar/status/1633350884192133122?s=20/photo/1
⭕ 7 Mar 2023
🐣 RT @calxandr The main front in the war against Russian fascist aggression is in heroic Ukraine. But the fight for democracy in Georgia, Belarus, Moldova, Kazakhstan & elsewhere also gives the Kremlin nightmares they richly deserve.
🐣 RT @SenSchumer Tucker Carlson is siding with the enemies of democracy. Here’s what I just said on the Senate floor:
💽 https://twitter.com/SenSchumer/status/1633131186540118016?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @WarintheFuture “There is no part of Ukraine about which one can say that it can be abandoned. There is no Ukrainian trench in which the resilience and heroism of our warriors would be disregarded.” The defence of #Bakhmut continues.
⋙ PresUkraine: The occupier is killing for the very fact that we are Ukrainians, for the mere word about Ukraine – address by President Volodymyr Zelenskyy https://tinyurl.com/3wx5h9bz
ABCNews: Rupert Murdoch said Trump, Giuliani were ‘both increasingly mad’ in wake of 2020 election, new documents show https://tinyurl.com/2s3hwxjx
// The documents are part of Dominion Voting Systems’ lawsuit against Fox News.
Fox Corp. chairman Rupert Murdoch privately bashed then-President Donald Trump and his attorney, Rudy Giuliani, following the 2020 election, according to court records made public on Tuesday as part of Dominion Voting Systems’ $1.6 billion defamation lawsuit against Fox News.
Murdoch wrote that Trump and Giuliani were “both increasingly mad” — using the British expression for “crazy” — in an email whose contents were read during a deposition taken as part of the lawsuit.
The voting machine company has filed court documents containing private communications from Fox News personnel appearing to cast doubt on claims that Dominion’s voting machines had somehow rigged the presidential election in Joe Biden’s favor.
Tuesday’s newly unveiled records included additional correspondence between Fox network executives and on-air hosts regarding Trump’s claim that the 2020 presidential election was rigged against him. ¤ “The real danger is what he might do as president,” Murdoch wrote of Trump, according to a transcript of the deposition. “Apparently not sleeping and bouncing off walls!”
Murdoch also acknowledged in a Jan. 21, 2021, email to a Fox News executive that “maybe Sean and Laura went too far,” referring to Sean Hannity and Laura Ingraham, two primetime hosts who echoed Trump’s claims of election fraud. The email was sent in the wake of the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol.
“All very well for Sean to tell you he was in despair about Trump, but what did he tell his viewers?” Murdoch wrote.
The thousands of pages of new documents provide additional evidence that network leaders privately acknowledged that Joe Biden had won the election despite what Fox News’ on-air personalities told their viewers.
In response to the documents, Fox News officials said that Dominion was misleading the public by not providing the full context behind some of the quotes. In one example, Fox host Sean Hannity’s statement about election fraud that he “did not believe it for one second,” which was included in an early Dominion filing, was only a partial quote and did not include that he said that he “waited for the proof.”
“Thanks to today’s filings, Dominion has been caught red-handed using more distortions and misinformation in their PR campaign to smear FOX News and trample on free speech and freedom of the press,” Fox News officials said in a statement. “We already know they will say and do anything to try to win this case, but to twist and even misattribute quotes to the highest levels of our company is truly beyond the pale.”
Other documents released Tuesday show one of Fox’s biggest stars, Tucker Carlson, privately saying that he hated Trump “passionately.” ¤ “We are very, very close to being able to ignore Trump most nights,” Carlson privately wrote on Jan. 4, 2021, according to the documents. “I truly can’t wait.” ¤ “I hate him passionately,” he said.
Separately, in a group chat between Carlson, Hannity and Laura Ingraham, the Fox News hosts vented privately about the network, its declining ratings, and their fellow employees in mid-November, the records show. ¤ “We are all officially working for an organization that hates us,” Ingraham wrote on Nov. 16, 2020, according to the documents. “My anger at the news channel is pronounced,” she said later. ¤ “I’m disgusted at this point,” Hannity said later in the conversation, per the records.
The new material also documents backlash to Fox News’ decision to call Arizona for Biden before other networks had done so. After Fox News made the call, Bret Baier, the network’s chief political anchor, urged executives to “back off AZ” and retract the call. ¤ “The sooner we pull it — even if it gives us major egg … the better we are. In my opinion,” Baier wrote on Nov. 5.
Murdoch also said during his deposition as part of the lawsuit that he “never” believed the theory that the voting company was involved in an effort to “delegitimize and destroy votes for Donald Trump.” ¤ “I never believed it,” he said during his deposition on Jan. 19, 2023, according to a more complete transcript that was released as part of the newer documents.
But elsewhere in the deposition, Murdoch acknowledged Trump’s importance, saying “nobody wants Trump as an enemy. ¤ When asked why, Murdoch said “because he had a great following, big.” ¤ “Seventy-five million people voted for him,” Murdoch said.
🐣 RT @JStein_WaPo McCarthy’s chief of staff has told colleagues his office is now in a nearly impossible bind, having vowed to advance a budget that eradicates the deficit in a decade without touching Medicare & Social Security or increasing taxes
⋙ WaPo: The Kevin McCarthy aide tasked with defusing the GOP’s debt limit bomb https://tinyurl.com/8jax6xcp “The following months will put Meyer’s aptitude managing lawmakers to the test. The Minnesotan is a constant but understated presence in the Capitol”
// Dan Meyer, the speaker’s chief of staff, has seen tense budget standoffs before. But the Republican Party has changed since then.
🐣 RT @wartranslated As if we are now getting used to almost daily videos from Russian mobilised soldiers, this one is different. The commander of this platoon is not appealing to Putin, but directly stating he is refusing to obey orders. These men were transferred to “DPR” for “meat assaults” and lost a major part of their personnel due to a “complete lack of training and reconnaissance”.
💽 https://twitter.com/wartranslated/status/1633212458662764556?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @ChuckPfarrer DELIVERED TO UKRAINE: The JADM-ER has arrived in Ukraine. The Australian-US designed kit can be fitted to 500 lb. bombs. The JADAM-ER’s integrated inertial guidance/GPS receivers will permit UKR aircraft to deliver precision strikes at ranges better than 40 mi (64.7 Km).
◕ https://twitter.com/ChuckPfarrer/status/1633293233382981634?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @MartyLenz_KOA The January 6 Whitewash Will Backfire @RadioFreeTom @TheAtlantic on Carlson, McCarthy and the J6 tapes. ¤ The only other plausible possibility: ¤ Tuck is auditioning for Newsmax or OANN.
⋙ TheAtlantic, Tom Nichols: The January 6 Whitewash Will Backfire https://tinyurl.com/zx79ahh4
// Tucker Carlson and the GOP are trying to erase a dark day. Their public-relations gamble is already failing.
[…] To recap the events of the past few weeks: McCarthy apparently decided that Carlson was the person who could remove the stain of January 6 from the Republican Party. Remember, once Trump was elected in 2016, the GOP was a national majority, holding the House, the Senate, the White House, most governor’s mansions, and most state legislatures across the country. Trump destroyed much of that, and his decision to run again meant that January 6 could not somehow be memory-holed. So the speaker gave the ever-perplexed Carlson access to thousands of hours of video from the attack.
The objective here was clear from the start. If the GOP is going to make a run at national power again, it must find a way to deny the reality of January 6 and neutralize the cloud of seditious stink that still clings to every Republican because of Trump and the insurrectionists. Who better than Carlson to sneer his way through a dismissal of one of the worst days in the history of the United States?
Unfortunately, the attempt to gaslight millions of people isn’t going very well. Carlson, as my colleague David Graham points out, is engaging in a “long-standing Donald Trump approach of demanding that his supporters believe him rather than their lying eyes.” But there are likely limits to that gambit even for Carlson, who is presenting as bombshells things we already knew. It is not a revelation, for example, that the “QAnon Shaman,” Jacob Chansley, walked along with Capitol cops who were trying to keep the fur-hatted weirdo calm even while he was howling in the Senate chamber. Carlson’s attempt to deny the danger of that moment is not only silly but also a gobsmackingly incompetent attempt to use footage depicting a rioter whose bizarre behavior was already well-known to the public.
It’s one thing to assume that the Fox audience isn’t very bright and will believe almost anything—I will gladly stipulate to that—but it’s another to ask them to leap across a chasm of credulity. Sedition-friendly Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, for example, tried to capitalize on Carlson’s after-school-video special by immediately calling for a new trial for Chansley. But even Fox viewers probably know that Chansley wasn’t convicted in a trial: He loquaciously pleaded guilty and got a stiff sentence of 41 months in prison.
… You might have expected someone like Senator Mitt Romney of Utah to zing Carlson, and he did, saying the Fox host had gone “off the rails” and describing him as a radio “shock jock.” But conservative Senators Kevin Cramer of North Dakota and Mike Rounds of South Dakota both criticized Carlson. (Even Senate Minority Leader and ongoing profile in courage Mitch McConnell carefully opined that Fox “made a mistake” in depicting January 6 in a way that was “completely at variance” with how the head of the Capitol Police “correctly” described the day.) Senator Thom Tillis of North Carolina said Carlson’s presentation was “inexcusable” and, for good measure, “bullshit.”
Trump, of course, thanked both Carlson and McCarthy. Because, really, if the point was to reassure the American public about whether the GOP is still in the grip of violent seditionists, what better way to do it than to clumsily cherry-pick some video and then elicit an all-caps tirade from the leader of the Republican Party?
LET THE JANUARY 6 PRISONERS GO. THEY WERE CONVICTED, OR ARE AWAITING TRIAL, BASED ON A GIANT LIE, A RADICAL LEFT CON JOB. THANK YOU TO TUCKER CARLSON AND SPEAKER OF THE HOUSE KEVIN McCARTHY FOR WHAT YOU BOTH HAVE DONE. NEW VIDEO FOOTAGE IS IRREFUTABLE!!!
Well then. As Sonny Bunch from The Bulwark wryly observed this morning: “Going to be kind of funny to watch GOP candidates dance around acknowledging that the presidential frontrunner and the party’s semi-official media organ are more or less pro-storming-the-Capitol at this point.”
As counterintuitive as it might be, perhaps the best thing for American democracy would be for Carlson to keep bumbling his way through more January 6 footage and to keep images of the insurrection in front of millions of viewers for as long as possible. If that’s how McCarthy and Carlson intend to restore the image of the GOP as a normal political party, who are any of us to argue with such public-relations geniuses?
🐣 RT @ChuckPfarrer BURN RATE: Putin has lost more than 3423 tanks in his ‘Special Military Operation’. To replace them, Moscow is refurbishing T-62 tanks. Though some will have upgraded optics, most will lack modern reactive armor. These 60-year-old antiques will be easy meat for UKR’s Leopards.
[TextLink:] https://twitter.com/ChuckPfarrer/status/1632770280795021314?s=20/photo/1
// UK Defense Intelligence Summary 3/6/2023
WaPo: Capitol Police chief blasts Tucker Carlson over ‘misleading’ Jan. 6 footage https://tinyurl.com/4erjb5vj Includes statement by Brian Sicknick’s family, video of McConnell stating support for Capitol Police letter
// Carlson showed segments, including ‘QAnon shaman’ Jacob Chansley, which didn’t show violence on the day rioters stormed the Capitol
CNN: Exclusive: Zelensky warns of ‘open road’ through Ukraine’s east if Russia captures Bakhmut, as he resists calls to retreat https://tinyurl.com/4najj2cz
Russian troops will have “open road” to capture key cities in eastern Ukraine if they seize control of Bakhmut, President Volodymyr Zelensky warned in an interview with CNN, as he defended his decision to keep Ukrainian forces in the besieged city.
“This is tactical for us,” Zelensky said, insisting that Kyiv’s military brass is united in prolonging its defense of the city after weeks of Russian attacks left it on the cusp of falling to Moscow’s troops. ¤ “We understand that after Bakhmut they could go further. They could go to Kramatorsk, they could go to Sloviansk, it would be open road for the Russians after Bakhmut to other towns in Ukraine, in the Donetsk direction,” he told CNN’s Wolf Blitzer in an exclusive interview from Kyiv. “That’s why our guys are standing there.”
He said that if Russia is able to “put their little flag” on top of Bakhmut, it would help “mobilize their society in order to create this idea they’re such a powerful army.” ¤ Though Bakhmut does not hold significant strategic value in itself, its road connections to Kramatorsk and Sloviansk – two densely populated, industrial urban hubs to the northwest – mean those cities be next in Russia’s crosshairs if they are able to take control. …
NATO intelligence meanwhile estimates that for every Ukrainian soldier killed defending Bakhmut, Russian forces have lost at least five, a military official with the alliance told CNN on Monday. The official cautioned the 5-to-1 ratio was an informed estimate based on intelligence.
Wagner troops have been descending on the city since capturing the town of Soledar in January. Should they gain control of Bakhmut, it would mark a rare case of a town changing hands in what has become a sluggish and slow-moving war in Ukraine’s eastern Donbas region.
An adviser within the Ukrainian Presidency, Mykhailo Podolyak, told CNN on Monday that in defending Bakhmut, Ukraine had two main goals: buying time to replenish its forces and inflicting heavy losses on Russian armies. ¤ “It achieved its goals by 1,000%,” he said. “Even if the military leadership at some point decides to retreat to more favorable positions, the case of defending Bakhmut will be a great strategic success for the Ukrainian Armed Forces as a foundation for future victory.”
Ukraine is meanwhile racing to integrate Western weapons systems and dozens of tanks into its operations, after Zelensky successfully persuaded the US, the UK, Germany and a bloc of other European nations to step up its military aid. ¤ It comes ahead of an anticipated Russian spring offensive that may encompass territory in central and northern Ukraine which Russia was unsuccessful in capturing in its initial invasion last year.
🐣 RT @mhmck The General Staff reports units of the Armed Forces of Ukraine repelled attacks by the Russian fascist invaders in the areas of Ivanivs’ke, Klishchiyivka and Bakhmut. ¤ That Ukrainian defenders hold positions near Klishchiyivka is good news. The enemy isn’t surrounding Bakhmut.
🌎 https://twitter.com/mhmck/status/1633159127982637056?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @therecount Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell says Tucker Carlson’s whitewashing of the Capitol insurrection was a “mistake.” ¤ “My concern is how it was a depicted … Clearly, the chief of the Capitol Police … correctly describes what most of us witnessed firsthand on January 6th.”
💽 https://twitter.com/therecount/status/1633191586254274563?s=20/photo/1
CNN: US Capitol Police chief rips into Tucker Carlson over ‘offensive’ use of January 6 footage https://tinyurl.com/yc5fu5hu “Several congressional Republicans, most notably Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, have expressed concern with Carlson’s portrayal of the attack”
Several congressional Republicans, most notably Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, have expressed concern with Carlson’s portrayal of the attack. ¤ “With regard to the presentation on Fox News last night, I want to associate myself entirely with the opinion of the Chief of the Capitol Police about what happened on January 6,” McConnell told reporters at the Capitol Tuesday.
According to the Justice Department, 140 officers were assaulted at the Capitol that day, including 60 Metropolitan Police officers and 80 USCP officers.”
🐣 RT @ChuckPfarrer BAKHMUT /1400 UTC 7 MAR/ On 6 MAR, a major Russian offensive was crushed by UKR at the village of Dubovo-Vasylivka. UKR ground forces, artillery & missile forces defeated thirty-seven (37) RU attacks in heavy fighting. Wagner troop & materiel losses are assessed as heavy.
🌎 https://twitter.com/ChuckPfarrer/status/1633105588862197761?s=20/photo/1
⋙ 🐣 RT @ChuckPfarrer CULMINATION? RU’s failed attack at Dubovo-Vasylivka marks one of the most severe Russian defeats in the long campaign to take the city of Bakhmut. UKR reinforcements are now assessed to be deployed in strong defensive lines in the city and surrounding areas.
⋙⋙ 🐣 RT @SKmartinTO Omega Special Unit of the National Guard of Ukraine is on the front line of contact, decimating demoralized armed criminals from the PMC in the Battles on Bakhmut Fortress. #BakhmutFortressHOLD
💽 https://twitter.com/SKmartinTO/status/1633114304076476418?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @kyledcheney JUST IN: DOJ says it has crossed 1,000 Jan. 6 defendants, with more than half pleading guilty and another 53 found guilty in trials.
⋙ DOJ: 26 Months Since the Jan. 6 Attack on the Capitol https://tinyurl.com/m7bhn7cd
Arrests made: More than 999 defendants have been arrested in nearly all 50 states and the District of Columbia. (This includes those charged in both District and Superior Court).
Criminal charges:
● Approximately 326 defendants have been charged with assaulting, resisting, or impeding officers or employees, including approximately 106 individuals who have been charged with using a deadly or dangerous weapon or causing serious bodily injury to an officer.● Approximately 140 police officers were assaulted Jan. 6 at the Capitol, including about 80 from the U.S. Capitol Police and about 60 from the Metropolitan Police Department.
● Approximately 11 individuals have been arrested on a series of charges that relate to assaulting a member of the media, or destroying their equipment, on Jan. 6.
● Approximately 919 defendants have been charged with entering or remaining in a restricted federal building or grounds. Of those, 101 defendants have been charged with entering a restricted area with a dangerous or deadly weapon.
● Approximately 61 defendants have been charged with destruction of government property, and approximately 46 defendants have been charged with theft of government property.
● More than 306 defendants have been charged with corruptly obstructing, influencing, or impeding an official proceeding, or attempting to do so.
Approximately 55 defendants have been charged with conspiracy, either: (a) conspiracy to obstruct a congressional proceeding, (b) conspiracy to obstruct law enforcement during a civil disorder, (c) conspiracy to injure an officer, or (d) some combination of the three.
Pleas:
● Approximately 518 individuals have pleaded guilty to a variety of federal charges, many of whom faced or will face incarceration at sentencing.Trials:
● 53 individuals have been found guilty at contested trials, including 3 who were found guilty in the Superior Court of the District of Columbia. Another 16 individuals have been convicted following an agreed-upon set of facts. 19 of these 72 defendants were found guilty of assaulting, resisting, or impeding officers, a felony, including one who has been sentenced to 10 years in prison.Sentencings:
● Approximately 420 federal defendants have had their cases adjudicated and received sentences for their criminal activity on Jan. 6. Approximately 220 have been sentenced to periods of incarceration. Approximately 100 defendants have been sentenced to a period of home detention, including approximately 15 who also were sentenced to a period of incarceration.
🐣 RT @SenRonJohnson Truth is beginning to be revealed. ¤ Thank you @SpeakerMcCarthy,
@TuckerCarlson & company for showing America the rest of the Jan. 6 story. ¤ When will judges begin applying justice equally? ¤ Doesn’t look like “thousands of armed insurrectionists” to me. https://tinyurl.com/3un7anvp
[TextLink:] https://twitter.com/SenRonJohnson/status/1632924556116541441?s=20/photo/1 -3
⋙ 🐣 Please make these materials available to all news outlets, to allow for the widest possible context and analysis. ¤ That said, keep in mind that the “trophy” videos made by participants and bodycam videos of police officers provide additional points of view of what took place
🐣 Richard Haass declares Biden’s “Nothing about Ukraine without Ukraine” policy as Biden allowing Ukraine to set US national security policy. @Morning_Joe can do better and needs to host alternative views that don’t favor the US bullying its partners. @JoeNBC
⭕ 6 Mar 2023
NatRev, Charles Cooke: Donald Trump’s Recipe for Electoral Failure https://tinyurl.com/5n8fs648 “[W]hy, on each of the last three times [Trump] has attempted to compete in American elections, he has proven himself to be such a bewildering loser”
// The former president portrays any attempt to appeal to voters beyond his core base as a sign of weakness
Despite his preferred approach to politics having been responsible for grievous Republican losses in the last three national elections, Donald Trump is once again seeking to cast himself as the savior of the American Right. During his chaotic speech at CPAC on Saturday, Trump boasted to the crowd that, until he came along, “the Republican Party was ruled by freaks, neocons, open-border zealots, and fools,” before reassuring attendees that, under his continued leadership, the GOP is not at risk of “going back to the party of Paul Ryan, Karl Rove, and Jeb Bush.”
This was not an offhand comment. Increasingly, Trump likes to point to Paul Ryan, Karl Rove, Jeb Bush, and even Ronald Reagan as examples of what has historically been wrong with the GOP — as well as a warning of what the party will become again if any of the other candidates for the Republican nomination prevail in 2024. In recent months, Trump has begun to fuse these critiques with his attacks on Ron DeSantis, having complained variously that DeSantis is being pushed by “Jeb Bush, Karl Rove, Paul Ryan,” that Fox News’s coverage of DeSantis “reminds me of 2016 when they were pushing ‘JEB!’,” and that DeSantis is suspect because “he used to be a Reagan Republican.”
WaPo: Russia advances in Bakhmut by sending waves of mercenaries to certain death https://tinyurl.com/52u3x7ue “Wagner leader Yevgeniy Prigozhin has tried to use the Bakhmut battle to bolster his position in Russia and to attack Russia’s military leadership”
🐣 RT @ olgatokariuk Russians cowardly and dishonorably executed this unarmed Ukrainian POW. His last words were ‘Glory to Ukraine’. He was shot repeatedly after saying it. If Russians did it with a goal of intimidating Ukrainians, they achieved the opposite effect: he will be forever seen as a hero
🖼 https://twitter.com/olgatokariuk/status/1632815330790719488?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @SpiroAgnewGhost The deranged rantings of a madman, 2:26 a.m.
[TextLink:] https://twitter.com/SpiroAgnewGhost/status/1632651954001432576?s=20/photo/1
[Text:] 🐣 RT @realDonaldTrump How does Rupert Murdoch say there was no election fraud when 2000 Mules shows, on government tape, that there were millions of “stuffed ballots,” & Elon Musk released the FBl/Twitter Files, where pollsters say that the silencing of information made a 17% difference in the Vote. Then there was, of course, FBI/Facebook, another big election integrity fraud costing millions of Votes-& this doesn’t even count all of the many other ways they cheated, or the fact that they avoided State Legislatures?
⭕ 5 Mar 2023
NBCNews: Biden bucks liberals and tells Democrats to get tough on crime https://tinyurl.com/435wmyzk //➔ this is why Dems need Biden: he knows how to “read the room” ~~ when “the room” has do with winning elections
// It shows how powerful the issue has become, says James Carville, who helped Bill Clinton counter soft-on-crime attacks during the 1990s crime wave.
🐣 RT @ChuckPfarrer BAKHMUT CITY /1510 UTC 5 MAR/ Simplified TACMAP of lines of contact in Bakhmut urban area. Based on 0600 (Local) briefing of UKR Gen’l Staff. #Bakhmut #BakhmutHolds #BakhmutDefenders
🌎 https://twitter.com/ChuckPfarrer/status/1632395700557463552?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @wartranslated I mean, he’s [Girkin is] an internationally convicted war criminal, so… Besides, he was the one who entered Sloviansk in 2014, and the war started with him. As we say here in Essex, The Only Way is Hague.
🐣 RT @wartranslated Girkin claims the video with Prigozhin that surfaced yesterday was actually made at the peak of the shell conflict two weeks ago. Despite that, Girkin suggests Prigozhin must be immediately removed from Wagner’s leadership due to his psychopathy, self-promotion and criminal links. ¤ Girkin does not believe removing Wagner will lead to the same consequences as what Prigozhin claims. https://t.me/strelkovii/4130
[TextLink:] https://twitter.com/wartranslated/status/1632328568398139395?s=20/photo/1 -2
[Text:] 1/2 Briefly, regarding Prigozhin’s statements on social media that “without Wagner, the front would collapse”: – the statements were made at the height of the “shell conflict” with the MoD about two weeks ago; – statements are an example of shameless “criminal” self-promotion; – despite Wagner’s capabilities to “break with its forehead” (“washing in blood” at the same time) through the enemy’s positions at the strategic dead-end section of the front through the reckless expenditure of human resources, and the inability of the active formations of the RF Ministry of Defense to demonstrate something similar in other places (perhaps due to reluctance), Wagner has a very minor effect on the overall strategic situation on the front. Both due to the incorrect and wasteful use of its forces, and due to considerations of the scale of the war, in which a fierce battle (not yet finished) for a small town in the Donbas is neither general nor decisive, is of an operational-tactical nature and leads only to mutual huge loss of combatants. At the same time, the command of the Armed Forces of Ukraine is completely transparent in “exchanging territory and human resources for gaining time.” Just as it did in the situation with Popasna, Lisichansk, Severodonetsk in the summer of last year; – in the event of the disbandment or removal of “Wagner’ from the front, the situation for the RF Armed Forces will undoubtedly become worse, but – against the general background – insignificantly.
2/2 And, yes, a little more about Wagner. In my opinion, “Wagner”, after the completion of the assault on Bakhmut, cannot be withdrawn from the front, nor (all the more so) disbanded. The formation must be withdrawn to the rear for replenishment and reorganisation, in order to subsequently be used in a more promising strategic direction to break through the front.
But to withdraw Prigozhin himself from the front and COMPLETELY remove him from the leadership of Wagner is urgently necessary. Since his political ambitions (multiplied by psychopathy, the organisation of demonstrative war crimes, a tendency to shameless and in many respects false self-promotion and the spread of rotten “criminal concepts” to the armed forces) only harm both Wagner and the common cause of victory over Ukraine However, all of the above (except for “war crimes”) also applies to the non-plywood Marshal Shoigu. In short, it is necessary to kick out both and it is better to kick them both at once, since “two boots are a pair.”
🐣 RT @ChuckPfarrer BAKHMUT AXIS /1215 UTC 5 MAR/ RU renewed unsuccessful attacks across the M-04 HWY. UKR carried out 18 aviation strike missions, targeting RU troop concentrations, air defense sites and a bridge. Missile/ artillery units hit RU troops, EW stations and air defense complexes.
🌎 https://twitter.com/ChuckPfarrer/status/1632356690896072705?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @TWMCLtd #Russia’s cattle fodder being made to fight not only with outdated tactics, but also 150-year-old weapons (kind of). ¤ Here’s the daily update from the #UK ¤ #RussiansGoHome
[TextLink:] https://twitter.com/TWMCLtd/status/1632274009810255873?s=20/photo/1
● In late February 2023, Russian mobilised reservists described being ordered to assault a Ukrainian concrete strong point armed with only ‘firearms and shovels’. The ‘shovels’ are
likely entrenching tools being employed for hand-to-hand combat.● The lethality of the standard-issue MPL-50 entrenching tool is particularly mythologised in Russia. Little changed since it was designed in 1869, its continued use as a weapon
highlights the brutal and low-tech fighting which has come to characterise much of the war. One of the reservists described being ‘neither physically nor psychologically’ prepared for
the action.● Recent evidence suggests an increase in close combat in Ukraine. This is probably a result of the Russian command continuing to insist on offensive action largely consisting of
dismounted infantry, with less support from artillery fire because Russia is short of munitions.
🐣 RT @ChuckPfarrer BAKMUT AXIS /0010 UTC 5 MAR/ Street-fighting continues within Bakhmut: the situation remains fluid and serious. UKR forces repelled RU attacks N and S of the city and counter-attacks SW of Ivanivske have driven RU units back to Klischiivka.
🌎 https://twitter.com/ChuckPfarrer/status/1632169880194625539?s=20/photo/1
⭕ 4 Mar 2023
NYT, Peter Baker: Inside the Panic at Fox News After the 2020 Election https://tinyurl.com/5ykxxpr9
// “If we hadn’t called Arizona,” said Suzanne Scott, the network’s chief executive, according to a recording reviewed by The New York Times, “our ratings would have been bigger.”
🐣 RT @RonFilipkowski This is a montage of 55 clips over 6 minutes of the “highlights” from CPAC 2023. ¤ THE 2023 REPUBLICAN PARTY
💽 https://twitter.com/RonFilipkowski/status/1632450572396658688?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @KyivIndependent ⚡ISW: Russian forces unlikely to encircle Bakhmut soon. ¤ Russian advances “do not suggest Russian forces will be able to encircle Bakhmut soon, must less that they will be able to take the city by frontal assaults,” the Institute for the Study of War said. ¤ 🎞️ John Moore/Getty
🐣 RT @wartranslated Prigozhin today is once again seen explaining how invaluable Wagner is for Russia, and how retreating from Bakhmut will lead to the collapse of the whole Russian front. ¤ Also appears to be hinting at the fact that his mercenaries might find it rather unpleasant if they suspect that Russian authorities set them up by not providing ammo and reinforcements. ¤ Besides. Why is he talking about retreating from Bakhmut at all, if just yesterday he was claiming to have “nearly surrounded” it?
💽 https://twitter.com/wartranslated/status/1632148708748935168?s=20/photo/1
[See Comments]
🐣 RT @christogrozev Russian telegram channels connect this with Rozdulgin’s health emergency. Rozdulgin is allegedly one of Putin’s largest asset proxies.
⋙ 🐣 RT @JanR210 A strange flight to/from #Russia. ¤ Apparently a #VIP medical issue. ¤ It was a medical emergency airplane Bombardier Challenger 604. ¤ Flight path: Frankfurt-Moscow-Nurnberg ¤ All concerned European states agreed for overflight. ¤ cc @STRATPOINTS_EU
⋙ 🐣 RT @ ICIJorg Four bankers have been charged for allegedly failing to figure out the true owner behind Russian cellist Sergei Roldugin’s Swiss bank accounts. A longtime friend of Putin, Roldugin’s web of offshore companies was first revealed in the #PanamaPapers https://bit.ly/3SJYBgX
PravdaUA: 171 cases of sexual violence by Russian military recorded – Zelenska https://tinyurl.com/5n78ur73
// The prosecutor’s office is investigating 171 cases of sexual violence against Ukrainians by the Russian military, with 39 men among the victims.
🐣 RT @McFaul The country invaded for no reason is the one that “needs to find peace not war.” Incredible. ¤ This blame-the-victim argument is disgusting. ¤ Imagine saying this about victims of other crimes? Or civilians killed in other wars? Or those killed by other terrorists?
⋙⋙ 🐣 RT @atrupar Big CPAC applause for this from Marjorie Taylor Greene: “No money to Ukraine, and that country needs to find peace not war. And while I will look at a camera and directly tell Zelenskyy you better leave your hands off our sons and daughters, because they’re not dying over there”
💽 https://twitter.com/McFaul/status/1632202244035858432?s=20/photo/1
⋙ 🐣 the chair of every House Committee directly involved with Ukraine is firmly pro-Ukraine, some blaming Biden for not acting more decisively; all have been on recent CODELs. ¤ MTG is an outrage machine, part of the 🤡caucus ~ ignore her
🐣 RT @RadioFreeTom I think there’s a huge difference between a child tax credit (which I think it is necessary as long as it’s means-tested) and paying people to be Hero Mothers of the State
⋙ 🐣 it’s so grey-sounding to talk about the child tax credit (the pandemic era expansion of which Dems failed to get extended); evidence Trump continues to be good at branding
🐣 The report below is FAKE! Here is the DefenseHQ report from 3/4/2023:
https://twitter.com/DefenceHQ/status/1631917276126380033?s=20 ¤
⇈ ⇊
🐣 RT @yasminalombaert (Unverified) British military experts believe that the Russian dictator Putin will try to exchange the occupied parts of the Zaporozhye and Kherson regions for the Crimea, with the subsequent withdrawal of the Russian Armed Forces troops from these territories.
[TextLink:] https://twitter.com/yasminalombaert/status/1632036393655435264?s=20/photo/1
[Text:] [Unverified] Withdrawal of troops from Zaporozhye and Kherson regions in exchange for Crimea: Putin is trying to bargain to end the war as soon aspossible – British intelligence The latest report says that Putin went to extreme measures to end the war as soon as possible, as the Russian economy, hard hit by sanctions, simply needs to lift the sanctions. Donbass, he hopes to seize by military means. Putin’s main goal is to save his face in front of the Russian population and not lose power.
🐣 RT @RonFilipkowski I have tried very hard for a long time not to have a visceral contempt for people who believe this should be president. Especially since some of them are my family: [Trump at CPAC:] “I am your warrior. I am your justice. And for those who have been wronged and betrayed, I am your retribution.”
💽 https://twitter.com/RonFilipkowski/status/1632226509405450240?s=20/photo/1
🧵 RT @atrupar Trump is about to speak at CPAC 2023 in DC. My video thread starts here.
📌 💽 https://twitter.com/atrupar/status/1632143206392516609?s=20/photo/1
🧵 RT @wartranslated Summary of the livestream with Oleksiy Arestovych, former Ukraine’s Presidential Head of Office advisor, Day 374, March 4th. Kindly brought to you by Anastasiya: @Anastasiya1451A Read thread or visit: https://tinyurl.com/ys3km95b
📌 https://twitter.com/wartranslated/status/1632167506449166336?s=20
[ThreadReader:] https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1632167506449166336.html
⚡️Russian resistance in Bryansk & FSB’s lie: Feygin had an interview with the Russian volunteer who fights on the side of Ukraine and who crossed into the Bryansk region, declaring that they will fight the Kremlin’s criminal regime that is destroying the Russian people’s… ¤ …prospects.
FSB has tried to spread disinformation about Russian resistance fighters to portray them as “terrorists”, claiming that they wounded two people, then correcting their story and saying that it was just one man, a school bus driver.
The “bus driver” story is designed for the American audience. While a yellow school bus is emblematic in the US, it isn’t actually used in Russia to collect and transport school students.
Arestovych thinks that the war started by the Russian regime will spread to Russia. ¤ More Russian partisans may start active resistance against the Kremlin’s regime and may use more drones in Russian territory.
Many people are discontent with the Kremlin’s regime and people wronged by them, including Russians, Tatars, Chechens, Dagestani, etc. The Kremlin knows about the potential for separatist movements and riots in Russia and, therefore, Putin and Medvedev are complaining about… ¤ …separatism and division of Russia among Muscovites, Siberians, etc.
⚡️Bakhmut
Russia keeps trying to encircle Bakhmut from the North and South, with the situation remaining very difficult with Ukrainian troops defending against more numerous Russian forces. ¤ Russian sources also report losing ground south of Bakhmut to the Ukrainian troops.While Russian propaganda inflates the significance of Bakhmut and there is political & media importance to Bakhmut, all decisions regarding the defence or retreat from Bakhmut are made by the Ukrainian General Staff and military commands.
Even if Ukraine decides to leave Bakhmut, the Ukrainian troops will retreat to the next defensive line and will retake the town as it has liberated Lyman and Kherson before.
⚡️Mariinka & Avdiivka
Russians attempted to advance in Mariinka, with the town being completely destroyed by Russian artillery.⚡️Vuhledar & Orehiv
Tactical battlers near Vuhledar. Minor battles near Orehiv. After already losing 150 tanks and APCs, Russians seem to be planning another attack on Vuhledar.⚡️Kreminna
Russians are attempting to advance near Kreminna, with mixed results, no major gains, and high Russian human cost.⚡️Kherson
Artillery duels continue in Kherson.⚡️Crimea
Explosions were reported near several Russian military air bases in Crimea, potentially from drone attacks.⚡️Zaporizhzhja
The Russian missile strike on a residential building in Zaporizhzhja left 11 dead, including one child, and more were wounded. ¤ Russia is murdering Ukrainian civilians, families in their homes, and children sleeping in their beds. Isn’t that the definition of terrorism? ¤ This strikingly contrasts with Ukraine which is just defending itself and attacks Russian military units, not civilians or Russian cities.⚡️Mobilization & fate of Russian soldiers
More videos from the Russian mobilized and their families are surfacing – mobilized and their wives complain about being sent to the frontline without training, equipment, ammunition, and artillery support.While Ukrainians are volunteering to fight and defend their land and to prevent another massacre like Bucha’s, with only the elite units used to assault Russian positions, the Russian mobilized are being thrown as cannon fodder to assault the Ukrainian defences.
⚡️Argentina, China & the Big Picture
Argentina has stated that it’s willing to renegotiate with the UK over the Falkland/Mal Islands, which may be an attempt to destabilize the West.The US has sanctioned 28 Chinese companies over sanction violations and trade with Iran. ¤ This is a sign to everyone to avoid violating sanctions, including by trading with Russia. The collective West is showing China that there will be a harsh response and grave consequences for any country that aids Russia. ¤ At the same time, the Chinese drone company, DJI, has halted its contracts to export drones to Russia.
[The Economist reports China being furious at the Russian Government for not keeping the potential military cooperation secret, especially when China’s economy is dependent on trade with the US and the EU.]
⚡️Russian diplomatic circus
When giving a speech at a press conference in India, the audience laughed at Lavrov’s declarations of “Ukraine has attacked Russia”. Lavrov managed to keep poker face thanks to his long experience in this position.⚡️Russian oil & gas
Russian oil and gas extraction fell by half and profit from the export fell by 46% in February.
In June, the Russian government may not only lose its remaining army to the Ukrainian counteroffensive but also be unable to pay pensions and salaries to the Russian public workers.⚡️Sanctions
The US and the collective West have called on Turkey and the UAE to end trade with Russia. Moreover, the American Government has warned about the criminal responsibility for any company that intentionally does business with Russia, even though a third party.The Russian oligarchs who directly fund Kremlin’s regime are facing confiscation of property (luxury villas) in France. At the same time, Swiss bankers trying to hide Putin’s financial assets are facing criminal charges.
The EU’s Ursula von der Leyen has stated that there will be a special tribunal for Russian war criminals. The West has taken a strategic decision, aiming to hold the Russian regime and Russian regime collaborators accountable for their crimes.
⚡️Putin’s response to sanctions
In response to Western sanctions and the struggling Russian economy, Putin has signed a law allowing the confiscation and nationalization of Russian businesses that cannot fulfil their contractual obligations to the Russian military.The association with Putin brings only misery to those who do it. The Russian oligarchs, elite, and populace should ask themselves why they chose to continue to suffer because of one man.
⚡️Tanks for Ukraine
The German Rheinmetall is planning the construction of a factory and production of up to 400 tanks a year German tanks in Ukraine.While this provoked another hysteric outburst from Medvedev, who threatened the German company with an Kalibr missiles, it’s entirely possible that by the time of construction Ukraine may not only have an air defence to protect the military-industrial complex but may become…
…part of NATO.Rheinmetall is also discussing the buyback of Leopard 1 from Switzerland to upgrade them and send them to Ukraine. ¤ At the same time, the UK will send more Challenger tanks and other APCs than previously discussed.
⚡️The Western values
Scholz has met Biden in Washington DC, praising Germany’s help to Ukraine. While China may quietly try to negotiate with Germany and Belarus, both countries’ future development and civilizational prospects are aligned with the collective West. ¤ Next stream is on Monday, 6th of March.
🐣 RT @ChuckPfarrer BAKMUT AXIS /0010 UTC 5 MAR/ Street-fighting continues within Bakhmut: the situation remains fluid and serious. UKR forces repelled RU attacks N and S of the city and counter-attacks SW of Ivanivske have driven RU units back to Klischiivka.
🌎 https://twitter.com/ChuckPfarrer/status/1632169880194625539?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @SpiroAgnewGhost As an expert on Trump’s thousands of demented & unhinged rants, this may be the craziest & most desperately deranged one of all time. He’s like a stream of consciousness Grandpa Simpson who can’t help but show his immense fear & lunacy at levels umimaginable for any other person.
[TextLink:] https://twitter.com/SpiroAgnewGhost/status/1632070787468509185?s=20/photo/1
[Text:] 🐣 RT @realDonaldTrump This Animal Prosecutor that they stuck on me over the Boxes Hoax is trying to TORTURE my people into telling lies. It’s all for political reasons, and the fact that l’m leading, big, in all of the polls. He’s flying people from all over and throwing them in front of a D.C. Grand Jury. They are confused and scared – they’ve never done this before. These Democrat Marxist pigs should be the ones that are investigated. The nice guy prosecutor in the Biden documents case hasn’t even started yet!
🐣 RT @AndrewC66721154 When others would have fled, he stayed. When the Russian hit squads were in Kyiv, he stayed. He has led his country with dignity, bravery and pride.
🐣 RT @Flash_news_ua China is angry with the russian federation because their arms sales discussions were made public, – The Economist.
[TextLink:] 🖼 https://twitter.com/Flash_news_ua/status/1632004204549091328?s=20/photo/1
[Text:] [Cover of Economist:] Chinese arms could revive Russia’s failing war
// But China’s leaders are treading carefully for now
🐣 RT @MeidasTouch CPAC lost their major sponsors. Many of their usual high profile speakers refused to show. There’s barely anyone in attendance. ¤ This is a dying movement.
🐣 RT @ZaleskiLuke Trump’s willing to treat his fellow citizens like mortal enemies. He is the most divisive character in American history. He’s an effective vehicle for Putin’s aim of destroying the nation. He is dividing and conquering us and his followers have no idea they’re at war with America
[TextLink:] https://twitter.com/ZaleskiLuke/status/1632035351253463041?s=20/photo/1
[Text:] 🐣 RT @realDonaldTrump The U.S. Injustice Department, which has dangerously become the Radical Left Democrats WEAPONIZED SYSTEM OF LAW, is threatening and harassing many people that work for me, wanting them to say anything bad in order to be left alone or even, set free. They are being carted off to Washington, D.C., and put before a Grand Jury, where the modern day Gestapo does everything in its power to make them look and sound as bad as possible. This Soviet style of “Justice” is going to take down the U.S.A. Bad!
🐣 RT @Tendar Russia committed crimes unseen since the WW2. A Nuremberg tribunal 2.0 is needed. ¤ President of the EU commission, Ursula von der Leyen, announced the agreement to set up the International Centre for Prosecution of the Crime of Aggression in The Hague.
💽 https://twitter.com/Tendar/status/1631953225870979073?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @SpiroAgnewGhost The illiterate, utterly deranged lunatic & imbecile has now put “STOLLEN” in all CAPS—even funnier since he is talking about money this time when he says it. Nearly every single word in here is a delusionally insane lie.
[TextLink:] https://twitter.com/SpiroAgnewGhost/status/1632051664025952261?s=20/photo/1
[Text:] 🐣 RT @realDonald Trump But the Radical Left Democrat Prosecutors go after Trump over the Boxes Hoax, Horseface, and all other trivia. They’ve STOLLEN millions of dollars, caught on tape in the Laptop from Hell, and nothing happens. Likewise, the Election fraud, to put these people in office, was massive. Millions of votes, on tape, in “ballot stuffing” alone. Little Legislative approval, FBI/Twitter, FBI/Facebook-All a big disgrace! We are a Third World Nation, with mostly FAKE NEWS. MAGA!
🐣 RT @ChuckPfarrer BAKHMUT AXIS /1310 UTC 4 MAR/ On 3 MAR, UKR forces destroyed bridges at Khromove & across the Bakhmutka River to slow RU advances. UKR counter-attacks SW of Ivanivske have put UKR troops in contact at Klischiivka. UKR air defense destroyed eight RU recon UAVs of various types.
🌎 https://twitter.com/ChuckPfarrer/status/1632002660718071808?s=20/photo/1
// ✛ “It is assessed as likely that UKR will begin to disengage in areas east of the Bakhmutka River. The arrival of UKR reinforcements are considered sufficient to support retrograde operations to series of previously prepared defensive positions.”
🐣 RT @wartranslated Update on Bakhmut, 4 March – Kyianyn.
💽 https://twitter.com/wartranslated/status/1631991835764707334?s=20/photo/1
// as rumors swirl about fall of Bakhmut, Kyianyn pushes back against believing them and says any order to leave Bakhmut will be directed from above; chastises over attributing battle more significance than to other battles, some wins/some losses: ‘Bakhmut will be Ukraine,’ regardless of the outcome of this battle
🐣 RT @KyivIndependent NATO’s Supreme Allied Commander in Europe said Russia has lost more than 200,000 troops since the start of its invasion in Ukraine on Feb. 24, 2022, describing the extent of the war as “unbelievable.”
⋙ KyivIndependent: NATO commander in Europe: Russia’s losses in Ukraine amount to over 200,000 troops https://tinyurl.com/27wpxfp8
NATO’s Supreme Allied Commander in Europe, U.S. Army General Christopher Cavoli, said that Russia has lost more than 200,000 troops since the start of its invasion in Ukraine on Feb. 24, 2022, describing the extent of the war as “unbelievable.” ¤ He added that over 1,800 Russian officers were killed or wounded, German magazine Der Spiegel reported.
Cavoli also said that Russia has lost “far more” than 2,000 large battle tanks and that its army fires an average of 23,000 artillery shells per day.
The U.K. Defense Ministry previously estimated that Russia’s army and private mercenary groups have likely lost 175,000-200,000 people in Ukraine, with up to 60,000 killed. According to a report, prisoners recruited by the Kremlin-backed private mercenary Wagner Group have suffered a casualty rate of up to 50%. ¤ “The Russian casualty rate has significantly increased since September 2022 when ‘partial mobilization’ was imposed,” reads the report.
The General Staff of Ukraine’s Armed Forces reported on March 4 that Russia had lost 152,190 troops in Ukraine since the beginning of its full-scale invasion on Feb. 24 last year. ¤ This number includes 820 casualties Russian forces suffered just over the past day.
🐣 RT @EuromaidanPress The number of Russian invaders killed by the Ukrainian Army exceeds the size of many European militaries 🎞️ UA War Infographics
◕ https://twitter.com/EuromaidanPress/status/1631840665926508544?s=20/photo/1
// 150.6K Ru killed
🐣 RT @PhillipsPOBrien First time I’ve seen a clear Ukrainian claim on this. Oleksii Danilov says Ukrainians believe the Russians are losing 7 soldiers for each Ukrainian lost in the Bakhmut fighting. That would be extreme, and explains why the Ukr have drawn things out—if true https://tinyurl.com/yk2mz2d2
🐣 RT @JimmySecUK Situation around Bakhmut is increasingly confused. Bridges out of the city have been blown, units have been pulled out, but official Ukrainian sources denying any withdrawal.
⋙ 🐣 RT @ @HickPhilistine I think this exactly what I would expect if they are withdrawing. During the Lysyschansk/Hirske/Zolote withdrawal it was similar until they were out, just don’t want to give away exactly what/when it is happening.
⋙ 🐣 RT @TStanfield1789 They should withdraw. It has zero strategic value. It has served its purpose of delaying and attriting the Russian army.
⭕ 3 Mar 2023
TheBulwark, William Kristol and Jeffrey Gedmin: The Ukraine War Has Transformed Europe—for Good https://tinyurl.com/y4574uan “[The] European future can and must be in the spirit of what Zelensky says and stands for.”
// The notion of a Zeitenwende—a major turning point—is not just German anymore. Putin’s war has become a Zeitenwende for all Europe.
[ … ] What is now widely understood is that the Europe of the last three decades ended on February 24, 2022, with Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine.
The full-scale character of the war, and its brutality in every respect, has proved more bracing than those countless transatlantic seminars on how much of a nation’s GDP should be spent on defense. The largest land war in Europe since 1945 has been more than a wakeup call. It has been an alarm bell that that continues to ring every day with a loudness and persistence that may be difficult for Americans to appreciate.
Putin’s war has become Europe’s Zeitenwende. The extraordinary leadership of Ukraine’s President Zelensky has been absolutely crucial. The United States has stepped up in a very important way. But what’s been also striking is Europe’s reaction, and the way Europeans are emerging from their cocoon.
Germany, a country of few flags, feels suddenly comfortable with Ukrainian flags pretty much anywhere. They were certainly in plentiful view in the neighboring Czech Republic, at the train station in Prague and in the old city square. … It’s also where we listened to Czech President-elect Petr Pavel, a retired army general and former NATO military committee chief, denounce appeasement, past and present.
By the way, Czechs have taken in about half a million Ukrainian refugees—more per capita than any other EU nation. But many other nations, including Poland and Germany, have been very generous, and they seem not be seeing much in the way of a public backlash.
In Berlin, there’s a lot of discussion of various aspects of the German Zeitenwende. We have ourselves written about its bumpy, although in our view singularly promising, path. But the larger story is one of generational change and ideological transformation.
In Germany, the Greens—with politicians in their thirties, forties, and early fifties—are leading the way. They don’t mind talking straightforwardly about the struggle for freedom and the responsibility to defeat tyranny. Younger Social Democrats have turned their back on the legacy of former Chancellor Gerhard Schröder, late of Rosneft and Gazprom. In less than a year, cautious Germans have moved from providing helmets to Leopard tanks. Their liberation from dependence on Russian energy has been pretty spectacular.
For Czechs, the war feels close. You could fly from Prague to Kyiv in two hours—faster than flying from New York to Chicago. (Well, you could do that before Ukrainian airspace was closed by Russian fighter jets.) It was striking in our discussions how much the 1968 Warsaw Pact invasion of the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic is back in Czech consciousness.
For Nordics and Balts, the threat is even closer. The Swedes and Finns are racing to join NATO, with broad public support. There’s a vision emerging among the Czechs, Poles, and Northern Europeans of a Europe with serious military capacity. There’s a new focus on geopolitical strategy with defense and deterrence at its core. And Europe’s strategic center of gravity is shifting to a broader constellation of nations, away from the almost complete dominance of France and Germany.
Which brings us back to Ukraine. There’s a clear sense in Europe that a clock is now ticking. There’s a feeling of urgency, an understanding that we must finally give the Ukrainians the weapons they need for victory this year. As one European told us, both Europe and the United States need “less incrementalism, more decisiveness.”
This broad European Zeitenwende won’t be easy. But the new frontline European nations are looking ahead. They see a need and opportunity for new structures that can protect European democracies for years to come. And there’s a growing conviction that victory in Ukraine can and should lead to meaningful political change in Russia itself.
For Americans, this is an opportunity to join our frontline European friends not only in a commitment to Ukrainian victory but also in thinking more clearly of what Europe can look like when Ukraine wins.
That European future can and must be in the spirit of what Zelensky says and stands for. Europe’s future is not in the spirit of Orbán. Nor of Schröder. And certainly not of Putin.
🐣 RT @warmonitor3 The defence of Bakhmut goes down in history. ¤ An embarrassment for the Russian military whatever way they spin it.
// No “Bakhmut Holds” banner tonight
🐣 RT @anders_aslund This is also indicative of the intellectual level of the Putinistas.
⋙⋙ 🐣 RT @pete_moss44 If this is the level of Russian callousness to their own men, one realises just how callous the Russian administration is with Ukrainians – given that they brand Ukrainians, including children, as “Nazi’s”.
[Text:] “Today’s Ukrainians are a race of degenerates that crawled up from the sewage. Genocide is in order.” ¤ Aleksandr Dugin, ¤ Professor of Moscow State University ¤ Ideologue of “Novorossya
⋙ 🐣 Dostoyevsky to Dugin: quite a devolution
TIME, Igor Novikov: How Giuliani and Trump Destabilized Ukraine https://tinyurl.com/2s48mtff Even during the (first) impeachment, Rudy and Trump were still blackmailing Zelensky, though by then, Trump “much preferred back channels”
🐣 RT @SpiroAgnewGhost This is not a remotely sane person. It never ceases to be astonishing.
[TextLink:] https://twitter.com/SpiroAgnewGhost/status/1631820743175729152?s=20/photo/1
[Text:] 🐣 RT @realDonaldTrump The Racist Manhattan District Attorney, Alvin Bragg, who is presiding over one of the most dangerous and violent cities in the U.S., and doing NOTHING about it, is being pushed relentlessly by the Radical Left Democrats, the Fake News Media, and the Department of “Injustice,” to bring charges against me for the now ancient “no affair” story of Stormy “Horseface” Danials, where there is no crime and charges have NEVER been brought on such a case before. In the meantime, Hunter & Joe Biden skate!
🐣 RT @Tomthescribe Donbas is full of small towns like this one near Lyman, just wiped off the map and abandoned. There are dozens of mini-Bakhmut’s or Mariupols scattered around these lands.
💽 https://twitter.com/Tomthescribe/status/1631599530813603840?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @thehill Garland reaffirms US commitment to holding Russia accountable in surprise Ukraine visit https://trib.al/G9JDsh8
🐣 RT @NOELreports Zelenskyi’s daily video. ¤ “Every day, Ukrainian heroes give their lives to stop Russian aggression. And that is why the world has a clear moral obligation to our soldiers, to each and every one who is currently in battle and who defends freedom.”
💽 https://twitter.com/NOELreports/status/1631770707557269504?s=20/photo/1
🧵 RT @D4nciingQueen Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska warns: “Russia could run out of money next year”. According to The Guardian, the oligarch said this Thursday, at an investment conference in Siberia, that “there will be no money next year” and the help of “foreign investors” will be needed. 1/4
📌 https://twitter.com/D4nciingQueen/status/1631637748170760193?s=20
🐣 RT @ChristopherJM Ukrainian Commander of Eastern Forces Col. Gen. Oleksandr Syrskyi visited troops in Bakhmut today, proving there’s still a road into the city. He said Russians increasing forces, including units of Wagner & regular army. “Intense fighting in and around the city.” via Land Forces
¤ https://twitter.com/ChristopherJM/status/1631671464037429248?s=20/photo/1 -4
🐣 RT @NATO Putin’s intentions are clear for the world to see. No one should be fooled by Russia’s litany of lies
💽 https://twitter.com/NATO/status/1631645471704842240?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @wartranslated Incredible footage of combat in the residential area of Bakhmut. The enemy is on the same street as the Ukrainians, 15 meters away. The task, at a minimum, is to create a flurry of fire to prevent enemy assault. Source: MotoLife.
💽 https://twitter.com/wartranslated/status/1631757166217424900?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @k_sonin This is hilarious. And embarrassing. Russian Foreign Affairs Minister Lavrov says “the war we are trying to stop was launched against us” and the Indian audience – supposedly sympathetic – audibly laughs. Russian “diplomats” think that the lies they use to feed Putin’s fantasies [to get promoted] could be taken as anything but lies by anyone else.
💽 https://twitter.com/k_sonin/status/1631681166808940544?s=20/photo/1
WaPo: As 2024 race begins, special counsel advances with focus on Trump lawyers https://tinyurl.com/bdaznsdk
// Prosecutors have sought information from multiple attorneys and senior aides to the former president, triggering new legal battles
Federal prosecutors investigating efforts to overturn the 2020 election have asked witnesses extensive questions about the actions of Rudy Giuliani, a lawyer for former president Donald Trump — including where he got his information about alleged fraud, what he did in the days around Jan. 6, 2021, and what he knew about the actions coming that day, people who have appeared in front of the grand jury say.
Investigators looking into classified documents taken to Mar-a-Lago, Trump’s Florida home and private club, have sought to force testimony from another Trump lawyer, Evan Corcoran, by saying there is evidence that the former president used the attorney’s legal services in furtherance of a crime.
And prosecutors have repeatedly sought information on the actions of yet another Trump lawyer, Boris Epshteyn, in connection with both classified documents and Trump’s false electors scheme, three people said. They have quizzed multiple Trump attorneys involved with the documents case, including Christina Bobb, Alina Habba and Jesse Binnall, according to the people familiar with the investigation, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss it.
The investigative activity highlights one of the ways in which the Trump probes are unusual and complex — turning some of his many current or former attorneys into witnesses or potential investigative targets. A Trump spokesman said the legal strategy was a sign of weakness in the case against the former president.
The probes are led by special counsel Jack Smith, who was appointed by Attorney General Merrick Garland to insulate the work from political influence. Smith’s pace appears to be quickening as the 2024 presidential election starts to take shape, with Trump once again a candidate and President Biden — Garland’s boss — poised to seek a second term. Trump so far has two declared Republican opponents. Legal experts say that if Smith brings criminal charges against Trump, those charges would likely be pending when the GOP primary debates begin in August. …
🐣 RT @KyivPost 🇺🇸🇩🇪US President Joe #Biden and German Chancellor Olaf #Scholz met at the White House. ¤ Both leaders promised to continue supporting #Ukraine as long as necessary.
⋙ 🐣 RT @Bundeskanzler Thank you for your leadership and friendship, Joe! It’s good to be back here in Washington. Transatlantic coordination is indispensable and has never been stronger. We are steadfast in our support for #Ukraine. Freedom and peace for Ukraine is our common goal. @Potus
🐣 RT @NOELreports “The decisive battle between Russia and Ukraine will take place this spring and it will be the last before the end of the war,” says Kirill Budanov, head of the GUR.
⋙ 🐣 wish EU would hurry with the MBTs or the battle will be fought with IVFs, possible but still …
🐣 RT @ChuckPfarrer POSSIBLE RU OFFENSIVE? Ukraine has begun evacuation of elderly and vulnerable civilians from Kupiansk. Intel reports the shifting of RU armor and motor rifle units north of Svatove. MAP CREDIT: LiveUMap.
🌎 https://twitter.com/ChuckPfarrer/status/1631725962118443009?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @wartranslated Aleksandr Khodakovsky is worried that while Russia is busy with Bakhmut, Ukraine might strike soon and deal a defeat that will eclipse Bakhmut and much more. [Telegram link]
[TextLink:] https://twitter.com/wartranslated/status/1631711474241482753?s=20/photo/1
[Text:] Ukraine is obviously preserving the personnel resource, realiing that if there are bones, the meat will grow. Western sources talk about the formation of new Ukrainian units and filling the existing ones with blood, and a situation is being created when we, distracted by Bakhmut or Vuhledar, may face another attack, which, if we do not repel it, will eclipse Bakhmut, washing away the joy of a difficult and expensive local victory with the bitterness of a possible non-local defeat. 1 sincerely wish the men to put an end to the difficult story with Bakhmut – they deserve a sense of satisfaction with what they have achieved – but all thoughts are now about something else. About where and when the enemy will begin the attack, how we will meet him and how we will respond later. The examples before our eyes testify that anything can happen. I hope that the decrease in the daily consumption of ammo is dictated by the desire to accumulate a reserve just in case
🐣 RT @EuromaidanPress German ex-Chancellor Angela Merkel partially responsible for Russia’s war, Bundestag MP Strack-Zimmermann says ¤ “In 2008, Germany & France blocked Ukraine’s accession to NATO because of Russia, which was a strategic mistake,” Strack-Zimmermann told @ntvde. https://tinyurl.com/y4e2d5rh
🐣 RT @UKRWarSitRep The new package of US military assistance includes missiles for the HIMARS MLRS, Bradley infantry fighting vehicles, howitzers and tank bridge layers #Ukraine #UkraineWar #Russia #UkraineInvasion
[TextLink:] https://twitter.com/UKRWarSitRep/status/1631710322342993921?s=20/photo/1
// Defense budget
[Text:] [Blinken:] … Pursuant to a delegation of authority from President Biden, I am authorizing our 33rd drawdown of U.S. arms and equipment for Ukraine since August 2021, valued at $400 million. This military assistance package includes ‘more
● ammunition for U.S.-provided HIMARS and howitzers,
● ammunition for Bradley Infantry Fighting Vehicles,
● Armored Vehicle Launched Bridges,
● demolitions munitions and equipment, and
● other maintenance, training, and support. …’
🐣 RT @ChuckPfarrer BAKHMUT / 1550 UTC 3 MAR/ UKR forces destroyed bridges at Khromove & across the Bakhmutka River in Bakhmut. RU increased aviation strikes in support of infantry ops against UKR Lines of Communication & Supply (LOCS). UKR air defense downed a RU Mi-24 attack helicopter & an Su-25.
🌎 https://twitter.com/ChuckPfarrer/status/1631681374846328833?s=20/photo/1
Reuters: Germany trains Ukrainians on advanced IRIS-T SLM air defence weapon https://tinyurl.com/yckx4nwy Berlin has promised to send four of the coveted systems, with the second due to arrive within weeks – two years before Germany’s own air force can expect its first
⭕ 2 Mar 2023
🐣 RT @ChuckPfarrer KREMINNA /2340 UTC 2 MAR/ In the past 48 hours, a number of RU attacks across the P-66 HWY were broken up by UKR forces. Probes S of Kreminna were also repelled. As a result, RU offensive operations were paused today. RU may be expected to resume offensive operations shortly.
🌎 https://twitter.com/ChuckPfarrer/status/1631434077977866241?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @sentdefender The Pentagon stated today that it is “Nonsense” that the U.S. would ever Support or provide Intelligence for Ukrainian Strikes on Russian Territory, they further stated that, “We are not at War with Russia nor do we seek a War with Russia.”
🐣 RT @SpiroAgnewGhost There needs to be a new category of insanity invented for this maniac. At least a lawyer helped him write it this time.
[TextLink:] https://twitter.com/SpiroAgnewGhost/status/1631429182730436608?s=20/photo/1
[Text:] Statement from Trump Spokesperson on the Department of Justice’s Amicus Brief on Presidential Immunity
President Trump’s speech and statements on January 6, 2021, repeatedly called for peace, patriotism, and respect for our men and women of law enforcement. President Trump authorized up to 20,000 National Guard troops to ensure peace and safety on January 6, 2021, only to have that offer rejected by Democrats Nancy Pelosi and Washington, D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser. The D.C. Courts should rule in favor of President Trump in short order and dismiss these frivolous lawsuits. The Department of Justice has rightfully agreed that presidential immunity is broad and absolute. If it were not, Joe Biden would be personally liable for the disasters in Afghanistan, our Southern Border, record drug use causing massive destruction of families and lives, and many other terrible crises that he has caused. Additionally, other Presidents throughout history would be held responsible for catastrophes they potentially may not be responsible for. All witch hunts and hoaxes have to end!
🐣 RT @ChuckPfarrer FALSE FLAG FLOP: Russia claims “Ukrainian forces” have stormed into the Russian city of Bryansk. Moscow claims “hostages are being held”, by a group of up to 50 Ukrainian fighters. Kyiv denies any involvement in Putin’s latest ‘action movie’.
🌎 https://twitter.com/ChuckPfarrer/status/1631422550428270595?s=20/photo/1
⋙ NewcomAU: False flag fears as Vladimir Putin makes wild claim about Ukraine troops https://tinyurl.com/2p97ja9m
// Russia has claimed Ukrainian forces are storming across the border amid fears Moscow is staging a false flag attack
WaPo, Jennifer Rubin: Christopher Wray is getting away with doing a lousy job https://tinyurl.com/n7x5e99n “The problem is not that Wray … is showing favoritism to a Democratic administration. It’s that he is not doing his job when it comes to threats from rightwing authoritarianism”
🐣 RT @francis_scarr I haven’t seen anything like this on Russian state TV since Ukraine’s counter-offensives last year ¤ Karen [m.] Shakhnazarov says Russia needs to recognise the fact that it might lose and that anyone who thinks the West is about to fall apart is deluding themselves
🐣 RT @officejjsmart Russia 🇷🇺 is losing its largest partner! ¤ Kazakhstan 🇰🇿 has announced a new strategic cooperation agreement with the United States 🇺🇸! ¤ A key member of the pro-🇷🇺 military bloc is moving away from Moscow 🇷🇺, which has become, globally, a toxic pariah. ¤ – The Moscow Times
🐣 RT @ChuckPfarrer BAKHMUT/1900 UTC 2 MAR/ At great cost, RU continues ops against UKR Lines of Communication and Supply (LOCS). RU units are in contact within the N & E areas of the city and continue to infiltrate and consolidate lodgments within the urban area. UKR reinforcements arrive in AO.
🌎 https://twitter.com/ChuckPfarrer/status/1631366018311282700?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @washingtonpost Breaking news: Former president Donald Trump can be held liable in court for the actions of the mob that overtook the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, the Justice Department said Thursday.
⋙ WaPo: Trump can be sued by police over Jan. 6 riot, Justice Department says https://tinyurl.com/56kpen96
// Two U.S. Capitol Police officers and 11 Democratic House members are seeking to hold Donald Trump liable for injuries they suffered during the riot.
🐣 RT @AlexKokcharov In #Russia, president Putin called today’s events in #Bryansk region “a terrorist act”. ¤ Putin: “those who penetrated the territory of the Bryansk region want to deprive us of historical memory, our history and language”. ¤ Another reason to think this was a false flag operation.
🐣 RT @EuromaidanPress Russian media claims that 50 Ukrainian saboteurs infiltrated across the border into Russia’s Bryansk Oblast towards the villages of Lyubechany and Sushany. ¤ Ukraine’s General Staff denied claims saying the Ukrainian army operates only in the territory of Ukraine.
Reuters: Scholz urges China not to arm Russia as U.S. explores sanctions https://tinyurl.com/xjb9zhjf “My message to Beijing is clear: use your influence in Moscow to urge the withdrawal of Russian troops,” Scholz said. “And don’t deliver any weapons to the aggressor Russia”
⭕ 1 Mar 2023
VOA: Ukraine Says It Has Defeated Russia’s Attempt to Inflict Wintertime Pain https://tinyurl.com/3bkjp2jv “Despite the cold, darkness, and missile strikes, Ukraine persevered and defeated [Putin’s] winter terror” ~ Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba
NYT, Thomas Edsall: This Is Trump’s ‘Magic Trick’ https://tinyurl.com/4v755txu “The parallel to Fox News, [poliscientist Gary] Jacobson noted, ‘is obvious: Trump’s support depends on continuing to meet expectations he has created; doing otherwise might turn his audience elsewhere’”
NYT: In an Epic Battle of Tanks, Russia Was Routed, Repeating Earlier Mistakes https://tinyurl.com/yc2hvu8d “Blown up on mines, hit with artillery or obliterated by anti-tank missiles, the charred hulks of Russian armored vehicles now litter farm fields all about Vuhledar”
// A three-week fight in the town of Vuhledar in southern Ukraine produced what Ukrainian officials say was the biggest tank battle of the war so far, and a stinging setback for the Russians.
🐣 RT @TruWordsRSpoken Trump’s going to burn the whole party to the ground if he loses the nomination. ¤ Oh wait, he’ll burn it down if he wins. ¤ Win/win.
[TextLink:] https://twitter.com/TruWordsRSpoken/status/1631012740461649923?s=20/photo/1
[Text:] 🐣 RT @realDonaldTrump Failed former Congressman David McIntosh and his Globalist friends at Club for No Growth, who fought me all the way in 2016, and LOST, and then fought me again in 2020 Senate Races in Ohio, Alabama, North Carolina, New Hampshire, plus more, and LOST AGAIN, are now threatening to spend money against me early because their new boy, Ron DeSanctus, the man who wants to cut Social Security and MediCare, has dropped so drastically in the Polls to me. No Growth Members know there will be RETRIBUTION!!!
🐣 RT @Gerashchenko_en As our Warrior spoke about the situation in Bakhmut yesterday, Russian airstrike happened. ¤ It is so horrible what our Defenders have to live through. Glory to Heroes! 📹: Infosich2/TikTok
💽 https://twitter.com/Gerashchenko_en/status/1630978182785400836?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @albir2024 Another # Bakhmut update. Ukrainian forces holds the city and where the fighting is going. Bakhmut is fulfilling its main tasks to contain and demilitarize a huge concentration of enemy troops, and the Russians have found a calling “to see Bakhmut and die.”
🐣 RT @ChuckPfarrer BAKHMUT: Ukraine’s Deputy Defense Minister, Hanna Maliar, reports that UKR is sending reinforcements to the Bakhmut area of operations. Heavy fighting continues on the M-03 and H-32 HWYs, and RU forces are reported to be in contact within the urban area.
⋙ NewVoiceUkraine/YahooNews: Ukraine sends reinforcements to Bakhmut https://tinyurl.com/mwhhbvwf
As the situation in Bakhmut, Donetsk Oblast, becomes increasingly challenging for the Ukrainian military, Kyiv has dispatched additional reinforcements there, Ukrainian Deputy Defense Minister, Hanna Maliar, told Ukrainian TV broadcasters on Feb. 28.
According to her, Russian troops have concentrated their main efforts around Bakhmut, in an attempt to capture the entirety of Donetsk Oblast. ¤ She clarified that the Commander of Ukraine’s Ground Forces, Gen. Oleksandr Syrskyi, during his recent trip to Bakhmut, decided to move additional units there.
Maliar said the decision to hold Bakhmut is purely military, and not political. ¤ On Feb. 28, Ukraine’s General Staff reported that invading Russian forces are focused on the offensive on the Kupyansk, Lymanske, Bakhmut, Avdiivka, and Shakhtarsk axes in Donbas. ¤ On Feb. 27, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said that the situation in Bakhmut is becoming ever more difficult, as the Russian invaders systematically destroy every structure Ukrainian troops could use defensively.
🐣 RT @SpiroAgnewGhost We are numb to his insanity at this pt, but imagine if any other Ex-POTUS made a single post that was this conspicuously deranged—their family would immediately seek psychiatric care for them & the public would be in an utter state of shock. ¤ Also, he still can’t spell STOLEN!
[TextLink:] https://twitter.com/SpiroAgnewGhost/status/1630943417189699585?s=20/photo/1
[Text:] 🐣 RT @realDonaldTrump If Rupert Murdoch honestly believes that the <- Presidential Election of 2020, despite MASSIVE amounts of proof to the contrary, was not Rigged & Stollen, then he & his group of MAGA Hating Globalist RINOS should get out of the News Business as soon as possible, because they are aiding & abetting the DESTRUCTION OF AMERICA with FAKE NEWS. Certain BRAVE & PATRIOTIC FoxNews Hosts, who he scorns and ridicules, got it right. He got it wrong. THEY SHOULD BE ADMIRED & PRAISED, NOT REBUKED & FORSAKEN!!!
⋙ 🐣 faux outrage: he’s cosplaying that he really believed the election was “rigged and stollen”; he knows he lost but that will be his defense strategy for his sedition trial
Newsweek: Fact Check: Did Zelensky Say U.S. Will Send Its Kids to War for Ukraine? https://tinyurl.com/m3p9wbkt No. He suggested that Russia would not stop if it defeated Ukraine, but could go on to attack NATO countries, resulting in the U.S. becoming involved directly:
[TextLink:] https://twitter.com/Auriandra/status/1630970690974121986?s=20/photo/1
“Are American children any different from ours? Don’t Americans enjoy the same things as we do?” he asked rhetorically. “I don’t think we’re very different.”
Zelensky suggested that if American support for Ukraine weakened and depleted, and Kyiv went on to lose the war against Russia, NATO members including the U.S. risk being dragged into a bigger conflict.
This, Zelensky predicted, is because “Russia is going to enter Baltic states, NATO member states, and then the U.S. will have to send their sons and daughters, exactly the same way as we are sending our sons and daughters, to war.
“And they will have to fight because it’s NATO that we’re talking about and they will be dying, God forbid, because it’s a horrible thing.”
🐣 RT @ChuckPfarrer BAKHMUT /1415 UTC 1 MAR/ The situation is assessed as deteriorating. RU units are in contact in the N & E urban areas of Bakhmut city. UKR missile/artillery forces targeted nine RU troop concentrations and two air defense complexes. Heavy fighting along M-03 and H-32 HWYs.
🌎 https://twitter.com/ChuckPfarrer/status/1630932129356951552?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @ABC The number of plots that were disrupted grew by nearly three times, from 81 in 2014 to 456 in 2021, according to data from the Government Accountability Office.
⋙ ABCNews: Domestic terrorism-related cases increased by more than 350% over 8 years: Watchdog https://tinyurl.com/439wdyn5
// Domestic terrorism-related cases increased 357% from 2013 to 2021, according to the Government Accountability Office.
🐣 RT @NewVoiceUkraine “We see Ukraine’s frontline units effectively employing security assistance every day on the battlefield,” Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security, Celeste Wallande said
⋙ NewVoiceUkraine: Pentagon finds no evidence of misuse of US weapons in Ukraine https://tinyurl.com/4mnwebpt
// The United States didn’t find any evidence that U.S.-supplied weapons that were transferred to the Armed Forces of Ukraine ended up outside of Ukraine, CNN reported on Feb. 28, citing Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security, Celeste Wallander
⭕ 28 Feb 2023
🔄 📋 📊 WaPo, Philip Bump (Feb 28): Underrecognized: Extremist murders are usually from right-wing actors https://tinyurl.com/3kt9vbem Data for 2013 to 2022 from the Anti-Defamation League (Jewish hate-monitoring organization)
// 2/28/2023
◕ https://twitter.com/Auriandra/status/1656944250142040066?s=20/photo/1 -3
The first chart shows the ideologies of politically motivated murders.
● 90% of incidents and 75% of deaths were by rightwing extremists.
● About 5% of inclidents and 20% of deaths were by Islamic radicals.
● About 5% of inclidents and 5% of deaths were by leftwing extremists (like “antifa”)
The second chart shows the that during the last 7 or so years (since Trump), almost all incidents and deaths were by right wingers.
This last chart shows who people think is responsible, leftwing or rightwing. It is msybe not surprising that Democrats blame the rightwing and Republicans blame the leftwing. But it’s the Republicans who are wrong.
🐣 RT @FaceTheNation Fmr. Sec. of State Condoleezza Rice on potential 2024 GOP presidential candidates calling for the U.S. to pull back on its aid to Ukraine: ¤ “To those who are going to run for office, be careful what you say…Just remember dates. 1914, 1941, 2001. These conflicts always come home”
WaPo, Nicholas Eberstadt: China’s collapsing birth and marriage rates reflect a people’s deep pessimism https://tinyurl.com/yckrhn5d “In this land without democracy, the birth collapse can be read as a landslide vote of no confidence in President Xi Jinping’s rule”
🐣 RT @ChuckPfarrer VUHLEDAR /2220 UTC 28 FEB/ RU is reported to have deployed reinforcements from Melitopol to bolster the battered 155th Naval Infantry Brigade. An attempt to flank Vuhledar is considered likely, possibly by an RU offensive based out of Mykilske and Volodymvrivka.
🌎 https://twitter.com/ChuckPfarrer/status/1630692685727035393?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @SykesCharlie Demented Florida Man has some thoughts.
[TextLink:] https://twitter.com/SykesCharlie/status/1630566147190923266?s=20/photo/1
[Text:] 🐣 RT @realDonaldTrump Why is Rupert Murdoch throwing his anchors under the table, which also happens to be killing his case and infuriating his viewers, who will again be leaving in droves – they already are. There is MASSIVE evidence of voter fraud & irregularities in the 2020 Presidential Election. Just look at the documentary “2000 MULES” and you will see large scale ballot stuffing caught on government cameras, or votes cast without Legislatures approval, or just recently, the FBI/Twitter Files Scandal. RIGGED!!!
🐣 RT @ChuckPfarrer KREMINNA /1940 UTC 28 FEB/ Despite RU operations S and W of Kreminna, UKR forces have maintained contact within the Kreminna urban area along the C-130514 HWY. In the last 24 hrs, RU units were reported in contact at Dibrova, SW of Kuzmyne and in the Serebryansk Forestry Area.
🌎 https://twitter.com/ChuckPfarrer/status/1630654687807414290?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @ChuckPfarrer BAKHMUT /1450 UTC 28 FEB/ RU forces are in contact in the urban areas of Bakhmut. UKR is holding along the N-S rail right-of-way between Yahidne & Khromove. RU forces are increasing their operational tempo with the objective of taking urban space & severing Ukrainian LOCS.
🌎 https://twitter.com/ChuckPfarrer/status/1630579903421640705?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @KyivIndependent ⚡️Reuters: Blinken warns China’s Wang Yi against aid to Russia in Ukraine. ¤ Secretary of State Antony Blinken said the U.S. was concerned China may provide lethal aid to Russia, warning top diplomat Yi it “would have serious consequences in our relationship,” Reuters reports
⭕ 27 Feb 2023
Law&Crime: Dominion bombshells reveal how Rupert Murdoch, Paul Ryan, and Fox’s top lawyer secretly reacted to Trump’s ‘wild’ election claims https://tinyurl.com/ycke9mxw
TheAtlantic, Tom Nichols (2/27): To Save Ukraine, Defeat Russia and Deter China https://tinyurl.com/5n6mx9un “Chinese aid would be yet another sign that the authoritarians intend to rewrite the rules—or at least the few left—that govern the international system”
// The future of the world order is at stake.
American intelligence officials are concerned that China is considering sending lethal aid to Russia. The West must increase the speed and scale of aid to Ukraine, to remind Beijing that it should stay out of a war Moscow is going to lose.
Since the beginning of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s war against an innocent neighbor, Chinese President Xi Jinping and his diplomats have said many of the right things, warning against escalation in Ukraine, including the use of chemical, biological, or nuclear weapons, and reaffirming the principle of state sovereignty in international affairs. But China has also, of course, tried to provide support for a fellow authoritarian regime by continuing trade with Russia, criticizing Western sanctions, and in general pretending that Putin’s war of aggression—including his many crimes against humanity—is just another routine spat in the international community.
Now Beijing might be pondering a more aggressive move. CIA Director Bill Burns said over the weekend that China may be considering sending lethal aid (that is, artillery shells and the like rather than military gear or supplies) to Russia to help Putin’s forces, who are still floundering about in a bloodbath of their own making. Providing shells without more launchers might not help Russia very much in the short term, but it would be a provocative move meant to signal to the West that the authoritarians can and will support each other in attacks against their neighbors—an issue important to Beijing as it continues to covet Taiwan.
Burns indicated that the Chinese had not yet made a decision, and that the U.S. was discussing the possibility in public as a way of trying to warn them off. The Biden administration has been extremely savvy about releasing intelligence, and this seems to be yet another strategic leak. ¤ We know what you’re thinking, the Americans are saying to China. Don’t do it. …
… Russia has escalated the violence despite the West’s measured approach. Putin remains as stubbornly delusional as ever, and he is sending thousands more troops into battles that have already killed or wounded some 200,000 men. A year of pretenses is over: The Russians themselves now know—as does the world—that this is Putin’s personal war and not, as he has tried to frame it, a campaign against neo-Nazis or shadowy globalists or militant trans activists. The West, meanwhile, has fully embraced its role as “the arsenal of democracy,” as it did against the actual Nazis, and Western arms, powered by Ukrainian courage and nimble Ukrainian strategy, are defeating Putin’s armies of hapless conscripts, corrupt officers, and mercenary criminals.
Now it’s time for the West to escalate its assistance to Ukraine, in ways that will deter China and defeat Russia. For example, the U.S. and NATO do not yet have to send advanced fighter jets to Ukraine—but they can start training Ukrainian pilots to fly them. To Russia, such a policy would say that things are about to get much worse for Putin’s forces in the field; to China, it would say that our commitment to Ukraine and to preserving the international order we helped create is greater than Beijing’s commitment to Moscow. As the Washington Post writer Max Boot noted last month, the Chinese president has an interest in helping a fellow autocrat, but he is also “an unsentimental practitioner of realpolitik” who “does not want to wind up on what could be the losing side.”
… [I]f Putin remains unmoved and unwilling to stop, then the only answer is to increase the costs of his madness by sending more tanks, more artillery, more money, more aid of every kind. (We could also reopen the issue of whether we should provide longer-range systems, including the Army’s tactical missile system, the ATACMs.)
China must be warned away from assisting Russia, because so much more than the freedom of Ukraine is at stake in this war. Chinese aid would be yet another sign that the authoritarians intend to rewrite the rules—or at least the few left—that govern the international system of diplomacy, trade, and cooperation constructed while the wreckage of World War II was still smoldering. Many Europeans, who are closer to the misery Russia is inflicting on Ukraine, understand this better than Americans do. …
Americans who ask “What does any of this mean to me?” will find out just how much it means to them when things they want—or need—are provided only through the largesse and with the permission of their enemies. We knew this during the Cold War, and we must learn it again. We should ignore the pusillanimous Putinistas among the right-wing media. Instead, the United States and its allies must make the case, every day, for Ukrainian victory—and send the Ukrainians what they need to get the job done.
🐣 RT @wartranslated Girkin is quite melancholic today about the prospects of the 3-day war: time is running out, air strikes have stopped, production of missiles isn’t going well, and the president has checked out… https://t.me/strelkovii/4070
[TextLink:] https://twitter.com/wartranslated/status/1630175329422655489?s=20/photo/1 -2
[Text:] Days, like grains of sand in an hourglass, flow away and flow away … There is less and less time left to make the necessary decisions before they lose their relevance …
Tanks, guns, ammunition and all other weapons and equipment flow in a wide stream to the so-called “Ukraine”, but strikes at supply lines have not been carried out, and are not being carried out. Strikes on the power system have been stopped. “Decision-making centers” in Kyiv make decisions in the most comfortable and safe way, no one even tried to endanger them so far. Meanwhile, the supply of missiles and precision-guided munitions of all kinds over the past year in the Russian Federation has clearly not increased (I won’t be arguing that it simply does not exist now, otherwise I would be accused either of “disclosing military secrets” (which I do not know) or of “defeatist moods” ” (Which I don’t have and can’t even have)). Problems with ammunition and simply the production of the most conventional weapons in the Russian Federation are also increasing every day.
And, against the backdrop of all this, the irremovable “marshals” continue to “beat their foreheads” (not their own, unfortunately) against the enemy’s prepared defenses in the Donbas. With extremely insignificant successes (and more often without any success), but with heavy losses.
There is no martial law and it is not expected (based on the statements of a person who outwardly resembles the president), the borders are open, oil and gas are flowing to partners (including Kyiv). The Central Bank of the Russian Federation is increasing investments in US government bonds.
And the only “entertainment” for angry patriots dumbfounded by reality is the public mutual scuffle paid for by gentlemen Shoigu and Prigozhin, which is ugly as it is, and testifying both to “how rotten everything is” in our country, but also to the fact that in the military leadership – unity of command. (And who of the two indicated persons is “more right” you should decide for yourself, if you wish. As for me, it’s better to avoid sorting out two sorts of crap).
🐣 RT @ChuckPfarrer BAKHMUT /1210 UTC 27 FEB/ 0600 brief of the UKR Gen’l Staff did not clarify initial reports of UKR offensive progress N of Bakhmut. UKR forces were confirmed to have broken up RU attacks in the vicinity of Dubovo-Vasylivka and Yahidne, as well as enemy attacks on the urban area.
🌎 https://twitter.com/ChuckPfarrer/status/1630178012837601281?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @ChuckPfarrer CRIMEA THE VULNERABLE: General Ben Hodges @general_ben lays out the plan for Crimea’s liberation. Long-range strikes to cut off Crimea’s logistics. Daily precision munition attacks on the Black Sea Fleet and RU air forces will prepare the battle space for a land campaign.
🌎 https://twitter.com/ChuckPfarrer/status/1630188206313418754?s=20/photo/1
⋙ 🐣 RT @general_ben Priority: use long-range precision strike to isolate Crimea, then make it untenable for Russian forces. Drive Black Sea Fleet from Sevastopol with daily precision strikes. Ditto for Russian Air Force at Saky, etc. Allow no sanctuary for Drone lunches. Land forces can come later.
¤ https://twitter.com/general_ben/status/1630091591997071361?s=20
[See convo in comments]
⋙⋙ 🐣 RT @ChrisFlaherty8 I think the argument isn’t that a Crimean victory is impossible; just that it’s probably impractical while Mariopal, and other vast swathes of Ukraine lie in ruins under Russian control. Crimea can be retaken, as the Soviets knew well, but it would cost a lot of blood.
↥ ↧
Politico, Rory Finnan: Why Crimea Is the Key to Peace in Ukraine https://tinyurl.com/595t8uc5
// Peace is only possible if Ukraine keeps Crimea. Here’s why.
⭕ 26 Feb 2023
💙🐣 RT @wartranslated A quick review of “deescalation”, “regrouping”, “uneasy decision” and “concrete/effective” stages of the SMO by Girkin as he wraps up one year of the war. “In its current state, the Russian army is unable to defeat the Ukrainian Armed Forces”.
💽 https://twitter.com/wartranslated/status/1629881909030387712?s=20/photo/1
💙🐣 📋 RT @LukeDCoffey The cost of US military aid to Ukraine is 25¢ per day per American
For this investment Ukraine is dismantling the military of a top US adversary & China’s top partner
There is no “forever war” because we aren’t fighting
This isn’t a proxy war because Russia attacked Ukraine
🐣 RT @ChuckPfarrer BAKHMUT / FLASH TRAFFIC/ On 26 FEB, UKR forces launched a combined arms counter-attack SE along the M-03 HWY axis. Timely reporting by Jarosław Wolski @wolski_jaros indicates that RU forces have been flanked and driven SE down the M-03 HWY toward Berkhivka.
🌎 https://twitter.com/ChuckPfarrer/status/1630022705117274113?s=20/photo/1
NYT, David French: Why Fox News Lied to the Viewers It ‘Respects’ https://tinyurl.com/38x9wjdp Fox followed its viewers “straight into a morass of lies and conspiracy theories that should undermine Fox’s credibility for years to come”
Thanks to a recent filing by Dominion Voting Systems in its defamation lawsuit against Fox, there is now compelling evidence that America’s most-watched cable news network presented information it knew to be false as part of an effort to placate an angry audience. It knowingly sacrificed its integrity to maintain its market share.
Why? There are the obvious reasons: Money. Power. Fame. These are universal human temptations. But the answer goes deeper. Fox News became a juggernaut not simply by being “Republican,” or “conservative,” but by offering its audience something it craved even more deeply: representation. And journalism centered on representation ultimately isn’t journalism at all.
To understand the Fox News phenomenon, one has to understand the place it occupies in Red America. It’s no mere source of news. It’s the place where Red America goes to feel seen and heard. If there’s an important good news story in Red America, the first call is to Fox. If conservative Christians face a threat to their civil liberties, the first call is to Fox. If you’re a conservative celebrity and you need to sell a book, the first call is to Fox. ¤ … ver time Fox morphed into something well beyond a news network.
Fox isn’t just the news hub of right-wing America, it’s a cultural cornerstone, and its business model is so successful that it’s more accurate to think of the rest of the right-wing media universe not as a collection of competitors to Fox, but rather as imitators. From television channels to news sites, right-wing personalities aren’t so much competing with Fox as auditioning for it. … ¤ Take, for example, the online space. Fox News is so dominant that, according to data from December, you could take the total traffic of the next 19 conservative websites combined, and still not reach half of Fox’s audience.
But that kind of loyalty is built around a social compact, the profound and powerful sense in Red America that Fox is for us. It’s our megaphone to the culture. Yet when Fox created this compact, it placed the audience in charge of its content. ¤ During the Trump years, Fox faithfully upheld its end of the bargain. If you were Republican and felt embattled for supporting Donald Trump, a quick visit to Fox (especially in prime time) would calm your mind and soothe your soul. …
As the Trump years wore on, the prime-time messaging became more blatant. Supporting Trump became a marker not just of patriotism, but also of courage. And what of conservatives, like myself, who opposed Trump? … ¤ Our disagreement was cast as an act of outright betrayal. People like me had allegedly turned our backs on our own community. We had failed in our obligation to be their voice.
So you can start to understand the shock when, on Election Day in 2020, Fox News accurately, if arguably prematurely, called Arizona for Joe Biden. It broke the social compact. By presuming the fairness of the election and by declaring Joe Biden the winner of a previously red state, Fox sent a message to its own audience — an audience that had been primed to mistrust election results by Trump and by reports on Fox News — that it did not hear them. It did not see them.
In the emails and texts highlighted in the Dominion filing, you see Fox News figures, including Sean Hannity and Suzanne Scott and Lachlan Murdoch, referring to the need to “respect” the audience. To be clear, by “respect” they didn’t mean “tell the truth” — an act of genuine respect. Instead they meant “represent.” …
But there is a difference between coming from a community and speaking for a community. In journalism, the former can be valuable, but the latter can be corrupt. … [I]n extreme instances — such as what we witnessed from Fox News after the 2020 presidential election — it can result in almost cartoonish villainy.
There are courageous reporters at Fox. We learned some of their names in the Dominion filing. They were the people who had the courage to tell the truth. But then there are the leaders, and the prime-time stars. Tough? Courageous? Hardly. When push comes to shove, they embody the possibly apocryphal remark of the French revolutionary Alexandre Auguste Ledru-Rollin: “There go the people. I must follow them, for I am their leader.” And follow them they did, straight into a morass of lies and conspiracy theories that should undermine Fox’s credibility for years to come.
🐣 RT @ChuckPfarrer FLASE [sic] FLAG? Unconfirmed reports say that a Russian A-50 AWACS aircraft has been damaged in an attack on Machulishchi airfield in Belarus. It is also claimed that one Belarusian soldier is dead after clashes with Ukrainian troops.
⋙⋙ EuroWeeklyNews: Belarusian partisans claim responsibility for blowing up important Russian plane at Belarus air base https://tinyurl.com/3u9mudh5
⋙ 🐣 RT @ChuckPfarrer NOTE: The destruction of the Russian A-50 at Machulishchi airfield in Belarus is variously reported as the work of Belarusian partisans, UKR saboteurs or UKR stand-off weapons. Updates as information develops.
⋙⋙ 🐣 Belarus has been loudly warning it would get involved in the war if it were attacked ~ which I took as an alert to be on the lookout for false flags
🐣 RT @nexta_tv Czech President-elect Petr Pavel compared Putin’s current actions to Hitler’s expansionist policies toward Czechoslovakia ¤ “Before the WWII, Hitler behaved in exactly the same way that Putin is behaving now in Ukraine,” Pavel said during a Ukraine solidarity action in Prague. 1/2
⋙ 🐣 RT @nexta_tv Petr Pavel recalled that Hitler used the German national minority in the Sudeten territories of Czechoslovakia to incite hatred and violence. Moscow, he said, also justified the invasion of Ukraine, among other things, by allegedly repressing Russian-speaking residents there. 2/2
🐣 RT @ChuckPfarrer BAKHMUT /1430 UTC 26 FEB/ UKR forces destroyed retention dikes to flood an area S of the M-03 HWY to slow the advance of RU forces toward Berkhivka. UKR units are reported in contact within the urban area of Bakhmut west of the T-13-02 and south of Patrice Lumumba Blvd (H-32).
🌎 https://twitter.com/ChuckPfarrer/status/1629853368024801280?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @NOELreports Putin talked about the collapse of Russia
“If the West ever succeeds in destroying the Russian Federation and establishing control over its ruins, they may not survive but Muscovites, Uralians and others will,” he said. ¤ Ok. 🫠
💽 https://twitter.com/NOELreports/status/1629776083359789059?s=20/photo/1
⭕ 25 Feb 2023
🐣 RT @Ukrainewartoday #Kuleba says ISW director is sure of #Ukraine’s victory. ¤ The Institute for the Study of #War is sure that #Ukraine will #win the #war, Foreign Minister #Dmytro Kuleba wrote after meeting #ISW director Kimberly Kagan on Feb. 25.
🐣 RT @StateDept NATO protects 1 billion+ people in Europe & North America from 21st-century threats, from cybercrime to pandemics such as COVID-19, and empowers all members to have an equal voice in decisions affecting the alliance. Read some examples of @NATO in action. https://tinyurl.com/2hv7ycj5
🐣 RT @ChuckPfarrer KREMINNA /1610 UTC 25 FEB/ UKR forces broke up a large RU assault south of Kreminna. 70 RU dead were left on the battlefield after the attacking force was defeated. UKR carried out 20 aviation strike missions & artillery/missile forces targeted RU troop concentrations.
🌎 https://twitter.com/ChuckPfarrer/status/1629510498952593411?s=20/photo/1
🐣 Maybe the China-haters in Congress should reconsider their at-times tepid support for Ukraine in light of Pompeo’s point. (So many tectonic plates are shifting given China’s recent moves regarding possible lethal aid to Russia)
⋙ 🐣 RT @mikepompeo China wants Putin to win. ¤ The best way to deter the CCP is to help Ukraine defeat Russia.
🐣 RT @francis_scarr Igor Girkin says Russia needs a Chinese “lend-lease” if it’s to continue fighting in Ukraine “with any level of success” ¤ He complains that Russian generals led by the “cretin” Gerasimov are burning through armour at a rate that Russian defence plants can’t withstand
💽 [tr] https://twitter.com/francis_scarr/status/1629433899326603264?s=20/photo/1
⋙ 🐣 RT @Chepicoro09 China produces more than half of the world steel, China has the capacity to become the “arsenal of the dictatorships”… Girkin is right
🧵 RT @ChrisO_wiki 1/ Yevgeny Prigozhin, the head of the Wagner Group, has given an interview to Russian milblogger Vladlen Tatarsky in which he explains why he thinks Wagner is experiencing severe ‘shell hunger’ in eastern Ukraine. It includes a lot of interesting details. A rough translation:
📌 https://twitter.com/ChrisO_wiki/status/1628676822261985283?s=20/photo/1
[ThreadReader:] https://tinyurl.com/ynuemy2r
⋙ 🐣 another way Ru is utterly dysfunctional, luckily for us, but the West too has been caught flat-footed providing enough ammunition to Ukraine: we thought rifle and artillery warfare between large armies was a thing of the past; we were woefully mistaken
🧵 RT @NikaMelkozerova Zelensky now says the scariest day of the war for him so far was Bucha and what he saw there after liberation. “I saw that devil was here,”he said during the press conference in Kyiv today. And here’s how he looked that day.
📌 🖼 https://twitter.com/NikaMelkozerova/status/1629153796109500416?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @rshereme “Was”. A simple word that is used in everyday life, but it is not that simple for us, because now ordinary Ukrainians cannot say “was” without bursting into tears. This was my home. This was my friend. This was my dog. This was my car. This was my job. And this was my father ….
💽 https://twitter.com/rshereme/status/1629207441828372480?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @ChuckPfarrer BAKHMUT /1450 UTC 25 FEB/ RU has cut the M-03 HWY between Dubovo-Vasylivka & Pidhorodne. RU continues to sustain heavy losses in attacks S of the HWY. UKR air defense reports downing a RU Mi-24 helicopter [24 FEB], 2 ‘Lancet’ loitering munitions and an ‘Orlan-10’ recon UAV.
🌎 https://twitter.com/ChuckPfarrer/status/1629490760138498050?s=20/photo/1
🧵 RT @CanadianKobzar FELLAS! STAY AWHILE AND LISTEN! In hour of Ukraine’s heroic fight this past year, I wanted to dedicate this thread to highlighting Ukraine’s heroes throughout the centuries. Today, I will list my Top 10 Ukrainians of all time! 1/24
📌 https://twitter.com/CanadianKobzar/status/1629482719934664705?s=20
🐣 RT @Gerashchenko_en “This is where I’ve been living for a year” – @ZelenskyyUa showed Ukrainian journalist Dmytro Komarov his wartime living conditions and his wardrobe.
💽 https://twitter.com/Gerashchenko_en/status/1629427232618815488?s=20/photo/1
⭕ 24 Feb 2023
🐣 RT @DmytroKuleba Arming a country that defends itself from aggression is legitimate and is an act of defending the UN Charter. On the contrary, helping an aggressor is illegitimate and defies the Charter. If you give weapons to Russia, you commit a crime. ¤ UNSC address: https://bit.ly/3ZdwqZQ
⋙ 🐣 RT @mykhalreynolds I have said this many times it is 100 % legitimate, rational, and morally irreproachable to aid a country against illegal acts of aggression. Chapter VII articles 39-51 go over this in great detail. Aiding Russia would be the equivalent to participating in genocide & terrorism.
🐣 RT @Gerashchenko_en “This is where I’ve been living for a year” – @ZelenskyyUa showed Ukrainian journalist Dmytro Komarov his wartime living conditions and his wardrobe.
💽 https://twitter.com/Gerashchenko_en/status/1629427232618815488?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @ABCWorldNews “The idea that China is going to be negotiating the outcome of a war that’s a totally unjust war for Ukraine is just not rational,” Pres. Biden tells @DavidMuir of China’s peace plan. https://abcn.ws/3Ixsvk5
💽 https://twitter.com/ABCWorldNews/status/1629303920198660098?s=20/photo/1
ABCNews: Biden tells ABC’s Muir ‘we would respond’ if China sends weapons to Russia https://tinyurl.com/w73e4mn6
// He spoke in an exclusive interview at the White House Friday.
During an exclusive interview with ABC’s David Muir, President Joe Biden said Friday the U.S. “would respond” if China were to supply Russia with lethal weapons in its war against Ukraine, although he said he didn’t “anticipate” China doing so, despite warnings from administration officials China may be considering the move.
“I don’t anticipate — we haven’t seen it yet, but I don’t anticipate a major initiative on the part of China providing weaponry to Russia,” Biden told Muir in an interview at the White House one year after the Russian invasion began.
Muir pressed Biden on whether China providing weapons to Russia in the future would be crossing a line, but Biden insisted that the U.S. “would respond” and referred to sanctions other countries have received after supporting Russia.
🐣 RT @ZelenskaUA Even one day of war is a lot – it costs lives that cannot be returned. We remember everyone. We celebrate not a year of war, but a year of resilience, humanity and salvation. A year of united Ukraine that has changed the world. A year of those who made faith and hope a reality
💽 https://twitter.com/ZelenskaUA/status/1629010781848354816?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @Gerashchenko_en First Leopard tanks have arrived to Ukraine! ¤ Polish Prime Minister @MorawieckiM, Prime Minister @Denys_Shmyhal and Defense Minister @oleksiireznikov have welcomed them. ¤ Grateful to our Allies for helping us bring Victory day closer!
🔄 🐣 the [Chinese] proposal is not serious: half just restates existing UN and IAEA rules ¤ but then it proposes replacing NATO, eliminating the ability to impose any sanctions, restoring supply chains (eg Russian gas); borders are to be “negotiated”; no mention of justice for war crimes
// Chinese peace proposal
(📊) WaPo: Mitch McConnell tells US to ‘wake up’ to threat of Russia on Ukraine war anniversary https://tinyurl.com/58x3ktb4 He “urged the US and its allies to renew their resolve to help Ukraine as it stands up to Russian ‘thuggery,’ tacitly pushing back against members of his own party”
Ukrainians vowed Friday to fight on as the world marked the first anniversary of Russia’s full-scale invasion, which violently ended decades of European stability and unleashed a charged battle between autocracy and freedom.
The war, which has displaced millions of Ukrainians and killed tens of thousands on each side, has galvanized Western powers around defending a vulnerable democracy on Europe’s eastern edge, injected the NATO military alliance with a new sense of purpose and spurred the European Union to designate Ukraine as an official candidate for membership. …
Zelensky recalled the initial moments of the war, when much of the world expected Kyiv to fall within days and U.S. officials offered to ferret him out of the city to escape assassination. He declined to go. ¤ “That is how Feb. 24, 2022 began. The longest day of our lives. The hardest day of our modern history,” Zelensky said in a video address. “We woke up early and haven’t fallen asleep since.” …
A year into the conflict, it remains unclear what sort of concessions he or Putin might accept as part of a negotiated settlement. The Ukrainian leader has put forward a 10-point peace proposal, which includes the full withdrawal of Russian troops, the restoration of his country’s borders and a special tribunal to adjudicate alleged Russian war crimes.
After their discussion with Zelensky, the G-7 nations cited the president’s plan and voiced support for a “comprehensive, just and lasting peace,” expressing their willingness to take part security guarantees that would aim to ensure Russia cannot mount future cross-border attacks. …
[T]he United Nations overwhelmingly approved, with 141 nations voting in favor, a resolution affirming Ukraine’s sovereignty and calling for Russia’s withdrawal. While 32 nations including China and India abstained from the vote, Russia was joined by only six other countries in voting against the measure. …
President Biden underscored support from the United States, by far the biggest military backer, after making a symbolically potent surprise visit to Kyiv on Monday. “A dictator bent on rebuilding an empire will never erase the people’s love of liberty,” Biden said on Twitter. “Ukraine will never be a victory for Russia.” …
Congressional Republican leaders however remain strongly on Kyiv’s side. Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), the Senate’s top Republican, said U.S. aid was a “core” American interest. “It is not an act of charity,” McConnell said Friday. Some lawmakers from both parties are pressing the White House to quickly provide additional aid and include fighter jets and longer-range missiles. …
As the war enters its second year, the role of China remains unclear. The Biden administration has said China is actively considering providing lethal weapons to Russia, which would further damage Washington’s already tense relations with Beijing. … ¤ British Foreign Secretary James Cleverly said that “international order” was at stake. “Putin cannot, must not, win in Ukraine,” Cleverly said. …
(📊) WaPo: Mitch McConnell tells U.S. to ‘wake up’ to threat of Russia on Ukraine war anniversary https://tinyurl.com/58x3ktb4
// The Senate Republican leader pushed back against calls from within his own party to pare back U.S. funding in support of Ukraine
Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) on Friday urged the United States and its allies to renew their resolve to help Ukraine as it stands up to Russian “thuggery,” tacitly pushing back against members of his own party who have become loudly skeptical of Ukraine’s fight as the conflict passes the one-year mark.
“America and our friends need to finish waking up from our holiday from history, welcome Finland and Sweden into NATO by this summer, and make significant investments in military modernization and our defense-industrial capacities that are commensurate with the major challenges we face,” McConnell said in a statement, shortly before appearing alongside President Sauli Niinisto in Helsinki to support Finland’s bid to join NATO.
The message marked a stark contrast to the one pushed by former president Donald Trump and some congressional Republicans, who criticized President Biden’s trip to Kyiv earlier this week and have called for ending or slowing aid to Ukraine. In a tweet, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga), a hard-right ally of House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) and one of dozens of House Republicans to vote against Ukraine aid in May, called Biden’s trip “insulting” and proof that he “chose Ukraine over America.”
But nearly 50 U.S. lawmakers, including McConnell and Senate Majority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.), traveled to the Munich Security Conference in Germany last week to reassure European allies that Congress, which is split between a GOP-controlled House and Democratic-controlled Senate, will continue to support Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky with weapons and funds. …
“If Putin were given a green light to destabilize Europe, invading and killing at will, the long-term cost to the United States in both dollars and security risks would be astronomically higher than the minuscule fraction of our GDP that we have invested in Ukraine’s defense thus far,” McConnell said in the statement.
Congress appropriated billions in aid for Ukraine at the end of last year, which was expected to last through September. ¤ The issue is dividing Republicans thought to be vying for their party’s 2024 presidential nomination. Trump, who has announced his candidacy, and Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis have criticized Biden’s avowed commitment to assisting Ukraine, while former vice president Mike Pence and announced candidate Nikki Haley have argued for a forceful posture against Russia. Trump has said he believes the U.S. aid risks inciting a third world war.
Eleven House Republicans supported a “Ukraine Fatigue” resolution last month in Congress, calling for an end to all aid, but it’s unclear whether they will win out. McCarthy has said he does not favor a “blank check” when it comes to Ukraine aid, but he has not foreclosed on the possibility of providing additional support. And some of McCarthy’s top allies, including Rep. Michael R. Turner (R-Ohio), chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, also went to Munich last week.
Recent polling has shown some erosion in public support for the assistance, driven by Republicans’ increasing skepticism. About a quarter of Americans said in a recent Pew poll that too much aid is flowing to Ukraine, up six percentage points since September and 19 percentage points since March, shortly after the war began. An Associated Press poll found that 48 percent of voters support continued assistance, down from 60 percent in May. … McConnell said helping Ukraine sends a message to China, as well. …
🐣 RT @ChuckPfarrer BAKHMUT /2320 UTC 24 FEB/ Heavy fighting is ongoing S of the M-03 HWY between Dubovo-Vasylivka and Pidhorodne. RU advances on this axis have been made at the expense of heavy losses of men and equipment. UKR air defense reports downing a Russian Mi-24 attack helicopter.
🌎 https://twitter.com/ChuckPfarrer/status/1629256776968204288?s=20/photo/1
// second Bakhmut update today
🐣 RT @POTUS Over the past year, our commitment to the people and future of a free, sovereign, and democratic Ukraine hasn’t wavered. ¤ And it never will.
💽 https://twitter.com/POTUS/status/1629251195398152192?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @olex_scherba Zelensky: “Two things I had luck with – my country and my family. Immensely thankful to my wife. Love my parents whom I never see now…”. ¤ Yep. Ukraine wins because of two things. One is courage. The other is love. ¤ #StandWithUkraine #UkraineWillWin
💽 https://twitter.com/olex_scherba/status/1629197073785430020?s=20/photo/1
// tags: tearful Zelensky tearful
⋙ 🐣 RT @drmom1984 Zelenskyy may be a talented actor but he was not acting when he gave this response. His tears were real. His love for family and country is real.
🐣 RT @LeaderMcConnell A year into Russia’s escalation in Ukraine, it’s safe to say it has not turned out how Putin thought it would. He thinks he can wear the free world down. Today alongside President Niinistö [President of Finland], we delivered the message that we will continue to support Ukraine.
NYT, J Michael Luttig: Mike Pence’s Dangerous Ploy https://tinyurl.com/bdhrey4u “Mr. Pence’s decision to brand the Department of Justice’s perfectly legitimate subpoena as unconstitutional is a far cry from the constitutionally hallowed ground on which he stood on Jan. 6”
🐣 RT @anders_aslund Paul Krugman: “Why has Russia’s military failed so spectacularly? Because modern wars aren’t won by strutting guys flexing their biceps. They’re won mainly through logistics, technology and intelligence…that Russia does badly and Ukraine does surprisingly well.”
🐣 RT @POTUS I think Senator Romney would be the first to tell you that we don’t always agree. ¤ But he knows what I know: that standing with Ukraine — and standing up for freedom — advances our national security.
⋙ 🧵 RT @MittRomney It is in America’s interest to support Ukraine. If Russia can invade, subjugate, and pillage Ukraine with impunity, it will do the same again to others, and a world at war diminishes the security of Americans.
📌 https://twitter.com/MittRomney/status/1628817687098060800?s=20
🐣 RT @ 🐣 RT @ReportWar1 🇺🇦🇷🇺The advisor to the head of Zelensky’s office, Podoliak, stated after the publication of the PRC plan that any proposal should include a ‘return to the 1991 borders’. #Russia #Ukraina #UkraineWar #Ukraine #UkraineWarNews #RussiaUkraineWar #UkraineRussiaWar #UkraineRussianWar
🐣 RT @michael_brodsk My tweet exactly a year ago. A year of brutal, tragic and pointless war
⋙ 🐣 RT @michael_brodsk [Feb 24, 2022] Can’t believe it is really happening #Kyiv #Ukraine
🖼 https://twitter.com/michael_brodsk/status/1628881797357371392?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @juliaioffe It’s hard to believe it’s been a year. A year of senseless, mind-stilling slaughter, a year of an imperial bloodlust that just won’t quit, but also a year of Ukrainians not giving in and defying all the odds.
🐣 RT @jaketapper “Russia has already lost this war,” Biden national security adviser Jake Sullivan said during a CNN town hall Thursday night.
⋙ CNN: Takeaways from CNN’s town hall a year after Russia invaded Ukraine https://tinyurl.com/4rm8msnb
💙 RT @MacaesBruno [Kiyanyn:] A 500-year war approaches its end
💽 https://twitter.com/MacaesBruno/status/1629117857459060744?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @KyivIndependent Zelensky on war anniversary: ¤ “Ukraine has surprised the world. Ukraine has inspired the world. Ukraine has united the world. There are thousands of words to prove it, but a few will be enough: HIMARS, Patriot, Abrams, IRIS-T, Challenger, NASAMS, Leopard.” ¤ President’s Office
↥ ↧
🐣 RT @KyivIndependent Read Zelensky’s full address on the occasion of the 1-year anniversary of Russia’s all-out war against Ukraine here:
⋙≣ KyivIndependent: Zelensky’s address on 1-year anniversary of Russia’s all-out war https://tinyurl.com/2s3pk4ys
🐣 RT @NOELreports “As for the “peace plan” proposed by China, they do not have much credibility. They haven’t condemned the invasion until now, but instead signed a limitless partnership agreement with Russia days before,” NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg. ¤ You are totally right Jens
⋙ 🐣 the “peace plan” would replace NATO w “Euroasian security framework” (ie, no US), eliminates sanctions without UN Sec Council approval😂, restores prior trade patterns (eg Ru gas), and skirts punishment for war crimes ¤ many points simply reiterate the UN charter and IAEA rules
🐣 RT @front_ukrainian ‼️Austin: the 🇺🇸USA is preparing motorized infantry brigades of the Armed Forces of 🇺🇦Ukraine, and this will allow to break through the defense of the 🇷🇺Russian military ¤ «We are training and equipping several motorized infantry brigades – this is quite a significant potential.»
🐣 RT @sherwiebp China’s 12-point plan for Ukraine peace #sabcnews
[TextLink:] https://twitter.com/sherwiebp/status/1628944613753950210?s=20/photo/1 -2
⋙ 🐣 1. Russia doesn’t accept Ukraine as a separate country, so how would “respecting sovereignty” work?
2. New security apparatus for EuroAsia: Goodbye NATO, US; no “bloc” expansion: forget it, Sweden, Norway etc: add Russia, China
3-4. Ceasefire: so Russia rearms
⋙⋙ 🐣 … 10. Stop “unilateral sanctions“ that don’t have UN SC approval: so Russia and China will veto: end of sanctions
11. Supply chains (see Sanctions): eg restore gas flow from Russia
✛ No mention of justice: no Hague, no ICC
[much of the rest is covered in UN charter, IAEA etc]
🔄 💙 📔 FMPRC: China’s Position on the Political Settlement of the Ukraine Crisis https://tinyurl.com/4xs2v938
// main areas of concern flagged: 1) alliances, 2) ceasefire, 3) sanctions
1. Respecting the sovereignty of all countries. Universally recognized international law, including the purposes and principles of the United Nations Charter, must be strictly observed. The sovereignty, independence and territorial integrity of all countries must be effectively upheld. All countries, big or small, strong or weak, rich or poor, are equal members of the international community. All parties should jointly uphold the basic norms governing international relations and defend international fairness and justice. Equal and uniform application of international law should be promoted, while double standards must be rejected.
‼️2. Abandoning the Cold War mentality. The security of a country should not be pursued at the expense of others. The security of a region should not be achieved by strengthening or expanding military blocs. The legitimate security interests and concerns of all countries must be taken seriously and addressed properly. There is no simple solution to a complex issue. All parties should, following the vision of common, comprehensive, cooperative and sustainable security and bearing in mind the long-term peace and stability of the world, help forge a balanced, effective and sustainable European security architecture. All parties should oppose the pursuit of one’s own security at the cost of others’ security, prevent bloc confrontation, and work together for peace and stability on the Eurasian Continent.
!? 3. Ceasing hostilities. Conflict and war benefit no one. All parties must stay rational and exercise restraint, avoid fanning the flames and aggravating tensions, and prevent the crisis from deteriorating further or even spiraling out of control. All parties should support Russia and Ukraine in working in the same direction and resuming direct dialogue as quickly as possible, so as to gradually deescalate the situation and ultimately reach a comprehensive ceasefire.
4. Resuming peace talks. Dialogue and negotiation are the only viable solution to the Ukraine crisis. All efforts conducive to the peaceful settlement of the crisis must be encouraged and supported. The international community should stay committed to the right approach of promoting talks for peace, help parties to the conflict open the door to a political settlement as soon as possible, and create conditions and platforms for the resumption of negotiation. China will continue to play a constructive role in this regard.
5. Resolving the humanitarian crisis. All measures conducive to easing the humanitarian crisis must be encouraged and supported. Humanitarian operations should follow the principles of neutrality and impartiality, and humanitarian issues should not be politicized. The safety of civilians must be effectively protected, and humanitarian corridors should be set up for the evacuation of civilians from conflict zones. Efforts are needed to increase humanitarian assistance to relevant areas, improve humanitarian conditions, and provide rapid, safe and unimpeded humanitarian access, with a view to preventing a humanitarian crisis on a larger scale. The UN should be supported in playing a coordinating role in channeling humanitarian aid to conflict zones.
6. Protecting civilians and prisoners of war (POWs). Parties to the conflict should strictly abide by international humanitarian law, avoid attacking civilians or civilian facilities, protect women, children and other victims of the conflict, and respect the basic rights of POWs. China supports the exchange of POWs between Russia and Ukraine, and calls on all parties to create more favorable conditions for this purpose.
7. Keeping nuclear power plants safe. China opposes armed attacks against nuclear power plants or other peaceful nuclear facilities, and calls on all parties to comply with international law including the Convention on Nuclear Safety (CNS) and resolutely avoid man-made nuclear accidents. China supports the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) in playing a constructive role in promoting the safety and security of peaceful nuclear facilities.
8. Reducing strategic risks. Nuclear weapons must not be used and nuclear wars must not be fought. The threat or use of nuclear weapons should be opposed. Nuclear proliferation must be prevented and nuclear crisis avoided. China opposes the research, development and use of chemical and biological weapons by any country under any circumstances.
9. Facilitating grain exports. All parties need to implement the Black Sea Grain Initiative signed by Russia, Türkiye, Ukraine and the UN fully and effectively in a balanced manner, and support the UN in playing an important role in this regard. The cooperation initiative on global food security proposed by China provides a feasible solution to the global food crisis.
‼️ 10. Stopping unilateral sanctions. Unilateral sanctions and maximum pressure cannot solve the issue; they only create new problems. China opposes unilateral sanctions unauthorized by the UN Security Council. Relevant countries should stop abusing unilateral sanctions and “long-arm jurisdiction” against other countries, so as to do their share in deescalating the Ukraine crisis and create conditions for developing countries to grow their economies and better the lives of their people.
11. Keeping industrial and supply chains stable. All parties should earnestly maintain the existing world economic system and oppose using the world economy as a tool or weapon for political purposes. Joint efforts are needed to mitigate the spillovers of the crisis and prevent it from disrupting international cooperation in energy, finance, food trade and transportation and undermining the global economic recovery.
12. Promoting post-conflict reconstruction. The international community needs to take measures to support post-conflict reconstruction in conflict zones. China stands ready to provide assistance and play a constructive role in this endeavor.
🐣 RT @AnonOpsSE #BREAKING Chinas Proposed for ending #RussianUkrainianWar
This has been leaked to #Anonymous and it’s expected to be released by Beijing in the coming days. #Russia #Ukraine #China
China’s Peace Plan
[TextLink:] https://twitter.com/AnonOpsSE/status/1628939519582957568?s=20/photo/1
● Respect sovereignty of all countries
● A country’s security cannot be at expense of other countries’ security
● Regional security cannot be guaranteed by strengthening or even expanding military blocs
● Cease fire and stop fighting, prevent Ukraine crisis from further aggravating or even getting out of control
● Gradually promote de-escalation and easing of situation and finally reach comprehensive ceasefire
● Dialogue, negotiation are only viable way to resolve Ukraine crisis
● Maintain safety of nuclear power plants, oppose armed attacks on nuclear facilities
● Nuclear weapons cannot be used and nuclear war cannot be fought
● We oppose development, use of biological and chemical weapons by any country under any circumstances
● Oppose any unilateral sanctions not authorized by the UN Security Council
🐣 RT @kalev1990 February 24th is forever a part of our history. It has already been etched in memory by the #Bucha’s blood, #Mariupol’s ashes, #Kharkiv’s tears, #Bakhmut’s fire & the resistance of the whole of #Ukraine, which has become not just a shield, but a sword of #Europe. Just remember!
⭕ 23 Feb 2023
🐣 RT @China_MFA The US is the No.1 violator of sovereignty and interferer in the internal affairs of other countries. Since the end of WWII, the US has reportedly sought to subvert 50+ foreign governments, interfered in elections in 30+ countries & attempted assassination on 50+ foreign leaders.
⋙ 🐣 please: (recent:) Viet Nam, the Uyghurs, Tibet, Hong Kong, Shanghai, plus devastating domestic misadventures like the Great Leap Forward and the draconian COVID-19 lockdowns, not to mention threats to Taiwan and claims to the South China Sea ~ China is no role model
⋙⋙ 🐣 also: Tiananmen Square; and those are just the ones I, not a China expert, can think of; your “weather” balloons have violated the sovereignty of at least 40 countries ¤ where would China be today without the US marketplace and the stealing of US trade secrets?
⋙ 🐣 Post the lists mentioned, please, so our Intelligence Community and @StateDept can respond. ¤ Also, please post your “peace plan” and explain how Russia did not invade Ukraine, whose borders snd sovereignty are recognized by the United Nations.
🐣 RT @PatronDsns During the past year, the 🇷🇺 launched almost 5,000 missiles and 3,500 air strikes. “Kyiv in 3 days”, “Let’s go to Berlin like our grandfathers”, “Everyone will respect and fear us”. But it’s been a year since they became a laughingstock. So cruel and angry but a laughingstock.
🖼 https://twitter.com/PatronDsns/status/1628853474921267202?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @ChuckPfarrer MORE ON THE WAY: The US is expected to announce a further $2 billion Ukraine aid package on Friday. Included will be more HIMARs, 155mm artillery ammunition, combat and reconnaissance UAVs, mine clearance equipment and anti-drone technology.
⋙ CNN: US expected to announce $2 billion Ukraine aid package on Friday https://tinyurl.com/3nzcxzjx
// Defense budget
The Biden administration is expected to announce another $2 billion in Ukraine Security Assistance Initiative [USAI] funds on Friday, the one-year anniversary of the Russian invasion, a US official said Thursday.
Unlike drawdown packages, which are pulled directly from US weapons stocks and can be shipped quickly to Ukraine, USAI [Ukraine Security Assistance Initiative] packages are purchased or contracted from the industry. Though the aid can take far longer to arrive in Ukraine, it also signals a longer-term commitment to providing assistance to Kyiv in what the US sees as a protracted conflict against Russia. ¤ This is new funding for purchases and new contracts for equipment for Ukraine, including:
● HIMARS rockets [launchers or missiles?]
● 155m artillery ammunition
● multiple types of drones (UAVS)
● Counter UAV equipment
● Mine clearing equipment
● Secure communications equipment
● Funding for training and maintenanceThe US announced its 32nd drawdown of US equipment for Ukraine just three days ago, valued at $450 million, which included
● more HIMAR and Howitzer ammunition,
● Javelin anti-tank missiles and
● air surveillance radars.The announcement came the same day President Joe Biden made a highly secretive visit to Kyiv, meeting with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, and then giving an impassioned speech in support of Ukraine from Warsaw.
🐣 RT @ChuckPfarrer WAGNER OUT? Yevgeny Prigozhin, head of the Wagner Group, is watching his career fade. UKR intel reports that the RU military is setting up a rival Private Military Contracting firm, Yastreb [Hawk]– an organization closely aligned with RU intelligence.
⋙ YahooNews/UkrainskaPravda: Russian secret services set up new private military company to oust Wagner mercenaries General Staff https://tinyurl.com/2p9a64up
⋙ 🐣 RT @MCTothSTL There is a growing proliferation of PMCs in Moscow. Even Shoigu has one now. ¤ Fears of PMCs causing a post-Putin civil war are one major reason why the Biden administration is arguably not tying to outright win this war in Ukraine as I wrote in @TheHill.
⋙⋙ TheHill: Is winning not an option in Ukraine? https://tinyurl.com/2djtb2ye
🐣 📋 RT @robbertt4321 Russia has visually confirmed lost 47% of its tanks in active service in the first year of the invasion… ¤ Data from @oryxspioenkop & the Military Balance 2022, retrieved on February 23rd.
[TextLink:] https://twitter.com/robbertt4321/status/1628895410738589698?s=20/photo/1
🐣 📋 RT @SecRaimondo Taiwan alone produces 92% of the world’s leading-edge chips – even though the majority of them are still based on American technology created at UC Berkeley with federal funding. ¤ It’s not right – and we’re going to fix it with the CHIPS and Science Act.
WaPo: Oral history: Leaders recall dismay, fury on first day of war in Ukraine https://tinyurl.com/34z3m947 “I thought about the rockets flying over my children, over all of our children. This means that there will be a huge number of deaths. It was clear” ~ Volodymyr Zelensky
// Political, military and intelligence officials describe their reaction to the Russian invasion and what they did that first day
TheAtlantic, Tom Nichols: The War in Ukraine Is the End of a World https://tinyurl.com/jec5btr8 “I underestimated the power of Soviet imperial nostalgia. And so today, I grieve”
// A shroud is settling over the dreams many of us had at the end of the 20th century.
[…] I grieve for the innocent people of Ukraine, for the dead and for the survivors, for the mutilated men and women, for the orphans and the kidnapped children. I grieve for the elderly who have had to live through the brutality of the Nazis and the Soviets and, now, the Russians. I grieve for a nation whose history will be forever changed by Putin’s crimes against humanity.
And yes, I grieve, too, for the Russians. I care not one bit for Putin or his criminal accomplices, who might never face justice in this world but who I am certain will one day stand before an inescapable and far more terrifying seat of judgment. But I grieve for the young men who have been used as “cannon meat,” for children whose fathers have been dragooned into the service of a dictator, for the people who once again are afraid to speak and who once again are being incarcerated as political prisoners.
Finally, I grieve for the end of a world I knew for most of my adult life. I have lived through two eras, one an age of undeclared war between two ideological foes that threatened instant destruction, the next a time of increasing freedom and global integration. This second world was full of chaos, but it was also grounded in hope. The Soviet collapse did not mean the end of war or of dictatorships, but after 1991, time seemed to be on the side of peace and democracy, if only we could summon the will and find the leadership to build on our heroic triumphs over Nazism and Communism.
Now I live in a new era, one in which the world order created in 1945 is collapsing. The United Nations, as I once wrote, is a squalid and dysfunctional organization, but it is still one of the greatest achievements of humanity. It was never designed, however, to function with one of its permanent members running amok as a nuclear-armed rogue state, and so today the front line of freedom is in Ukraine. But democracy is under attack everywhere, including here in the United States, and so I will celebrate the courage of Ukraine, the wisdom of NATO, and the steadfastness of the world’s democracies. But I also hear the quiet rustling of a shroud that is settling over the dreams—and perhaps, illusions—of a better world that for a moment seemed only inches from our grasp.
I do not know how this third era of my life will end, or if I will be alive to see it end. All I know is that I feel now as I did that night in Red Square, when I knew that democracy was in the fight of its life, that we might be facing a catastrophe, and that we must never waver.
🧵 RT @NATO ❝I’d always been a journalist… on day two of Russia’s full-scale invasion, I went and joined the Armed Forces of Ukraine.❞ This is Pavlo’s story [1/10]
📌 https://twitter.com/NATO/status/1628687934000885760?s=20
⋙ 🐣 RT @NATO 🗣️Ukraine is hosting one of the great epics of this century
❝We are Harry Potter and William Wallace, the Na’vi and Han Solo. We’re escaping from Shawshank and blowing up the Death Star. We are fighting with the Harkonnens and challenging Thanos.❞ [9/10]
⋙ 🐣 RT @NATO ❝We haven’t won yet. But in many ways, we have won.❞
Read Pavlo’s full story on #NATOreview: http://bit.ly/3IQbpzf [10/10]
💙 🐣 RT @ManiatiGeorge When I saw this clip on February 24th evening my time…I knew these men here were cut from a different mold. I showed it to my wife. She cried. She was worried they wouldn’t be able to hold the Orcs from taking Kyiv. I knew Kyiv would not fall..too big..and the Ukrainian spirit..
💽 https://twitter.com/ManiatiGeorge/status/1628549905768714241?s=20/photo/1
// clip 2/24/2022: Zelensky addresses nation with his team: “We are here”
⋙ 🐣 RT @Semper1908 When I saw that I cried. And for the next week I went to bed every night fearing Kyiv would fall while I slept. And then one day I realised the Russians were just failing and that maybe Ukraine would triumph. And that little flower just grew in my heart, victory after victory
🐣 RT @GoncharenkoUa The UN General Assembly voted in favor of a resolution calling on Russia to immediately withdraw its troops from Ukraine ¤. Against – only 7 (Russia and Belarus, Syria, North Korea, Eritrea, Nicaragua, Mali – true friends of Putin)
[TextLink:] https://twitter.com/GoncharenkoUa/status/1628864048367382536?s=20/photo/1
// In Favor: 141; Abstentions: 32 (incl China, India, Iran, Pakistan, So Africa, etc)
🧵 RT @justartsndstuff “Putin prepared invasion of Ukraine secretly from his inner circle and caused elite discontent with military aggression – FT ¤ One of the oligarchs asked Lavrov how Putin could have planned such a large-scale invasion in such a narrow circle that most senior Kremlin officials, 1/
📌 https://twitter.com/justartsndstuff/status/1628788969897922560?s=20
⋙ the economic cabinet and Russia’s business elite did not believe it was even possible. ¤ “He has three advisors,” Lavrov replied, “Ivan the Terrible, Peter the Great, and Catherine the Great.” ¤ Even as the enormous cost of the invasion to Russia becomes apparent to Putin, 2/
⋙ the Kremlin leader is more determined than ever to see it through, people who know him say. ¤ “The idea was never that hundreds of thousands of people would die. It all went horribly wrong,” said a Russian ex-official. ¤ Some officials are trying to convince him to end the war, 3/
⋙ pointing to the economic damage caused by the sanctions. ¤ “But how can you convince a madman? His brain will collapse if he realizes that it was a mistake,” the source concluded.” END/ [link to Telegram
🐣 RT @ChuckPfarrer VUHLEDAR /1320 UTC 23 FEB/ Two RU probes toward the T-05-24 HWY at Vuhledar were broken up. UKR reports that elements of the Cossack Detachment (Volunteers) assigned to RU 155th Brigade of Marine Infantry (Pacific Fleet), have refused orders to engage in offensive operations.
🌎 https://twitter.com/ChuckPfarrer/status/1628746280527593472?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @kajakallas Explained to @bbcnickrobinson why it is important to end the cycle of Russian aggression. This aggression cannot pay off. ¤. Also emphasised why accountability is crucial and why no Russian leader can be immune from responsibility. ¤ Listen from 08:45.
🔊 BBC: https://tinyurl.com/4jvwk4ka/photo/1
🐣 RT @Gerashchenko_en Russian propagandists complain that they need more allies and no one is really coming to their side. ¤ Skabeyeva consoles them that as soon as Russia has real successes, allies will appear. ¤ I’ve got bad news for her.
💽 [tr] https://twitter.com/Gerashchenko_en/status/1628651370336374784?s=20/photo/1
KyivPost: Zelensky’s Chief of Staff Yermak Speaks Openly with Kyiv Post about War with Russia https://tinyurl.com/tf2y26dt ‘Unless there are radical changes in the structure of the Russian Federation, there will always be a risk of another full-scale invasion of Ukraine’ ~ Yermak
// The top Ukrainian official told Kyiv Post that only NATO membership will protect Ukraine from another future war with Russia, adding that the Kremlin has “no chance” of winning against the alliance.
🐣 RT @NOELreports Prighozin reports that the “ammunition train” has started moving. Referring towards his tirade yesterday against the Russian military leadership, complaining about the lack of ammunition and an immediate need for it.
[TextLink:] https://twitter.com/NOELreports/status/1628652615285309440?s=20/photo/1
🚫 🐣 RT @vinm300 #Ukraine
Xi Peace proposition facts
a) Ceasefire
b) halt to weapons for Ukr
FM Kubela has seen part of it & didn’t reject
Therefore (speculation) :
c) Russia withdraws, replaced by UN peace-keepers
d) UN diplomacy to resolve borders within 10yrs
Xi’s amour propre needs success
⋙ 🐣 corr: Dmytro Kuleba ¤ Ukr asked for a vote on its peace proposal by the UN assembly; I think the vote is today(?) ¤ I doubt either Zelenskyy or the Ukr people would be willing to hand over to the UN decisions on restoring Ukraine’s 2014 borders
🐣 RT @mhmck Reacting to the significant losses of personnel suffered by the invaders in the offensive near Vuhledar, the so-called “Cossacks” attached to the 155th Marine Brigade (RU) refuse to go into combat. ¤ Source: Armed Forces of Ukraine operational information, 06:00, 23 February 2023
⭕ 22 Feb 2023
DailyBeast, David Rothkopf: 10 Surprising Lessons of the Ukraine War So Far https://tinyurl.com/2jcy6ky7 “4. Poland is the new Germany. (And Estonia is the new France.)” “8. Ukraine is already in the EU and NATO whether you (or Russia or Turkey) like it or not.”
// From revealing Putin’s weaknesses to new ways to wage war to intriguing new power centers, the war in Ukraine has served up one surprise after another—and we can expect many more.
● While Ukraine has pleaded for fighter jets for a year, unmanned aircraft have stolen the show.
● “No Time for Sergeants” was once a TV hit in America. It has been a flop for the Russian army.
● Speaking of time, it’s time for traditional navies to realize their time will soon be up.
● Poland is the new Germany. (And Estonia is the new France.)
● Vladimir Putin may be a madman, but at least he has the common sense not to want to be obliterated in a nuclear war with NATO.
● Speaking of Putin, stick a fork in him. He may not be quite done yet, but he will be soon… and besides if anyone deserves to have a fork stuck in him, it’s Putin.
● TikTok is more than just an annoying teenage time-waster and Chinese espionage plot.
● Ukraine is already in the EU and NATO whether you (or Russia or Turkey) like it or not.
● With friends like Turkey, Israel, the global South and Elon Musk, who needs enemies?
● And the most important lesson of all is, as it will be for the remainder of this century, everything is always about China.
🐣 RT @POTUS Bucharest Nine leaders have provided critical security assistance to Ukraine and critical support to millions of refugees. ¤ We’ve helped ensure Ukrainians can access basic services. ¤ And together, we’ll continue our enduring support for Ukraine as they defend their freedom.
🐣 RT @SpiroAgnewGhost His panic has now understandably reached a new level.
[TextLink:] https://twitter.com/SpiroAgnewGhost/status/1628432153049731074?s=20/photo/1
[Text:] 🐣 RT @realDonaldTrump This Georgia case is ridiculous, a strictly political continuation of the greatest Witch Hunt of all time. Now you have an extremely energetic young woman, the (get this!) “foreperson” of the Racist D.A.’s Special Grand Jury, going around and doing a Media Tour revealing, incredibly, the Grand Jury’s inner workings & thoughts. This is not JUSTICE, this is an illegal Kangaroo Court. Atlanta is leading the Nation in Murder and other Violent Crimes. All I did is make TWO PERFECT PHONE CALLS!!!
🐣 RT @AustinAustin231 The #UN General Assembly will vote today on a peace plan for #Ukraine which includes most of plan proposed by #Ukraine. President #Zelensky is calling for all nations to vote for the plan.
🐣 RT @wartranslated Magyar, the mastermind behind “Magyar’s birds” goes into detail about how his air reconnaissance group operates, and what his specific responsibilities in the unit are. It works like taxi – whoever accepts the enemy destruction order first, gets to hit it.
💽 https://twitter.com/wartranslated/status/1628546751677300736?s=20/photo/1
⋙ 🐣 RT @HickPhilistine Its stuff like this that lets Ukraine do more with less. A force multiplier and faster adaptability than on the Russian side where this kind of initiative is discouraged rather than adopted.
⋙ 🐣 RT @1901James These guys invented a new way of fighting. Drones were used before, of course, but the scale, precision and the entire process used in Ukraine is on an entire different level to anything else except probably the USA. It is probably the most efficient price per target in any war.
🐣 RT @AmbVasyl An excellent oped by @WarintheFuture reflecting on 1 year of the Russian full scale invasion. “A year when Ukraine reminded us what a lion’s heart looks like”
⋙ SydneyMorningHerald, Mick Ryan: A year when Ukraine reminded us what a lion’s heart looks like https://tinyurl.com/3htk3rrc “In his darkest hour, … Zelensky demanded of the free world not a way out of the war but a way to stay, save his people and win the war”
// “It was a roar heard around the world”
// A year on from the invasion of Ukraine, the Western world has been reminded of what a nation with a lion’s heart looks like.
🐣 RT @ @TruWordsRSpoken FACTS NOT FEELINGS MATTER #EastPalenstineOH #TrumpDerailment
[TextLink:] https://twitter.com/TruWordsRSpoken/status/1628540701830180864?s=20/photo/1
● No, Buttigieg couldn’t have prevented the disaster
● No, Buttigieg is NOT responsible for the clean-up
● No, Democrats didn’t order the train cars be burned
● Yes, Gov. DeWine ordered the train cars be burned
● Yes, The Norfolk Southern CEO donated to DeWine
● Yes, Trump removed safety standards
● Yes, Trump weakened the EPA
● Yes, we ALL should be working together to make sure this doesn’t happen again
📊 Bipartisan Report: Marist Poll for NPR/PBS: Biden Approval Rating Rises Again As Policy Wins Continue https://tinyurl.com/4tv844ns 49% approve (23% “strongly”)/45% disapprove amid strong economic news, lower gas prices, overseas successes
🐣 RT @ChuckPfarrer KREMINNA /2120 UTC 22 FEB/ RU units attempted to advance W of Kreminna; they are reported to have been defeated in heavy fighting, losing armored vehicles as they retreated. UKR counter-battery fire destroyed RU guns at Stara Krasnyanka.
🌎 https://twitter.com/ChuckPfarrer/status/1628503477180678144?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @VolodyaTretyak As always an amazing interview with the Chief of GUR, Kyrylo Budanov, from 22.02.2023. He talks about Russian mobilization, Russia’s weapon production capabilities, his opinion on Bakhmut, not accidental arsons in Russia, and the near future of the war.
⋙ WarTranslated: Forbes.ua interview: GUR’s chief Kyrylo Budanov interview https://tinyurl.com/5d6sf324
⋙⋙ 🐣 RT @PhillipsPOBrien The Russian offensive is indeed underway–its just of such poor quality that ‘not everyone can even see it’ Ouch. There is also a number of really important points made in the article
⋙⋙ 🐣 RT @PhillipsPOBrien Ukrainians are studying Russian ammunition production–the Russians cant make nearly enough to replace what they are using. Then some really interesting ideas on how Russian munitions production is struggling overall.
⋙⋙ 🐣 RT @PhillipsPOBrien Near the end Budanov repeats a prediction–the war will turn in the Spring (when presumably the Ukrainian Army will have finished preparing its forces) at that point the Russian offensive will be crushed.
WaPo, David Ignatius: What a year of war has revealed of three leaders https://tinyurl.com/ye26mz7r “Who could have imagined that a Ukrainian comic actor named Volodymyr Zelensky would prove to be the first truly heroic leader of the 21st century”
War reveals the essential traits of human character that shape events. Who could have imagined that a Ukrainian comic actor named Volodymyr Zelensky would prove to be the first truly heroic leader of the 21st century. Who would have bet that Putin, the canny and cynical ex-KGB officer, would grossly misread both intelligence and history and ransom his country to what amounted to a fairy tale about the “oneness” of Russia and Ukraine.
Perhaps most surprising of all, who would have bet that an 80-year-old U.S. president, a man who was garrulous, sentimental and sometimes appeared senescent, would turn out to the most undervalued American leader in modern times. President Biden’s brave visit Monday to Kyiv was a defining moment in his presidency. Even conservative commentators who make a living trashing him had to be stirred by the sight of him standing in St. Michael’s Square while air raid sirens wailed.
… In Putin’s case, this vanity led him to march his nation off a cliff. On Feb. 24 last year, Putin launched the invasion with a speech that is still astonishing for its sense of victimization and desire for revenge.
Putin cast the Ukraine story as a tale of Russian innocence and Western perfidy. In expanding NATO eastward toward Russia’s borders, the United States and its allies had shown a “contemptuous and disdainful attitude” and behaved “rudely and unceremoniously from year to year.” The West had hurt Russia’s feelings, in other words.
Putin’s chief war aim, bizarrely, seemed to be greater respect. The West, rather than treating a disoriented post-Soviet Russia “professionally, smoothly, patiently,” had flaunted its power with a “state of euphoria created by the feeling of absolute superiority, a kind of modern absolutism.” NATO had talked of inviting Russian cooperation, but Putin insisted: “They have deceived us, or, to put it simply, they have played us.”
Zelensky’s piece of this story is a combination of raw courage and an actor’s intuitive understanding of how to play the role of his life. … Zelensky resisted U.S. offers of help in evacuating Kyiv. When he emerged from his bunker after the initial days of assault in his green fatigues, surrounded by his fellow ministers, you sensed a change in Earth’s gravitational field. “I’m not hiding,” he said. “And I’m not afraid of anyone.” …
In the end, war is a test of wills. Putin was convinced that his cold-eyed, brutal resolve would outlast everyone else’s. But a year on, Putin’s staying power begins to look questionable, while Zelensky and Biden have never looked stronger.
🐣 RT @ChuckPfarrer BAKMUT /1400 UTC 22 FEB/ RU forces continue operations against UKR Lines of Communication and Supply (LOCS). UKR forces are in contact in the eastern suburbs of Bakhmut, north and south of the H-32 HWY.
🌎 https://twitter.com/ChuckPfarrer/status/1628392297120337923?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @POTUS There is no sweeter word than freedom, no nobler goal than freedom, and no higher aspiration than freedom. ¤ All that we do now must be done so our children and grandchildren will know it as well: Freedom.
💽 https://twitter.com/POTUS/status/1628378676491390980?s=20/photo/1
// Biden in Warsaw before a crowd of 30K
🐣 RT @AustinAustin231 The Mariupol city council (Ukrainian authorities, not Russian occupiers) says that a Russian ammo depot has been hit near the Port of Mariupol. Russian sources are shocked but confirm that strikes took place, and claim that a previously unseen weapon was used.
⋙ 🐣 possibly this … these were included in the previous package of mil aid: they double the range for HIMARS and are exceptionally precise
◕ https://twitter.com/Auriandra/status/1628378476641234947?s=20/photo/1
// Ground-launched Small Diameter Bomb (GLSDB)
🐣 RT @POTUS Mr. President, you and all Ukrainians remind the world of what courage is – every single day. ¤ We have every confidence that you’re going to prevail and we will be with you for as long as it takes.
⋙ 🐣 RT @ZelenskyyUa Kyiv stands strong. Kyiv stands proud, it stands tall and most important, it stands free. @Potus said this today in Warsaw after a historic visit to Ukraine. We all stand united and brave – 🇺🇦, 🇺🇸 and our entire coalition of victory. 1/2
⋙⋙ 🐣 RT @ZelenskyyUaI thank @POTUS and all of America for their leadership in rallying the world in support of freedom and for their vital assistance to Ukraine. Together we are heading towards a common victory, and we must ensure it this year already! 2/2
🐣 RT @nytimesworld A delegation of five House Republicans led by Representative Michael McCaul of Texas, who is chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, met with President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine in Kyiv on Tuesday, one day after President Biden’s visit.
⋙ NYT: A House Republican delegation visits Kyiv and Zelensky in a show of bipartisan American support https://tinyurl.com/apmn4p4w
According to a spokeswoman for the committee, Mr. McCaul met with Mr. Zelensky and Representative Darrell Issa of California, Representative Max Miller of Ohio and Representatives Jake Ellzey and Keith Self of Texas. Margaret Kibben, the House chaplain, also attended.
The group met with Mr. Zelensky, Ukraine’s top finance, defense and foreign officials, as well as several members of Ukraine’s parliament, the committee spokeswoman said. The American delegation also visited Bucha, the Kyiv suburb that Russian forces have ravaged over the last several months, making it the site of some of the worst atrocities of the war.
Mr. Zelensky updated the Americans on the state of the war and expressed confidence in Ukraine’s position, his office wrote in a readout of the meeting. He also outlined the Ukrainian army’s artillery needs and thanked the congressmen for their support, nearly one year since Russia’s full-scale invasion.
“We are grateful for all the steps that have been taken, which have been endorsed by the president of the United States and the Congress,” Mr. Zelensky said, adding appreciation “for the aid packages for our army, our military on the battlefield. And, of course, for the financial support to overcome all the challenges that have arisen as a result of Russian aggression.”
🐣 RT @nytimesworld A delegation of five House Republicans led by Representative Michael McCaul of Texas, who is chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, met with President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine in Kyiv on Tuesday, one day after President Biden’s visit.
⋙ NYT: A House Republican delegation visits Kyiv and Zelensky in a show of bipartisan American support https://tinyurl.com/apmn4p4w
🐣 RT @USAmbKyiv Yesterday, a Congressional delegation led by #HFAC Chair @RepMcCaul and I met with survivors of Russia’s atrocities in Bucha. I am horrified by their stories of brutal murders of civilians by Russia’s forces. The U.S. is committed to ensuring those responsible are held to account
🖼 https://twitter.com/USAmbKyiv/status/1628360122949926913?s=20/photo/1 -2
⋙ 🐣 Thank you, @RepMcCaul, for visiting Bucha. There are many Buchas ~ virtually any town or city Ukr troops have entered after Ru have left. ¤ Please share your insights with your colleagues in the House who do not yet understand the serious threat faced to civilization itself.
🐣 RT @sandumaiamd Had a very good meeting with President @AndrzejDuda today to discuss pressing security challenges and Moldova’s EU accession. ¤ Poland is a key partner in our pursuit of a democratic, prosperous future for 🇲🇩. ¤ Grateful for 🇵🇱’s unwavering support in advancing our shared goals.
NYT: Ukraine appears to attack deep into Russian-occupied territory https://tinyurl.com/2kv99djz “The Ukrainian General Staff said only that Ukraine’s Air Force had launched 8 attacks on the temporary bases of Russian troops & 2 strikes on … Russia’s anti-aircraft missile systems”
🐣 RT @RFERL The treaty, the last remaining nuclear arms accord between the two superpowers, restricts each nation to 1,550 deployed strategic nuclear warheads and 700 deployed intercontinental ballistic missiles and strategic bombers.
⋙ RFERL: Russia’s State Duma Approves Putin’s Move To Suspend New START Nuclear Deal https://tinyurl.com/2p95t86x
🐣 RT @uarealitynow (CNN) Russia carried out a test of an intercontinental ballistic missile that appears to have failed around the time President Joe Biden was in Ukraine on Monday, according to two US officials familiar with the matter.
💙 WaPo: A year in the trenches has hardened Ukraine’s president https://tinyurl.com/59hf8yr8 “Experience and tragedy … washed over him. Cynicism battled with idealism inside him. He had seen the aftermath of atrocities and grasped the hands of the loved ones of Ukraine’s dead soldiers”
// // Volodymyr Zelensky came into office thinking peace with Putin was possible. He now believes victory is the only answer.
🐣 RT @KyivIndependent ⚡️CNN: Russia’s nuclear-capable ICBM Sarmat allegedly failed test. ¤ Russia’s nuclear-capable intercontinental ballistic missile Sarmat appears to have failed a test launch around Feb. 20, according to the U.S. officials.
⭕ 21 Feb 2023
🐣 RT @ DucuGavril I’m hoping for a plot twist here, something that would destroy the “myth of putin” completely. Something in the classic russian genre of decay and destruction. 🥲
⋙ 🐣 RT @wartranslated There’s a noticeable rift between Wagner and MoD supporters on the channels. Prigozhin himself is livid. I don’t believe this is psyops. But I wouldn’t go as far as saying this might lead to something. But it’s great it’s happening, nevertheless.
🐣 RT @Azovsouth Wagner terrorist boss Prigozhin, said he was not invited to Putin’s dry speech today and that he was busy storming office after office looking looking for ammo to give his stranded Wagner criminals in #Bakhmut. ¤ He has also accused Gerasimov and Defense Minister Shoigu of treason
Politico [EU]: ‘Treason!’ Wagner boss slams Russia’s military leaders https://tinyurl.com/3e85wbch
// They want to ‘destroy’ Wagner, says Yevgeny Prigozhin about Russia’s defense minister and army chief.
🧵 RT @WhiteHouse One year after Russia’s brutal invasion of Ukraine, President Biden traveled to Kyiv to meet with President Zelenskyy. Here’s how it happened. ¤ On Sunday at 4:15 AM EST, @POTUS departed D.C. on Air Force One for Germany – where the plane refueled and was wheels up at 6:29 PM CET.
📌 https://twitter.com/WhiteHouse/status/1628046905178566658?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @GirkinGirkin [tr] Over the past day, units of the Defense Forces of Ukraine have repelled attacks by invaders in the areas of the settlements of Kuzemivka and Dibrova in the Luhansk region and Fedorivka, Yagidne, Berkhivka, Bakhmut and Kurdyumivka in the Donetsk region. ¤ (and Kurdyumivka, yes)
🐣 🗳 RT @gelliottmorris First big night of 2023 elections this year and Democrats are doing very well
– Liberal WI Supreme Court candidates >50% total
– In NH, D outrunning 2022 by 10pts
– A KY state senate seat that was Biden+30 is D+55
– Dems on track to swing VA04 by 10pts; huge rural vote swing
🐣 RT @thejackhopkins BREAKING: Vladimir Putin has initiated a draft. All college students are now going to war. He is sending them to be slaughtered in Ukraine. This man is desperate, and approaching panic mode.
🐣 RT @NSC_Spox 30,000 crowd count for President Biden’s speech tonight, according to the Warsaw Mayor’s office. 🇺🇸🇵🇱🇺🇦
💽 https://twitter.com/NSC_Spox/status/1628089403364249600?s=20/photo/1
🧵 RT @JominiW 1/ Ukraine TVD, 8-19 FEB 23. The past 2 weeks of February saw the Russian Winter Offensive intensify as major pushes continued in Kreminna, Bakhmut, and Vuhledar. Russian made few gains, Ukrainian defenses continue to hold. #UkraineRussiaWar #RussianArmy #UkraineFrontLines
📌 🌎 https://twitter.com/JominiW/status/1628213037768273922?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @officejjsmart 🇷🇺 FOR THEE, NOT ME ¤ Below each of these smiling faces of Russia’s leadership are the names and ages of their sons. ¤ How many of them have sons in the Russian Army? ¤ None of them.
🖼 https://twitter.com/officejjsmart/status/1628129125780099075?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @ChuckPfarrer KREMINNA AXIS /2320 UTC 21 FEB/ Reports indicate that UKR has engaged elements of the RU 55th Motor Rifle Brig and the 331st Reg of the 98th Division (Airborne) east of Yampolivka. RU forces also launched attacks toward Dibrova, south of Kuzmyne and again at Bilohorvika.
🌎 https://twitter.com/ChuckPfarrer/status/1628167902879748096?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @AustinAustin231 Momentum in #Washington is shifting toward sending #Ukraine ATACMS and F-16 Fighter Jets, says a Senior U.S. Lawmaker (#Reuters)
¤ https://twitter.com/AustinAustin231/status/1628133987142053889?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @ChuckPfarrer BAKHMUT AXIS /1230 UTC 21 FEB/ N of Bakhmut, RU units are attempting to expand control of the M-03 HWY. UKR units were in contact at Berkhivka, Pidhorodne and south of the T-13-02/M-03 jct. RU pressed attacks in the E Bakhmut suburbs, along the Patrice Lumumba Blvd /H32 axis.
🌎 https://twitter.com/ChuckPfarrer/status/1628008111662325760?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @Gerashchenko_en “The West was not plotting to attack Russia. President Putin chose this war. Every day the war continues is his choice. ¤ It’s simple. If Russia stopped invading , it would end the war. If Ukraine stopped defending itself against Russia, it would be the end of Ukraine” – @POTUS
🐣 RT @NOELreports Belarus said that there is a significant grouping of Ukrainian troops massed near its border and warned that this posed a threat to its security. “At present, a significant grouping of the Ukrainian army is concentrated in the immediate vicinity of the border,” The MoD said.
🚫 🐣 RT @front_ukrainian ⚡️The 🇷🇺Russian Federation is going to seize the airport in Chisinau for the transfer of troops, – 🇲🇩Moldovan Prime Minister Recean [Dorin Recea]
🌎 https://twitter.com/front_ukrainian/status/1628066431517569030?s=20/photo/1
⋙ 🐣 RT @MariusBatca In fact, Zelensky said that. In response, Prime Minister Dorin Recean said that this is one of the “multiple scenarios” to destabilize the situation in the Republic of Moldova.
🐣 RT @wartranslated Update from Bakhmut, 21 February: No success by Russians in Bakhmut, although frequent assaults continue. Comments on the world stage events – Kiyanyn.
💽 https://twitter.com/wartranslated/status/1628060306629951492?s=20/photo/1
// on Budapest Memorandum; Chinese drones etc
🐣 it’s a sad fact of history that who the aggressor was depends on how far back you want to go ¤ but in 1991-2, when the USSR collapsed, many states became independent and were recognized by the UN ¤ Putin never accepted this, calling it the greatest geopolitical tragedy of the 20thC
🐣 RT @BlaySylvester Summary of Putin’s speech [Bingo card]
¤ https://twitter.com/BlaySylvester/status/1627971470495293441?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @wartranslated More madness from Prigozhin this morning who declares there’s “direct work to destroy Wagner” as even the sapper shovels are not provided to the PMC anymore. “These officials decided it is their country, their people, they will decide when they die”, he adds.
💽 https://twitter.com/wartranslated/status/1627970502173028353?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @ktotakoe France 2019. Putin’s speech on implementation of the 2015 Minsk agreements and recognition of a special status of the Donetsk and Lugansk republics. The reaction of Zelensky speaks for itself.
💽 https://twitter.com/ktotakoe/status/1625110927421874177?s=20/photo/1
⭕ 20 Feb 2023
NYT, David Axe: Some of the Best Weapons in the World Are Now in Ukraine. They May Change the War https://tinyurl.com/48pv5xky “Allied countries are reaching deep into their arsenals to make sure [Ukraine’s] anticipated counteroffensive has the best possible chance of succeeding”
🐣 RT @michaeldweiss Exclusive: a consortium of international investigative journalists including @holger_r and myself have obtained the Russian Presidential Administration’s strategy document for Vladimir Putin’s takeover of Belarus by 2030.
⋙ YahooNews: Revealed: Leaked document shows how Russia plans to take over Belarus https://tinyurl.com/23n8b4mp
// The document, written for Putin’s Presidential Administration, envisages the total incorporation of Belarus into a “Union State” with Russia by 2030.
TheAtlantic, Anne Applebaum: Biden Went to Kyiv Because There’s No Going Back https://tinyurl.com/mezz83z2 “He’s the American president. He made an unprecedented trip to a war zone, one where there are no U.S. troops to protect him. And, yes, he’s old. But he went anyway”
// The president’s surprise visit sent a message to Moscow—and to European leaders.
🐣 RT @WarMonitors ⚡️What to expect from Putin’s speech via the Kremlin Pool
[TextLink:] https://twitter.com/WarMonitors/status/1627939549417467905?s=20/photo/1
[Text:] There are only four hours left before Putin’s message. The head of state did not address the Federal Assembly for 1 year and 10 months, during which time the political environment has accumulated a lot of expectations regarding the president’s speech. We share the main ones:
● The speech should inspire “the country and the army” and paint an image of the future. In this case, the president should not ignore the support of new regions of Russian Federation.
● The theme of the special operation will become the leitmotif of the President’s message and will determine many other topics: social security for the participants of the MD, equipping the army, training fighters.
● The President will outline socio-economic tasks. Will touch upon the issues of the standard of living in the country, demography, incomes of the population, prices for food and medicines
● Interlocutors in the agricultural sector are concerned about the removal of restrictions on grain exports, the abolition of duties, large-scale procurement interventions and electricity tariffs.
● Entrepreneurs expect to understand what kind of social and economic assistance the authorities expect from business, and what kind of support they are ready to give in return. In addition, businesses are waiting for signals regarding changes in the tax area. The message will also be addressed to an external audience.
● The head of state will talk about the fight against terrorists and saboteurs, the modernization of the military-industrial complex and the results of confronting Western sanctions.
🐣 RT @anders_aslund Cleverly, @POTUS showed courage & commitment by going to Kyiv the day before Putin is supposed to give his annual speech to the Russian Federal Assembly in secluded Gostinny Dvor beside the Kremlin in Moscow. ¤ Let us see how far that coward will be from any person!
🐣 RT @IAPonomarenko Lemme give you a detailed plan for Putin’s big speech due tomorrow:
1. Russia has never attacked anyone.
2. They made us do this, we didn’t have a choice.
3. The survival of Russia is at stake now.
4. It’s all still part of the plan though.
You’re welcome.
🐣 RT @KyivIndependent ⚡️Putin to deliver speech ahead of one year mark of war in Ukraine. ¤ Russian dictator Vladimir Putin will give a speech on Feb. 21 updating Russia’s political and military elite on the state of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine that began nearly one year ago.
(📊) USNews&World/AP (2/14): GOP Leaders Start Laying Groundwork for More Ukraine Aid https://tinyurl.com/mrxkrw24 ‘Leading Republicans in Congress are launching an early & aggressive effort to make the case for why the US should continue spending billions on the war effort’
// 2/14/2023; Republicans assuming new positions of leadership in the House and Senate are not waiting for the next funding debate over Ukraine to begin making the case for why the U.S. should continue supporting the war-torn nation
Leading Republicans in Congress are not waiting for the next debate over assistance to Ukraine, instead launching an early and aggressive effort to make the case for why the U.S. should continue spending billions of dollars on the war effort. ¤ One of their main challenges: winning over skeptical Republican colleagues.
“I’m very much focused on the dissension within my own party on this,” Republican Rep. Michael McCaul of Texas, the chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, told The Associated Press. ¤ McCaul plans to hold a hearing in the spring focused on Russian atrocities against Ukrainian civilians, to try to bring home the war’s terrible toll. ¤ “I find that moves the dial, when they see these horrific killings of children,” McCaul said. …
With opponents of Ukraine spending warning of fraud and corruption, the House Armed Services Committee is planning to hold monthly classified briefings for lawmakers to detail, dollar by dollar, how the U.S. security aid is being allocated.
The briefings will be every two weeks for key staff, said Armed Services Chairman Mike Rogers of Alabama, and a public hearing is in the works “to try to get more visibility for the public into the tracking that we’re doing.” …
The inspectors general for the Defense and State departments and the U.S. Agency for International Development are the lead offices tracking Ukraine spending. Rogers said he is encouraging NATO to bring in a third party to track U.S. weapons to assure the public they don’t end up in the wrong hands. …
Recent polling from Gallup found that about two-thirds of Americans support aid for Ukraine to help it regain its territory, even if it means a prolonged conflict. But that support varied depending upon political party. Nearly half of Republicans, or 47%, say the U.S. is doing too much compared with 35% of independents and just 10% of Democrats.
In the Senate, Republican leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky has consistently pressed the Biden administration for more robust action to help Ukraine win the war. He wore a bright blue and yellow tie to the State of the Union address last week — the colors of Ukraine’s flag — to trumpet his support.
The ranking Republican on the Senate’s Armed Services panel, Sen. Roger Wicker of Mississippi, is using the bully pulpit as well. He spoke at length on the Senate floor about Ukraine and followed up with an op-ed in the National Review, a conservative outlet.
“It is a relatively modest amount that we are contributing without being asked to risk life and limb,” Wicker told the AP. “The Ukrainians are willing to fight the fight for us if the West will give them the provisions. It’s a pretty good deal.” ¤ “And what we’ve done is expose Russia’s very soft, vulnerable underbelly and we’ve made it less likely that any of our NATO allies will be attacked.” …
🐣 China’s import/export market is seriously intertwined with that of the U.S., in a way Russia’s has never been ¤ At a time when Biden is already promoting a “Built in America” agenda, China has much to lose
⋙ 🐣 RT @KashPrime Authoritarian leaders don’t have to listen to their population or business leaders. Choosing to back Russia is suicide for the Chinese economy, just as invading Ukraine set Russia back decades. Unfortunately doesn’t mean they won’t do it; we just need to prepare ASAP.
🐣 RT @mhmck Today is the Day of Commemoration of the Heroes of the Heavenly Hundred. ¤ Nine years ago today was the worst day of killings on Maidan by Putin-Yanukovych forces. ¤ But it was also the day of the triumph of the Revolution of Dignity. The Ukrainian people held firm and won.
⋙ 🐣 RT @mhmck EuroMaidan is a pivotal event in European history. The Russian fascist state started its long-planned invasion of Ukraine to crush it. ¤ Learn more at the web site of the National Memorial to the Heavenly Hundred Heroes and Revolution of Dignity Museum.
¤ https://maidanmuseum.org/en
WaPo, Eugene Robinson: Biden’s Kyiv visit shows Putin seriously misjudged his courage https://tinyurl.com/mr44khsb “Biden is rarely more animated than when he talks about drag racing in his Corvette at triple-digit speeds. He is a man with considerable tolerance for risk”
As President Biden walked the streets of Kyiv on Monday beside Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, air raid sirens began to wail. A Russian fighter jet had reportedly taken off from Belarus, carrying the type of hypersonic missile that Ukraine’s defenders cannot shoot down. The two leaders did not flinch.
Say what you want about Biden, he lacks neither courage nor resolve. His surprise visit to the Ukrainian capital might be the first time a sitting president has braved an active war zone — with no inviolable U.S. military cordon around him — since 1864, when Abraham Lincoln went to see the fighting at Fort Stevens, near the northern tip of the District of Columbia, and came under fire from Confederate sharpshooters. “Get down, you damn fool!” shouted a young Union officer named Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., who later served as a justice on the Supreme Court. …
What many people fail to understand about Biden, the oldest president in our history, is the extent to which he is guided by a sense of mission. He came out of retirement and ran for the White House only because he believed he had the unique ability, and thus the obligation, to save the nation from another four years of Donald Trump. And he has faced Russia’s invasion of Ukraine with the same burden of duty imposed by history.
“I’m a great respecter of fate,” Biden said last year, having seen so much of it during his long and eventful life: He lost his first wife and daughter to a car accident, lost his first son to cancer, almost lost his second son to drug addiction. And in 1988, he suffered two brain aneurysms and was given no better than a 50 percent chance of survival. ¤ In his 2007 book, “Promises to Keep,” Biden wrote: “Maybe I should have been frightened at this point, but I felt calm. In fact, I felt becalmed, like I was floating gently in the wide-open sea. It surprised me, but I had no real fear of dying.” …
… [Putin] neglected to take into account Biden’s deep and abiding Roman Catholic faith, his belief in destiny, his commitment to the rules-based international order — and the fact that Biden is rarely more animated than when he talks about drag racing in his Corvette at triple-digit speeds. He is a man with considerable tolerance for risk. …
Other world leaders allied with Ukraine have visited Kyiv, as have other high-ranking U.S. officials, including former House speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.). But Zelensky said Monday’s was “the most important visit in the whole history of the Ukraine-U.S. relationship” — and that was an understatement.
Without Biden’s leadership and diplomacy, it is hard to imagine how the NATO alliance could have been made stronger by Putin’s invasion, rather than weaker. Without Biden and Congress providing what almost amounts to an open spigot of military and economic aid, it is hard to imagine Ukraine not only surviving the Russian onslaught but also reclaiming lost territory and inflicting massive casualties on Putin’s forces. …
It would be no surprise if Putin reacted to the Biden visit with a deadly barrage of missiles against civilian targets. No one can keep Putin from waging his war. But Biden can — and will — keep him from winning it.
🐣 RT @ Cristinamarie62 @POTUS this is a personal message for you from Magyar and his comrade on the front lines in Bakhmut, Ukraine. 🇺🇦🤝🏽🇺🇸
⋙ 🐣 RT @wartranslated Update from Bakhmut, 20 February – Magyar
💽 https://twitter.com/wartranslated/status/1627807713152360448?s=20/photo/1
⋙⋙ 🐣 RT @FerransRichard Magyar, please understand It’s actually the other way around: The President of the United States came to Ukraine to honor YOU & your fellow brave citizen-soldier brothers & sisters. ¤ The President represents all of us who honor you as well. ¤ That’s the simple truth. ¤ Slava Ukraini🇺🇦
⋙⋙ 🐣 RT @ gina_shreve Wow!! I just saw This clip from Magyar aired on CNN News!! ¤ @wartranslated please tell Magyar 🇺🇸🇺🇸people heard Him today!! Heroyam Slava 💪🙏🏻🇺🇦🌻🙏🏻
🐣 RT @WarMonitor3 Bakhmut Holds! ¤ Heavy assaults take place to the north sector of the frontline they throw everything. ¤ There is firefights for every metre. ¤ To the south more assaults towards the road attempting to bypass Ivanivske from the west
🐣 RT @ChuckPfarrer BAKHMUT /2245 UTC 20 FEB/ There has been no briefing by the UKR Gen’l Staff for the last 24 hours. RU forces are reported to have crossed the M-03 HWY north of Bakhmut, and captured the important M-03/T-05-13 HWY junction
🌎 https://twitter.com/ChuckPfarrer/status/1627799256437256194?s=20/photo/1
🐣 .@MSNBC: Don’t listen to MTG, Biggs or Gaetz about aid to Ukraine. Talk to the chairs:
@RepMikeRogersAL, Armed Services: @HASCRepublicans
@RepMcCaul, Foreign Affairs: @HouseForeignGOP
@RepMikeTurner, Intelligence: @HouseIntel
@RepMarkGreen, Homeland Security: @HomelandGOP
💽 MSNBC: Adm. Stavridis: China sending lethal military aid to Russia could trigger more U.S. aid to Taiwan https://tinyurl.com/2p8d2jut
// Former Deputy National Security Advisor Ben Rhodes and former NATO Supreme Allied Commander Admiral James Stavridis join Andrea Mitchell to break down what’s at stake if China provides lethal military aid to Russia. Stavridis explains that China providing aid to Russia could lead the U.S. to respond by sending more aid to Taiwan. He says, “Let’s hope both sides can kind of step back from this. It’s in neither sides’ interest for China to take this on, supporting this rotten regime in Moscow.”
RT @ Timodc First look at DeSantis foreign policy:
– Blames US for Russian invasion of Ukraine
– Attacks US president while in war zone
– Signals we should dial back support for Ukraine
– minimizes RUS threat
– Anti Afghanistan withdrawal
– Bellicose talk about China
⋙ 🐣 RT @atrupar Ron DeSantis on Fox & Friends on Biden’s visit to Ukraine: “I and many Americans are thinking to ourselves, Ok, he’s very concerned about those borders halfway around the world. He’s not done anything to secure our own borders here… we have a lot of problems accumulating here.”
━━━━━━━▼ House support for Ukraine
🔄 🐣 Key House Defense Committees:
@RepMikeRogersAL, Armed Services: @HASCRepublicans
@RepMcCaul, Foreign Affairs: @HouseForeignGOP
@RepMikeTurner, Intelligence: @HouseIntel
@RepMarkGreen, Homeland Security: @HomelandGOP
~ combat MD Iraq Afgh; CODEL 2022 met Ze; pro-mil-aid, but wants itaccounted for
4️⃣ Newsweek (2/9): Full List of Republicans Backing Matt Gaetz’s Resolution to End Ukraine Aid https://tinyurl.com/4veuce5k 9 are members of the “Cosplay 🤡 Caucus” (voted to not certify Biden); Luna is new; Massie is anti-Trump, but voted not to honor Hill cops
[TextLink:] https://twitter.com/Auriandra/status/1627930964620894208?s=20/photo/1
// 2/9/2023
Eleven (of 435 House Members) oppose Ukraine aid:
Andy Biggs KY 🤡
Lauren Boebert CO 🤡
Matt Gaetz FL 🤡
Paul Gosar of AZ 🤡
Marjorie Taylor Greene GA 🤡
Anna Paulina Luna FL (new member; may have falsified bio)
Thomas Massie KY (anti-Trump; opposed honors for capitol cops)
Mary Miller IL 🤡
Barry Moore AL 🤡
Ralph Norman SC 🤡
Matt Rosendale MT 🤡
3️⃣ 🐣 RT @HASCRepublicans Chairman @RepMikeRogersAL, @RepGaramendi @DonaldNorcross @RepLisaMcClain @Rep_Clyde, @RepMalliotakis, & @RepMarkAlford released the following statement after a CODEL to Romania and Poland to conduct oversight of the U.S. aid being sent to Ukraine. https://tinyurl.com/2naxnzrs
[TextLink:] https://twitter.com/HASCRepublicans/status/1625933597122170903?s=20/photo/1
// 2/15/2023
[Text:] The American people have every right to know that U.S. military equipment donated to Ukraine is being used for its intended purpose – Ukraine’s fight for national survival.
As a bipartisan Congressional delegation, we traveled to Poland and Romania to conduct oversight of this process. We came away with a clear understanding of the various safeguards the U.S. government, in partnership with the Ukrainians and other nations, have put in place to ensure each article is accounted for and tracked to the frontline of the war.
We traveled to the International Donation Collection Center in Poland to see firsthand the accounting and tracking practices which provide accurate counts of shipments into Ukraine. While there, we also met with General Agudo and the Department of Defense’s Security Assistance Group Ukraine, who provided us with a comprehensive briefing which detailed how the U.S. tracks our donations directly to the frontline. We left that briefing confident in our ability to track U.S. equipment from the moment it leaves our possession and makes it into the hands of Ukrainian warfighters.
We also relayed the concerns of Americans with the following message: should we confirm that any defense articles are siphoned off, diverted, or missing the flow of U.S. equipment would cease to be tenable. Our job of oversight is not done and we will continue to monitor U.S. equipment flowing into Ukraine.
Chairman Mike Rogers (R-AL), Rep. John Garamendi (D-CA), Rep. Donald Norcross (D-NJ), Rep. Lisa McClain (R-MI), Rep. Andrew Clyde (R-GA), Rep. Nicole Malliotakis (R-NY), Rep. Mark Alford (R-MO)
⋙ 🐣 This visit (CODEL) was clearly intended to counter the small number (“about 10 co-sponsors out of 435 members“) of GOP voices in the House calling for scrutiny of military aid sent to Ukraine and to respond to Speaker McCarthy’s statement that there can be “no blank check”
2️⃣ 🐣 RT @saletan On CNN, @RepMcCaul and @RepMikeTurner dismiss the latest House resolution to cut off aid to Ukraine.
McCaul: “That bill had about 10 co-sponsors out of 435 members.”
Turner: “There are 435 members of Congress. There are probably 400 that are for continuing this direction.”
// 2/19/2023
⋙ 🐣 These are not just two random House members
.@RepMcCaul is Chair Foreign Affairs Cmte: @HouseForeignGOP
.@RepMikeTurner is Chair Intelligence Cmte: @HouseIntel
1️⃣ 🐣 RT @HouseForeignGOP @HouseForeignGOP CHM @RepMcCaul and @HASCRepublicansCHM @RepMikeRogersAL release a joint statement urging the Biden administration and allies to swiftly send Ukraine weapons needed to win
[TextLink:] https://twitter.com/HouseForeignGOP/status/1615802390023933952?s=20/photo/1
// 1/18/2023
[Text:] The current handwringing and hesitation by the Biden administration and some of our European allies in providing critical weapon systems to Ukraine stinks of the weak policies of 2021, such as not sanctioning Nord Stream 2 or providing U.S.-origin Stingers before the full scale invasion. While those policies failed to deter this conflict, the current indecision and self deterrence will prolong it – costing Ukrainian lives. Now is the time for the Biden and Scholz governments to follow the lead of our U.K. and Eastern European allies – Leopard 2 tanks, ATACMS, and other long-range precision munitions should be approved without delay.”
⋙ ForeignAffairsCmte (1/18): McCaul, Rogers Urge Admin & Allies to Swiftly Send Ukraine Weapons Needed to Win https://tinyurl.com/58tevhbs //➔ The chairs of key House committees urge Biden “to transfer to Ukraine urgently critical weapon systems they need to defeat Russia”
// 1/18/2023
━━━━━━━▲
🐣 RT @cozad_june Sharing grief is one of his super powers.
🖼 https://twitter.com/cozad_june/status/1627714453973385216?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @BradBeauregardJ President Zelenskyy wipes tears from his eyes as President Biden meets with Ukrainians in Kyiv. ¤ So proud of our president for making this courageous and dangerous trip.
💽 https://twitter.com/BradBeauregardJ/status/1627639661026852865?s=20/photo/1
🧵 RT @KyivIndependent Exactly nine years ago on Feb. 20, 2014, Ukraine was going through one of the bloodiest days in the three-month-long EuroMaidan Revolution. Also known as the Revolution of Dignity, it is often credited as one of the most consequential events in Ukraine’s modern history.
📌 🖼 https://twitter.com/KyivIndependent/status/1627686188311105541?s=20/photo/1 -4
🐣 RT @ZelenskyyUa Historic. Timely. Brave. I welcomed @POTUS in Kyiv as Russian full-scale aggression approaches its one-year mark. I am thankful to the U.S. for standing with Ukraine and for our strong partnership. We are determined to work together to ensure Ukraine’s victory.
💽 https://twitter.com/ZelenskyyUa/status/1627631915263004672?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @vinm300 24 Feb 2023 Wang Yi in Moscow will present China’s “Peace proposition”
It will be the same as Deal 1 (9 Nov) : demilitarised Crimea under UN, with a UN referendum after 7yrs
Difference : Crimea will be under the Aegis of Ukrainenfor those 7yrs – NOT Russia
Putin accepted Deal
⋙ 🐣 what about the rest of Ukraine?
🐣 RT @vinm300 Thanks for asking Putin agreed to give up Donbas on 9 Nov, &
Russia would “demilitarise Crimea, UN referendum in 7yrs”
Deal 2 24 Feb Russia will give up Donbas (maybe ‘Basque autonomy’ UN transitioned)
“Crimea demilitarised” by Ukraine – UN transition, UN referendum after 7yrs
⋙ 🐣 thanks a lot; looking forward to the written proposal
the Ukr proposal, of course, wants reconstruction, criminal prosecutions, etc, and ALL territory returned, plus security guarantees and a fast path into the EU
~ hard to see Putin explaining to his people
🐣 📋 RT @lance_cotten Today Is Mon. Feb 20th, 2023 and Joe R Biden has been in Office for 761 Days. Since in office he has reduced the debt in his first year by $1.7T. Pres.Biden has passed the biggest infrastructure bill in History! The Lowest Unemployment in 50yrs! Tap the 💙 and RT to keep it going.
🖼 https://twitter.com/lance_cotten/status/1627630446258319362?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @NOELreports A video of Biden and Zelenskyi visiting the St. Michael’s Golden-Domed Monastery where they laid flowers for those who died. They also visited the plaque that was dedicated to Joe Biden on the Alley of Courage in Kyiv.
💽 https://twitter.com/NOELreports/status/1627659113940373507?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @WhiteHouse Today, President Biden is in Kyiv to reaffirm America’s unwavering commitment to Ukraine’s democracy, sovereignty, and territorial integrity. ¤ The United States of America will stand with the Ukrainian people for as long as it takes.
🖼 https://twitter.com/WhiteHouse/status/1627644745735438340?s=20/photo/1 -4
NYT, Oksana Zabuzhko: The Problem With Russia Is Russia https://tinyurl.com/mpkuf8d3 “Russia will not become a democracy until it falls apart. … Russia is not really a nation-state but [a] premodern multiethnic empire living on geographic expansion and resource looting”
The dismemberment of the Soviet empire was duly halted at the borders of the Russian Federation — at the cost of two devastating Chechen wars, for which the Kremlin was given a free hand both domestically and internationally. As a result, Chechnya-Ichkeria became a testing ground for the military strategy now applied against Ukraine: state terrorist warfare.
What if, I keep asking myself, Russia’s new totalitarianism had not been so lightheartedly overlooked by the rest of the world in the 1990s? Back then, to spare humanity the rise of a new Hitler, it would have been enough to let Russia go on peacefully shrinking under proper international control. Alas, the West agreed to blame Communism alone for all the atrocities of the Soviet regime. Russian imperialism was never identified as a problem.
Could this have been — as my war-honed anticolonial acuity prompts me to believe — a case of latent imperialistic solidarity? Was it guilty pleasure that for decades made the elites of the former Western empires smile indulgently, rather than shudder, when faced with the brazen colonial supremacy with which Moscow was treating its non-Russian subjects? I fail to see any other reasonable explanation for why so many in the West clung to the irrational belief that democratic transformation in Russia was just around the corner. …
Russia will not become a democracy until it falls apart. That’s because Russia is not really a nation-state but the same premodern multiethnic empire living on geographic expansion and resource looting as 300 years ago — and is thus doomed to reproduce, again and again, under whatever ideological cover, the same prison-ward-like political structure that alone keeps it together. …
[T]he age of imperialism is over. If there could be any positive result found in the 12 months of this horrific war — in tens of thousands of people murdered, raped and mutilated, in millions of lives ruined, in the best black soil on earth littered with mines, in innumerable treasures of cultural heritage turned to debris — it would be that we Ukrainians have all together, in a united effort of resistance, proved that non-Russian lives matter.
🐣 RT @DefenseU On the eve of the anniversary of the full-scale invasion, on the Day of Heroes of the Heavenly Hundred, our most reliable partner, the United States of America, sends a powerful message to our enemy: tyranny will not defeat the Free World!
Welcome to Ukraine, Mr.President @POTUS
🐣 RT @ APonomarenko This is what historic figures do. ¤ In hard times, they take the leadership and overcome, instead of just drifting with the tide and rolling over. ¤ That’s what makes them different from generic and mediocre managers.
🐣 RT @wartranslated Bombshell audio recording indicates Prigozhin is unable to solve any issues with ammunition for Wagner. ¤ This morning, Prigozhin’s mouthpiece channel posted a 7-minute recording of him saying that he is forced to “apologise and obey” to get ammunition.
💽 https://twitter.com/wartranslated/status/1627623132528779264?s=20/photo/1
🐣 Richard Haass is clueless. He doesn’t know about the 5x rampup in US production of artillery shells or the EU ammunition alliance to inventory & identify ammo to be sent to Ukraine. As for China, it’s anyone’s guess and he’s guessing, too, but I doubt China wants to ruin US trade
🐣 “Humanity is outraged in me & with me – We must not dissimulate or forget this indignation, which is one of the most passionate forms of love” ~ George Sand
#Ukraine
🖼 https://twitter.com/Auriandra/status/1627620937536249857?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @AUSTROHNGARO2 U.S. President Biden in #Kyiv: ¤ #Ukraine will receive a new $500 million military aid package to be announced on Tuesday.
[TextLink:] https://twitter.com/AUSTROHNGARO2/status/1627615306658054144?s=20/photo/1
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
February 20, 2023
Statement from President Joe Biden on Travel to Kyiv, UkraineAs the world prepares to mark the one-year anniversary of Russia’s brutal invasion of Ukraine, I am in Kyiv today to meet with President Zelenskyy and reaffirm our unwavering and unflagging commitment to Ukraine’s democracy, sovereignty, and territorial integrity.
When Putin launched his invasion nearly one year ago, he thought Ukraine was weak and the West was divided. He thought he could outlast us. But he was dead wrong.
Today, in Kyiv, I am meeting with President Zelenskyy and his team for an extended discussion on our support for Ukraine. I will announce another delivery of critical equipment, including artillery ammunition, anti-armor systems, and air surveillance radars to help protect the Ukrainian people from aerial bombardments. And I will share that later this week, we will announce additional sanctions against elites and companies that are trying to evade or backfill Russia’s war machine. Over the last year, the United States has built a coalition of nations from the Atlantic to the Pacific to help defend Ukraine with unprecedented military, economic, and humanitarian support – and that support will endure.
I also look forward to traveling on to Poland to meet President Duda and the leaders of our Eastern Flank Allies, as well as deliver remarks on how the United States will continue to rally the world to support the people of Ukraine and the core values of human rights and dignity in the UN Charter that unite us worldwide.
🐣 RT @POTUS As we approach the anniversary of Russia’s brutal invasion of Ukraine, I’m in Kyiv today to meet with President Zelenskyy and reaffirm our unwavering commitment to Ukraine’s democracy, sovereignty, and territorial integrity.
🐣 RT @NOELreports Biden in Kyiv, while the air alarm goes off. Today is going to be a good day. ¤ 👊👊👊
🐣 RT @peterbakernyt Biden makes a surprise visit to Kyiv, Ukraine, to demonstrate his commitment to beating back Russian invaders nearly a year after Putin invaded the country. Story with @shearm will post momentarily.
🐣 RT @Purtova_aa President Biden @POTUS is already in Kyiv! This is a moment that will go down in history. It is a symbol that Ukraine is not alone. Our friends are by our side. We are united in our goal of preserving Ukraine, its western and democratic growth path.
🖼 https://twitter.com/Purtova_aa/status/1627606913943732225?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @general_ben Exactly what our President should be doing…personal presence to convey American commitment. I hope POTUS will use this opportunity to say that US policy is for Ukraine to win, to eject Russia from all Ukrainian territory, and that we will do all that is necessary.
🐣 RT @@KyivPost US President Joe Biden in #Kyiv. ¤ To the sounds of air raids, #Biden honored the fallen defenders of #Ukraine.
💽 https://twitter.com/MikeStaresinic/status/1627607612324732929?s=20/photo/1
⬇️ Mykola 🇺🇦🇺🇸🇵🇱🇨🇦🇬🇧🇱🇹🇱🇻🇪🇪🇫🇮
🐣 RT @Mykola65109280 ⚡️Deputy Head of MFA of 🇺🇦 #Ukraine Melnyk: “In #Kyiv, we are preparing a surprise. It is important for us that on the eve of the anniversary of the 🇷🇺aggression, we feel and see not only verbal support but also the presence of our important and main partners. Let’s wait and see.”
🖼 https://twitter.com/Mykola65109280/status/1627592147699482625?s=20/photo/1
// 🇺🇸US, 🇵🇱Poland, 🇨🇦Canada, 🇬🇧UK, 🇱🇹Lithuania, 🇱🇻Latvia, 🇪🇪Estonia, 🇫🇮Finland
// photo of Biden
🐣 RT @DefenceHQ [UK] Latest Defence Intelligence update on the situation in Ukraine – 20 February 2023 ¤ Find out more about Defence Intelligence: http://ow.ly/N1Lu50MWtH0
🇺🇦 #StandWithUkraine 🇺🇦
● Russia continues to pursue several offensive axes in eastern Ukraine: Vuhledar, Kremina, and Bakhmut. Casualties reportedly remain high, particularly in Bakhmut and Vuhledar. Specifically, the ‘elite’ 155th and 40th Naval Infantry Brigades have sustained very high losses in Vuhledar and are likely combat ineffective.
● Russian forces are likely under increasing political pressure as the anniversary of the invasion draws near. It is likely that Russia will claim that Bakhmut has been captured to align with the anniversary, regardless of the reality on the ground.
● If Russia’s spring offensive fails to achieve anything then tensions within the Russian leadership will likely increase
⭕ 19 Feb 2023
🐣 RT @JuliaDavisNews Russian TV aired the first installment of the cringiest docu-series, “The Woman on Top”—an ode to the head of RT, Margarita Simonyan. She urged everyone not to lie and then lied the whole time. BTW, LOL, they’ve included the same clip of me—twice.
💽 https://twitter.com/JuliaDavisNews/status/1627532773102583808?s=20/photo/1
// [See Comments]
⋙ 🐣 RT @Prune602 “My lies can lead to a catastrophe for my Motherland” ~Margarita Simonyan ¤ Congratulations Champ! You did it.
⋙ 🐣 RT @Prune602 [Caption:] “The truth is her weapon” ¤ Margarita Simonyan? Is…is today Opposite Day?
🧵 RT @KofmanMichael A few thoughts on the Russian winter offensive, which began 3+ weeks ago, and has so far yielded little progress for RU forces. Poor force quality, loss of junior officers, ammunition, and equipment constraints limit Russian offensive potential. Thread. 1/
📌 https://twitter.com/KofmanMichael/status/1627309427907854336?s=20
[ThreadReader:] https://tinyurl.com/577s9xck
🐣 RT @TimothyDSnyder Deporting children to denationalize them, as Russia is doing, is indeed a war crime. In fact, “forcibly transferring children of the group to another group” is genocide, according to 1948 convention. Summary here, full report @YaleSPH.
⋙ NPR: Russia deports thousands of Ukrainian children. Investigators say that’s a war crime https://tinyurl.com/3b9p8hw6
// 2/14/2023.
🐣 RT @USAmbKyiv I honor the courage and sacrifice of the Heavenly Hundred who, nine years ago, gave their lives fighting for a better future for Ukraine. In the midst of Russia’s horrific war, the United States stands with you in support of a future worthy of them and so many Ukrainian heroes.
💽 https://twitter.com/USAmbKyiv/status/1627543052553183232?s=20/photo/1
NYT: U.S. Warnings to China on Arms Aid for Russia’s War Portend Global Rift https://tinyurl.com/55jz2thh
// Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken says Washington has indications that Beijing is strongly considering giving military aid to Moscow for the war in Ukraine.
[N]ew warnings by U.S. officials that China may be preparing to give weapons and ammunition to Russia for its war on Ukraine portend the worst of the old Cold War.
In that decades-long shadow struggle, the United States, the Soviet Union and occasionally China poured military resources into protracted wars around the globe, engaging in bloody proxy conflicts from Korea to Vietnam to Afghanistan.
American officials say that China, unlike Iran and North Korea, has over the year of the war in Ukraine refrained from giving material aid to Russia. President Biden has stressed to Xi Jinping, China’s leader, that any such move would have far-reaching consequences.
There is no doubt that China’s entry into the war in that manner would transform the nature of the conflict, turning it into an epochal struggle involving all three of the world’s largest superpowers and their partners on opposing sides: Russia, China, Iran and North Korea aligned against the United States, Ukraine and their European and Asian allies and partners, including Japan and South Korea.
Warnings to China from Antony J. Blinken, the U.S. secretary of state — made in multiple settings on Saturday and Sunday, including on television — revealed that the Biden administration believes Beijing is close to crossing the line. And the fact Mr. Blinken spoke out publicly shows the desperation of the United States as it tries to dissuade Mr. Xi and his aides from doing so.
Officials in Washington and European capitals, including here in Madrid, one of the staunchest aid providers to Kyiv, say that they are bracing for a new Russian offensive in Ukraine this spring, and that they need to do everything they can this winter to blunt Russia’s chances of breaking through Ukrainian defenses.
Mr. Blinken confronted China’s top foreign policy official, Wang Yi, when the two met on Saturday night on the sidelines of the Munich Security Conference, telling him Washington believed that China was “considering providing lethal support to Russia in its efforts in Ukraine,” the secretary of state said in an interview with Margaret Brennan of CBS News. ¤ “And I was able to share with him, as President Biden had shared with President Xi, the serious consequences that would have for our relationship,” Mr. Blinken said. …
American officials say China has deepened its ties with Russia during the war. And last Thursday, on the eve of the security conference, Wang Wenbin, a spokesman for the Chinese Foreign Ministry, said, “China stands ready to work with Russia to further advance our comprehensive strategic partnership of coordination for a new era.” ¤ Wang Yi, the foreign policy official, is expected to go to Moscow in the coming days, a trip that U.S. officials are closely watching. Russia has said Mr. Xi will visit it sometime this year. …
The United States has few, if any, good cards to play with China. Though the two nations remain robust trade partners, relations are at one of their lowest points in decades, made worse by the crisis that erupted over the Chinese spy balloon that entered the continental United States at the start of this month.
A long readout of the meeting between Mr. Blinken and Mr. Wang issued by Xinhua, the Chinese state news agency, did not mention any talk of Ukraine and Russia, but did say the two officials clashed over the balloon episode, and said more broadly that “the United States is using all means to block and suppress China.”
Italy’s foreign minister, Antonio Tajani, said on Italian radio last Friday that Mr. Wang had told him that Mr. Xi plans to make a “peace speech” on the war in the coming days. ¤ U.S. officials and some European officials say they are skeptical, asserting that Chinese officials are trying to make it appear as if China is a neutral broker seeking a peace agreement when in reality it is edging toward giving material aid to the Russian war effort.
Barry Pavel, a fellow at the Atlantic Council, a foreign policy research group in Washington, said in an online post that news that Mr. Xi was preparing a speech was “very troubling both for why China is doing this as it also is considering lethal support to Putin, and also what form the ‘peace plan’ may take and how that too, will support Putin’s offensive.”
🐣 RT @IuliaMendel China’s top diplomat Wang Yi said at the Munich conference that world leaders need to think “about what kind of efforts we can make to stop this war.” Chinese President Xi Jinping is set to deliver a “peace speech” Feb. 24, the anniversary of Russia’s invasion.
⋙ 🐣 Alarming: Don’t forget that China claims Taiwan is part of China, similar to Russia’s claim that Ukraine is part of Russia.
WaPo, Robyn Dixon and Catherine Belton: Putin, czar with no empire, needs military victory for his own survival https://tinyurl.com/2s44u7nz “Putin’s vision of Russia horrifies many [elites], who confide that the war has been a catastrophic error that has failed in every goal”
President Vladimir Putin likes to portray himself as a new czar like Peter the Great or Ivan III, the 15th-century grand prince known as the “gatherer of the Russian lands.” But Putin’s year-long war in Ukraine has failed so far to secure the lands he aims to seize, and in Russia, there is fear that he is leading his nation into a dark period of strife and stagnation — or worse.
Some in the elite also say the Russian leader now desperately needs a military victory to ensure his own survival. “In Russia, loyalty does not exist,” one Russian billionaire said.
Putin’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine began with hubris and a zeal to reshape the world order. But even as he suffered repeated military defeats — diminishing his stature globally and staining him with allegations of atrocities being committed by his troops — Putin has tightened his authoritarian grip at home, using the war to destroy any opposition and to engineer a closed, paranoid society hostile to liberals, hipsters, LGBTQ people, and, especially, Western-style freedom and democracy. …
[B]usiness executives and state officials say Putin’s own position at the top could prove precarious as doubts over his tactics grow among the elite. For many of them, Putin’s gambit has unwound 30 years of progress made since the collapse of the Soviet Union. Putin’s vision of Russia horrifies many oligarchs and state officials, who confide that the war has been a catastrophic error that has failed in every goal. But they remain paralyzed, fearful and publicly silent. …
As the casualties mount in Ukraine, filling graveyards across Russia’s provinces, Moscow’s glittering facade conveys a hedonistic, indifferent city. Its restaurants and cafes are crammed with glamorous young patrons sporting European designer wear, taking selfies on the latest iPhones, and ordering truffle pizza or duck confit to be washed down with trendy cocktails.
But beneath, Putin is creating a militarized, nationalistic society, fed on propaganda and obsessed with an “existential” forever war against the United States and NATO. So far, no one in officialdom has had the nerve to object — not publicly, at least. …
The president seems forever haunted by the moment when as a young KGB officer serving in Dresden, the Soviet Union “gave up its position in Europe” as the Berlin Wall collapsed. And his pursuit of the empire lost with the subsequent Soviet collapse is throwing his country back into a gray, repressive and isolated past. For Putin, his efforts are a quest to right what he has perceived as historical wrongs. In his near-maniacal revisionist view, Ukraine has always belonged to Russia.
But even if Putin somehow forces Ukraine into capitulating and ceding occupied territory, those in the elite who lean toward a more liberal society stand to lose the most. Punitive Western economic sanctions are likely to remain in place, and some oligarchs undoubtedly would be pressed to pay to rebuild Russia’s new lands. Some analysts predict a sweeping purge of oligarchs and others deemed insufficiently patriotic.
Already, there are shocking glimpses of Putin’s new Russia: A couple in a Krasnodar restaurant were arrested, handcuffed and forced to the floor after being denounced to the police by an eavesdropper who heard them quietly bemoaning the war. ¤ An older woman on a bus was dragged from her seat, thrown to the floor and roughly pushed out the door by passengers because she called Russia an empire that sends men to fight in cheap rubber boots. ¤ Videos purportedly show members of the Kremlin-approved but technically illegal mercenary Wagner Group executing “traitors” in beatings with a sledgehammer.
Former central bank official Alexandra Prokopenko described an atmosphere in which officials fear prison amid intimidation by the security services. ¤ “It is a concern for every member of the Russian elite,” said Prokopenko, who is in exile in the West. “It’s a question of survival for high-ranked, mid-ranked officials who all remained in Russia. People are quite terrified about their safety now.” She said former colleagues still at the bank told her they saw “no good exit for Russia right now.” …
Kremlin image makers convey Putin’s power in staged events where he looks the archetypal dictator — often a lone figure in the distance placing flowers at monuments to past military heroes. His staged appearances with purported ordinary Russians seem scripted and artificial, with participants simpering in nervous awe. The same faces keep appearing in different settings — dressed as soldiers, fishers or churchgoers, raising questions about how many real people the president ever meets.
As the war casualties pile up, Putin and top propagandists extol a fatalistic cult of death, arguing that it is better to die in Russia’s war than in a car accident, from alcoholism or from cancer. … [A] man who died in war “did not leave his life for nothing,” he said. “His life was important.” …
🐣 RT @TimothyDSnyder Everyone should watch “Twenty Days in Mariupol.” A landmark in the culture that helps us understand the conflict of our time.
💽 ⋙ 🐣 RT @bbcselect As we approach a year since the start of the current Russia-Ukraine conflict, three @BBCNews documentaries premiere in the US and Canada on Select. Watch Mariupol: The People’s Story, Putin vs the West and Ukraine: The People’s Fight from today: https://bit.ly/3S3MZoI
🐣 RT @justartsndstuff “The new Prime Minister of Moldova announced the need for the demilitarization of Transnistria. ¤ Dorin Recean said that Transnistria should be demilitarized, RU troops should be expelled from there, after which economic and social integration of citizens will be necessary
🧵 RT @ PhillipsPOBrien There is alot to Blinken saying this publicly that needs to be unpacked. The 1st reason is the USA must be very concerned that China is actually going to supply significant military support to Russia. So far, most have said that China was more helping around the edges.
📌 https://twitter.com/PhillipsPOBrien/status/1627375456491130880?s=20
[ThreadReader:] https://tinyurl.com/yvewwhyh
⋙⋙ 🐣 RT @TheresaAFallon Blinken said US is “vy concerned”🇨🇳is considering supplying🇷🇺w/weapons & ammunition in🇺🇦. ¤ Blinken warned that such support would have “serious consequences” for the US relationship with Beijing during a meeting on the sidelines of #MSC2023.
The 2nd thing is that this indicates that China must believe that the Russian army is in terrible shape and desperately needs aid. The Chinese are assumed to be studying how effective sanctions can be if the US order sticks together. [ForeignAffairs link]
The 3rd–this is really important because a major (and regular) supply of Chinese military products would be a real benefit to Russia. Russian domestic production seems to be woefully inadequate to make up for Russian losses. China can produce far more.
I would go so far as to say that the only way Russia can wage a long-war is with significant Chinese support in both finished munitions, spare parts and specialized components such as microchips.
The 4th, is that this will lead almost definitely to an escalation in the aid given to Ukraine (and one wonders if the Chinese decision makers are wondering whether this is worth this risk). If China basically throws in militarily with Russia, Western aid to Ukraine is increased.
the 5th, the USA has to believe that the Chinese government is torn about how much military aid to give Russia and by going public they are trying to put maximum pressure on Beijing not to do this. ¤ It would be one of the most fateful choices of the war–so bears watching closely.
🐣 RT @anders_aslund The Munich Security Conference attracted many more top politicians than Davos World Economic Forum this year. Politicians have become more interested in discussing security policy than in socializing publicly with billionaires. Also, Munich is not for profit.
🐣 RT @ChuckPfarrer BAKHMUT /2045 UTC 19 FEB/ Wagner PMCs continue efforts against the critical M-03 / T-13-05 junction. On 19 FEB, UKR forces broke up a series of RU ground attacks on Dubovo-Vasylivka and Berikhivka, South of the M-03. RU casualties mount in a series ineffective infantry attacks.
🌎 https://twitter.com/ChuckPfarrer/status/1627407790565203968?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @ChuckPfarrer FROM SWEDEN WITH LOVE: Stockholm will be sending C-90 Infantry Fighting Vehicles (IFVs) to UKR. Equipped with updated optics, night vision, thermal targeting systems and armed with a 40mm Bofors L/70 auto cannon, the C-90 will prove troublesome for Ukraine’s uninvited guests.
◕ https://twitter.com/ChuckPfarrer/status/1627089181683126276?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @ChuckPfarrer LONG DISTANCE PUNCH: The UK has said it will provide long range weapons to UKR. One system under consideration is the Stormshadow SCALP/EG, a stealthy air-launched cruise missile. https://tinyurl.com/yxef7ata
◕ https://twitter.com/ChuckPfarrer/status/1627314493700153348?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @mhmck President Biden needs to fire Jake Sullivan and all his incompetent, unqualified advisors who are stuck in pre-1991 thinking about Russia and Ukraine. ¤ The only policy which serves US national security is total victory for Ukraine and utter defeat for the Russian terrorist state.
🐣 RT @ChuckPfarrer MERCI PARIS: The French Minister of Defense, Sébastien Lecornu, said the the first shipment on AMX-10 Fighting Vehicles will be handed to Ukraine next weekend. A highly mobile recon vehicle with modern sensors and a tank-killing 105mm gun, the AMX-10 will make an impression.
◕ https://twitter.com/ChuckPfarrer/status/1627300531474427909?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @EuromaidanPress Speaking at #MSC2023, @kajakallas said that for sustainable peace in Europe, Russians must face their past and modern crimes through a tribunal for Russia’s leadership and by facing historical crime
⋙ EuromaidanPress: For sustainable peace, all Russians must face their crimes – Estonian PM https://tinyurl.com/5d47dyzw
// For sustainable peace in Europe, Russians must face their past and modern crimes, Estonian President Kaja Kallas said at the Munich Security
🐣 RT @SlavaUk30722777 Witch had a crazy idea in Bakhmut #Ukraine
💽 https://twitter.com/SlavaUk30722777/status/1627158314286194688?s=20/photo/1.
🐣 RT @Hilmatthews1
[TextLink:] https://twitter.com/Hilmatthews1/status/1627084508188282882?s=20/photo/1
[Text:] 🐣 RT @@laurenboebert One thing you can be sure of – I’ll never go woke.
⋙ 🐣 RT @Leslieoo I’m sure of that. To be woke requires awareness, an enlightened mind, exposure to different cultures and different types of people. It requires maturity to realize that not everyone looks like you or thinks like you and that’s okay.
Woke is an antonym of ignorance.
⋙ 🐣 we used to just say liberal
1. willing to respect or accept behavior or opinions different from one’s own; open to new ideas.
2. relating to or denoting a political and social philosophy that promotes individual rights, civil liberties, democracy, and free enterprise.
🐣 📋 RT @RobbieGramer Secretary of State Antony Blinken says China is considering sending Russia weapons to help its war in Ukraine in an interview with @margbrennan
⋙ CBSNews: Transcript: Secretary of State Antony Blinken on “Face the Nation,” Feb. 19, 2023 https://tinyurl.com/4kkhh8wf
MARGARET BRENNAN: We go now to Secretary of State Antony Blinken, who is in Germany attending the Munich Security Conference. Mr. Secretary, I know you just met with your Chinese counterpart, Wang Yi, who has publicly said the U.S. response to the spy balloon was ‘absurd,’ ‘hysterical,’ and an ‘effort to divert attention away from domestic problems.’ Was he that dismissive to you in private?
SECRETARY OF STATE ANTONY BLINKEN: Margaret, I don’t want to characterize what he said, I can tell you what I said. I made very clear to him that China sending a surveillance balloon over the United States, in violation of our sovereignty, in violation of international law, was unacceptable, and must never happen again. We also had an opportunity to talk about what’s happening here in Munich, the focus of the conversation of Russia’s war of aggression against Ukraine, and concerns that we have the China’s considering providing lethal support to Russia, in its efforts in Ukraine. And I was able to share with him, as President Biden had shared with President Xi, the serious consequences that would have for our relationship. Finally, it was important for me to underscore that we believe having lines of communication, engaging in direct diplomacy, is very important. We have a responsibility to manage our relationship in a responsible manner. That’s part of what this evening was about.
MARGARET BRENNAN: Does that mean their defense minister will pick up the next phone call from Secretary Austin instead of refusing it?
SEC. BLINKEN: Well, it’s one of the things that we talked about. The importance of having lines of communication, including military-to-military lines of communication. It’s vital to making sure that there aren’t miscommunications, misunderstandings, especially if you’ve got a crisis or some other situation on your hands. And so I tried to impress upon my Chinese counterpart the importance of having those contacts, including military-to-military.
MARGARET BRENNAN: A senior Pentagon official said last week that President Xi Jinping was caught by surprise by the surveillance balloon and that he doesn’t trust his own military. Did the left and right hand of the Chinese government not know what was going on?
SEC. BLINKEN: I can’t speak to that, Margaret. But what I can- what I can tell you is this. It doesn’t matter in the sense that China is responsible for this action. And ultimately, as the leader of the country, President Xi is responsible. It’s one of the reasons it was important for me on behalf of President Biden to share directly with the most senior Chinese foreign policy official, the very clear determination that this must not happen again.
MARGARET BRENNAN: Well, if Colin Kahl, this Pentagon officials’ comments are accurate, that would raise the risk of miscalculation if China doesn’t have control over its own military. That’s why I wanted you to clarify that.
SEC. BLINKEN: So Margaret, I can’t again- I can’t speak to the- the Chinese views on this. I can only imagine that China must be in the process of trying to draw its own lessons from this incident. And of course, we’re not the only- the only ones concerned, Chinese use these surveillance balloons over more than 40 countries across five continents. So one of the things I’m hearing here in Munich, is real concern about the surveillance balloon program. I suspect the fact that it’s been exposed by us is going to have to cause China to take another look at this.
MARGARET BRENNAN: I’m going to come back to what you mentioned in terms of providing support to Russia. There is open-source reporting that Chinese companies are providing surveillance equipment to that mercenary group, the Wagner group fighting in Ukraine. Does the U.S. consider this to be providing military support to Russia?
SEC. BLINKEN: We’ve been concerned from day one about- about that possibility. In fact, if you go back to the very first conversations that President Biden and President Xi had about Russia’s war of aggression against Ukraine, just a couple of weeks into the war, President Biden shared with with President Xi our deep concern about the possibility China would provide lethal support to Russia to- to Russia in this effort, as well as engaged in the systematic evasion of sanctions. And the reason for that concern was just weeks before the aggression, you’ll remember that President Xi and President Putin had a meeting in which they just talked about a partnership with no limits. And we were concerned that among those- among the lack of limits would be Chinese support for Russia in the war. We’ve been watching this very closely. To date, we have seen Chinese companies and of course, in China, there’s really no distinction between private companies and the state. We have seen them provide non-lethal support to Russia for use in Ukraine. The concern that we have now is based on information we have that they’re considering providing lethal support, and we’ve made very clear to them that that would cause a serious problem for us and in our relationship.
MARGARET BRENNAN: Lethal support, what would that entail? What do you think–
SEC. BLINKEN: Weapons. Weapons.
MARGARET BRENNAN: That’s ammunition, that’s–
SEC. BLINKEN: Primarily weapons.
MARGARET BRENNAN: Primarily–
SEC. BLINKEN: There’s a whole gamut of things that- that fit in that category, everything from ammunition to the weapons themselves.
MARGARET BRENNAN: Iran is also accused of providing more weaponry to Russia here. So they are–
SEC. BLINKEN: That’s right. We’ve seen Iran provide–
MARGARET BRENNAN: They are building an alliance.
SEC. BLINKEN: We’ve seen Iran provide drones that Russia is using in Ukraine to attack civilian infrastructure, to kill civilians. This is something that’s been going on for months. We’ve been working to expose that, to take action against it, to sanction it. There’s an increasingly noxious relationship between Russia and Iran. And it’s actually a two way street. Not only is Iran providing this- this equipment to Russia, but Russia is also providing military equipment to Iran, including, it looks like, sophisticated fighter planes. That’s something that looks like it may be happening, which would make Iran an even greater threat, if it acquires that technology. So this is something that we’ve been talking about with allies and partners around the world. That relationship is a growing concern.
MARGARET BRENNAN: And that would make them party to this conflict directly. In other words, this isn’t just a war between Russia and Ukraine.
SEC. BLINKEN: Well, what we’ve seen with Iran is that the malicious activities that it’s engaged in, through – throughout the region, and it’s been engaged in for years, we now see that expanding out to other parts of the world, and particularly in this case, to Russia’s war against Ukraine. And that’s, of course, a real concern. We’ve also seen them targeting opponents of the regime, including in the United States, as you know, some individuals were arrested just a short while ago for trying to assassinate an Iranian journalist in New York, who opposes the regime.
MARGARET BRENNAN: So from your conversation with your Chinese counterpart, do I understand that usually, when you say it’s a direct conversation, that’s “diplo-speak” for it didn’t go very well? It was pretty heated? Or did you make plans to visit Beijing in the near future?
SEC. BLINKEN: It’s “diplo-speak” for saying it was very important to speak very clearly, very directly, about the deep concerns we have. The concerns that we have about this surveillance balloon, and the entire program, the concerns we have about the possibility that China will provide lethal material support to Russia and its war effort against Ukraine–
MARGARET BRENNAN: But there was no apology?
SEC. BLINKEN: And it’s important that- again, don’t want to characterize what they said, although it’s safe to say there was no apology. But again, it’s also important, and this is why it was also useful to have this meeting this evening, also important to have these direct lines of communication, to make sure that- that we are talking to engage in diplomacy. We have to manage this relationship responsibly. We have to make sure that the competition that we’re clearly engaged in, does not veer into conflict, into a- into a new Cold War. It’s not in our interest, I won’t speak to theirs, but it’s not in ours. But at the same time, we will very resolutely stand up for our interests. We will resolutely stand up for our values. That’s what we’ve been doing over the last couple of years and that’s what we’ll continue to do.
MARGARET BRENNAN: In terms of Russia’s war, 97% of its military is already engaged in this fight in Ukraine, according to the UK, but they have substantial airpower they haven’t tapped into yet. Do you see evidence that Russia is preparing an aerial attack on Ukraine?
SEC. BLINKEN: Russia’s losses have been horrific. You’re right that 90- 97 percent or so of their ground forces have been engaged in this war, which is extraordinary. And the losses to date have been horrific. Public figures suggest 200,000 casualties, that is a combination of those killed, and those wounded. The destruction of their war machine itself, the tanks, the armored vehicles, the missile launchers, etc, has also been extensive. In terms of airpower, they tried some of this early on. Ukraine’s air defenses were actually successful in shooting down a lot of Russian aircraft. So they backed off of using aircraft. That doesn’t mean that they won’t try to do that going forward. But at least to date, Ukraine has had air defenses that have allowed it to pose such a threat to Russian aircraft that they haven’t really been flying.
MARGARET BRENNAN: So do you see a change in the U.S. position to greenlight other countries to provide fighter jets to Ukraine? Do you expect any policy change when President Biden visits Poland in the days to come?
SEC. BLINKEN: Margaret, what we’re focused on is trying to the best of our ability to make sure that Ukraine has what it needs, when it needs it, to deal with the challenge it faces in the moment. And all along, we’ve been very clear that we shouldn’t fixate or focus on any particular weapons system, because it’s not just the weapon system. You’ve got to make sure that the Ukrainians are trained to use it, you’ve got to make sure they have the capacity to maintain it, because if they’re not trained to use it, it’s not going to do them a lot of good. If they can’t maintain it and it falls apart in a week, it’s not going to do them a lot of good. And so, some of these weapons systems of one kind or another, are highly sophisticated, things that they haven’t used in the past, we’ve got to make sure that- that they have the capacity to use them and use them effectively–
MARGARET BRENNAN: You’re talking about U.S. jets there, it sounds like, versus- versus the Soviet-era jets–
SEC. BLINKEN: Well, I’m talking about any- any–
MARGARET BRENNAN: that Poland has, for example, that could be transferred, that they’ve offered to transfer–
SEC. BLINKEN: I’m talking about any sophisticated piece of military equipment that the Ukrainians haven’t had practice using in the past. But the other thing is this, we’re also very focused on the here and now and the months to come. Right now, what’s going on is this. The Russians are engaged in an offensive along the eastern front, and they’re putting a huge amount into it and they are suffering terribly for that effort, as I said, losing a huge number of forces, using- losing a huge number of pieces of equipment. And the Ukrainians are doing everything that they can with our assistance to withstand that, and they’re doing that very, very well. But in the months ahead, we fully anticipate that Ukraine will engage in its own counter offensive. And what’s vitally important is that they have what they need for that counter offensive, not what they may need in a year or two years. We’re working on that too, but the focus now has to be on what would they be able to use right now to defend themselves against the Russian offensive, and to engage in their own offensive to take back more of the land that was seized by Russia by force.
MARGARET BRENNAN: I’m going to ask you, lastly, about this designation of crimes against humanity that the Vice President announced. She cited horrific things like a four-year-old girl being raped by Russian soldiers, thousands of Ukrainian children being taken from their families, to say that this constitutes legally crimes against humanity. President Biden has already used the term genocide. Is the State Department working on a genocide determination?
SEC. BLINKEN: We will, as always, look at every legal possibility when it comes to going after the atrocities that Russia is committing in Ukraine. The determination that- that we made crimes against humanity that the Vice President announced today is unfortunately, starkly clear. And we’ve seen that almost from day one. We saw it in Bucha, when the Russian tide receded, we saw what was left in its wake, and it’s horrific. And we continue to see it across the country, the fact that they’re targeting civilians, targeting civilian infrastructure, so that people freeze to death, don’t have the lights on.This practice that, as a parent, is almost impossible to fathom, of literally seizing Ukrainian children, sending them to Russia, sending them to centers, there are about 43 of them that we found. There was a project undertaken by Yale University with our support that has documented this, to 43 centers in Russia and some in Ukrainian territory that Russia now holds. Some of these places are closer to Alaska than they are to Ukraine. Separating them from their families and then having them adopted by Russians. This is in and of itself, horrific. It also speaks to the fact that President Putin has been trying from day one to erase Ukraine’s identity, to erase its future. That’s what’s going on, and that too, is a crime against humanity.
MARGARET BRENNAN: Some of what you described is consistent with the statutory basis for the Genocide Convention. So I’m hearing what you’re saying as you are potentially looking at that?
SEC. BLINKEN: We will look at every possible determination, but we’re going to follow the facts, and we’re going to follow the law. These are very serious determinations, and we will engage in them very seriously.
MARGARET BRENNAN: Secretary Blinken, thank you for your time today.
🧵 RT @wartranslated Summary of the semi-daily livestream with Oleksiy Arestovych, former Ukraine’s Presidential Head of Office advisor, Day 330, January 19th. Kindly brought to you by Janat: @Janat_H1 Read thread or visit: https://tinyurl.com/crtvp93e
📌 https://twitter.com/wartranslated/status/1627240278321991682?s=20
[ThreadReader:] https://tinyurl.com/2p8ut9yb
⚡️ Munich Security Council
– Feygin: US President Biden is expected to address Putin and RF citizens during his visit to Warsaw. Munich security council’s message foreshadows what that speech might be about: “Moscow lost and needs to surrender.”– Arestovych: Russia could have taken a prominent place in the global arena and participated in the formation of a new, fair world order. Putin chose to take RF citizens hostage and started the largest war since WWII.
This led to tectonic changes in global security, and Russia is no longer a global power: Macron called for UN security council reform where RU may not remain a permanent member.
Addressing RF citizens, Biden might say that the new, restructured world order could exclude Russia, but RF citizens still have a chance. They must stop the senseless new offensive and mobilization efforts which will be futile and only result in more deaths. ¤ The united world is determined to fight RF until RF is defeated.
Germany’s Foreign Affairs minister Annalena Baerbock stated that Germany would not support the proposal of territorial concessions to Ukraine in exchange for peace with RF.
To do otherwise is to condone Russia’s aggression, betray the UN charter, and make the people of Ukraine Russia’s prey. RU must withdraw its troops, then peace talks can begin. The West clearly stated its position to support Ukraine until RF’s defeat.
It is up to RF and its president to determine the scale of this catastrophe. Russia can still withdraw its troops, extradite war criminals, pay reparations, and return to the global community, or suffer a catastrophic defeat and be excluded from the new world order.
⚡️ China
China’s Xi plans a ‘peace speech’ on the invasion anniversary, which will not be to Putin’s liking. But the speech will be welcomed by a “peace party” beginning to form behind the scenes in Moscow.This “peace party” can use it to build stronger arguments to win the doubters in RU, presenting the positions of both the West and China.
⚡️ Weapons
The UK pledges to be the first to supply long-range missiles.
Sunak said the irony is that all NATO weapons and equipment were always intended for Moscow, so these deliveries are strictly within purpose.While the UK, US, and Germany do not promise jets, they will support any country that will supply – logistics, training, and maintenance.
⚡️ Frontline Update
Air raids: there were four cruise missile strikes, with two intercepted. ¤ There were hits, but the power supply wasn’t interrupted. 16 missile strikes today. Despite heavy losses, RU continues with the offensive in Bakhmut, Kupyansk, Lyman, and Avdiivka directions. MoD of RF reported the capture of Dvorichna, a settlement of 650 people. Ukraine denied.RU tries to push UA away from Svatove-Kreminna highway, advance toward Lyman and Slovyanks, and encircle Bakhmut. Russia withdraws one artillery regiment from Bakhmut due to heavy losses. RU efforts in the Avdiivka-Maryinka direction resulted in no advances.
Vugledar: RU changed troop concentration and direction of attack but failed. Kherson: artillery exchanges with RU targeting civilian objects and UA targeting military aims.
⚡️ Wagner-MoD Conflict
The rift between the RU private military company and the Army is spilling over into broad information space. Wagnerites shot portraits of generals Lapin and Gerasimov (chief of the general staff).Wagner accuses MoD of not supplying them with ammunition and shot a grim video from the morgue to indicate their losses could have been avoided.
As an authoritarian, centralized state, RU will not tolerate such statements from a field commander.
RU doesn’t need the Wagner group inflated into an army. Wagner will become a smaller, tamed, more manageable company for specific missions, for example, in CAR. Its leader Prigzhin will not become a political figure.
⚡️ New Ethics in Politics
Ukraine fights for new ethics from this war to form the basis for postwar world order – Andriy Yermak at Munich Security Conference.This new ethics should include three points: 1) injustice should be unprofitable; 2) injustice must be reprehensible; 3) benefit should be determined only by justice.
⚡️ Russian Offensive
Arestovych called it suicide. ¤ The new offensive might last 4-6 weeks and result in devastating losses. The time is just as unfavorable as last year, the army is weakened, with inadequate equipment and troops suffering from low morale. There will be waves of cruise missile attacks.They even might take another small village. But ultimately, everyone in the RU government, army, and society will realize that their political goals cannot be reached with military means. Not clear what this realization will lead to.
Three surprises to expect after this “offensive”:
– It will be much smaller than predicted
– It will be shorter than predicted
– It will create a sense of dead-end and senselessness in everyone in Russia
– Russian people may never know the real scale of the losses, but they will all understand this was pointless.Putin is preparing a speech before the federal assembly on Feb 21; the next day, he will speak at the Luzhniki stadium in front of the state employees.
State Duma invited representatives of South Ossetia, Abkhazia and, possibly, Transnistria to its upcoming gathering. Without much success in Ukraine, Putin might take a compensatory measure and announce these territories as new members of the union state.
Moldova and Georgia will have to take a stronger position on that. If this measure is taken, long-range missiles might be supplied by not only UK.
It is unlikely Putin will announce general mobilization. ¤ Mobilization never stopped, but RU lacks training grounds and equipment to train its troops.
⚡️ #SaveMisha
Feygin: February 20 – a global campaign in support of the ex-president of Georgia, Saakashvili, will occur in multiple capital cities. ¤ We need a wide public response to this initiative worldwide.This issue is being discussed in State Department, and President Biden might address the government of Georgia during his press conference in Warsaw. ¤ Georgia faces its biggest defeat in foreign policy if it loses its European integration opportunity
🐣 RT @McFaul Biggest impression from #MSC2023 . Western leaders keep saying to Ukraine we will be with “as long as it takes.” Ukrainians keep saying, be with us stronger and faster now (more & better weapons sent faster). Ukrainians don’t feel like they have a lot of time.
🐣 RT @NOELreports The Supreme Commander of NATO’s Joint Forces in Europe, General Christopher Cavoli, supports providing Ukraine with the most advanced Western weapons, including F-16s and long-range missiles, to bring it closer to victory, he said in a closed door meeting
⋙ Politico: F-16s, longer-range missiles could help Ukraine beat Russia, U.S. general privately tells lawmakers https://tinyurl.com/576s9tpm
// Gen. Christopher Cavoli’s comments go further than other administration officials
⭕ 18 Feb 2023
WaPo: Top U.S., Chinese diplomats hold first meeting since balloon incursion https://tinyurl.com/4uecja3k
// Secretary of State Antony Blinken and China’s top diplomat, Wang Yi, discussed China’s surveillance activities and alliance with Moscow — topics that have brought diplomatic relations between Beijing and Washington to new lows
The viewpoint of China is looming particularly large at Munich’s traditionally Eurocentric conference given the surprise announcement that Chinese President Xi Jinping is planning to deliver a “peace speech” on the anniversary of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. ¤
China will lay out its position on resolving the Ukraine conflict in a document underscoring that warring countries’ territorial integrity must not be violated, said Wang, who spoke on a panel at the conference on Saturday.
Wang said world powers need to start thinking “about what kind of efforts we can make to stop this war” and underscored that “nuclear wars must not be fought.”
Despite Beijing’s expressions of interest in bringing an end to the conflict, Blinken did not come away from the discussion believing that China is poised to break with Russia, said a senior State Department official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive discussions.
NYT, Nicholas Kristof: Biden Should Give Ukraine What It Needs to Win https://tinyurl.com/ypx98uss “Putin is all in, and we should be as well. That means fighter aircraft, ATACMS, high-end anti-ship cruise missiles — the kitchen sink” ~ James Stavridis, former NATO allied commander
NYT Editorial: Putin Began His Unjust War One Year Ago. Here’s What Ukraine Needs Now https://tinyurl.com/4cuda7z9 “A conflict that ends with a stronger Ukraine will send a message that the US does have the resolve and capability to help counter the excesses of autocrats and bullies”
A conflict that ends with a stronger Ukraine will send a message that the United States does have the resolve and capability to help counter the excesses of autocrats and bullies. The Biden administration’s regular declarations of full support for Ukraine, even when military aspects of that support are under discussion, demonstrate that America has not, as Mr. Putin thought, forever lost its ability to lead. America’s readiness to stand up to Mr. Putin has united most of the world’s major democracies behind a common cause.
It is hard to imagine, for example, that without a strong commitment from Washington, Sweden or Finland would have applied to join a NATO that only three years ago President Emmanuel Macron of France described as “brain-dead,” or that Germany would have agreed to send German tanks to repel Russia. And while key allies such as Britain, France, Germany, Poland and others may not match America’s level of support, they have shown a readiness to absorb far greater economic consequences stemming from sanctions on Russia. …
… [S]erious diplomacy has a chance only if Russia accepts that it cannot bring Ukraine to its knees. And for that to happen, the United States and its allies cannot waver in their support.
TheGuardian, James Meek: One year after the start of war, what lies ahead for Ukraine? https://tinyurl.com/3dyx2wxm “A year ago, the world doubted Ukraine’s survival; now is the time to plan how to help it live and thrive”
// It’s a year since Vladimir Putin’s savage invasion began. The west has been Kyiv’s arsenal and banker but what role would it play in a conflict that could last generations?
… Popular uprisings in 2004 and 2014, in which intellectuals and the emergent middle class played a lead role and European bourgeois democratic ideals came to the fore, failed to alert the west that the old, simplistic framework of a nationalist versus Soviet nostalgist schism in Ukraine was breaking down. Too many in the west were still ready to believe that, in some fundamental sense, Ukraine “belonged” to Russia. When in 2014 Russia annexed Crimea and sent troops into eastern Ukraine to salvage the failing armed uprising it contrived there, there was anxiety in the west, wringing of hands and mild sanctions, but no serious consequences for Putin.
Last year’s invasion shocked the west, and provided us with an entire new set of cliches: Ukraine the brave, the defiant, the ingenious, the suffering, the wronged, screaming “Why?” over the body of a dead newborn. Ukraine, the defender of civilisational values; Ukraine, keeping calm and carrying on as the original writers of the slogan imagined, Ukraine, capturing tanks with tractors, giving a battlecruiser the finger and sinking it. Fleets of Russian tanks pouring down Ukrainian highways in rigid formation, blown apart by a handful of daring Ukrainian improvisers on quad bikes using donated western anti-tank missiles and drones ordered on the internet.
The sense of purpose and righteous mission this has generated in the west is real, and has broad public support, but it has a short time-horizon. Even the overall strength of support in the west for Ukraine since the invasion began conceals radical shifts in the west’s sense of the country. In the first few days of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, when the scope of Putin’s ambition became clear, horrified watchers in Europe and America guessed the days to the country’s inevitable fall. A few weeks later, when Ukraine held Russia at the gates of Kyiv, there was admiration and surprise at the country’s resilience.
When the savage nature of Russian occupation emerged in towns like Bucha, a shiver of pity, anger and shame ran through the west, and support for arming Ukraine grew appreciably. The Russian retreat from Kyiv and north-eastern Ukraine raised hopes; doubts set in about Ukraine’s ability to push Russia further; in autumn, the Ukrainians swept Russia from Kherson and Kharkiv, western weapons began to flow and complete victory seemed plausible; the Russians dug in, and began, with methodical waves of missiles, to destroy the Ukrainian economy. … …
If Putin’s ideal Ukraine is a shrunken Russian vassal, Ukraine’s own ideal is security against Russia, and integration with the west, to which the west’s reply is: not yet. Not yet – perhaps never – to Nato, not yet to the EU, not yet to an effective air force. If the west is to keep faith with Ukraine, and encourage it to accept any loss of territory – to lay the grounds, one far-off day, for the good relations it ought to have with a better-run Russia that has learned to lose its contempt for its neighbour’s statehood – it has to make a better offer than “not yet”. It will be exceptionally difficult, since the offer would have to include a military element of peacekeeping troops or air power that will infuriate Putin, and trade terms with the EU that will be politically hard for Europe.
It will be expensive, it will be open-ended, and it will come under constant and furious political attack from inside the west and from outside. It will be hostage to the future politics of Ukraine, Russia, the US and Europe. It’s worth it. A year ago, the world doubted Ukraine’s survival; now is the time to plan how to help it live and thrive.,
🐣 📋 RT @uasupport999 Russia has lost 200 thousand soldiers in the war with Ukraine, – Blinken at the Munich conference. ¤ According to American sources, this figure includes killed and wounded soldiers of the Russian Armed Forces.
🐣 RT @SpencerGuard Big sign they are losing the war – “The Russian Ministry of Defense (MoD) confirmed the names of the four military district commanders, finalizing a complete turnover of the Russian military’s initial command since the start of the invasion of Ukraine.”
🐣 RT @@PStyle0ne1 🤡 Russian troops have 2-3 weeks left, – Ghirkin ¤ According to his conviction, the invaders have 2-3 weeks of offensive operation left. Afterward, there is nothing left to fight on. At the same time, the main problem of the Russian army is the communication and control system.
WaPo Editorial: How to break the stalemate in Ukraine https://tinyurl.com/3vwdnuwu “[T]he West’s overarching goal must be ensuring that the Russian tyrant gains nothing by his aggression. To allow an outcome that rewards the Kremlin in any way would be a moral travesty”
Nearly a year after Vladimir Putin unleashed carnage in Ukraine — a war triggered by Kyiv’s aspiration to be fully democratic, pluralistic, European and forever free of Moscow’s yoke — the West’s overarching goal must be ensuring that the Russian tyrant gains nothing by his aggression. To allow an outcome that rewards the Kremlin in any way would be a moral travesty. It would also deal a potentially lethal blow to the principle on which Western stability and civilized international conduct rests: that sovereign states cannot be invaded, subjugated and subjected to mass slaughter with impunity.
To thwart Russia and safeguard Ukraine’s sovereignty, the United States and its European allies have little choice but to intensify their military, economic and diplomatic support for Kyiv. That means equipping Ukrainian forces with more decisive weapons and in greater numbers, imposing more aggressive sanctions on Moscow and galvanizing a more muscular international coalition to isolate and ostracize Russia. …
Kyiv will need greater numbers of almost every type of weaponry — artillery shells, which it is firing at a rate of nearly 100,000 per month; fighting vehicles; advanced drones; and, especially, high-tech air defense systems. The United States and its allies, especially Germany, should accelerate their production and supply of air defense systems to blunt Russia’s systematic campaign to pulverize Ukrainian power stations and degrade critical infrastructure.
Kyiv will also need advanced Western fighter jets. Providing that air capability has been ruled out for now by Mr. Biden, in the case of U.S.-made F-16s. He should reconsider on the condition that Kyiv commits that the jets will be used to defend Ukraine on its own territory, not for attacks inside Russia. Sooner or later, the West will need to provide Ukraine with weapons systems that not only help to end the war but also dissuade Russia from launching new ones. The most effective deterrent will be a convincing array of military muscle on the ground and in the skies — as well as, eventually, NATO membership and the security guarantee it provides.
… Only when the Kremlin grasps that victory is impossible — that it cannot hold sovereign Ukrainian territory seized illegally — will negotiations be possible. …
Western public opinion has so far remained relatively solid behind Ukraine’s plight, despite signs of slippage in some countries. In a January poll by Gallup, nearly two-thirds of Americans supported Ukraine’s effort to regain its territory taken by Russian aggression. That’s roughly the same proportion that held that position last summer, although Republican backing for the war is wobbly. As costs mount to sustain Ukraine’s survival, Kyiv’s successes on the battlefield would help buttress public opinion in the United States and Europe.
Mr. Biden and allied leaders will also be crucial in stiffening Western resolve by reminding their electorates that the bloodletting in Ukraine is a war of aggression led by a dictator deluded by dreams of imperial revival. They need to drive home the point that the inevitable result of a Russian victory would be a far more dangerous world — and an invitation to further aggression by Moscow. The targets of that aggression would likely be other nearby states, including NATO members whose security rests on the assumption that U.S. and European troops will ride to the rescue. …
[A] principal lesson from the past year is that the risk of escalation is overblown. Ukraine is in a defensive war to recapture its own territory. As for the Russian autocrat, he has nothing left to escalate with other than manpower and nuclear weapons. If the West adequately arms Ukraine, he cannot win with the former and is very unlikely to resort to the latter, which would alienate his most important ally, China. A tactical nuclear strike by Russia would be one of history’s greatest acts of strategic self-immolation, cementing Russia’s pariah status for decades.
This is a pivotal moment in 21st-century history and a critical juncture for U.S. interests, leadership and prestige. The crucial objective should be fortifying Ukraine so that Russia’s unwarranted war is understood by dictators as a cautionary tale — and not as a template for remaking the world to their liking.
🐣 RT @NOELreports NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg urged to increase military assistance to Ukraine. “For the alliance, the risk of an escalation of the conflict is not comparable to the risk of a Russian victory.”
🐣 RT @Tendar Russians who suddenly fall out from windows after questioning Putin’s sanity and competence clearly have underestimated the *gravity* of the situation.
⋙ BI: Top Russian military official dead after plunging out of high-rise https://tinyurl.com/mt83n3zb
// Marina Yankina, the head of the financial support department for the Russian Defense Ministry’s Western Military District, was found dead Wednesday.
🐣 RT @Gerashchenko_en Ukrainian anthem at Maidan on fire, 18 February 2014 when Ukrainians fought against pro-Russian president for the right to join the EU.
We will never forget those who gave their lives for our freedom.
9 years ago we didn’t allow to break us and we won. We will win now, too.
💽 https://twitter.com/Gerashchenko_en/status/1626977723707977728?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @ChuckPfarrer KREMINNA /2100 UTC 18 FEB/ RU operations in the Kreminna Area of Operations (AO) appear to have temporarily paused. Intel confirms that RU has concentrated forces N of the urban area of Kreminna: RU units can be assumed to be readying for combined arms operations.
🌎 https://twitter.com/ChuckPfarrer/status/1627049512534515712?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @ChuckPfarrer BAKHMUT AXIS /1450 UTC 18 FEB/ It is assessed that Russian units have effectively interdicted the M-03 HWY is between Berikhivka and Pidhorodne. With recent RU gains North of Bakhmut, the struggle for control of the M-03 HWY is entering a critical phase.
🌎 https://twitter.com/ChuckPfarrer/status/1626956617878056961?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @USNATO Russia’s savage attacks on Ukraine are the latest demonstration that President Putin has no interest in meaningful diplomacy. The United States, our NATO Allies and partners will continue to support Ukraine’s self-defense.
💽 https://twitter.com/USNATO/status/1626510262009307138?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @USAmbKyiv We have examined the evidence, and I have heard firsthand from survivors. There is no doubt: Russia’s forces committed crimes against humanity in Ukraine. For all the victims, known and unknown, of this systematic violence: Justice must be served.
⋙ 🐣 RT @SecBlinken Based on the law and available facts, I have determined that members of Russia’s forces and other Russian officials have committed crimes against humanity in Ukraine. All those responsible for these atrocities must be held accountable.
⋙⋙ State[.]gov: Crimes Against Humanity in Ukraine https://tinyurl.com/4ax95a9w
… Members of Russia’s forces have committed execution-style killings of Ukrainian men, women, and children; torture of civilians in detention through beatings, electrocution, and mock executions; rape; and, alongside other Russian officials, have deported hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian civilians to Russia, including children who have been forcibly separated from their families. These acts are not random or spontaneous; they are part of the Kremlin’s widespread and systematic attack against Ukraine’s civilian population. …
There can be no impunity for these crimes. All those responsible must be held accountable. As today’s determination shows, the United States will pursue justice for the people of Ukraine for as long as it takes.
🐣 RT @marlowc2324 “The United States has formally determined that Russia has committed Crimes against Humanity, and I say to all perpetrators & their superiors that you will be held to account. On behalf of all of the victims, known & unknown, Justice will be served.” ¤ – US Vice President #Munich
🐣 RT @GermanyDiplo #USA & Germany are in lockstep in our support for #Ukraine in its fight against Russia’s war of aggression. – @ABaerbock & @SecBlinken also spoke in the margins of #MSC2023 about our cooperation in the #NATO alliance & the upcoming summit in Vilnius.
🐣 RT @MavkaSlavka OTD, February 18 2014, then Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych, ordered the Berkut riot police to use disproportionate force, with stun grenades, rubber bullets and real ammunition on people protesting on the Maidan in Kyiv (to be known as the Revolution of Dignity).
🖼 https://twitter.com/MavkaSlavka/status/1626865718221475840?s=20/photo/1 -4
⋙ 🐣 💽 RT @MavkaSlavka Watch: “Winter on Fire: Ukraine’s Fight for Freedom” https://youtu.be/yzNxLzFfR5w
🐣 RT @GlasnostGone My kind of headline: Prime Minister Rishi Sunak is to urge world leaders to “double down” on military support for #Ukraine. In a speech at the Munich Security Conference, Sunak will say allies must give the country “advanced, #NATO-standard capabilities.” [BBC:] https://tinyurl.com/4nf6zf7d
🐣 RT @SpiroAgnewGhost Deep Thoughts from Deranged Grandpa Ranty at 1:04 a.m.:
[TextLink:] https://twitter.com/SpiroAgnewGhost/status/1626827173729533954?s=20/photo/1
[Text:] 🐣 RT @realDonaldTrump [ts] I will never call Ron DeSanctimonious “Meatball Ron, as the Fake News is insisting I will. Even though FoxNews killing lightweight Paul Ryan is revered by him, Low Energy Jeb Bush is his hero and always at his side, his beaches and State were closed for long periods of time, his testing, testing, testing for the China Virus didn’t work out too well, and his loyalty skills are really weak, it would be totally inappropriate to use the word “meatball” as a moniker for Ron!
🐣 RT @ChuckPfarrer BAKHMUT AXIS /0010 18 FEB/ RU units appear to have finally taken Krasna Hora, and have advanced into the adjacent town of Paraskoviivka. A RU airstrike hit Berikhivka; this failed to dislodge UKR defenders, who continue hold the M-03 HWY and the Bakhmut urban area.
🌎 https://twitter.com/ChuckPfarrer/status/1626730977677479937?s=20/photo/1
⭕ 17 Feb 2023
RFE/RL: What Happened in Vuhledar? A Battle Points To Major Russian Military Problems https://tinyurl.com/ydkdjyct Estimates from Ukrainian & Russian sources said Russia lost around 130 armored vehicles; up to 500 dead. A U.S.-based think tank blamed “highly dysfunctional tactics”
The town’s relative high elevation makes it optimal for staging artillery and rocket systems, to threaten not only Pavlivka, but also the east-west T-0509 highway, which leads to a bigger highway connecting the port of Mariupol and the major city of Donetsk. ¤ It also puts at risk a major rail line that can be used to resupply troops in Donetsk and Mariupol, but also ship supplies west to Zaporizhzhya, which is under Russian control. ¤ Some military analysts have speculated that Zaporizhzhya could be the focus of a planned Ukrainian counteroffensive.
… Russian units again attacked Vuhledar — units from the 155th brigade as well as the 40th Naval Infantry Brigade, based on the Pacific peninsula of Kamchatka … ¤ It didn’t go well. ¤ By the end of the first week of February, the Russian offensive apparently stalled. … Russian commanders then tried a flanking assault from the north, but that failed in the face of fierce Ukrainian artillery and drone strikes from higher ground, and heavily land-mined approaches to the town.
Estimates by Ukraine’s General Staff said Russia lost at least 130 armored vehicles, including 36 tanks, though some observers said those figures were likely exaggerated. ¤ But anecdotal reports circulating on Telegram, plus aerial video and still photos from fields near Vuhledar, showed major losses of equipment for Russian units, estimated at between 20 and 40 tanks and other vehicles. … [U]p to 500 soldiers in total may have been killed. …
Igor Girkin, a former Russian military intelligence officer who is now an outspoken critic of Russian commanders’ conduct of the war, also suggested a major loss. He claimed that more than 30 armored vehicles were destroyed and that “dozens” of tank crew members were killed, with “even higher” losses among naval infantry special forces, and motorized riflemen. ¤ “Without much difficulty, the enemy again held his positions in the fortified area, which had already been repeatedly attempted to take in the spring and summer of last year (also head-on),” Girkin, who has been convicted in the 2014 downing of Malaysia Airlines flight MH17, wrote on his Telegram channel.
The Institute for the Study of War, a U.S.-based think tank, said in its February 10 assessment that the video footage that had circulated widely indicated “highly dysfunctional tactics.” ¤ Tactics, it said, “that are far more indicative of the fact that the 155th Naval Infantry Brigade is likely comprised of poorly trained mobilized personnel than of poor command.” ¤ “Fear of commanders, unwillingness to correct mistakes, failure to use the experience of a year of war, and routine bureaucracy: those are the main reasons for what happened,” Rybar wrote on February 11. “Systemic changes are needed in how they approach the conduct of hostilities.” ¤ Otherwise, Rybar said, “Vuhledar will be repeated time after time.”
🧵 RT @LukeDCoffey [thread] Nobody in the think-tank community gets it right all the time. I’ve been wrong and I try being the first to admit when I am. That’s how you learn. But one year ago, just before the invasion, Samuel Charap and Scott Boston of Rand got it WRONG. ¤ And I mean W.R.O.N.G. 👇🏻
📌 https://twitter.com/LukeDCoffey/status/1626765593549455360?s=20
🧵 RT @nexta_tv THREAD Russian Z-bloggers are losing faith in the offensive and winning the war ¤ Russian Z-bloggers are losing faith in a successful offensive after the failed battle near Vuhledar, where 2 elite brigades of marines were destroyed with a hundred pieces of military equipment. 1/5
📌 💽 https://twitter.com/nexta_tv/status/1626557958510239744?s=20/photo/1
// starring (tags) Igor Strelkov Igor Girkin @girkingirkin etc
🐣 RT @nomasofi Orcs, time to give up. You got no choice.💪💪
💽 https://twitter.com/nomasofi/status/1626680035372421131?s=20/photo/1
// video: new Archer self-propelled howitzer firing Excaliber shells
🐣 RT @Tendar General Dynamics Ordnance in Scranton, Pennsylvania, producing 155mm shells for the Ukrainian army. ¤ Another factory in Texas will also produce the same type of shells. ¤ The USA ramping up the production capacities. #USA #Pennsylvania #Texas #Ukraine
🖼 https://twitter.com/Tendar/status/1626753732590419971?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @broe_jake Russian State TV is openly stating that Putin is building a Third Russian Empire… a Third Empire… a Third Realm… a Third Reich. I swear, everyone in the Kremlin looked at the what the Nazis did in the 1930s and said, “Let’s just copy them.”
💽 https://twitter.com/broe_jake/status/1626722457578270721?s=20/photo/1
// 1. Peter the Great, 2. Stalin, 3. Putin
🐣 RT @MunSecConf Last year, President @ZelenskyyUA visited Munich just a few days before Russia brutally attacked his country. Today, he took the stage #MSC2023 to share his vision for next year’s conference
💽 https://twitter.com/MunSecConf/status/1626703072050159616?s=20/photo/1
CNN, Oliver Darcy: Analysis: Fox News has been exposed as a dishonest organization terrified of its own audience https://tinyurl.com/ydkmnxnu “[A] stunning legal filing [was] made public on Thursday as part of Dominion Voting Systems’ $1.6 billion lawsuit against Fox News”
Fox News has been exposed like never before. ¤ A trove of newly-released text messages and emails have laid bare how the right-wing media giant operated with little regard for fact in the weeks and months following the 2020 presidential election. The correspondence reveals that the network’s senior-most executives and highest-profile hosts chose not to disclose what they believed to be the truth of the election out of fear that that the facts would alienate Fox News’ audience and throw the highly profitable business into ruin.
The messages were contained in a stunning legal filing made public on Thursday as part of Dominion Voting Systems’ $1.6 billion lawsuit against Fox News, showing the network’s executives and talk hosts privately trashing lies pushed by former President Donald Trump’s camp and his supporters asserting the 2020 election was rigged.
But, despite privately acknowledging the realiity of the situation, the network allowed the lies to take hold on its air, in large part because executives and hosts were terrified that telling its sizable audience the truth would prompt them to tune out.
After the election, an incensed Trump had attacked Fox News and encouraged his followers to switch to Newsmax, a smaller right-wing talk channel that was saturating its airwaves with election denialism.
Trump was enraged that Fox News was the first network to call the critical swing state of Arizona for now-president Joe Biden. And he couldn’t stand that the network, rightfully, declared Biden as the winner of the presidential contest.
In the days and weeks after the presidential contest had been called, Fox News’ audience listened to Trump and rebelled against the channel. Fox News shed a chunk of its audience while Newsmax gained significant viewership. …
Rupert Murdoch, the Fox Corporation chairman, emailed Suzanne Scott, the Fox News chief executive, telling her that Newsmax needed to be “watched.” Murdoch said that he didn’t “want to antagonize Trump further” and stressed to her, “everything at stake here.”
The messages underscore that Fox News did not live up to the basic journalistic principle that news organizations are supposed to deliver the news to viewers, without fear or favor. Instead, the right-wing talk channel engineered its coverage to appeal to its audience which was actively being lied to by Trump and his campaign surrogates. ¤ “Our viewers are good people and they believe [the election fraud claims],” Tucker Carlson acknowledged in one message to Laura Ingraham.
A week after the election had been called, Sean Hannity told Carlson and Ingraham, “In one week and one debate they destroyed a brand that took 25 years to build and the damage is incalculable.” ¤ “It’s vandalism,” Carlson responded. ¤ Hannity then discussed the damage a competitor could really do to Fox News, describing it as a potentially “serious problem.” ¤ “That could happen,” Carlson replied. … …
In a statement Thursday night, Fox News argued that the court filing contained cherry-picked quotes lacking context. ¤ “There will be a lot of noise and confusion generated by Dominion and their opportunistic private equity owners, but the core of this case remains about freedom of the press and freedom of speech, which are fundamental rights afforded by the Constitution and protected by New York Times v. Sullivan,” the network said.
RFE/RL: How Did Everybody Get The Ukraine Invasion Predictions So Wrong? https://tinyurl.com/27c5jhu7 “The only thing that stopped the Russians from going into Kyiv was the group of a few hundred volunteers that had been preparing for this invasion for months”
On February 22, 2022, Josep Borrell, the European Union’s foreign policy chief, took a phone call from the United States’ top diplomat.
According to Borrell, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken told him that Russia, after months of building up a massive military force on Ukraine’s border, was, in fact, going to invade.
“Tony Blinken phoned me and told me, ‘Well, it is going to happen this weekend’,” Borrell recalled in a speech months later. “And certainly, two days later, at 5 o’clock in the morning, they started bombing Kyiv. We did not believe that this was going to happen. ¤ “We did not believe that the war was coming,” he said. …“Undoubtedly, it was a great intelligence success,” said Konrad Muzyka, a Polish-based defense analyst. “We’re used to talking about intelligence failures when it comes to the U.S.: the failures to predict the invasion of Georgia, Syria, all the stuff during the Cold War, the invasion of Hungary, Czechoslovakia.” “What the U.S. intelligence community predicted was spot-on,” he said. “They provided everyone with a lot of warning, which was luxurious, because you usually don’t really get that much warning.” …
With upwards of 175,000 troops deployed in regions along the Ukrainian border, and naval dominance in the Black Sea, Russia’s forces were expected to steamroll into Ukraine, taking Kyiv in a few days and toppling President Volodymyr Zelenskiy’s government. Instead, Russia’s efforts to quickly seize Kyiv from the north were thwarted — in large part by the successful defense of an airfield just north of the capital, which prevented paratroopers from landing. In the south, Russia had more success, capturing the administrative capital of the Kherson region and then, after a weeks-long siege, capturing the Azov Sea port city of Mariupol. By spring, Russian units had withdrawn from northern districts, retreating across the border and redeploying for a new effort in eastern Ukraine.
“Why Russia did not prevail — why it was instead stopped in its tracks, routed outside major cities, and put on the defensive — has become one of the most important questions in both U.S. foreign policy and international security more broadly,” Dara Massicot, an expert on the Russian military at the Rand Corporation, a U.S. think tank, wrote in an article published this month in Foreign Affairs. “Where people got it wrong it was in their assessments of the Russian Army,” Freedman said. “It was not preordained that the Russians would screw up so badly.”
… “Despite a poor plan on Russia’s part, Russia has shown it was not the military we thought it was going into the war. And that expectation of Russia was based on assumptions that modernization and training efforts over a decade would produce results on the battlefield. We have not seen that.” “The Russians have been working very hard at building up what you might call a Potemkin village of military capability,” Davies said. …
He pointed to the example of Russia’s newest tank — the T-14 Armata — which, despite vaunted technologies and military officials bragging about its capabilities, has yet to be deployed in Ukraine.
“It’s easy to look at an adversary on paper, look at it and count [equipment]…. You can take all the satellite photographs you want. You can count up all the tanks and armored fighting vehicles, and the aircraft and what have you, and add up the balance sheet — who’s got more on one side or the other,” he said. “But the willingness to use it, the ability to use it, and the skill in using it: You can’t see that in a satellite photograph.” …
The same missed prognosis holds true for Ukraine, whose forces, many experts forecast, would not be able to hold out for long against a larger, better-equipped Russian Army. Instead, supplied with some Western weaponry and intelligence, Ukrainian forces thwarted the early Russian attempt to capture Kyiv. “We did not foresee how effectively Ukraine would resist,” Borrell said in his October speech. “I overestimated the Russian capabilities,” Muzyka said. “On the other hand, you have to remember the initial confusion and chaos on the Ukrainian side, in the initial days of the war.
“The only thing that stopped the Russians from going into Kyiv was the group of a few hundred volunteers that had been preparing for this invasion for months, and it was their resistance in Bucha and Irpin that stalled Russian advances.” Later, Ukraine surprised Russia — and outside observers — when it staged a lightning counteroffensive in the Kharkiv region in the northeast and pressured Russian forces in the Kherson region, in the south, until they withdrew across the defensive barrier of the Dnieper River — abandoning the only regional capital they had taken since the February invasion. …
Western governments and analysts were not alone in their predictions about how the invasion of Ukraine would unfold. Russia’s intelligence also was flawed, according to multiple Russian press accounts and public statements by Western officials. …
“There’s a dog that’s not barking in the night in all these discussions,” [Davies] said. “I have a sneaking suspicion…that the Ukrainians probably had quite good intelligence on the Russians,” Davies said, “and had quite a long time to invest in having good intelligence on the Russians. And [they] seem to have been better prepared for the poor state of Russian preparation than everyone else. “How solid, how detailed the intelligence was that the Ukrainians had on the Russians, and what kind of intelligence — especially their human operations — had on the Russians,” he said. “I think that will, when all the papers come out years from now, prove to be much more significant in how things played out then than we’re giving them credit for right now.”
🐣 RT @SpiroAgnewGhost The flopsweat & terror is dripping off of him.
[TextLink:] https://twitter.com/SpiroAgnewGhost/status/1626711777471000576?s=20/photo/1
[Text:] 🐣 RT @realDonaldTrump [ts] The Democrats have really WEAPONIZED the Department of Injustice, even sending political operatives to work in the Manhattan D.A.’s Office. They want to GET “Trump” this way, because they know they can’t beat me at the polls. They’ve been after me for years with Hoaxes and Witch Hunts, but as I become more and more popular, at least partially because of the contrast between now and just 3 years ago, it only gets more dangerous and worse. America will not become a Marxist Nation!
NYT, N. Eisen, E.D. Perry & A.L. Copeland: It’s Time to Prepare for a Possible Trump Indictment https://tinyurl.com/mt9dzdmv “It would be the trial of the 21st century, no doubt a long and bumpy ride — but a necessary one for American democracy”
If Mr. Trump is charged, it will be difficult and at times even perilous for American democracy — but it is necessary to deter him and others from future attempted coups. …
Still, the debate is worth having, and the risks are worth taking. The core American idea is that no one is above the law. If there is serious evidence of crimes, then a former president should face the same consequences as anyone else. If we do not hold accountable those who engage in this kind of misconduct, it will recur.
It would be the trial of the 21st century, no doubt a long and bumpy ride — but a necessary one for American democracy.
NYT, Michelle Goldberg: What Fox News Says When You’re Not Listening https://tinyurl.com/35acjvw6 After the “incalculable damage” the accurate Arizona projection did to Fox ratings, “hyping false claims about election fraud was a way for Fox to win its audience back”
As the Dominion filing lays out, there was panic at Fox News over viewer backlash to the network correctly calling Arizona for Joe Biden on election night. Despite its accuracy, the call was viewed, internally, as a catastrophe.
“Do the executives understand how much credibility and trust we’ve lost with our audience?” Carlson texted his producer. He added, “An alternative like Newsmax could be devastating to us.” Sean Hannity, in an exchange with fellow hosts Carlson and Laura Ingraham, fretted about the “incalculable” damage the Arizona projection did to the Fox News brand and worried about a competitor emerging: “Serious $$ with serious distribution could be a real problem.”
Hyping false claims about election fraud was a way for Fox to win its audience back. While the Arizona call was “damaging,” Fox News C.E.O. Suzanne Scott wrote in a text to Fox executive Lachlan Murdoch, Rupert Murdoch’s son, “We will highlight our stars and plant flags letting the viewers know we hear them and respect them.” …
🐣 RT @ZelenskyyUa David defeated Goliath not by conversation, but by courage & sling. Courage we do have. The sling should get stronger. So that the next year we would gather for the Post-War @MunSecConf. We shall prevail over Putin & “putins” in 🇷🇺 & all over the world.
🐣 RT @Azovsouth 🔥🔥 Pro Kremlin accounts reports of growing tension between #Prigozhin & #Shoigu ¤ In his dreams Prigozhin wished to capture Bakhmut before Jan 2023 but was intervened by Shoigu & the Rashists forces. These sentiments have angered Putin & the tension has grown even wider & bitter
🐣 RT @NOELreports “We will hold Bakhmut. Anyone who complains that the defense demands too many victims should not forget: if we withdraw, another city will become a new Bakhmut. That is why our soldiers fight for every square centimeter,” minister Dmytro Kuleba said to WAZ
🐣 RT @SollenbergerRC NEW: Special Counsel Jack Smith is reportedly investigating payments to Trump’s Save America PAC vendors—and it could finally unravel what one campaign finance expert called “one of the biggest campaign finance violations in history.” Me
⋙ DailyBeast: Trump’s Shell Spending Scheme Comes Under DOJ Scrutiny https://tinyurl.com/3tmzxk3z
// Special counsel Jack Smith appears to have set his sights on a number of Trump’s vendors. And there’s plenty to look into.
WaPo: In wake of Ukraine war, U.S. and allies are hunting down Russian spies https://tinyurl.com/26jjxhyd “[T]he fallout may add to the list of consequences that Russian President Vladimir Putin — a former KGB officer … failed to anticipate when he ordered the invasion of Ukraine”
// Officials caution that Russia retains significant capabilities despite exposure of multiple operatives in Europe
WaPo: Fox News hosts, execs privately doubted 2020 conspiracies shared on air https://tinyurl.com/9e7z9r2h “‘Not a single Fox witness testified that they believe any of the allegations about Dominion are true,’ Dominion argued in the filing”
// Rupert Murdoch called election conspiracies ‘really crazy stuff,’ according to new legal filings in Dominion’s $1.6 billion defamation lawsuit
🐣 RT @kajakallas I’m going to #MSC2023 with 3 messages:
Ukraine must win and the aggressor must be defeated.
No Russian crime against Ukraine must go unpunished.
Grey areas in European security create instability and lead to war – they must become a thing of the past
⭕ 16 Feb 2023
🔊 TheBulwark, Charlie Sykes: Ben Wittes: Jack Smith at Ramming Speed https://tinyurl.com/mtuhjx42 “Mike Pence is erasing his own profile in courage by trying to resist special counsel Jack Smith’s subpoena”
🧵 RT @ TheStudyofWar Ukrainian officials stated that Russian forces aim to capture #Bakhmut by the first anniversary of the invasion of #Ukraine, which would require a significantly higher rate of Russian advance than anything seen for many months. http://isw.pub/UkrWar021623
📌 https://twitter.com/TheStudyofWar/status/1626430734624858113?s=20
CNN: Fox News stars and executives privately trashed Trump’s election fraud claims, court document reveals https://tinyurl.com/56yacfnr
🐣 RT @ ErikWemple Fox News wiggled out of a defamation suit by arguing people shouldn’t take the programming seriously (specifically, Tucker Carlson’s show). Perhaps to fend off that defense, the Dominion filing goes into detail to show that the network’s people see themselves as journalists:
¤ https://twitter.com/ErikWemple/status/1626385740106956801?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @krassenstein Text messages revealed from Fox News personalities in Dominion Case:
– Trump is “a demonic force, a destroyer” – Tucker Carlson
– Trump’s election fraud allegations are “total bs,” “insane,” and “nonsense.” – Dana Perino
In other words, Fox News knows Fox News is FAKE!
🐣 RT @mmfa They knew it was a lie: The behind-the-scenes happenings at Fox while the network pushed false claims about Dominion
💙 ⋙ MMFA: They knew it was a lie: The behind-the-scenes happenings at Fox while the network pushed false claims about Dominion https://tinyurl.com/53h7s3ce
// Newly released filing in defamation lawsuit shows the full extent of how Fox lied about Dominion and dishonestly pushed the “Big Lie” after the 2020 election
In March 2021, Dominion filed a defamation suit against Fox for the false claims the network pushed after the election. Those false claims were extensive: In the two-week period after Fox News declared Joe Biden the president-elect, the network questioned the results of the election or pushed conspiracy theories about it almost 800 times, including by using Dominion as a scapegoat. Fox became an outlet that aired Trump campaign lies about Dominion voting machines getting hacked without any evidence.
For Dominion to prove defamation, the company must show that Fox acted with “actual malice,” meaning that Fox knew the allegations made about Dominion were false or that Fox acted in reckless disregard for the truth. …
Here’s some of the damning quotes from the filing showing how much Fox’s executives and employees knew they were lying about Dominion or the election at the time:
● Fox star Tucker Carlson to his producer Alex Pfeiffer about Sidney Powell, one of Trump’s campaign lawyers: “Powell is lying.” [11/16/20]
● Host Laura Ingraham to Carlson and fellow host Sean Hannity: “Sidney Powell is a bit nuts. Sorry but she is.” [11/15/20]
● Carlson to Ingraham: “Sidney Powell is lying by the way. I caught her. It’s insane.” Ingraham replied: “Sidney is a complete nut. No one will work with her. Ditto with Rudy.” Carlson replied: “It’s unbelievably offensive to me. Our viewers are good people and they believe it.” [11/19/20]
Fox Corp. Chairman Rupert Murdoch: “Really crazy stuff.” [11/19/20]● Murdoch after watching Giuliani and Powell on November 19, 2020: “Terrible stuff damaging everybody, I fear.” Fox News CEO Suzanne Scott replied, “Yes Sean [Hannity] and even [Jeanine] Pirro agrees.” [11/19/20]
● Fox reporter Lucas Tomlinson to anchor Bret Baier: “It’s dangerously insane these conspiracy theories.” [12/1/2020]
● Fox Politics Editor Chris Stirewalt on whether the allegation that Dominion rigged the election was true: “No reasonable person would have thought that.”
● Fox News CEO Suzanne Scott responded “Yes, I believe that,” to the question “You believe, since at least the time that Fox News called the election on November 7th, that Joe Biden was legitimately elected the President of the United States, correct?”
● As the filing outlined, Carlson texted a redacted name “that it was ‘shockingly reckless’ to claim that Dominion rigged the election ‘[i]f there’s no one inside the company willing to talk, or internal Dominion documents or copies of the software showing that they did it’ and ‘as you know there isn’t.’” [11/21/20]
● Fox’s internal “fact checks” about Dominion allegations reported they were “incorrect” and “not evidence of widespread fraud.” [11/13/20; 11/20/20]
● After canceling Pirro’s November 7 show, Fox executive David Clark told Executive Vice President of Primetime Programming Meade Cooper: “Her guests are all going to say the election is being stolen and if she pushes back at all it will just be token.”
● Ingraham’s producer Tommy Firth texted Fox executive Ron Mitchell: “This dominion shit is going to give me a fucking aneurysm—as many times as I’ve told Laura it’s bs, she sees shit posters and trump tweeting about it.” [11/8/20]
● Fox News CEO Suzanne Scott to Fox Corp. CEO Lachlan Murdoch: “Viewers going through the 5 stages of grief. It’s a question of trust—the AZ [call] was damaging but we will highlight our stars and plant flags letting the viewers know we hear them and respect them.” Murdoch replied: “Yes. But needs constant rebuilding without any missteps.” Scott responded: “Yes today is day one and it’s a process.” [11/9/20]
● Fox News Washington, D.C., Managing Editor Bill Sammon to Fox Political Editor Chris Stirewalt on the network’s coverage of “supposed election fraud”: “It’s remarkable how weak ratings make[] good journalists do bad things.” [12/2/20]
● Carlson to Ingraham: Powell’s “a nut, as you said at the outset. It totally wrecked my weekend. Wow… I had to try to make the WH disavow her, which they obviously should have done long before.” Ingraham responded to Carlson: “No serious lawyer could believe what they were saying.” [11/22/20]
● Rupert Murdoch told Scott to read a Wall Street Journal piece about Newsmax, telling her: “These people should be watched, if skeptically. Trump will concede eventually and we should concentrate on Georgia, helping any way we can. We don’t want to antagonize Trump further, but Giuliani taken with a large grain of salt. Everything at stake here.” [11/16/20]
● Scott: “Privately, I had a number of conversations with Sean where he wanted the President to accept the results.”
● After White House correspondent Kristen Fisher fact-checked Giuliani and Powell’s press conference, she received a call from her boss, Bryan Boughton, in which he “emphasized that higher-ups at Fox News were also unhappy with it,” and said that Fisher “needed to do a better job of…—this is a quote—‘respecting our audience.’” [11/19/20]
● Fox Corp. Senior Vice President Raj Shah wrote: “shit is so crazy right now. so many people openly denying the obvious that Powell is clearly full of it.” Carlson’s producer Alex Pfeiffer replied: “She is a fucking nutcase.” [11/22/20]
● Rupert Murdoch told Suzanne Scott, “It’s been suggested our prime time three should independently or together say something like ‘the election is over and Joe Biden won,’” and that such a statement “would go a long way to stop the Trump myth that the election [was] stolen.” [1/5/21]
● Carlson complained to Hannity about Fox News reporter Jacqui Heinrich, who “was ‘fact checking’ a tweet by Trump that mentioned Dominion—and specifically mentioned Hannity’s and Dobbs’ broadcasts that evening discussing Dominion” Carlson reportedly wrote: “Please get her fired. Seriously….What the fuck? I’m actually shocked…It needs to stop immediately, like tonight. It’s measurably hurting the company. The stock price is down. Not a joke.” [11/12/20]
● According to the filing, “Ingraham herself testified that she has no basis to believe Dominion committed election fraud by rigging the 2020 Presidential Election or that it is owned by a company founded in Venezuela to rig elections for Hugo Chavez (and agreed its ownership is ‘readily ascertainable’).”
● Anchor Dana Perino also called the voter fraud allegations “total bs,” “insane,” and “nonsense.”
● Powell sent an email to Bartiromo about voter fraud claims that “Powell had received from a ‘source’ which the author herself describes as ‘pretty wackadoodle.’” According to the filing, “Bartiromo agreed at her deposition that this email was ‘nonsense’ … and inherently unreliable.”
● As the filing laid out:
Each circumstantial factor cuts strongly in Dominion’s favor. But here, the words of multiple Fox employees provide overwhelming direct evidence of actual malice. In addition to the evidence cited above, the excerpts below feature just some of the additional examples showing Fox employees knew at the time that these claims—and the guests promoting them—were:
● “ludicrous” –Tucker Carlson [11/20/20]
● “totally off the rails” –Tucker Carlson [12/24/20]
● “F’ing lunatics” –Sean Hannity [12/22/20]
● “nuts” –Dana Perino [11/16/20]
● “complete bs” –Producer John Fawcett to Lou Dobbs [11/27/20]
● “kooky” –Maria Bartiromo, regarding email received from Powell [11/07/20]
● “MIND BLOWINGLY NUTS” –Raj Shah, Fox Corporation SVP [11/21/20]Fox knew that it was pushing lies about Dominion and the election, and the network continued to smear the company and spread conspiracy theories anyway.
🐣 RT @KatiePhang “[Fox News] hosts Tucker Carlson, Sean Hannity & Laura Ingraham, as well as others at the company, repeatedly insulted and mocked Trump advisers, including Sidney Powell and Rudolph W. Giuliani, in messages with each other in the weeks after the election.”
⋙ NYT: Fox Stars Privately Expressed Disbelief About Election Fraud Claims. ‘Crazy Stuff.’ https://tinyurl.com/mx9h9vpw //➔ It’s never been clearer that Fox’s business model is based on lying to their viewers, that Ratings are King, and the stars, producers and owners are all in on it
// The comments, by Tucker Carlson, Sean Hannity and others, were released as part of a defamation suit against Fox News by Dominion Voter Systems.
🐣 RT @leahmcelrath I’ve never seen anything quite as damning as the evidence in this Dominion lawsuit against Fox News. ¤ Setting aside Dominion, these Fox News people have contributed to the destruction of the social fabric of this nation and harmed not only our democracy but countless families.
🧵 RT @ErikWempel Huge day in the Dominion Voting Systems v. Fox News defamation case, with both sides filing summary-judgment motions. Dominion’s version is a nearly 200-page document bursting with text messages from network talent in the tense days following the 2020 presidential election. 1/
📌 https://twitter.com/ErikWemple/status/1626372140479004672?s=20
🧵 RT @willsommer This filing in the Dominion lawsuit against Fox News is one of the most remarkable documents I’ve ever seen. Filled with private texts between Fox stars like Hannity and Carlson, plus Murdoch, all admitting they knew Fox’s stolen election claims were lies.
📌 https://twitter.com/willsommer/status/1626382493480878080?s=20
≣ 📔 🔆 This❗️⋙ Dominion v. Fox: Court Doc: [pdf] https://tinyurl.com/3s5f9pk8 192p
// “DOMINION’S BRIEF IN SUPPORT OF ITS MOTION FOR SUMMARY JUDGMENT ON LIABILITY OF FOX NEWS NETWORK, LLC AND FOX” Jan 17, 2023
DailyBeast: REVEALED: Fox Stars Think Trumpworld Figures Are Just as ‘Insane’ as You Do https://tinyurl.com/3a8r9xnx “As the start of an explosive brief unsealed Thursday evening as part of Dominion Voting Systems’ $1.6 billion defamation lawsuit against the network argues: ‘Fox knew’”
// Tucker, Sean, Laura, and others privately trash-talked the conspiracy theorists they were putting on the air, according to an unsealed filing in Dominion Voting Systems’ suit.
Behind the scenes of the shows where they were amplifying baseless claims that the 2020 presidential election was rigged, the star hosts, producers, and executives of Fox News were furiously messaging each other. They reacted in frustration and bewilderment to their own broadcasts, calling the conspiracy theorists to which they were ceding airtime “F’ing lunatics,” “totally off the rails,” and “MIND BLOWINGLY NUTS.”
As the start of an explosive brief unsealed Thursday evening as part of Dominion Voting Systems’ $1.6 billion defamation lawsuit against the network argues: “Fox knew.”
“From the top down, Fox knew ‘the dominion stuff’ was ‘total bs,’” the filing continues. “Yet despite knowing the truth—or at minimum, recklessly disregarding that truth—Fox spread and endorsed these ‘outlandish voter fraud claims’ about Dominion even as it internally recognized the lies as ‘crazy,’ ‘absurd,’ and ‘shockingly reckless.’”
The partially redacted, 192-page filing is stuffed with texts, emails, and testimony from marquee names like Tucker Carlson, Sean Hannity, and Laura Ingraham lashing out at key Trumpworld figures and insulting them in bitter terms.
Sidney Powell? An “unguided missile,” “dangerous as hell,” and “poison,” according to Carlson. ¤ Mike Lindell? “On the crazy train with no brakes,” as Gary Schreier, senior vice president of programming for Fox Business, phrased it. ¤ Rudy Giuliani? “So full of shit,” a Lou Dobbs Tonight producer snapped.
The concerns wormed their way up to the top of the food chain, according to the filing. On Nov. 19, Rupert Murdoch, Fox’s powerful chairman, watched as his network broadcast the entirety of a press conference held by Giuliani and Powell, who took turns spewing vitriolic remarks about the election. Murdoch then fired off a text: “Really crazy stuff. And damaging.”
The messages show that Murdoch also at one point asked Fox CEO Suzanne Scott if it was “unarguable that high-profile Fox voices fed the story that the election was stolen and that January 6 [was] an important chance to have the results overturned.” ¤ Network executives responded to his query with 50 examples proving as much, the brief states.
On Nov. 7, the New York Post, another Murdoch family jewel, published an editorial begging Trump to “stop the ‘stolen election’ rhetoric” and help yank Giuliani off TV. Scott, according to the filing, ensured the editorial “received wide distribution” inside the company. That was the same day Fox called the election for President Joe Biden.
Less than 24 hours later, Murdoch told Scott, “Getting creamed by CNN! Guess our viewers don’t want to watch it.”
In the days and weeks that followed, the filing states, any “effort to prevent false charges from spreading” by the network became markedly less overt.
Dominion’s lawyers have a high bar to clear in finding the “actual malice” they need to prove to win the case. The company’s attorneys need to demonstrate that Fox either knew that what it was broadcasting was false, or that it acted with reckless disregard of the truth. ¤ The term “actual malice,” a standard established in the landmark 1964 Supreme Court case New York Times v. Sullivan, is used 45 times in Thursday’s briefing.
“Here… literally dozens of people with editorial responsibility—from the top of the organization to the producers of specific shows to the hosts themselves—acted with actual malice,” the filing explains in its opening pages. Then it begins pulling receipts. ¤ On Nov. 5, Bret Baier, Fox’s chief political correspondent, texted, “There is NO evidence of fraud. None. Allegations—stories. Twitter. Bullshit.” ¤ Exactly a week later, a producer for The Ingraham Angle texted an executive, “This dominion shit is going to give me a fucking aneurysm—as many times as I’ve told Laura it’s bs, she sees shit posters and trump tweeting about it—” The rest of the producer’s message is redacted. …
🐣 RT @TeamPelosi We are in solidarity with the people of Ukraine as they fight for their nation and for Democracy – for themselves and for the world. -NP #SlavaUkraini
💽 https://twitter.com/TeamPelosi/status/1626290312766423041?s=20/photo/1
// Recalling JFK’s innaugural address, which she attended: “‘ … To the citizens of the world, ask not what America can do for you, but what we can do together for the freedom of mankind.’ And Joe Biden did just that.”
🐣 RT @atrupar Mitch McConnell on Fox News: “I’m gonna try to help explain to the American people that defeating the Russians in Ukraine is the single most important event going on in the world right now … there should be a bipartisan support for this.”
💽 https://twitter.com/atrupar/status/1626244170917478400?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @ Maks_NAFO_FELLA Wow 👀👀👀
[TextLink:] https://twitter.com/Maks_NAFO_FELLA/status/1626317881490214914?s=20/photo/1
[Text:] TheTimes [UK]: Russia is losing as many as 2,000 men for every 100 yards gained in human wave assaults in eastern Ukraine, according to Nato intelligence.
↥ ↧
TheTimes [UK]: Russia ‘loses 2,000 troops for every 100 yards won’ https://tinyurl.com/5435845h
// Nato is racing against the clock to get anti-aircraft missiles and ammunition to Ukraine […]
🐣 RT @ neal_katyal Very important thread by Judge Luttig. The most impt individual tweet is the one where he points out that any privilege would yield to the demands of criminal process. Pence’s legal maneuvering is frivolous and about delay, not about protecting our Constitution.
⋙⋙ 🧵 RT @judgeluttig It is an unsettled question of constitutional law whether a Vice President of the United States possesses qualified Speech or Debate Clause privileges and protections when he or she serves, in accordance with the Twelfth Amendment, as President of the Senate
📌 https://twitter.com/judgeluttig/status/1626375756946321408?s=20
⋙ 🐣 RT @drothkopf I’d add that the Const. specifically identifies Sens & Reps as those receiving the protections of the Speech or Debate clause & refers to the VP, specifically, elsewhere w/no such protections. In fact, were a VP to have them, he’d have more such protections than the president.
NYT: Russia lost about half of its tanks since invading Ukraine, new report says https://tinyurl.com/msx5d7sh “The report also identified…Russian difficulties on the battlefield, including undertrained reservists being called to the front lines w/o ammunition or proper equipment”
// A report by the International Institute for Strategic Studies said Russia’s tank and artillery fleets had suffered “significant attrition” in the war.
🧵 RT @ ChrisO_wiki 1/ Three Russian generals are reported to have been sacked over the provision of poor-quality uniforms, which has left troops fighting in Ukraine without adequate protection against the cold. A further scandal has erupted over the decision to appoint a new uniform provider. ⬇️
📌 https://twitter.com/ChrisO_wiki/status/1626148736295440385?s=20
🚫 WaPo: As Russians inch forward near Bakhmut, Ukrainians dig fallback defenses https://tinyurl.com/yfx75ur2
// waiting to post
🧵 RT @andrewmichta I’m increasingly convinced that #Putin and “Putinism” have been made possible by the accumulation of resentments across the Russian society. #Putinism has emerged from Russians’ inability to accept that they lost the Cold War because the Soviet Union could no longer compete 1/
📌 https://twitter.com/andrewmichta/status/1626104801397276672?s=20
[ThreadReader:] https://tinyurl.com/sde4d6sc
#Putinism is akin to the Dolchstoßlegende that emerged in Germany after its 1918 loss in Wold War I. It argued that the great German people were never defeated, but betrayed by cowardly politicians-stabbed in the back. That German legend fueled DEU interwar national resentment.2/
Roughly within a decade after WWI the Dolchstoßlegende and the national resentment it fueled gave rise to Hitler and his attempt to re-litigate the outcome in 1918. Only the unequivocal defeat of Germany in 1945 buried the legend, foreclosing the path to empire through war.3/
At a risk of over-rationalizing history, I’d argue that for the past 30 yrs Russia has travelled a trajectory similar to that of interwar Germany. Putin’s neo-imperial aspirations are nested in a sea of RUS national resentment over loss of power & prestige on the world stage. 4/
The Russian story that Putin has been pushing is one of the West, having taken advantage of Russia’s weak leaders (Gorbachev, Yeltsin, etc) robbed Russia of it glory to diminish its “velikiy russkiy narod [great Russian people],” That it is now poised to destroy RUS civilization. 5/
If I’m right, the Russian threat to its neighbors and its neo-imperial drive will not end regardless whether Putin remains in power or not. In the long duree of Russian history, it can only break if Russia is decisively defeated in #Ukraine- in a way that every Russian sees it 6/
That’s why so much is riding on the outcome of the war in #Ukraine. If Russia wins it will see this as a civilizational victory over the West. It will be emboldened to press on into #Georgia, #Moldova and down even breaching the @NATO line. 7/
But if Russia is defeated in #Ukraine, the collapse of the legend of “velikiy russkiy narod” could unleash centrifugal forces in RUS that would foreclose its path to empire. It would be a period of instability & risk but it would offer Europe a path to peace. #ArmUkraineNow End
🧵 RT @Frialum I still want to ask those who say that we must separate Russian culture from the context of war – how do they explain that Russians so easily wage war and commit genocide in Ukraine? How do they have so little empathy toward Ukrainians? You know, it’s not coming from nowhere.
📌 https://twitter.com/Frialum/status/1626103287152881670?s=20
⋙ 🐣 RT @Frialum The answer is simple and complicated at the same time – it’s their imperial culture and how they explain the history with this grand idea that all neighboring people are inferior to them and thus have fewer human rights than them.
⋙ 🐣 RT @Frialum And when so-called cultural institutions in Europe invite Russians for another talk about “great Russian art or literature, or philosophy” they embrace their chauvinistic worldview, and they give them a platform to spread it.
⋙ 🐣 RT @Frialum Ask yourself why even Europeans knew so little about Ukraine before the war. Why was it such a surprise that Ukrainians are a nation with its own long history and multilayered culture? Mb because everybody has seen it only through the eyes of Russians and their “culture?
🐣 RT @ChuckPfarrer KREMINNA AXIS /1945 UTC 16 FEB/ The 1800 (local) briefing of the Gen’l Staff indicated UKR forces are counter attacking SW of Kreminna. UKR troops are in contact in the western limits of the urban area of Krimenna. RU efforts to maneuver west of Lysychansk have been broken up.
🌎 https://twitter.com/ChuckPfarrer/status/1626305273521442825?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @ChuckPfarrer BAKHMUT AXIS /1320 UTC 16 FEB/ RU forces are assessed to have functionally interdicted the M-03 HWY North of Krasna Hora. RU units appear to have been driven back from the H-32 HWY S of Chasiv Yar, with UKR troops in contact in the vicinity of Klischiivka.
🌎 https://twitter.com/ChuckPfarrer/status/1626207979136602113?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @ChuckPfarrer VUHLEDAR /0200 UTC 16 FEB/ It is assessed that 2 RU Brigade Tactical Groups (BTGs) lost more than 40 Main Battle Tanks and upwards of 130 Infantry Fighting Vehicles in a series haphazard attacks on Vuhledar– making it one of the worst defeats suffered by RU since World War II.
🌎 https://twitter.com/ChuckPfarrer/status/1626038204410331141?s=20/photo/1
⋙ 🐣 RT @PlessierMarc Hi Chuck, So was that over the last 10 days or so, and does 2 brigades equate to 10,000 soldiers? Also, what do you believe the casualty rates were for them 30, 50 or 70% maybe?
⋙⋙ 🐣 RT @PaulAndCoffee Yes, this is a loss summation from the past couple weeks there. The UK intelligence folks estimate that, in this time span & just in that area, total KIA, WIA, MIA & captures total ~5,000 men. That’s a LOT of men made combat ineffective from ~12 days of engagements in one area.
🐣 RT @ChuckPfarrer KREMINNA /0030 UTC 16 FEB/ A 14 FEB Russian surge west of Kreminna has been halted and reversed by UKR counter-attacks. RU probes were broken up by Ukrainian forces at Novosadove and Zarichne, with RU units withdrawing back across the P-66 highway.
🌎 https://twitter.com/ChuckPfarrer/status/1626013797818281984?s=20/photo/1
⭕ 15 Feb 2023
🐣 📋 RT @CSwampthing The US has given $50B to Ukraine over 12m, yes that’s right just $13/month per American or 42 cents per day. ¤ Yes that’s right, for less than a cup of coffee per day you too can vaporize the russian army! ¤ This has got to be the best deal in the history of foreign relations.
CNN: Exclusive: Trump chief of staff Mark Meadows subpoenaed by special counsel in Jan. 6 investigation https://tinyurl.com/yc3jfhey “Meadows received the subpoena sometime in January, the source said”
WaPo: Election deniers face a nationwide wave of pushback https://tinyurl.com/4w4rw9s6 “[E]lection denialism does not appear to be going away, even as the evidence has grown — in public polling as well as in the midterm election results — that most Americans have grown tired of it”
// The growing effort by election officials and others is intended to counter mistrust arising from Donald Trump’s claims of a rigged 2020 vote
🐣 RT @ TheStudyofWar Kyiv’s continued defense of #Bakhmut … has been “strategically sound” because it sapped Moscow’s momentum, ISW said late Tuesday. Kyiv’s defense has “degraded significant #Russian forces,” including units from the #Wagner Group. @AP http://ow.ly/hEhm50MT7wQ.
🐣 RT @wartranslated Prigozhyn declares Russians shouldn’t downplay the enemy by saying Bakhmut is “surrounded”, his best guess is encircelemnt will happen in March-April now, although new weapon deliveries will have a significant impact in this estimation.
💽 https://twitter.com/wartranslated/status/1625912951373692929?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @ DefMon3 Artillery wizard and owner of the “Stick of death” Magyar talk about the Situation in Bakhmut today. Video from @wartranslated
💽 https://twitter.com/DefMon3/status/1625926693004116003?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @ChuckPfarrer BAKHMUT /1430 UTC 15 FEB/ On 14 FEB, UKR conducted offensive actions against at Krasna Hora & Chasiv Yar. At present, the Forward Edge of the Battle Area (FEBA) is unclear; these two operations may be described as raids.
🌎 https://twitter.com/ChuckPfarrer/status/1625863816935342082?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @ChuckPfarrer PUTIN’S TROLLS: RU is increasingly turning to social media to sew disinformation and attack Ukraine’s supporters. Cambridge University has put together a 5-minute game to show you the techniques trolls use disseminate fake news on any topic. https://goviralgame.com/en/play
◕ https://twitter.com/ChuckPfarrer/status/1625619765438849030?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @ZMiST_Ua British intelligence claims that the production of weapons and equipment in the Russian Federation “is becoming a critical weak point” and does not meet the needs of the Russian Federation in waging war against Ukraine
🐣 RT @front_ukrainian The United States signed a contract for the production of ammunition for Ukraine, – Welt. ¤ According to the publication, the contract was signed with two companies for more than $500 million. The first artillery ammunition under this order should be delivered next month.
🐣 RT @starsandstripes Time is growing short for Ukraine’s military backers to gather vast quantities of new equipment and move it along supply lines that are fast becoming overwhelmed with shipments Kyiv awaits as it plans to launch a spring counteroffensive.
⋙ Stripes: Ukraine’s allies rush to send more equipment, risking logjams https://tinyurl.com/2p8cxv5a
🐣 RT @NOELreports Around 6,000 Ukrainian children were forcibly put into 43 “re-education camps” in Russia. Under the guise of recreation, children are being brainwashed with Russian propaganda. Some camps even provide military training for children.
⋙ Conflict Observatory: Russia’s Systematic Program for the Re-education and Adoption of Ukraine’s Children https://tinyurl.com/4npe9az8
⭕ 14 Feb 2023
TheAtlantic, Anne Applebaum & Nataliya Gumenyuk: ‘They didn’t understand anything, but just spoiled people’s lives’ https://tinyurl.com/7cff5pv7 “They discovered a world different from the one they knew. So they smashed it up, hit back at it, & are still trying to destroy it forever”
// How Russian invaders unleashed violence on small-town residents
🐣 RT @ AWeissmann_ BREAKING-Crime Fraud Exception: not unusual that Jack Smith is seeking to learn communications between atty Corcoran and Trump, arguing it’s not covered by privilege if Trump were doing it to further a crime. The DC judge ruled in favor of govt on this issue in Manafort case.
NYT: Prosecutors Seek Trump Lawyer’s Testimony, Suggesting Evidence of Crime https://tinyurl.com/ufwa2edt ‘The crime-fraud exception allows them to work around attorney-client privilege when they have reason to believe legal advice or services have been used in furthering a crime’
// tags: crime fraud crime/fraud; The Justice Department cited the crime-fraud exception to attorney-client privilege in demanding testimony from a lawyer representing former President Donald Trump in his documents case.
🐣 RT @grantstern When you think about the train derailment in East Palestine, Ohio, and the GOP’s tepid response, keep in mind that the Trump Administration did what railroad lobbyists wanted the most. ¤ They repealed an Obama Administration safety rule for trains with hazardous chemicals.
[TextLink:] https://twitter.com/grantstern/status/1625235092908961795?s=20/photo/1
🧵 📊 Survey: A survey was carried out in Ukraine for the Munich security conference. 85% of Ukrainians said that Russia retreating to pre-February 2022 borders would not be sufficient cause for peace.
📌 https://twitter.com/Auriandra/status/1625764872318251010?s=20
⋙ 🐣 89% would be willing to carry on the war until victory even in the event of a nuclear strike by Russia.
⋙ 🐣 The main conclusion that was drawn from this survey was that the united determination of the Ukrainians to defend their democracy is the main reason for the resilience of Ukraine.
⋙ 🐣 via @wartranslated
¤ https://twitter.com/wartranslated/status/1625617555585900550?s=20
🧵 RT @wartranslated Short summary of the livestream with Oleksiy Arestovych, former Ukraine’s Presidential Head of Office advisor, Day 355, February 13th (yesterday). Kindly brought to you by Stepan: twitter.com/childsacrifice1 Read thread or visit: https://tinyurl.com/3u9b7ybn
📌 https://twitter.com/wartranslated/status/1625617555585900550?s=20
[ThreadReader:] https://tinyurl.com/5brtrnws
⚡️ Wagner: PMC Wagner killed another person with a sledgehammer as if it was ISIS. Arestovych would like for the Ukrainian authorities to clarify how exactly prisoners are exchanged with Russia as he is not satisfied with this process that has allowed this to occur twice now.
Wagner’s significance on the front is diminishing however they are still fighting in all the main directions, mainly Bakhmut.
⚡️ Battlefield update: The enemy is still concentrating their forces on the Kupyiansk, Lyman, Bakhmut, Avdiivka and Novopavlivka directions.
Enemy attacks were repulsed in Hryanykivka north of Kupyiansk, near Kreminna. Bakhmut is being attacked from all directions. Several enemy attacks in the Siversk salient were also repulsed.
The enemy is trying to cut off the Siversk salient, which is critical for success in the Lyman and Bakhmut directions. Despite claims by Wagner, Krasna Hora has not yet fallen.
The Russians are having no success in Avdiivka and Vuhledar and some of their units have gone into defense. The overall situation is complicated, especially around Bakhmut/Siversk.
⚡️ Stoltenberg: The head of NATO Jens Stoltenberg said that the Russian offensive has started.
He also added that the current stage of the conflict is the logistics phase and the pace of weapons and ammunition to Ukraine should be increased. This will be discussed at the NATO meetings on 14-15 February.
President Duda also commented that Russia could win in Ukraine if Kyiv does not receive urgent support from the West. This was said to create buzz before the NATO meetings. However, Ukraine will receive the weapons and Russia will not win.
⚡️ 📊 Survey: A survey was carried out in Ukraine for the Munich security conference. 85% of Ukrainians said that Russia retreating to pre-February 2022 borders would not be sufficient cause for peace.
89% would be willing to carry on the war until victory even in the event of a nuclear strike by Russia.
The main conclusion that was drawn from this survey was that the united determination of the Ukrainians to defend their democracy is the main reason for the resilience of Ukraine.
⚡️ Sanctions: According to Politico, upcoming sanctions may affect 3 major Russian banks including Alfabank, 130 financial personnel, the exporting of construction equipment from the EU, and the importing of bitumen from Russia.
A ban on the exporting of Russian diamonds is also being discussed. Ukraine has accused Russia of deliberate sabotage of the grain deal as the rate of inspections of ships is deliberately sabotaged.
⚡️ Negotiations and Belarus: The Hungarian foreign minister visited Belarus and phrased Hungary’s desire for Negotiations in Ukraine. Columbia, Brazil and Argentina also announced their support for negotiations.
Lukashenko also spoke to the CSTO implying that Belarus will eventually have to get involved in the conflict. The governments of France, Canada and Brazil (?) called for their citizens to leave Belarus.
Arestovych believes this is a warning to Belarus or any other CSTO countries that war may break out on their home soil if they decide to get involved in Ukraine.
⚡️ India: India has halted talks with Russia concerning the purchase of new fighter jets and helicopters.
This shows that the world is assessing the performance of Russian weapons on the battlefield. India refusing to buy weapons would be a very major blow to the Russian defense industry.
🐣 RT @JeffLawsonOttaw Prigozhin’s Freudian slip on Telegram. ¤ “Bakhmut will not be taken tomorrow, because there is heavy resistance and grinding,…” ¤ Not liberated, but taken.
[TextLink:] https://twitter.com/JeffLawsonOttaw/status/1625538378111369227?s=20/photo/1
[Text:] Press Service of Prigozhin [likely on Telegram]
“We publish a comment by Evgeny Viktorovich Prigozhin:”
“I don’t understand where this nonsense comes from. In all directions, the enemy is becoming more active, pulling up more and more new reserves. Every day, from 300 to 500 new fighters approach Bakhmut in all directions. Artillery fire intensifies every day. To date, heavy fighting is going on in the north. There are no prerequisites for encircling the enemy in the northern regions. House after house is stormed, square meter after square meter. Hard work is going on. Where the stories about some kind of environment and something else come from is not at all clear. Bakhmut will not be taken tomorrow, because there is heavy resistance and grinding, the meat grinder is working. In [ … ? … ]
From CNN: https://tinyurl.com/4e8hk273
Bakhmut will not be taken tomorrow, because there is heavy resistance and grinding, the meat grinder is working,” Yevgeniy Prigozhin said in a statement distributed on a Wagner Telegram channel. “For the meat grinder to work properly, it is impossible to suddenly start festivities. There won’t be any festivities anytime soon.”
Despite months of intense battle, Wagner and Russian forces have failed to capture Bakhmut, though they are slowly pushing towards encircling the city.
And yet, Prigozhin cautioned that that was anything but imminent. He was responding to a question about whether Wagner forces had captured a small portion of northern Bakhmut.
“I don’t understand where this nonsense comes from,” he said. “In all directions, the enemy is becoming more active, pulling up more and more new reserves. Daily 300 to 500 new fighters approach Bakhmut in all directions. Artillery fire intensifies with each day.”
“To date, heavy fighting is going on in the north. There are no prerequisites for encircling the enemy in the northern regions. Attack is carried out house by house, square meter by square meter. We are seeing the full-blown military engagement. It is just not clear where all these stories about some encirclement and something else come from.”
↥ ↧
🐣 RT @pedrodesanta93 [tr] Official statement by Mr. Prigozhin on rumors of a quick takeover of Bakhmut: “I don’t understand where this nonsense comes from. In all directions, the enemy is becoming more active, pulling more and more reserves.
💽 https://twitter.com/pedrodesanta93/status/1625702256971505665?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @KyivIndependent Yevgeny Prigozhin, the head of the Kremlin-controlled Wagner Group, whose mercenaries, along with the Russian regular army, have been attempting to capture Bakhmut, says the battle for the city is far from over.
⋙ KyivIndependent: Ukraine war latest: Wagner boss says Russia won’t capture Bakhmut soon, West says no planes for now https://tinyurl.com/4rmzcxk2
// Key developments on Feb. 14: No news on fighter jets for Ukraine after Ramstein, US says; Pentagon head says allies to help Ukraine launch
Yevgeny Prigozhin, the head of the Kremlin-controlled Wagner Group, whose mercenaries, along with the Russian regular army, have been attempting to capture Bakhmut, says the battle for the city is far from over. ¤ “Bakhmut will not be taken tomorrow because there is heavy resistance and grinding,” he said on Feb. 14, referring to the battle for the city as a “meat grinder.”
“We will not be celebrating in the near future,” he added. ¤ Bakhmut and surrounding areas remain the primary focus of Russia, as Moscow seeks to open up the main road leading to two other cities in the east — Kramatorsk and Sloviansk.
On Feb. 12, Russia claimed it had seized control of Krasna Hora, a village about five kilometers north of Bakhmut, but Ukraine denied the statement the next day. ¤ However, the U.K. defense ministry said in its daily intelligence update that over the past three days, Russia’s Wagner mercenaries had “almost certainly” made further small gains around the northern outskirts of Bakhmut, including into the Krasna Hora.
The battle for Bakhmut is the fiercest at the moment, according to Mark Milley, chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff. He said on Feb. 14 that the fighting for the eastern city is the most extensive in terms of losses, and Ukrainian forces continue to repel attacks. ¤ “I would describe it as a war of attrition. The Russians are suffering huge losses,” he said.
Ukrainian officials describe the situation in the city as very dire. ¤ Donetsk Oblast Governor Pavlo Kyrylenko said on national television that “there is not a single square meter in Bakhmut that is safe or that is not in range of enemy fire or drones.”
… NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg said that providing Ukraine with Western fighter jets was “not the most important issue now,” though adding that it was an “ongoing discussion.” …
🐣 RT @igornovikov A few days ago Prigozhin (the founder of the Wagner mercenary group) posted a video in a SU-24 fighter jet “over Bakhmut” inviting President Zelensky to a dogfight. ¤ Well… That SU-24 has been shot down by our forces yesterday ¤ I suppose the dogfight is postponed
‼️ 🐣 RT @Azovsouth Wagner terrorists boss Prigozhin said, it won’t be possible for the Rashists Orcs to take Bakhmut in the near future. This comes after Putin banned the words #Wagner & #Prigozhin in🇷🇺 ¤ At this stage Prigozhin is ready to withdraw his Wagner criminals from the #Bakhmut front. [⁉️]
🐣 RT @jennycohn1 I think I’m done with this bird. I reactivated only so I can find my own research and to post a farewell thread of some of my work. Thank u to those who supported me. It’s been an interesting 7 years or so. I hope I made a small difference 4 the better. 1/
📔 https://twitter.com/jennycohn1/status/1625535958723743745?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @ChuckPfarrer KREMINNA /1615 UTC 14 FEB/ RU forces have extended a salient west of the city. UKR forces report breaking up a RU assault east of Nevske. RU forces are reported in contact at Kuzmyne, near Shypylivka, and N of Bilohorivka as RU attempts to push SW out of the Kreminna AO.
🌎 https://twitter.com/ChuckPfarrer/status/1625526974994169856?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @ChuckPfarrer BAKHMUT AXIS /1520 UTC 14 FEB/ Despite heavy losses & minimal gains near Krasna Hora, RU press & sympathetic social media continue to issue daily claims of victory. UKR forces remain in strong defensive positions in the urban center.
// 2 Su-24Ms, 1 Su 25 downed by UKR air defense.Fighting continues along the H-32 HWY south of Chasiv Yar.UKR air defense downed two Su-24M strike fighters, believed to have been piloted by Wagner PMC pilots. UKR missile/Artillery strikes interdicted 7 concentrations of RIItroons
🌎 https://twitter.com/ChuckPfarrer/status/1625511743978872833?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @ GlasnostGone US top general Mark Milley castigates Russia, branding the war “a barbaric Russian invasion”, one started by Putin “brutally, illegally & in an unprovoked way. For 🇺🇦, it’s not a war of aggression, it’s a war of defence. For 🇷🇺, it’s a war of aggression.” https://tinyurl.com/mr3rar7d
🐣 RT @pravda_eng The Minister of Defense [of UA Reznikov] stated that he was “very satisfied” with the results of Ramstein-9. He noted that 54 representatives of the world participated in the meeting, which means that “the anti-Kremlin coalition is growing.”
🐣 RT @NewVoiceUkraine U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin opened the eighth meeting of the Ramstein format on February 14, declaring the readiness to continue efforts to support Ukraine against the background of continued Russian attacks on peaceful cities. ¤ More news here https://english.nv.ua
🐣 RT @Gerashchenko_en We are all witnessing a dying Moscow empire in agony. Over there barbarians with sledgehammers and propagandists run wild, leadership is going crazy from inevitability of retribution. ¤ Sadly, Ukrainians are not just historians who observe the fall. Empire’s last strike is at us.
⋙ 🐣 I dream of a day without Russia’s malign, disruptive influence throughout the world, and am thankful beyond measure for Ukraine’s sacrifice, its bravery and commitment to freedom. I wish we could do much, much more. Godspeed, Heroes. Slava Ukraine‼️ 🇺🇦 💙 🇺🇦
NYT: NATO Defense Ministers to Discuss Supplying More Ammunition to Ukraine https://tinyurl.com/2p9dn2nj Faced with wave after wave of “cannon fodder” Wagner prisoner-recruits and poorly trained “mobiks” with guns at their backs, Ukrainians risk being overwhelmed in Bakhmut
🐣 RT @nexta_tv According to the Norwegian Intelligence Service (NIS), the ships and submarines of #Russia’s Northern Fleet carry tactical nuclear weapons on board. This is the first time in 30 years.
⋙ 🐣 RT @MarekZezulka Nice, nato submarines (UK and US) are carrying them all the time.
🐣 RT @IlvesToomas Starlink Competitor Touts Pentagon Partnership, Blasts Musk
⋙ BloomberlLaw (Oct): Starlink Competitor Touts Pentagon Partnership, Blasts Musk https://tinyurl.com/y5yfsdyy
// 10/19/2022; Bill Gates-funded; Rivals of Elon Musk’s Starlink satellite communications are gaining attention from the Pentagon as Musk draws criticism for Starlink’s Starlink’s unavailability in contested areas like Ukraine
⭕ 13 Feb 2023
🐣 RT @ Reuters Russian forces bombard Ukraine’s Bakhmut in what NATO sees as start of new offensive http://reut.rs/3RStPSJ
r🐣 RT @ JEyal_RUSI Interesting: @SlawomirDebski, @PISM_Poland director, said Orbán’s position on Russia has in effect ended bilateral ties, as well as activities of the Visegrád Four. “Nobody wants to meet the Hungarians anymore.” @VisegradPlus @BalazsOrban_HU
⋙ TheGuardian: Hungary’s staging of the opera War and Peace puts spotlight on its Russia stance https://tinyurl.com/yc38mwdn Budapest “has emerged as the friendliest European Union capital towards Russia since the war broke out last year”
// Patriotic Russian opera opens in Budapest as first anniversary of war in Ukraine approaches
Orbán, who won a fourth consecutive term in office at election last spring, has long thrived on criticism from abroad. He has proudly announced he is building an “illiberal democracy” in contrast with what he views as the degenerate, “woke” west. ¤ However, even some of Orbán’s conservative friends have been alarmed at the Hungarian prime minister’s courting of Russia. Most notably, it has torpedoed the country’s warm relations with Poland. The two countries had previously supported each other over criticism on rule of law issues from Brussels, but now Poland has emerged as a leading supporter of Ukraine.
Sławomir Dębski, director of the Polish Institute of International Affairs in Warsaw, a thinktank close to the Polish government, said Orbán’s position on Russia has in effect ended bilateral ties, as well as activities of the Visegrád Four, a grouping of Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic and Slovakia that holds frequent leader summits and has often been aligned on issues in the past. …
🐣 RT @ NewVoiceUkraine “Just ‘de-putinization’ (of Russia) will certainly not be enough,” said Ohryzko.
⋙ NewVoiceUkraine: Post-war Russia must be disarmed, former Ukrainian FM argues https://tinyurl.com/yckpysec
// Moscow must be made unable to attack its neighbors again in the future, Minister of Foreign Affairs of Ukraine in 2007-2009 and head of the Russian Research Center, Volodymyr Ohryzko, said in an interview with NV Radio on Feb. 13
🐣 RT @wartranslated Wow, a damning piece by Prigozhyn’s mouthpiece Grey Zone channel, suggests (confidently) that the Vuhledar assault was an attempt by the Rus. MoD to take away some of Wagner’s fame after Soledar. A serious attack on MoD with Wagner promising to “protect its prey”.
[TextLink:] https://twitter.com/wartranslated/status/1625203163111235585?s=20/photo/1 -3
⋙ 🐣 RT @wartranslated It almost seems that Prigozhyn is dead serious on taking over certain authority (not power (yet)) among the Russian army and the MoD is facing a major challenger in the face of Wagner, especially after catastrophes like in Vuhledar. [Ru link]
⋙⋙ [Comments interesting]
🐣 RT @DmytroKuleba In December 1991, Russia illegally usurped the USSR’s seat in the United Nations Security Council. No legal procedures defined by the UN Charter were upheld. This gave Moscow a feeling of absolute impunity which led to numerous crimes. The UNSC will be better off without Russia.
🐣 RT @haynesdeborah Vital words from #NATO chief @jensstoltenberg that could decide who wins in Ukraine – the side that makes ammo fastest: “It is clear we are in a race of logistics. ¤ “Key capabilities like ammunition, fuel, and spare parts must reach Ukraine before Russia can seize the initiative”
🐣 RT @paulmcleary NEW: US concerns over Ukraine using ATAMCS to strike into Russia have subsided, the Pentagon is now telling Kyiv is doesn’t have enough to spare w/ @laraseligman @alexbward
⋙ Politico: U.S. tells Ukraine it won’t send long-range missiles because it has few to spare https://tinyurl.com/d29bmsac
// The Biden administration wants to ensure it has enough ATACMS for the U.S. military.
🚫 🧵RT @EuromaidanPR BREAKING Representatives of five regions of the russian Federation announced the start of preparations for referendums on their independence (!) 1/
📌 https://twitter.com/EuromaidanPR/status/1625104167290167297?s=20
⋙ 🐣 RT @EuromaidanPR The leaders of certain regions, namely: the Urals, Koenigsberg (Kaliningrad Region), Ingria (Leningrad Region), Siberia and the Kuban, declared their intention to fight on the side of Ukraine and ask for help from NATO and the EU in secession from the russian Federation. 2.
⋙ 🐣 RT @EuromaidanPR Five russian regions will hold referendums on independence https://tinyurl.com/bddjm8kv #UkraineFrontLines
🌎 https://twitter.com/EuromaidanPR/status/1625323225554071554?s=20/photo/1
// hmmmm, interesting psyops
This was reported by “censor.net.” ¤ “We announce the beginning of the process of secession from Moscow and the first referendums of free people who live in Königsberg, Ingria, Siberia, Ural and Kuban, on the sovereignty of our states,” the group members said.
This became known during the “Post-Russia Forum” at the premises of the European Parliament in Brussels on Monday, January 30. Initiative groups emphasize that the time has come for real changes.
“We appeal to our compatriots to take part in referendums and say their firm yes to independent Königsberg, Ingria, Ural, Siberia and Kuban,” they called.
The members of the initiative groups also noted the advantages in the field of economy for each individual region, if it decides to separate from the russian federation. The initiators announced their slogans: “Enough to feed Moscow!”, “Enough to die for the Kremlin!”, “Vote for the Independence of your republic! Choose a happy future for yourself and your children!” They plan to hold a referendum on February 16 on an online platform; the organizers will soon announce about it.
The announcement is made not by the officials from the mentioned regions, but initiative representatives willing to stress attention on the problems people in russia face with now, due to the full-scale war against Ukraine. Any referendum results will have no legislation background and will not come into force the next day. But it is already something, that the ordinary citizens in russia will surely discuss.
NYT: G.O.P. Legislative Agenda Hits Snags Amid Party Divisions https://tinyurl.com/s2j2svcj 🤡 🤡 🤡
// Republicans have pulled back on legislation to crack down on unauthorized immigrants and support law enforcement as internal disputes conspire with a tiny majority to freeze them in place.
🐣 RT @AWeissmann_ BREAKING: substantial win for Willis; but three portions may be released Thursday but won’t include names of those thought to have lied to the special grand jury.
⋙⋙ [CourtDoc:] https://tinyurl.com/2y232fd 8p
⋙ 🐣 RT @AWeissmann_ Key: the portions to be released include the introduction/conclusion, as well as a section discussing concern that “some witnesses may have lied under oath… Because the grand jury does not identify those Witnesses, that conclusion may be publicly disclosed at this time.”
⋙ 🐣 RT @AWeissmann_ If the special grand jury thinks there were witnesses who lied to them, then you can pretty sure that they are going to have recommended prosecution for folks. That makes it pretty clear that they hardly think there were no crimes to see here!
🧵 RT @DionisCenusa #Moldova: The picture of allegedly planned subversive actions by Russia in Moldova becomes clearer. President Sandu revealed the details received from Zelensky last week. The alleged subversive actions could include the following: 1) attacks on state institutions with the⤵️
📌 https://twitter.com/DionisCenusa/status/1625075455379361794?s=20
🐣 RT @AP Moldovan President Maia Sandu has outlined what she described as a plot by Russia to overthrow her country’s government using external saboteurs and derail its aspirations to one day join the European Union.
⋙ AP: Moldova’s President outlines Russian ‘plan’ to topple gov’t https://tinyurl.com/s76snmd9
CHISINAU, Moldova (AP) — Moldova’s President outlined Monday what she described as a plot by Moscow to use external saboteurs to overthrow her
🐣 RT @nytimes Ukraine’s military on Monday barred aid workers from entering Bakhmut as Russian forces tightened their grip, in what could be a prelude to a Ukrainian withdrawal and the biggest tactical gain for the deeply troubled Russian invasion since July.
⋙ NYT: Ukraine Bars Aid Workers From Bakhmut as Russia Tightens Its Grip https://tinyurl.com/jys75j8u
// With Moscow’s forces closing in, the besieged city is too dangerous for the volunteers, Ukrainian commanders said, in what could be a prelude to a Ukrainian withdrawal.
🚫 WaPo: U.S. warns Ukraine it faces a pivotal moment in war https://tinyurl.com/4xvkjvps
// appeasement; As first anniversary nears, White House fears flow of arms may be harder to come by
🐣 RT @ChuckPfarrer BAKHMUT AXIS /1320 UTC 13 FEB/ RU continues operations against the M-03/ T-05-13 JCT north of Bakhmut. Repeated claims that RU has captured Krasna Hora are false: UKR forces remain in contact within the urban center. Fighting continues along the H-32 HWY south of Chasiv Yar.
🌎 https://twitter.com/ChuckPfarrer/status/1625121586981347328?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @ChuckPfarrer VUHLEDAR AXIS /1345 UTC 13 FEB/ RU forces have advanced north of Grafske and enveloped the UKR salient between the T-05-09 HWY in the west and the O-0531 road in the east. Outflanked, UKR forces in Blahodatne and Volodymvrivka withdrew in an orderly manner.
🌎 https://twitter.com/ChuckPfarrer/status/1625128665087373319?s=20/photo/1
📋 WaPo: Russians abandon wartime Russia in historic exodus https://tinyurl.com/2p8wf23v “Initial data show that at least 500K, and perhaps nearly 1 million, have left … — a tidal wave on scale w emigration following the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution & the Soviet Union’s collapse in 1991”
◕ https://twitter.com/Auriandra/status/1625031837897695232?s=20/photo/1
⭕ 12 Feb 2023
🐣 RT @MuellerSheWrote DID YOU KNOW: the US & some EU members are paying Elon for Starlink for Ukrainian forces but Elon jammed it so it won’t work for drones saying “this wasn’t meant for war” but then launched “Starshield” last month which is Starlink but “for war”?
⋙ SpaceNews (1/19): With Starshield, SpaceX readies for battle https://tinyurl.com/3t42ke6m
// 1/19/2023; Government-focused ‘secured satellite network’ positions SpaceX to heed the Pentagon’s call for commercial allies
🧵 RT @wartranslated Summary of the livestream with Oleksiy Arestovych, former Ukraine’s Presidential Head of Office advisor, Day 353, February 11th. Kindly brought to you by Stepan: https://twitter.com/childsacrifice1 ¤ Read thread or visit:
📌 https://twitter.com/wartranslated/status/1624716793183981568?s=20
⋙ 💽 WarTranslated: Day 353, February 11th. Summary of Arestovych and Feygin broadcast https://tinyurl.com/34myhdd9
NYT: Jack Smith, Special Counsel for Trump Inquiries, Steps Up the Pace https://tinyurl.com/uvjzskx7 “The intensified pace of activity speaks to his goal of finishing up before the 2024 campaign gets going in earnest, probably by summer”
// Named less than three months ago to oversee investigations into Donald J. Trump’s efforts to hold onto power and his handling of classified documents, the special counsel is moving aggressively.
The intensified pace of activity speaks to his goal of finishing up before the 2024 campaign gets going in earnest, probably by summer. At the same time, the sheer scale and complexity and the topics he is focused on — and the potential for the legal process to drag on, for example in a likely battle over whether any testimony by Mr. Pence would be subject to executive privilege — suggest that coming to firm conclusions within a matter of months could be a stretch. …
In looking into Mr. Trump’s efforts to hold onto power after his election loss and how they led to the Jan. 6 riot, Mr. Smith is overseeing a number of investigative strands. The subpoena to Mr. Pence indicates that he is seeking testimony that would go straight to the question of Mr. Trump’s role in trying to prevent certification of Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s victory in the election and the steps Mr. Trump took in drawing a crowd of supporters to Washington and inciting them.
His team is sifting through mountains of testimony provided by the House Jan. 6 committee, including focusing on the so-called fake electors scheme in which some of Mr. Trump’s advisers and some campaign officials assembled alternate slates of Trump electors from contested states that he had lost.
More recently his team has been asking witnesses about research the Trump campaign commissioned by an outside vendor shortly after the election that was intended to come up with evidence of election fraud. The existence of that research was reported earlier by The Washington Post. …
In the investigation into Mr. Trump’s handling of classified information, and whether he obstructed justice when the government sought the return of material he had taken from the White House, investigators are casting a wide net. They appear to be seeking to recreate not only what took place once Mr. Trump had departed the White House with hundreds of sensitive documents, but also how he approached classified material and presidential records long before that, according to multiple people briefed on the matter.
Mr. Smith’s team is seeking interviews with a number of people who worked in the Trump White House and who had familiarity with either how he consumed classified information, or how he dealt with paper that he routinely carted with him in cardboard boxes, during much of the span of his presidency. …
“I’ve never seen anything like it,” Chuck Rosenberg, a former federal prosecutor and former F.B.I. official, said of the cascade of Trump aides and lawyers becoming drawn into investigations. “It’s just a whirling dust cloud, and everyone who gets near it gets covered in grime.” …
🐣 RT @Heroiam_Slava Russians have already launched an offensive in five areas ¤ The occupants have deployed a large number of forces and equipment at the Kupyansk, Lyman, Bakhmut, Avdiivka and Vuhledar directions, but continue to suffer huge losses and have no success,” -Vladyslav Selezniov.
🐣 RT @ChristopherJM Ukraine’s Minister of Finance @SergiiMarchenk3 in the @FT: It’s time to cut Russia out of the global financial system.
⋙ FT: It is time to cut Russia out of the global financial system https://tinyurl.com/y3kv82se
// Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine and financing of terrorism makes a mockery of the idea of a ‘rules-based order’
🧵 RT @FreudGreyskull [SoW:] https://tinyurl.com/mpcmzstw #Ukrainian military officials and #Russian pro-war nationalist voices are downplaying Russia’s ability to launch a sweeping large-scale offensive in #Donetsk Oblast in the current circumstances of the Russian Armed Forces. […]
📌 https://twitter.com/FreudGreyskull/status/1624678306552614917?s=20
⋙ 🐣 RT @FreudGreyskull Russian forces’ reported culmination and tactical failures around #Vuhledar, Donetsk Oblast, have likely further weakened the Russian ultranationalist community’s belief that Russian forces are able to launch a decisive military effort.
⭕ 11 Feb 2023
WaPo: After helping prince’s rise, Trump and Kushner benefit from Saudi funds https://tinyurl.com/4pb7y9zp
// An investment fund overseen by Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman is backing ventures that profit the former president and his senior adviser, raising questions of conflict
🐣 RT @ChuckPfarrer BAKHMUT AXIS /2120 UTC 11 FEB/ RU continues attempts to cut Lines of Communication and Supply (LOCS) into Bakhmut. RU has consolidated a salient N of Krasna Hora, threatening the M-03 HWY. UKR air defenses downed a Russian Su-25 strike aircraft.
🌎 https://twitter.com/ChuckPfarrer/status/1624517992884105217?s=20/photo/1
HistoryChannel (2019): Why Have There Been So Many UFO Sightings Near Nuclear Facilities? https://tinyurl.com/453vmm44 “In the last 75 years, high-ranking U.S. military and intelligence personnel have also reported UAPs near sites assc’d w nuclear power, weaponry and technology”
// 6/2023/2019; It started in the 1940s, near A-bomb development sites. More recently, something has been stalking nuclear carrier strike groups.
NYT (1/13/2023): Did Aliens Land on Earth in 1945? A Defense Bill Seeks Answers https://tinyurl.com/4kh9y8tp 1945 was the year when, by one account, “a large, avocado-shaped object” struck a tower in NM known as the “Trinity Site,” where the world’s first atomic bomb was detonated”
// The Defense Department’s annual spending bill requires it to review U.F.O. sightings dating to 1945, the year some believe an object from space crashed in the New Mexico desert.
WIRED, Chantel Tattoli (Feb 2022): Jacques Vallée Still Doesn’t Know What UFOs Are https://tinyurl.com/2at4bde2 “Vallée’s papers, entrusted to Rice University, will ultimately include files on some 500 anomalous events that he has personally investigated”
// After six globe-trotting decades spent probing “the phenomenon,” the French information scientist is sure of only one thing: The truth is really, really out there.
🐣 RT @ wartranslated More on the mobiks from 1231 regiment I posted about earlier, addressing the command personally. They’ve been robbed of all equipment and sent to assault a height the locals were unable to take for ages. Several battalions of mobiks before them have already been slaughtered.
💽 https://twitter.com/wartranslated/status/1624536177863802881?s=20/photo/1
WaPo, Matt Bai: I should care more about Hunter Biden. Here’s why I don’t. https://tinyurl.com/yc4t4wam 😕
WaPo: Trump campaign paid researchers to prove 2020 fraud but kept findings secret https://tinyurl.com/4wapwa6w The researchers found no evidence that Trump had won the election. The results were shared with Trump, Meadows and others prior to the January 6th attack.
// An outside firm’s work was never released publicly after researchers uncovered no evidence that the election had been rigged for Joe Biden
Former president Donald Trump’s 2020 campaign commissioned an outside research firm in a bid to prove electoral-fraud claims but never released the findings because the firm disputed many of his theories and could not offer any proof that he was the rightful winner of the election, according to four people familiar with the matter.
The campaign paid researchers from Berkeley Research Group, the people said, to study 2020 election results in six states, looking for fraud and irregularities to highlight in public and in the courts. Among the areas examined were voter machine malfunctions, instances of dead people voting and any evidence that could help Trump show he won, the people said. None of the findings were presented to the public or in court.
About a dozen people at the firm worked on the report, including econometricians, who use statistics to model and predict outcomes, the people said. The work was carried out in the final weeks of 2020, before the Jan. 6 riot of Trump supporters at the U.S. Capitol. ¤ … The Trump campaign’s commissioning of its own report to study the then-president’s fraud claims has not been previously reported. …
Senior officials from Berkeley Research Group briefed Trump, then-chief of staff Mark Meadows and others on the findings in a December 2020 conference call, people familiar with the matter said. Meadows showed skepticism of the findings and continued to maintain that Trump won. Trump also continued to say he won the election. The call grew contentious, people with knowledge of the meeting said. …
The findings from Berkeley were among the many streams of information after the election that showed Trump he lost. According to testimony presented to the Jan. 6 committee, Trump was repeatedly told by advisers that he did not win the election but continued to cast about for others who would entertain his theories and say that he had won. Dozens of judges — including many Trump appointees — rejected his campaign’s attempts to challenge election results in court. …
The Berkeley research was done through a subsidiary company called East Bay Dispute and Advisory. Federal Election Commission filings show the Trump campaign paid East Bay Dispute and Advisory more than $600,000 in the final weeks of 2020. A person familiar with the matter said there were also other researchers commissioned to help prove electoral fraud from outside Berkeley Research Group. The payments were described as consulting fees.
The states studied by the analysts over a period of several weeks included Georgia, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, Arizona and Nevada, according to people familiar with the matter. All but Nevada had been won by Trump in 2016 but flipped to the Democratic nominee four years later.
🐣 RT @ruinwanderer A fuller video of the Russian collapsing offensive at Vuhledar previously advertised as a big winter offensive. There’s quite a bit of movement back and forth with people running not knowing what to do.
💽 https://twitter.com/ruinwanderer/status/1624610924509253632?s=20/photo/1
⭕ 10 Feb 2023
Politico: Biden prepares largest Pentagon budget in history as spending cuts loom https://tinyurl.com/bdc7hzcr ‘ … reflecting efforts to simultaneously counter the threat from Russia, keep pace with China’s growing technological advantage, modernize aging arsenals and fight inflation’
// Lawmakers have threatened defense cuts in larger battle over the debt ceiling.
🐣 RT @SpiroAgnewGhost Aaaand..its Friday Midnight Meltdown from Citrus Caligula.
[TextLink:] https://twitter.com/SpiroAgnewGhost/status/1624271420577689601?s=20/photo/1
[Text:] @realDonaldTrump [ts] Will Trump Hating Prosecutor Jack Smith be investigating the FACT that they SPIED on my campaign, even as I was in the Oval Office, they Stuffed the Ballot Boxes (per 2000 Mules), used Covid to cheat, that the FBI pushed Twitter & Facebook around, causing massive voter disruption, and so much more? That’s really what he should be looking at, not asking a very decent Mike Pence why he didn’t send the votes back to State Legislatures for scrutinization, which he could have done. Get the RIGGERS!
🐣 RT @ChuckPfarrer KREMINNA /1910 UTC 10 FEB/ UKR forces report breaking up a desultory RU assault on the O-0528 HWY axis at Dibrova. RU maintains a strong presence in the area; despite the apparent lull, it’s assessed RU is capable of large-scale maneuver operations from Kreminna on short notice.
🌎 https://twitter.com/ChuckPfarrer/status/1624120227666460693?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @ChuckPfarrer BAKHMUT AXIS /1720 UTC 10 FEB/ Cutting UKR Lines of Communication & Supply (LOCS) remain a RU priority. RU has advanced North of Krasna Hora, threatening the M-03 HWY. UKR missiles, artillery and strike aviation targeted RU troop concentrations & HQ elements in heavy fighting.
🌎 https://twitter.com/ChuckPfarrer/status/1624093813609316352?s=20/photo/1
Politico [EU]: Moldova’s pro-EU government falls after months of pressure from Russia https://tinyurl.com/mvnu6aw3 “Moldova has found itself precariously close to the war, and has been keen to strike a balancing act as it seeks to protect itself militarily without provoking Moscow”
// Moldova was granted EU candidate status last June, but has faced intense pressure from Moscow.
🐣 RT @flash_news_ua ⚡️ Volodymyr Zelenskyi: “Several russian missiles passed through the airspace of Moldova and Romania. These missiles are a challenge to NATO, collective security. This is terror that can and must be stopped. The world must stop it.
💽 https://twitter.com/Flash_news_ua/status/1624024302323367942?s=20/photo/1
⋙⋙ 🐣 I agree it’s a challenge to NATO, but Moldova is not part of NATO. My guess is the US will want to not over-react but make clear we expect the government in Moldova to proceed with selecting a new PM without outside interference.. No little green men, no pressure from Russia
⋙ 🐣 RT @flash_news_ua [Ze:] I thank everyone who understands this. Thanks to everyone who helps. And of course, I thank our Air Force, all our anti-aircraft fighters, everyone who protects Ukraine and our people.”
🐣 RT @thehoff102 I don’t like the sound of this. The Kremlin and its proxies in Moldova have been trying to bring down the pro-Ukrainian pro-European and pro-Western Moldovan Government led by their President Maia Sandu over the last year.
🔆 This❗️⋙ 🐣 RT @GreenSquareAC The Prime Minister of Moldova, Natalia Gavriliță, has just announced she is resigning, and it looks like the entire government in Chisinau will also resign.
⋙⋙ 🐣 RT @GreenSquareAC “Moldova is expected with open arms inside the EU — Moldova has friends — but if the government had had the same support at home, we would have progressed more and faster,” Gavrilita told reporters in Chisinau.
⋙⋙ 🐣 RT @GreenSquareAC A new government will be nominated by President, Maia Sandu, and then needs to be approved by Moldova’s parliament.
🐣 RT @EUwatchers Day 351: highlights from Zelenskyi’s addresses to European Parliament, European Council in Brussels https://uacrisis.org/en/day-351 source/editor : Дмитро Васильєв
⋙ UACrisis: Day 351: highlights from Zelenskyi’s addresses to European Parliament, European Council in Brussels Оригінал статті – на сайті Українського кризового медіа-центру: https://uacrisis.org/en/day-351
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyi made a trip to Brussels on Thursday, February 9, a day after he made a surprise visit to the UK and France. In Brussels, Zelenskyi delivered a speech to the European Parliament and later addressed the 27 EU leaders gathered for a summit.
The European Council is meeting for a summit in Brussels on February 9-10 to discuss Russia’s war against Ukraine, EU support for Ukraine, and results of last week’s EU-Ukraine summit. Here are the highlights from President Zelenskyi’s addresses to the European Parliament and the European Council.
“Ukrainian European way of life”
During an address to EU lawmakers, President Zelenskyi said: “All of us, Europeans, each and every one of the hundreds of millions of people on our continent, combine these two statuses — representatives of Europe and leaders of Europe. This combination reflects what our Europe, a modern Europe, a peaceful Europe, gives to the world. European way of life. European path of life. European manner of life. European rules of life.”
“When everyone matters. When the law rules.”
“When states strive to be social and societies strive to be open. When diversity is a value and the values of the different are united by fair equality.”
“When borders are inviolable, but one does not feel them as they cross them.”
“When people believe in tomorrow and are willing to take to the streets to fight for their tomorrow. When there is only one single barrier between the president and the protesters, and that is fair elections.”
“This is our Europe. These are our rules. This is our way of life. And for Ukraine, it’s a way home, a way to its home.”
“Now I am here in order to defend our people’s way home. All Ukrainian men and Ukrainian women, [people] of different ages, political beliefs, social classes, religious views, personal history, who share European history with all of you.”
“There is an attempt to destroy the Ukrainian European way of life by an all-out war. But what for?”
“In order to fully destroy the European way after the Ukrainian European way of life is destroyed, [destroy it] for each of the 27 elements of the European way of life — the 27 countries of the European Union. We will not allow that to happen.”
“We defend ourselves against the most anti-European force in modern world.”
“This total war that has been unleashed by Russia is not just about territory in one part of Europe or another,” President Zelenskyi said as he addressed the European Parliament.
“Its threat is not only in the fact that there is a dictator with huge stockpiles of Soviet-made weapons and weapons supplies from other dictatorships, in particular the Iranian regime. In order to be able to wage this war, the Kremlin has been consistently destroying, step by step, year after year, what we see as the basis of our Europe.”
“The sacred value of human life has been completely destroyed in Russia as well. No one matters to the authorities there, except for those inside the Kremlin walls, their relatives and their wallets. For them, for the Kremlin, all others, all 140 million citizens are just bodies capable of carrying weapons — carrying weapons to Ukraine and on the battlefield, keeping others obedient or being obedient themselves.”
“The rule of violence and obedience are the rules there instead of the rule of law.”
“The Russian regime not only hates everything, any sociality and diversity, but also deliberately stirs xenophobia and tries to make all the inhuman things that happened in the 1930s and 1940s part of the norm on our continent.”
“But will it last forever? This is a question for all of us. The answer is no! No! Europe! We are defending ourselves against the most anti-European force in the modern world. We are defending ourselves. We, Ukrainians, are on the battlefield with you.” …
President Zelenskyi called on EU leaders to “enhance the dynamic of our cooperation and act faster than the aggressor can mobilize its potential.” He thanked them for the “sanctions packages that are already in force.”
“But have they sufficiently limited Russia’s aggressive potential? This is a path that needs to be completed,” he added.
“We need to add security to our freedom and unity. (…) The European Union is already on the way toward the security. Fundamental steps have already been taken, but we have to go all the way through. We must enhance the dynamic of our cooperation and act faster than the aggressor can mobilize its potential.”
“Security interaction [between the EU] and Ukraine created a historical precedent for any aggressor, and set an example of why one should not start aggression against Europeans. Russian aggression must inevitably fail,” Zelenskyi said.
“The sooner freedom and European values are restored in all of Ukraine, including the parts that are now occupied, the more solid and lasting will be the peace in all of Europe,” he said.
Zelenskyi called for a special tribunal to prosecute Russia for its crime of aggression against Ukraine. “There must be a compensation mechanism for all the damage caused by Russian terror,” he said.
“These are all part of the peace formula. Ukraine has never sought this or any other war. Ukraine has never provoked it and has always tried to maintain peace,” Zelenskyi said. …
⭕ 9 Feb 2023
NYT, Bret Stephens: How to Destroy (What’s Left of) the Mainstream Media’s Credibility https://tinyurl.com/ms43nced “Our job is to collect and present relevant facts and good evidence. … The only place where nonobjective truth can play a valuable role … is in the Opinion section”
WaPo, Eugene Robinson: The Republican clown-car caucus is undermining itself https://tinyurl.com/2p98xrvj “Right now, we have one center-left political party — the Democrats — and one flaming hot mess of ego, resentment and paranoia. It’s going to be a long two years”
💙 🧵 RT @JominiW 1/ Ukraine TVD, 1-7 FEB 23. The first week of February saw the Russian Winter Offensive move into full swing as major pushes were made in Kreminna, Bakhmut, and Vuhledar. The Russians made some gains but Ukrainian defenses held. #UkraineRussiaWar #RussianArmy #UkraineFrontLines
📌 🌎 https://twitter.com/JominiW/status/1623857574679392257?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @TristanSnell BREAKING: Putin plans to destroy nation of Moldova. ¤ Ukraine intercepted the Russian plans and handed them over to their western neighbor Moldova. ¤ Putin’s plan for 2023 is clearly to expand his war of aggression, surrounding Ukraine on another front. ¤ Moldova must be defended.
🐣 RT @RonaldKlain He’s not wrong.
⋙ 🐣 RT @seungminkim Yowza — McConnell, to KY radio guy Terry Meiners, absolutely knifes Rick Scott on his 12-point plan: ¤ “This is a bad idea. I think it will be a challenge for him to deal with this in his own reelection in Florida, a state with more elderly people than any other state in America.”
¤ https://twitter.com/seungminkim/status/1623842177750118400?s=20
🐣 RT @ABC EXCLUSIVE: Former Vice Pres. Pence has been subpoenaed by the special counsel overseeing probes into former Pres. Trump, according to multiple sources.
⋙ ABC: Mike Pence subpoenaed by special counsel overseeing Trump probes: Sources https://tinyurl.com/2tsvdp84
// It follows months of negotiations between prosecutors and Pence’s legal team.
WaPo: SpaceX questions Ukraine’s use of Starlink for war https://tinyurl.com/e6sbxwk4 “Oleksiy Danilov, the secretary of Ukraine’s National Security and Defense Council, said Kyiv was not worried” ⇊ ⇊
[TextLink:] https://twitter.com/Auriandra/status/1623811566641594369?s=20/photo/1
[Text:] Oleksiy Danilov, the secretary of Ukraine’s National Security and Defense Council, said Kyiv was not worried. “If you believe that we use only Starlink, and because of this we don’t have any other options of use for this or that weapon — this does not correspond to reality at all,” Danilov told The Washington Post. “Let’s not rush to conclusions. We need to clarify to what extent this will be an influence, or not be an influence. Maybe we need to change the means of attack in one sector or another.”
🐣 RT @Euan_MacDonald Ukraine has been using Starlink for drones for nearly a year, and SpaceX suddenly decides it’s against the rules just as the long-expected big new Russian offensive starts? This effectively means the company is aiding fascist Russia’s invasion of democratic Ukraine.
⋙ 🐣 RT @julianborger Fury in Ukraine as Elon Musk’s SpaceX limits Starlink use for drones Report by @dansabbagh ¤ The decision partially blinds Ukrainian forces just as they face new Russian offensives in the East and South.
⋙⋙ TheGuardian: Fury in Ukraine as Elon Musk’s SpaceX limits Starlink use for drones https://tinyurl.com/37n8uxyn
🐣 RT @RepDanGoldman In 2020, Sens Grassley and Johnson funneled through their committees Russian disinformation provided to them and Rudy Giuliani by a Russian intelligence agent in order to damage candidate Joe Biden. ¤ It was a gross abuse of power and a “weaponization of the federal government.”
🐣 RT @wartranslated Girkin believes that with Wagner terminating recruitment, its days are basically numbered. But given the state of the Russian armed forces, there will be no one to replace the death battalions who were the only ones to achieve any success in recent months.
[TextLink:] https://twitter.com/wartranslated/status/1623635097680244736?s=20/photo/1
[Text:] With regard to the statement by E. Prigozhin on the termination of the recruitment of prisoners in the Wagner PMC. – I believe that the termination of the recruitment was caused by the “order from above”. And (after some time) it will seriously affect the Wagner’s ability to successfully assault one position after another head-on, as is happening now near Bakhmut.
Simply due lacking the resources for replenishment of large losses in the infantry. I refrain from evaluating the expediency and correctness of such a measure, since it is a “double-edged sword.”
The only thing I will repeat for the hundredth time is that the “death battalions” cannot win the war in the absence of normal military discipline and order in the rest of the active army. And the active army (judging by the numerous video messages to the president from the “mobiks”) – everything remains in the same “amazing” state (in terms of supply, armament, provision of basic food and uniforms, etc.) and demonstrates the same signs of decay that our media and “cheerleaders” “relish” when discussing the problems of the Armed Forces of Ukraine.
🐣 RT @ChuckPfarrer KREMINNA /2140 UTC 9 FEB/ RU artillery resumes fire missions against the urban area of Kreminna– confirming UKR presence in the city. RU forces carried out attacks at Shypylivka and Zolotarivka. This may indicate the opening of a new RU axis of advance based in Lysychansk.
🌎 https://twitter.com/ChuckPfarrer/status/1623797589215772672?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @ChuckPfarrer BAKHMUT /2100 UTC 9 FEB/ RU forces have registered important gains in the Bakhmut Area of Operations (AO). North of the city, RU forces threaten the M-03 HWY. South of Bakhmut, RU units are in contact across the H-32 west and east of the rail right of way at Chasiv Yar.
🌎 https://twitter.com/ChuckPfarrer/status/1623788525626720256?s=20/photo/1
⋙ 🐣 Chuck, you thought Ukr would retreat to Chasiv Yar and take up defensive positions there. Does this mean it’s too late for that?
🐣 RT @petestrzok Starlink – now paid for in Ukraine by US/NATO – just reduced capability, helping Russia. ¤ “There are things that we can do to limit [Ukraine’s] ability to do that,” referring to Starlink’s use with drones. “There are things that we can do, and have done.”
⋙ Reuters: http://reut.rs/
Harvard (4/13/2021): The Effect of Spanking on the Brain https://tinyurl.com/b6n6ph36
// Spanking found to impact children’s brain response, leading to lasting consequences
🐣 RT @mhmck By constant and fruitless assaults on Vuhledar, Donetsk region, Ukraine, the 155th Marine Brigade of the Russian fascist invaders is being wiped out. ¤ Losses – especially of personnel – of this “elite” Russian unit are catastrophic.
🐣 RT @LeaderMcConnell Russia’s brutal aggression has brought @NATO even closer together. Our allies are deepening their commitments to collective defense. Glad to meet with Secretary General @jensstoltenberg today and discuss the future of the strongest military alliance the world has ever known.
NYT (2017): In Targeting Political Groups, I.R.S. Crossed Party Lines https://tinyurl.com/yc7wspxy An exhaustive Treasury Dept Inspector General Report found that the IRS also targeted left-wing groups (words like “Progressive,” “Occupy,” “Green Energy,” & “ACORN”) #weaponization
// 10/5/2017
WaPo, Philip Bump (12/5): No, limiting the Hunter Biden laptop story didn’t cost Trump the election https://tinyurl.com/2p83cj2y The MRC poll cited was “a push poll of the rankest sort,” like telling people their candidate “was an alien from the planet Toxicus” #weaponization
// 12/5/2022
🧵 RT @atrupar I’m going to follow the House Republican hearing on “weaponization” of the government. Thread starts here.
📌 💽 https://twitter.com/atrupar/status/1623739261227790336?s=20/photo/1
WaPo: U.S. declassifies balloon intelligence, calls out China for spying https://tinyurl.com/ye294tsj The State Department revealed what it’s calling “a sophisticated effort to surveil ‘more than 40 countries across 5 continents’”
🐣 RT @ChuckPfarrer VICTORY at VUHLEDAR /1532 UTC 9 FEB/ UKR forces broke up a Russian company-sized armor & mech. infantry attack on Vuhledar. More than 31 RU vehicles were damaged, destroyed or abandoned in a failed attack across the T-05-09 HWY. RU KIAs estimated at 400 plus scores wounded.
🌎 https://twitter.com/ChuckPfarrer/status/1623702105172152321?s=20/photo/1
CNBC: Russian forces are closing in on the strategic city of Bakhmut, giving Ukraine a tough choice to make https://tinyurl.com/bddex8pe “The Russians are desperate to advance ahead of the one year anniversary of this aggression” ~ Yuriy Sak, advisor to Ukraine’s defense ministry
⭕ 8 Feb 2023
Politico: House Republicans’ wanted list: Hunter Biden, big tech and the FBI https://tinyurl.com/msdm8cxd Hunter Biden, Twitter and the FBI: 1. House Republicans: 0.
// Republicans’ Wednesday Twitter hearing was a who’s who of the party’s major targets.
WaPo, Paul Waldman: Sarah Huckabee Sanders’s strange ‘woke’ rant reveals a big GOP problem https://tinyurl.com/bdh3pc5m The GOP “can demagogue an issue brilliantly, but they can’t persuade the middle to support their policies”
🐣 RT @UkrainianNews24 Ukraine is preparing for a large-scale Russian offensive in Donbas . Moscow has concentrated hundreds of thousands of troops in the east of the country, using tactics of brute force and numerical superiority, trying to destroy the defense of the Armed Forces of Ukraine
ISW: Russian Offensive Campaign Assessment, February 8, 2023 https://tinyurl.com/yckryztu
🧵 RT @anneapplebaum Do people who think the Russian war in Ukraine should be ended for “humanitarian” reasons not understand what is happening in Russian-occupied Ukraine? They haven’t read about the torture chambers? The mass murders? Deportation of thousands of children?
📌 https://twitter.com/anneapplebaum/status/1623432463753134080?s=20
There may be less bombardment of occupied Kherson or Donetsk provinces at the moment, but an even uglier, bloodier and more terrifying humanitarian crisis is unfolding there. You want to make that crisis permanent? You want more people to die?
You say you want to stop the suffering in Ukraine. Do you have any idea what kind of suffering would follow a Ukrainian capitulation? Or even a decision to hand over more Ukrainian territory?
Also, what makes you think Putin has given up on his original plan to occupy Ukraine, kill Zelensky, carry out genocide and install a puppet government? How is your negotiation going to persuade him to give up that imperialist dream? What’s your plan?
🧵 RT @WarintheFuture There is so much to learn from the war in #Ukraine. But, as we approach 1 year since the Russian invasion, we should also be thinking about how our potential adversaries might learn from the conflict. 1/17
📌 https://twitter.com/WarintheFuture/status/1623436354284843008?s=20
WaPo: At combative hearing, GOP fans allegations of collusion by government, Big Tech https://tinyurl.com/2s372bz3 “Twitter hearing ends with no testimony that FBI tried to influence Twitter’s decision on the Hunter Biden laptop”
🐣 RT @NOELreports In #Bakhmut the situation is precarious. The M03 to Slovyansk is operationally cut. RU troops are in the vicinity of the highway. UA does fight back. The aim is to encircle UA troops in Paraskoviivka and Krasna Hora. In the latter, some positions have reportedly been abandoned.
🌎 https://twitter.com/NOELreports/status/1623432479595167745?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @AdamParkhomenko
Democrats: we need to protect social security and Medicare
Republicans: we need to see the president’s son’s dick
🐣 RT @RVAwonk AOC, as usual is on fire: ¤ “Political operatives [are] weaponizing the use of this committee… A whole hearing about a 24-hour hiccup in a right-wing political operation. That is why we are here right now. It’s an abuse of public resources and an abuse of public time.”
🐣 RT @JDLuckenbach Keep an eye on Daniel Goldman. He’s going to be an absolute star. ¤ This guy will not let Republicans lies go unchallenged.
⋙ 🐣 RT @atrupar Rep. Goldman schools Comer on facts in the Hunter Biden story that the New York Post got wrong
💽 https://twitter.com/atrupar/status/1623364616213483520?s=20/photo/1
⋙ 🐣 RT @atrupar Goldman: “So far we’ve seen no actual evidence of any lies or any support for Joe Biden being involved in anything having to do with Ukraine other than promoting US foreign policy.”
💽 https://twitter.com/atrupar/status/1623365159447142400?s=20/photo/1
↥ ↧
🧵 RT @atrupar House Republicans are unveiling their inflation plan this morning
⋙ caption: “OVERSIGHT HEARING ON HUNTER BIDEN CENSORSHIP”
📌 https://twitter.com/atrupar/status/1623337349097697281?s=20
⋙ 🐣 RT @atrupar Goldman: “Let’s run down what Twitter know about this hard drive and this story when it was published. First, the sole source of the hard drive was Rudy Giuliani, who had been working closely with Russian intelligence agents throughout 2020.”
💽 https://twitter.com/atrupar/status/1623408363999485952?s=20/photo/1
↥
🐣 RT @tooronlists The Republican Party can’t cut taxes for the rich any more than they already have, soooooooooo, they got nothin’. ¤ But alas Caesar, the people must be entertained!! Send in the clowns!, Que the M&M battle!, Release the pronouns!, Fire the Conspiracy cannon!! Are you not amused!
USAToday, Rex Huppke: Dark Brandon’ shows up at State of the Union, mops the floor with lost Republicans https://tinyurl.com/y6s6hvk8 “[T]hey ran at him like a pack of lemmings and, with a wink and a grin, he politely directed them to the cliff”
// Biden went off script regularly, parrying GOP lawmakers who heckled him, at one point backing the party into a corner and getting them to swear to protect Medicare and Social Security benefits.
President Joe Biden, at the ripe age of 80, came out with ample vim and vigor in Tuesday night’s State of the Union address and proceeded to mop the House floor with the howling, discombobulated remains of the Republican Party.
Preaching populism and leaning hard on his noted skill as the empathizer-in-chief, Biden bounded through a speech that acknowledged the nation’s struggles while remaining unerringly optimistic. He went off script regularly, parrying Republican lawmakers who heckled him, at one point backing the whole party into a corner and getting them to swear to protect Medicare and Social Security benefits.
I’ve never seen anything like it in a State of the Union speech – they ran at him like a pack of lemmings and, with a wink and a grin, he politely directed them to the cliff.
⭕ 7 Feb 2023
🐣 RT @DavidJollyFL Whoa. It’s not often you see an 80 year old man giving a public beat down to 222 grown adults, but my word. What a night.
🐣 RT @AdamKinzinger Joe Biden sparring with the crowd and winning wasn’t something I expected.
🐣 RT @POTUS Nearly 25% of our country’s debt was added under my predecessor. ¤ How did Congress respond? They lifted the debt ceiling three times. They paid America’s bills. Tonight, I’m asking this Congress to follow suit. ¤ The full faith and credit of America will never be questioned.
🐣 📋 RT @WhiteHouse In the last two years, President Biden cut the deficit by more than $1.7 trillion. ¤ This is the largest deficit reduction in American history.
🐣 RT @ KeithOlbermann Hi, Professional Cynic Here, the President just gave the best State of the Union speech I’ve ever heard.
🐣 RT @djrothkopf To anyone who thinks Joe Biden should not run for re-election listen to this speech. Listen again. He is the best candidate either party can muster. He has the best record of any president’s first two years in modern memory. And he’s very good at making the case for his agenda.
🐣 RT @Victorshi2020 That was one of the best speeches President Biden has given. He called out Republicans. He made his accomplishments clear. He spoke directly to the American people. And he offered bold policies that would help American families. That was a true State of the Union speech. Amazing.
Politico: Why Biden’s Speech Worked https://tinyurl.com/282hafxf
// He had a clear political message, and his populist outrage sounded genuine
🐣 RT @ TVietor08 Really strong speech from Biden. Love the contrast of his (mostly) unifying message vs the ranting extremist idiot faction. The WH must be so happy about the heckling and energy it brought.
🐣 RT @RepRaskin What a brilliant, refreshing speech that revives true American populism—progressive democratic populism, not right-wing authoritarian fake-populism. Biden sounds Rooseveltian and is taking American politics by storm.
WaPo: Biden, in State of the Union, mixes bipartisanship with defiance https://tinyurl.com/2p8cxm8w
// Speech is marked by unusual back-and-forth between president and Republican lawmakers
🐣 RT @sbg1 Biden made perhaps the best speech of his presidency. The heckling from Republicans only helped make his points
🐣 RT @POTUS Done. And we’re set to decrease it by another $250 billion over the next decade.
⋙ 🐣 RT @POTUS By the end of this year, the deficit will be down to less than half what it was before I took office. ¤ I’m the only president ever to cut the deficit by more than one trillion dollars in a single year.
🐣 RT @ MuellerSheWrote Brilliant bit of unanimity as Biden forces republicans to pledge to take Social Security and Medicare cuts off the table. Absolutely perfectly handled. #sotu2023
🐣 RT @DavidJollyFL I’m not sure anyone expected Biden to so quickly and ably put Republicans on the ropes and then just keep swinging, all with a smile on his face. ¤ This is a very good speech and a very good look for the President.
🐣 RT @KamauMandela We have a President who understands where we are, accomplishing & working to get major things done for ALL Americans while doing it with class. ¤ Tonight’s #SOTU speech was a homerun. Forever proud to be Team 46. It’s more work ahead. Well done, @POTUS! ¤ Let’s finish the job!🇺🇸
🐣 RT @ChuckPfarrer KREMINNA AXIS/2315 UTC 7 FEB/ RU resumed artillery fire missions against targets in Kreminna– confirming a UKR lodgment in the city. Sources report that UKR troops are engaged with RU units in central Kreminna along Kuybyshev St and south of School No 4 in the city center.
🌎 https://twitter.com/ChuckPfarrer/status/1623097040908566528?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @ChuckPfarrer BAKHMUT /2250 UTC 7 FEB/ Heavy fighting ongoing in the Bakhmut Area of Operations (AO). RU’s aim is to cut UKR supply lines & seize road junctions to dimmish UKR maneuver options. RU forces, including airborne units, attempt to cut the the M-03 / T-05-13 HWY junction.
🌎 https://twitter.com/ChuckPfarrer/status/1623089460593164288?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @JosepBorrellF Information oils the engine of democracy. ¤ Russia is using information manipulation & interference as a crucial instrument in its war of aggression against Ukraine ¤ We have plenty of evidence – over 15.000 cases collected and published by @EUvsDisinfo, to expose & raise awareness
⭕ 6 Feb 2023
WaPo, Jennifer Rubin: Prosecutors must carefully select which charges, if any, to bring against Trump https://tinyurl.com/yc3bvt6s “[T]he public’s desire for Trump to be held accountable is not sufficient reason to file every possible criminal case against him” [‼️]
🧵 ISW: #Ukrainian officials assess that #Russian forces are preparing to launch a large-scale decisive offensive in eastern Ukraine in mid to late February. https://isw.pub/UkrWar020623
📌 🌎 https://twitter.com/TheStudyofWar/status/1622803359739809793?s=20/photo/1 -4
[ThreadReader:] https://tinyurl.com/29az9ed5
2/ Key takeaways for February 6, 2023: Select Russian nationalist voices continued to express skepticism towards #Russia’s ability to launch a successful offensive in #Ukraine past late February.
3/ German Chancellor Olaf Scholz undermined Russian President Vladimir #Putin’s false narrative that the provision of German tanks to #Ukraine threatens Russian security.
4/ Kremlin-appointed Russian and occupation officials continue to implement social benefit schemes that target children and teenagers in occupied areas of #Ukraine to consolidate social control and integration of these territories into #Russia.
5/ Kremlin-appointed Russian and occupation officials continue to implement social benefit schemes that target children and teenagers in occupied areas of Ukraine to consolidate social control and integration of these territories into Russia.
6/ Russian Commissioner on Children’s Rights, Maria Lvova-Belova (appointed by #Putin) is likely working directly on Putin’s orders to institute several social institutions and programs in occupied areas of #Ukraine to collect personal data on children…
7/ …carry out various social programming functions aimed at integrating occupied areas using pseudo-humanitarian organizations, and set conditions to legitimize and institutionalize the deportation and adoption of Ukrainian children into Russian families.
8/ Russian President Vladimir #Putin continues to open the door for further institutionalized corruption in Russia through legislative manipulations.
9/ The Kremlin continues to deny Wagner financier Yevgeny Prigozhin legitimacy and authority in #Russia. Prigozhin’s appeal in the Russian nationalist information space may also be declining as he continues to overcompensate for the culmination of Wagner’s attack around Bakhmut.
10/ Failures of Western sanctions efforts against the provision of arms components to Iran have likely contributed to #Russia’s ability to bypass Western sanctions to acquire components for combat drones through military cooperation with #Iran.
NYT: Russian Attacks Intensify in Eastern Ukraine Ahead of Expected Offensive https://tinyurl.com/35tp8k8m “Ukraine’s defense minister, Oleksii Reznikov … , said that Moscow was determined to break through Ukraine’s defensive lines before the anniversary of Russia’s invasion”
// Russia is deploying hundreds of thousands of newly mobilized soldiers, in small groups, to probe for vulnerabilities in Ukrainian defensive lines.
💙 NYT: Outnumbered and Worn Out, Ukrainians in East Brace for Russian Assault https://tinyurl.com/mw3248z4 If you read anything, read this: gifted article
// The war is intensifying in a string of villages on the eastern front, where doctors struggle to handle an influx of gruesome injuries and soldiers fret about a Russian army sending waves of new conscripts.
🧵 RT @WarintheFuture Recently there has been more speculation about the timing & size of 2023 Russian offensives in #Ukraine. That the Russians will attempt them is almost a given. Russia has been assembling the pieces of their 2023 offensives since late last year. 1/21
📌 https://twitter.com/WarintheFuture/status/1622748080482418688?s=20
🐣 RT @dpatrikarakos I embedded with UA Special Forces fighting in Bakhmut. This is the story of life & death on the frontlines of the war’s most intense battle. In it, you see both the determination of #Ukraine 🇺🇦 & the cost of #Russia|n🇷🇺 imperialism. My latest for Unherd.
⋙ Unherd, David Patrikarakos: The madness behind the battle for Bakhmut https://tinyurl.com/yssmwew9
// Russian troops are dying in their thousands here
📊 WaPo, Aaron Blake: GOP’s ‘weaponization’ committee viewed as more suspect than its targets https://tinyurl.com/2p8uak2k polls, polls, polls
🐣 RT @ChuckPfarrer KREMINNA AXIS /2310 UTC 6 FEB/ RU forces resumed serial offensives & armed reconnaissance across the P-66 HWY. RU artillery fire missions are plotted inside central Kreminna– confirming that UKR forces have maintained contact within the urban area.
🌎 https://twitter.com/ChuckPfarrer/status/1622731212899991552?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @ChuckPfarrer BAKHMUT /1405 UTC 6 FEB/ UKR reports ‘complete lack of coordination’ between Wagner PMC & RU forces in the Bakhmut Area of Operations. UKR forces were again in contact S of the H-32 HWY at Ivanivske. UKR Gen’l Staff reports 9 aviation strike missions on RU troops & HQ elements.
🌎 https://twitter.com/ChuckPfarrer/status/1622595573730709512?s=20/photo/1
⭕ 5 Feb 2023
RT @tribelaw “The Koch network joins the Club for Growth and several of the party’s biggest individual donors, such as finance billionaires Kenneth C. Griffin and Stephen A. Schwartzman in signaling their opposition to Trump’s current campaign.” The balloon’s bursting
⋙ WaPo: Koch network to back alternative to Trump after sitting out recent primaries https://tinyurl.com/mrxr6ya9
// The return of one of the biggest spenders in American politics to the presidential primary field poses a direct challenge to the former president’s comeback bid
NYT: Taking Aim at Trump, Koch Network Will Back G.O.P. Primary Candidates https://tinyurl.com/35r2af3j “The best thing for the country would be to have a president in 2025 who represents a new chapter” ~ letter from Americans For Prosperity (AFP) to donors
// The move by the alliance of conservative donors could provide an enormous boost to a Republican alternative to the former president.
⋙ Letter to AFP donors: https://tinyurl.com/b25rm9sc
🐣 RT @ademyarslan White House says stands ready to provide “any and all” needed assistance following the massive earthquake in Turkey and Syria.
[TextLink:] https://twitter.com/ademyarslan/status/1622460889566793735?s=20/photo/1
[Text:] TheWhiteHouse: FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
February 5, 2023 Statement from National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan on the
Earthquake in Turkiye and Syria
The United States is profoundly concerned by the reports of today’s destructive earthquake in Turkiye and Syria. We stand ready to provide any and all needed assistance. President Biden has directed USAID and other federal government partners to assess U.S. response options to help those most affected. We will continue to closely monitor the situation in coordination with the Government of Türkiye.
🐣 RT @Ayei_Eloheichem Prigozhin says Ukraine is not withdrawing from Bakhmut, and won’t: “Fierce battles are going on for every street, every house, every stairwell…The Ukrainian Armed Forces are not retreating anywhere. The Ukrainian Armed Forces are fighting to the last man.”
😅 RT @EdKrassen Republicans: “Trump would have shot down a Chinese spy balloon. ¤ Pentagon: “It happened three times under Trump and he didn’t shoot it down.” ¤ Republicans: “Hunter Biden!”
⭕ 4 Feb 2023
DefenseOne: Key Republicans Launch Two-Part Plan to Pressure Biden on Ukraine https://tinyurl.com/yncypt3x
// Sen Roger Wicker, Rep Mike Rogers; National security committee leaders in Congress are waging a public campaign to signal they support sending more advanced weapons to Ukraine–and faster than Biden is allowing
Republicans have launched a two-front campaign to pressure the Biden administration in the coming months into sending more advanced weapons to Ukraine, including some the president has so far been reluctant to provide. But the conservatives’ push comes with the expectation of more and faster progress by Ukraine, as polls indicate declining support for the effort to arm Ukraine, particularly among Republicans.
The first part of the dual campaign is to conduct closed-door classified information gatherings in Congress, like the recent classified Senate Armed Services Committee briefing that included Celeste Wallander, assistant secretary of defense for international security affairs and William LaPlante, the under secretary of defense for acquisition and sustainment, according to two people with direct knowledge of current discussions within Republican leadership.
The second part is a public-facing campaign to call on President Joe Biden to provide things like Grey Eagle drones, and the long-range Army Tactical Missile System, or ATACMS, which would help Ukraine strike at the Russian artillery batteries continuously lobbing missiles at Ukrainian forces. Kyiv has been requesting ATACMS since the start of the war, but the requests have grown louder as the United States approved other pieces of equipment it previously resisted, such as M-1 Abrams tanks.
The public portion of the Republicans’ campaign could take a variety of forms. Virtually every Armed Services Committee hearing in the House and Senate provides opportunity for comment, the two individuals said. Lawmakers could also speak on the issue during floor speeches and media engagements. …
🐣 RT @krassenstein GOP this morning: How dare Biden not shoot the Chinese Spy Ballon down. ¤ GOP at 2PM: How dare Biden wait so long to shoot balloon down. ¤ Pentagon: We tracked the balloon, jammed it’s signal & gathered data on it, before shooting it down over the Atlantic. ¤ GOP Now: Silence
🧵 RT @ CanadianKobzar Fellas! Stay awhile and listen! Today I present a Two cautionary tales from Ukrainian history. Two divided eras of Ukrainian history following the collapse of golden ages – The fragmentation of Rus in the 12th century and the Ruin of the 17th. 1/17
📌 https://twitter.com/CanadianKobzar/status/1621972437620359168?s=20
🐣 RT @jimsciutto Notable: US officials say they were able to block the balloon from gathering intel during its overflight of the US, while the US military was able to turn the tables, so to speak, to gather intel on the balloon itself and its equipment.
🐣 my guess is they waited to shoot the balloon down over water, not because someone on the ground might get hurt (mostly was over unpop. areas), but in the hope of recovering the technology intact ~ as opposed to a hard landing; plus, easier to locate
🐣 RT @ChuckPfarrer BAKHMUT AXIS /1310 UTC 4 FEB/ RU forces continue offensive operations against Krasna Hora. UKR has maintained a disruptive lodgment near Klischiivka. UKR missiles, artillery and strike aviation targeted RU troop concentrations and HQ elements in heavy fighting.
🌎 https://twitter.com/ChuckPfarrer/status/1621856267605000195?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @ChuckPfarrer KREMINNA AXIS /1245 UTC 4 FEB/ RU continues determined offensive efforts in the Kreminna Area of Operations (AO). During the period 3-4 FEB, RU forces resumed serial offensives & armed reconnaissance across the P-66 HWY. UKR artillery and air strikes hit RU troops.
🌎 https://twitter.com/ChuckPfarrer/status/1621849727607111683?s=20/photo/1
🧵 RT @tomiahonen Here is latest daily count of cumulative Russian losses in their disastrous year-long invasion war into Ukraine, via the excellent Kyiv Independent RT @KyivIndependent ¤ That number of dead Russian soldiers inside one year, 130,000… is STAGGERING ¤ Let’s do a bit of math […]
📌 https://twitter.com/tomiahonen/status/1621816826354192384?s=20
⋙🐣 RT @tomiahonen In WW1, your chance to die was 4% per year ¤ In WW2, it was 3% per year ¤ For Soviet soldier, 8% died per year in WW2. That was worst casualty rate of any army of WW2 ¤ In Ukraine, for Russian soldiers it is EIGHT TIMES DEADLIER than WW2 = 68% death rate! ¤ This is sheer madness!
// numbers appear to exclude newly mobilized
🐣 📊 RT @jburnmurdoch German public opinion on allowing its tanks to be sent to Ukraine is striking: ¤ 75% of Green voters back sending tanks, vs just 6% of AfD. ¤ Really shows how the Greens have embraced pragmatism (see also agreeing to keep nuclear pants open), while AfD captured by pro-Russian nuts.
◕ https://twitter.com/jburnmurdoch/status/1621807289970704384?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @NAChristakis Here, @billmaher @RealTimers rightly sees the Maoist elements of many denunciation cases in the arts and academia. This idea that humans can simply negate reality, with words, is an old one — and well understood for its limits if not falsity.
⋙ 🐣 RT @billmaher If you’re part of today’s woke revolution, you need to study the part of revolutions where they spin out of control.
💽 https://twitter.com/NAChristakis/status/1621850269725196288?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @olex_scherba Nice. Ukraine’s security service hacked a zoom-call between moscow and the quislings in Ukraine. And officially notified the latter that they’re charged with treason. ¤ And then let them listen to ukraine 🇺🇦 anthem. ¤ #StandWithUkraine
💽 https://twitter.com/olex_scherba/status/1621803146501554176?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @NikaMelkozerova This is mind-blowing. Chechens fighting for Russia after Grozny, after everything… Buryats dying for Russia while their native culture is almost destroyed.
⋙⋙ 🐣 RT @NOELreports Kadyrov’s detachments do not allow Buryats to retreat from the battlefield, urging them to stand with shovels against tanks. ¤ True comradery.
💽 https://twitter.com/NikaMelkozerova/status/1621826267434696706?s=20/photo/1
⋙ 🐣 RT @olex_sherba All you need to do is convince people that freedom doesn’t exist. That it’s a western ploy to conquer others. Also, liberate them from the “chimera of conscience”… ¤ Someone did terrible things to them when they were weak. Now they’re strong – and entitled to do it to others.
⭕ 3 Feb 2023
OCCRP: Kremlin-Linked Group Arranged Payments to European Politicians to Support Russia’s Annexation of Crimea https://tinyurl.com/2p86vyz6
// For years, a secret organization run from inside Russia’s parliament successfully interfered with European policies on occupied Ukraine. Leaked emails give a new overview of the operation and show how European Union politicians who helped push Moscow’s agenda were offered cash and perks.
● Leaked emails show how a Duma insider built a network of analysts, journalists, and others who helped him push the Kremlin’s interests abroad.
● His group offered cash to European politicians to propose pro-Russian motions in their local legislatures, and paid far-right activists to publish pro-Kremlin articles in European media outlets.
● The network arranged trips to occupied Crimea for European politicians and businessmen, with travel and accommodation covered by Russian state-funded organizations and honoraria apparently offered to some individuals.
● It also helped bring European political figures to Russia to act as election observers, with a 68,000-euro budget allocated to the project.
EuromaidanPress: US announces $2.175 bn worth aid for Ukraine, confirms it includes longer-range rockets https://tinyurl.com/7298vfbj ‘The ground-launched, bomb-tipped rocket Ground Launched Small Diameter Bomb (GLSDB) will double Ukraine’s strike range to 150km’
// Defense budget
The US has announced two new military aid packages for Ukraine worth $2.175 billion in total.
“Pursuant to a delegation of authority from the President, I am authorizing our 31st drawdown of US arms and equipment for Ukraine since August 2021, valued at $425 million. In addition, the US Department of Defense will be committing another $1.75 billion in support for Ukraine under the Ukraine Security Assistance Initiative to help strengthen Ukraine’s military,” US State Secretary Antony Blinken’s press statement reads.
According to the statement, the packages include “critical air defense and counter-drone capabilities,” armored infantry vehicles, Javelin anti-tank missiles, artillery ammunition, and “conventional and long-range rockets for US-provided HIMARS.” Brigadier General Patrick Ryder also told a news briefing at the Pentagon that the packages also include counter artillery and air surveillance radars, communications equipment, PUMA drones, and medical supplies.
According to The Independent, the air defense equipment included in the package are the HAWK air defense firing units.
Reuters adds that Gen. Ryder told that a new rocket included in the US military aid package is the ground-launched, bomb-tipped rocket Ground Launched Small Diameter Bomb (GLSDB). These rockets would double Ukraine’s strike range as the GLSDB’s range is 151 km against the 77 km range of standard HIMARS rockets.
🐣 RT @gtconway3dg [“ghost of George Conway”] Mark Pomerantz: “He demanded absolute loyalty and would go after anyone who crossed him. He seemed always to stay one step ahead of the law … In my career as a lawyer, I had encountered only one other person who touched all of these bases: John Gotti.”
⋙ NYT: Trump Likened to Mob Boss John Gotti in Ex-Prosecutor’s New Book https://tinyurl.com/2p83wevh
// Mark F. Pomerantz, who resigned from the Manhattan district attorney’s office last year, wrote that he had pursued a racketeering case against the former president.
Mark F. Pomerantz, resigned in protest early last year after the newly elected district attorney, Alvin L. Bragg, decided not to seek an indictment of Mr. Trump at that time. By then, the inquiry was more narrowly focused on whether the former president had fraudulently inflated the value of his assets to secure loans.
But for months beforehand, Mr. Pomerantz had mapped out a wide-ranging possible case against the former president under the state racketeering law, according to the soon-to-be published book, “People vs. Donald Trump.” That broader approach was based on the theory that Mr. Trump had presided over a corrupt business empire for years, a previously unreported aspect of the long-running inquiry.
Mr. Pomerantz and his colleagues cast a wide net, examining a host of Trump enterprises — including Trump University, his for-profit real estate education venture, and his family charitable foundation.
“He demanded absolute loyalty and would go after anyone who crossed him. He seemed always to stay one step ahead of the law,” Mr. Pomerantz, a prominent litigator who has prosecuted and defended organized crime cases, writes of Mr. Trump. “In my career as a lawyer, I had encountered only one other person who touched all of these bases: John Gotti, the head of the Gambino organized crime family.” …
🐣 RT @PKouretsos Goodnight Moon,
Goodnight Chinese high-altitude spy balloon,
Goodnight stars,
Goodnight air,
Goodnight persistent overhead reconnaissance everywhere.
NYT: Zelensky insists ‘no one will give away Bakhmut’ https://tinyurl.com/2p9b8bk9 “The challenge for Ukraine, he said, is to resist the increased Russian pressure while waiting for its own forces to gather strength, complete training on new weapons systems and build up its arsenal”
🐣 RT @JosepBorrellF [EU official] Our meeting in Kyiv today underlines the vital importance of our bilateral agenda. It demonstrates that the European dream of the Ukrainian people is becoming reality. ¤ The EU and Ukraine are closer together than ever. Ukraine’s future lies within the EU.
🐣 RT @ZMiST_Ua The great offensive of the Russian Federation will end by April and will not be successful – ISW
⋙ 🐣 RT @ZMiST_Ua Putin probably overestimated the strength of the Russian army again, and therefore its major offensive in the east of Ukraine will end prematurely in the spring rainy season and will not be effective, analysts of the Institute for the Study of War are convinced
🐣 RT @ZMiST_Ua The great offensive of the Russian Federation will end by April and will not be successful – ISW
WaPo, Sean Connelly (Oct): In the 1850s, the Irish faced the same hostility as today’s immigrants https://tinyurl.com/4kbssz44 “The parallels between the era of the American Know-Nothings and the present day are undeniable”
// 10/6/2022; This history provides lessons about why our current immigration panic is misguided
⭕ 2 Feb 2023
NYT: Soaring Death Toll Gives Grim Insight Into Russian Tactics https://tinyurl.com/2p89ytwv “American officials … say the strategic value of Bakhmut simply is not in line with the price Russia has paid”
// Moscow is sending poorly trained recruits, including convicts, to the front lines in eastern Ukraine to pave the way for more seasoned fighters, U.S. and allied officials say.
🐣 RT @BillKristol Continue to supply Ukraine money? ¤ All voters: 63% favor, 34% against.(79% of Democrats, 51% of Republicans, 55% of independents favor) ¤ Continue to supply Ukraine weapons? ¤ All voters: 64% favor, 33% against. (79% of Ds, 55% of Rs, 56% of indies favor)
⋙ FoxNews: Fox News Poll: Bipartisan support for sending funding, weapons to Ukraine https://tinyurl.com/34s8vby6
// Over half of American voters think Ukraine is winning the war against Russia
// 1/27-1/30/2023
🐣 RT @ChuckPfarrer BAKHMUT AXIS /1425 UTC 2 FEB/ RU forces have cut the T-05-13 HWY N of Bakhmut at Blahodatne. UKR staged a disruptive counter-strike against RU areas near Klischiivka. UKR Missile and Artillery targeted RU troop concentrations and a HQ element.
🌎 https://twitter.com/ChuckPfarrer/status/1621151491741618177?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @ChuckPfarrer KREMINNA AXIS /2150 UTC 2 FEB/ During the period 1-2 FEB, RU forces conducted a series of armed reconnaissance and offensive operations. UKR forces report contact W of the P-66 HWY between Ploschanka & Bilohorivka.
🌎 https://twitter.com/ChuckPfarrer/status/1621247758907719682?s=20/photo/1
NYT: Putin Promises Victory in Ukraine as His Forces Strike Key City of Kramatorsk https://tinyurl.com/4vnrf8n8 https://tinyurl.com/2xcan3wm “Russia’s slow gains in the east and its attempts to capture the nearby city of Bakhmut have come at a huge cost in lives, Ukraine says”
⭕ 1 Feb 2023
🐣 RT @ john_sipher “Russia is a whole separate world, submissive to the will, caprice, fantasy of a single man…Contrary to all the law of the human community, Russia moves only in the direction of her own enslavement and the enslavement of neighboring people.” Peter Chaadaev 1854
🐣 RT @WarMonitor3 Ukrainian forces are inflicting significant losses on the most highly trained and capable brigades of the Russian army around Bakhmut, Kreminna and Vuhledar. ¤ In these areas naval brigades, airborne divisions and Spetsnaz units continue to take losses in frontal assaults.
🐣 RT @nytimes On Wednesday, the head of Ukraine’s military administration in Luhansk said that Russia was “trying to advance” from Kreminna and the city of Svatove. Ukrainian officials say they expect the Kremlin to renew its offensive soon in Luhansk and in Donetsk.
Ukrainian soldiers firing shells toward Russian fortifications located inside the city of Kreminna, at the end of December.
⋙ NYT: The town of Kreminna is in the cross hairs in the fight for northern Luhansk https://tinyurl.com/msf7tecu
🐣 RT @ChuckPfarrer KREMINNA AXIS /1230 UTC 1 FEB/ The 0600 brief of the Gen’l Staff reports UKR forces are in contact at Terny, Chervonopopivka & Dibrova. UKR forces have apparently maintained some positions in Kreminna. RU offensive ops aim to secure the east bank of the Zherebets reservoir.
🌎 https://twitter.com/ChuckPfarrer/status/1620762145326788608?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @ ChuckPfarrer BAKHMUT / 2145 UTC 1 FEB/ RU Wagner PMC units conduct offensive operations at Krasna Hora in an attempt to capture the T-05-13 / M-03 HWY junction. S of the city, Wagner & VDV units continue efforts to reach the H-32 Hwy in the vicinity of Ivanivske.
🌎 https://twitter.com/ChuckPfarrer/status/1620899569620983833?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @ ChuckPfarrer FRIENDS LIKE THESE: @abdbozkurt reports that Turkey’s President Erdogan, smarting over a US refusal to provide F-35 fighter jets, now proposes a Turkish alliance with Syria, Russia and Iran. Erdogan has previously voiced doubts about the ascension of Sweden & Finland to NATO.
⋙ 🐣 RT @abdbozkurt #Turkey’s President #Erdogan threatened to make the US pay a price for what he claimed unfulfilled promises on fighter jets, vowed to make an alliance with #Russia, #Iran, and #Syria to bring peace in the region.
WaPo: Amid attacks from DeSantis, AP African American studies course is updated https://tinyurl.com/3mkdkxjy //➔ the revised course outline is significantly improved over the previous one; the course will be a better preparation for serious scholarship in college
// The College Board denies that it watered down the course after criticism from Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R)
⋙ WaPo doc: College Board: Proposed AP African American Studies Course [pdf] https://tinyurl.com/v677caxm 234p
🐣 RT @ChuckPfarrer BAKHMUT /0000 UTC 01 FEB/ RU forces maintain a lodgment across the T-05-13 HWY north of Blahodatne, and are attempting an encirclement of Krasna Hora. UKR forces are in contact east of the T-05-13 / M-03 HWY and continue to hold this important junction.
🌎 https://twitter.com/ChuckPfarrer/status/1620572197256564736?s=20/photo/1
⭕ 31 Jan 2023
🧵 RT @JominiW 1/ Ukraine TVD, 1-31 JAN 23. The first month of 2023 saw a determined effort by the VSRF to finally seize control of Bakhmut in central Donetsk, blunt ZSU advances in Luhansk, and expand territorial control in Zaporizhzhia. #UkraineRussiaWar #RussianArmy #UkraineFrontLines
📌 🌎 https://twitter.com/JominiW/status/1620626767366209537?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @RonFilipkowski Stormy thanks Trump for his confession.
[TextLink:] https://twitter.com/RonFilipkowski/status/1620494501751177217?s=20/photo/1
[Text:] 🐣 RT @StormyDaniels Thanks for just admitting that I was telling the truth about EVERYTHING. Guess I’ll take my “horse face” back to bed now, Mr. former “president”. Btw, that’s the correct way to use Tweet quotation marks. Donald J. Trump @realDonald Trump, With respect to the “Stormy” 💋
⋙ [Text:] 🐣 RT @realDonaldTrump With respect to the “Stormy” nonsense, it is VERY OLD & happened a long time ago, long past the very publicly known & accepted deadline of the Statute of Limitations. I placed full Reliance on the JUDGEMENT & ADVICE OF COUNCIL, who I had every reason to believe had a license to practice law, was competent, and was able to provide solid legal […]
⋙ 🐣 RT @KAFearless Also.. the statute of limitations has NOT run out 😂😂😂
[TextLink:] https://twitter.com/KAFearless/status/1620501720731361280?s=20/photo/1
[Text:] Statute of limitations on Trump over Stormy Daniels I have seen a few posts that claim that AG Bragg allowed the statute of limitations to run out against Trump on the Stormy Daniels case. ¤ That’s what Trump claims, but, as usual, it is a false claim. Under NY law, the statute of limitations can be extended an additional 5 years if the suspect continually lives outside of NY. Trump spent 4 years in DC and has lived in Florida since then. So Bragg is able to pursue the case, still within NY’s statute limits. Scroll down to the end of this article to read what it says about the NY statute of limitations.
🐣 RT @Reuters The euro zone posted an unexpected rise in GDP in the fourth quarter, amid warnings that growth in 2023 is expected to be among the weakest on record https://reut.rs/3Hjdem5
⋙ 🐣 Goldman Sachs now says the US and the EU (except for the UK) may not have a recession this year
TheIntercept (2020): Erik Prince Offered Lethal Services to Sanctioned Russian Mercenary Firm The WagnerGroup https://tinyurl.com/34vwac2f
// 4/13/2020; A business relationship between Prince and Wagner would, in effect, make the prominent Trump administration adviser a subcontractor to the Russian military.
🐣 RT @BlackKnight10k Attorneys General*
[TextLink:] https://twitter.com/BlackKnight10k/status/1620598348888825857?s=20/photo/1
[Text:] 🐣 RT @ @realDonaldTrump The Democrat D.A.’S, Attorney Generals, and Prosecutors are very DANGEROUS to the well being of our Country. Many are deranged and only interested in pleasing the Fake News Media and the Democrat Party. Fair and True Justice means NOTHING in our Country anymore. I am being hit by so many DEMOCRAT Prosecutors, LOCAL, STATE, & FEDERAL, all to keep me from “running,” and all because I am leading by sooo much. The great people of our Country aren’t going to take it. MAKE AMERICA
GREAT AGAIN!
WaPo: GOP report shows plan to ramp up focus on disproven election fraud claims https://tinyurl.com/2p8mv2b8 “The report suggests building a massive new party organization involving state-level ‘election integrity officers’ & intensive new training models for poll workers & observers”
// The report prepared by the Republican National Committee proposes expanding ‘election integrity’ activities in response to perceptions of a rigged process
🐣 RT @NOELreports $1.725 billion will be received from the USAI (weapons from industry, not from current US stock) and used to purchase GLSDB with a 150km range. No delivery time has been announced. The US has rejected requests for 300km range ATACMS missiles, writes Reuters.
⋙⋙ 🐣 RT @NOELreports The United States reportedly is readying a $2.2 billion package of military aid for Ukraine that is expected to include longer-range rockets for the first time, and other munitions and weapons, two U.S. officials briefed on the matter told Reuters on Tuesday.
⋙ 🐣 RT @Frank68332165 Finally! goes further than HIMARS and just as precise. The same launcher as HIMARS can be used.
◕ https://twitter.com/Frank68332165/status/1620569598868484099?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @Biz_Ukraine_Mag Former US President Donald Trump says he trusts Russian dictator Vladimir Putin over America’s own intelligence services
[TextLink:] https://twitter.com/Biz_Ukraine_Mag/status/1620561715305017344?s=20/photo/1
[Text:] 🐣 RT @realDonaldTrump [ts] Remember in Helsinki when a 3rd rate reporter asked me, essentially, who I trusted more, President Putin of Russia, or our “Intelligence” lowlifes. My instinct at the time was that we had really bad people in the form of James Comey, McCabe (whose wife was being helped out by Crooked Hillary while Crooked was under investigation!), Brennan, Peter Strzok (whose wife is at the SEC) & his lover, Lisa Page. Now add McGonigal & other slime to the list. Who would you choose, Putin or the Misfits?
⋙ 🐣 Brennen, Comey, Strzok, McCabe and Page are all good ret. FBI leadership or agents targeted by Trump. McGonigal is now in hot water for taking $$ from and working with Deripaska and acting in ways that may have helped get Trump elected over Hillary Clinton.
🐣 RT @ChuckPfarrer KREMINNA /1325 UTC 31 JAN/ Two RU offensive probes were undertaken during the period 29-30 JAN. The first, north of Kreminna, was repulsed by UKR east of Terny. RU forces retreated with losses. A second RU thrust on the O-0528 HWY was apparently also broken up by UKR forces.
🌎 https://twitter.com/ChuckPfarrer/status/1620409645801283584?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @NOELreports Currently, approximately 326,000 Russian soldiers are fighting in Ukraine says head of intelligence Budanov in The Washington Post.
⋙ WaPo: Ukraine intel chief predicted Russia’s war. He says Crimea will be retaken https://tinyurl.com/yc7x9zxr
It was Feb. 23 — the night before Russia launched its war on Ukraine — and Budanov had staked his career on being the rare Ukrainian official who was convinced that Russia was about to attack and attempt to capture Kyiv, the capital. ¤ He and his wife stared at the clock that night, anxious that Budanov could soon be out of work if all did not go as he had loudly predicted to Ukraine’s skeptical political leadership. …
Eleven months later, the 37-year-old Budanov’s words carry serious weight with President Volodymyr Zelensky and others in Kyiv. In Ukrainian political circles, he is respected as the one person — along with U.S. and British intelligence — who correctly warned months in advance what Russia was planning. ¤ At the time, he was largely brushed off. Most other Ukrainian government and military officials expected Russia’s invasion to be limited to the eastern part of the country rather than a full scale, three-pronged attack.
Budanov’s forecast for this year is that Russia will focus on occupying more territory in the eastern Donetsk and Luhansk regions. A renewed offensive from its forces stationed north of Ukraine, in Belarus, is unlikely, he said, and just an attempt to distract and divide Kyiv’s troops. He also said that “we must do everything to ensure that Crimea returns home by summer.”
Asked if he thinks Ukrainian troops reaching Crimea, which Russia invaded and annexed illegally in 2014, could trigger Russian President Vladimir Putin to use a nuclear weapon, Budanov said: “This is not true. And Crimea will be returned to us. I’ll tell you more: It all started in Crimea in 2014, and it will all end there.”
Budanov’s other claims have included that Putin is terminally ill with cancer and has multiple body doubles. “It’s an open question if it’s the real Putin now,” Budanov said. He is so confident in his intelligence that he occasionally opens a folder to give exact figures — “approximately 326,000 Russian forces” fighting in Ukraine now or that Russia has just 9 percent of its stock of Kalibr long-range missiles left.
Budanov’s quick rise to becoming one of the youngest generals in Ukraine’s history accelerated in August 2016, when a lieutenant colonel in Russia’s Federal Security Service, or FSB, was killed in Crimea, allegedly by Ukrainian saboteurs. Budanov was believed to have been one of the Ukrainian special operators involved, working behind enemy lines, and he was later awarded Ukraine’s “Order of Courage” for undisclosed operations. In 2020, then just 34, he was named head of Ukraine’s Main Directorate of Intelligence, or GUR. …
He remains a target for the Kremlin. After an explosion on the Crimean Bridge in October, Moscow named Budanov and other GUR agents as the culprits. ¤ Ukrainian officials, including Budanov, have not publicly claimed responsibility for the bridge attack or others deep into Russian territory. … ¤ “What’s next?” Budanov asked, repeating a request that he serve up further predictions. “Ukraine’s victory,” he said. “I’m not saying anything new.
🐣 RT @MarQs__ The US is readying a $2.2 billion package of military aid for Ukraine that is expected to include longer-range rockets for the first time, and other munitions and weapons, two U.S. officials briefed on the matter told Reuters
⋙ YahooNews/Reuters: U.S. readies $2.2 bln Ukraine aid package with longer-range weapons [⁉️] – sources https://tinyurl.com/3k5v7p6n
WaPo, Manuel Roig-Franzia: A conservative judge helped stop Trump on Jan. 6. He wants to finish the job https://tinyurl.com/bdhzpm52
// Michael Luttig, one of the most celebrated legal minds of his generation, never ascended to the Supreme Court. But many think the retired jurist played a far more consequential role for the nation. Now he envisions ‘the beginning of the end of Donald Trump.’
🐣 Slavery in many forms has been the rule not the exception through human history & prehistory. Oppression of one group by another is the natural state of nature. This makes the aspirations of the Enlightenment & US founding principles, however imperfectly fulfilled, remarkable
🐣 RT @NOELreports According to German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, any peace negotiations should be conditional on Russia withdrawing its troops from the territory of Ukraine. In addition he said there can be negotiations with Ukraine only, not behind their backs or on behalf of them.
⋙ 🐣 Stated US policy: “Nothing about them without them”
⭕ 30 Jan 2023
WaPo, Boris Johnson: Putin has paved the way for Ukrainian membership in NATO https://tinyurl.com/nevv2x34 “Ukrainians should be given everything they need to finish this war, as quickly as possible, and we should begin the process of admitting Ukraine to NATO, and begin it now”
🐣 RT @MuellerSheWrote YES! @JudiciaryDems are going to look into the Durham misconduct. Please ask Wray, Garland, Barr, and Durham to testify before your committee, @SenatorDurbin. We deserve to know why Durham has not been fired for cause, or investigated himself. [TheHill:] https://tinyurl.com/2p8mneyc
⋙⋙ 🧵 RT @MuellerSheWrote [1/27] THREAD: Did the Durham probe cross a line from prosecutorial discretion to misconduct, or even criminal misconduct? I believe this new reporting is something @TheJusticeDept needs to address – either by press conference or testimony to @HouseJudiciary or both. 1/
📌 https://twitter.com/MuellerSheWrote/status/1618974945639530496?s=20
⋙ 🐣 RT @AshaRangappa_ How has Garland been letting this idiotic investigation go on this long?? I can only imagine that he thought shutting it down would make him look partisan. Now Durham is going to write his Deep State conspiracy report for his fans.🙄
WaPo, Aaron Blake: The crimes Trump could be charged with in Fulton County, Georgia https://tinyurl.com/h47z876h
According to legal experts, including a group at the Brookings Institution and Georgia State University law professor Clark D. Cunningham, a few could be in play. Below is a look at the various crimes that could be cited, along with the past conduct pointing in that direction and how compelling the publicly available evidence is.
● Solicitation to commit election fraud
● Conspiracy to commit election fraud
● Intentional interference with performance of election duties
● Interference with primaries and elections/filing false documents
● False statements
● Racketeering
🐣 RT @ChuckPfarrer KREMINNA AXIS /1350 UTC 30 JAN/ A growing concentration of RU forces are centered at Kreminna. These RU are assessed to be preparing offensive ops, likely a thrust west on the O-0528 HWY axis. The goal would appear to be the capture of Dibrova, Zarichne and ultimately Lyman.
🌎 https://twitter.com/ChuckPfarrer/status/1620048165323030528?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @ChuckPfarrer BAKHMUT /2040 UTC 30 JAN/ RU units have made significant progress in isolating Bakhmut. Advancing from Soledar, RU forces have crossed the T-05-13 HWY north of Blahodatne. This salient has severed Bakhmut’s principal north-south Line of Communications & Supply (LOCS).
🌎 https://twitter.com/ChuckPfarrer/status/1620156596641992704?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @harrylitman Very big development. The Stormy Daniels hush money case that DA Bragg previously mothballed is now being presented to a grand jury. via @NYTimes
⋙ NYT: Manhattan Prosecutors Will Begin Presenting Trump Case to Grand Jury https://tinyurl.com/2p93wcfn
// The Manhattan district attorney’s decision represents a dramatic escalation of the inquiry, and sets the case on a path toward criminal charges against the former president.
WaPo: Some Democrats are worried about Harris’s political prospects https://tinyurl.com/4a3nuvar Plagued by staff turnover, communications missteps and a number of “resets,” is Harris an asset in 2024 and a viable candidate to lead the party to a Democratic presidency in 2028?
// At a pivotal point in Biden’s term, many party activists are not sure the vice president has shown she is up to winning the top job
NYT, David Firestone: Bill Barr’s Image Rehab Is Kaput https://tinyurl.com/t4vv8pke //➔ The House Committee on the “weaponization of government” should call on him to testify and see which version of Bill Barr appears
Former Attorney General William Barr has spent the last year in a desperate salvage operation for what’s left of his legal and ethical reputation. During his 22 months in office, he allowed his Justice Department to become a personal protection racket for his boss, Donald Trump, and left prosecutors, the F.B.I. and other law enforcement officials subject to the worst impulses of the president. But then, in his 2022 memoir, Mr. Barr did an about-face, bashing Mr. Trump for lacking a presidential temperament and singling out his “self-indulgence and lack of self-control.”
In the book, he urged Republicans not to renominate Mr. Trump in 2024, accusing the former president of going “off the rails” with his stolen-election claims by preferring the counsel of “sycophants” and “whack jobs” to that of his real advisers. Clearly concerned that history was paying attention, he was even stronger in his videotaped testimony to the Jan. 6 committee, loosing a variety of barnyard epithets and bitter insults to describe Mr. Trump’s legal strategy. He said the president had become “detached from reality” and was doing a disservice to the nation. …
But if Mr. Barr harbored any fantasy that he might yet be credited with a wisp of personal integrity for standing up for democracy, that hope was thoroughly demolished on Thursday when The Times published the details of what really happened when Mr. Barr launched a counter-investigation into the origins of Robert Mueller’s report on the 2016 Trump campaign’s ties to Russia. The reporting demonstrated a staggering abuse of the special counsel system and the attorney general’s office, all in a failed attempt by Mr. Barr to rewrite the sour truths of Mr. Trump’s history.
It was bad enough when, in March 2019, Mr. Barr tried to mislead the public into thinking the forthcoming Mueller report exonerated Mr. Trump, when in fact the report later showed just how strong the links were between the campaign and the Russian government, which worked to help defeat Hillary Clinton. A few months later Mr. Barr assigned John Durham, a federal prosecutor in Connecticut, as a special counsel to investigate Mr. Mueller’s investigation, hoping to prove Mr. Trump’s wild public allegations that the federal intelligence officials had helped instigate the claims of Russian interference to damage him. …
When the Justice Department’s own inspector general prepared to issue a report saying that, while the F.B.I. made some ethical mistakes, the investigation was legitimate and not politically motivated, Mr. Durham lobbied him to drop the finding. When that effort was unsuccessful, Mr. Barr reverted to his usual pattern of trying to spin the report before it was issued, disagreeing with its finding before it was even out. Mr. Durham then followed up with a similar statement, shattering the clear department principle of staying silent about a current investigation.
The two men even traveled to Britain and Italy together, pressuring government agencies there to disclose what they told U.S. spy agencies about the Trump-Russia connections. That infuriated officials of those governments, who said they had done nothing of the kind, and no evidence was ever found that they had. But on one of those trips, The Times reported, Italian officials gave the men a tip which, people familiar with the matter said, linked Mr. Trump to possible serious financial crimes. (It is not clear what those crimes were, and more reporting will be necessary to reveal the details.) Did Mr. Barr follow protocol and turn the tip over to regular prosecutors in his department for investigation? No. Instead, he gave it to his traveling companion, Mr. Durham, who opened a criminal investigation but never made it public and never filed charges, and when word began to trickle out that a suspected crime had been discovered, he falsely let the world think it had something to do with his original goal.
The Durham investigation, of course, has never presented any evidence that the F.B.I. or intelligence agencies committed any misconduct in the course of the Russia investigation, bitterly disappointing Mr. Barr and especially his patron, Mr. Trump, who had assured his supporters for months that it would produce something big. Desperate for some kind of success, Mr. Durham indicted Michael Sussmann, a lawyer who had worked for Democrats in their dealings with the F.B.I., over the objections of two prosecutors on the special counsel team who said the case was far too thin and who later left the staff.
Mr. Sussmann was acquitted last May of lying to the bureau, and the jury forewoman told reporters that bringing the case had been unwise. Mr. Barr later tried to justify the trial by saying it served another purpose in exposing the Clinton campaign’s starting the Russia narrative as a “dirty trick.” The trial did nothing of the kind … .
One of the other casualties of this deceitful crusade was the deliberate damage it did to the reputations of the F.B.I., the intelligence agencies and officials in Mr. Barr’s own department. All of these agencies have had many problematic episodes in their pasts, but there is no evidence in this case that they willfully tried to smear Mr. Trump and his campaign with false allegations of collusion. They were trying to do their jobs, on which the nation’s security depends, but because they got in Mr. Trump’s way, Mr. Barr aided in degrading their image through a deep-state conspiracy theory before an entire generation of Trump supporters. Republicans in the House are launching a new snipe hunt for proof that these same government offices were “weaponized” against conservatives, an expedition that is likely to be no more effective than Mr. Durham’s and Mr. Barr’s. …
🐣 Does Russia have an inferiority complex? With about 60% of the population of Russia, Germany has about 240% of Russia’s GDP. Other statistics:
GDP Pop.
$. 1.8Tr 143M Russia
$ 32.4Tr 959M NATO
$ 23.3Tr 332M US
$ 16.6Tr 448M EU ($4.3Tr, 83M Germany)
⭕ 29 Jan 2023
WaPo: Black Memphis police spark dialogue on systemic racism in the U.S. https://tinyurl.com/6an2yubu
// By Robert Klemko, Silvia Foster-Frau and Emily Davies
My Comment: Police in this country kill a disproportionately high percentage of Blacks compared to Whites. For Blacks, about 10% more are killed than would be expected based on population. For Whites, it’s about 15% fewer. Metropolitan areas with the highest levels of police killings cluster in the Southeast.
But what worries me most is that police killings in this country are at least 10 TIMES what they are in other developed countries. In the US in 2019, there were 33.5 police killings per 10 million people. In Canada, there were 10, in European countries 1 or 2, in Japan 0.
My hunch is that focusing entirely on systemic racism may blind us to other factors, including “toxic” police culture, male “pack” behavior, the militarization of police departments, and the guns, the guns, the guns.
🐣 RT @OneLoveNLAW “The Russians only understand our strength” – Petr Pavel is hot and based AF
🖼 https://twitter.com/OneLoveNLAW/status/1619824769955934209?s=20/photo/1
JerusalemPost: Drone attack on Iranian weapons factory was phenomenal success – sources https://tinyurl.com/25fscefy “Multiple large drones with significant amounts of explosives were involved and hit their targets with pinpoint accuracy” ~ Mossad?
// The Islamic Republic claimed that the drone attack had failed and only cause minor roof damage.
🐣 RT @lindacosylife Blinken: All options available to prevent Iran from acquiring a nuclear weapon https://ara.tv/4ttvb This is how the war machine uses propaganda. Tell Iranian people that we are worried about their freedom and that we are going to help them get rid of their government. Chaos
⋙ Al-Arabia: Blinken: All options available to prevent Iran from acquiring a nuclear weapon https://tinyurl.com/mr2swsu3 “Blinken highlighted US support to Iranian people, stressing that the decision of ‘regime change’ remains ultimately up to the [Iranian] people”
// US Secretary of State, Anthony Blinken, said on Sunday that Iran has rejected the current proposal
US Secretary of State, Anthony Blinken, said on Sunday that Iran has rejected the current proposal to return to the nuclear agreement, adding that Washington still believes that diplomacy is the most effective way to deal with the Iranian nuclear file [sic]. ¤ Blinken said in an exclusive interview with Al-Arabiya that Iranian youth are defending their basic rights in the face of Tehran’s regime, adding that US focus now is on the Iranian regime’s suppression of its people in the streets.
‘We support the Iranian people’
Blinken highlighted US support to Iranian people, stressing that the decision of “regime change” remains ultimately up to the people. He added: “The Iranian regime is convincing its people of the idea that the US wants regime change.” ¤ In addition, he stressed that Iran supports Russia in its war against Ukraine and provides it with drones and other weapons, expressing his concern about Tehran providing Moscow with drones and missiles.
‘All options are available’
He stressed that US President Joe Biden stressed his determination that Iran not acquire nuclear weapons, explaining that all options are available on the table to prevent Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon. ¤ He pointed out that Washington has punished all those responsible for repression in Iran, stressing that his country continues to search for ways to disrupt Iran’s malign activities.
‘Deterring aggressors’
Blinken also said that the main goal of US military efforts was deterring aggressors, specifically the US military exercises with Israel. ¤ He announced that he would hold talks with the Israelis and Palestinians to reduce the escalating tensions.
‘Important relationships’
As for the Saudi-American ties, Blinken said that the relations between his country and the Kingdom have been important and ongoing for decades, noting that Saudi Arabia has provided great support to Ukraine in the face of the Russian war. ¤ He said that Saudi Arabia voted against the Russian war in Ukraine before the UN General Assembly, stressing the need for relations with Saudi Arabia to reflect common interests and values.
He also said: “We were worried about the OPEC+ decision to cut oil production.” ¤ He reaffirmed that Washington is working with Riyadh to end the war in Yemen.
🐣 RT @NewVoiceUkraine Blasts erupted at five military sites across Iran at night on Jan. 29, with the Iranian Defense Ministry saying there had been a drone attack on at least one of its facilities.
🧵 RT @RitchieTorres Iran is the leading aggressor of the Middle East; the leading state sponsor of terrorism in the world; and a longstanding oppressor of its own people. ¤ The Iranian regime has been shaken to the core by a revolution led by powerful women.
📌 💽 https://twitter.com/RitchieTorres/status/1619692061959262210?s=20/photo/1
[ThreadReader:] https://tinyurl.com/2p9ferm
The women in Iran, who are risking their lives in confronting a monstrous and murderous regime, are among the most courageous freedom fighters in the world.
The United States must stand with our Iranian sisters in their fearless fight for freedom. ¤ On September 13th, 2021, Masha Amini was brutally beaten to death by the Iran’s Orwellian morality police merely for not wearing a head covering.
Out of the tragedy of Masha’s murder came a spontaneous groundswell of thousands of Iranian women rising up for their freedom, some removing their head coverings and cutting their hair as a poignant form of protest.
The revolution there reminds us that the future of Iran does not belong to a regime whose malevolence and obsolescence have become too glaring to ignore.
Iran’s future belong to its people led by its fearless formidable female freedom fighters. ¤ The vision of a free and democratic Iran is an unrealized dream whose time has come, whose realization is long overdue.
🐣 RT @ABCWorldNews: Drone strikes hit several targets, including a munitions factory inside Iran, and according to the Wall Street Journal, Israel may have been behind the attacks. It comes amid renewed tensions in the Middle East. @lamahasan has more. https://abcn.ws/2XvP3JQ
🐣 RT @ChuckPfarrer BAKHMUT /1445 UTC 29 JAN/ A RU attack was broken up short of the H-32 HWY. UKR staged a disruptive raid against RU rear areas near Andriivka. UKR Missile & Artillery targeted RU troop concentrations, EW stations and air defense complexes. UKR supply lines threatened.
🌎 https://twitter.com/ChuckPfarrer/status/1619705612312674304?s=20/photo/1
WSJ: Israel Strikes Iran Amid International Push to Contain Tehran https://tinyurl.com/e7kp2eta “Israel’s latest strike comes as Israeli and American officials are discussing new ways to combat Iran’s destabilizing operations, including its deepening military cooperation with Russia”
// Israeli, American officials discuss new ways to combat Iranian operations
Israel’s latest strike comes as Israeli and American officials are discussing new ways to combat Iran’s destabilizing operations, including its deepening military cooperation with Russia. ¤ Central Intelligence Agency Director William Burns made an unannounced trip to Israel last week to discuss Iran and other regional issues, according to people familiar with his visit. Secretary of State Antony Blinken is scheduled to arrive in Israel on Monday to continue the U.S.-Israel talks about Iran and other regional issues.
Last week, the U.S. and Israel carried out their largest-ever joint military exercise involving more than 7,500 personnel from both countries and a series of scenarios to test their ability to take out air-defense systems and refuel jet planes—both of which could be key elements of a major military strike on Iran.
WaPo/AP: Iran says drone attack targets defense facility in Isfahan https://tinyurl.com/56wkk3dk “Bomb-carrying drones targeted an Iranian defense factory in the central city of Isfahan overnight, authorities said early Sunday”
🐣 RT @Flash_news_ua ⚡️ The events in Iran are the consequences of their policies, said Yuriy Ihnat, the spokesman of the Verkhovna Rada of the Armed Forces of Ukraine.
🚫 🐣 RT @manamuntu Iran Nuclear site totally destroyed! ¤ This video is from yesterday night,the National Nuclear Center of Iran has been bombed by NATO which caused an Earthquake of 5.5 magnitude in the nearby areas. This is a revenge attack by NATO, Iran supplied drones to Russia despite warnings!
// waiting confirm
🐣 RT @KorsasErik The list of objects in #Iran on which #missile strikes were carried out has become known
-Headquarters of the IRGC
IRGC Special ForcesBase “Quds”
-Ammunition and UAV Production Center
-Refinery.
-Weapons factory.
-Military bases in #Hamadan and #Keredzh
#iranunderattack #Iranian
💽 https://twitter.com/KorsasErik/status/1619582453328523265?s=20/photo/1 -4
⭕ 28 Jan 2023
🐣 RT @AnonOpsSE Internet services suspended across the #Iran after multiple drone strikes on Iranian cities Tehran, Karaj, Narmak, Hamadan, Isfahan, Khoy, Azarshahr and Tabriz. Drone factories and other military installations targeted. Irani fighter jets are hovering in own sky.
🐣 RT @ExScientia_Vera Dear Iran & the Supreme Leader of the Islamic Revolution: ¤ You were advised by the greatest military power in the world not to assist Russia in its genocidal war against Ukraine. You fucked around anyway, and find out you did.
💽 https://twitter.com/ExScientia_Vera/status/1619532496760360960?s=20/photo/1
// Lloyd Austin: On Iran providing military support to Russia is “We think … it’s a really, really bad idea. And we’ll leave it at that”
🐣 RT @noclador The mullah regime in Iran is one of the most brutal dictatorships in the world and it constantly exports it’s vile ideology, brutality, and cruelty to other nations. ¤ To the nation bombing this regime tonight: thank you! Please continue!
🐣 RT @TreasChest Residents of the capital of Iran rejoice at attacks on military facilities and shout from their windows “Death to the dictator, death to Khamenei.”
🐣 RT @ ChuckPfarrer ISRAELI AIR STRIKES? Jason Jay Smart @officejjsmart reports that several aerospace / drone manufacturing plants in Iran have been attacked. Iran’s Telegram channels claim that Israeli aircraft have been reported over several cities in the Islamic Republic.
⋙ 🐣 RT @ officejjsmart Iran 🇮🇷 is being attacked. A number of weapons / drones factories have been struck. ¤ Iranian 🇮🇷 Telegram indicates that Israeli 🇮🇱 Air Force has been seen over multiple Iranian cities. ¤ Seems Russia’s 🇷🇺 drone supplier, to attack Ukraine 🇺🇦, may be going out of business!!! 👍👍👍
⋙⋙ 🐣 to date, Israel hasn’t shown much interest in helping out Ukraine; Zelensky has complained about it multiple times ¤ so what changed?
🐣 RT @ igorsushko 🚨 #Iran: What appears may have been a bunker-buster strike against an underground weapons factory in Iran was followed by a significant earthquake in the area.
🐣 RT @igorsushko Overnight in #Iran, in addition to strikes on oil refineries, munitions manufacturers, and multiple military bases, extreme-precision strikes reportedly eliminated individual human targets. Iran has been supplying weapons and munitions to #Russia for use against #Ukraine.
🐣 RT @davidfrum Seriously, no one country operating alone would have dared a strike like this. Whoever was the tip of the spear – it’s a world coalition acting to stop Iran from supplying Russia with weapons of atrocity and genocide. Holocaust Remembrance Day. It’s fitting.
⋙ 🐣 do you have a source, or it this conjecture? ¤ I trust your writing, David, but this seems like quite a branch to go out on
⋙ 🐣 RT @seybertooth It was obviously Israel and of course they “dare”, they know they can do what they want under the unlimited cover from their sugar-daddy America (and the veto protection in the UN). ¤ I’m no fan of Israel’s militarily aggression but in this case it is justified and convenient.
⋙⋙ 🐣 Israel has a way of doing things the US disapproves of and then expecting the US to back them up ¤ I did read Blinken will be paying them a visit soon; the very awkwardness of that implies to me the US didn’t know ~ if, that is, it was Israel
NYT: How an Oligarch May Have Recruited the F.B.I. Agent Who Investigated Him https://tinyurl.com/3u292sbx
// The bureau tried to court Oleg Deripaska, a Russian aluminum magnate, as an informant. Instead, one of its own top agents may have ended up working for him.
TheDrive: Iran Claims It Has Come Under Drone Attack Following Explosions https://tinyurl.com/bdz4z6u2
// The Iranian Ministry of Defense claims drones struck a facility in Isfahan as reports of blasts in other cities cause alarm.
🐣 RT @KateGoesTech 🇺🇸 reconnaissance planes have entered 🇮🇷 controlled region of Syria 🇸🇾 ¤ It’s happening
🐣 RT @JasonMBrodsky Targeting #Iran’s drone or nuclear program are possible explanations concerning attack on the MODAFL facility in Esfahan. #Israel in 2021 warned Tehran was training proxies at the Kashan Air Base, north of Esfahan. That base also made a cameo appearance in training Russians. 1/3
⋙ 🐣 RT @JasonMBrodsky Although the MODAFL facility was not in same location as the Kashan Air Base, that general area is of interest relating to the drone program. Of course Esfahan also has interesting facilities related to Iran’s nuclear program. 2/3
⋙ 🐣 RT @JasonMBrodsky In 2022, Iran informed IAEA that it intended to produce centrifuge rotor tubes and bellows at a new location in Esfahan following the attack on the TESA Karaj complex. So these are some potential reasons, but we’ll have to wait for more details. 3/3
🐣 RT @NewsBreakingX 🇮🇷 Iran. Situation at the moment
▪️ A fire at a factory for the production of ammunition and UAVs.
▪️ Fire at an oil refinery.
▪️ Fire at the weapons factory.
▪️ Explosions at the military base in Hamadan and Keredzh.
▪️ Explosions on some military units.
🐣 RT @k_sonin Whoever is behind the attack on the Iranian factory that produces Shahed drones tonight, I hope it will help not only to dwarf Iran’s military cooperation with Russia, but bring freedom for Iranians closer.
⋙ 🐣 RT @MrFukkew The factory that produces ammo and Shahed kamikaze drones is hit by a kamikaze drone in Isfahan, Iran. Oops! #Iran #Ukraine #Russia #UkraineRussiaWar️
💽 https://twitter.com/MrFukkew/status/1619481702191202305?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @Neighbour88 David, it’s precision missile strikes at several facilities within a very short timeframe. ¤ I’ll give you one guess. ¤ Iran are now in this war whether they like it or not. ¤ Russia cannot protect themselves, never mind their abettors.
⋙ 🐣 Iran made its choice
🐣 RT @WernerDThomas Turkie, Azerbaijan, Israel, Emirates, Saudies, Taliban, everybody is fed up with the gangster Mullahs
🐣 RT @ NOELreports Local authorities confirm the explosions at the munitions factory in Isfahan, — IRIB News ¤ Iranian media also reported drone attacks on military facilities in the Iranian cities of Tabriz, Hamadan and Karaj.
🐣 RT @stavridisj So happy to see my dear friend and former NATO colleague, Peter Pavel, become the leader of the Czech Republic. He is a strong voice for freedom, democracy, and trans Atlantic alliance!
🐣 RT @OlgaNYC1211 Whoa! Multiple blasts reported in Iran. There were explosions at a military factory in the city of Isfahan from a drone attack ¤ Iran’s Defense Ministry says there was an ammunition depot was hit. Meanwhile, Iranian drones continue to kill Ukrainians
🐣 RT @anneapplebaum The new Czech president is a former general who supports Ukraine, has broad Nato experience and wants his country firmly anchored in the democratic world. The Czechs have just made an important civilizational choice.
// Petr Pavel @general_pavel
🐣 RT @front_ukrainian 🇺🇸✈️ The Pentagon insists on sending F-16s to Ukraine, – Politico. ¤ A group of military officials are quietly pushing the Pentagon to approve sending F-16 fighter jets to Ukraine to help our country defend itself, according to three people familiar with the discussions.
🐣 RT @front_ukrainian ⚡️🇺🇦Ukraine is conducting accelerated negotiations with Western countries on the transfer of aviation and long-range missiles to Kyiv, said Mikhail Podolyak, adviser to the head of the office of the President of Ukraine.
🐣 RT @stavridisj This is the right thing to do. Tanks will be helpful, better aircraft will be decisive via #politico
⋙ Politico [EU]: At the Pentagon, push to send F-16s to Ukraine picks up steam https://politi.co/3WJWKcC
// Kyiv has renewed its request for modern fighters in recent days after the U.S. and Germany approved transferring tanks.
🐣 RT @lindyli The ex-girlfriend of Russia-funded FBI agent McGonigal stayed at Giuliani’s home for an extended period
Giuliani knew AHEAD of time that Comey was gonna sabotage Clinton
Nothing to see here ¤ Just traitors literally in bed with each other & prostituting themselves to Daddy Putin
⋙ 🐣 Giuliani bragged they had something ‘up their sleeve’ and it had to do with players in the FBI
🐣 RT @SkinnerPm I don’t know how I can continue to be a police officer in America. I do know I don’t want to right now. Law enforcement in America is the scattered good will of individual officers in a change-resistant structure with fundamental principles & philosophies that are utterly rotten
⋙ 🐣 you might consider writing a book; it would be a good book ♡
🐣 RT @MuellerSheWrote Imagine if Jack Smith met with Garland weekly to sip bourbon, and then asked the DoJ Inspector General to lie in a report about his investigation into Jeffrey Clark, then found Biden committed a crime but covered it up. Because that’s what Durham did.
🐣 RT @polialertcom Man Who Assaulted Capitol Police Officer Brian Sicknick Sentenced To 80 Months In Prison
🐣 RT @BernieSanders While working families struggled to pay outrageously high gas prices last year, Chevron made a record $35.5 billion in profits & will spend $75 billion to manipulate its stock price in order to make the rich even richer. We must ban stock buybacks & enact a windfall profits tax.
🐣 RT @ChuckPfarrer BAKHMUT /1310 UTC 28 JAN/ UKR troops are engaged in the urban area of Krasna Hora as RU tactical units attempt to take the T-05-13 / M-03 HWY junction. South of the city, the UKR Gen’l Staff reports two RU attacks were repelled S of Ivanivske.
🌎 https://twitter.com/ChuckPfarrer/status/1619319943375523840?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @ChuckPfarrer KREMINNA AXIS /1325 UTV 28 JAN/ RU launched attacks across the P-66 HWY, engaging UKR troops at Novosadove & Chervonopopivka. UKR is a reported to have rebuffed these sallies. UKR air defense downed a RU ‘SuperCam’ recon UAV, as well as an Mi-8 helicopter.
🌎 https://twitter.com/ChuckPfarrer/status/1619325559238172672?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @ZelenskyyUa We share 🇮🇱 pain after the terrorist attacks in Jerusalem. Among the victims is a 🇺🇦 woman. Sincere condolences to the victims’ families. The crimes were cynically committed on the Intl Holocaust Remembrance Day. Terror must have no place in today’s world. Neither in 🇮🇱 nor in 🇺🇦
🐣 RT @ TODAYshow A New Jersey man was sentenced to almost seven years in prison for assaulting Capitol police officer Brian Sicknick during the Jan. 6 riots.
🐣 RT @pewglobal Majorities say voting, helping reduce climate change effects, staying informed, getting COVID-19 vaccination are important for being a good member of society https://pewrsr.ch/3ZZygyM
◕ https://twitter.com/pewglobal/status/1619280880500985858?s=20/photo/1
⭕ 27 Jan 2023
🐣 RT @theworldindex World’s Top 10 Richest People:
1.🇫🇷Bernard Arnault: $190b
2.🇺🇸Elon Musk: $167b
3.🇺🇸Jeff Bezos: $126b
4.🇺🇸B Gates: $112b
5.🇺🇸W Buffet: $108b
6.🇺🇸Larry Ellison: $101b
7.🇮🇳Gautam Adani: $93b
8.🇺🇸Larry Page: $92b
9.🇺🇸Steve Ballmer: $89b
10.🇺🇸Sergey Brin: $88b
(Bloomberg Jan 27, 22)
🐣 RT @UkraineAidOps Today is International #HolocaustRemembranceDay, a day to remember the past and reaffirm our commitment to the promise #NeverAgain
Genocide once again haunts and we must take a stand against it! Will you join us?
⋙ 🎹 RT @michael_brodsk The Ukrainian Army choir singing Eli Eli at #BabynJar on the #HolocaustMemorialDay
💽 https://twitter.com/michael_brodsk/status/1618953814257860608?s=20/photo/1
piano
🐣 RT @Tendar Russian pundits are in panic mode and they have all reason to be. What amazes me is that how this conversation between Solovyov and Alex Kots reflects the obvious. Russia is in huge trouble and they feel it maybe better than anyone in Kremlin.#Ukraine
💙 ⋙ DailyBeast, Julia Davis: Putin’s No. 1 Cheerleader Rips into Russia’s War Failures https://tinyurl.com/2p8aw54y
// Putin’s favorite propagandist (Vladimir Solovyov) lost it on his latest TV show, blasting the failed tactics and strategy that’s left Russia losing in Ukraine and facing worse to come.
Top Russian propagandist Vladimir Solovyov has been spending his weekends on the frontlines in order to support and promote Russia’s stuttering invasion of Ukraine. Unfortunately for the Kremlin, all that time being confronted by the grim reality is teaching Solovyov just how badly this war is going. ¤ And he’s not happy about it.
In a wild rant on Thursday, Solovyov attacked the overall strategy, claimed the Russian Army was failing miserably to suppress their enemies, and said he had first-hand evidence of foolish tactical errors on the frontline.
During his show Full Contact, Solovyov was raging about the recent announcement that Ukraine would soon be getting Abrams and Leopard-2 tanks from NATO countries. The host started his monologue with a deep sigh, asking, “So, we lived long enough to see this?” He urged the audience not to trust the numbers of the tanks slated for the upcoming deliveries, predicting they will send even more: “They will deliver everything. I’ve been saying it for a while, these bastards will also rehabilitate Hitler in our lifetime… this is where everything is going… WWIII is underway and the West has returned to its Nazi roots. Germany got tired of concealing its Nazi nature and America finally openly acknowledged its own Nazi ways.”
Calling Americans “conniving liars,” Solovyov said that their arrogance is Russia’s own fault: “We aren’t creating any threats against them. We aren’t conducting strikes against New York, we aren’t banging Washington, we aren’t threatening Miami, we aren’t doing anything to endanger Americans. They blew up our pipelines, we just wiped our face off. They’re delivering heavy tanks, we’re wiping our face off. Stop talking about red lines! It’s a totally empty phrase that doesn’t mean a thing!”
Enraged, Solovyov screamed: “Berlin, Paris, Madrid, London, Washington should be on fire! The capitals of Nazi countries who made a decision to go to war with Russia… Why wasn’t Kyiv wiped off the face of the earth after the Nazi nation of Ukraine conducted a strike against our strategic aviation base? Stop resorting to empty, worthless words!”
The host went on to claim: “Strikes are being carried out against our cities! Against our land! Russian soldiers are perishing! Russian people are dying! Nazis are rejoicing! How are we planning to respond? By howling that avoiding nuclear war is the most important thing? Then why the heck do we have a stockpile of tactical and strategic nuclear weapons? To be afraid to use it? So that big decorated generals would gasp, “Do you want a nuclear war?” Do you want the destruction of Russia with conventional weapons, of which NATO countries have 3 and a half times more than we do?”
Solovyov yelled that destroying Ukraine’s infrastructure was insufficient. He demanded to know: “Why do Odesa, Kharkiv, Dnipropetrovsk [Dnipro] still exist?” He angrily shouted: “We are no longer stationed near Kyiv! Was it a damn goodwill gesture? A goodwill gesture? And Kharkiv was a goodwill gesture? No one was executed by shooting for [surrendering] Kharkiv! No one was sent into retirement, at least not publicly. The society didn’t get any answers to its questions. I’m asking you, why did you move the frontline closer to Belgorod? We still didn’t get back to those positions! In response—silence. Silence.”
Solovyov demanded that enemies be destroyed “on their land”: “Citizens of NATO countries should not feel at peace, while the Russian man is suffering… Citizens! A war has been declared against us. Wake up! Wake up.”
Solovyov’s guest, military correspondent Alexander Kots, revealed one of the reasons for the host’s helpless rage: glaring incompetence and mismanagement of the invading forces by their military leadership. Discussing new items slated for delivery to Ukraine by NATO countries, Kots said: “While we have this list, only on paper for now, we should start thinking about what we will do when or if all of it gets to the frontlines. Somehow, we have to counter their artillery systems and tanks. For the last month, throughout the holidays, as a member of the presidential Human Rights Council, I was receiving outraged and concerned messages from the relatives [of soldiers]. We have trained—I won’t say how many, but a decent quantity of the artillery battalions, but all of them were sent to the infantry. This is a huge number of people, we’ve been training them for three months, spending ammo, spending money to house them, great instructors from our military universities—including the Mikhailovskaya Artillery Military Academy—had given their time and knowledge to train them. With respect to our artillery, it’s a very sad story… we don’t have any artillery schools left! We used to have eleven and now only Mikhailovskaya remains.”
Solovyov remarked that he was aware of this problem because of his frontline visits. Kots added that the same issue is happening with the anti-tank divisions, describing them as “the very units that should have been the ones meeting this tank Armada, burning up those Abrams and Leopard tanks. Instead, for some reason, they’re also being transferred to the infantry. I can’t understand why this is happening… We professionally trained up specialists, trained them well, but they sit without being given appropriate tasks… While we’re facing a threat of these deliveries from the West to the frontlines by Spring, it’s very wasteful on our part.”
Solovyov chimed in: “I understand that you don’t fight tanks with tanks, you use other means. Our anti-tank fist should be ready.” Kots hit him over the head with more bad news: “The first line of defense that will be meeting these tanks will often be comprised of mobilized men. Our mobilized soldiers on the frontlines are armed solely with Kalashnikovs. Unfortunately, there are no anti-tank weapons on many stretches of the frontline.”
Solovyov reverted to his favorite topic, claiming that it’s only a matter of time before NATO gives the Ukrainians tactical nuclear weapons. He said, “I believe that the use of tactical nuclear weapons is unavoidable. The question is who will do it first: us or them.” Playing along, Kots pointed out: “The tanks that are being delivered contain depleted uranium.” After Solovyov noted that depleted uranium is not radioactive, Kots suggested: “It could still be used as the pretext, in order to use our tactical nuclear weapons.”
But even his trademark shtick of threatening Russia’s adversaries with nuclear mayhem failed to bring the bitter propagandist even a modicum of customary satisfaction. Introducing his next guest, Solovyov bitterly complained: “I’m sad. All of this is very sad.”
🐣 RT @stuartpstevens Republicans have appointed a woman who supports the overthrow of the US Government and genocide in Ukraine to Homeland Security. It’s a radical, anti-American act by a party that has become radical and anti-American. There is no saving this party. It must be defeated.
// @stuartpstevens was Romney’s campaign manager
🐣 📋 RT @JimPethokoukis GOLDMAN SACHS (Hatzius): All major economies (except the UK) now look likely to avoid recession this year.
🐣 RT @DenesTorteli 27.01.2023. Pr. Zelenskyy today: “Never again to – hatred. Never again to – indifference. The more nations of the world overcome indifference, the less space there will be in the world for hatred. Eternal memory to all victims of the Holocaust!”
💽 https://twitter.com/DenesTorteli/status/1618940752247283712?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @cepa “Since the beginning of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, its troops have deported more than 2 million Ukrainians from the occupied territories, forcing them to adopt Russian citizenship.” @elina_beketova
⋙ CEPA: Behind the Lines: Russia Steps up Ukrainian Deportations https://tinyurl.com/2p8djm35
// While Russia offensives continue Donbas and Zaporizhzhia oblasts, more people were deported from Ukraine’s occupied territories.
KyivPost: Senators Call for U.S. to Give Ukraine F-16s and ATACMS https://tinyurl.com/3sbm3mt6 “Sens Sheldon Whitehouse, Lindsey Graham, and Richard Blumenthal said even more advanced weapons systems were still needed to ‘erode Russia’s capability to continue fighting in Ukraine’”
// One intelligence specialist says that besides their accuracy and range, the weapons are useful for the “abject fear it would project into the hearts of Russian battle commanders.”
A bipartisan trio of senators have called for the U.S. to bolster military support for Ukraine even more by sending ATCAMS long-range artillery systems and F-16 fighter jets. ¤ Welcoming President Biden’s recent announcement about the delivery of Abrams heavy tanks, Senators Sheldon Whitehouse (D-Rhode Island), Lindsey Graham (R-Tennessee), and Richard Blumenthal (D-Connecticut) said even more advanced weapons systems were still needed to “erode Russia’s capability to continue fighting in Ukraine.”
In a statement released on Friday Jan. 27, they said: “While the tanks represent a tremendous upgrade in Ukraine’s military, we urge the Biden Administration and our allies to send more long range artillery, such as ATACMS, and fighter aircraft such as F-16s and MiG-29s.
“The combination of tanks, fighter aircraft, and ATACMS will help Ukraine confront the upcoming Russian offensive and go on offense in both the East and the South in an attempt to further erode Russia’s capability to continue fighting in Ukraine. ¤ “Let’s give the Ukrainians everything they need to win – now.”
🐣 RT @ChuckPfarrer SVATOVE AXIS /1410 UTC 29 JAN/ Intel reveals a significant & growing concentration of RU forces around Kreminna; an assembly of units and capabilities far in excess of the the defensive requirements of this sector of the front. A pending RU offensive cannot be ruled out.
🌎 https://twitter.com/ChuckPfarrer/status/1618973380061073409?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @dabeard How did Putin’s dictatorial predecessors hide their slaughter of millions of Ukrainians in 1932-33? They destroyed local archives, altered death records, even census records—and barred discussion in schools and elsewhere. From “Red Famine,” by @anneapplebaum
⭕ 26 Jan 2023
🐣 RT @SenatorRomney History has taught us that when one country feels they can invade another country with little consequence, violence spreads and we become vulnerable to being pulled into a conflict. Supporting Ukraine is not just the right thing to do, it’s imperative for U.S. national security.
💽 https://twitter.com/SenatorRomney/status/1618682140887027725?s=20/photo/1
🐣 So, now the DOJ Inspecctor General and the Senate Intelligence Committee have to investigate the investigator who was investigating the investigation ~ while House Intelligence proceeds merrily on its way as if the original investigation was “weaponized” when it wasn’t @nytimes
🐣 If you do a simple (twitter) search on “Bakhmut,” it’s swarming with Ru trolls (40%?). A similar search on “Kreminna” ~ almost none. ¤ Why the difference? Prigozhin, who leads Wagner militia heavily engaged in Bakhmut, also runs Ru’s main troll farm
Pravda [UA]: Special operations forces of Azov regiment become separate assault brigade of Ground Forces and fight in Bakhmut https://tinyurl.com/y5nmdy6m “The special operations forces of the Azov regiment are expanding and gaining even greater strength in the war of liberation”
// The Special Operations Forces of the Azov regiment became the 3rd Separate Assault Brigade as part of the Ground Forces of the Armed Forces of Ukraine and are already fighting on the Bakhmut front in Donetsk Oblast.
🐣 RT @carman_upshaw. Here is a conservative third party summary of russian equipment losses in Ukraine. After 11 months Russia has only been losing territory to Ukraine and can’t even take Bakhmut. So Ukraine is doing alright with what they have. New equipment will crush 🇷🇺
⋙ 📋 Oryx: Attack On Europe: Documenting Russian Equipment Losses During The 2022 Russian Invasion Of Ukraine
Ru losses: https://tinyurl.com/4pcz7675
Ukr losses: https://tinyurl.com/2z9vynh3
🐣 📋 RT @WhiteHouse Today’s economic report shows that our economy grew at 2.9% last quarter while annual inflation fell and unemployment hit record lows. ¤ President Biden’s first two years of economic growth were the strongest first two years since President Clinton.
🐣 RT @CAPAction MAGA Republicans are threatening to throw the economy into chaos to force cuts on Social Security and Medicare. @POTUS: “This nation has gone through too much…I will not let that happen.”
💽 https://twitter.com/CAPAction/status/1618701743440920577?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @DavidCornDC Hey I found the “weaponization” of the federal government! Spoiler alert: It was Barr & Durham. I’m sure the House GOP will be investigating this. And guess what: The Russian investigation was no witch hunt. The effort to prove it was…was the witch hunt.
🐣 RT @MuellerSheWrote BREAKING: Durham – who is batting zero in his investigation of the Russia probe – LOBBIED THE DOJ IG HOROWITZ TO DROP HIS FINDING THAT THE RUSSIA PROBE WAS OPENED PROPERLY.
🐣 RT @JoyceWhiteVance Jaw dropping reporting. Lots here including an explanation of why Durham’s colleague resigned: under pressure from Barr to release an “interim” report damaging Clinton & the FBI as the election drew near, Durham had a draft prepared that wasn’t factual.
🐣 RT @PaulaChertok Now THIS warrants a special counsel, AG Garland >> Trump was under **criminal investigation** while running for re-election in 2020 and Barr & Durham kept it secret
🐣 RT @AWeissmann_ This is all about the Trump weaponization of the DOJ – but we know that the House Rs won’t give a damn about it. ¤ How Barr’s Quest to Find Flaws in the Russia Inquiry Unraveled
💙 🔆 This❗️⋙ NYT: Barr Pressed Durham to Find Flaws in the Russia Investigation. It Didn’t Go Well https://tinyurl.com/fysfme8h How the Durham investigation, after insinuating much, went down in 🔥 #longread
// The review by John Durham at one point veered into a criminal investigation related to Donald Trump himself, even as it failed to find wrongdoing in the origins of the Russia inquiry.
Egged on by Mr. Trump, Attorney General William P. Barr set out in 2019 to dig into their shared theory that the Russia investigation likely stemmed from a conspiracy by intelligence or law enforcement agencies. To lead the inquiry, Mr. Barr turned to a hard-nosed prosecutor named John H. Durham, and later granted him special counsel status to carry on after Mr. Trump left office.
But after almost four years — far longer than the Russia investigation itself — Mr. Durham’s work is coming to an end without uncovering anything like the deep state plot alleged by Mr. Trump and suspected by Mr. Barr. …
Interviews by The Times with more than a dozen current and former officials have revealed an array of previously unreported episodes that show how the Durham inquiry became roiled by internal dissent and ethical disputes as it went unsuccessfully down one path after another even as Mr. Trump and Mr. Barr promoted a misleading narrative of its progress.
● Mr. Barr and Mr. Durham never disclosed that their inquiry expanded in the fall of 2019, based on a tip from Italian officials, to include a criminal investigation into suspicious financial dealings related to Mr. Trump. The specifics of the tip and how they handled the investigation remain unclear, but Mr. Durham brought no charges over it.
● Mr. Durham used Russian intelligence memos — suspected by other U.S. officials of containing disinformation — to gain access to emails of an aide to George Soros, the financier and philanthropist who is a favorite target of the American right and Russian state media. Mr. Durham used grand jury powers to keep pursuing the emails even after a judge twice rejected his request for access to them. The emails yielded no evidence that Mr. Durham has cited in any case he pursued.
● There were deeper internal fractures on the Durham team than previously known. The publicly unexplained resignation in 2020 of his No. 2 and longtime aide, Nora R. Dannehy, was the culmination of a series of disputes between them over prosecutorial ethics. A year later, two more prosecutors strongly objected to plans to indict a lawyer with ties to Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign based on evidence they warned was too flimsy, and one left the team in protest of Mr. Durham’s decision to proceed anyway. (A jury swiftly acquitted the lawyer.)
Now, as Mr. Durham works on a final report, the interviews by The Times provide new details of how he and Mr. Barr sought to recast the scrutiny of the 2016 Trump campaign’s myriad if murky links to Russia as unjustified and itself a crime. …
A month after Mr. Barr was confirmed as attorney general in February 2019, the special counsel Robert S. Mueller III ended the Russia investigation and turned in his report without charging any Trump associates with engaging in a criminal conspiracy with Moscow over its covert operation to help Mr. Trump win the 2016 election.
Mr. Trump would repeatedly portray the Mueller report as having found “no collusion with Russia.” The reality was more complex. In fact, the report detailed “numerous links between the Russian government and the Trump campaign,” and it established both how Moscow had worked to help Mr. Trump win and how his campaign had expected to benefit from the foreign interference. …
At the time Mr. Barr was confirmed, he told aides that he already suspected that intelligence abuses played a role in igniting the Russia investigation — and that unearthing any wrongdoing would be a priority. …
… Mr. Durham spent his first months looking for any evidence that the origin of the Russia investigation involved an intelligence operation targeting the Trump campaign. ¤ Mr. Durham’s team spent long hours combing the C.I.A.’s files but found no way to support the allegation. Mr. Barr and Mr. Durham traveled abroad together to press British and Italian officials to reveal everything their agencies had gleaned about the Trump campaign and relayed to the United States, but both allied governments denied they had done any such thing. Top British intelligence officials expressed indignation to their U.S. counterparts about the accusation, three former U.S. officials said.
Mr. Durham and Mr. Barr had not yet given up when a new problem arose: In early December, the Justice Department’s independent inspector general, Michael E. Horowitz, completed his own report on the origins of the Russia investigation.
The inspector general revealed errors and omissions in wiretap applications targeting a former Trump campaign adviser and determined that an F.B.I. lawyer had doctored an email in a way that kept one of those problems from coming to light. (Mr. Durham’s team later negotiated a guilty plea by that lawyer.)
But the broader findings contradicted Mr. Trump’s accusations and the rationale for Mr. Durham’s inquiry. Mr. Horowitz found no evidence that F.B.I. actions were politically motivated. And he concluded that the investigation’s basis — an Australian diplomat’s tip that a Trump campaign adviser had seemed to disclose advance knowledge that Russia would release hacked Democratic emails — had been sufficient to lawfully open it. …
Minutes before the inspector general’s report went online, Mr. Barr issued a statement contradicting Mr. Horowitz’s major finding, declaring that the F.B.I. opened the investigation “on the thinnest of suspicions that, in my view, were insufficient.” He would later tell Fox News that the investigation began “without any basis,” as if the diplomat’s tip never happened.
Mr. Trump also weighed in, telling reporters that the details of the inspector general’s report were “far worse than anything I would have even imagined,” adding: “I look forward to the Durham report, which is coming out in the not-too-distant future. It’s got its own information, which is this information plus, plus, plus.”
And the Justice Department sent reporters a statement from Mr. Durham that clashed with both Justice Department principles about not discussing ongoing investigations and his personal reputation as particularly tight-lipped. He said he disagreed with Mr. Horowitz’s conclusions about the Russia investigation’s origins, citing his own access to more information and “evidence collected to date.
But as Mr. Durham’s inquiry proceeded, he never presented any evidence contradicting Mr. Horowitz’s factual findings about the basis on which F.B.I. officials opened the investigation. ¤ By summer 2020, it was clear that the hunt for evidence supporting Mr. Barr’s hunch about intelligence abuses had failed. But he waited until after the 2020 election to publicly concede that there had turned out to be no sign of “foreign government activity” and that the C.I.A. had “stayed in its lane” after all. …
By the spring and summer of 2020, with Mr. Trump’s re-election campaign in full swing, the Durham investigation’s “failure to deliver scalps in time for the election” began to erode Mr. Barr’s relationship with Mr. Trump, Mr. Barr wrote in his memoir.
Mr. Trump was stoking a belief among his supporters that Mr. Durham might charge former President Barack Obama and former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. That proved too much for Mr. Barr, who in May 2020 clarified that “our concern of potential criminality is focused on others.”
Even so, in August, Mr. Trump lashed out in a Fox interview, asserting that Mr. Obama and Mr. Biden, along with top F.B.I. and intelligence officials, had been caught in “the single biggest political crime in the history of our country” and the only thing stopping charges would be if Mr. Barr and Mr. Durham wanted to be “politically correct.”
Against that backdrop, Mr. Barr and Mr. Durham did not shut down their inquiry when the search for intelligence abuses hit a dead end. With the inspector general’s inquiry complete, they turned to a new rationale: a hunt for a basis to accuse the Clinton campaign of conspiring to defraud the government by manufacturing the suspicions that the Trump campaign had colluded with Russia, along with scrutinizing what the F.B.I. and intelligence officials knew about the Clinton campaign’s actions.
Mr. Durham also developed an indirect method to impute political bias to law enforcement officials: comparing the Justice Department’s aggressive response to suspicions of links between Mr. Trump and Russia with its more cautious and skeptical reaction to various Clinton-related suspicions. … … …
As the focus of the Durham investigation shifted, cracks formed inside the team. Mr. Durham’s deputy, Ms. Dannehy, a longtime close colleague, increasingly argued with him in front of other prosecutors and F.B.I. agents about legal ethics. …
Now, Ms. Dannehy complained to Mr. Durham about how Mr. Barr kept hinting darkly in public about the direction of their investigation. In April 2020, for example, he suggested to Fox News that officials could be prosecuted, saying that “the evidence shows that we are not dealing with just mistakes or sloppiness. There is something far more troubling here.” ¤ Ms. Dannehy urged Mr. Durham to ask the attorney general to adhere to Justice Department policy and not discuss the investigation publicly. But Mr. Durham proved unwilling to challenge him. …
By summer 2020, with Election Day approaching, Mr. Barr pressed Mr. Durham to draft a potential interim report centered on the Clinton campaign and F.B.I. gullibility or willful blindness. …
Ms. Dannehy erupted, according to people familiar with the matter. She told Mr. Durham that no report should be issued before the investigation was complete and especially not just before an election — and denounced the draft for taking disputed information at face value. She sent colleagues a memo detailing those concerns and resigned. …
In any case, in late September 2020, about two weeks after Ms. Dannehy quit, someone leaked to a Fox Business personality that Mr. Durham would not issue any interim report, disappointing Trump supporters hoping for a pre-Election Day bombshell. …
[On AlfaBank:] Trial testimony, however, showed that while Mrs. Clinton and her campaign manager hoped Mr. Sussmann would persuade reporters to write articles about Alfa Bank, they did not want him to take the information to the F.B.I. And prosecutors presented no evidence that he or campaign officials had believed the data scientists’ complex theory was false.
After Mr. Sussmann’s acquittal, Mr. Barr, by then out of office for more than a year, suggested that using the courts to advance a politically charged narrative was a goal in itself. Mr. Durham “accomplished something far more important” than a conviction, Mr. Barr told Fox News, asserting that the case had “crystallized the central role played by the Hillary campaign in launching as a dirty trick the whole Russiagate collusion narrative and fanning the flames of it.” ¤ And he predicted that a subsequent trial, concerning a Russia analyst who was a researcher for the Steele dossier, would also “get the story out” and “further amplify these themes and the role the F.B.I. leadership played in this, which is increasingly looking fishy and inexplicable.”
That case involved Igor Danchenko, who had told the F.B.I. that the dossier exaggerated the credibility of gossip and speculation. Mr. Durham charged him with lying about two sources. He was acquitted, too. ¤ The two failed cases are likely to be Mr. Durham’s last courtroom acts as a prosecutor. Bringing demonstrably weak cases stood in contrast to how he once talked about his prosecutorial philosophy.
James Farmer, a retired prosecutor who worked with Mr. Durham on several major investigations, recalled him as a neutral actor who said that if there were nothing to charge, they would not strain to prosecute. “That’s what I heard, time and again,” Mr. Farmer said.
Delivering the closing arguments in the Danchenko trial, Mr. Durham defended his investigation to the jury, denying that his appointment by Mr. Barr had been tainted by politics.
He asserted that Mr. Mueller had concluded “there’s no evidence of collusion here or conspiracy” — a formulation that echoed Mr. Trump’s distortion of the Russia investigation’s complex findings — and added: “Is it the wrong question to ask, well, then how did this get started? Respectfully, that’s not the case.” ¤ The judge interrupted him: “You should finish up, Mr. Durham.” [Ta dah‼️]
🐣 RT @GlasnostGone Today Russia launched 55 cruise missiles at #Ukraine. Again targeted civilian “energy facilities,” some power substations hit. However another remarkable effort by 🇺🇦 air defences saw 47 of the missiles shot down, along with 24 Iran drones downed overnight [FB link]
◕ https://twitter.com/GlasnostGone/status/1618612498151936001?s=20/photo/1 -2
⋙ 🐣 … and this is BEFORE a single Patriot air defense system has been set up: 4 are promised ~ and another 3 NASAMS
🐣 📋 RT @ byHeatherLong Sometimes you need to look at the big picture: It’s been an incredible rebound from the 2020 pandemic recession. ¤ The US has recovered all output lost in the crisis and gotten back on trend.
GDP
2022: +2.1%
2021: +5.9%
2020: -2.8%
https://tinyurl.com/bdh39cxd via @abhabhattarai
◕ https://twitter.com/byHeatherLong/status/1618606527606317058?s=20/photo/1
⋙ WaPo: U.S. economy grew 2.1 percent in 2022, but recession fears linger https://tinyurl.com/bdh39cxd
// GDP report shows six months of solid growth, including 2.9 percent expansion in the most recent quarter, though many economists say a slowdown may be near
NYT, Steve Erlanger: Ukraine War Accelerates Shift of Power in Europe to the East https://tinyurl.com/mtjhsc9p Central and Eastern Europe, “delivers a lot of attitude” … The war “has confirmed the reality that Europe can no longer be ruled from Paris and Berlin”
// The war has raised the influence of Central and Eastern European countries with negative views of Russia, amplified calls to expand the E.U. and NATO, and dimmed the power of France and Germany.
NYT, Mikhail Zygar: The Man Who May Challenge Putin for Power https://tinyurl.com/y9468ymj Prigozhin “appears to be the most important player in Russia. He is both the most popular political operator and the one who is feared by Russian high officials and businessmen”
// Yevgeny Prigozhin, head of the mercenary group Wagner, may be Putin’s greatest threat to power.
[I]n recent years, Mr. [Yevgeny] Prigozhin has made a very unexpected career. At first, he was known as “Putin’s chef,” who managed to become a state contractor of school lunches for Russian children all across the country. Then he created the troll factory, the Internet Research Agency, and he was singled out in Robert Mueller’s investigation into interference in the 2016 election. Finally, Mr. Prigozhin became famous as the founder of the Wagner group, whose contractors fought in Africa, Syria and now Ukraine.
… [T]his year, Mr. Prigozhin moved into another league, surpassing all of Mr. Putin’s other friends in power. These include Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu; the Russian Security Council secretary, Nikolai Patrushev; the C.E.O. of Russia’s state-owned defense giant, Rostec, Sergei Chemezov; and Mr. Putin’s closest friend, Yury Kovalchuk. Mr. Prigozhin bypassed all of them and appears to be the most important player in Russia. He is both the most popular political operator and the one who is feared by Russian high officials and businessmen. …
On Jan. 10, Mr. Prigozhin reported on his company’s Telegram channel that Wagner militants had taken the Ukrainian city of Soledar. … The Ministry of Defense claimed that the seizure of Soledar was their achievement, which was immediately denied by Mr. Prigozhin and numerous military correspondents. [Neithee had]
It was presumably at this moment that Mr. Putin realized that Mr. Prigozhin might be a bit too popular. So he elevated Mr. Prigozhin’s main enemies — Generals Lapin and Valery Gerasimov, and appointed the latter as commander of the operation in Ukraine. This is Mr. Putin’s traditional bureaucratic game, which has been effective but may not work this time. …
🐣 RT @ChuckPfarrer BAKHMUT AXIS /1330 UTC 26 JAN/ RU forces continue attempts to cut Bakhmut’s Lines of Communications and Supply (LOCS). RU forces at Soledar have reached positions near the T-05-13 HWY, other RU units have advanced northwest of Myika Pond in an attempt to sever the vital H-32 HWY
🌎 https://twitter.com/ChuckPfarrer/status/1618600321823150084?s=20/photo/1
WaPo: Biden to blast House GOP over economic agenda amid debt ceiling feud https://tinyurl.com/5hfzbwyt He “seeks to draw a contrast with Republicans, highlighting how some … have sought to ‘cut Social Security and Medicare’ and target other ‘programs Americans have earned’”
// The White House maintains it will not negotiate with the new GOP majority over its refusal to raise the debt ceiling
🐣 RT @mhmck Units of the Armed Forces of Ukraine have advanced farther towards Russian-occupied Kreminna in Luhansk region. The Russian fascist invaders shelled positions of Ukrainian defenders in the Veryhins’ke Forest. ¤ –General Staff of the Armed Forces of Ukraine, 06:00, 26 January 2023
🌎 https://twitter.com/mhmck/status/1618483959587037186?s=20/photo/1
⭕ 25 Jan 2023
WaPo, Benjamin Wittes:The Jan. 6 committee report footnotes: A treasure trove in fine print https://tinyurl.com/2s4avm5r ‘The Amazing Mr Klukowski’ and other tales the DOJ shouldn’t overlook
🐣 RT @Gerashchenko_en Oleksandra @avalaina Matviichuk, head of the organization that received a Nobel Peace prize this year, called to give Ukraine all the weapons it needs at
@ksfopenukraine. She said values must be protected
YahooNews/NewVoiceUkraine: Ukrainian forces’ withdrawal from Bakhmut ‘out of question,’ says General Staff https://tinyurl.com/267p6hkb “As long as there are basements in Bakhmut and the ability to hold this territory, the fighters will stay there” ~ Ukrainian General Staff spokesman
// “[Ukrainian General Staff spokesman Andriy] Kovaliov said.”
TheDrive: M1 Abrams Tanks In U.S. Inventory Have Armor Too Secret To Send To Ukraine https://tinyurl.com/m963pmm3
// M1 tanks will be heading to Ukraine, but they can’t just be pulled from U.S. stocks due to their sensitive armor.
🐣 RT @CharlesPfarrer ARMORED EQUALIZER: The US has confirmed it will send M-1 Abrams Main Battle Tanks (MBTs) to Ukraine. The Abrams is the standard MBT used by the US Army. Its sensors, targeting computers and main gun will make it an exesential threat to RU armor.
◕ https://twitter.com/ChuckPfarrer/status/1618312650177536002?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @Hay69A It will take decades to rebuild Ukraine and clear munitions from the land – the environmental damage is severe
⋙ 🐣 I don’t understand why landmines at least aren’t designed to deactivate after a given period of time. I suppose the bad actors would not go along with it but there are other “rules” of armed conflict that we expect countries to follow or face war crimes tribunals
WaPo Editorial: McCarthy may regret kicking Schiff off House Intelligence Committee https://tinyurl.com/wr8bmhas “He might have laid the groundwork for Mr. Schiff to succeed Ms. Feinstein not only as a senator but also in a leading role on the Senate [‼️] Intelligence Committee”
NYT: How Biden Reluctantly Agreed to Send Tanks to Ukraine https://tinyurl.com/msf22vbd ‘What the Pentagon was not taking into enough account was the intense fear among EU governments of doing anything to provoke Russia without having the cover of the US doing the same thing first’
🐣 RT @AaronBlake Freedom Caucus is a little over 20% of House GOP.
It will be:
-38% of Oversight Committee
-44% of Judiciary
-44% of select covid panel
-50% of panel on “weaponization” of gov’t
And that doesn’t include Rules, where 2 HFC members + Massie loom large.
⋙⋙ WaPo, Aaron Blake: GOP gives the Freedom Caucus the keys to the car https://tinyurl.com/3vy4r326
⋙ 🐣 RT @AaronBlake To be clear, these are percentages *of GOP members* on each committee.
🐣 RT @clashreport Danish-Swedish racist Rasmus Paludan says he received help for the idea to burn the Holy Quran in front of the Turkish Embassy in Stockholm from Swedish journalist Chang Frick, who collaborated with a subsidiary of the Russian propaganda channel RT. ¤ Frick made all the payments.
¤ https://twitter.com/clashreport/status/1618267831379820545?s=20/photo/1
🧵 RT @TimothyDSnyder In April 2016, I broke the story of Trump and Putin, using Russian open sources. Afterwards, I heard vague intimations that something was awry in the FBI in New York, specifically counter-intelligence and cyber. We now have a suggestion as to why. 0/20
📌 https://twitter.com/TimothyDSnyder/status/1618309363084718080?s=20
[ThreadReader:] https://tinyurl.com/bjxvkjws
The person who led the relevant section, Charles McGonigal, has just been charged with taking money from the Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska. Follow this thread to see just how this connects to the victory of Trump, the Russian war in Ukraine, and U.S. national security. 1/20
The reason I was thinking about Trump & Putin in 2016 was a pattern. Russia had sought to control Ukraine, using social media, money, & a pliable head of state. Russia backed Trump the way that it had backed Ukrainian president Viktor Yanukovych, in the hopes of soft control 2/20
Trump & Yanukovych were similar figures: interested in money, & in power to make or shield money. And therefore vulnerable partners for Putin. They also shared a political advisor: Paul Manafort. He worked for Yanukovych from 2005-2015, taking over Trump’s campaign in 2016. 3/20
You might remember Manafort’s ties to Russia from 2016. He (and Jared Kushner, and Donald Trump, Jr.) met with Russians in June 2016 in Trump Tower as part of, as the broker of the meeting called it, “the Russian government’s support for Trump” (#RoadToUnfreedom, p. 237). 4/20
Manafort had to resign as Trump’s campaign manager in August 2016 when news broke that he had received $12.7 million in cash from Yanukovych. But these details are just minor elements of Manafort’s dependence on Russia. (#RoadToUnfreedom, p. 235). 5/20
Manafort worked for Deripaska, the same Russian oligarch to whom McGonigal is linked, between 2006 and 2009. Manafort’s assignment was to soften up the U.S for Russian influence. He promised “a model that can greatly benefit the Putin government.” (#RoadToUnfreedom, p. 234). 6/20
While Manafort worked for Trump in 2016, though, Manafort’s dependence on Russia was deeper. He owed Deripaska money, not a position one would want to be in. Manafort offered Deripaska “private briefings” on the campaign. He was hoping “to get whole.” (#RoadToUnfreedom, 234) 7/20
Reconsider how the FBI treated the Trump-Putin connection in 2016. Trump and other Republicans screamed that the FBI had overreached. In retrospect, it seems the exact opposite took place. The issue of Russian influence was framed in a way convenient for Russia and Trump. 8/20
The FBI investigation, Crossfire Hurricane, focused on the narrow issue of personal connections between the Trump campaign and Russians. It missed Russia’s cyber attacks and the social media campaign, which, according to Kathleen Hall Jamieson, won the election for Trump. 9/20
Once the issue of Russian soft control was framed narrowly as personal contact, Obama missed the big picture, and Trump had an easy defense. Trump knew that Russia was working for him, but the standard of guilt was placed so high that he could defend himself. 10/20
It is entirely inconceivable that McGonigal was unaware of Russia’s 2016 cyber influence campaign on behalf of Trump. Even I was aware of it, and I had no expertise. It became one of the subjects of my book #RoadtoUnfreedom. 11/20
The FBI did investigate cyber later, and came to some correct conclusions. But this was after the election, and missed the Russian influence operations entirely. That was an obvious counterintelligence issue. Why did the FBI take so long, and miss the point? 12/20
I had no personal connection to this, but will just repeat what informed people said at the time: this sort of thing was supposed to go through the FBI counter-intelligence section in New York, where tips went to die. That is where McGonigal was in charge. 13/20
The cyber element is what McGonigal should have been making everyone aware of in 2016. In 2016, McGonigal was chief of the FBI’s Cyber-Counterintelligence Coordination Section. That October, he was put in charge of the Counterintelligence Division of the FBI’s NY office. 14/20
We need to understand why the FBI failed in 2016 to address the essence of an ongoing Russian influence operation. The character of that operation suggests that it would have been the responsibility of an FBI section whose head is now accused of taking Russian money. 15/20
Right after the McGonigal story broke, Kevin McCarthy ejected Adam Schiff from the House intelligence committee. Schiff is expert on Russian influence operations. It exhibits carelessness about national security to exclude him. It is downright suspicious to exclude him now. 16/20
Back in June 2016, Kevin McCarthy expressed his suspicion that Donald Trump was under Putin’s influence. He and other Republican members concluded that the risk of an embarrassment to their party was more important than American security. #RoadToUnfreedom, p. 255. 17/20
The Russian influence operation to get Trump elected was real. It serves no one to pretend otherwise. We are still learning about it. Denying that it happened makes the United States vulnerable to ongoing Russian operations. 18/20
I remember a certain frivolity from 2016. Trump was a curiosity. Russia was irrelevant. Nothing to take seriously. Then Trump was elected, blocked weapon sales to Ukraine, and tried to stage a coup. Now Ukrainians are dying every day in the defining conflict of our time. 19/20
The McGonigal question goes even beyond these issues. He had authority in the most sensitive possible investigations within U.S. intelligence. Sorting this out will require a concern for the United States that goes beyond party loyalty. 20/20
CNN: High-ranking Russian officials are defecting. This man is aiding them https://tinyurl.com/3rp3rufu “Implicit in such officials’ escape from Russia through Osechkin’s network is an agreement to provide him with information about Moscow’s inner workings”
🐣 RT @NuggetMcBoom They’re pouring in combat aircraft to slow down or halt the advance. If Ukraine takes Kreminna it puts pressure on the Ruskie holdings around Rubizhne and Severodonetsk. The stakes are pretty high there and can potentially threaten to undo Russia’s big victory from last summer.
🐣 RT @Sky_Lee_1 “Today I’m announcing that the United States will be sending 31 Abrams tanks to Ukraine, the equivalent of one Ukrainian battalion…the Abrams tanks are the most capable tanks in the world.”- @POTUS
⋙ 🐣 RT @Acyn Biden: Putin expected Europe and the United States to weaken our resolve. He expected our support for Ukraine to crumble with time. He was wrong. He was wrong. He was wrong from the beginning and he continues to be wrong
💽 https://twitter.com/Acyn/status/1618295823246233609?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @Sky_Lee_1 “Today I’m announcing that the United States will be sending 31 Abrams tanks to Ukraine, the equivalent of one Ukrainian battalion…the Abrams tanks are the most capable tanks in the world.”- @POTUS
🐣 RT @PaulaChertok Russian propagandist demands Moscow nuke Berlin for sending tanks so Ukraine can defend itself from these genocidal maniacs
⋙ 🐣 RT @Gerashchenko_en “German tanks on Russian land – the reason to destroy Berlin!” ¤ Sign of a right decision – Solovyev’s tantrum.
💽 https://twitter.com/PaulaChertok/status/1618283796234932224?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @Sensibleplease Happy Birthday!
🖼 [TextLink:] https://twitter.com/Sensibleplease/status/1618235325196931072?s=20/photo/1
[Text:] This is the guy that Trump tried to bribe into blackmailing Biden and Putin tried to bully into giving up his country. He was a comedian who became a leader in an age where leaders everywhere became clowns. What a fucking champion. #Zelenskiy
🐣 RT @front_ukrainian In the new package of military aid, the 🇺🇸USA will also transfer to 🇺🇦Ukraine 8 BREM ARV M88A2, intended for the repair, evacuation and emergency refueling of Abrams tanks
🐣 RT @Gerashchenko_en Wishing President @ZelenskyyUa a happy birthday! ¤ Hoping to include a Victory announcement in the video for your next birthday.
💽 https://twitter.com/Gerashchenko_en/status/1618273268854849536?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @ChuckPfarrer KREMINNA /1350 UTC 25 JAN/ UKR forces are advancing NE of Dibrova. During 23-24 JAN, RU increased close air support / aviation strike missions. UKR reports that air defense downed a Su-25 strike aircraft, 3 Ka-52 attack helicopters, 4 recon UAVs, and 1 Lancet loitering munition.
🌎 https://twitter.com/ChuckPfarrer/status/1618242596270407681?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @ChuckPfarrer BAKHMUT / 1310 UTC 25 JAN / RU troops press offensive operations on the Bakhmut Area of Operation (AO). An increase in RU Close Air Support Sorties has resulted in a number of kills for UKR air deference. UKR shot down a Su-25 strike aircraft and 3 RU Ka-52 attack helicopters.
🌎 https://twitter.com/ChuckPfarrer/status/1618237222892998663?s=20/photo/1
🧵 RT @BeschlossDC “When the C.I.A. noticed in late 2010 that its spies were disappearing…as fears of a mole grew, the government set up a secret task force….A veteran F.B.I. counterintelligence agent, Charles McGonigal, was assigned to run it,” reported @nytimes in 2018.
📌 https://twitter.com/BeschlossDC/status/1617673023053778945?s=20
[ThreadReader:] https://tinyurl.com/ywhd49ft
🐣 RT @bpolitics Germany pledged to supply Ukraine with Leopard 2 battle tanks, providing Kyiv’s forces with a significant upgrade against Russia. ¤ Chancellor Olaf Scholz says the decision was made following “intensive consultation” with allies (via @quicktake) https://trib.al/mfUUi2k
💽 https://twitter.com/bpolitics/status/1618255452625670146?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @AtlanticCouncil “The war in Ukraine will prove that tanks still matter—and Leopards will outclass their Russian counterparts,” the @AtlanticCouncil’s @John_T_Watts tells @CNBC. Read more:
⋙ CNBC: Germany announces it will send 14 of its Leopard 2 battle tanks to Ukraine https://tinyurl.com/kt47jm3r
// Germany announced it is ready to send 14 its own tanks to Ukraine and to allow others to do so, in an U-turn from its previous position
🐣 RT @grahworin Well, Al-Jaz got access to a TOC drone room in Bakhmut direction
💽 https://twitter.com/grahworin/status/1618231520250171397?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @abel_riu “Ahead of what is expected to be a brutal spring of fighting, US & Western officials have begun suggesting that Ukrainian forces cut their losses in Bakhmut, which has little strategic significance, and focus instead on planning an offensive in the south”
⋙⋙ CNN: The US and its allies want Ukraine to change its battlefield tactics in the spring https://tinyurl.com/yxt744c9
⋙ 🐣 RT @ abel_riu “The US wants to help Ukraine shift away from the sort of pitched battle of attrition playing out in Bakhmut and focus instead on a style of mechanized maneuver warfare that uses rapid, unanticipated movements against Russia”
🐣 RT @JillWineBanks Fulton County DA Willis asked Court not to release the Special Grand Jury Report but,more importantly, said “decisions are imminent” about seeking criminal charges against figures involved in Mr Trump’s push to overturn the 2020 election. That is big news. More than 1 defendant!
🐣 RT @ZelenskaUA I am often asked about how you have changed this year. And I always answer: “He haven’t changed. He is the same. The same guy I have met when we were seventeen.” ¤ But actually, something has changed: you smile much less now. For example, like on this photo… 1/2
🖼 https://twitter.com/ZelenskaUA/status/1618141304793485313?s=20/photo/1
⋙ 🐣 RT @ZelenskaUA I wish you to have more reasons for smiling. And you know what it takes. We all do. ¤ You are stubborn enough. But the main thing is to have enough health. So please, be healthy! I want to smile near you forever. Give me this opportunity! 2/2
// Zelensky is 45 today 🎂
🐣 RT @leonidragozin Contours of settlement as per Blinken:
– Ukraine inside the EU but outside NATO and armed so as to be fully aggression-proof
– Demilitarised Crimea under Russian control; status issue deferred
– No word on Donbas (implicit hope of liberation)
⋙ WaPo, David Ignatius: Blinken ponders the post-Ukraine-war order https://tinyurl.com/mr28sdvt
… The administration’s standard formula is that all decisions must ultimately be made by Ukraine, and Blinken reiterated that line. He also backs Ukraine’s desire for significant battlefield gains this year. But the State Department, Pentagon and National Security Council are also thinking ahead.
Crimea is a particular point of discussion. There is a widespread view in Washington and Kyiv that regaining Crimea by military force may be impossible. Any Ukrainian military advances this year in Zaporizhzhia oblast, the land bridge that connects Crimea and Russia, could threaten Russian control. But an all-out Ukrainian campaign to seize the Crimean Peninsula is unrealistic, many U.S. and Ukrainian officials believe. That’s partly because Putin has indicated that an assault on Crimea would be a tripwire for nuclear escalation.
The administration shares Ukraine’s insistence that Crimea, which was seized by Russia in 2014, must eventually be returned. But in the short run, what’s crucial for Kyiv is that Crimea no longer serve as a base for attacks against Ukraine. One formula that interests me would be a demilitarized status, with questions of final political control deferred. Ukrainian officials told me last year that they had discussed such possibilities with the administration. …
🐣 RT @UkrainianNews24 Ukrainian pilots have visited the U.S. and the specific type of aircraft to be provided to Ukraine has already been selected, the top spokesman for the Ukrainian Air Force claimed on Tuesday. [link]
🐣 RT @NOELreports “Discussions about red lines are a thing of the past, the United States has unequivocally declared its desire to inflict a strategic defeat on the Russian Federation,” says the Russian Foreign Ministry.
🔄 🐣 Tanks Encyclopedia: World’s Main Battle Tanks (2017) https://tinyurl.com/3vxs7pby
◕ https://twitter.com/Auriandra/status/1618162674889805824?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @Flash_news_ua The US endorses Volodymyr Zelenskyi’s resolute action against corruption and irresponsibility, says a spokesman of the US State Department Ned Price.
⭕ 24 Jan 2023
AlJazeera, Botakoz Kassymbekova: How Western scholars overlooked Russian imperialism https://tinyurl.com/56tekavw “To understand former and current Russian colonies, one needs to listen to historians from these places and study their cultures, languages and histories”
// For far too long, Western academia has ignored the legacies of the Russian Empire and colonisation.
Russian imperial ambitions date back to the 16th century when the Grand Principality of Moscow, or Muscovy, proclaimed itself the third Rome, the successor of the Byzantine Empire and protector of all Orthodox Christians.
The Russian imperial army fought numerous wars in the east, west and south, and by the mid-19th century, Russia had become the largest land empire. Along with the British, Austro-Hungarian and French empires, it understood and presented itself as a European colonial power.
Following the October Revolution in 1917, the Bolsheviks proclaimed the end of the Russian monarchy and Russian imperialism, but they fought brutally to preserve the Russian imperial borders. They reconquered newly formed independent states, such as Ukraine, Georgia, Armenia, and Azerbaijan, which emerged after the collapse of the Russian Empire.
In the early 1930s, Joseph Stalin embraced Russian nationalism based on the old imperial myth of the greatness of the Russian people. Bolshevik Moscow made ethnic Russians the most privileged group in the Soviet Union and sent Russian settlers to populate and control non-Russian regions.
Purging native leaders, forcefully resettling entire ethnic groups and creating conditions that led to mass deaths were all part of Soviet colonisation. Non-Russian people’s cultures, languages and histories were disparaged while Russification was presented as enlightenment.
At the same time, the Soviet Union adopted a progressive narrative of enfranchising nations conquered by the Russian Empire and giving them national rights within the Soviet Union. Many in Western academia bought into the anti-colonial narrative Moscow was trying to sell because they took official proclamations at face value and wanted to believe in the story of communist anti-imperialism.
Indeed, the Bolsheviks eliminated the tsarist aristocracy, and the people who took power were of diverse backgrounds. Stalin, for example, was an ethnic Georgian who spoke Russian with an accent.
For many Western scholars, that apparently meant that he was leading a post-colonial state. By focusing on individuals and official proclamations, Western academia too often overlooked the fact that Stalin was obsessed with maintaining Russian imperial borders and had adopted the same toolkit – ethnic cleansing, crushing dissent, destroying national movements, privileging Russian ethnicity and culture – that tsarist Russia used to maintain them.
Soviet coloniality was dismissed also because knowledge about the Soviet Union in the West was Russocentric. The Soviet Union was often referred to simply as Russia. There was little knowledge about non-Russian people. Non-Russian émigrés who fled to the West and wrote about Soviet coloniality with firsthand experience of Soviet imperialism were dismissed as anti-Soviet conservative ideologues.
Importantly, the Soviet Union also became a space of projections for those who looked for ways to criticise capitalism and Western imperialism. Those who blamed capitalism for oppression believed that eliminating capitalism would end all forms of oppression. For them, the Soviet Union was an internationalist project that brought equality and freedom to formerly subjugated peoples. ¤ Violence against various nations and ethnic groups was either ignored or treated as a necessary evil of the transition to communism.
Western scholarship also overwhelmingly focused on the Soviet metropoles – Moscow and Leningrad. They knew very little, if at all, about the Soviet peripheries, which meant that nobody really understood the uprisings in Central Asia, the Caucasus or the Baltics from the late 1980s onwards or the bloodshed in Tajikistan, Nagorno-Karabakh, Transnistria, Abkhazia, South Ossetia and later Chechnya.
As Ronald Gregor Suny, historian of Soviet imperial nation-building, noted in a 2017 interview, “Before the late 1980s, no one cared about non-Russians. Sovietology and Soviet studies [were] about the centre and the top – who was standing where on the Kremlin, on the mausoleum, and so forth.”
The generation of scholars who started studying the Soviet Union in the late 1980s and early 1990s were also shaped by their firsthand experience of the country. When they travelled as foreign students to Moscow, they found impoverished people. Empty shelves and pervasive poverty made Russians look like victims of the Soviet regime, and financially, Soviet Moscow seemed more like a European periphery than an imperial metropole, which they associated with material affluence. …
In Russia itself, the dominant narrative was one of victimhood. Russians learned to see themselves as a special nation that sacrificed its own wellbeing for the sake of non-Russians in the Soviet Union. “Let us stop feeding them” was the slogan Russians used to explain Moscow’s decision to let the colonies go in 1991.
In the West, the collapse of the Soviet Union came as a shock. Many – both in academia and politics – liked Mikhail Gorbachev and saw him as a hero, a man of peace. They approved of his reforms, which spurred a new era of freedom of speech.
Gorbachev was soft, open and democratic in his communication and seemed like a good partner for the next few decades. The United States was even willing to offer him assistance to reform the country; US policy was against Soviet disintegration.
This is how late Professor Mark von Hagen recalled in 2016 the political atmosphere back then: “Again, George Bush … was defending Gorbachev until the very last possible moment because he and the United States government at that level, with a few dissenting voices, wanted to keep the Soviet Union together because they were so afraid of the kind of crazy, fascist nationalism that they thought the Ukrainians represented.”
Indeed, this Western fear of chaos, bloodshed and even nuclear incidents led to the perception of independence movements within the former Soviet space as expressions of destructive ethno-nationalism rather than a natural progression of an empire collapsing.
At the same time, since the official dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991 was organised centrally by Moscow, it made the question of imperial oppression obsolete in the minds of Western observers. The idea that the Soviet Union was an internationalist experiment continued to stick, and its collapse was seen as this experiment simply expiring.
Many Western historians perceived it not as a regime that erased diverse polities and national movements, but as a political project that created and developed nations. This is highly problematic not only because it ignores the history of national movements that took place prior to the Bolshevik takeover but also goes contrary to the idea of a nation being formed on the basis of popular legitimacy.
Still there were exceptions. Influential works by historians like Ronald Grigor Suny (The Revenge of the Past) and Andreas Kappeler (Russia as a Multinational Empire) have pointed to the violent Bolshevik policies towards colonised nations and their resistance. Others like von Hagen (Does Ukraine Have a History?) and Timothy Snyder (Bloodlands) who have written from the point of view of the colonised were able to properly predict and warn of historical continuities and dangers still posed by Russia today for these nations.
What the myth of the Soviet Union as a nation-builder did was promote in the West the idea that Russia has a sphere of influence, a “backyard”, where it has the right to intervene.
That is why Western academia and political circles had little to say about the genocidal wars Boris Yeltsin and his successor, Vladimir Putin, led in Chechnya. Rather than seeing people claiming sovereignty and nationhood, the West readily bought into their portrayals of Chechens as bandits, nationalists and terrorists. That is why they also failed to see Russian imperial ambitions in Eastern Europe – the 2008 war on Georgia, the annexation of Crimea, etc – as such.
There has already been some recognition that mistakes were made. As Professor Susan Smith-Peter recently commented: “As scholars of Russia, we need to undertake a searching moral inventory to see the ways in which we have taken the Russian state’s point of view as a default. Have we in any way taken part in the glorification of the Russian state that Putin has taken to a pathological extreme? Has our field participated in casting Ukraine as a state without history in our own way?“ ¤ Indeed, it has. And it is time to correct that.
To understand Russia, one needs to listen to those who lived under Russian colonial rule. To understand former and current Russian colonies, one needs to listen to historians from these places and study their cultures, languages and histories, both written and unwritten. To appreciate the ways out of colonial dictatorships, one needs to study the successful transformations of states like Ukraine. This would require dismissing the myth of the “artificial nation” and finally seeing Russia as an empire.
🐣 RT @KyivIndependent Zelensky: Russia preparing new wave of aggression. ¤ Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky warned in his evening address that Russia is preparing for a new wave of aggression and is increasing military activity near Bakhmut and Vuhledar in Donetsk Oblast.
🐣 RT @RepAdamSchiff Kevin McCarthy just kicked me and @RepSwalwell off the Intelligence Committee. ¤ This is petty, political payback for investigating Donald Trump. ¤ If he thinks this will stop me, he will soon find out just how wrong he is. ¤ I will always defend our democracy.
⋙ 🐣 Trump hates you because you described him so perfectly in one of the best speeches ever given in the House (Impeachment #1 summary argument)
🐣 RT @IlvesToomas Ukraine’s Sacrifice Protects NATO, EU, and Democracy – CEPA
⋙ CEPA: Our Debt to Ukraine — Payback Time https://tinyurl.com/5cmvarky
// NATO and the EU are still standing and still viable, because of the heroism and sacrifice of the Ukrainians to stop Russian aggression.
🐣 RT @nicholadrummond Lots of people asking which tank is best. Challenger 2, Leopard 2 and M1A2 Abrams all have comparative advantages relative to each other, but all are quantifiably better than anything Russia has fielded, including T-90M.
🚫🐣 RT @RisingSC_taiwan The frigate of the #Russian Navy “Admiral #Gorshkov” with nuclear warheads on board is now moving towards the United States, – The Sun. ¤ The publication also claims that the Admiral Gorshkov is under close surveillance by the #NATO naval forces.
// messing around
🚫🐣 RT @TreasChest The frigate of the Russian Navy “Admiral Gorshkov” with nuclear warheads on board is now moving towards the USA, – The Sun.
¤ https://twitter.com/yasminalombaert/status/1617997111907454979?s=20
// ~Noon Central
🚫 ⋙ 🐣 RT @Quetzalcoatl_SF Eight (8) stratofortress B52 type bombers flying due East over Long Island , in formation, perhaps a meet and greet?
// ~4:30pm Central
🐣 RT @Artur_Micek [tr] In an optimistic scenario, the UA can receive the following amount of Leopard 2 tanks:
– Poland: 14
– Germany: 14 to 19
– Netherlands: 18
– Sweden: 10-12
– Norway: 8
– Finland: 10am to 2pm
– Portugal: 4-6
– Denmark: 10-14
– Spain: 6-12
Total: from 94 to 117. ¤ These are estimates!
🐣 RT @ IAPonomarenko If you want my honest opinion, 🇩🇪 Germany today has scored the very final victory over the shadow of its past. It’s been tempted by deceitful evil, yet it made the most crucial symbolic step. Not without pressure from its friends, but it made it.
🐣 RT @IAPonomarenko Germany, in a painful moment of truth, said no to empowering a revanchist, hateful war of aggression, and opted to help the victim prevail and restore just peace. No more deals with the devil. ¤ So thank you 🇩🇪Germany for being on the right side of history with us. ¤ And goodnight.
WaPo, Michael McFaul: Are we seeing the beginning of the end of Putinism? https://tinyurl.com/2p9cmr4f “It is hard to escape the sense though that the best days for Putin and his ideas are behind him. Like Leonid Brezhnev in Afghanistan, Putin has overreached in Ukraine”
🐣 RT @ @nickschifrin US officials confirm to me the US will announce tomorrow sending approximately 30 M1 Abrams tanks, in coordination with Germany’s announcing Leopard 2’s can go to Ukraine.
⋙ 🐣 RT @nickschifrin The Abrams will be sent using Ukraine Security Assistance Initiative (USAI), NOT through Presidential Drawdown Authority, the officials confirmed. Which means when it comes to spring offensives, the focus will be on getting Ukrainians trained and operating the Leopard 2’s.
🐣 RT @ @nickschifrin US officials confirm to me the US will announce tomorrow sending approximately 30 M1 Abrams tanks, in coordination with Germany’s announcing Leopard 2’s can go to Ukraine.
🐣 RT @officejjsmart New Wagner cemetery in Russia . ¤ Of 50,000 prisoners taken into their ranks, only about 10,000 are left. ¤ Wagner admits that it does not keep stats on its soldiers, but the organization suffered from the desertion of many soldiers who returned home to Russia with their weapons
🐣 RT @ @Tendar Many see only the military aspect of the decisive step of sending Leopard 2 tanks to Ukraine, but far more important is the political framework around it. The West has made the irrevocable decision to enable Ukraine to defeat Russia and it will use all necessary tools to achieve.
🐣 RT @francis_scarr Solovyov reacts to media reports that Olaf Scholz has decided to send Leopard 2 tanks to Ukraine ¤ He urges Russia to carry out strikes on Germany so that Germans “know which new Nazi leaders they’ve raised and brought to power” ¤ “You European Pharisees, you Nazi scumbags!”
💽 https://twitter.com/francis_scarr/status/1618010872995270657?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @BalticSnowTiger 🇺🇦💪🇩🇪 The Dam has broken #FreeTheLeopards HQ @MriyaReport thanks 🇺🇸🇬🇧& 🇫🇮🇵🇱, the 🐆Coalition of the Willing🇪🇸🇳🇱🇸🇪🇩🇰🇵🇹🇬🇷🇳🇴and🇨🇿🇸🇰, the millions of supporters & friends. A Leap of Leopards @general_ben @WarintheFuture @YAmzallagh @AndriyYermak @Makeiev @VVoytsitska @noclador
🐣 RT @KremlinTrolls F16s
⋙ 🐣 RT @ bayraktar_1love “Our military pilots traveled to the US. The type of aircraft that will probably be provided to 🇺🇦 and the corresponding terms for pilot training have already been determined,” – Yuriy Ignat, speaker of the Ukrainian Air Force. https://tinyurl.com/2p9yfxe4
🐣 RT @Gerashchenko_en [Ru tv]”Berlin will be destroyed if Germany continues supplying weapons to Ukrainian Nazis”
💽 [tr] https://twitter.com/Gerashchenko_en/status/1617901901986828289?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @sentdefender The Ukrainian Military is reportedly expecting a Large-Scale Russian Offensive across multiple Fronts sometime between February and March with Defenders in the North, East, and South continuing to make all preparations needed.
🐣 RT @STEMthebleeding DODM 5200.01 , Vol 2, change 4, page 40. ¤ Every declassified document must be reviewed by a board and annotated in the following manner prior to release, which is synonymous w/ declassification in this regard.
[TextLink:] https://twitter.com/STEMthebleeding/status/1617956109469503489?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @NOELreports An overview of the latest announced military equipment from Western countries to Ukraine which will be provided within short to mid term. ¤ Tomorrow, this graphic will probably be outdated :-)
[TextLink:] https://twitter.com/NOELreports/status/1616149484526010368?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @ChuckPfarrer BAKHMUT /1310 UTC 24 UTC/ N of Bakhmut, UKR troops are engaged within the urban limits of Krasna Hora, defending the T-05-13 HWY. In the eastern industrial districts of the Bakhmut, fighting continues along the Patrice Lumumba Blvd axis.
🌎 https://twitter.com/ChuckPfarrer/status/1617870473442000903?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @ChuckPfarrer KREMINNA /2000 UTC 24 JAN/ UKR forces are reported to be advancing NE of Dibrova, pushing the line of contact eastward. UKR air defense reports the downing of an Orlan-10 recon UAV as well as 2 Russian Su-25 aircraft and a Ka-52 attack helicopter.
🌎 https://twitter.com/ChuckPfarrer/status/1617972021564157952?s=20/photo/1
🐣 Leopards freed! 🐆🐆🐆🐆🐆🐆🐆🐆🐆🐆🐆🐆🐆🐆🐆🐆🐆🐆🐆🐆🐆🐆🐆🐆🐆🐆🐆🐆🐆🐆🐆🐆🐆🐆🐆🐆🐆🐆🐆🐆🐆🐆🐆🐆🐆🐆🐆🐆🐆🐆🐆🐆🐆🐆
NYT: Pentagon Will Increase Artillery Production Sixfold for Ukraine https://tinyurl.com/3jpfvbk7 “The effort, which will involve expanding factories and bringing in new producers, is part of ‘the most aggressive modernization effort in nearly 40 years’”
// The Army’s top acquisition official says production of the 155-millimeter shells badly needed by Kyiv will rise to 90,000 a month in two years.
The Pentagon is racing to boost its production of artillery shells by 500 percent within two years, pushing conventional ammunition production to levels not seen since the Korean War as it invests billions of dollars to make up for shortfalls caused by the war in Ukraine and to build up stockpiles for future conflicts. ¤ The effort, which will involve expanding factories and bringing in new producers, is part of “the most aggressive modernization effort in nearly 40 years” for the U.S. defense industrial base, according to an Army report
🐣 RT @stavridisj If true, this could be a true pivot point in the war. Well done, Germany, and “Danke Schoen”
⋙ Reuters: Germany to send Leopard tanks to Kyiv, allow others to do so – sources https://tinyurl.com/55hf6y24
😅 RT @Sputnik_Not BREAKING: Russia’s Ministry of Defence says today Russian forces in Ukraine have destroyed 200 Abrams M1 tanks, 150 Leopards, 15 HIMARS, four Swedish submarines, two Royal Navy aircraft carriers and a NATO mosquito training centre
🐣 RT @POLITICOEurope “Officials will no longer be able to travel abroad for vacation or for any other non-governmental purpose,” Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said.
⋙ Politico: Zelenskyy bans Ukrainian officials from traveling abroad https://tinyurl.com/2d2ubatw
// Kyiv is dealing with a major corruption probe involving government officials.
WaPo: Top Ukrainian officials ousted in anti-corruption sweep https://tinyurl.com/mr4xb8zu “Ukraine, under pressure from the US and especially the EU, has worked aggressively in recent years to root out corruption, which had long been pervasive across the government”
🧵 RT @Tatarigami_UA (12/3) Some people have been wondering why Russians have concentrated several brigades near a tiny town called Vuhledar, which approximately occupies only 5 square kilometers, and what makes Russians so obsessed with the idea to take it?
// 12/3/2022
📌 🌎 https://twitter.com/Tatarigami_UA/status/1599074248647057408?s=20/photo/1
[ThreadReader:] https://tinyurl.com/43bs87ju
To understand that, we need to look at the Russian military doctrine. Railroads are a core of Russian logistics and essential to supply entire armies. It allows Russia to move large numbers of supplies and reinforcements within a relatively short period./photo/1 -4
After the destruction of the railroad section in the Crimean bridge, Russians are facing significant logistics issues and frantically looking at possible solutions to reinforce their Southern group.
The railroad pathway highlighted in red color would allow the Russian army to establish an important logistics route between Russia-Luhansk-Donetsk-Mariupol and possibly Crimea. 🌎
The proximity of the railroad to Vuhledar, Novomykhailivka, and Mar’inka makes this endeavor difficult, as the Ukrainian army has fire control over the railroad, making it impossible for Russians to use. I marked that small railroad section with the red line 🌎
This brings us back to the Vuhledar question. Despite the small size, Vuhledar is located at an important strategic point that allows the Ukrainian army to keep under control both the railway and railway stations, more importantly – Volnovakha 🌎
To get closer to the Vuhledar, the enemy made a series of attempts to take over Pavlivka in October and November, which resulted in the total loss of about 2000 people as KIA, MIA, POWs, or seriously crippled on the Russian side.
While the enemy was able to push out Ukrainian troops from Pavlivka, they couldn’t establish control over the settlement, as it’s located much lower than Vuhledar and gives Ukrainian troops great fire control over the area. 🌎
After suffering devastating losses during the Pavlivka offense, the enemy replenishes its forces with manpower and vehicles. It seems like the enemy is planning to utilize additional battalions which just underwent training and rotation.
The same units involved in Pavlivka will be used in Vuhledar – 40th Naval Infantry Brigade, 155th Naval Infantry Brigade, special task unit “Kaskad” and various volunteer battalions such as “Tigr”/photo/1
At this moment, the enemy focuses on Vuhledar’s defense suppression. To achieve that, the enemy uses regular and rocket artillery, direct and indirect tank fire, and occasional unguided rocket barrages from helicopters and jets./photo/1
The morale remains low, and the regular army units perform fake offensives – they retreat under minimal fire and exaggerate combat reports to justify their retreats. To avoid stalling, the Russian command utilizes brutal tactics:
They use units consisting of BARS(Active Combat Military Reserve), volunteer battalions, and freshly mobilized, supported by armored units to perform assaults and to exhaust available Ukrainian material and human resources/photo/1
Another offensive operation will result in much worse losses than during the Pavlivka offense, but the threat to Vuhledar remains real and needs to be taken seriously – the Kremlin wants this task to be done, no matter the cost.
🐣 RT @ CaptFreneyNAFO Just to rub salt in his wounds after his failed business venture in Soledar Prigozhin is now expected to be called to the Kremlin for tea. On his way there he will have to avoid having a fatal car accident as well as potentially lethal ruzzian windows wherever he stays. 🤡💀☠️
⋙ 🐣 RT @EarthlyTweet The kremlin does not rule out that Kyiv may commit an assassination attempt on Yevgeny Prigozhin. ¤ This was stated by the press secretary of Khyla Dmytro Peskov in a comment to journalists on Tuesday, January 24. ¤ Sounds like someone needs to avoid windows & tea.
🐣 RT @Flash_news_ua ⚡️The Biden administration provided the Chinese government with evidence that some Chinese state-owned companies are assisting russia in military operations in Ukraine — Bloomberg with reference to sources.
[TextLink:] https://twitter.com/Flash_news_ua/status/1617860314799955968?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @vmedick BIG NEWS: Germany sends heavy Leopard tanks to Ukraine, approves Polish request, forms new tank alliance with other partners. @ChHickmann with exclusive details of what could be military turning point @derspiegel
⋙ DerSpiegel (S+): Krieg in der Ukraine: Deutschland schickt Leopard-Panzer https://tinyurl.com/2nx65ehf
// Nach monatelanger Debatte hat sich Kanzler Scholz durchgerungen, Kampfpanzer an die Ukraine zu liefern. Auch die Verbündeten wollen …
🐣 RT @Ukrainene The U.S. is considering sending 30-50 Abrams tanks, sources from #Pentagon said. ¤ #US is weighing heavily sending #Abrams tanks to #Ukraine, thus unlocking the #German #LeopardsForUkraine from #Germany and other European capitals, thus settling a growing rift over tanks.
WSJ: U.S. Leans Toward Providing Abrams Tanks to Ukraine https://tinyurl.com/4w56ept6 “The deal would address a rift between the U.S. and the Germans and other Europeans over providing tanks for Ukraine during a pivotal phase of the war”
// Deliveries would be part of deal to enable provision of German-built Leopards
The shift in the U.S. position follows a call on Jan. 17 between President Biden and German Chancellor Olaf Scholz in which Mr. Biden agreed to look into providing the Abrams tanks against the judgment of the Pentagon. A senior German official said that the issue had been the subject of intense negotiation between Washington and Berlin for more than a week and appeared to be on the way to resolution.
In a contentious meeting last week at Ramstein Air Base in Germany, the U.S. and its allies failed to persuade Germany to allow other nations to send German-made tanks, exposing the first serious rift in the alliance that has supported Kyiv. ¤ Previously, the Pentagon had ruled out providing the tanks to Ukraine, saying they were too complicated for the Ukrainians to maintain and operate. But White House and State Department officials were described as being more open to providing Abrams to break the diplomatic logjam holding up Leopard deliveries.
German officials initially said that they wouldn’t be the first to send tanks to Ukraine and wouldn’t do so unless the U.S. provided its own Abrams tanks. Germany’s new defense minister, Boris Pistorius, told German television last week that German and U.S. tanks don’t need to be provided at the same time and indicated that his government was still weighing what to do.
Poland’s defense minister said Tuesday that Poland had asked Germany for permission to send some of its German-made tanks to Ukraine. ¤ “The Germans have already received our request for consent to transfer Leopard 2 tanks to Ukraine,” Defense Minister Mariusz Błaszczak said. “I also appeal to the German side to join the coalition of countries supporting Ukraine with Leopard 2 tanks.”
Publicly, U.S. officials have praised Germany for weapons contributions it has made to Ukraine, including the IRIS-T air defense system and the promise to send a Patriot antimissile battery to supplement the ones pledged by the U.S. and the Netherlands, as well as Marder infantry-fighting vehicles.
Privately, U.S. officials were frustrated by Germany’s refusal to approve the provision of German-made tanks and have debated how to persuade Berlin to change its stance.
Some State Department and White House officials, however, have been open to meeting the German demands on the Abrams to avoid a deepening rift among Ukraine’s backers over aid to Ukraine and to expedite the delivery of more armor. ¤ The British promised earlier this month to send 14 Challenger 2 main battle tanks to Ukraine, but that wasn’t enough to persuade the Germans to release their hold on the Leopards.
🐣 RT @EuromaidanPress The Biden administration is leaning toward sending a significant number of Abrams M1 tanks to Ukraine and an announcement of the deliveries could come this week, US officials said – WSJ
⋙ .EuromaidanPress: US leaning toward sending a significant number of Abrams tanks to Ukraine – WSJ sources https://tinyurl.com/y6v8tnzz
The Biden administration is leaning toward sending a significant number of Abrams M1 tanks to Ukraine and an announcement of the deliveries could come this week, US officials said, The Wall Street Journal reports. ¤ According to WSJ, the announcement would be part of a broader diplomatic understanding with Germany in which Berlin would agree to send a smaller number of its own Leopard 2 tanks and would also approve the delivery of more of the German-made tanks by Poland and other nations. The White House declined to comment.
🐣 RT @JChengWSJ The war in Ukraine has exposed widespread problems in the American armaments industry that may hobble the U.S. military’s ability to fight a protracted war against China, according to a new study. @glubold
⋙ WSJ: U.S. Weapons Industry Unprepared for a China Conflict, Report Says https://tinyurl.com/2m2runbh
// The war in Ukraine is highlighting the inability of U.S. arms companies to replenish the military’s stocks
But the protracted conflict has also exposed the strategic peril facing the U.S. as weapons inventories fall to a low level and defense companies aren’t equipped to replenish them rapidly, according to the study, written by Seth Jones, a senior vice president at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a Washington, D.C.-based think tank.
For more than the last 20 years, the U.S. fought insurgency warfare in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere, a troop-intensive strategy, but the Ukraine conflict is a largely conventional war that relies more on heavy weaponry. A potential conflict with China in the Indo-Pacific would be different from the largely land war taking place in Ukraine, but would nonetheless need to draw deeply from U.S. arms stockpiles.
The problems with the industrial base, in part the result of outdated military contracting procedures and a sluggish bureaucracy, are now affecting the ability to create a credible deterrent in the Indo-Pacific region or face-off against China in a military conflict, according to the study’s finding. ¤ “These shortfalls would make it extremely difficult for the United States to sustain a protracted conflict,” the report said. “They also highlight that the U.S. defense industrial base lacks adequate surge capacity for a major war.”…
Mr. Jones recommends that the U.S. reassess its total munition requirements, urging Congress to hold hearings on the matter. Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Army Gen. Mark Milley said in November that such an effort is already under way. … The study also suggests reassessing American requirements for replenishing its stockpiles, creating a strategic munitions reserve and determining a sustainable munitions procurement plan to meet current and future requirements.
🐣 RT @maxseddon Blockbuster @MilesMJohnson investigation: how high-end lawyers in London and Moscow helped Wagner’s Yevgeny Prigozhin evade western sanctions for his role running paramilitary group Wagner – and helped him construct an elaborate lie to hide it
⋙ FT, Miles Johnson: Wagner Inc: a Russian warlord and his lawyers https://tinyurl.com/2va2m3ha
// Yevgeny Prigozhin, founder of the mercenary operation, has used prominent legal firms around the world to try to keep western governments
🐣 RT @ChuckPfarrer SLENDER THREADS: General Ben Hodges @general_ben points out the vulnerabilities of RU’s ‘colony’ of Crimea. Only 2 Lines of Communication (LOC) connect Crimea Ukraine. Only one, the Kerch Bridge, connects it to Russia. UKR’s long-range precision weapons can hit them all.
🌎 https://twitter.com/ChuckPfarrer/status/1617893809014345728?s=20/photo/1
⋙ 🐣 RT @general_ben This is the so-called “land bridge”, one of only two Land Lines of Communication (LOC) connecting Crimea to Russia. The other is the Kerch Bridge. There’s a reason the Kremlin is upgrading that road. Send UKR the necessary long-range precision weapons to wreck this “land bridge”.
🔄 🐣 Feel free to follow my curated Lists on Ukraine and (more technical:) War in Ukraine
(Don’t tell Elmo, but there on no ads in Twitter Lists)
Ukraine: https://twitter.com/i/lists/157259218
✛ War in Ukraine: https://twitter.com/i/lists/1545071393397784576
🧵 RT @RealCynicalFox Scholz und Panzers [thread]: ¤ Chancellor Scholz has once again prevaricated on the decision whether to authorize Leopard 2 transfers to Ukraine from Germany’s various client states. While there are likely several reasons for this, I’d like to briefly delve into one of them here. ¤ 1/
📌 https://twitter.com/RealCynicalFox/status/1617844201953329152?s=20
[ThreadReader:] https://tinyurl.com/yc3fpuk8
My assessment of his behavior is that Scholz still harbors dreams of returning to something approaching a pre-war status quo between Russia & Germany. He’s caught between this desire, & growing internal/external pressure to provide increasing levels of aid to Ukraine.
2/
Therefore Scholz continually attempts to thread the needle between the two. Aid is forthcoming, but not in relatively large quantities for a nation like Germany, nor is it sent with great alacrity. Increases happen only under pressure, & when Germany can delay – she does.
3/
MBTs are a Rubicon, especially considering that Leopard 2s would be far easier to transfer & sustain in quantity than a like number of Abrams sent from the US. They & their entire support system are already in Europe. They’re also vastly superior to any Russian tank.
4/
So, Scholz can’t say “Yes” if he wishes a return to the post-war status quo w/ Russia. He also can’t give a definitive “No” given the mounting pressure from NATO allies & his own govt.’s previous statements on the issue. His solution is to say neither, to delay.
5/
Scholz hopes (IMO) that if he delays long enough the decision will be taken out of his hands. Either the US will step in with the Abrams, or German client states will violate their agreements & transfer Leopard 2’s w/o German consent. In his mind, this keeps his hands clean.
6/
This would give him cover to eventually agree to transfers or support assistance (if he has to), but allows him to make the argument post-war to Russia that he didn’t initiate the transfer & either his hand was forced or agreements were violated so it isn’t his fault.
7/
I’m admittedly ascribing some fairly cynical motivations to the German Chancellor. H/e given his statements & behavior to date, I do not think it an unfair assessment. ¤ 8/8.
🐣 RT @RenaEUNV Ukraine: Stoltenberg ‘confident’ solution on German tanks will be found soon video | Global #GermanNews #German #GlobalNews
⋙ EuropeNewsVideo[.]com: Ukraine: Stoltenberg ‘confident’ solution on German tanks will be found soon video | Global https://tinyurl.com/ycx5ewm8
// Nato’s secretary general told reporters that Ukraine needed heavier and more advanced weapons and it needed them quicker
🐣 RT @RFERL The departure of the deputy head of the presidential administration came as Volodymyr Zelenskiy announced he would make personnel changes at senior and lower levels following the most high-profile graft allegations since Russia’s invasion.
⋙ RFE/RL: Ukrainian Officials Out Amid Corruption Scandal As Poland Presses Germany On Tanks For Kyiv https://tinyurl.com/4v4nr6b7
🐣 RT @UFfrontline 🚨#Breaking, Reportedly 12 countries have agreed to supply 🇺🇦Ukraine with 100 Leopard 2 tanks if the 🇩🇪German government gives its approval, a senior Ukrainian official tells ABC News. ¤ #Ukraine #UkraineRussiaWar #kreminna #Leopard2 #Leopard #Leopards #LeopardsForUkraine
WaPo, Ishaan Tharoor: Tanks, but no tanks: What’s the matter with Germany? https://tinyurl.com/2mdrkuaa “‘[F]or domestic consumption, it is seen as a positive thing for a German chancellor not to lead on this, to be cautious, to be resistant, to have tried all other options’”
⋙ 🐣 It’s a feature (not a bug?) of the German language that you can structure a sentence so the verb comes at the end and even after the verb, you can play around with adverbs “I tomorrow to the store go maybe”
⭕ 23 Jan 2023
NBC: Jan. 6 rioter who put his feet on desk in Pelosi’s office is convicted on all eight counts https://tinyurl.com/ycxrssz8 “‘I made some bad mistakes and I regret them, but I don’t think I broke the law,’ Barnett said. ‘I feel like a f—— idiot’”
// Richard Barnett, of Arkansas, said on the witness stand last week that he regretted going to the Capitol the day of the riot.
🐣 RT @ChrisMurphyCT You can’t make this up. ¤ Republicans added $4 TRILLION to the debt with their tax cut for corporations and billionaires. ¤ Now, they are refusing allow Treasury to pay back the loans unless Congress agrees to cuts to Medicare and Social Security.
🐣 RT @BryanDawsonUSA BREAKING: Charles McGonigal. the FBI Special Agent in Charge who said he found no Trump-Russia collusion was arrested over Russian collusion, taking 250K & covering for sanctioned Deripaska implicated in Trump scandal. He worked at office that leaked Hillary emails investigation.
🔊 https://twitter.com/BryanDawsonUSA/status/1617672079008231426?s=20/photo/1
⋙ 🐣 RT @ While Republicans defend Trump’s theft of top secret documents, a reminder @GOP destroyed Hillary over nothing but lies.
🔹Emails FBI thought marked classified: 3 [Human error]
🔹Actual emails marked classified: 0
🔹# of 33,000 “missing” emails: 0
🧵 RT @ jimfitznews EXCLUSIVE INVESTIGATION – A vast cache of hacked material from Russia has shed new light on how the UK govt helped warlord Prigozhin mount a targeted legal attack on a journalist in London. This is #londongrad writ large.
📌 https://twitter.com/jimfitznews/status/1617580880935153666?s=20
// many addtl links in thread
⋙⋙ OpenDemocracy: Exclusive: Treasury helped Putin ally sue UK journalist https://tinyurl.com/yc6weky3
// UK Treasury, then under Rishi Sunak’s control, let Yevgeny Prigozhin circumvent sanctions to target Eliot Higgins
🐣 RT @Kasparov63 As I’m fond of saying, I believe in coincidences, but I also believe in the KGB!
‼️ 💙 ⋙ 🧵 RT @KaivanShroff Just to be clear, when the New York Times reported that the FBI saw “no link between Trump and Russia” — a week before the 2016 election — the FBI agent who was just arrested over ties to Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska was heading up the investigation. ¤ Just an absolute scandal.
📌 [NYT TextLinks:] https://twitter.com/KaivanShroff/status/1617613877868662785?s=20/photo/1 -2
// see comments
TheDrive: Ukraine Situation Report: Why Capturing The Small Town Of Kreminna Matters https://tinyurl.com/2p8vazyf “‘Kreminna is a gateway to the north and central Luhansk region,’ a Ukrainian military advisor told The War Zone on Monday. ‘And it allows us to hit the flank of Bakhmut’”
// Taking Kreminna could bust open the lines in Luhansk and put pressure on Russian forces advancing on Bakhmut.
🐣 RT @ Azovsouth Private Group of terrorists and mercenaries Wagner boss #Prigozhin has been left abandoned by the Kremlin after him and his terror troops, failed to capture #Bakhmut. -ISW Reports
🐣 RT @ Historian_Matt How is Germany “coordinating internationally” when Czechia, France, Morocco, North Macedonia, Poland, Slovenia and UK are *already providing tanks*, while Denmark, Finland, Poland, and others have asked for Germany’s permission to export their Leopard 2s but Scholz prevents it?
🐣 RT @KvvKwiatkowski The head of the Ministry of National Defense @mblaszczak announced that Poland will transfer 100 T-72 main battle tanks and infantry fighting vehicles to Ukraine together with 14 Leopards #Ramstein #NATO #LloydAustin #FreeTheLeopards @SecBlinken @SecDef @jensstoltenberg
🐣 RT @KyivIndependent PM: Poland to apply for Germany’s approval to send Leopard tanks to Ukraine. ¤ “Even if we did not get this approval, we would still transfer our tanks together with others to Ukraine,” Mateusz Morawiecki said, adding that Germany’s consent is “of secondary importance.”
🐣 RT @ChuckPfarrer BAKHMUT /2125 UTC 23 JAN/ RU has continued incremental advances in the Bakhmut Area of Operations. N of Bakhmut, UKR troops are contesting a RU attack on Krasna Hora. UKR air defense downed 2 Russian Su-25 strike aircraft, a Ka-52 attack helicopter and an Orlan-10 recon UAV.
🌎 https://twitter.com/ChuckPfarrer/status/1617632291924369409?s=20/photo/1
⋙ 🐣 RT @the_black_leaf Chuck I don’t see any evidence that the heights above Klischiivka have been taken. Not even Rybar claims those heights. I understand Ivanivske was included in a daily report, but I don’t think that’s enough to explicitly say that hill is now in Russian hands.
🐣 RT @UrmasReinsalu [Estonia] I will emphazise today @ #FAC in #Brussels 🇧🇪 that #Ukraine needs additonal defensive aid including heavy weaponry & oil🛢️price cap must be lowered. ¤ 🇪🇪 will contribute than 1% of our GDP to 🇺🇦 defensive aid & I call on other nations to do the same.
🧵 RT @SniperFella Stoltenberg: More main battle tanks for Ukraine. In the debate about the delivery of Western-style battle tanks to Ukraine, the NATO Secretary General emphasized NATO’s unity and again campaigned for more arms deliveries.
📌 https://twitter.com/SniperFella/status/1617620255194636288?s=20
⋙ 🐣 RT @ Since the war began almost a year ago, there has been “an unprecedented level of support” in the alliance, said Jens Stoltenberg on the TV station Welt when asked whether the alliance was divided in a crucial phase of the war. Asked if he would welcome German approval….
⋙ 🐣 RT @ …of Poland’s announced supply of Leopard tanks to Ukraine, Stoltenberg said: “My message is that the Allies have to supply more, have to supply heavier equipment, equipment, combat systems for Ukraine. And that is absolutely urgent.”
⋙ 🐣 RT @ He welcomes all the announcements made by the Allies about battle tanks. “So if we really want to have a solution where Ukraine survives as a sovereign country and a free country, then it’s absolutely essential to act like that.”
🐣 RT @PLPermRepEU [Poland in the EU] FM @RauZbigniew 🇵🇱 after #FAC in Brussels: ¤ We are going to send #Leopard 2 tanks to 🇺🇦. We will be in touch with the 🇩🇪 government about it. But regardless of the decision of other countries, we are more determined to deliver these tanks as promised.
🐣 📋 RT @JaneotN When Clinton banned assault rifles in 1994, mass shootings dropped by 44%. When Republicans let this ban expire in 2004, mass shootings increased by 245%. ¤ Listen. It’s the guns.
WaPo: Former senior FBI official accused of working for Russian he investigated https://tinyurl.com/2fvcx24z “The former head of FBI counterintelligence in New York has been charged in two separate indictments that accuse him of taking secret cash payments of more than $225,000”
// Charles McGonigal, a former counterintelligence chief, is charged with money laundering and other counts connected to oligarch Oleg Deripaska
🐣 RT @ChuckPfarrer KREMINNA AXIS /1445 UTC 23 JAN/ UKR forces continue incremental advances within the urban area of Kreminna. Battle-space information on 23 JAN indicates that UKR forces have captured a sawmill and entered the campus of a boarding school in the western limits of Kreminna.
🌎 https://twitter.com/ChuckPfarrer/status/1617532063128911874?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @alextencate (1/22) Pistorius has already overruled her, by stating it’s the chancellor’s decision and by repeating that Germany isn’t the only country with doubts. It’s back to the reluctant follower position.
↥ ↧
🐣 RT @OlgaNYC1211 Who could have anticipated this? Germany is pathetic and doesn’t want to burn bridges w Russia for future relations
⋙ 🐣 RT @vonderburchard Seems like Baerbock did not represent an agreed government line when she said that Germany “would not stand in the way” of a Polish Leopard request. ¤ Gov spox told @grinaldi97 that such a request would have to be first discussed and decided in Germany’s Federal Security Council.
🚫⋙⋙ 🐣 RT @vonderburchard Germany “would not stand in the way” if Poland or other allies asked for permission to send their German-built Leopard tanks to Ukraine, said Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock. ¤ Her comments put pressure on Scholz and put the ball back in Poland’s court:
🚫⋙⋙⋙ Politico [EU] (1/22): Germany ready to let Poland send Leopard tanks to Ukraine: foreign minister https://tinyurl.com/2s49r7c8
// Warsaw still hasn’t requested permission from Berlin, but ‘if we were asked, we would not stand in the way,’ Annalena Baerbock said.
🐣 RT @sumlenny A wise move from Germany would be sharing the power and leading by example and by participation. Instead, the corrupt SPD elites have stupidly chosen the way of blockade and betrayal, heading Germany towards a huge fall, second only to our crash after we chose the NS deception.
🐣 RT @IAPonomarenko Yeah, some of those not-my-problem people in the West need to sit down and watch Russian television with subtitles, for just one day. ¤ They’d be shocked.
⋙ 🐣 RT @wartranslated If only people could observe the rhetoric and the spiralling down to complete insanity by Russia over the past year. We’re so incredibly lucky there’s a nation sacrificing itself every day to stop it. But we’re arguing whether to give them tanks. Wake up, before it’s too late.
🐣 RT @andersostlund Soviet Union (Russia) committed genocide against Ukrainians in the 30s. ¤ Germany committed genocide against Ukrainians in the 40s, the massacre of Ukrainians at Babi-Yar was probably the worst atrocity of WWII when it happened. ¤ Russia is committing genocide against Ukrainians now.
⋙ 🐣 RT @andersostlund Ukraine has been the big prize for the aggressors in all the three major European wars the last 120 years, and millions of Ukrainians have died because of it.
🐣 RT @Gerashchenko_en “There is no time for bargaining, we need to survive” – @ZelenskyyUa in an interview to ARD about tanks for Ukraine.
💽 [tr] https://twitter.com/Gerashchenko_en/status/1617465193046413312?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @mccaffreyr3 Careful we don’t confuse a political argument with a military view. The most effective, battle tested, lethal, and reliable main battle tank in the world is the US M1A2 upgrade. We have 1500. MULTI FUEL. Gas. Diesel. Jet fuel. 265 mile range. 45 MPH.
⋙⋙ 🐣 RT @McFaul If Abrams tanks work in Poland, why cant they work in Ukraine? I understand the jet fuel and high maintenance constraints. And Leopards are better. But there’s no military utility in deploying them in Ukraine? Really?
¤ https://twitter.com/McFaul/status/1617379224691806208?s=20
// [Comments interesting]
⋙⋙⋙ AP (12/6/2022): US approves $4B sale of Abrams tanks to NATO ally Poland https://tinyurl.com/3vcjbz3m
⋙⋙ 🐣 RT @JoseonOne The M1 is a sophisticated platform that requires tons of maintenance. It takes 6 months or more to train to maintain, way longer than to operate. Weapon systems are more than capabilities. The logistics and maintenance goes hand in hand to be combat effective.
⋙⋙⋙⋙ 🐣 RT @McFaul Yep. Just talked to a 3 star general who used to command them. But that was also exactly the same argument we heard about Patriots six months ago. And if they so damn hard to use, why are we selling them to Poland? Why do we like them?
⋙ 🐣 RT @mccaffreyr3 It has superb Indep Tank CDR Thermal Viewer. IVIS battle management. A radical upgrade redesign from the M1A2 tanks in my 24th ID that slaughtered Soviet era armor in Desert Storm. The M1 incredibly survivable when hit. Turbine engine SIMPLE in design.
NYT: Here’s a look at Stryker vehicles and why the Pentagon is sending them to Ukraine https://tinyurl.com/5n8wc58m “[T]he U.S. is providing Ukraine with specific capabilities designed to enable Kyiv’s armed forces to break though Russian defenses”
// faulty link
⭕ 22 Jan 2023
‼️🐣 RT @Heroiam_Slava Germany will not prevent Poland from transferring Leopard 2 tanks to Ukraine, – German Foreign Minister Annalena Burbock
💽 https://twitter.com/Heroiam_Slava/status/1617261601341448192?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @JayinKyiv US Army General Keith Kellogg visits Izyum to witness the destruction left by Russian barbarian trash that spent 5 months committing brutal atrocities here. ¤ Russians tortured, raped, buried residents alive, the whole laundry list of Russian activities went down in Izyum.
🖼 https://twitter.com/JayinKyiv/status/1617183364280365058?s=20/photo/1 -4
🧵 RT @ TheStudyofWar Putin likely turned to Prigozhin & Prigozhin’s reported ally, Army Gen. Sergey Surovikin, to continue efforts to gain ground and break the will of #Ukraine and its Western backers to continue the war after the conventional military had culminated & suffered disastrous setbacks.
📌 https://twitter.com/TheStudyofWar/status/1617365586052534272?s=20/photo/1 -4
[ThreadReader:] https://tinyurl.com/bdfv737t
2/ The Russian MoD and General Staff, headed by Sergey Shoigu and Army General Valeriy Gerasimov respectively, had turned their attention to mobilizing Russian reservists and conscripts and setting conditions for improved performance by the conventional Russian military… ¤ …but they had little hope of achieving anything decisive in the Fall and early Winter of 2022.
3/ Putin apparently decided to give Prigozhin and Surovikin a chance to show what they could do with mobilized prisoners, on the one hand, and a brutal air campaign targeting Ukrainian civilian infrastructure on the other.
4/ Both efforts failed, as Prigozhin’s attempts to seize Bakhmut culminated and Surovikin’s air campaign accomplished little more than inflicting suffering on Ukrainian civilians while expending most of Russia’s remaining stocks of precision missiles.
5/ Prigozhin seems to have decided in this period that his star really was on the rise and that he could challenge Gerasimov and even Shoigu for preeminence in Russian military affairs. Those hopes now seem to have been delusional.
6/ Putin appears to have decided to turn away from relying on Prigozhin and his irregular forces and to put his trust instead in Gerasimov, Shoigu, and the conventional Russian military once more.
7/ Putin began to re-centralize control of the war effort under the Russian Ministry of Defense (MoD) in early December.8/ Ukrainian and select Kremlin officials have also reported that Putin is preparing to launch a second wave of reserve mobilization to expand the Russian Armed Forces… ¤ … and ISW has reported that the Russian MoD has been attempting to improve the professionalism of its conventional forces and to test the effectiveness of its chains of command.
9/ Such reforms and appointments mark a significant inflection in the Kremlin’s efforts to reconstitute its conventional military and a deemphasis on short-term mitigation efforts such as using irregular formations on the frontlines.
10/ Putin’s decision to focus and rely on conventional Russian forces is marginalizing the Wagner Group and the faction that nevertheless continues to contribute to Russian war efforts in Ukraine.
11/ Putin likely turned to Prigozhin’s irregular forces to get through the period following the Russian conventional military’s culmination after the reckless and costly push to seize Severodonetsk and Lysychansk.
12/ Prigozhin likely imagined that his efforts in Ukraine would continue to lend him military and political power in Russia.
13/ Prigozhin’s command over the Bakhmut direction and proximity to Putin likely gave him a false sense that he could use the victory in Bakhmut against the backdrop of Russian MoD’s military failures as a bargaining tool for his own commercial objectives… ¤ …such as the legalization of Wagner Group’s mercenary activity in Russia, expanding his political power within the Kremlin, or even displacing the authority of Shoigu.
14/ Putin had never fully given in to Prigozhin’s recommendations or demands throughout this transitional period and had likely always planned to put Prigozhin back into his place once the Russian conventional military improved enough to bear the burden of continuing the war.
15/ Putin’s turn on Prigozhin has positive and negative implications for Russia’s military campaign in Ukraine. He is now marginalizing & distancing himself from a hard-to-control mercenary group made predominantly of ill-disciplined convicts commanded in the most brutal manner.
16/ The marginalization of people like Prigozhin, who has had men executed with sledgehammers and hands out Wagner sledgehammers as gifts, is a good thing.
17/ The return to influence of more professional military officers likely suggests a reduced likelihood that Putin will give in to the crazier demands of the far-right pro-war faction, possibly in turn further reducing the already-low likelihood of irrational Russian escalations.
18/ But the re-emergence of the professional Russian military is also concerning, as Prigozhin could never have established a formidable and sustainable national military apparatus.
19/ It can never be good to have people like Prigozhin near the center of power, so any indication that he is receding from power is positive.
20/ Prigozhin is not yet gone and will not likely leave Putin’s circle permanently. And he could rise again if Gerasimov and his cronies fail Putin once more. But Prigozhin is, for now, apparently an increasingly spent force in the Kremlin’s inner circles, and that is good.
🐣 RT @KyivIndependent⚡️ISW: Wagner boss rise in decline after failure to take Bakhmut. ¤. Private mercenary Wagner Group boss Yevgeny Prigozhin appears to be on the outs with the Kremlin after failing to capture Bakhmut with his troops, the Institute for the Study of War said in its latest update.
🐣 RT @KyivIndependent ⚡️US lawmakers call for giving Ukraine Abrams tanks. ¤ Michael McCaul, chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, on Jan. 22 called for giving Ukraine U.S.-made Abrams tanks as a way to push Germany to allow the delivery of German-made Leopard tanks to Ukraine.
🐣 RT @andersostlund Good thread on German obstruction.
⋙ 🧵 RT @jgotkowska 1.🇵🇱 has been delivering huge amounts of heavy equipment to 🇺🇦: tanks (300+), infantry fighting vehicles (200+), self-propelled howitzers… 🇵🇱 doesn’t need to be frustrated because 🇩🇪 declared to deliver 40 Marders. Here is an overview
📌 https://twitter.com/jgotkowska/status/1617235688314867717?s=20
WaPo: Germany won’t object if Poland sends tanks to Ukraine, foreign minister says https://tinyurl.com/4xawzexj //➔ They have flip-flopped on this so many times, it’s hard to know what to believe […tbc…]
🐣 RT @Gerashchenko_en “USA are going to help Ukraine strike Russian Crimea” – Skabeyeva [Ru tv]
💽 https://twitter.com/Gerashchenko_en/status/1617190424325623810?s=20/photo/1
⋙ 🐣 note: these warheads (GLSDB) have a range of 150km, twice the range of current HIMARS missiles (70-90km), but half of ATACMS (300km)
🐣 RT @KleineBrockhoff Here is an unlikely saviour for Olaf #Scholz: Mike McCaul, new chair of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, wants to send #Abrams to unblock 🇩🇪 policy
⋙ CNN: House Foreign Affairs chairman says some members don’t understand what’s at stake in Ukraine https://tinyurl.com/485naztk
🐣 📋 RT @MacFarlaneNews About #DebtCeiling ¤ Sen. Dick Durbin (D-IL) tells CNN: “Almost 25% of the national debt accumulated over the history of the United States, 230 years, was accumulated during the four years of Donald Trump”.. says GOP leaders “need to face the responsibility to pay for it”
🐣 RT @mccaffreyr3 [1/20] Astonishing nonsense about refusal to provide M1A1/A2 MBT’s to Ukraine. The Egyptians have 1100. The Saudis have 450. The Moroccans have 380. Its a multi-fuel engine of enormous speed and reliability. Incredible lethality. An experienced UKR tank crew could fight in 30 days.
⋙ 🐣 RT @mccaffreyr3 [1/20] Germany’s refusal to give tanks to Ukraine without a similar pledge from the U.S. has left Scholz isolated among allies—but so far aligned with public opinion at home
// 1/20/2023
EuromaidanPress: Germany could send 19 Leopard tanks to Ukraine from available 212 – Spiegel https://tinyurl.com/yb4r99mv “Since the summer of 2022, the German Ministry of Defense has had a list of Leopard tanks that could be used to identify vehicles [for] Ukraine”
🐣 RT @ChuckPfarrer KREMINNA AXIS /1500 UTC 22 JAN/ Explosive Ordnance Disposal (EOD) task elements attached to UKR recon teams continue render-safe operations in the the heavily mined areas surrounding Kreminna. UKR units enter W Kreminna urban area.
🌎 https://twitter.com/ChuckPfarrer/status/1617173380322725891?s=20/photo/1
// “Again today, on 22 JAN, RU conducted fire missions against the western urban areas of Kreminna, indicating that UKR troops have achieved a lodgment.”
🐣 I just noticed on the list of items from Ramstein that it does include Stryker armored vehicles and GLSDB which, while not ATACMS, seriously increases the missiles’ range to 150KM with very high precision:
◕ https://twitter.com/Auriandra/status/1617178255756238849?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @ChuckPfarrer BAKHMUT /1300 UTC 22 JAN/ In the E. industrial districts, fighting continues along Patrice Lumumba Blvd / H-32 HWY. RU forces have achieved a lodgment in the Bakhmutskty Building / ceramics factory complex & maintain positions in the furniture factory on the N side of the HWY.
🌎 https://twitter.com/ChuckPfarrer/status/1617144376391516160?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @wartranslated Girkin does not think highly of a successful Russian offensive in the coming future unless done by small motivated units such as Wagner on limited sectors of the frontline. He believes Russian forces have no superiority over Ukraine to achieve success anywhere due to low morale
[TextLink:] https://twitter.com/wartranslated/status/1617131387923873792?s=20/photo/1 -3
🐣 RT @thorstenbenner US administration sources make public via @sz that Llyod Austin had “fierce exchange of words” with head of chancellory @W_Schmidt_ & that Sullivan “read riot act” to Scholz’ national security advisor Plötner for putting conditions on Leopard transfer.
⋙ SuddeutscheZeitung: Die USA sind wütend [furious] auf Scholz https://tinyurl.com/4pvvnadh
⋙ 🐣 RT @thorstenbenner Sounds like Julie Smith called up Stefan Kornelius to write up story in deliberate effort to undercut narrative “Scholz & Biden are fully aligned on support for ” & to make it clear that Biden administration expects Scholz to move on US terms rather than him setting conditions.
⋙ 🐣 RT @bjan9 So why doesn’t the US agree to send some tanks as Scholz requests?
⋙⋙ 🐣 it would look like egregiously wasteful spending at a sensitive time when the Republicans are trying to make deep budget cuts in order to go along with increasing the debt ceiling ~ the US says the Abrams don’t match what Ukr needs
🐣 RT @Winter_z123 Interesting, John Kirby & the Pentagon speaker had really nice compliments for Germany yesterday. May it be, that this is another propaganda campaign by US defense industry, now that journalists start to analyse the interests of defense industry? They don’t want to reveal that
🐣 RT @saabj35 So that’s why the rhetoric changed from “We can only release them if USA goes first” (excuse #134) to “Uhhm, I suddenly remembered, we still… eh… have to count them! Yes, that’s it, we haven’t counted them yet!” (excuse #135).
🐣 RT @Nickyschwenzer German opposition & even parts of the government (everyone except SPD) is absolutely appalled of what Scholz & the SPD does!💥💥💥
Love u Poland 🇵🇱 & 🇪🇪🇨🇿🇬🇧🇫🇮🇸🇪🇦🇹🇱🇹
Free the Leopards!💙💛🇪🇺🇺🇸👊 #UkraineWillWin
#GermanyHasNoBalls
🔄 🐣 You amaze me with your courage and bravery, bearing the entire fate of the West and our shared values on your shoulders. You are heroes indeed. Fight well and come home safe to your families. We will help you rebuild your beautiful country to be the moral beacon of Europe! Slava!
🐣 RT @thorstenbenner “US offers used tanks from its own stocks plus long term industrial partnership to every European country that can deliver Leopard 2 to “, defence industry circles claim. “Each country that accepts US offer is lost for defence industry”.
¤ https://twitter.com/thorstenbenner/status/1617064545788522497?s=20
⋙ 🐣 my German is not good enough to understand fully the nzz article, but I find nothing in the US press about an offer by US to provide Leopards (if we even have them) and cut deals with EU countries to buy US arms; sounds implausible
🐣 RT @ukraine_map What Ukraine 🇺🇦 needs the most to help them win the war
1. ATACMS
2. Leopard 2 Tanks
3. More Patriot Batteries
4. Gray Eagle Combat Drones
5. Lots of 155mm Artillery Shells
🐣 RT @wartranslated Hilarious. Russian volunteer in “LPR” Murz explains how expensive Russian EW works. It’s put in the rears to avoid destruction by artillery and… you guessed it, it jams own Russian equipment. And no one does anything about it because “orders”. Waste of money, says Murz.
[TextLink:] https://twitter.com/wartranslated/status/1617094220430610432?s=20A/photo/1 -3
🐣 RT @NOELreports State Duma speaker Volodin threatens the US and NATO with a “terrible war”. Putin’s associate said that the supply of offensive weapons to Ukraine would lead to a global catastrophe and to retaliatory measures using more powerful weapons.
⋙ 🐣 RT @NOELreports “Given the technological superiority of Russian weapons, foreign politicians making such decisions need to understand that this could end in a global tragedy that will destroy their countries,” Volodin added.
⋙⋙ 🐣 such threats are exactly why Russia must be defeated; the idea that nuclear-armed countries can simply invade and take over their neighbors is a situation the world cannot accept ¤ Russian forces need to leave Ukraine
🐣 RT @Andrii2603 ISW explained why the months-long defense of Bakhmut is crucial ¤ Experts from the American Institute for the Study of War (ISW) call the defense of Bakhmut, during which Ukraine suffers significant losses, “a strategically sound operation, despite its costs.”
⋙ 🐣 RT @Andrii2603 Ukraine would pay a significant price if Russian troops could easily take Bakhmut, analysts are sure.
⋙ 🐣 RT @Andrii2603 “Ukrainian forces are effectively holding back Russian forces … hindering Russia’s ability to continue its offensive elsewhere,” ISW said.
🧵 RT @CanadianKobzar FELLAS! Stay awhile and listen! Today I am very very excited, as I will be discussing my FAVOURITE topic in history. One which is of absolute monumental importance to Ukraine – The KOZAKY! This thread is dedicated to @PainfulFella – hope you are doing well my brother. 1/21
📌 https://twitter.com/CanadianKobzar/status/1617055788111101952?s=20
Kozaky have their origins in 15th C. Ukraine in the wake of the Mongolian Invasion. Ukraine was raided by Tatars leading to thousands women and children were taken as slaves to the Ottoman Empire. The “lucky” ones became serfs under either Muscovite or Polish rule. 5/21
In response, groups of brave warriors began to form self-governing military communities in Ukraine to resist against oppression. Adapting the tactics and martial arts of the Tatars, these “free men” or “kazaks” in Turkish, would become the Kozaky. 6/21
Early Kozak rebellions against PLC [Polish Lithuanian Commonwealth] in the 17th focused on expanding the register and Kozak rights. But as the PLC began to impose serfdom and attack the rights of the Orthodox church – Kozaky would rebel against the PLC, championing the oppressed and the Orthodox faith. 14/21
This would culminate in 1648 with the Khmelnitsky Rebellion. This resulted in the liberation of Ukraine from the PLC and the creation of the first Kozak state known as the Hetmanate. This state included Sloboda Ukraine, the Zaporozhian lands and much of modern day Ukraine. 15/21
Kozaky were not just innovators on the battlefield. The Hetmanate had one of the highest literacy rates in Europe in the 18th century. Art and science flourished under the Kozak Baroque period of the 18th century. But democratic thought was truly a Kozak innovation. 16/21
From its birth the Sich was a democracy. The Otaman (later Hetman) was an elected position. In 1710, Pylyp Orlyk’s Constitution was the FIRST constitution to establish the separation of powers of state between judiciary, executive and legislative – well before Montesquieu. 17/21
This all ended in 1775 when Catherine II liquidated the Sich and slaughtered thousands of innocent Ukrainians. While Ukrainian Kozaky had periodic appearances in the Napoleonic wars, the Kuban Kozak Host, and the Kozak movement in 1918 – 1775 marks the death of Kozakdom. 18/21
The spiritual legacy of the Kozaky lives on in various aspects of Ukraine today – in our dance, song culture and especially in our armed forces defending against Russian oppression. 19/21
Many will ask what the difference between Russian Cossacks and Ukrainian Kozaks are. While this deserves a thread on its own, I will sumarize my thoughts here: ¤ Kozaky always fought in opposition to authority and fought for freedom for the oppressed. 20/21
Russian “Cossacks” on the other hand were always the enforcer of the Tsar’s will and oppression. So when you see a Russian “Cossack” – they are not real Kozaky or “free men”, but they are merely false pretenders and slaves to authority. Slava Ukraini! SLAVA KOZAKY! 21/21
PS – some additional personal details about Kozaks. They were very ritualistic. When a Hetman (leader) of the Kozaks was elected, he had to reject his election three times. Other traditions include my family tradtion in the thread below!
⋙ 🧵 https://twitter.com/CanadianKobzar/status/1597015084118601728?s=20
🧵 RT @CanadianKobzar FELLAS! Stay awhile and listen! Today I am very very excited, as I will be discussing my FAVOURITE topic in history. One which is of absolute monumental importance to Ukraine – The KOZAKY! This thread is dedicated to @PainfulFella – hope you are doing well my brother. 1/21
📌 https://twitter.com/CanadianKobzar/status/1617055788111101952?s=20
🐣 RT @igorsushko While we are still sitting on our hands and refusing to supply #ATACMS, #GreatBritain says so be it, we are going to send #Ukraine Storm Shadow cruise missiles (#SCALP). 250km – 560km range, 1000 lb warhead. 👏
💽 https://twitter.com/igorsushko/status/1617054808661188608?s=20/photo/1
⋙ 🐣 ◕ https://twitter.com/Auriandra/status/1617056896346726400?s=20/photo/1
💙 🐣 RT @WarintheFuture “President Vladimir Putin’s war in #Ukraine was meant to be his crowning achievement, a demonstration of how far Russia had come since the collapse of the Soviet empire in 1991. It hasn’t turned out that way.”
⋙ ForeignAffairs, Liana Fix and Michael Kimmage: Putin’s Last Stand https://tinyurl.com/3nfyymds
// Jan-Feb 2023; The promise and peril of Russian defeat.
🐣 RT @ChuckPfarrer BAKHMUT AXIS /0030 UTC 22 JAN/ A RU probe crossed the rail line N of Blahodatne and was broken up by UKR forces. Efforts by RU to cut the T-05-13 HWY continued at Krasna Hora and Pidhorodne. UKR defends H-32 at Ivanivske.
🌎 https://twitter.com/ChuckPfarrer/status/1616955233791365122?s=20/photo/1
⭕ 21 Jan 2023
WaPo Editorial: Germany is refusing to send tanks to Ukraine. Biden cannot let this stand https://tinyurl.com/3cb3ac6a ‘Scholz is sacrificing sound strategy on the altar of political calculation by wavering in the face of opposition from some political allies and a segment of Germans’
🧵 RT @DofConsequence 1/ I haven’t written about the Svatove-Kreminna axis because the fog of war is thick. Now that 🇺🇦 is knocking on Kreminna’s door, we’re getting clarity. Here’s a short [thread] explaining what’s going on, & why it’s a big deal. h/t @AndrewPerpetua @BruckenRuski @Suriyakmaps
📌 🌎 https://twitter.com/DofConsequence/status/1616922342336110594?s=20/photo/1 -2
StudyofWar: The Ukrainian defense of Bakhmut is likely a strategically sound effort despite its costs for Ukraine https://tinyurl.com/yckw2zps ‘By “slow-rolling” weapons systems & supplies, the West has contributed to Ukraine’s inability to take advantage of pinning Russia at Bakhmut’’
// Russian Offensive Campaign Assessment, January 21, 2023
The Ukrainian defense of Bakhmut is likely a strategically sound effort despite its costs for Ukraine.
While the costs associated with Ukraine’s continued defense of Bakhmut are significant and likely include opportunity costs related to potential Ukrainian counter-offensive operations elsewhere, Ukraine would also have paid a significant price for allowing Russian troops to take Bakhmut easily. Bakhmut itself is not operationally or strategically significant but had Russian troops taken it relatively rapidly and cheaply they could have hoped to expand operations in ways that could have forced Ukraine to construct hasty defensive positions in less favorable terrain. One must also not dismiss the seemingly “political” calculus of committing to the defense of Bakhmut lightly—Russian forces occupy more than 100,000 square kilometers of Ukrainian territory including multiple Ukrainian cities and are inflicting atrocities on Ukrainian civilians in occupied areas. It is not unreasonable for political and military leaders to weigh these factors in determining whether to hold or cede particular population concentrations. Americans have not had to make such choices since 1865 and should not be quick to scorn considerations that would be very real to them were American cities facing such threats.Ukrainian forces have previously employed a similar gradual attrition model to compel Russian operations in certain areas to culminate after months of suffering high personnel and equipment losses in pursuit of marginal tactical gains. Russian troops spent months attempting to grind through effective Ukrainian defenses in Severodonetsk and Lysychansk in the early summer of 2022 and captured Lysychansk only after a controlled Ukrainian withdrawal from the area.[1] The capture of Lysychansk and the Luhansk Oblast administrative border, however, quickly proved to be operationally insignificant for Russian forces, and the ultimate result of the Ukrainian defense of the area was the forced culmination of the Russian offensive in Luhansk Oblast, leading to the overall stagnation of Russian offensive operations in Donbas in the summer and fall of 2022. Ukrainian defense of Bakhmut will likely contribute to a similar result—Russian forces have been funneling manpower and equipment into the area since May 2022 and have yet to achieve any operationally significant advances that seriously threaten the Ukrainian defense of the area. ISW continues to re-evaluate its assessment that the Russian offensive on Bakhmut may be culminating but continues to assess that Ukrainian forces are effectively pinning Russian troops, equipment, and overall operational focus on Bakhmut, thus inhibiting Russia’s ability to pursue offensives elsewhere in the theater.
The West has contributed to Ukraine’s inability to take advantage of having pinned Russian forces in Bakhmut by slow-rolling or withholding weapons systems and supplies essential for large-scale counteroffensive operations.
🐣 RT @SofiOksanen This is what the leadership looks and sounds like. #Scholzing and sleepwalking is not leadership. #Estonia #Ukraine
⋙ 🐣 RT @kajakallas There is war in #Ukraine because Russia started it, not because Ukraine is defending itself. Russia’s goals haven’t changed, it wants to continue its war of aggression. ¤ This means we all need to do more. Give many more weapons to Ukraine, faster. We’re in it for the long haul.
🐣 RT @Gerashchenko_en Pain is filling the heart. The indescribable sadness is covering the soul. Ukraine is losing its best sons and daughters every day. ¤ Thank you for your important and decent work for the benefit of Ukraine. You are forever in our hearts. Eternal memory! -@ZelenskyyUa
💽 https://twitter.com/Gerashchenko_en/status/1616788355987148800?s=20/photo/1
// Visitation for members of .Ukraine’s Department of .interior who died in helicopter crash
🐣 RT @W_W_3_2022 The USA will support the transfer of F-16 fighter jets by allies to Ukraine – the American ambassador to the OSCE.#UkraineRussianWar #Ukraine #UkraineUnderAttack #Kherson #Soledar #Wagner #ATACMS #Bakhmut #HIMARS #Kramatorsk #Luhansk #Ukraina #Zaporizhzhia #Moscow #Crimea
⋙ 🐣 RT @W_W_3_2022 The United States ambassador to the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, Michael Carpenter, confirmed that Washington will agree with the idea of partners to transfer F-16 fighter jets to Ukraine.
🐣 📋 RT @m8rbnsn
_ Abrams M1A2 _
Fuel capacity: 1909l
Range: 426km
km/l: 0.223
_ Leopard 2 _
Fuel capacity: 1200l
Range: 340km
km/l: 0.283
A Leopard 2 can only go 27% farther on a litre of fuel than an M1A2. An M1A2 can drive round trip from Kharkiv to Bakhmut without refueling.
NYT: Amid Mounting Frustration With Germany, Ukraine Holds Out Hope It Will Get Tanks https://tinyurl.com/2s3tupx8 “Ukraine’s appeals for tanks and more weapons … have taken on greater urgency with the approach of spring, when both sides to the conflict are preparing offensives”
// While Germany has not yet made a decision on whether to send Leopard 2s to Ukraine, a Kyiv official said his country’s soldiers would begin training on them.
🐣 RT @ChuckPfarrer COMPROMISED? This hirsute young politico is Olaf Scholz. In the 80’s, Scholz was a self-identified Marxist. The DDR (East Germany) then regarded him as an ‘important ally in the struggle against NATO’. Scholz is now the principal stumbling block to providing armor to Ukraine.
🌎 https://twitter.com/ChuckPfarrer/status/1616800669121363971?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @ChuckPfarrer KREMINNA AXIS /1410 UTC 21 JAN/ RU conducted fire missions against sections of the western urban areas of Kreminna, indicating that UKR troops have achieved a lodgment in the city. RU has deployed considerable reinforcements to the Kreminna axis as see-saw fighting continues.
🌎 https://twitter.com/ChuckPfarrer/status/1616797931985686528?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @ChristopherJM Sen. Lindsey Graham in Kyiv yesterday: “I am tired of the s*** show surrounding who is going to send tanks and when are they going to send them. Putin is trying to rewrite the map of Europe by force of arms. World order is at stake. To the Germans: Send tanks to Ukraine…”
⋙ 🐣 RT @LindseyGrahamSC All three of us, one Republican and two Democrats, share the same goal – for Ukraine to drive the Russians out of Ukraine. ¤ To achieve that goal, the Ukrainian military needs tanks.
🐣 RT @tashecon Germany has plenty of Ukrainian blood on its hands for WW2, and it will have more if it does not do more to help Ukraine defend itself against Russia’s Genocidal war against Ukraine.
🐣 RT @McFaul Ukraine is winning. Russia is losing, And Putin knows it.
🐣 RT @ Gerashchenko_en “Sanctions can bring Russia back into the previous century in just one moment” – Simonyan
💽 [tr] https://twitter.com/Gerashchenko_en/status/1616708425471217664?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @apmassaro3 US Senators in Kyiv: “If Putin gets away with this, there goes Taiwan. If Putin is successful in Ukraine and is not prosecuted under international law, everything we’ve said since WWII becomes a joke. He will continue beyond Ukraine” @LindseyGrahamSC @SenWhitehouse @SenBlumenthal
💽 https://twitter.com/apmassaro3/status/1616753733735415808?s=20/photo/1
KyivPost, Timothy Ash: Outlook for the war in Ukraine https://tinyurl.com/yrmkazfv “Russia has no path to victory, and the longer the war goes on the worse it gets for Russia, and Putin”
// Timothy Ash shares his frank thoughts on the state of Russia’s war against Ukraine and the West.
Russian conventional kit losses are just so huge now that they cannot be easily or quickly replaced – they are running short of key munitions and armaments. … ¤ … Putin has continuously set red lines when it has come to military supplies from the West, and NATO has continuously rolled through these, calling Putin’s bluff. ¤ What we have learned from red lines being set and rolled through is that Putin does not have escalation domination. He has limits. He is ultimately scared of NATO … If NATO deploys its own 4th and 5th generation kit against Russia it would be over in hours. Putin knows this. He faces total defeat if he escalates – and WMD are just not options …
Speaking to military types with firsthand experience now in Ukraine I asked them why the Russians have not really bombed NATO convoys supplying arms to the Ukrainians. They told me that the Russians don’t have full battlefield satellite coverage, which is key in modern warfare. And thru NATO, the Ukrainians do. …
[W]hile Russia might have lost 100k plus dead and injured and plenty of treasure for not very much, Putin dominates the information narrative at home, and can sell whatever narrative he wants. If people don’t agree they can leave, or protest and end up with Navalny in the Gulag.
… Despite the shift from Russia to attacks on critical infrastructure I see zero change in the motivation of the Ukrainian government to fight on – opinion polls still show 90% support for continuing the war, and they think they are going to win (so do I). …
Talk I know of the West being soft on Ukraine and not willing to stay for the long haul. Add in there the GOP control of the House in Congress and concerns about the ability of Biden to fund the Ukrainian defence. ¤ Actually I think the West is remarkably unified, and they get that the future of European security depends on Putin being beaten. The Yanks, the Brits, the East Europeans, the Scandies, even the Dutch are absolutely on the same page. Germany is a joke, and will be pulled kicking and screaming along with the dominant Western view. Orban is largely seen as a traitor in the West now who will be dealt with after the war ends. Macron is just not relevant on Ukraine – the French are providing sufficient finance nor military kit as to be relevant in any way. The French, and Germans, have been totally and utterly wrong on Russia for the past decade and are not seen as having any useful perspective.
A large majority in Congress are still anti Putin, and pro Ukrainian. And in any event, Congress already signed off in the $38bn financing package for Ukraine in 2023 which will be front loaded. ¤ So, I see no change in prospects for US and indeed NATO/Western support for Ukraine. In fact, I think the realisation is dawning that the best way to avoid NATO having to fight Putin’s Russia at some point in the future, is actually to ensure the Ukrainians beat Russia now.
… I see a decent chance that we see the end of Putin and, while not my base case, I think it’s possible we see a collapse of the Federation into many new states – as with the USSR in 1991. Think here Tatarstan, Chechnya, Dagestan, Rump Russia, et al. The Federation is I think 89 regions and autonomous republics. We could see 20 new states.
And the irony herein that Putin started this war to create a Greater Russia, but the likely net effect will be a Lesser Russia.
🐣 RT @UkrainianNews24 US President Joe Biden has responded to a question about sending Leopard tanks to Ukraine by saying that Ukraine will receive “all the help” it needs to fight against Russian troops. ¤ Source: CNN
⋙ 🐣 This could mean the US will continue to pressure Germany to provide Leopard tanks or even that the US will provide Abrams tanks; but it could ALSO mean that the US believes the many lighter tanks that have been provided are adequate in the immediate timeframe
🐣 RT @OnePaul87 🇺🇲🇺🇦⚡— US advises Ukraine to withdraw troops from Bakhmut, – AFP publication, citing a senior US official ¤ Kiev’s heightened focus on holding the city is reportedly hindering preparations for the expected spring offensive.
🐣 RT @ChuckPfarrer BAKHMUT /0340 UTC 21 JAN/ RU has poured reinforcements into the pocket west of Klischiivka and are attempting a northward advance. UKR forces are engaged south of Ivanivske; the vital H-32 HWY supply route is at risk.
🌎 https://twitter.com/ChuckPfarrer/status/1616639238308519938?s=20/photo/1
⭕ 20 Jan 2023
🐣 RT @mbk_center If the West holds firm, Putin’s regime will likely collapse in the near future. Everything from ’s advances to the West’s unity & resolve in the face of Putin’s aggression points to 2023 being a decisive year @Kasparov63 & @mbk_center for @ForeignAffairs
⋙ ForeignAffairs, Garry Kasparov & Mikhail Khodorkovsky: Don’t Fear Putin’s Demise https://tinyurl.com/mscanmdb ‘Putin’s defeat would help catalyze a transformation in Russia, allowing those who seek a brighter future to dismantle the old regime & forge a new political reality’
// Victory for Ukraine, Democracy for Russia
🐣 📋 RT @LukeDCoffey The U.S. has provided $27.5 billion in military assistance to Ukraine since Russia’s invasion. This equals 3.2 percent of the FY 2023 defense budget, about one-tenth of one percent of America’s GDP, or about $3.50 from each American taxpayer per week. A bargain!
📋 WSJ: China’s Global Mega-Projects Are Falling Apart https://tinyurl.com/2963rj5s “During the past decade, China handed out a trillion dollars in international loans as part of Beijing’s Belt and Road initiative, intended to develop economic trade and expand China’s influence”
// Many of China’s Belt and Road infrastructure projects are plagued with construction flaws, including a giant hydropower plant in Ecuador, adding more costs to a program criticized for leading countries deeper into debt
WaPo: U.S. to brand Russia’s Wagner Group a ‘transnational criminal’ entity https://tinyurl.com/374mp8vv “The designation will come alongside additional U.S. sanctions against Wagner and its support network, spanning multiple continents”
// Wagner has risen to international renown as a ruthless shadow instrument of Russian power, now using convicts to wage Putin’s war against Ukraine
🐣 RT @KyivIndependent ⚡️ US Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman: Hard to eject Russian forces from Ukraine this year. ¤ U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Gen. Mark A. Milley said on Jan. 20 at the Ramstein-8 summit that Russia’s full-scale war will likely “end in a negotiation” and not on the battlefield.
⋙ 🐣 that is NOT the position articulated by Biden who says it’s the prerogative of Zelensky and the Ukr people how/when to end the conflict ¤ yes, many wars end in negotiation, but it’s not the place of the US to press for this (Milley speaks inappropriately on a regular basis)
🐣 RT @OSINTreporting Finally a Russian who is not on drugs
⋙ 🐣 RT @Gerashchenko_en [‘]Starting a special military operation was a catastrophic mistake. ¤ I don’t know who told Putin that the Ukrainians would not resist.[‘] ¤ I highly recommend listening to it.
💽 https://twitter.com/Gerashchenko_en/status/1616518635702419471?s=20/photo/1
WaPo: Tank dispute splits Ukraine’s allies as Zelensky seeks more firepower https://tinyurl.com/bdd5eym2 “We need to keep our momentum and resolve,”US Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin told the allies. “We need to dig even deeper”
// Germany has rebuffed requests for its Leopard tanks to be used against Russian forces, roiling a meeting of defense ministers from nations aiding Ukraine
🐣 RT @front_ukrainian 🇵🇱Poland plans to train a tank brigade of the Armed Forces of 🇺🇦Ukraine by March, – Polish Minister of Defense Mariusz Blaszczak.
🐣 What’s at stake in Ukraine
[TextLink:] https://twitter.com/Auriandra/status/1616482338166145025?s=20/photo/1
[Text:] The group will remain united and continue to increase efforts to support Ukraine.
This is not only about the security of Ukraine. It is also about European security and global security. It is about the world we want to live in and the world we want our children and grandchildren to inherit.
— US Defense Secretary Austin
🐣 RT @ Flash_news_ua ⚡ The United States Department of Justice plans to begin the process of transferring some of the confiscated Russian assets to Ukraine in the coming weeks and months. The funds are to be transferred through the State Department in accordance with a recent law, says Andrew Adams.
🐣 RT @PaulaChertok 🇺🇦”As much as it takes. As long as it takes.”—General Milley in Germany stating allies’ collective commitment to help #Ukraine defeat #Russia
💽 https://twitter.com/PaulaChertok/status/1616469799999262720?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @Biz_Ukraine_Mag Russian Orthodox Church leader Patriarch Kirill says Russian defeat in Ukraine would mean the end of the world. Are they starting to get worried?
Reuters: UK, Poland, others pledge to pursue ‘unprecedented’ military support for Ukraine http://reut.rs/ b
A group of nine nations including Britain, Poland and the Netherlands on Thursday pledged to pursue providing an “unprecedented set of donations” including main battle tanks to help Ukraine in its conflict with Russia.
“We commit to collectively pursuing delivery of an unprecedented set of donations including main battle tanks, heavy artillery, air defence, ammunition, and infantry fighting vehicles to Ukraine’s defence,” a joint statement said.
The statement, published on the British government website, was made by the defence ministers of Britain, Estonia, Poland, Latvia and Lithuania, and representatives from Denmark, the Czech Republic, the Netherlands and Slovakia following a meeting in Estonia.
🐣 I believe this meeting was in part to brief Zelensky on the nuances of US politics, esp the impact of the 2022 US elections, ie to not worry too much about the chaos in the House; that mil support for Ukr will in all likelihood not be significantly curtailed
// on CIA Director Burns’ “secret” meeting with Zelensky
🐣 RT @wartranslated As Wagner’s GREY ZONE comments, the infantry is advancing practically in an open field. No support with armoured vehicles was provided and the infantry was left to their own devices.
[TextLink:] https://twitter.com/wartranslated/status/1616452867593994240?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @GlasnostGone Let’s not get hung up on leopards. Yes #Ukraine needs tanks to aid its offensives, but they’ll come eventually. Lets rejoice at the huge level of support out there for the Ukrainian people & the mass of military aid donated to the country.
WaPo, Iuliia Mendel: Ukrainians are bracing for the next Russian onslaught https://tinyurl.com/k3vk257b “Russia is now gathering forces for another escalation. Together with our partners, we must make it clear to the ‘owners’ of Russia that no escalation will help them” — Zelensky
Russian propaganda continues to insist on its own twisted version of events. Day in and day out, Russian media calls for the complete destruction of the Ukrainian state, vows war with NATO, or threatens the use of nuclear weapons. Meanwhile, Moscow presses ahead with covert and open mobilization, the training of soldiers, the accumulation of weaponry and the massing of troops along the border. All of this suggests that Russia, like a wounded beast, might be preparing for a new attack. …
“They don’t have good equipment, they just send in lots of people to die,” Maryna told me. “This is not a war with spears — the advantage belongs to those who have modern equipment. We have strengthened and fortified Kyiv, and we’re getting modern equipment from the West. We have no reason to panic.” I don’t believe that Maryna, the mother of a 3-month-old daughter, ever thought that she would one day be offering expertise on military matters. But circumstances have forced all Ukrainians to adapt.
Preparing to counter this possible aggression, Ukraine has been pleading for modern tanks and more weapons. At least three European Union countries have publicly declared their willingness to supply Leopard 2 main battle tanks to Ukraine – but they can’t do so without approval from Germany, which manufactures the tanks. Leaders in Kyiv worry that the resulting delays might not leave enough time to prepare for fresh Russian attacks. Though 74 percent of Europeans approve of E.U. support for Ukraine, some fear becoming directly involved in a military conflict. …
🐣 The one country that will take encouragement from Germany’s waffling is Russia ¤ #Ramstein
🐣 RT @ KyivIndependent ⚡️US Defense Secretary: Russia suffers significant battle losses, almost out of ammunition. ¤ The U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin said during the Defense Contact Group meeting that “Russia is running out of ammunition and is suffering significant battle losses,” CNN reports.
🐣 RT @ @wartranslated Kiyanyn – update from Bakhmut, 20 January. No major changes in the Soledar-Bakhmut area, the enemy is struggling to gain a foothold in Soledar as the city is destroyed. Do not listen to false claims by the enemies on their progress in Bakhmut.
💽 https://twitter.com/wartranslated/status/1616386606075617280?s=20/photo/1
// daily [tr] video report from Bakhmut
🐣 RT @ChuckPfarrer BAKHMUT /1320 UTC 20 JAN/ On 19 JAN, a RU Motor Rifle unit was repelled in a probe on the eastern suburbs of Bakhmut city. UKR conducted 21 aviation strike missions across all axes of contact, including 7 strikes on RU air defense sites. UKR missile forces hit 6 RU HQ elements.
🌎 https://twitter.com/ChuckPfarrer/status/1616422499495063553?s=20/photo/1
🐣 Germany didn’t resist fascism in 1933 ¤ and they’re doing little to resist it now ¤¤ I hope something happens to change my mind ¤¤ Ramstein
🐣 RT @United24media Russia is RUNNING OUT OF AMMUNITION, it has suffered significant losses, according to the head of the Pentagon at the Ramstein meeting. ¤ News we LIKE to hear.
🐣 RT @GlasnostGone At #Ramstein, US Secretary of Defense said: This is a crucial moment. regrouping, recruiting & trying to re-equip. This isn’t a moment to slow down. It’s a time to dig deeper. people are watching us. Kremlin’s watching us. And history is watching us.
⋙ CNN: US will support Ukraine “for as long as it takes,” says @SecDef Austin https://tinyurl.com/muasr2ef “Russia’s attacks are designed to break the spirit of Ukraine. But they have failed. And the people of Ukraine have inspired the world,” he said.
[TextLink:] https://twitter.com/Auriandra/status/1616422271781945344?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @DefenceU .@oleksiireznikov There are three priorities of Ukraine at #Ramstein 8:
✅ More air defence systems;
✅ Weapons for the offensive operations (tanks, howitzers, ammo);
✅ Systematic ammo supplies +service&repair for armament and machinery.
We will win together!
🐣 RT @oleksiireznikov Chevrons of 🇺🇦 military units at #Ramstein base displayed at the venue,which has become a symbol of international support for 🇺🇦 More proof of Ukraine’s strides towards integration into NATO. #Ramstein 8 is sure to bring great news for 🇺🇦 soldiers with these chevrons. Stay tuned! 🖼
🐣 RT @MelnykAndrij We appeal to the new German Minister of Defence to put an end to this crazy Punch & Judy show around Leopards today in Ramstein & clear the way for a global TANK COALITION to empower Ukraine to kick out russian troops.please stop hiding behind back [link SDZeitung]
🐣 RT @Gerashchenko_en Addressing Ramstein meeting, @ZelenskyyUa called to speed up military support because time plays in Russia’s favor. ¤ We have very little time. Russia can throw millions of mobilized into war. Without sufficient & timely weapon supplies, war will go further.
🐣 RT @nexta_tv The meeting at #Ramstein Air Base has begun.#Pentagon chief Lloyd Austin said the war was is a tipping point, noting that support for #Ukraine would continue as long as necessary.
🐣 RT @ WarMonitors⚡️The head of the Pentagon said during his speech at the Ramstein base that Ukraine’s support will continue as long as necessary.
TheGuardian: Trump and lawyer ordered to pay $1m for bringing ‘frivolous’ lawsuit against Hillary Clinton https://tinyurl.com/4fynds2e
// In scathing ruling, US district court judge writes, ‘misuse of the courts by Mr Trump and his lawyers undermines the rule of law’
[Court doc:] https://tinyurl.com/4csnnje3
In a scathing ruling, US district court judge Donald Middlebrooks castigated Trump and his lead attorney, Alina Habba, for abusing the legal system by advancing a lawsuit that furthered his political grievances over the 2017 Russia investigation using arguments replete with misinformation and errors.
“We are confronted with a lawsuit that should never have been filed, which was completely frivolous, both factually and legally, and which was brought in bad faith for an improper purpose,” Middlebrooks wrote in the 46-page order imposing sanctions of $937,989.39 against Trump and Habba.
The lawsuit, originally filed by Trump in March 2022, alleged that Clinton and the Democratic National Committee conspired with senior FBI officials and others before the 2016 election to fabricate ties between the Trump campaign and Russia in order to damage him politically.
But Middlebrooks dismissed the case after he found that Trump engaged in a scattershot pleading that amounted to an obstruction of justice, and which included allegations that were known to be false. His legal arguments, including racketeering and conspiracy, were found to be without foundation.
The judge noted for instance that Trump’s allegations that former FBI director James Comey conspired with Clinton to prosecute him was wrong – as Trump was never prosecuted – while such a conspiracy was implausible since Comey likely damaged Clinton’s 2016 campaign by reopening the investigation into her emails.
“I find that the pleadings here were abusive litigation tactics. The complaint and amended complaint were drafted to advance a political narrative; not to address legal harm caused by any defendant,” Middlebrooks wrote of Trump’s lawsuit.
The judge also found that Trump’s racketeering and conspiracy lawsuit appeared to be part of a pattern by the former president of misusing the courts by filing frivolous lawsuits in order to serve a political purpose. ¤ “Misuse of the courts by Mr. Trump and his lawyers undermines the rule of law, portrays judges as partisans, and diverts resources from those who have suffered actual legal harm” he wrote.
Middlebrooks examined other seemingly politically motivated lawsuits filed by Trump and wrote that they all followed a playbook of including provocative rhetoric, political language carried over from rallies, attacks on political opponents and, typically, a lack of legal analysis.
“Trump is a prolific and sophisticated litigant who is repeatedly using the courts to seek revenge on political adversaries. He is the mastermind of strategic abuse of the judicial process,” the judge wrote. “He knew full well the impact of his actions.”
The immediate fallout of the sanctions order was not clear. Trump had wanted to drop the lawsuit after the case was assigned to Middlebrooks, an appointee of Bill Clinton, but Habba told Fox News in a segment referenced in the ruling that she had advised him to press ahead.
Trump and Habba – as well as her law firm Habba, Madaio and Associates – are jointly liable for the $1m penalty, though the former president indicated to associates that he essentially believed it should be paid by his attorney instead of him, according to sources familiar with the matter.
The penalty handed down by the judge, designed to disincentive future frivolous lawsuits, is in addition to a $50,000 fine imposed in November and $16,000 in reimbursement of legal costs for Charles Dolan, a Democratic public relations executive, who filed the first sanctions request.
🐣 RT @washingtonpost Over the past few weeks, Western allies of Ukraine have committed massive packages of mechanized armor to break the stalemate with Russia. Here’s how it came together — and what they expect Kyiv to do with it.
⋙ WaPo: Inside the urgent push to arm Ukraine for a spring offensive https://tinyurl.com/yaxwmf36
// Over the past few weeks, Ukraine’s Western allies have committed massive packages of mechanized armor to break the stalemate with Russia. But is it enough to change the tide of the war?
⭕ 19 Jan 2023
Reuters: UK, Poland, others pledge to pursue ‘unprecedented’ military support for Ukraine http://reut.rs/ b
A group of nine nations including Britain, Poland and the Netherlands on Thursday pledged to pursue providing an “unprecedented set of donations” including main battle tanks to help Ukraine in its conflict with Russia.
“We commit to collectively pursuing delivery of an unprecedented set of donations including main battle tanks, heavy artillery, air defence, ammunition, and infantry fighting vehicles to Ukraine’s defence,” a joint statement said.
The statement, published on the British government website, was made by the defence ministers of Britain, Estonia, Poland, Latvia and Lithuania, and representatives from Denmark, the Czech Republic, the Netherlands and Slovakia following a meeting in Estonia.
VOA (Dec): Republican, Democratic Senators Predict Continuing US Support for Ukraine https://tinyurl.com/msc7k7hp Interview; “[T]here is strong, strong support in both houses and both parties. Are there a handful of people who are dissidents? Yes. … That’s the American way”
// 12/6/2022
AP (Nov): What US election results mean for the future of Ukraine aid https://tinyurl.com/h63khh9t “Despite the escalating opposition from the right, there is little risk of Congress ending America’s financial and military support for Ukraine anytime soon”
// 11/11/2022
🐣 RT @MSkrypchenko Preliminary list of all weapons and equipment that NATO countries are going to transfer to Ukraine in the nearest future #Ukraine️ #UkraineWar #russiaisateroriststate #Ramstein
[TextLink:] https://twitter.com/MSkrypchenko/status/1616149099514073088?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @ ChuckPfarrer KREMINNA AXIS / DELAYED POST 19 JAN/ RU forces, likely from the 4th Separate Motor Rifle Brigade, have advanced in the forested area to the W of Kreminna. Presently, a salient extends from the western suburbs to a point 4 Km NW of Dibrova.
🌎 https://twitter.com/ChuckPfarrer/status/1616222903829143552?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @IAPonomarenko America rocks again. ¤ Goodnight from Ukraine. There will be a new day and new hope for the best.
[TextLink:] https://twitter.com/IAPonomarenko/status/1616224945171734539?s=20/photo/1
// Defense Budget
• Additional munitions for NASAMS;
• 8 Avenger air defense systems;
• 59 Bradleys+590 TOW missiles+ammo;
• 90 Strykers + 20 mine rollers;
• 53 MRAPs;
• 350 HMMWVS;
• 20,000 155mm artillery rounds;
• 600 precision-guided 155mm rounds;
• 95,000 105mm artillery rounds;
• 11,800 120mm mortar rounds;
• Additional ammo for HIMARS;
• 12 ammunition support vehicles;
• 6 command post vehicles;
• 22 tactical vehicles to tow weapons;
• HARM missiles;
• Approx 2,000 anti-armor rockets;
• 3,000,000 rounds of small arms ammo;
• Demolition equipment for obstacle clearing;
• Claymore anti-personnel munitions;
• Night VIS devices,
• Spare parts and other field equipment.
WaPo: CIA director holds secret meeting with Zelensky on Russia’s next steps https://tinyurl.com/2b9cbm38
// High-level visit by Burns comes at critical juncture in war and as government in Kyiv airs concern about durability of U.S. support
CIA Director William J. Burns traveled in secret to Ukraine’s capital at the end of last week to brief President Volodymyr Zelensky on his expectations for what Russia is planning militarily in the coming weeks and months, said a U.S. official and other people familiar with the visit.
Top of mind for Zelensky and his senior intelligence officials during the meeting was how long Ukraine could expect U.S. and Western assistance to continue following Republicans’ takeover of the House and a drop-off in support of Ukraine aid among parts of the U.S. electorate, said people familiar with the meeting. All spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the private high-level engagement.
Burns emphasized the urgency of the moment on the battlefield and acknowledged that at some point assistance would be harder to come by, the people said. ¤ Zelensky and his aides came away from last week’s meeting with the impression that the Biden administration’s support for Kyiv remains strong and the $45 billion in emergency funding for Ukraine passed by Congress in December would last at least through July or August, those familiar with the discussion said. Kyiv is less certain about the prospects of Congress passing another multibillion-dollar supplemental assistance package as it did last spring, they said. ¤ While hawkish Republicans in Congress continue to favor arming Ukraine, other conservatives have said they want to slash U.S. spending, in particular, the billions of dollars going to the war effort. …
At the moment, Ukrainian and Russian forces are locked in an intense war of attrition in eastern Ukraine around Bakhmut. The city has relatively little strategic value but it has taken on symbolic importance for both sides, in particular, Russia, which hasn’t captured a major Ukrainian city since last summer. ¤ Military analysts expect that an uptick in fighting this spring could determine the war’s trajectory. …
Moscow, which has recruited convicted felons in the war effort, has shown a willingness to endure heavy casualties. Last year, many of the recruits were highly inexperienced, given only two weeks of training before being sent to the front lines. But in recent months, Russia has improved its training, according to Western intelligence officials.
More recently, Burns has linked the Russian president’s decision to invade Ukraine as a key step in his goal of returning Moscow to its former glory. ¤ “He is convinced that his destiny as Russia’s leader is to restore Russia as a great power,” he told an audience at a security forum in Aspen in July. “He believes the key to doing that is to re-create a sphere of influence in Russia’s neighborhood and he does not believe you can do that without controlling Ukraine and its choices. And so that’s what produced, I think, this horrible war.” …
That same day, NATO defense ministers began a two-day meeting in Brussels where the topic of Leopard tanks divided allies, with Poland threatening to send 14 tanks regardless of whether Germany approves. Technically, Germany’s approval is required because it is the manufacturer of the Leopard 2. ¤ “Either we will obtain this consent, or we will do the right thing ourselves,” Polish Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki told a local broadcaster.
🐣 RT @mbk_center [Mikhail Khodorkovsky] Acclaimed film director Martin Scorsese addressed the Ukrainians: ¤ “At this moment, your spirit, the strength of your spirit, is like light. It is the light of the whole world. And I pray that it will be bright enough to guide you through this darkness.”
⋙ 🐣 RT @olex_scherba Wow. The great Martin Scorsese. Thank you. #StandWithUkraine
💽 https://twitter.com/mbk_center/status/1616041914431684608?s=20/photo/1
🧵 RT @TheStudyofWar #Lavrov’s equations of the West with Nazi Germany and its support for #Ukraine with an effort to exterminate the Russian people are ludicrous and almost certainly aimed at a domestic Russian audience. http://isw.pub/UkrWar011823
📌 https://twitter.com/TheStudyofWar/status/1616061373619834882?s=20
🐣 RT @ChuckPfarrer BAKHMUT/ 1300 UTC 19 JAN/ RU continues a series of platoon and company sized probes along the line of contact. On 18 JAN, UKR air defense downed a Russian Ka-52 attack helicopter and a RU ‘Merlin’ recon UAV. UKR missiles strike RU Electronic Warfare site, troop assemblies & HQ.
◕ https://twitter.com/ChuckPfarrer/status/1616057237419458561?s=20/photo/1
WaPo/AP: EU assembly wants special court for Russia’s war in Ukraine https://tinyurl.com/2dx2ppnc
The nonbinding resolution was approved by a 472-19 vote with 33 abstentions in the European Parliament, and underscored the EU’s willingness to make sure Moscow should be brought to justice for Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
The legislature called on the EU “to work in close cooperation with Ukraine to seek and build political support in the U.N. General Assembly and other international forums … for creating the special tribunal for the crime of aggression against Ukraine.”…
The Hague-based ICC has launched an investigation into war crimes in Ukraine but can’t prosecute the crime of aggression — the act of invading another country — because the Russian Federation is not a signatory to the Rome Statute, the treaty that created the court.
The call came despite the chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Court saying his court was capable of effectively dealing with war crimes committed in Ukraine.
Since Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered the invasion of Ukraine on Feb. 24, his military forces have been accused of abuses ranging from killings in the Kyiv suburb of Bucha to deadly attacks on civilian facilities, including the March 16 bombing of a theater in Mariupol that an Associated Press investigation established likely killed close to 600 people.
Reuters: Putin ally Medvedev warns NATO of nuclear war if Russia is defeated in Ukraine https://tinyurl.com/yc4b4fex
⋙ It’s OKAY, Everyone gets a ⬇️ Partcipation Trophy! ⬇️
🖼 https://twitter.com/Auriandra/status/1616045482631122944?s=20/photo/1
MOSCOW, Jan 19 (Reuters) – Former Russian President Dmitry Medvedev, an ally of Kremlin chief Vladimir Putin, warned NATO on Thursday that the defeat of Russia in Ukraine could trigger a nuclear war.
Striking a similar tone at what he described as an anxious time for the country, the head of the Russian Orthodox Church said trying to destroy Russia would mean the end of the world.
Since Russia invaded Ukraine, Medvedev has repeatedly raised the threat of a nuclear apocalypse, but his admission now of the possibility of Russia’s defeat indicates the level of Moscow’s concern over increased Western weapons deliveries to Ukraine.
“The defeat of a nuclear power in a conventional war may trigger a nuclear war,” Medvedev, who serves as deputy chairman of Putin’s powerful security council, said in a post on Telegram.
“Nuclear powers have never lost major conflicts on which their fate depends,” said Medvedev, who served as president from 2008 to 2012.
Medvedev said NATO and other defence leaders, due to meet at Ramstein Air Base in Germany on Friday to talk about strategy and support for the West’s attempt to defeat Russia in Ukraine, should think about the risks of their policy.
Russia and the United States, by far the largest nuclear powers, hold around 90% of the world’s nuclear warheads. Putin is the ultimate decision maker on the use of nuclear weapons.
Asked if Medvedev’s remarks signified that Russia was escalating the crisis to a new level, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said: “No, it absolutely does not mean that.”
He said Medvedev’s remarks were in full accordance with Russia’s nuclear doctrine which allows for a nuclear strike after “aggression against the Russian Federation with conventional weapons when the very existence of the state is threatened”.
While NATO has conventional military superiority over Russia, when it comes to nuclear weapons, Russia has nuclear superiority over the alliance in Europe.
Putin casts Russia’s “special military operation” in Ukraine as an existential battle with an aggressive and arrogant West, and has said that Russia will use all available means to protect itself and its people.
“ALARMING TIME”
Russia’s Feb. 24 invasion of Ukraine has triggered one of the deadliest European conflicts since World War Two and the biggest confrontation between Moscow and the West since the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis.The United States and its allies have condemned Russia’s invasion of Ukraine as an imperial land grab, while Ukraine has vowed to fight until the last Russian soldier is ejected from its territory.
Patriarch Kirill, the head of the Russian Orthodox Church, said in a sermon: “We pray to the Lord that he bring the madmen to reason and help them understand that any desire to destroy Russia will mean the end of the world.”
“Today is an alarming time,” state news agency RIA quoted him as saying. “But we believe that the Lord will not leave Russian land.”
NOT BACKING DOWN
Since a grim New Year’s Eve message describing the West as Russia’s true enemy in the war on Ukraine, Putin has sent several signals that Russia will not back down. He has despatched hypersonic missiles to the Atlantic and appointed his top general to run the war.Putin said on Wednesday that Russia’s powerful military-industrial complex was ramping up production and was one of the main reasons why his country would prevail in Ukraine.
Washington has not detailed in public what it would do if Putin ordered what would be the first use of nuclear weapons in war since the United States unleashed the first atomic bomb attacks on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945.
U.S. Central Intelligence Agency Director William Burns cautioned Putin’s spy chief Sergei Naryshkin in November about the consequences of any use of nuclear weapons by Russia, U.S. officials said at the time.
Russia has 5,977 nuclear warheads while the United States has 5,428, China 350, France 290 and the United Kingdom 225, according to the Federation of American Scientists.
Medvedev, 57, who once presented himself as a reformer who was ready to work with the United States to liberalise Russia, has recast himself since the war as the most publicly hawkish member of Putin’s circle.
He said that the nuclear risks of the Ukraine crisis should be obvious to any Western politicians who had “preserved at least some traces of intelligence.”
🐣 RT @Gerashchenko_en “Russia must be brought to justice for every burnt Ukrainian city and village, for every destroyed life. We must punish evil. This terrorist war should become the last such war.” – @ZelenskyyUa during Russian War Crimes exhibition at @Davos
🌎 https://twitter.com/Gerashchenko_en/status/1616033102958051329?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @carlbildt While much of the buzz in Davos is about 🇩🇪, Scholz and Leopard tanks 🇸🇪 announces a very solid military support package to 🇺🇦 with advanced artillery and 50 CV90 armored fighting vehicles.
⋙ 🐣 RT @ZelenskyyUa Sincerely grateful to the Government of Sweden & @SwedishPM for the new military assistance package to 🇺🇦. CV90 IFVs, Archer self-propelled howitzers & NLAW ATGMs are powerful weapons that 🇺🇦 army needs to liberate our land from the Russian invader. Together to a common victory!
🐣 RT @ IAPonomarenko Just when you’re thinking Russia can’t fall even deeper, FM Lavrov crawls out of woods and draws parallels between the Western support of Ukraine and Hitler’s Holocaust. ¤ “The Final Solution for Russian people” is what’s happening, yeah.
⋙ 🐣 RT @IAPonomarenko Among the Kremlin’s key, long-lasting issues that will eventually bring it to its downfall is that it never knew when to stop in propaganda.
🐣 RT @saintjavelin 🐆Polish Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki said that his government will either receive permission from Germany to give Ukraine Leopard 2 or will do it on its own.
WSJ: Berlin Won’t Allow Exports of German Tanks to Ukraine Unless U.S. Sends Its Own https://tinyurl.com/y8n5vnmt “By deferring to Washington, Mr. Scholz is now adding pressure on President Biden to authorize the export of Abrams tanks to Kyiv, the closest U.S. equivalent”
// North Atlantic Treaty Organization allies have over 2,000 German-made Leopard tanks
🐣 RT @KyivIndependent Scholz on Leopard 2 tanks to Ukraine: ‘We must avoid Russia-NATO war.’ ¤ When asked about Berlin’s reluctance to provide Ukraine with German-built Leopard 2 tanks in Davos, German Chancellor Olaf Scholz said Germany has been “among the biggest supporters of Ukraine.”
🐣 RT @ryankakiuchan Joint statement by Minister for Foreign Affairs of Ukraine Dmytro Kuleba and Minister of Defence of Ukraine Oleksii Reznikov on German-made Leopard 2 tanks.
[TextLink:] https://twitter.com/ryankakiuchan/status/1615984636576018433?s=20/photo/1
[Text:] We welcome the bold and very timely decision of the United Kingdom to transfer the first squadron of Challenger 2 tanks to Ukraine. However, it is not sufficient to achieve operational goals. Therefore, we are addressing our appeal to the states that have Leopard 2 tanks in service, including Canada, Denmark, Finland, Germany, Greece, the Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, and Turkey. We guarantee that we will use these weapons responsibly and exclusively for the purposes of protecting the territorial integrity of Ukraine within internationally recognized borders.
⭕ 18 Jan 2023
NatRev, Stanley Kurtz: AP African-American Studies Program, as Written, Violates Florida Law https://tinyurl.com/bdefzutj The curriculum “promotes leftist radicalism, with virtually no readings providing even a classically liberal point of view, much less some form of conservatism”
DeSantis’s refusal to approve APAAS is entirely justified. Although the College Board has pointedly declined to release the APAAS curriculum, I obtained a copy and wrote about it in September. There I argued that APAAS proselytizes for a socialist transformation of the United States, that it directly runs afoul of new state laws barring CRT, and that to approve APAAS would be to gut those laws.
Florida’s Stop WOKE Act, for example, bars any K–12 attempt to promote the idea that color blindness is racist. Yet most of the readings in the final quarter of APAAS (Unit 4: Movements and Debates) reject color blindness. … Overall, the readings in the final quarter of APAAS — the quarter chiefly devoted to ideological controversies rather than to history per se — are extraordinarily one-sided. They promote leftist radicalism, with virtually no readings providing even a classically liberal point of view, much less some form of conservatism. If DeSantis were to approve a course pushing the idea of “color-blind racism,” he would effectively be nullifying his own Stop WOKE Act.
In my earlier exploration of APAAS’s curriculum, I described the neo-Marxist thrust of the course. This is evident enough from the readings. On top of that, however, we know that Joshua M. Myers, the member of the APAAS curriculum-writing team whose expertise covers the final quarter of the course, is an acolyte of Cedric Robinson, author of Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition. Myers’s writings on African-American studies explicitly call for the field to reject traditional concepts of disciplinary neutrality and adopt openly anti-capitalist radical advocacy instead. In short, for DeSantis to approve the APAAS course as currently configured would be to repudiate everything he stands for. It would welcome woke, not stop it.
Again, for the College Board to keep the APAAS curriculum secret while simultaneously asking states to approve the course for high school and college credit is indefensible. This secrecy validates long-standing concerns about the College Board’s acting as a de facto unelected national school board. By filling APAAS with Marxism and critical race theory, while at the same time presenting the course as a harmless exercise in African-American history, the College Board is trying to fool the public. …
The larger danger here is that once APAAS is approved, we will see the College Board devise AP courses in women’s studies, gender studies, transgender studies, latino studies, environmental studies, the full panoply of politicized “studies” courses that have balkanized and politicized higher education.
That said, Florida has invited the College Board to revise its curriculum. A radically reconfigured APAAS still has a chance in Florida. A successful revision wouldn’t necessarily require the complete elimination of readings based in neo-Marxism and CRT. At minimum, however, it would call for such readings to be fully balanced by traditional liberal and conservative perspectives.
We shall see how it all plays out—and whether the College Board maintains its unjustified secrecy. At a minimum, no state should approve APAAS until the curriculum is released and there has been ample opportunity for the public to assess and debate it. In the meantime, all honor to DeSantis for being faithful to both his word and to the law. Truly, he is doing what it takes to stop woke.
🐣 RT @UFfrontline According to Politico, the US’s new package will contain GLSDB ammunition! ¤ These can be fired from, for example, HIMARS/M270 and have a range of 15 miles and a hit pattern of one meter☄️ #UkrainianArmy #kreminna #UkraineRussia
💽 https://twitter.com/UFfrontline/status/1615833075669245991?s=20/photo/1
// wow!
Politico [EU]: Tanks, no tanks: Scholz holds key to Leopards for Ukraine, but waits for Biden https://tinyurl.com/34jp8fje ‘Scholz has warned against going it alone with regards to arms deliveries to Ukraine. But now, by his hesitancy, he is doing exactly that’
// Several countries are goading the German chancellor ahead of a meeting of Western defense ministers on Friday.
🐣 RT @NewVoiceUkraine Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic, who is thought to be one of the staunchest allies of Russian dictator Vladimir Putin, said that Crimea and Donbas are Ukrainian territories and denounced Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
⋙ NewVoiceUkraine: Serbian President Vucic denounces Russian occupation of Crimea and Donbas https://tinyurl.com/bdhc7scb
🐣 RT @Kasparov63 Credit where due, impressive start from the new House Foreign Affairs Committee and its chairman McCaul. “Leopard 2 tanks, ATACMS, and other long-range precision munitions should be approved without delay.”
⋙ HouseForeignAffairs/Armed ServicesComms: McCaul (R), Rogers (R) Urge Admin and Allies to Swiftly Send Ukraine Weapons Needed to Win https://tinyurl.com/58tevhbs “Leopard 2 tanks, ATACMS, and other long-range precision munitions should be approved without delay”
Washington, D.C.– House Foreign Affairs Committee Chairman Michael McCaul (R-TX) and House Armed Services Committee Chairman Mike Rogers (R-AL) released the following statement urging the administration and our allies to transfer to Ukraine urgently critical weapon systems they need to defeat Russia.
“The current handwringing and hesitation by the Biden administration and some of our European allies in providing critical weapon systems to Ukraine stinks of the weak policies of 2021, such as not sanctioning Nord Stream 2 or providing U.S.-origin Stingers before the full-scale invasion. While those policies failed to deter this conflict, the current indecision and self-deterrence will prolong it – costing Ukrainian lives. Now is the time for the Biden and Scholz governments to follow the lead of our U.K. and Eastern European allies – Leopard 2 tanks, ATACMS, and other long-range precision munitions should be approved without delay.”
WaPo, George Will: Why Germany mustn’t hesitate sending tanks to Ukraine—lots of them https://tinyurl.com/y9temmtc “Why hoard these when Ukrainians are eager to use a small fraction of them in the fight against Russia, the only clear & present danger confronting Europe’s militaries?”
// 📋 “Astonishingly, some congressional Republicans, being parsimonious where this is least virtuous, profess alarm about the cost of aid to Ukraine. In 2022, this was 0.09 percent of the United States’ gross domestic product.”
WaPo, George Will: Why Germany mustn’t hesitate sending tanks to Ukraine—lots of them https://tinyurl.com/y9temmtc “Why hoard these when Ukrainians are eager to use a small fraction of them in the fight against Russia, the only clear & present danger confronting Europe’s militaries?”
// 📋 “Astonishingly, some congressional Republicans, being parsimonious where this is least virtuous, profess alarm about the cost of aid to Ukraine. In 2022, this was 0.09 percent of the United States’ gross domestic product.”
🐣 RT @GeoffStooke The desire from geopolitical strategists for a neutral Ukraine in a “Finland model” is now officially over.
🖼 https://twitter.com/GeoffStooke/status/1615675476122685441?s=20/photo/1
// “NATO membership for Ukraine is ‘appropriate,’ says Former US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger”
🐣 RT @LeaderMcConnell We stand with the people of Ukraine grieving the loss of their Interior Minister and all those killed in the tragic helicopter crash. I know their commitment to the defense of their country and its freedom and sovereignty will live on as Ukraine keeps up its brave fight.
🐣 RT @wartranslated Girkin threw another hissy fit today, a long read: claims Russia needs to build up several armies, mass retraining asap to avoid (almost) inevitable defeat. Does not expect Ukraine to start an advance until April, by which time the West will send even more weapons
[TextLink:] https://twitter.com/wartranslated/status/1615859747772665856?s=20/photo/1 -3
[Text:] 1/3 They [Ukrainians] are unlikely to advance in the first half of April: rains and mudslides are possible until the middle of the month. In the second – it is already relatively warm at night, the roads and the ground will dry up, in the daytime it is warm like in summer, but not yet hot – the mercenaries (“foreign military specialists”) will not have to experience inconvenience from our Russian southern climate. Again, around 20 April in Novorossiya [Donbas] and Malorossiya [Ukraine] it is already “green” – it is easier to hide military equipment from our still relatively numerous aviation in preparation for an offensive and for organising breakthroughs. And for the enemy, whose infantry and armored forces are “packed” with thermal imaging equipment much more fully than the RF Armed Forces, the greenery is not a hindrance for searching and identifying targets. Plus, significantly (many times? By an order of magnitude?) better reconnaissance: air, space, undercover, radio-electronic. Plus, a much more adequate command, which managed to prove to its troops that it can successfully beat the enemy. Yes, the numbers of equipment calculated by respected oman “Donetsky” [blogger] is not enough to “defeat Russia”, of course. But for one serious attack, quite. And from there, depending on “how it plays out.” After all, it’s only January now, they will give a lot of things and promise even more until April (and they give EVERYTHING that they promise – there is no need for
illusions – our enemies don’t disagree with their deeds).2/3
And our commander-in-chief is not talking about the defeat of the so-called. “Ukraine”, but boasts of the production of air defense missiles – i.e. purely defensive weapons, while to win this war you need offensive weapons, and a lot, and modern ones, and – these weapons must be in the hands of people trained to use them. We need ON THE FRONT several (in addition to the existing) armies, consisting of 3-5 full-fledged divisions (that is, each has 2 motorised rifle regiments, 1 tank regiment, 1 artillery regiment, sappers, reconnaissance and all other necessary units and subunits). They must be urgently formed now, by calling up the necessary contingent of reservists as part of mobilisation (at least as the necessary weapons and equipment are accumulated). So that in 3-4 months these divisions (at least to some extent) would be at least relatively trained, well-coordinated and combat ready. It is desperately necessary to urgently deploy training / retraining courses for junior and middle command personnel, sending there not “citizens” through through the military offices, but already experienced soldiers and front-line sergeants. And it is also necessary to deploy “from scratch” the training of masses of military specialists – signalmen, artillerymen, tankmen. All this was done by our grandfathers. Can we repeat??? That is, if they are not capable of inventing anything themselves, because what did they invent, it would look funny from the outside, if only we were not so offended, bitter and hurt.3/3 And the General Staff of the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation, headed by its chief, should be engaged in this most complex organisational work (the very fact of combination of position of Head of General Staff with the position of commander of a joint group is an example of exceptional cretinism. Even if Gerasimov was “a rocket scientist”, which is not the case, he would not be able to perform at the same time both functions well anyway. However, my opinion is unchanged – neither he nor his “boss” Shoigu are capable of fulfilling any duties assumed. On the creation of the State Defense Committee (of which many “dreamed wetly” on the eve of the next “bla-bla-bla” that sounded [from Putin] the other day), on the creation of the Headquarters of the Supreme Commander- in-Chief and the mobilisation of the rears and industry, on the termination of gas and oil supplies to / through the so-called “Ukraine” and striking at the enemy’s strategic communications… I’m already tired of writing and talking
about this – it’s been almost a year already .. 1 remind you once again: if by the end of spring the above (and not only) measures are not taken, defeat in the war may become almost inevitable … In the meantime, as a result of a 3-month “freeze” of mobilisation measures, only new defeats of operational scale became invetiable. At what front and when, we will find out in due time (I hope to be mistaken).
⋙ 🐣 RT @amaurygaillard Anybody understands why this guy has never crossed a high-located window and fell ? Curious.
⋙⋙ 🐣 RT @wartranslated He’s FSB
⋙⋙⋙ 🐣 RT @poli_pockette The FSB watches to see who dares agree with him, and I don’t doubt that he’s reported every sympathetic nod and social media follow of the last 12 months back to them.
⋙⋙⋙ 🐣 RT @esq_mike Remember Chernobyl the HBO Series? ¤ “When the truth offends, we lie and lie until we can no longer remember it is even there, but it is still there. Every lie we tell incurs a debt to the truth. Sooner or later, that debt is paid.” ¤ Frankly, we’re lucky Russia lies to itself.
⋙⋙⋙ 🐣 RT @MikTukhachevsky Russia cannot build its way out of operational and strategic military defeat in this war. It lacks the natural resources, technology, productivity, and skill to out-perform Ukraine and its allies, because Russia is a thoroughly mismanaged, inept kleptocratic dystopia.
⋙⋙⋙ 🐣 RT @wakeupjohnston Igor Girkin as usual is prescient. Russia is well on its way to losing.
🐣 RT @Euan_MacDonald Abrams tanks and Bradley infantry fighting vehicles seen transported by train in Poland. US has promised Bradleys to Ukraine, but has not said it will supply the advanced, modern Abrams main battle tanks. Ukraine urgently needs modern tanks to defeat Russian invasion forces.
🐣 RT @SecDef Wheels down in Berlin. I look forward to meeting with 🇩🇪 German Minister of Defense Pistorius and Federal Minister Schmidt, to discuss our shared defense priorities and enhanced cooperation among democracies.
🐣 RT @JulianRoepcke So Scholz is blackmailing the US government. Only if it allows #Abrams into Ukraine, Germany will allow #Leopard2 into the country. Scholz knows very well that this won’t make sense for the Americans, but I’m told “a symbolic amount” (5-10) would be enough [link]
🧵 RT @TheStudyofWar #Prigozhin directly attacked Russian President Vladimir #Putin’s presidential administration and insinuated that some officials working there are traitors who want #Russia to lose the war in #Ukraine—one of his boldest attacks against the #Kremlin to date. http://isw.pub/UkrWar011823
📌 https://twitter.com/TheStudyofWar/status/1615892834380398592?s=20
🐣 📋 RT @TristanSnell Donald Trump raised the debt ceiling 3 times — ballooning the national debt by 39% in just 4 years.
🐣 RT @GlasnostGone At the World Economic Forum @Davos, #Ukraine’s President Zelensky said “The tyranny is outpacing democracy. Russia needed less than one second to start the war. … The time the free world uses to think is used by the terrorist state to kill.”
⋙ CNN: Zelensky urges allies to act fast against Russia’s aggression: “The world must not hesitate today and ever” https://tinyurl.com/yc58ahc5
YahooNews: Putin’s Chef Threatens Traitors With ‘Sledgehammer’ in Batshit Outburst https://tinyurl.com/34prdbsv Prigozhin “has taken aim at unnamed figures in the country’s presidential administration in a violent rant about traitors, YouTube, and punishment by ‘sledgehammer’”
… Bizarrely, his outburst was sparked by a seemingly innocuous question about why prosecutors have not yet followed up on his request and blocked YouTube throughout the country. ¤ Calling the video-sharing service the “information plague of our time,” Prigozhin claimed the “main reason” the site hasn’t yet been shut down is because of “a huge number of people on Staraya Square in the presidential administration” who “think about only one thing—the sooner Russia loses the war, the sooner the Americans will come and regulate us.”
“Because when we fall to our knees before Uncle Sam, he will forgive us for all sins: for supporting pro-Russian interests, for supporting Putin, and for the fact that we generally live on this earth. Lord, this won’t happen. Take note, it is not enough to humiliate yourself in front of the Americans. You have to do it in a way that makes them happy. But this will never happen. They won’t take you in. And then you will come to us, where Wagner’s sledgehammer will already be waiting for you,” he said through his press service.
Prigozhin also used the opportunity to rage against “the bastards” who he claimed “pretend to participate” in the war against Ukraine but actively work against it and “move their relatives abroad,” apparently referring to high-ranking officials. ¤ “Those who actively use YouTube will be identified and will suffer a well-deserved punishment after it is banned,” he said.
His rant appeared to shock even some pro-Kremlin pundits. ¤ “Yevgeny Viktorovich Prigozhin is out of control,” wrote propagandist Sergei Mardan, noting that compared to Prigozhin, Kremlin foe Alexei Navalny seems like a “puppy.”
Prigozhin, once seen as a close ally of Vladimir Putin, has seemed to increasingly test the Kremlin in recent months by blasting top military brass and hijacking PR efforts for the war with a spotlight on his horde of freed prison inmates-turned-mercenaries. ¤ A day before his latest outburst, he released footage of himself sending off the latest group of inmates granted pardons in exchange for a turn on the battlefield. ¤ “I said I needed your criminal talents in order to kill the enemy in the war. Now your criminal talents aren’t needed, so try to remember that you don’t need to go back” to prison, he told the group.
WaPo: Thousands answered Ukraine’s call for volunteers. Here’s what motivated them https://tinyurl.com/4ccfajcr
// An estimated 1,000 to 3,000 such foreign fighters are believed to be active. Some went to defend democracy after Russia invaded Ukraine in February. Others went to escape their own demons.
Politico: U.S. prepping major military package for Ukraine https://tinyurl.com/584cafek
// Defense Budget; Friday’s announcement is expected to include Stryker vehicles, but not tanks.
While the next tranche will include additional artillery, ammunition and armor — likely Stryker armored combat vehicles — the U.S. is not expected to sign off on American M1 Abrams tanks, said the people, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss the talks ahead of an announcement.
The Biden administration currently has no plans to send the Abrams, the Army’s 60-ton main battle tank, the people said. ¤ The reluctance is due to the logistical and maintenance challenges of the tanks, and not over concern that their transfer could escalate the conflict, one of the U.S. officials said. This person noted that the U.S. has helped Ukraine obtain Soviet-era tanks and supports the British decision to send around a dozen of its Challenger 2 tanks.
The package will likely include a number of Strykers, an eight-wheeled armored fighting vehicle built by General Dynamics Land Systems, as well as ground-launched Small Diameter Bombs, which have a range of roughly 100 miles, two of the people said. POLITICO first reported last week that the Pentagon was considering sending Strykers in the upcoming tranche of aid. Reuters first reported that Boeing-made Small Diameter Bombs were under discussion.
This package will not include the long-range Army Tactical Missile System that can reach Moscow, according to two of the people. The Biden administration has balked at sending long-range munitions, despite Kyiv’s pleas, for fear of provoking Russian President Vladimir Putin.
“We believe the provision of modern tanks will significantly help and improve the Ukrainians’ ability to fight where they are fighting now and fight more effectively going forward,” National Security Council spokesperson John Kirby told reporters on Wednesday, referring to European tanks. He declined to comment on any upcoming aid package from the U.S.
The White House has not yet signed off on the package, which is still being finalized and could change this week. But officials expect an announcement around the regular Ukraine Defense Contact Group meeting at Ramstein Air Base in Germany on Friday, where Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin and Joint Chiefs Chair Gen. Mark Milley will meet with their counterparts to discuss new Ukraine aid.
The latest meeting comes as Kyiv raises alarms that Moscow is preparing to launch a major new offensive to take the capital city. Ukrainian intelligence officials have warned the Kremlin plans a new mobilization of up to 500,000 conscripts, while on Monday, Russia and Belarus began joint military exercises. …
Ukraine is still pleading for Western tanks on top of the U.K.’s Challengers. A handful of nations have signaled their willingness to send their German-made battle tanks, but are waiting on a decision from Berlin to greenlight the re-export. The Leopards are seen as a better option than the Abrams because of the sheer number in use already in Europe. Leopards are also considered easier to maintain and consume less fuel.
While German Defense Minister Boris Pistorius, who replaced Christine Lambrecht this week, is expected to meet on Thursday with Austin, it’s possible a decision has already been made higher up in the German government on whether to approve the transfers. …
This week’s Ramstein meeting promises to be one of the most significant of the monthly gatherings of defense ministers, as the 50 nations discuss how to prepare Ukraine for more hard months of fighting. In addition to the recent British announcement of Challenger tanks and the new American package, Finland is expected to unveil its largest Ukraine military aid shipment to date, according to one person familiar with the thinking in Helsinki. Finland doesn’t publicize its contributions, but has sent artillery, small arms and winter clothing in the past.
Western leaders have been cautious about publicly pushing Germany too hard on the tank issue. Support for Ukraine is “about making sure that each of us can do what we can do,” James Cleverly, the U.K.’s foreign secretary, told reporters in Washington on Tuesday. “And our ability to support is going to be different from one nation to another.”
Meanwhile, the U.S. kicked off new training programs for Ukraine this week: an expanded course to enhance Ukrainian forces’ fighting skills in Germany, and training on the Patriot missile system at Fort Sill, Okla. Ukraine is set to receive three Patriot batteries, a defensive system designed to shoot down missiles and aircraft: one from the U.S. and one each from Germany and the Netherlands. …
🐣 RT @theintercept A discharge petition to raise or eliminate the debt ceiling could avert a financial crisis threatened by Freedom Caucus members who opposed Rep. Kevin McCarthy’s bid for House speaker. ¤ But Democrats would have to move fairly quickly.
⋙ TheIntercept, Ryan Grim (Jan 9): House Rules Package Gives Democrats a Path to Averting a Debt Ceiling Crisis https://tinyurl.com/ycxx2cr5
// 1/9/2023; Republicans preserved the discharge petition in the new rules package, allowing any bill with 218 votes to come to the floor — even one codifying Roe v. Wade.
House Republicans enacted new rules for the 118th Congress on Monday that preserve the traditional right of rank-and-file members of Congress to bypass House leadership and put legislation on the floor directly if they obtain the signatures of a majority of the chamber. This opens a handful of legislative opportunities for Democrats, despite Republican ideological cohesion.
The maneuver, known as a discharge petition, was famously deployed by President Lyndon Johnson and his House allies to pressure reluctant opponents of civil rights to allow a vote for the Civil Rights Act on the floor. Under standard rules, the majority leader sets the floor schedule, in collaboration with the House Rules Committee, but a discharge petition can automatically pull a bill from committee and move it to the floor. Once the logjam was broken, it passed with significant support.
A discharge petition to raise or eliminate the debt ceiling, on the other hand, could avert a financial crisis threatened by Freedom Caucus members who opposed Rep. Kevin McCarthy’s bid for the speakership. In exchange for their votes, Freedom Caucus members won a commitment that McCarthy would hold U.S. debt payments hostage in exchange for significant spending cuts across the board. But if Democrats could find five Republicans unwilling to risk default, which would spark a global financial crisis, a discharge petition would give those Republicans a route around their own leadership. …
Democrats would have to move fairly quickly, however, to avert a financial crisis. First, a bill would have to be introduced and referred to committee, according to House rules and precedents. Then 30 legislative days would need to expire. Once 218 signatures are collected, another seven legislative days need to pass, at which point the motion would come to the floor on the second or fourth Monday after those seven legislative days are up. A legislative day is one in which the House is in session and then adjourns. A motion to discharge filed in February or March ought to be ripe by summer. The Treasury Department has not put a precise date at which default will occur, but the estimate is summer.
Using a discharge petition to avert default could, however, become a moot issue. Constitutional scholars have argued that the debt ceiling itself is unconstitutional: If Congress appropriates money, the executive is required to spend that money, not default because of a lack of borrowing authority when other avenues to fulfill the appropriations exist.
WaPo, Jeff Stein: Democracy defenders and Rambo wannabes: Ukraine’s volunteer foreign fighters https://tinyurl.com/4ccfajcr
🐣 RT @theintercept A discharge petition to raise or eliminate the debt ceiling could avert a financial crisis threatened by Freedom Caucus members who opposed Rep. Kevin McCarthy’s bid for House speaker. ¤ But Democrats would have to move fairly quickly.
⋙ TheIntercept, Ryan Grim (Jan 9): House Rules Package Gives Democrats a Path to Averting a Debt Ceiling Crisis https://tinyurl.com/ycxx2cr5
// 1/9/2023; Republicans preserved the discharge petition in the new rules package, allowing any bill with 218 votes to come to the floor — even one codifying Roe v. Wade.
🐣 RT @ChuckPfarrer BAKHMUT AXIS / 1320 UTC 18 JAN/ RU units continue efforts to cut the T-05-13 HWY N of Bakhmut at Krasna & Podhorodne. While presently contained, the Kurdiumivka salient poses a significant threat to the vital H-32 HWY. UKR morale in the Bakhmut Area of Operations (AO) is high.
🌎 https://twitter.com/ChuckPfarrer/status/1615701478458417154?s=20/photo/1
NYT: U.S. Warms to Helping Ukraine Target Crimea https://tinyurl.com/v8fzwrrb “This week, top U.S. and Ukrainian commanders will hold a high-level planning meeting in Germany to game out the offensive planning”
// The Biden administration is considering the argument that Kyiv needs the power to strike at the Ukrainian peninsula annexed by Russia in 2014.
🐣 RT @KEYCNewsNow A Russian national who founded a cryptocurrency exchange that evaded U.S. regulations and became a haven for the proceeds of criminal activity has been arrested, federal officials said Wednesday.
⋙ KEYCNews/AP: Justice Dept. charges Russian founder of cryptocurrency firm https://tinyurl.com/bd6mea36 “Prosecutors allege that Legkodymov’s cryptocurrency exchange, Bitzlato Ltd., of which he served as majority owner, did not implement required anti-money-laundering safeguards”
🧵 RT @wartranslated Terrorist Igor Girkin gave commentary to a Russian publication on the timelines of Russian progress in the Donbas, saying they are nowhere near approaching Sloviansk and Kramatorsk, and Ukraine is holding back its strongest reserves. … [link] …
📌 https://twitter.com/wartranslated/status/1615712853612273664?s=20
[ThreadReader:] https://tinyurl.com/4hx42yj9
We bring a translation of his statement below. As the interviewer questions how quickly the Russians will reach Kramatorsk and Sloviansk line of defence, Girkin rejects an idea that it will happen any time soon given that Bakhmut is still standing. ¤ According to him, Wagner will not be enough to occupy the rest of the Donetsk and Luhansk regions. More on this below:
⚡️ SVPRESSA: Even in the summer, analysts voiced that “Russia will take several months to liberate the front lines of Seversk-Soledar-Bakhmut.” ¤ And now these months have passed, and the enemy’s line of defense is gradually shifting to the west. Sooner or later, the Armed Forces of Ukraine will roll back to the next line – Sloviansk, Kramatorsk, Druzhkovka, Konstantinovka.
How do we break it? Do we continue going straight ahead, or around – maybe to the south, or maybe better to the north? What kind of scenarios can be there? The question of what will happen next is better to identify in advance, and it would be nice to find an answer to it in advance.
The space in front of the line of cities from Sloviansk in the north to Konstantinovka in the south can be occupied. All the way to Bakhmut, there are only fields and small villages. American military experts even say: “The left bank of the Dnieper is a desert.” ¤ That is, the Russians can get through this territory relatively easily. But how to take the one fortified area that is essentially elongated from north to south? Here, one city passes into another. ¤ Apparently, we will again have to gnaw through step by step, freeing the west of Donbas.
It would be necessary to act more cunningly, to maneuver, but is it possible? ¤ To answer this question, we turned to the ex-Minister of Defense of the [so-called] DPR, the head of the social movement “Novorossiya” Igor Strelkov, who believes that it is premature to talk about reaching the line between Sloviansk and Kramatorsk:
⚡️ Girkin: So far, there is no discussion even about the capture of Bakhmut, because the battles for this city continue. And it has been under siege for a long time. Therefore, to say that “we will soon go to Sloviansk” can only be corrected: “relatively soon.”
In general, my position on the operation, which is being carried out by the Russian military command in the Donbas, is quite well known and is defined by the words: “It is yet to be done.” ¤ All over the world, it has long been customary to bypass defense nodes, to force the enemy to leave them without a fight. And we decided to act according to the patterns of the First World War, and in its worst versions.
It’s hard for me to say when our troops will reach the line Sloviansk, Kramatorsk, Druzhkovka, Konstantinovka. Maybe relatively soon, maybe not very soon. ¤ Maybe in the coming months, they won’t reach it at all, there is a fairly large foreground there and the “respectable Ukrainian partners” will not leave it without a fight.
But in any case, even if we reach this line, it will be a pity if these cities are also destroyed during offensive operations, as Bakhmut has now been destroyed. ¤ And it will be even more difficult to take them because they are much larger, much more strongly fortified.
If in Soledar before the start of the special operation, the population was just over ten thousand people, then Kramotorsk until 2014 was a city of 150 thousand people. No Wagner is enough to take the agglomeration by storm. This will require way more forces.
Frankly, I do not share the victorious, and, as they say, hurray-patriotic moods of our media after the capture of Soledar. After all, this victory means practically nothing compared to, just for example, the surrender of Kherson. ¤ And even the surrender of the much larger city of Izyum, which happened during the so-called regrouping, but in fact, it was a retreat of our troops from the Kharkiv region.
⚡️ SVPRESSA: But after all, the Armed Forces of Ukraine also suffer, in your words, “ultra-casualties.” But the leadership in Kyiv planned this – they are preparing reserves in the rear, but do not bring them into battle. ¤ This happened near Popasna (LPR), near Severodonetsk, near Lysychansk. And later they threw these forces into a counterattack on Kherson. Are we seeing the same picture now?
⚡️Girkin: The enemy still retain their reserves. Moreover, they create new ones. They do not bring them into battle, do not expose to our blows the most combat-ready units intended for offensive operations on their side. ¤ Instead of them, the territorial defense is fighting, various reserve units formed from “mobiks”. And they hold back the staff units, as they did last summer when our troops stormed positions in Severodonetsk, Lysychansk, and then in Pisky.
Where the enemy is going to strike, or whether he keeps these units in reserve to repel our offensive, I do not have this information, since the only source of information about the enemy’s forces for me is the Internet. And this source is very incomplete and unreliable. ¤ But I look at which parts of them are involved in Soledar in Bakhmut and state the fact that there are no shock units and formations of the Armed Forces of Ukraine at the forefront.
⚡️SVPRESSA: What would you advise our chief commanders to do? Or is it not worth doing this at all, keeping a military secret?
⚡️Girkin: Our command does not need advice. It does not listen to them, and often acts illogically and completely opposite to what is required. ¤ They did not carry out an offensive operation on Dnipro to cut through the enemy’s communications between the Dnieper and Donbas. They won’t do it now. And in Mariupol, the enemy left the garrison just enough to order to divert our forces to it.
Now it has become more difficult for us. Everywhere, from the Kinburn Spit in the south, between the Dnieper and the Black Sea, to the border with Belarus in the north, the enemy has formed a continuous line of defense. ¤ I don’t know what our military leaders will do, and it’s useless to advise them anything…
According to the ex-Minister of Defense of the [so-called] DPR, now one can see a kind of repetition of the same picture that emerged in the spring and summer, when the Armed Forces of Ukraine in the Donbas deliberately fought to deplete the potential of Russian troops in their… ¤…fortified positions.
Yes, the Armed Forces of Ukraine fail, retreat, lose ground after fierce heavy fighting, but their failures are tactical. But they do not touch their strategic reserves. ¤ Perhaps they are preparing to repel our future offensive in other more promising areas. Or maybe they are planning a victory somewhere?
They are surrendering their positions on the fortified Soledar-Bakhmut line, not trying to make serious breakthroughs. ¤ They do not send their main forces there, if, of course, the Bandera regime still has them.
But, according to Strelkov, the management of the battle by our Western opponents “remains clear and thoughtful.” Although very bloody. ¤ End of translation.
🐣 RT @nytimesworld As Ukraine’s minister for internal affairs, Denys Monastyrsky oversaw the country’s police, its national guard and border patrol units including tens of thousands of combatants who have fought in the war.
⋙ NYT: Ukraine Minister Killed in Helicopter Crash Oversaw Some Security Forces https://tinyurl.com/sw4wrbkb
// Denys Monastyrsky was the highest-ranking Ukrainian government official to die since Russia’s invasion began in February last year.
TheAtlantic, David Brooks: Despite Everything You Think You Know, America Is on the Right Track https://tinyurl.com/2p8wyfeh
// Yes, America is a wounded giant—but it always has been, and the case for optimism is surprisingly strong.
… … Pessimism about our future is unwarranted. You may think that one major American political party has gone crazy, and I will agree with you. You can point to all of the ways in which life in America is infuriating and unjust, and I will agree with you there too. But the story of America is a story of convulsion and reinvention. We go through moments when the established order stops working. People and movements rise up, and things change. The culture is a collective response to the problems of the moment; as new problems become obvious, the culture shifts. We’ve been in the middle of one of those tumultuous transition periods since, I’d say, 2013. But 2022 evinced hopeful signs that we’re coming out of it.
If there is one lesson from the events of the past year, it is that open societies such as ours have an ability to adapt in a way that closed societies simply do not. Russia has turned violent and malevolent. China has grown more authoritarian and inept. Meanwhile, free democratic societies have united around the Ukrainians as they battle to preserve the liberal world order. And American voters seem to finally be adapting to the threat Donald Trump poses to our democracy, forming a robust anti-Trump coalition that will significantly lessen his chances of ever working in the White House again.
America is a wounded giant, and many of its wounds are self-inflicted. But America has always been a wounded giant. And it has always stumbled forward, driven by an inner turbine of ambition and aspiration that knows no rest.
🐣 RT @ChuckPfarrer SOLEDAR MINES /1250 UTC 19 JAN/ The main objective of the RU effort at Soledar was the cutting of the Bakhmut highway. This effort failed. UKR forces maintain control of the vital T-05-13 HWY West of Soledar and continue to hold RU forces short of the rail station at Blahodatne.
🌎 https://twitter.com/ChuckPfarrer/status/1615693827351658497?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @New_Narrative More than 500 of Twitter’s advertisers have paused spending on the site since Elon Musk’s takeover last year. The social media company’s daily revenue on Jan. 17 was 40% lower than the same day a year ago
⋙ Reuters: Over 500 advertisers have paused spending on Twitter – The Information https://tinyurl.com/bdess87z
⋙⋙ 🐣 Musk has only himself to blame. His brashness, abrupt dismissal of content moderation staff, and declarations he was opening Twitter to accounts suspended for hate speech and incitement scared advertisers. ¤ Wasn’t he going to hire a new CEO, btw?
🐣 These are the budget deficits by president: See a pattern? (Source: OMB)
◕ https://twitter.com/Auriandra/status/1615684680346656768?s=20/photo/1
// Bush2 through Biden
🐣 Deficit down every year under Biden
◕ https://twitter.com/Auriandra/status/1615682463442812928?s=20/photo/1
// White House chart
🐣 RT @IuliiaMendel BREAKING and AWFUL ¤ Interior Minister Denys Monastyrsky, First Deputy Interior Minister Yevhen Yenin and State Secretary of the Ministry of Internal Affairs Yuriy Lubkovych DIED in the HELICOPTER CATASTROPHE in the Kyiv region ¤ A total of 16 victims, including 2 children.
⭕ 17 Jan 2023
🧵 RT @igorsushko 🚨 My translation of Jan 17 2023 #FSBletters from #WindofChange inside the FSB to Vladimir Osechkin. Topics: #WagnerPMC commander Medvedev’s escape to Norway, Prigozhin & MoD, Soledar & mobilization, FSB readying to pounce on weakened Prigozhin. Please share far & wide.
📌 https://twitter.com/igorsushko/status/1615314883868000256?s=20
🧵 RT @ WarintheFuture Over the northern hemisphere winter, eastern Ukraine has been the scene of bitter and intense combat. The offensives around #Bakhmut & #Kreminna highlight the different strategic & cultural approaches that Ukraine and Russia have applied in this war. 1/23 🇺🇦
📌 https://twitter.com/WarintheFuture/status/1615611175106146310?s=20
[ThreadReader:] https://tinyurl.com/2p8prj6r
Over the northern hemisphere winter, eastern Ukraine has been the scene of bitter and intense combat. The offensives around #Bakhmut & #Kreminna highlight the different strategic & cultural approaches that Ukraine and Russia have applied in this war. 1/23
2/ Both offensives have featured trench and urban warfare, artillery duels, very short-range engagements between infantry and tanks, as well as long range strikes on supply and headquarters locations. But there are differences.
⋙ The tale of two battles in eastern Ukraine, and what they tell us about the direction of the war ¤ Over the northern hemisphere winter, eastern Ukraine has been the scene of bitter and intense combat. The two offensives highlight the different strategic and cultural approaches that Ukraine and Russ… [link]3/ One of the key differences is an asymmetry between Russian and Ukrainian operational thinking. For this Russian offensive, there has been a focus on securing towns like #Bakhmut & #Soledar that have limited strategic utility.
4/ In the main, the massive Russian losses suffered for these towns are not justified by the minor gains they present.
5/ The fight in the north waged by the Ukrainians is quite different. The Kreminna-Svatove-Starbil’s’k region is important for its transportation hubs. If Russia loses these cities, it loses its key supply routes into Luhansk and many of the northern routes into Donetsk.
6/ The ultimate outcome of Ukrainian success in this may see it recapture its Luhansk oblast and compromise the Russian scheme of defence in northern Donetsk. This would mean the Russians may have to redeploy forces intended for 2023 offensives to defend the region.
7/ Related to this dissimilar operational thinking is that the Russians have chosen to attack an area where the Ukrainians are strongest. The Donbas is where Ukraine has had eight years to prepare multiple, reinforcing defensive lines.
8/ Attacking areas where the enemy is strongest and best prepared is generally not recommended in war.
9/ The Ukrainians, on the other hand, conducted a rapid advance through #Kharkiv and into Luhansk at the end of 2023 because they had identified an area where Russia was weak. They then postured themselves for the current, more methodical operations.
10/ Another important difference highlighted by these two offensives is the kinds of forces being used. For Ukraine, this is an operation being conducted by professional and territorial military personnel and overseen by a unified command.
11/ The Russians have taken a different approach.
12/ The battles around Bakhmut, Soledar and surrounding areas are being fought by a mix of competing Russian army forces and mercenaries. This is exemplified by Wagner claims of victory in Soledar, and their whining about Russia failing to recognise it.
⋙ Wagner Group boss hits out at failure to recognize role in Soledar fighting ¤ Claim is yet another sign of the growing tensions in the Russian military ranks. [link]13/ It also says much about the two nations approach to this war. For Ukraine, its Army is reinforced by steady flow of volunteers that understand their purpose and have demonstrated for nearly eleven months the willingness to sacrifice themselves in the defence of their nation.
14/ Russia, on the other hand, has had to resort to using mercenaries – many of them pardoned convicts encouraged by men behind them with machine guns – for its most important campaign in Ukraine.
15/ Prussian theorist Carl von Clausewitz wrote extensively on the topic of ‘will’ in conflict. These different approaches to their people highlight an asymmetry in motivation and national will in this war.
16/ Finally, these two offensives are indicative of the mindsets of the political leaders of Russia & Ukraine. Putin is desperate for a victory of any kind. His military has not been able to achieve Putin’s political objectives – securing the five oblasts annexed in 2022.
17/ Therefore, Putin needs something before the one-year anniversary of his Ukraine invasion that he can portray to the Russian people as worthy of its costs. Soledar and Bakhmut fit this bill.
18/ Zelensky has a different challenge. His forces ended 2022 in the ascendancy. They had achieved significant battlefield victories over the Russians in Kherson and Kharkiv. Coming into 2023, they have the momentum and morale that will underpin their 2023 offensives.
19/ Zelensky is not desperate for a victory at any cost. He can be more patient & allow his Commander in Chief the time to carefully plan 2023 military strategy. That said, he still needs many more battlefield victories – & western support – to recapture many regions of Ukraine.
20/ The approaches to these battles in the Donbas demonstrate the different national and military cultures and values of the two belligerents in this war.
⋙ The tale of two battles in eastern Ukraine, and what they tell us about the direction of the war ¤ Over the northern hemisphere winter, eastern Ukraine has been the scene of bitter and intense combat. The two offensives highlight the different strategic and cultural approaches that Ukraine and Russ… [link]21/ And while both battles may be important to each side at present, they may pale into insignificance given the offensives to be launched in 2023.
22/ And therein lies the danger. Neither side can afford to commit too much to these battles. They must husband their resources for military campaigns in the east and in the south in 2023. There are many bloody and costly months ahead. End.
23/ Thank you to the following whose s and links were used in this thread: @TDF_UA @Militarylandnet @DefMon3 @abcnews @POLITICOEurope @UAWeapons @DefenceU
🐣 RT @IAPonomarenko The upcoming Ramstein summit has all chances to end up being among pivotal historic events of our time. ¤ It’s all about managers making decision and thus becoming leaders and historic figures.
NYT: Pentagon Sends U.S. Arms Stored in Israel to Ukraine https://tinyurl.com/ydszvt9j With stockpiles in the US strained and US arms makers not yet able to keep up with Ukraine’s needs, the Pentagon is drawing from US stockpiles of artillery shells stored in Israel and South Korea
// Israeli officials had initially expressed concerns that the move could damage its relations with Russia.
WaPo Editorial: Heavy tanks — and a push from the U.S. — are key to Ukraine’s success https://tinyurl.com/2s9yyn9p The war in Ukraine is approaching “what is likely to be its decisive moment.” @POTUS, your move.
🧵 RT @Tendar The murder of children is a deliberate Russian war tactic. In Syria we have seen this numerous times by both Assad terrorists and their Russian and Iranian helpers. The aim is to inflict desperation and emotional pain to the entire population so that impunity is dominant. [link]
📌 https://twitter.com/Tendar/status/1615363678299213824?s=20
⋙ 🐣 RT @Tendar Many in the West still cannot fathom the amount of ruthlessness the Russian regime possess, nor they can understand how rampant the amount of ignorance in the entire Russian society is. At this moment you cannot reason with them, nor you can have peace. You can only defeat them.
⋙ 🐣 RT @Tendar Half-measures will prolong the suffering. This is why the world community has to focus, unequivocally, to go all the way until Ukraine’s victory because this will be the only thing which will break the Russian delusions. Everything else is but a waste of life, time and resources.
🐣 RT @ukraine_map For the first time, the Commander-in-Chief of Ukraine’s Armed Forces, Valeryi Zalushnyi, met face to face with USA’s Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley in Poland ¤ Three days before Rammstein
🐣 RT @noclador The West must produce weapons in unlimited numbers so Ukraine gets the tools to defeat fascist russia. ¤ If russia wins, then putin will conclude brute force can resurrect the czarist empire & he will attack every nation from Warsaw to Lisbon. ¤ We must destroy russia’s army NOW!
⋙ 🐣 RT @EliotACohen Language matters. It is not enough to say we want Ukraine to defend itself – we want it to win. It is not enough to say we want to stop Russia – we want to defeat it. And that means a lot more fighting and the liberation of occupied Ukrainian territories.
⋙⋙ TheAtlantic, Eliot Cohen: Western Aid to Ukraine Is Still Not Enough https://tinyurl.com/2fny75wv
// Any result other than a victory for Kyiv will make the world a more dangerous place for all of us.
… To finish liberating its territory, … and to decisively defeat Russia’s forces, Ukraine needs not only greater quantities but also different types of arms, including modern battle tanks, extensive air and antiballistic-missile defenses, and, above all, deep-attack systems such as the Army Tactical Missile System (ATACMS) and long-range unmanned aerial vehicles. With such weapons, Ukraine can and will repeat and expand the disruption of Russian logistics that enabled its earlier counteroffensives.
Russia has been badly bloodied. Of its prewar army, perhaps a quarter of its troops were killed or wounded in its initial attacks on Ukraine. A hastily mobilized force of men swept up in a press-ganging effort is also suffering casualties at a horrific rate. But the losses have not yet broken the Russian army or the determination of the Putin regime in Moscow. Indeed, Ukrainian sources report that a new mobilization is being prepared with the aim of more than doubling the size of the Russian military to a total force of as many as 2 million personnel.
The Russian military is, by Western standards, poorly motivated, poorly trained, badly led, and inadequately supported. Its units have to be kept at the front by the fear of blocking units that will gun down soldiers fleeing the battlefield. Its maintenance practices are primitive, its rations outdated, its command unable to coordinate the combined-arms operations of modern war. But Russia retains three large advantages.
The first is, simply, size. With a population of 146 million, it still has plenty of bodies it can throw into the fight against Ukraine, a country of 43 million people, perhaps a third of whom have become refugees or have been internally displaced. Russia also retains vast stocks of military matériel accumulated during the Cold War—even if those have now been depleted. These are dwindling strengths, as skilled young men flee the country and sanctions retard and disrupt the war economy, but for now they matter.
Russia’s other advantages are less tangible. One of these is sheer ruthlessness. President Vladimir Putin and his generals simply do not care, from a human point of view, how many tens or even hundreds of thousands of their soldiers are killed or mutilated in war. They equally have no compunction about inflicting mayhem on Ukrainian civilians in apartment blocks, schools, or hospitals. They will feed soldiers and civilians alike into the furnace of war until such behavior threatens their own survival.
Russia has, in addition, the benefits of a homeland sanctuary. Ukraine has managed a few daring strikes into Russian territory, but it has not yet been able to inflict militarily significant damage there, much less to ruin the Russian economy.
Against these strengths, Ukraine has many and indeed more of its own. This war has reminded us of the transcendent importance of motivation. Ukrainians know what they are fighting for, and they will go on to the end. They have a growing edge in skill over their enemy, and all the creativity of a free society and an engaged civilian population that supports the front in many ways; this includes creating improvised drone squadrons and articles of war, and supplying food and tactical information to frontline units.
Wars are, in some measure, tests of a society’s will and resilience, and this one has shown just how different Russia and Ukraine are. Wars are also a test of vitality. Putin is 70; Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky is 44. Russia’s chief of the general staff (and now overall commander in Ukraine), Valery Gerasimov, is 67; Ukraine’s chief of staff, Valeriy Zaluzhny, is 49. Support for Russia’s war is strongest among those who remember the Soviet Union, and the war is being conducted by the aging men in Putin’s inner circle.
In contrast, support for Ukraine’s war is across the board, and the war is being led by a generation in its prime, no more than middle-aged. This is, in many ways, a war between a calcified society lost in its brutal past and a free society looking toward a decent future.
Behind Ukraine lie the powers of the West, understood in the old-fashioned sense of a free coalition of states led by the United States. Despite understandable fretting about the slowness of its military-industrial mobilization, the Western allies have enormous and growing capacity, and they have—too slowly, and at times even stingily—provided Ukraine with battlefield technology that outmatches that deployed by Russia. Over time, that disparity will grow, if the Western commitment matches even a fraction of that of Ukrainian civilians and soldiers.
“War weariness” in Western democracies is a tired trope. We in the West are sacrificing nothing beyond modest financial resources—no comparison to the blood tax paid by the people of Ukraine. As a number of analysts have noted, spending some tens of billions of dollars to shatter the land and air forces of one of our chief opponents, Russia, is a bargain. Spending some tens of billions of dollars more, for as long as it takes, is no less worth it. …
… Ukraine has shown remarkable restraint: The idea that long-range missile systems would be used to strike indiscriminately into Russia has no credible support. And fears of Russian escalation to the use of nuclear weapons have been discredited repeatedly, including in The Atlantic.
The real reasons for reluctance look to be timidity and a lack of imagination. So perhaps the best thing for Western leaders who cannot bring themselves to treat war as war is to clarify for them what they have to fear if they do not take the actions that both strategic calculations and moral imperatives demand.
Because Russia is big, ruthless, and counting on the sanctuary of its territory, the war can be concluded on reasonable terms only by the decisive defeat of its forces in Ukraine—their elimination by flight, capture, wounds, or death. Some 100,000 casualties have not been enough, but Russia’s will and resources are not infinite. If Moscow’s losses have to be several times that, the West has the ability to ensure such an outcome with little risk to itself. If Ukraine has heavy armor and long-range strike systems, the Russian position in occupied land can be rendered untenable. A defeat of that magnitude will likely bring about the internal changes that will deter Russia from pursuing its present path.
Should Western leaders, through their passivity or reluctance, bring about a cease-fire that leaves Russia with Ukrainian territory under its control, they would disgrace themselves as much the French and British leaders did at Munich in 1938—and with less excuse. They will lay the grounds for future wars because, after some period of recuperation, Russia will surely try again. Already, Russia does not recognize the legitimacy of Ukrainian independence; already, blood is on Western hands because of a failure to arm Ukraine and deter Russia on previous occasions. Next time will be even worse.
If fear is the only thing some Western leaders understand, they should consider this. For other nations, the lesson of a Ukraine that is not allowed to win this war is very simple: get yourself nuclear weapons. Finns, Poles, Kazakhs, Ukrainians, for that matter, and many others will conclude that conventional strength alone is not enough. That South Korea’s leadership has begun talking about the need to reintroduce nuclear weapons to the peninsula is not coincidental.
In a world where a large predatory state is stalled but not beaten decisively, the only resort for its smaller neighbors is to acquire weapons of cataclysmic power. Their leaders would be irresponsible if they did not consider that option. And the leaders of the major Western states are not just irresponsible but willfully negligent if they fail to take the measures—all well within their power—to avoid the world that this failure would bequeath to succeeding generations.
Eliot Cohen is a contributing writer at The Atlantic. He is the Robert E. Osgood Professor at Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies and the Arleigh Burke Chair in Strategy at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.
Politico [EU]: NATO membership for Ukraine would have prevented war, says Finland’s PM https://tinyurl.com/53dtt2z4
// ‘We want to become a member of NATO because we don’t ever again want war in Finland,’ says Sanna Marin.
⋙ 🐣 NATO is protecting Ukraine now, but without the full support of NATO troops and all its weapons, Ukraine bears the full weight of human suffering. ¤ I sincerely hope that Russia is defeated soundly and that 🇺🇦 will become a strong NATO partner soon.
🐣 RT @ForeignAffairs “The entire world has been wronged by Putin’s war, and the entire world deserves to play a role in punishing the crimes committed in the initiation, planning, and prosecution of it.”
⋙ ForeignAffairs: Russia’s Crime and Punishment https://tinyurl.com/2sxszus5
// How to prosecute the illegal war in Ukraine.
🧵 RT @P_Kallioniemi In today’s #vatnik soup and another edition of “You pronounced this nonsense, not me”. Today we’re going to talk about the “genocide in Donbas” disinformation and propaganda trope, that’s been debunked many times but just refuses to die in the social media sphere. 1/12
📌 ◕ https://twitter.com/P_Kallioniemi/status/1611980244252258304?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @OxanaShevel Anyone who drunk “Crimea was always russian” coolaid should read this article by Rory Finnin. Historically, geographically & economically Crimea’s ties to 🇺🇦 are stronger than to 🇷🇺. Khrushchev’s transfer of Crimea to Ukrainian SSR was “neither gift nor mistake but a rescue.”
⋙ 🐣 RT @PopovaProf Anyone who believes Crimea somehow naturally belongs to Ru needs to read this piece. It argues Crimea fits better w Ukraine (historically and geographically) and needs to return to it, not as a matter of justice only, but to achieve stable peace. https://politi.co/3w0TdM8
🐣 RT @ @KyivIndependent ⚡️Dutch PM pledges to supply Patriot air defense systems to Ukraine. ¤ During a meeting with U.S. President Joe Biden on Jan. 17, Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte said that the Netherlands would join the U.S. and Germany in sending Patriot air defense missiles to Ukraine.
⋙ 🐣 Eventually, Ukraine will have the best air defense in Europe. At this point 4 Patriot systems are promised, along with 9 NASAMS — 8 from US (2 delivered, 6 being built), 1 from Canada. Patriots’ detection range is ~150km; NASAMS is ~40km
⋙⋙ 🐣 RT @ukraine_map A map showing possible air defense coverage with all the systems that Ukraine 🇺🇦 is expected to receive
8 NASAMS 🔵
6 HAWK 🔴
4 IRIS-T 🟢
1 Patriot and 1 SAMP/T 🟠
🌎 https://twitter.com/ukraine_map/status/1605212471853473793?s=20/photo/1
[entire w link: https://twitter.com/Auriandra/status/1615509148979941378?s=20%5D
// 12/10/2022
🐣 RT @ChuckPfarrer BAKHMUT/ 2310 UTC 17 JAN/ RU forces attempting to reinforce, support, or resupply Andriivka salient remain under blistering UKR artillery and direct fire weapons. UKR sortied 10 aviation strike missions targeting troop concentrations. Air defense downed a RU Su-25 aircraft.
🌎 https://twitter.com/ChuckPfarrer/status/1615485476437364737?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @ChuckPfarrer BAKHMUT /1350 UTC 17 JAN/ RU units have renewed frontal attacks in Bakhmut’s Eastern suburbs. On 17 JAN, UKR forces were in contact on the H-32 HWY axis south of the Artyomovsk Winery. SW of the urban area, the Russian salient NW of Andriivka appears to have slowed its advance.
🌎 https://twitter.com/ChuckPfarrer/status/1615343718571073536?s=20/photo/1
WaPo: What the Jan. 6 probe found out about social media, but didn’t report https://tinyurl.com/yeykmpuj “… Twitter was terrified of the backlash they would get if they followed their own rules and applied them to Donald Trump,” said one former employee
// The House committee investigating the riot avoided detailed discussion in its report for fear of offending Republicans and tech companies, sources say
TheBulwark: The McCarthy-Jordan Plan to Weaponize the House https://tinyurl.com/2s3jbkde 🤡 🤡 🤡
// A November report on Republican grievances provides a roadmap for years of hyperpartisan investigations.
🐣 RT @ RYP__ Join the 1% Club:”The pace at which wealth is being created has sped up, as the world’s richest 1% amassed around half of all new wealth over the past 10 years.”
⋙ CNBC: The richest 1% of people amassed almost two-thirds of new wealth created in the last two years, Oxfam says https://tinyurl.com/47bjzn7s
// Over the last two years, the richest 1% of people have accumulated close to two-thirds of all new wealth created around the world, a new report from Oxfam says.
⋙ 🐣 This is the biggest political issue we face, but since Sanders lost his bid to Clinton, both parties have spent too much energy on identity politics; fortunately, Biden has taken steps to increase income taxes on the wealthy, but without a wealth tax, the problem will get worse
🐣 RT @TheStudyofWar #Prigozhin is continuing to undermine faith in the Russian MoD and in Putin-aligned actors. ¤ Prigozhin directly responded to Peskov’s statement in an interview question about the MoD-Prigozhin conflict, stating that he has no reason to not trust Peskov. http://isw.pub/UkrWar011623
¤ https://twitter.com/TheStudyofWar/status/1615194208364535808?s=20
⋙ 🐣 RT @TheStudyofWar 10/ Peskov also continued Putin’s efforts to undermine Wagner’s narrative that only Wagner forces were responsible for capturing Soledar, noting that Russians will remember both Russian servicemembers and Wagner forces for their achievements. http://isw.pub/UkrWar011623
TheAtlantic, Brian Klaas: Conspiratorial Thinking Is an American Disease https://tinyurl.com/2p94f8fy “Within the modern GOP, conspiracy theories—about stolen elections, satanic cults, or ‘deep state’ cover-ups—have replaced policy ideas as a rallying cry for Trump’s MAGA base”
// In the past decade, conspiratorial thinking has shifted from a worrying factor in Republican politics to a defining feature.
.bq
But Britain’s and America’s democratic woes are not at all the same. The problems in American democracy are worse. That’s because a particularly insidious disease has infected the core of its political system, one that is not present to the same degree in other rich democracies: extreme conspiracism. Other countries, including the U.K., have polarization. America has irrational polarization, in which one political party has fallen under the spell of conspiratorial thinking. Polarization plus this conspiracist tendency risks turning run-of-the-mill democratic dysfunction into a democratic death spiral. The battle for American democracy will be a battle over reality.
Within the modern GOP, conspiracy theories—about stolen elections, satanic cults, or “deep state” cover-ups—have replaced policy ideas as a rallying cry for Trump’s MAGA base. Trump’s disciples have developed an encyclopedic knowledge of a dizzying cast of characters, along with a series of code words for alleged cover-ups. They rattle off their accepted wisdom about conspiracies that most people have never heard of, such as “Italygate,” the absurd notion that the U.S. embassy in Rome, in conjunction with the Vatican, used satellites to rig the 2020 presidential election. …
In the past decade, conspiratorial thinking has shifted from a worrying factor in Republican politics to a defining feature. This is partly because of Trump himself, who peddled countless debunked conspiracy theories, including that climate change is a hoax invented by China, and the lie that Ted Cruz’s father had links to the JFK assassination. As Trump took over the party, his conspiratorial lies became Republican orthodoxy. And that opened the door to conspiratorial influencers, who started inventing new lies. …
On January 6, 2021, thousands of deluded insurrectionists attacked the Capitol because of lies spread by Trump and his acolytes. But the bigger problem was inside the ranks of Congress itself, as most House Republicans voted not to certify the election based on those debunked theories. These were the conspiratorial insurrectionists in suits—and they’re now in charge of the House of Representatives. What will they do now that they’re in power? Launch countless investigations into COVID vaccines, deep-state cover-ups, and the elections that they wrongly claim were stolen. Governing will be put on hold for two years. …
Unfortunately, loosening the grip of conspiratorial thinking in politics is extremely difficult; it means trying to make the storytelling animal give up on one hell of a story. But here is one nugget of wisdom for how to start, drawn from H. L. Mencken: “The way to deal with superstition,” he wrote, “is not to be polite to it, but to tackle it with all arms, and so rout it, cripple it, and make it forever infamous and ridiculous.”
QAnon is crazy. The notion that vaccines cause spoons to stick to you is moronic. Anyone who tells you that a best-selling historian is part of a secret plot to turn you into a cyborg is, with insincere apologies to Mike Flynn, a complete idiot. In the battle for reality, ridicule is a powerful weapon.
🐣 RT @KyivIndependent ⚡️Germany names new defense minister amid pressure to provide Leopard tanks to Ukraine.
⋙ 🐣 RT @KyivIndependent Regional interior minister and Social Democratic Party member Boris Pistorius will replace Christine Lambrecht, who resigned on Monday, after her tenure was dogged by criticism of how she handled military aid to Ukraine as well as the project to improve the German military.
🐣 RT @NOELreports Poland has already handed over 260 T-72 [Russian] tanks of various modifications to Ukraine – the President of Poland Andrzej Duda said. “Five days ago, I announced our decision regarding Leopard tanks. One company of Leopard tanks is about 14 tanks…. 1/2
⋙ 🐣 RT @NOELreports We have indeed decided to send them to Ukraine. But we hope and try to organize more support for Ukraine,” Andrzej Duda said during speech at the economic forum in Davos
🐣 RT @NOELreports Polish President Andrzej Duda expects NATO countries to be able to form at least a brigade of Leopard tanks for Ukraine. In Ukraine a tank brigade (at the start of the war) consists of around 100 tanks.
🧵 RT @Rail_splitter1 The last few days, the overwhelming tragedy in Ukraine, the sight of the destroyed and broken families, seeing Russians on Telegram channels celebrate the deaths and call for more, has left me seething.
📌 https://twitter.com/Rail_splitter1/status/1615245060723060736?s=20
For decades now the terrorist, fascist Russian state and its millions of genuine supporters have gotten away with everything while being allowed to infiltrate and undermine our societies, to use our platforms to spread hate, supremacism and cynicism.
None of what they are doing would have been possible without the West: the colluders, the endlessly greedy, the corruptly bought ones, the indifferent, the cynical.
They kill with weapons built with Western technology. They spread malicious, toxic hate, lies and cynicism using Western platforms. They have bought influence and stakes everywhere. Sanctions have scant effect because their illicit channels are everywhere.
We have lost our way. Societies being open and democratic, having respect for freedom of speech and expression, were never meant to become enablers of this barbaric campaign or providers of handy tools that can be used against us.
Some will say: that’s exactly what they want, for us to overreact and close off our societies. Not at all. I believe this is a false dichotomy. There is a way to be democratic and open while never again becoming witting and unwitting enablers of a vast mafia network.
UkrInform: Under Secretary of Defense Colin Kahl: US acknowledges Ukraine’s need to strike beyond front line https://tinyurl.com/34d9xxz2 Abrams not a good fit, but acknowledged need for tanks; not focusing on specific type of long-range missile is “helpful”
// The US has “consulted with the Ukrainian leadership and the military at every stage of the war about the most urgent needs”
⭕ 16 Jan 2023
🐣 RT @Rail_splitter1 Viktor Medvedchuk, Ukrainian traitor, offered himself up to head a “new pro-Russian” Ukrainian government. The response of Russian state propagandists and Russians on social media: We won’t need a new Ukrainian regime because there won’t be a Ukraine.
🚫 🧵 RT @igorsushko 🚨 #Gerasimov’s Hail Mary Attack on #Lviv: The following is reported by Volya Media, allegedly from sources inside the General Staff of #Russia.
1) Russia has readied 700,000 soldiers, some already in West Belarus, & 200,000 waiting in reserves.
2) Attack may start in weeks.
📌 🌎 https://twitter.com/igorsushko/status/1615220719293698048?s=20/photo/1
// not posted; seems like Ru misinfo
🐣 RT @ybarrap Trump is going to prison. ¤ #TrumpIsDone
[TextLink:] https://twitter.com/ybarrap/status/1615145157506043919?s=20/photo/1
[Text:] 🐣 RT @realDonaldTrump [ts] The FBI (Fake Bureau of Investigation) & the Department of Injustice, together with the Trump Hating Thug, Jack Smith, are interviewing, harassing, and subpoenaing people that work for me relative to the BOXES HOAX, & the “Peacefully & Patriotically” speech I made at the January 6th protest of the Rigged and Stollen Presidential Election, where so many have been treated horribly and Unconstitutionally. This is a Gestapo type operation! Are they doing this to the Biden people? I don’t think so!
🐣 📋 RT @RpsAgainstTrump Good news: in 2022, the deficit was sliced in half to $1.375 trillion, compared to the 2021 deficit of $2.776 trillion. ¤ This is the biggest drop in history.
🐣 RT @WarMonitor3 UK to transfer to Ukraine in new aid package
14 Challenger 2 tanks
8 SPG AS90 [self-propelled artillery] (22 come later)
100 armored vehicles
🐣 RT @igornovikov The shape of this war is the shape of future conflicts, whether they’re social, geopolitical, technological, or all of the above. Facing 🇷🇺, Ukrainians have gained knowledge that the entire world needs to learn, and urgently. We’re fighting this war so you won’t have to fight it
🐣 RT @mhmck Russia is invading Europe and at war with the collective West.
Ukrainians defend alone.
Scholz blocks tanks to Ukraine.
Biden blocks ATACMS to Ukraine.
The Swiss block arms to Ukraine.
Orbán blocks the NATO-Ukraine Commission.
Erdoğan blocks Finland and Sweden in NATO.
⋙ 🐣 why do these organizations allow one member to have a veto? it makes no sense: the more members they have, the harder it becomes to act to do what most members want. they need to lower the bar
🐣 RT @ChuckPfarrer KREMINNA AXIS /1320 UTC 16 JAN/ RU forces conducted fire missions on Kuzmyne, indicating the presence of UKR forces. The Forward Edge of the Battle Area (FEBA) is assessed to extend from the center of Kreminna in a southern direction to the banks of the Sievro-Donets River.
🌎 https://twitter.com/ChuckPfarrer/status/1614974367049420801?s=20/photo/1
WaPo: New details link George Santos to cousin of sanctioned Russian oligarch https://tinyurl.com/3v6p3vsz //➔ it never ceases to amaze me that there exists a whole class of people who can acrue millions of dollars by simply ‘dancing between the raindrops’
// The New York congressman once claimed Andrew Intrater’s company was his “client,” while another Intrater company allegedly made a deposit with a firm where Santos worked
NatuonalInterest (Sep): How Zelensky’s Leadership Saved Ukraine https://tinyurl.com/mwc3dmet “‘I’m absolutely convinced, he wouldn’t come out in the top 8 percent, which are people with super strong leadership attributes, he would come out in the top 1 percent,’ Mears said”
// 9/12/2022; Zelensky has shown a remarkable ability to consistently inspire Ukrainians and maintain a strong emotional connection to the country and its people.
🐣 RT @ChuckPfarrer BAKHMUT/ 0015 UTC 16 JAN/ A breakthrough at Kurdiumivka occurred on 12 JAN [?]: RU forces have consolidated gains and now menace the H-32 HWY. UKR UAV-directed artillery has taken advancing RU units under sustained fire.
🌎 https://twitter.com/ChuckPfarrer/status/1614775522546036736?s=20/photo/1
⭕ 15 Jan 2023
🐣 RT @SaltyProfessor Democrats aren’t banning gas stoves. The government isn’t coming for your guns. The border isn’t wide open. The elections weren’t rigged. Schools aren’t grooming kids. @POTUS isn’t corrupt. Babies aren’t being murdered after they’re born. Why do Republicans lie so much?
🐣 RT @general_ben Sanctuary for Russian systems that are killing innocent Ukrainians is created by our unwillingness to provide weapons that have capability beyond the 90km of a GMLRS launched from HIMARS. ATACM’s (300km range), Gray Eagle drones, Small Diameter Bombs will deny Russia sanctuary.
⋙ 🐣 RT @M_S_Billingslea In response to today’s horrific attack on Ukraine’s civilians, @POTUS should announce that we will (finally) supply ATACMS munitions. ¤ Further, the Admin should just bite the bullet & issue both primary & secondary sanctions on all Russian energy transactions & all Russian banks.
🐣 RT @anders_aslund On Russia-US-Ukrainian comparisons: The oldest Ukrainian university, the Kyiv-Mohyla Academy, was founded in 1615. Harvard, the oldest US university, was founded in 1636. The oldest Russian university was founded in St. Petersburg in 1725 (Moscow only in 1755).
⋙ 🐣 RT @anders_aslund So why are so many unaware of the Kyiv-Mohyla Academy? Because the Russian Empire conquered Ukraine and in 1817 Tsar Alexander I of Russia made the decision to close the academy. It was only Ukraine’s renewed independence in 1991 that facilitated the restart of the Kyiv-Mohyla.
🐣 📊 RT @accountable_us NEW POLL: Americans Already Disapprove of GOP Congress. ¤ By 26-pts, people already disapprove of the way Republicans in Congress are handling their jobs. via @NavigatorSurvey
◕ https://twitter.com/accountable_us/status/1614736684385505280?s=20/photo/1
// Navigator Poll: Approve 34%, Disapprove 60%
(Dems 14%/81%; Indies 21%/59%; GOP 59%/36%)
🐣 📋 RT @ tribelaw That’s a drop of 46% in the federal budget deficit in one year under Joe Biden. ¤ $1 TRILLION QUESTION: Who’s the last GOP president who came even close?
⋙ 🐣 RT @OccupyDemocrats BREAKING: Joe Biden scores a HUGE win as the Treasury Department announces that the U.S. federal budget deficit fell from $2.6 trillion to $1.4 trillion in 2022 — proving Democrats are far more fiscally responsible than Republicans with their rich tax cuts. RT TO THANK JOE BIDEN!
⋙⋙ 🐣 ◕ https://twitter.com/Auriandra/status/1614825677840175106?s=20/photo/1
// “DEFICIT DOWN EVERY YEAR UNDER BIDEN AFTER UP EVERY YEAR UNDER TRUMP” (2020-2022)
🐣 RT @mhmck Source: General Staff of the Armed Forces of Ukraine operational information as of 18:00 on 15 January 2023 regarding the Russian invasion ¤ Battle is engaged in Kreminna. Units of the Armed Forces of Ukraine are in the southwest precinct of the town.
🐣 RT @NOELreports NATO Secretary General Stoltenberg said that the normalization of relations between Western countries and Russia will not come even after the end of the conflict in Ukraine. ¤ Good.
🐣 RT @Gerashchenko_en Terrorist Girkin-Strelkov says civil war is possible in Russia, with millions of casualties and full collapse.
💽 [tr] https://twitter.com/Gerashchenko_en/status/1614590972666470401?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @ChuckPfarrer KREMINNA /1510 UTC 15 JAN/ UKR units are confirmed to be in contact within the city limits of Kreminna. Back and forth fighting continues in the south and central suburban areas as RU has conducted fire missions along the C-130514 road in the south liminal areas of the city.
🌎 https://twitter.com/ChuckPfarrer/status/1614637895477862401?s=20/photo/1
📋 KyivPost, Ret. Col. Orio Giorgio Stirpe: Winter War in Ukraine: Russia’s Army Can No Longer Conduct a Large-Scale Offensive https://tinyurl.com/4meswatm “[T]he whole Russian army has reverted to what is effectively a mobilized conscript mob” //➔ very informative
// Italian Military Expert on Significant Limitations Facing Russia Army
[T]he whole notion of a Russian massive coming back at Kyiv is completely unrealistic. ¤ Most people giving credit to those ideas have little understanding of the changes that have affected the Russian army in the last ten months. It is not only a matter of combat losses and morale slippage due to military failure – the very nature of the ground force has altered, leaving Putin with a military instrument unfit for offensive operations.
This does NOT mean the Russian army has been defeated. It hasn’t. It means that it has no credible capability to mount serious operational assaults and capture large swaths of territory. It is limited to retaining what it holds and mounting local spoiling attacks – as can currently be witnessed.
Personnel issues
The Russian army which invaded Ukraine last February was made up of approximately 200,000 professional soldiers, supported by another 50,000 conscripts and a significant number of relatively modern combat vehicles. That essentially amounted to the whole operational capability the Russian Federation could afford to mass in a single campaign.
As such, the very presence of conscripts – which was initially forbidden not only by Putin’s direct orders, but by federal law – came because there were simply not enough contract infantrymen to man the maneuver units. For his part, Russian General Valery Gerasimov tried to make things work despite the various personnel problems.
Russia’s professional army, which was credited with a good level of combat training by most experts, simply doesn’t exist anymore.
There are no final confirmed numbers for Russian casualties, and the official Ukrainian tally exceeds 100,000 killed in action. This may well be an over-estimate, but we are probably not so far from it, especially if we consider the independently confirmed combat vehicle losses, which are staggering. The Russians have lost more tanks than the whole inventory of the active U.S. army.
Talking of personnel, we must remember that, for every soldier killed in action, there are at least two seriously wounded or otherwise missing due to capture, desertion or dismissal. This means that even if Ukrainian data on Russian losses are exaggerated, very few of those professional soldiers who invaded in February are still fighting today. Most have been killed or mauled in the ten months of fighting, and the remainder have probably been promoted to higher ranks to fill the positions of missing officers and/or taken command of mobilized recruits.
Perhaps some elite mechanized paratrooper battalions are still being manned by the bulk of contract soldiers, and of course mercenary groups like Wagner are “professional” in nature, but the whole Russian army has reverted to what is effectively a mobilized conscript mob. I use the term “mob” intentionally, because of the nature of the “partial mobilization” we have witnessed.
In order to perform a working mobilization, one requires a detailed plan (which Ukraine had); infrastructure involving trainers and a reserve of personnel equipment to receive the recalled men (which Ukraine had to an extent); time to train and heavy equipment to support newly raised Units (which Ukraine badly lacked but managed in a barely satisfactory way); and most of all cadres to lead these Units into actual combat (which Ukraine could somehow gather).
ALL those elements were lacking in Russia, simply because of no real idea how to perform any form of mobilization. Furthermore, corruption and lack of resources had vastly depleted stored reserve equipment, so Russian mobilized personnel went to the front lacking everything but their own mortal bodies.
Poor material resources
The situation is even more dire as we turn our attention to material resources. ¤ Large as it is, the Russian Federation has a GDP vastly inferior to Italy’s, and any military budget – however inflated – has to start from this fundamental basis.
Considering that Russia’s military expenses are similar to the U.K.’s, but that Russia’s army is 20 times larger and has a nuclear deterrent equal in numbers to that of the U.S., we can see that the money available is definitely insufficient to maintain such a large army. As soon as we add corruption into the mix, it becomes evident that available resources have been scarce from start.
Whatever was available initially, has been seriously hit by western sanctions, so military industrial production has drastically dropped, and reserves have proven largely unworthy.
Gradually, the professional and equipped army that Russia fielded last February, has morphed into a poorly equipped and badly trained horde of demoralized recruits, supported by insufficient, outdated combat vehicles, and led by disgruntled officers raised from the ranks and with little leadership training.
Such an army is simply unfit for offensive operations in hostile territory. Even less so, when its opponents happen to enjoy higher numbers, better training and leadership, and even more modern equipment. ¤ Added to that, there is the motivational issue I have discussed previously.
Logistical problems also tie the Russians to railway heads for any prolonged offensive effort, since they lack the wheeled assets to move supplies – chiefly artillery ammunitions – required. Ukrainian generals planned their operations carefully to deny them to the invaders, so that now the railway connecting Rostov to Donetsk is the only one capable of supporting offensive operations into Ukrainian territory.
Any offensive from Belarusian territory is reliant on a single Belarusian railway line, manned by Ukraine-friendly Belarusian personnel. And we saw, last March, how efficient that was.
The Russian army is still alive and kicking. It has numbers on its side, and the resilience of a large nation to support it. It can also hold its line effectively for many months to come. Western Governments and Ukrainian authorities may have a vested interest in depicting it to be on the verge of a new onslaught in order to support the provision of more western military supplies. ¤ But it is in no position to mount large offensive operations: neither today nor in a few months.
WaPo: When Russia bombs a building full of people, this is the aftermath https://tinyurl.com/5hb5s8hk “‘We don’t have any safe spaces in Ukraine anymore,’ said Maksym Chornyi, 32, who volunteered to help rescue people at the scene”
WaPo: Bloody Bakhmut siege poses risks for Ukraine https://tinyurl.com/2dwdehp8 “Bakhmut has become a brutal slog, as Russia dumps thousands of fighters on the front, testing Ukrainian forces with wave after wave of personnel”
// Kyiv must balance its defense of the city, weighted with symbolism, with preparations for a counteroffensive
WashingtonPress: LOSING IT: Trump posts disturbed Truth Social rant that has people worried https://tinyurl.com/bdev6mr3
[Text:] 🐣 RT @realDonaldTrump Page 1: What Biden did was wrong, but he was given a reasonable and stable Special Counsel who is sane, inclined not to make waves, friendly with RINOS, and is not known as a flame-throwing lunatic or a Biden hater. What I did was RIGHT, Secured documents in a secured place, lock on the doors, guards and Secret Service all around, security cameras working. Mar-a-Lago is essentially an armed fort, and was built that way in the 1920’s, with High Walls & structure to serve as the Southern W.H.
🐣 RT @realDonald Trump Page 2: I was President of the U.S, and covered and protected by the Presidential Records Act, which is not criminal and allows and encourages you to talk to the NARA, which we were, very nicely, until the FBI, who it is now learned has been after me for years without pause or question, RAIDED Mar-a-Lago, a stupid and probably Illegal thing to do. As President, I have the right to declassify documents, Biden did not. Special “Prosecutor” Jack Smith, however, is a Trump Hating political Thug.
🐣 RT @realDonaldTrump Page 3: The Boxes Hoax Case against me should be dropped immediately. I have done nothing wrong.
🐣 RT @realDonald Trump How come the Biden “Prosecutor” is a nice guy, very friendly with Democrats and RINOS alike, close to Christopher Wray, & pretty much liked & known by everybody, while my “Prosecutor” is a Radical Left Trump HATING Lunatic, whose wife & family get a perfect “10” for spewing Trump HATE, & whose “friends” are the most evil, angry, & disgusting Marxists & Communists in & around Government? They are GRILLING innocent people in Grand Juries for hours, all to “get Trump.” These are Sick Thugs!
🐣 RT @realDonald Trump Page 1: Until now, I always thought that lawyers had a very special & revered place in our Country, but not anymore! It all began with the lawyer from hell, Michael Cohen, whose office was viciously RAIDED by the Fake Bureau of Investigation (FBI) early one morning, & whose files, & just about everything else, was taken from him on a case unrelated to me. Not too long thereafter, & being very brave, he screamed, I represent President Trump, I’ll tell you anything, but please leave me alone!
🐣 RT @realDonald Trump Page 2: Since then it has been open season on lawyers, their files, & their lives. They are attacked by the Radical Left Thugs at a level never seen before in our Country. Look at what they have done to Rudy Giuliani, who turned out to be right about so much, including the Laptop From Hell. So many others, also, all to try and “Get Trump,” due simply to Trump Derangement Syndrome. These Marxist Maniacs are improperly pushing City & State Prosecutors to do what they failed to do in Washington….
⭕ 14 Jan 2023
NYT: As Russians Steal Ukraine’s Art, They Attack Its Identity, Too https://tinyurl.com/yzxjhr5t “International art experts say the plundering may be the single biggest collective art heist since the Nazis pillaged Europe in World War II”
🐣 RT @ PhillipsPOBrien Latest piece just appeared in @TheAtlantic. Ukraine is going to win this war; the question is how long will it take? That depends on the support given. The better strategic and ethical choice is to give Ukraine what it needs to win the war more quickly.
⋙ Atlantic, Phillips O’Brien: Time Is on Ukraine’s Side, Not Russia’s https://tinyurl.com/4k9u22nr ‘The Biden administration must give Ukraine the final pieces of military technology it needs to force the Russians out. These include advanced vehicles, long-range artillery and ATACMS’
// With NATO’s help, the Ukrainians can outlast the invaders.
NYT, Daniel Bessner: The Dangerous Decline of the Historical Profession https://tinyurl.com/mukpx4xu “[A]s Americans fight over their history, the historical profession itself is in rapid — maybe even terminal — decline”
🐣 RT @ChuckPfarrer KHERSON AXIS /1110 UTC 14 JAN 2023/ UKR Partisans & SOF continue cross-river reconnaissance and targeting missions. On 12-13 JAN, UKR precision strikes were carried out a Russian S-300 air defense complex. RU Counter-Intelligence (CI) units have increased repressive measures.
🌎 https://twitter.com/ChuckPfarrer/status/1614218994419961857?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @DenesTorteli Clip of Comedian Zelenskyy, many years ago, saying: “One day we will have a president, about whom everyone in Ukraine will gather in their kitchens and say, ‘My God, how long have we been looking for you?”
💽 🎹 https://twitter.com/DenesTorteli/status/1614154394534281217?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @ChuckPfarrer KREMINNA AXIS /1145 UTC 14 JAN/ On 13 JAN, RU motor rifle troops mounted a defensive effort. UKR forces rallied & staged a counterattack, pushing RU units east, back into the W suburbs of Kreminna. On 14 JAN, UKR units are again confirmed to be in contact within the city limits. [‼️]
🌎 https://twitter.com/ChuckPfarrer/status/1614228326742200321?s=20/photo/1.
🐣 RT @ChuckPfarrer BAKHMUT /0014 UTC 14 JAN/ A RU breakthrough at Kurdiumivka occurred on 12 JAN. RU forces advanced NW along the watercourse and were stopped on 13 JAN short of the vital H-32 HWY. RU attacks on Krasna Hora & Podhorodne were broken up east of the T-05-13 / M-03 road junction.
🌎 https://twitter.com/ChuckPfarrer/status/1614050617701416962?s=20/photo/1
⭕ 13 Jan 2023
TheAtlantic, David Brooks: Despite Everything You Think You Know, America Is on the Right Track https://tinyurl.com/2p8wyfeh
// Yes, America is a wounded giant—but it always has been, and the case for optimism is surprisingly strong.
… … Pessimism about our future is unwarranted. You may think that one major American political party has gone crazy, and I will agree with you. You can point to all of the ways in which life in America is infuriating and unjust, and I will agree with you there too. But the story of America is a story of convulsion and reinvention. We go through moments when the established order stops working. People and movements rise up, and things change. The culture is a collective response to the problems of the moment; as new problems become obvious, the culture shifts. We’ve been in the middle of one of those tumultuous transition periods since, I’d say, 2013. But 2022 evinced hopeful signs that we’re coming out of it.
If there is one lesson from the events of the past year, it is that open societies such as ours have an ability to adapt in a way that closed societies simply do not. Russia has turned violent and malevolent. China has grown more authoritarian and inept. Meanwhile, free democratic societies have united around the Ukrainians as they battle to preserve the liberal world order. And American voters seem to finally be adapting to the threat Donald Trump poses to our democracy, forming a robust anti-Trump coalition that will significantly lessen his chances of ever working in the White House again.
America is a wounded giant, and many of its wounds are self-inflicted. But America has always been a wounded giant. And it has always stumbled forward, driven by an inner turbine of ambition and aspiration that knows no rest.
HillReporter: Hakeem Jeffries and Chuck Schumer Release Joint Statement Chiding MAGA Reps Over Debt Ceiling https://tinyurl.com/m57ps44m
Politico: House GOP tempts fall government shutdown with impossible spending demands https://tinyurl.com/yxvvx2ba “House Republicans are vowing to put Don Quixote to shame by tilting at a huge windmill: slashing federal spending by at least $130 billion without cutting defense”
// Conservatives pushed for severe cuts, more transparency and an amendment-free-for-all. A potential shutdown is months away, but lawmakers are already nervous.
🐣 RT @TheEconomist The rise of OSINT has transformed the way that people receive news about the war. It even predicted the onset of Russia’s invasion
⋙ TheEconomist: Open-source intelligence is piercing the fog of war in Ukraine https://tinyurl.com/2p89ut52
// Social-media posts and satellite imagery provide a torrent of data, but can overwhelm and confuse
🧵 RT @generalsvr_en Dear subscribers and guests of the channel! Yesterday, #Russian President Vladimir #Putin, during a meeting via video call with representatives of the leadership of the military bloc, expressed claims about the uncertainty with the capture of #Soledar.1/10
📌 https://twitter.com/generalsvr_en/status/1613826406638653440?s=20
[ThreadReader:] https://tinyurl.com/yfjuz9sa
The military reported that it could take from several days to several weeks to establish complete control over #Soledar. The military command recommended #Putin ignore #Prigozhin’s assurances about the exclusive role of PMCs in the operation to take this settlement. 2/10
The military described #Prigozhin as a “f..zdun” and focused the President’s attention on the disproportionately high expenditure of resources by PMCs to achieve dubious results. #Putin said that he would deal with this issue. 3/10
After the meeting with representatives of the leadership of the military bloc, #Putin spoke with #Patrushev, who also reported on the situation at the front. According to Patrushev, #Prigozhin’s PMC has suffered enormous losses over the past four weeks. 4/10
About a third of PMCs in a month are irretrievable losses. Without replenishment, at such a pace, in a month and a half, #Prigozhin’s PMC will simply cease to exist. #Putin was pleased with the report of the Secretary of the Security Council. 5/10
The decision of #Putin-Patrushev, adopted at a closed meeting in early December last year, not to completely destroy the #Prigozhin PMC group at the front but only significantly weaken it, has been successfully implemented. 6/10
According to #Putin and most of the President’s entourage, #Prigozhin “took a lot on himself”, and it was time to clip his wings. In the near future, Prigozhin will be asked to devote more time to projects in America, Asia and Latin America. 7/10
PMCs will remain at the front, but the #RussianArmy will have the initiative and full control. #Prigozhin will be allowed to continue recruiting prisoners, but only in the amount that will allow PMCs to exist at the front within “reasonable” limits. 8/10
In the event of a truce, a peace agreement, or defeat and exit from the occupied territories, the main part of the PMCs must be destroyed. 9/10
The command of the United Group of Forces at the front was transferred to #Gerasimov just before the exhaustion of resources and the weakening of #Prigozhin’s PMC. 10/10
🐣 RT @igorsushko #Kremlin’s new directive for Russian officials to cease any praise for #Prigozhin appears as planned. He’s lost tens of thousands of his mercenaries (most were prisoners) in #Ukraine and his position drastically weakened, to ensure he cannot challenge Putin, per #WindofChange [link]
🐣 RT @wartranslated I bet you’re jealous you can’t watch two hours of these sad fucks discussing how everything is lost with the Russian army in today’s livestream
// girkin/strelkov and someone else, looking dejected
⋙ 🐣 girkin actually predicted Ukr’s plan for Soledar in the last few days fairly accurately; it’s good the top brass are against him: he points out how antiquated RuAf entire operation is ¤ Slava Ukraini! 🇺🇦
🐣 📋 RT @KyivIndependent⚡️Over 300,000 generators delivered to Ukraine in December. ¤ The generators were delivered to Ukraine in December 2023 to keep the country running amid Russian attacks on Ukraine’s energy infrastructure, Kyrylo Tymoshenko, deputy head of the President’s Office, said.
🐣 RT @ChuckPfarrer KREMINNA AXIS /2345 13 JAN / RU troops including elements of the 144th Guards Motor Rifle Division, mounted a strong counter-assault during the daylight hours of 13 JAN. The Forward Edge of the Battle Area (FEBA) is now assessed to be NE of Dibrova and slightly south of Kuzmyne.
🌎 https://twitter.com/ChuckPfarrer/status/1614044280125018113?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @Trevor38480792 Lol #Soledar never mattered to 🇺🇦. They killed thousands of 🇷🇺 in exchange for a destroyed town with no protection and retreated to highly fortified positions. Meanwhile near #Kreminna, 🇺🇦 is about to breakthrough thanks to dumb 🇷🇺 planning 😜
🐣 RT @iamsneaker1 Soledar is irrelevant. Population was 11k but no other significance. ¤ Kreminna however key garrison; controls supplies to Lysychansk & Sieverodonetsk; opens routes to Svatove, Starobilsk, Luhansk city & Alchevsk. Strategic gold. ¤ Ukraine is making Russia waste itself on nothing.
🐣 RT @HKallioGoblin Russia will push towards Siversk in north from here, and Ukraine needs to either stop that, or overtake Kreminna before it happens. Its a race, and Bakhmut might be only secondary idea from here. Ukrainians should push really hard now, before russians materialize their plan.
🐣 RT @ChuckPfarrer SOLEDAR MINES / 2015 UTC 12 JAN/ Wagner PMCs have advanced across the southern rail right-of-way into the vicinity of mine complexes 2, 3 and 4. Wagner elements that infiltrated the eastern residential areas are attempting consolidation of positions.
🌎 https://twitter.com/ChuckPfarrer/status/1613627207204601856?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @ChuckPfarrer SOLEDAR /1330 UTC 13 JAN/ Wagner PMCs are reported to have expanded control over residential & industrial sections of the city. UKR forces have concentrated efforts to defend several key locations, notably the vicinity of the school, hospital and the access to mines 1 & 7.
🌎 https://twitter.com/ChuckPfarrer/status/1613891264390250496?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @ChuckPfarrer BAKHMUT / 1410 UTC 13 JAN/ RU forces reported to have broken through at Kurdiumivka; enemy forces have advanced NW along the watercourse and are likely intent on cutting the vital H-32 HWY. UKR UAV directed artillery has taken advancing RU units under sustained fire.
🌎 https://twitter.com/ChuckPfarrer/status/1613902044418408448?s=20/photo/1
CNN: “It is taking too long”: Putin berates industry and trade minister on delivering aircrafts https://tinyurl.com/bdd7u9mc Trade minister Denis Manturov replied with: “We will try to do our best.”
FT: Russia demotes ‘General Armageddon’ after battlefield failures https://tinyurl.com/5fm2fk9z
// Valery Gerasimov replaces Sergei Surovikin, who was appointed in October as head of Ukraine campaign
🐣 RT @general_ben War is a test of Will and a test of Logistics… ¤ How do Western weapons reach Ukraine? A visit to the site that coordinates deliveries
NZZ: How do Western weapons reach Ukraine? A visit to the secret site that coordinates deliveries https://tinyurl.com/y3cj3cra
// 1/2/2023; logistics; Without foreign military aid, Ukraine would be lost. Ensuring that hundreds of thousands of tons of war material is delivered where needed requires a logistical tour de force. The threads come together in an American base a thousand kilometers from Ukraine.
// Officially, this large-scale logistics center is called the International Donor Coordination Center (IDCC)
NYT: Ukraine says it still holds Soledar https://tinyurl.com/bddrbv82 “Ukraine said on Friday that fighting continued to rage in Soledar, despite claims by Russian mercenaries that they had taken control of the eastern salt-mining town”
President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine, in his nightly address on Thursday, thanked the Ukrainian fighters who he said “hold their positions and inflict significant losses on the enemy.” On the same day, Ukraine’s 46th Airmobile Brigade said in a statement on Telegram that it was conducting counterattacks in Soledar and making progress after a few days in retreat. Ukraine still controls the town’s railway station and the mine, it said. …
xThe Institute for the Study of War, a Washington think tank, said in its latest analysis that geolocated footage indicates Russian forces “likely control most if not all of Soledar, and have likely pushed Ukrainian forces out of the western outskirts of the settlement” where they had apparently been making a last stand. It called the capture “at best a Russian Pyrrhic tactical victory” after Moscow committed significant resources, adding that the battle will have contributed to “Russian forces’ degraded combat power and cumulative exhaustion.” …
🐣 RT @AustineDumas2 Russian sources say the rush to prematurely declare Soledar captured has resulted in horrific Russian casualties as literally everyone is now being pushed forward no matter what. They’re confident that Soledar will be seized, but say that it’s a “nightmare for such a small gain.”
🐣 🎹 Over there, over there
♫ Send the word, send the word over there
That the Tanks are coming
The Tanks are coming
The drums rum tumming everywhere
¤ https://youtu.be/B6hRDS3LvQQ♫ So prepare, say a prayer
Send the word, send the word to beware
They’ll be over, they’re coming over
And they’ll bonk those orcs till it’s over, over there
⭕ 12 Jan 2023
🐣 RT @lbarronlopez Full statement from President Biden’s special counsel, Richard Sauber:
[TextLink:] https://twitter.com/lbarronlopez/status/1613563073268269060?s=20/photo/1
[Text:] Statement of Richard Sauber, Special Counsel to the President
As we stated previously, we are fully cooperating with the National Archives and the Department of Justice in a process to ensure that any Obama-Biden Administration records are appropriately in possession of the Archives.
Following the discovery of government documents at the Penn Biden Center in November 2022, and coordinating closely with the Department of Justice, the President’s lawyers have searched the President’s Wilmington and Rehoboth Beach, Delaware, residences – the other locations where files from his Vice-Presidential office might have been shipped in the course of the 2017 transition. The lawyers completed that review last night.
During the review, the lawyers discovered among personal and political papers a small number of additional Obama-Biden Administration records with classified markings. All but one of these documents were found in storage space in the President’s Wilmington residence garage. One document consisting of one page was discovered among stored materials in an adjacent room. No documents were found in the Rehoboth Beach residence.
As was done in the case of the Penn-Biden Center, the Department of Justice was immediately notified. and the lawyers arranged for the Department of Justice to take possession of these documents. The White House will continue to cooperate with the review by tge Department of Justice.
Politico [EU], Janusz Bugajski: The benefits of Russia’s coming disintegration https://tinyurl.com/3rtbx3st “Russia is a failed state. It’s been unable to transform itself into a nation-state, a civic state or even a stable imperial state. It is a federation in name only”
// The West made a grave mistake when it assumed the collapse of Soviet communism meant the end of Russian imperialism.
… Russia is a failed state. It’s been unable to transform itself into a nation-state, a civic state or even a stable imperial state. It is a federation in name only, as the central government pursues a policy of ethnic and linguistic homogenization and denies any powers to the country’s 83 republics and regions. However, hyper-centralization has exposed the country’s multiple weaknesses, including a contracting economy squeezed by international sanctions, military defeats in Ukraine that reveal the incompetence and corruption of its ruling elite, and disquiet in numerous regions over their shrinking budgets.
Moscow is finally being exposed as a rapacious imperial center that’s exhausting its capacities to hold the country together. Yet, most Western leaders still fail to see the benefits of Russia’s disintegration.
The rupture of the Russian Federation will be the third phase of imperial collapse after the unravelling of the Soviet bloc and the disintegration of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s. It’s driven by elite power struggles and intensifying rivalries between the central government and disaffected regions, which in some parts of the country, could lead to civil wars and border disputes. However, it will also embolden the emergence of new states and inter-regional federations, which will control their own resources and no longer send their men to die for Moscow’s empire. …
[An] effective approach [to easing Russian transformation] would be to clearly specify what the West supports. Openly backing pluralism, democracy, federalism, civil rights and the autonomy of its republics and regions can help embolden Russia’s citizens by demonstrating they aren’t globally isolated. They will also need access to the information that Moscow suppresses, especially when it comes to providing security, economic development and cultivating peaceful, productive relations with neighbors. …
The West made a grave mistake when it assumed the collapse of Soviet communism meant the end of Russian imperialism. And as imperial states invariably collapse when they overreach and when centrifugal pressures are fueled by economic distress, regional resentments and national revivals, it must now avoid repeating that mistake — this time by wrongly presuming the current empire is permanent.
Reuters (~11:50pm): Ukraine says its forces hold out against Russia in battle for Soledar https://tinyurl.com/43bxz8pj “‘Even if both Bakhmut and Soledar fall to the Russians, it’s not going to have a strategic impact on the war itself,’ US NSC spokesman John Kirby told reporters”
🧵 RT @ChrisO_wiki 1/ Yevgeny Prigozhin’s apparently premature announcement of Soledar’s capture has reportedly led to a desperate push by Wagner to make it a reality. Wagner is fighting without regard for casualties, not just to gain Soledar, but for Prigozhin’s reputation.
📌 💽 https://twitter.com/ChrisO_wiki/status/1613671178563977217?s=20/photo/1
[ThreadReader:] https://tinyurl.com/u9amjzs6
2/ The Russian VChK-OGPU Telegram channel reports that a source (likely within Wagner) says of the situation at Soledar: ¤ “It’s a nightmare there now: the rush to announce a full takeover has led to the fact that one has to operate on the edge of what is possible.
3/ “The Wagnerites are literally being pushed from behind, everyone is being driven there – if Prigozhin personally has already announced a complete capture, then the price of the matter will no longer play a role. Losses for such a small section of the front are wild.
4/ “If something does not work out with Soledar now (the probability is minimal, but theoretically it’s there), the Ministry of Defence will use it against Prigozhin and the ‘Musicians’ personally – the supply of shells will not only not be improved, but reduced altogether…
5/ “I wouldn’t be surprised if those commanders who reported to Prigozhin yesterday that everything had already been taken and there were only a couple of hours [of fighting] left, these commanders might well have been reassigned to the assault troops.
6/ “Now the Wagnerites have to stretch out heavily and cross the river, at the same time the MLRS and artillery of the Armed Forces of Ukraine have shot everything there – they hit like in a shooting gallery, and there are plenty of snipers there as well.
7/ “Drones are constantly circling above, watching and throwing VOG grenades. There is nowhere to take cover – everything is in open space.
8/ “And the weather is such that if you are wounded in these conditions, you have almost no chance of survival – even if you stop the blood loss, you will freeze. There is no way to evacuate from there. Everyone is dead [if they get hit].” /end
Sources: 🔹 t.me/vchkogpu/35898
🐣 RT @TheStudyofWar “#Russian forces are still far from being within striking distance of an operational encirclement of #Bakhmut,” wrote the Institute for the Study of War, as they would have to reach two key highways kilometres behind #Ukrainian lines. @AJEnglish
⋙ AlJazeera: ‘Brutal, bloody battles’: Russia’s ‘insane’ fight for Soledar https://tinyurl.com/pebjpzv8
// Ukraine has been crying out for more heavy armour, longer range weapons, and air defence systems to end the war.
🐣 RT @NOELreports The Pentagon supports the decision of US allies to provide Western tanks to Ukraine. – US Department of Defense spokesman Pat Ryder. ¤ One week until Ramstein..
¤ https://twitter.com/NOELreports/status/1613673617396727808?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @davidgura “If you want to have a democracy, you have to say that it’s better, you have to believe that it’s better, and you can’t decide that other people, or other larger forces, are going to bring it to you.” ¤ @TimothyDSnyder on “The @ForeignAffairs Interview”:
⋙ 🔊ForeignAffairs: How Putin’s Lies Are Driving the War in Ukraine https://tinyurl.com/4bxnyp3p
// A Conversation With Timothy Snyder
💙🧵 RT @ james_rands […] Soledar is not strategically important. The phrase strategically vital will get bandied about a lot over the coming weeks. ¤¤ The nearest it has to importance is a salt mine (from which the town derives its name) which Prighozin seems quite excited about. However, if it falls Ukrainian forces will have to withdraw to the Western side of the river which runs to its West to adopt defensive positions.
📌 https://twitter.com/james_rands/status/1613460863687720960?s=20
⋙ 🐣 RT @james_rands This means ceding quite a bit of land but more importantly it allows Russian forces to interfere with the road network in the area and force resupply to Bakhmut to take a longer more complicated route to the South. It doesn’t stop Bakhmut being resupplied but it makes it trickier route. […]
⋙ 🐣 RT @james_rands The situation is messy and it’s unclear but what looked like a Russian victory a few days ago now looks more like a temporary set-back for Ukraine at a high cost to Russia.
🐣 RT @igorsushko Russia reportedly lost over 10,000 troops in the offensive on #Soledar so far, on top of over 10,000 lost in the attempt to take #Bakhmut. ¤ 60% of killed and injured are from PMCs, especially #WagnerPMC, many of whom are recruited prisoners.
💽 [tr] https://twitter.com/igorsushko/status/1613422520413335553?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @ChuckPfarrer SOLEDAR /0050 UTC 12 JAN/ In heavy fighting, UKR forces continue to hold key locations in the urban and industrial areas. During the day, Wagner PMC units infiltrated the eastern residential areas of Soledar but have yet to penetrate the central districts.
🌎 https://twitter.com/ChuckPfarrer/status/1613334708414468098?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @mhmck Ukrainian defenders have advanced to Kreminna in Luhansk region. ¤ In the morning report for 12 January 2023, the General Staff of the Armed Forces of Ukraine reports repelling an attack by the Russian occupiers in the area of Kreminna.
🌎 https://twitter.com/mhmck/status/1613407710019461120?s=20/photo/1
⭕ 11 Jan 2023
🧵 RT @TheStudyofWar The #Russian Ministry of Defense (MoD) announced today that Chief of the General Staff Army General Valery #Gerasimov will take over as theater commander as part of a major reshuffle of the Russian command structure for the war in #Ukraine. https://isw.pub/UkrWar011123
📌 🌎 https://twitter.com/TheStudyofWar/status/1613367257089933312?s=20/photo/1 -4
⋙ 🐣 RT @TheStudyofWar 3/ Gerasimov’s appointment over #Surovikin, a favorite of Russian milbloggers and #Wagner Group financier Yevgeny #Prigozhin, is also highly likely to have been in part a political decision to reassert the primacy of the Russian MoD in an internal Russian power struggle.
⋙ 🐣 RT @TheStudyofWar 4/ #Gerasimov will likely preside over a disorganized command structure plagued by endemic, persistent, and self-reinforcing failures that he largely set into motion in his initial role before the invasion of #Ukraine. [link]
🐣 RT @ KyivI🐣 RT @ KyivIndependent ⚡️ISW: Munitions shortage likely to hinder Russian offensives this year. ¤ Russia’s inability to address munitions shortages will likely frustrate Russian forces’ ability to sustain offensive operations in eastern Ukraine in 2023, the Institute for the Study of War said.
🐣 RT @EuromaidanPress NATO chief @jensstoltenberg said the fierce fighting around Bakhmut & Soledar showed the bravery of Ukrainian forces and the vital importance of stepping up military support to Ukraine ¤ “At this key juncture in the war, we must do even more, even faster” [link]
¤ https://twitter.com/EuromaidanPress/status/1613129505341579266?s=20
🧵 RT @Rail_splitter1 We shouldn’t fall for the comforting notion that Russia is facing imminent defeat. It can and must be defeated but doing so requires action now, not next month – Western tanks and ATACMS above all. Three reasons why Russia can keep going even after catastrophic losses.
📌 https://twitter.com/Rail_splitter1/status/1613366821729755136?s=20
🐣 RT @Rail_splitter1 One. Russia’s nature as a compromised mafia state paradoxically gives it extra flexibility to survive. Despite the veneration of autocracy and invariable statism, Russia has always been a weak state starting with the earliest czarist times. […]
🐣 RT @Rail_splitter1 Two. Putin does not care in the least about the lives of his own people. Any number are easily made sacrificial. When Putin said, “We have incurred no losses”, I believe he was genuine. The deaths of even hundreds of thousands do not even enter his notion of “loss”. […]
🐣 RT @Rail_splitter1 Three and crucial: society is almost infinitely pliable, trained to follow orders even in the face of utter absurdity and the certainty of imminent doom. Thousands of men trudge to certain death rather than, say, refuse and serve a 2-year sentence. Or rise up in protest.
DefenseIntelligence [UK]: Intelligence Update on Ukraine
[TextLink:] https://twitter.com/anno1540/status/1613317430411169795?s=20/photo/1
● On 11 January 2022, Russian Defence Minister Sergei Shoigu announced that the head of the Russian military, Chief of the General Staff (CGS) Valery Gerasimov is to take over as commander of the ‘special military operation’ in Ukraine. Gerasimov is to have three deputies in the role, including the previous incumbent, General Sergei Surovikin.
● This is a significant development in Russian President Vladimir Putin’s approach to managing the war. The deployment of the CG as theatre commander is an indicator of the increasing seriousness of the situation Russia is facing, and a clear acknowledgement that the campaign is falling short of Russia’s strategic goals.
● The move is likely to be greeted with extreme displeasure by much of the Russian ultra-nationalist and military blogger community, who have increasingly blamed Gerasimov for the poor execution of the war. In contrast, Surovikin has been widely praised by this community for his championing of a more realistic approach. As a now deputy commander, his authority and influence is almost certainly hugely reduced.
🧵 RT @ WarintheFuture It is 322 days since the Russian invasion of #Ukraine began. Today, an examination of the announcement that Russian General #Gerasimov ‘is taking charge’ of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. 1/25 🇺🇦
📌 https://twitter.com/WarintheFuture/status/1613330279825014784?s=20
🐣 RT @ThomasByrneTD Absolute – explains so much of current populist politics and how dangerous it really is
💽 https://twitter.com/ThomasByrneTD/status/1613097895573463040?s=20/photo/1
// Timothy Snyder
⋙ ★ 🐣 ResearchGate, Penny Spikins [UYork] (Aug 2022) : The Evolutionary Basis for Human Tolerance – Physiological Responses https://tinyurl.com/8yam2ryv “Genetic evidence suggests that particular hormones that play an important role in affecting capacities for tolerance”
⋙ 🐣 in brief, over the last 300,000 years, changes took place in the endocrine system which facilitated more openness to other groups, more curiosity, less fear and aggression; fascism appeals to the older way of organizing social groups into “us” and “them”
⋙ See under Entire Articles: Evolve Tolerance Aug 2022
// tags: oxytocin testosterone cortisol evolution
🐣 RT @Timodc Heck of a job Putey 🇺🇸 🇺🇸
⋙ 🐣 RT @JosephPolitano It’s official—For the first time ever, the European Union now imports more energy from the United States than from Russia!
◕ https://twitter.com/Timodc/status/1613336359413981186?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @Biz_Ukraine_Mag “General Armageddon” Sergei Surovikin has been removed as commander of Russian forces in Ukraine after less than 3 months. Surovikin was hailed as the man to rescue Putin’s failing invasion but his most notable achievement was the theft of a raccoon while retreating from Kherson
🖼 https://twitter.com/Biz_Ukraine_Mag/status/1613241561957163013?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @ChuckPfarrer KREMINNA /2240 UTC 11 JAN/ Sources indicate that UKR’s 140th Marine Recon. Battalion is attacking along the Vul Lymanska Rd (O-131306) east of Dibrova. UKR troops are also reported to have entered Kuzmyne, approximately 3 Km from the urban center of Kreminna.
🌎 https://twitter.com/ChuckPfarrer/status/1613302981423955970?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @ChuckPfarrer SOLEDAR /1300 UTC 11 JAN/ UKR artillery applied predictive and directed fires to prevent RU units from expanding control of prominent terrain N & S of the town. UKR’s 46th Air Mobile Brigade continued its strong defense overnight as RU failed to encircle the urban area.
🌎 https://twitter.com/ChuckPfarrer/status/1613157133549191170?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @ChuckPfarrer BAKHMUT AXIS /1350 UTC 11 JAN/ Overnight on 10-11 JAN, RU forces failed in an attempt to encircle Soledar. Despite repeated and costly attacks RU has failed to make any significant tactical progress against Bakhmut.
🌎 https://twitter.com/ChuckPfarrer/status/1613173348585902085?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @gr8musicvenues 🇷🇺 Strelkov/Girkin statement about #Soledar this morning
[TextLink:] https://twitter.com/gr8musicvenues/status/1613113117797392384?s=20/photo/1
[TextLink (full):] https://twitter.com/kampfhex/status/1613132507779579904?s=20/photo/1 -2
[Text:] However, the enemy’s front was NOT broken through; it was not possible to encircle the units and subunits defending the city. The enemy is creating a new line of defense on the western outskirts, relying on salt mines. The battles for the city are not over yet – the western outskirts and suburbs will have to be stormed. The enemy command definitely controls the situation, and although the retreat is accompanied by inevitable losses (including, probably, hundreds of garrison soldiers “forgotten” in the building), control is maintained and there is no talk of the enemy fleeing. […]
🐣 RT @DanReznikWSWS A portion of the units from the Armed Forces of Ukraine have retreated from the Soledar region, as reported by Presidential advisor Oleksiy Arestovich.
🧵 RT @Tendar The Prigozhin pics in the salt mine in Soledar are totally in line what he has been doing the last weeks. Despite the fact that Russian paratroopers are involved in their grind in Soledar, Prigozhin puts himself front and center. It is only about optics and not substance.#Soledar
📌 https://twitter.com/Tendar/status/1613084175812235265?s=20
⋙ 🐣 RT @Tendar The social media Vatniks are also joining the band wagon by hailing Wagner, without realizing that they are just fueling the Russian infighting and weakening the Russian war effort. The strategic Ukrainian defense is unscathed. Even Strelkov noted that, but they are too drunk.
⋙ 🐣 RT @Tendar From a strategic point of view I paraphrase what I have been saying before. Without Izyum/Lyman any advance (grind) in the Bakhmut/Soledar area is just a footnote, no matter how it will end. It is just a modern version of Verdun, while AFU prepares strategic counteroffensives.
🐣 RT @NOELreports Soledar is not under the control of Russia – the spokesman of the Defense Forces of Ukraine in the Eastern direction, Colonel Serhiy Cherevaty, denied to Suspilny the information spread that Soledar is under the control of the Russians.
🖼 https://twitter.com/NOELreports/status/1613077811270393856?s=20/photo/1
⭕ 10 Jan 2023
NYT: How Finland Is Teaching a Generation to Spot Misinformation https://tinyurl.com/37np3txj “Finland, which shares an 833-mile border with Russia, developed its national goals for media education in 2013 and accelerated its campaign to teach students to spot misinformation”
// The Nordic country is testing new ways to teach students about propaganda. Here’s what other countries can learn from its success.
NYT: Hunter Biden’s Tangled Tale Comes Front and Center https://tinyurl.com/3hjhbrk9 “The real Hunter Biden story is complex and very different in important ways from the narrative promoted by Republicans — but troubling in its own way.” //➔ Pretty much a nothingburger
// Federal prosecutors could decide soon whether to indict the president’s son on tax and gun charges, and he faces a fresh round of hostile congressional hearings. But a close look at his story shows that it differs in important ways from the narrative promoted by Republicans.
🐣 RT @LindseyGrahamSC It is imperative that the Biden Administration supply Ukraine with modern heavy tanks from the United States, which will encourage other Western allies to send theirs too.
⋙ WaPo (Jan 5) After months of resisting Kyiv’s pleas for tanks to face increasingly dug-in Russian forces along the lengthy southern and eastern fronts, the United States and its allies are now poised to deliver a variety of armored fighting vehicles to Ukraine. https://wapo.st/3X5LxDv
🧵 RT @TheStudyofWar Russian forces have not captured the entirety of #Soledar despite false Russian claims that the city has fallen and that #Bakhmut risks imminent encirclement. Russian sources claimed that Wagner Group forces advanced into the west of Soledar on January 10. http://isw.pub/UkrWar011023
📌 🌎 https://twitter.com/TheStudyofWar/status/1613006510229164033?s=20/photo/1 -5
🧵 RT @atrupar Kevin McCarthy during interview with Hannity compares Congress to children who max out a credit card and need to have their behavior changed
📌 💽 https://twitter.com/atrupar/status/1612996858569269249?s=20/photo/1
// Bring in the clowns 🤡 Sean Hannity, Kevin McCarthy, Gym Jordan and James Comer
🧵 RT @Mariia_Zolkina #Soledar. City which name is in all news now because of new #Russia’s attack. Some points important for foreign audience to understand the overall situation. FYI ¤ @dem_initiatives @LSEIRDep @lseideas 1/
📌 https://twitter.com/Mariia_Zolkina/status/1613076122698403841?s=20
🐣 RT @MoscowTimes Anonymous Chinese officials told the Financial Times they believed the Kremlin’s goals in Ukraine were doomed to failure and that Russia would emerge from the conflict as a “minor power.”
⋙ MoscowTimes/FT: Beijing Fears Russia Becoming ‘Minor Power’ Under ‘Crazy’ Putin https://tinyurl.com/2bemvs58 “China is also hoping to profit from the post-war reconstruction boom in Ukraine, officials said”
Beijing is planning to reorient its foreign policy away from Moscow fearing a decline in Russia’s economic and political clout as a direct result of its disastrous invasion of Ukraine and Putin’s eventual downfall, the Financial Times reported on Tuesday, citing anonymous Chinese officials and regional experts.
Though Vladimir Putin and Chinese leader Xi Jinping pledged to strengthen bilateral ties during a video conference in late December, sources told the FT that mistrust towards the Russian leader is growing among the upper echelons of the Chinese Communist Party.
“The invasion decision was made by a very small group of people. China shouldn’t simply follow Russia,” the FT quoted one anonymous Chinese official as saying. “Putin is crazy.”
China, according to the outlet’s sources and contrary to the widely accepted version of events, was not aware of the Kremlin’s plan to launch a full-scale military invasion of Ukraine last year and expected a limited military operation at most.
During a meeting on Feb. 4, Putin reportedly informed Xi that Russia “would not rule out taking whatever measures possible if eastern Ukrainian separatists attack Russian territory and cause humanitarian disasters.”
Beijing’s failure to obtain accurate intelligence on Putin’s plans left it unprepared for the invasion and resulted in the demotion of China’s then-vice-minister of foreign affairs and top Russia expert Le Yucheng, according to the FT.
Anonymous Chinese officials told the outlet they believed the Kremlin’s goals in Ukraine were doomed to failure and that Russia would emerge from the conflict as a “minor power.”
However, Beijing still has much to gain from its relationship with the Kremlin in the short term, seeing its closeness to Putin as a useful bargaining chip in its relationship with Europe, the FT sources said. ¤ China is also hoping to profit from the post-war reconstruction boom in Ukraine, officials said.
🐣 RT @QwertyDude14 Reminder, Russia should have honored its obligations to respect Ukraine’s territorial sovereignty per the 1994 Budapest memorandum. But it breached the agreement and invaded Donbas and Crimea Ukraine in 2014.
[TextLink:] https://twitter.com/QwertyDude14/status/1613009090317516807?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @Rail_splitter1 Many excitedly predicted that the campaign Prigozhin and Kadyrov mounted against Lapin would tear the regime apart. That betrays a lack of understanding of this mafia state. Now Lapin, who they viciously attacked (and who is as incompetent as all others), has been promoted.
🐣 📋 RT @NatashaBertrand “Out of its force of nearly 50,000 mercenaries— including 40,000 convicts—[Wagner Group] has sustained over 4,100 killed and 10,000 wounded, including over 1,000 killed between late November and early December near Bakhmut,” a senior admin official said.
⋙ CNN: Russian artillery fire down nearly 75%, US officials say, in latest sign of struggles for Moscow https://tinyurl.com/vhd76anf
🧵 RT @TheStudyofWar Igor Girkin, former commander of Russian militants in Donbas and a prominent milblogger, heavily implied that he would support the removal of Russian President Vladimir #Putin from office, his most direct criticism of Putin to date. http://isw.pub/UkrWar011023
📌 🌎 https://twitter.com/TheStudyofWar/status/1613018841281429505?s=20/photo/1 -4
🐣 RT @NOELreports Over to the maps. If you want to see a full overview of the front in Ukraine check out my interactive map:
🌎 ⋙ GoogleMyMaps: Ukraine-Russia Operational Situation https://tinyurl.com/5emkkv7r
// Overview of the situation on the ground in Ukraine in the war between Russia and Ukraine. Daily updated by @NOELreports.
⋙ 🐣 RT @NOELreports #Soledar-#Bakhmut
➡️ AFU soldiers did not receive an order to retreat.
➡️ The latest info i have is that AFU soldiers are still present in Soledar (this info is from noon).
➡️ In Bakhmut the Russians are pressuring east of Pidhorodne, of which i got confirmed is under 🇷🇺 control
NYT (2020): Who Signs Up to Fight? Makeup of U.S. Recruits Shows Glaring Disparity https://tinyurl.com/2p8kamyz //➔plus, when jobs are plentiful and more youth (64%) choose college, recruitment falls; 75% don’t qualify for health, competency or drug/criminal history
// 1/10/2020; More and more, new recruits come from the same small number of counties and are the children of old recruits.
(1 college-bound) 2021 HeritageFound: https://tinyurl.com/y45frjc4
(2 not qualified) 2018 HeritageFound: https://tinyurl.com/yvksrrap
🐣 RT @AWeissmann_ It’s not a crime to accidentally take and retain govt docs. If upon learning that you have docs, you return them, there is no crime. That is not what Trump did. If he had simply returned everything this wd have been a nonstory.
🐣 RT @RCdeWinter I’ve said it for years & I’ll say it again:
We’re living a mashup of
Rollerball
Minority Report
The Manchurian Candidate
The Handmaid’s Tale
The Twilight Zone
Outer Limits
1984
Animal Farm
Catch-22
Brave New World
Never thought I’d be an extra in an extravaganza from hell.
🐣 RT @SteveRattner You all know I like charts, so if you’re ever unsure as to what the @HouseGOP is up to, just refer to this one: ¤ (Right now, they’re on Step 3)
◕ https://twitter.com/SteveRattner/status/1612853547464364050?s=20/photo/1
// The GOP Cycle:
1. Campaign on crime, fiscal responsibility, “family values”
2. Win elections, gain power
3. Forget promises, cut taxes for the rich. slash the safety net, blow up the deficit
4. Lose elections, return to Step 1
WaPo, Mark Thiessen: Don’t cut defense or aid to Ukraine, Mr. Speaker. The Gipper is watching https://tinyurl.com/24j8ybfn “Reagan’s policy of ‘peace through strength’ brought us victory in the Cold War w/o firing a shot. … [We] should be pushing to increase, not cut, defense spending”
… McCarthy reportedly agreed to hold discretionary spending to fiscal 2022 levels, which would mean $75 billion being cut in defense spending. And Gaetz tweeted that in his fight to stop McCarthy, “Biggest loser: Zelensky. Biggest winner: US Taxpayers.”
Reagan would be appalled by this. His defense buildup — the largest peacetime military expansion in history — was one of the great achievements of his presidency. Reagan’s policy of “peace through strength” brought us victory in the Cold War without firing a shot. Today, as China and Russia have locked arms to wage a new Cold War against the West, conservatives should be pushing to increase, not cut, defense spending.,
🐣 RT @wartranslated Ukrainian reporter states there is no “encirclement” of the Ukrainian forces in Soledar: ¤ “Russian channels are spreading misinformation about the situation on the front. There is no encirclement of our troops.”
⋙ 🐣 RT @noclador 1) Even if Soledar falls. Taking 0,000001% of Ukraine for 5,000 KIA is only a disaster for russia. ¤ 2) Looks like putin is trying to draw Ukrainian troops away from Ukraine’s upcoming southern offensive (the same might be the purpose of a new push towards Kyiv).
🐣 RT @StateOfUkraine The West slowly budging on supplying Ukraine with limited amounts of long-requested heavier offensive weapons after 11 months of war has given Putin the time & breathing room to try everything possible in Ukraine. He will fail, but history will not be kind to those who dithered.
🐣 RT @AustineDumas2 Ukraine’s security service exposes over 600 Russian agents and spies since start of invasion ¤ They include a group of Russian military intelligence who were planning to assassinate Ukraine’s Minister of Defense and intelligence chief
¤ https://twitter.com/AustineDumas2/status/1612940162820104193?s=20
🐣 RT @AustineDumas2 Ukraine’s security service exposes over 600 Russian agents and spies since start of invasion ¤ They include a group of Russian military intelligence who were planning to assassinate Ukraine’s Minister of Defense and intelligence chief
🐣 RT @ KyivIndependent ⚡️Zelensky strips 4 Russia-affiliated former politicians, among them Putin ally Medvedchuk, of Ukrainian citizenship.
⋙ 🐣 RT @KyivIndependent “If MPs choose to serve not the people of Ukraine but the murderers who came to Ukraine, our actions will be appropriate, and these are not the last such decisions,” Zelensky said, adding that the decision was based on material gathered by the Security Service of Ukraine.
🐣 RT @front_ukrainian ⚡️🇺🇲 Ukraine will receive two batteries of Patriot air defense systems with 8 launchers from the USA in mid-spring 2023 – Podolyak Office of the President of Ukraine
@ChuckPfarrer KREMINNA /2110 UTC 10 JAN/ UKR forces have consolidated gains to the east of Dibrova and are in contact with RU troops at Kuzmyne. A RU attack on Chervonopopivka is reported to have been repelled with heavy casualties suffered by RU forces.
🌎 https://twitter.com/ChuckPfarrer/status/1612918331585232896?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @ 🐣 RT @igornovikov The “gentleman” on the left, Andriy Derkach has been stripped of his 🇺🇦 citizenship by President Zelensky. Before that he had been designated a 🇷🇺 agent by both 🇺🇲 and 🇺🇦 intelligence. ¤ That’s all you need to know about Giuliani’s “investigations” and the sh*t I had to deal with.
🖼 https://twitter.com/igornovikov/status/1612907664446464009?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @mhmck There were indeed over 600 militants of the Russian terrorist state packed into the school in Makiyivka on New Year’s Eve. Incompetence by Russian commanders led to them all being killed or wounded when artillery of Ukrainian defenders struck the troop concentration.
Pravda [UA]: Ukraine’s Armed Forces working to exhaust Russians as much as possible on Soledar front https://tinyurl.com/8xhhwaf3 “… so that even some of their minor tactical successes lead [only] to a major ‘Pyrrhic’ victory” ~ Serhii Chrevatyi, Eastern Armed Forces of Ukraine
The Armed Forces of Ukraine are focusing on maximum exhaustion of the Russian troops near Soledar on the Bakhmut front, so that even the minimal successes of the Russians will result in their defeat.
Source: Serhii Chrevatyi, spokesman for the Eastern Group of the Armed Forces of Ukraine, on the national joint 24/7 newscast
Quote: “The defenders of Soledar are now doing everything they can to exhaust the enemy, to reduce their potential as much as possible, so that even some of their minor tactical successes [obtained by superior forces and heavy losses – ed.] lead to a major ‘Pyrrhic’ victory.”
Background: In the last 24 hours the Russians have carried out 86 artillery attacks using various systems on Soledar, Donetsk Oblast, and its outskirts.
🐣 RT @ChuckPfarrer SOLEDAR MINES /1345 UT 10 JAN/ RU Wagner PMCs and RU units made a significant gain capturing the high ground to the south rail right of way. UKR artillery is reported to have demolished much of the above ground structures in the vicinity of the industrial areas.
🌎 https://twitter.com/ChuckPfarrer/status/1612804970536992768?s=20/photo/1
KyivIndependent: Russian troops hit Soledar in Donetsk Oblast 86 times over the past day https://tinyurl.com/9s3usrzm “‘This is one of the bloodiest places on the front,’ Zelensky said”
🐣 RT @FernandoJneiva :: SOLEDAR AND BAKHMUT :: ¤ Prigozhin will continue to use both confirmed and fabricated Wagner success in Soledar and Bakhmut to promote the Wagner as the only Russian force in Ukraine capable of securing tangible gains, as ISW has previously reported.
🐣 RT @KyivIndependent The ministry said capturing Soledar is an attempt by Russia to take control of Bakhmut from the north and disrupt Ukrainian lines of communication. However, Russian forces are unlikely to “envelop the town imminently” due to stable Ukrainian defensive lines and supply routes.
🐣 RT @wartranslated Update from Bakhmut and Soledar by Kiyanyn, 10 January (about 3 hours ago).
💽 [tr] https://twitter.com/wartranslated/status/1612761463550103555?s=20/photo/1
// upbeat message from the front
🐣 RT @JulianRoepcke Russian warlord and PMC Wagner chief Yevgeny Prigozhin said this today …
[TextLink:] https://twitter.com/JulianRoepcke/status/1612743679470407687?s=20/photo/1
[Text:] “The Ukrainian army is fighting bravely for Bakhmut and Soledar. The most difficult bloody battles are taking place on the western outskirts of Soledar. The Armed Forces of Ukraine defend the territory of Soledar with honor.”
WaPo: Brutal fighting as Russia focuses on seizing salt mining town near Bakhmut https://tinyurl.com/yc253h8t “This is what madness looks like,” Zelensky said of Soledar, which is divided between Russian & Ukrainian forces. “Everything is completely destroyed, there is almost no life”
⭕ 9 Jan 2023
TheIntercept, Ryan Grim (Jan 9): House Rules Package Gives Democrats a Path to Averting a Debt Ceiling Crisis https://tinyurl.com/ycxx2cr5
// 1/9/2023; Republicans preserved the discharge petition in the new rules package, allowing any bill with 218 votes to come to the floor — even one codifying Roe v. Wade.
🐣 RT @EuromaidanPR The US Ambassador to Hungary in a speech called the Fuhrer [Putin] a “small man” who could not move on from the authoritarian mentality of the past. And of course, this caused Pootie’s enablers to go ballistic. If the shoe fits, wear it.
⋙ DailyBeast, Noor Ibrahim: Russian Officials Throw a Tantrum After U.S. Diplomat Calls Putin ‘Small Man’ https://tinyurl.com/ytpbfd7a
// Russians officials descended into a petty meltdown over the “outrageous” remarks from a U.S. ambassador.
🐣 RT @igornovikov Tucker Carlson’s “interview” with a Ukrainian goes horribly wrong 😂😂😂 ¤ Watch till the end 😉 ¤ Stay tuned for the full version! ¤ Feel free to share 🇺🇦🫡
💽 https://twitter.com/igornovikov/status/1612515958618210304?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @ IlvesToomas Russian soldier brags how his unit raped and killed every young Ukrainian woman. ¤ Every one. None left. ¤ He laughs.
⋙ 🐣 RT @wartranslated In this intercepted call published by the SBU, a Russian soldier admits to crimes against civilians during the retreat from Lyman. Answering his friend’s question about the presence of young women, he says there are none since all were killed by retreating Rus. army.
💽 [tr] https://twitter.com/wartranslated/status/1612543588314783751?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @PresidentStas Colonel Yuriy Yurchik, the chief of staff of the special forces unit of the border service of Ukraine, who was liquidated in Soledar, was buried the day after. He died as a result of artillery shelling from the Wagner.
🧵 RT @ Krma4Karma ⚡️🇺🇦⚡️The main thing from Zelensky’s evening address.
▪️Bakhmut and Soledar, Kreminna and Svatove, general prospects in Donbas for the coming weeks. The battle for Donbas continues.
▪️And although the occupiers have now concentrated their greatest efforts on Soledar, the
📌 https://twitter.com/Krma4Karma/status/1612681941911740416?s=20
⋙ 🐣 RT @ result of this difficult and long battle will be the liberation of our entire Donbas.
▪️I thank all our soldiers who defend our Bakhmut and Soledar. There are almost no walls left in Soledar. Thanks to the resilience of our soldiers there, we have won additional time and
⋙ 🐣 RT @ additional forces for Ukraine.
▪️The whole land near Soledar is covered with the corpses of the occupiers and scars from the blows. This is what madness looks like.
🐣 RT @KyivIndependent ISW: Wagner boss using gains in Soledar to boost reputation. ¤ Wagner Group boss Yevgeny Prigozhin is using reports of the mercenary group’s gains in Soledar, Donetsk Oblast to promote its reputation as an effective fighting force, the Institute for the Study of War said.
🐣 RT @JacquesFrre2 [Ru] ⚠️ #Donbass – North Front: Soledar
▶️ Effort Wagner groups 🇷🇺 downtown ¤ Fight all night ¤ Sanatorium & school n°14 under control 🇷🇺
▶️ 46th Air Assault Brigade 🇺🇦 non-operational due to casualties
▶️ Remnants of 61st Brigade 🇺🇦 withdrawn due to losses
🌎 https://twitter.com/JacquesFrre2/status/1612679745946415104?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @chaledelazem [tr] The #Brigadekommandeur of the #Ukraine ‘s 61st Separate Mechanized Brigade is said to have ordered the subordinate battalion commanders to organize the withdrawal of its remaining and surviving units from the #Soledar city.
🐣 RT @BonettSol❗️[tr] The Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces of Ukraine 🇺🇦 , Valery Zaluzhny, proposed to withdraw troops from Soledar, which is now in a tactical encirclement, but was rejected.
🌎 https://twitter.com/BonettSol/status/1612675367071784960?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @inquirerdotnet Russia has stepped up a powerful assault on Soledar in eastern Ukraine, officials in Kyiv said, forcing Ukrainian troops to repel waves of attacks led by the Wagner contract militia around the salt mining town and nearby fronts. | @Reuters [link]
🐣 RT @TWMCLtd Everyone in #Ukraine is awaiting news from #Soledar on the eastern front. It’s not looking good with supply lines possibly having been effectively cut – #Russia has fire control over the main route in to the town in #Donetsk oblast. ¤ Russians are sacrificing 1000s but may succeed
🐣 RT @MuellerSheWrote Experts advising the DoJ have been preparing for over a year for the antics of the house GOP’s obstruction. The most brilliant minds have been working on it. Just thought you should know.
🐣 RT @ChuckPfarrer BAKHMUT /0150 UTC 10 JAN/ Heavy fighting continues around Soledar. A consensus of reports indicate that UKR troops occupy the N and W portions of the mine complex. RU staged an attack west of Pidhorodne in an attempt to cross and cut the M-03 HWY.
🌎 https://twitter.com/ChuckPfarrer/status/1612627811788881922?s=20/photo/1
WaPo: Justice Dept. reviewing classified documents found in Biden’s post-VP office https://tinyurl.com/yyae2jd8 “Garland has tapped U.S. Attorney for the Northern District of Illinois John R. Lausch Jr., who was nominated by Trump, to oversee the review of the Biden documents”
// The case echoes the investigation into Trump’s Mar-a-Lago documents, but details provided by Biden’s lawyer suggest key differences
🐣 RT @INTobservers The final update from Soledar tonight comes from Butusov as of 2 hours ago. It gives a general idea of how things are but the guys don’t give up and fight for every building. Will have an update from the 46th in the morning 🙏 ¤ Glory to the heroes 🇺🇦
[TextLink:] https://twitter.com/INTobservers/status/1612590187439071232?s=20/photo/1 -2
🧵 RT @UA_patriot_news Information from our military about #Soledar. The 46th Airmobile Brigade, as well as units of the DSPU, the SBU and the 17th Tank Brigade are inside the city, fighting for every house.#1 #Ukraine #Ukraina #Donetsk #Donbass #Соледар #ЗСУ
📌 https://twitter.com/UA_patriot_news/status/1612578792345686016?s=20
🐣 .@JakeSullivan46, the National Security Advisor, is the single person most responsible for the US slow walking military weapons to Ukraine ¤ He should be replaced
@WHCOS @SECDEF @ABlinken @POTUS
🐣 RT @olex_scherba Dear West, don’t you understand that history is being made in #Ukraine now? You’ll be either a winner or a loser for generations. The same for tyranny. So why do you hesitate whether to give Ukraine tanks & fighter jets? What’s the downside of it? ¤ #StandWithUkraine
🐣 RT @AWeissmann_ And the odds that a Grand Jury won’t recommend charges is slim. So this feels like an incoming rocket set to go off quite soon.
⋙ 🐣 RT @harrylitman Special purpose grand jury in Fulton county [GA] has finished its work and reported to the court. It wants to make the report public. Hearing on that in a couple weeks. Remember – they make recommendation to Fulton county DA Fanni Willis. Big step forward.
🐣 RT @SpiroAgnewGhost I do realize he is a deranged illiterate imbecile, but does anyone know what “China flagrant boss” means?!
[TextLink:] https://twitter.com/SpiroAgnewGhost/status/1612488650234941440?s=20/photo/1
[Text:] 🐣 RT @realDonald Trump Great job Kevin! We must now stop Mitch McConnell and his China flagrant boss, Coco Chow. It’s as though he just doesn’t care anymore, he pushes through anything the Democrats want. The $1.7 TRILLION quickly approved Bill of the week before was HORRIBLE. Zero for USA Border Security. If he waited just ten days, the now “United Republican Congress” could have made it MUCH BETTER, or KILLED IT. Something is wrong with McConnell, and those Republican Senators that Vote with him. PRIMARY THEM ALL!!!
🐣 RT @ChuckPfarrer BAKHMUT /1310 UTC 9 JAN/ In heavy combat, UKR forces continue counter-attacks against RU Wagner PMCs and RU units around Soledar. RU forces were driven back from Yokolivka. UKR’s 46th Air Mobile Brigade is reported to be advancing SE, in the vicinity of the mine complex.
🌎 https://twitter.com/ChuckPfarrer/status/1612434921271791623?s=20/photo/1
⭕ 8 Jan 2023
AtlanticCouncil, Stephen Blank: Rebuilding Ukraine the right way https://tinyurl.com/4f4xcdz8 “[T]he international community must … ensure the process actually strengthens Ukraine by revitalizing both its democratic and economic vibrancy”
🐣 RT @JakeSullivan46 The United States condemns any effort to undermine democracy in Brazil. President Biden is following the situation closely and our support for Brazil’s democratic institutions is unwavering. Brazil’s democracy will not be shaken by violence.
WaPo, Liz Sly: Ukraine sees ‘year of victory,’ but decisive defeat of Russia won’t be easy https://tinyurl.com/mu7n874x “As long as Western support remains strong, [Ret Lt Gen Ben] Hodges said he is confident that Ukraine can retake all or most Russian-occupied territory this year”
🐣 RT @RadioFreeTom Can’t wait for the Musk fanboys to set Gen. McCaffrey straight about the role of armor
⋙ 🐣 RT @mccaffreyr3 Very strange viewpoint by Musk. The key is the integration of combined arms warfare with AirPower, electronic warfare, deception, speed, maneuver, concentration of power. The M1 tank and M2 Inf Fighting Vehicle are the central killing tools in the battle.
⋙⋙ 🐣 RT @AdamKinzinger Really one of the more nonsensical takes on war. Tanks are essential for counteroffensives and a game changer for Ukraine.
[TextLink:] https://twitter.com/AdamKinzinger/status/1612223297822855171?s=20/photo/1
[Text:] 🐣 RT @elonmusk Tanks are a deathtrap now. With neither side having air superiority, you’re left with infantry & artillery essentially WW1.
🐣 RT @KyivIndependent Zelensky: Bakhmut and Soledar ‘hold on in spite of everything,’ more units to be sent to defense of key cities.
🧵 RT @CanadianKobzar FELLAS! Stay awhile and listen! For today we are going to educate some vatniks on proper history! I’d like to thank the vatnik below in particular for inspiring this historical bitch slap on the origins of Ukrainian cities! 1/25
📌 https://twitter.com/CanadianKobzar/status/1612136292573413377?s=20
// history of Ukrainian cities
🧵 RT @yazavtra please read about the Executed Renaissance in Ukraine in the 30s—those artists, poets, writers who protested Holodomor as genocide by starvation orchestrated by soviet regime and who even then advocated for unity with the West (and were harshly silenced for it).
📌 https://twitter.com/yazavtra/status/1590925307355463680?s=20
// resistance to the Holodomor
💙 🧵 RT @bctallis [Benjamin Tallis] 1. What is Neo-Idealism? (seeing as many of you have asked) ¤ It’s a new approach to Grand Strategy & International Relations that I think we can see emerging in responses to #Russia’s war & from #Ukraine’s brave resistance. 1st [thread] in a series on #NeoIdealism 1/25
📌 https://twitter.com/bctallis/status/1612105940441915395?s=20
🐣 RT @Gerashchenko_en Only the strengthening of Ukraine, only the successes of Ukraine, only the restoration of territorial integrity of Ukraine, only the return of all our people from Russian captivity are the guarantees of peace. We are bringing it closer every day – @ZelenskyyUa
💽 [tr] https://twitter.com/Gerashchenko_en/status/1612203875406340096?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @ChuckPfarrer BAKHMUT /1400 UTC 8 JAN/ UKR troops have advanced across the rail right-of-way and are engaging RU units in the west of Soledar’s urban area. UKR reports 21 aviation strikes missions were flown, including SEAD sorties that interdicted 3 RU surface to air missile complexes.
🌎 https://twitter.com/ChuckPfarrer/status/1612083212154556417?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @ChuckPfarrer IZIUM AXIS/ 1420 UTC 8 JAN / RU conducted two small scale attacks across the H-26 HWY in the last 24 hours. NW of Svatove UKR forces broke up an attack on Stelmakhivka. Yesterday UKR Khartia Battalion is reported to have defeated the 22nd Guard Spetsnaz Brig near Kryvoshyivka.
🌎 https://twitter.com/ChuckPfarrer/status/1612087282206490624?s=20/photo/1
⭕ 7 Jan 2023
🐣 RT @ general_ben Nonsense! Of course time is on Ukraine‘s side. They have no manpower issues and their logistics situation gets better every week. Not one single Russian Soldier actually wants to be there and sanctions are hurting. Ukraine liberates Crimea by end of August.
⋙ WaPo, Condoleezza Rice and Robert M. Gates: Time is not on Ukraine’s side https://tinyurl.com/2a2sdjv2 “[T]he United States and its allies [must] urgently provide Ukraine with a dramatic increase in military supplies and capability — sufficient to deter a renewed Russian offensive”
// The way to avoid confrontation with Russia in the future is to help Ukraine push back the invader now.
🧵 RT @RuthJorgenson “Over the past 24 hours, the Armed Forces of Ukraine repelled enemy attacks in the area of 14 settlements in Luhansk and Donetsk regions, where offensive attempts continue. ¤ ‘Over the past 24 hours, units of the Defense Forces repelled attacks by the occupiers in the areas of…”
📌 https://twitter.com/RuthJorgenson/status/1611598051055120385?s=20
⋙ RT @ “the settlements of Stelmakhovka, Makeyevka, Dibrova and Belogorovka, Luhansk region and Ozaryanovka, Soledar, Krasnaya Gora, Podgorodnoye, Bakhmut, Kleshchi.’ …
🐣 RT @SpeakerMcCarthy [12/30] This will be part of our investigation into the origins of covid. […]
⋙ 🐣 you’ll create doubt among those who don‘t understand science (your hs-educated “base”); this will fuel their suspicions and skepticism; the death rate from COVID-19 will keep being higher among unvaxxed MAGA and they‘ll die, while YOU are vaccinated ¤ endangering your own voters
🐣 RT @Las4Liberty “⚔️ Soledar and Bakhmut 🇺🇦 remain under the control of the Armed Forces of Ukraine, Serhiy Cherevaty, spokesman for the Eastern Group of Forces, said. ¤ Today, fierce battles are being fought for the cities. The statements of the Russians about the capture of Soledar are false.”
🧵 RT @ MargoGontar [10/21/2022] Just 20 minutes drive from #Bakhmut in Donetsk region of Ukraine there is a real jewel: Soledar salt mines. The 2nd deepest in Europe (after Wieliczka Salt Mine in Poland ): almost 300 m deep! Gives some Moria of LOTR vibes, right?
📌 💽 https://twitter.com/MargoGontar/status/1583479108545105920?s=20/photo/1
// beautiful
🐣 RT @ChuckPfarrer BAKHMUT/1950 UTC 7 JAN/ Despite a unilateral ‘Christmas’ cease fire’ RU’s 6th Separate Cossack Motor Rifle Reg. & Wagner PMCs attacked UKR troops in the vicinity of the salt mine complex at Soledar. RU units have gained control of the urban area east of the rail right-of-way.
🌎 https://twitter.com/ChuckPfarrer/status/1611809896315461633?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @Krma4Karma ❌🤡Prigozhyn explained why Russia needs #Bakhmut
⁉️The head of PMC “Wagner” Yevheniy Prigozhyn explained the desire of the Russian Federation to capture Bakhmut in Donetsk region by the fact that this city is a serious logistics center and has a system of Soledar and
⋙ 🐣 RT @Krma4Karma Bakhmut mines.
⁉️”In fact, it is a network of underground cities. In which there is not only a crowd of people at a depth of 80-100 meters, but also tanks and infantry fighting vehicles are moved.
⁉️And stocks of weapons have been stored since the First World War,”
⋙ 🐣 RT @Krma4Karma⚡️Prigozhyn’s press service quoted his words in Telegram.
🐣 RT @WarMonitor3 Russian forces are taking huge losses in Bakhmut and Soledar area due to their frontal assaults attempts at fortified positions.
⋙ 🐣 RT @LDas10514553 Ukr has caused significant losses of forces & weapons of Rus in the past few days, & now Rus is giving its heart & soul to conquer Bakhmut and Soledar to revive the spirit of not just its demoralized forces but the nation. But a Rus defeat here’ll sound the death-knell for Putin.
RT @Tendar If you are wondering how Russian “advance” In Bakhmut, Soledar or elsewhere then check this out. I have seen pictures like this several times. ¤ This is not sustainable, no matter if those are regulars, mobilized, mercenaries or convicts. This is the recipe of doom. #Ukraine
⋙ 🐣 RT @666_mancer Бахмутское направление, наши дни: это пиздец, конечно #роа #Вагнер #потерьнет #RussianUkrainianWar
🖼 https://twitter.com/Tendar/status/1611713677782093825?s=20/photo/1 -2
// dead Ru
🧵 RT @RuthJorgenson “Over the past 24 hours, the Armed Forces of Ukraine repelled enemy attacks in the area of 14 settlements in Luhansk and Donetsk regions, where offensive attempts continue. ¤ ‘Over the past 24 hours, units of the Defense Forces repelled attacks by the occupiers in the areas of…”
📌 https://twitter.com/RuthJorgenson/status/1611598051055120385?s=20
⋙ RT @RuthJorgenson “the settlements of Stelmakhovka, Makeyevka, Dibrova and Belogorovka, Luhansk region and Ozaryanovka, Soledar, Krasnaya Gora, Podgorodnoye, Bakhmut, Kleshchi.’ …
🐣 To compare: Jeffries rousing speech was both electric and specific, celebrating Dems’ values and successes and offering hope amid the chaos. ¤ McCarthy’s speech was vacuous and boring. It misapplied history, laid claim to values the GOP rejects, and skirted the ugliness of his party’s governing plans.
UkrInform: Russian fleet loses another two flagships – intelligence source https://tinyurl.com/27k2488y “[T]he heavy nuclear cruiser Admiral Nakhimov and heavy aircraft-carrying cruiser Admiral Kuznetsov of the Soviet Union Fleet – are deemed inoperable”
The intelligence source also reported that another ship of the Southern Fleet, the heavy aircraft-carrying cruiser Admiral Kuznetsov of the Soviet Union Fleet, is also in critical disrepair.
“In preparation for transferring the aircraft carrier from the dock to the factory for further repairs, it was discovered that the ship could not move on its own. It was decided to tow the ship, but it was found that the survivability standard could not be maintained due to deep corrosion of the decks below the third, outer hull of the vessel, as well as the presence of water in the holds. Accordingly, there is a risk that the ship will capsize to one side or sink during towing, so the process was postponed indefinitely,” the source informed.
At the same time, the report says the crews of both ships have been formed anyway. The size of the crew of the aircraft carrier Admiral Kuznetsov of the Soviet Union Fleet was brought to wartime alert. The crew of the heavy nuclear cruiser Admiral Nakhimov has also been formed and is preparing to arrive on board.
It should be noted that the Admiral Kuznetsov is the only aircraft-carrying cruiser of the Northern Fleet, while the Admiral Nakhimov is one of the three missile cruisers of the Northern Fleet.
⭕ 6 Jan 2023
WSJ, Adrian Karatnycky: Putin’s American Cheerleaders https://tinyurl.com/5yu6b88e ‘Every US citizen has a right to express an opinion about the issues of the day. But cooperation w official propagandists who beat the drum for a state perpetrating massive atrocities is another matter’
// How Jeffrey Sachs, Mark Episkopos and Dimitri Simes contribute to the Russian propaganda effort.
// Full: “Every U.S. citizen has a right to express an opinion about the issues of the day. And experts are free to challenge the pro-Ukraine views held by the vast majority of Americans. But cooperation with official propagandists who beat the drum for a state perpetrating massive war crimes and atrocities is another matter. Messrs. Sachs, Episkopos and Simes should know better.”
MSN/Mediaite: Hakeem Jeffries Tells New Congress That Democrats Will Put ‘Maturity Over Mar-a-Lago’ in Rousing Speech as GOP Sits Quietly https://tinyurl.com/yc83vb3u
Before giving the reins to the next speaker, Jeffries delivered a rousing speech that took several not-so-veiled shots at Republicans as they sat and listened.
“We do extend our hand of partnership to you and want to make clear that we extend and intend to try to find common ground whenever and wherever possible on behalf of the American people,” Jeffries said to applause. “Not as Democrats, not as Republicans, not as independents, but as Americans. But I also want to make clear that we will never compromise our principles.”
Jeffries then threw shade at Republicans by rattling off a series of contrasts, one of which was putting “maturity over Mar-a-Lago,” where former President Donald Trump resides in Palm Beach, Florida:mHouse Democrats will always put …
American values over autocracy,
benevolence over bigotry, the
Constitution over the cult,
democracy over demagogues,
economic opportunity over extremism,
freedom over fascism,
governing over gaslighting,
hopefulness over hatred,
inclusion over isolation,
justice over judicial overreach,
knowledge over kangaroo courts,
liberty over limitation,
maturity over Mar-a-Lago,
normalcy over negativity,
opportunity over obstruction,
people over politics,
quality of life issues over QAnon,
reason over racism,
substance over slander,
triumph over tyranny,
understanding over ugliness,
voting rights over voter suppression,
working families over the well-connected,
xenial over xenophobia,
“Yes we can” over “You can do it,” and
zealous representation over zero-sum confrontation.We will always do the right thing by the American people, so ‘let us not grow weary of doing good for the American people who will reap the benefit of the harvest if we do not give up.’ God bless you, God Bless the house, and God bless the United States of America.
💙 YouTube/MSNBC: Jeffries thanks Pelosi before handing gavel to McCarthy
💽 https://youtu.be/-1It5Z7dfMY
// 16.36m; Amazing speech with alphabetical list of Democratic values
💙 🐣 RT @StandForBetter 🇺🇸FULL SPEECH:
House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries opens the 118th Congress of The United States with one of the most amazing speeches I’ve ever heard.
💽 CLICK 👉 https://youtu.be/sfgek7nshkE
🐣 RT @ PaulaChertok Hakeem Jeffries ended his phenomenal speech by reciting Democratic principles in alliterative couplets in alphabetic order, literally going from A all the way to Z. What a star.
⋙ 🐣 RT @Acyn Pretty good finish
💽 https://twitter.com/Acyn/status/1611608545115480064?s=20/photo/1
Galatians 6:9, ESV: And let us not grow weary of doing good, for in due season we will reap, if we do not give up. (quoted by House Dem Leader Hakeem Jeffries after loss to McCarthy 2016/2012)
🐣 RT @mkraju McCarthy denies offering Matt Gaetz lchairmanship of a subcommittee in exchange for his ‘present‘ vote on Speaker. He said it would be up to the steering cmte to decide those appointments. ¤ “No one is promised anything,” McCarthy said. ¤ “Whatever happens in steering.”
🔆 This❗️⋙ NYT: The Republican leader claws his way to Speaker in a dramatic late-night vote. https://tinyurl.com/4mm77e9r ‘Rep Kevin McCarthy won election early Saturday as House speaker in a historic five-day, 15-ballot floor fight, after giving major concessions to right-wing holdouts’
🐣 RT @JaxAlemany Mike Rogers’ anger at Matt Gaetz likely stems from a potential offer, floated by Republican leadership, that would give Gaetz the gavel of a subcommittee on the House Armed Services Committee, 2 ppl familiar tell me & @MariannaReports: [link]
🐣 RT @therecount Rep. Dean Phillips (D-MN) as he nominates Hakeem Jeffries [for 15th vote] for House Speaker: ¤ “Madame Clerk, I rise to say, ‘Wow.’”
💽 https://twitter.com/therecount/status/1611588752098623488?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @ MarkHertling As @POTUS mentioned in emotional remarks earlier this week, our allies around the world are not yet convinced we’re back. ¤ Tonight isn’t going to help further burnish our improving credentials on the world stage.
🐣 RT @RepSwalwell Two years ago insurrectionists failed to take over the Capitol. Tonight Kevin McCarthy let them take over the Republican Party.
🐣 RT @PreetBharara When McCarthy becomes the Speaker, who is really the Speaker
⋙ 🐣 RT @JoyceWhiteVance A head of lettuce
🐣 RT @djrothkopf The worst speaker elected by the worst people in the worst possible way.
🐣 RT @therecount Here’s a wild closeup of Rogers having to be held back as he confronted Gaetz:
⋙ 🐣 RT @andyharnik Rep. Hudson, R-N.C., left, pulls Rep. Rogers, R-Ala., as he confronts Rep. Matt Gaetz, R-Fla., during the 14th round of voting for speaker as the House meets for the fourth day to try and elect a speaker in Washington, Friday, Jan. 6, 2023. (@AP Photo/@andyharnik)
🖼 https://twitter.com/andyharnik/status/1611582256660758528?s=20/photo/1
↥ ↧
🐣 Jason Crowe [sp?] of Mil Personnel Subc on @msnbc worried Gaetz may have been given chairmanship of that subcommittee ¤ but ~ who knows?
↥ ↧
🐣 RT @bensiegel Looks like Gaetz and McCarthy just reached a deal to stay and vote. ¤ On CSPAN looked like McCarthy said “thank you” and Gaetz appeared to mouth the word “committee.” ¤ (He currents sits on Armed Services. The chairman of that committee, Mike Rogers, just lunged at him.)
🐣 RT @TheStudyofWar Russian and Ukrainian forces continued offensive operations near #Kreminna & #Svatove. ¤ Russian sources claimed that Russian forces made gains in #Soledar as Russian offensive operations continued around #Bakhmut and the #Avdiivka-#Donetsk City area. http://isw.pub/UkrWar010623
🌎 https://twitter.com/TheStudyofWar/status/1611552422899466241?s=20/photo/1 -2
🐣 RT @fritzinmo JACK SMITH has added two longtime associates of the Justice Department to his team; Raymond Hulser, former chief of the DOJ’s public integrity section & David Harbach. ¤ Each specialize in public corruption and together they will lead the DOJ investigation of congressional members.
🐣 RT @oleksiireznikov Discussed details of the new US package of security assistance for 🇺🇦 and next #Ramstein meeting with Lloyd J. Austin III. ¤ Largest 🇺🇸 aid package gives us new capabilities to liberate our territory in the East and South. Thank you to @POTUS @SecDef and the 🇺🇸 people. 🇺🇦 will win.
// Defense Budget ⇊
[TextLink:] https://twitter.com/oleksiireznikov/status/1611477690460131363?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @apmassaro3 More than $3 billion in Russia-wrecking weapons for Ukraine. Merry Christmas from the USA
[TextLink:] https://twitter.com/apmassaro3/status/1611461624417906688?s=20/photo/1
// Defense Budget
● 50 Bradley infantry fighting vehicles with 500 TOW anti-tank missiles and 250,000
rounds of 25mm ammunition;
● 100 M113 Armored Personnel Carriers;
● 55 Mine Resistant Ambush Protected Vehicles (MRAPs);
● 138 High Mobility Multipurpose Wheeled Vehicles (HMMWVs);
● 18 155mm self-propelled Howitzers and 18 ammunition support vehicles;
● 70,000 155mm artillery rounds;
● 500 precision-guided 155mm artillery rounds;
● 1.200 155mm rounds of Remote Anti-Armor Mine (RAAM) Systems;
● 36 105mm towed Howitzers and 95,000 105mm artillery rounds;
● 10,000 120mm mortar rounds;
● Additional ammunition for High Mobility Artillery Rocket Systems (HIMARS);
● RIM-7 missiles for air defense;
● 4,000 Zuni aircraft rockets:
● Approximately 2,000 anti-armor rockets;
● Sniper rifles, machine guns, and ammunition for grenade launchers and small arms;
● Claymore antipersonnel munitions;
● Night vision devices and optics;
● Spare parts and other field equipment.
📔 WaPo: Investigation shows the Jan. 6 attack was neither a spontaneous act nor an isolated event: Before, During, After [Interactive] https://tinyurl.com/4wrrkwkb
🖼 WaPo: ‘No pictures, no pictures’: The enduring images from Jan. 6 https://tinyurl.com/5t559w65 “These images — quickly transmitted on screens across the world — have come to define that day.”
🐣 RT @kenvogel It’s not just about personality: ¤ The emerging deal KEVIN McCARTHY is considering includes capping 2024 government spending at 2022 levels, which would mean a $75B cut in defense spending. ¤ The stock prices of defense contractors declined on the news.
⋙ Bloomberg: McCarthy’s Emerging Speaker Deal Tees Up $75 Billion Defense Cut https://tinyurl.com/298vnbxv
McCarthy’s idea won’t sit well with most GOP defense hawks on the armed services and appropriations panels, who for years have pushed for major increases in national security. Those lawmakers such as Michael McCaul and Mike Gallagher have so far backed McCarthy. It would also need to get signoff from Democrats and the Senate.
Indeed, one person familiar with the matter said the issue came up on a call McCarthy had with Republicans Friday and that defense hawks were concerned about it.
The 2023 spending boost underscored bipartisan concerns about rising inflation, strategic competition with China and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. It was also the only way to receive Republican support for the annual defense authorization bill and the omnibus spending bill containing the Pentagon’s budget as well.
WaPo: Review of Jan. 6 cases finds judges give harsh lectures, lighter sentences https://tinyurl.com/2p8wtv4c //➔ I suppose it’s irrelevant to mention that 99% of the defendants are White Males, many middle-aged
// Judges have gone below prosecutors’ recommendations three-quarters of time, and below federal sentencing guidelines a little less than 40 percent
WaPo: Supporters raise millions to rebrand Jan. 6 rioters as ‘patriots’ https://tinyurl.com/8umycxrh “Right-wing supporters of the ‘Jan. Sixers’ have formed prayer chains, instigated letter writing campaigns, organized vigils and raised millions for their legal defense”
📋 January6thstats: 950 arrests; 284 assault charges, 99 weapons charges; 484 guilty pleas; 40 found guilty; police still looking for 350
// tags: Jan 6 stats January 6 stats; source: Twitter
🐣 📊 RT @YouGovAmerica On the second anniversary of the U.S. Capitol insurrection, our latest survey finds that the share of Americans who approve of the events of that day has increased by 11 points over the last two years. https://tinyurl.com/2p8ukub6
◕ https://twitter.com/YouGovAmerica/status/1611368237383536642?s=20/photo/1
// from 9% ➔ 20%
TheBulwark, Mark Hertling: What Bradley Fighting Vehicles Will Mean for Ukraine https://tinyurl.com/33d5rvan “Giving Ukrainians Bradleys and other armored vehicles will transform the tactical capability of a technologically advanced maneuver force”; they’re a better fit now than the Abrams …
// The Bradley has the speed, range, and firepower to help Ukraine retake its territory.
⋙ 🐣 Hertling views the Bradleys as a transitional step to getting Abrams tanks in the future: “[L]ogistics networks don’t emerge overnight; they have to be designed, developed, tested, and optimized. Giving the Ukrainians Bradleys will begin the process of developing those logistics”
[TextLink:] https://twitter.com/Auriandra/status/1611317508404822023?s=20/photo/1
[Text:] Yes, the Abrams would be even more of a boon to the Ukrainians than the Bradley. But the Abrams is a more complicated machine. Each Bradley needs not only soldiers to operate it, but soldiers to repair it, fuel it, and deliver spare parts and tools and ammunition and fuel to where the Bradleys are, which, hopefully, is constantly moving. For the Abrams, the fuel requirements are greater, the ammunition is heavier, there are more parts, and the turbine engine is more complicated than the Bradley’s diesel. Moreover, at up to 74 tons, the thing itself is harder to transport.
⭕ 5 Jan 2023
🐣 RT @Kasparov63 Germany now says it will soon be independent of Russian energy. It’s taken a year, while Merkel had 16 years and said it was impossible! As welcome as all these moves are to finally stand up to Russia, they expose the appeasement of previous admins.
WaPo, Jennifer Rubin: What the heck does ‘weaponizing the federal government’ even mean? https://tinyurl.com/4mkad4wk “Their party of nihilists insists that legitimate functions of government amount to tyranny, while their own abuse of power represents the will of ‘real Americans’”
🐣 RT @MaxKennerly If this deal goes through it’s a reminder that there are no “moderate” Republicans. It’d just take a few voting for Jeffries to maintain sanity, but they—every single Republican—would rather put MAGA extremists in charge than moderate Democrats.
⋙ 🐣 RT @costareports If this deal goes thru and McCarthy become speaker, you’re looking at a House where McCarthy is speaker and/but the Freedom Caucus is at the table on all big things: rules for floor, standoffs on budgets, and spreading HFC moves to key fiscal committees (approps, budget, etc.)…
⋙⋙ 🐣 RT @costareports It’s comparable as one person puts it to Boehner welcoming the Tea Party into the leadership in 2011 and making the RSC’s right wing a powerful force on all tricky fiscal and spending items… others say it could tie McCarthy’s hands in terms of any deals with President Biden…
🧵 RT @CanadianKobzar 🎄FELLAS! Stay awhile and listen! Tomorrow is Sviatyi Vechir (Holy Evening) and Saturday is Christmas day for many Ukrainians including myself! In this thread I will share our Christmas traditions! 1/14
📌 🖼 https://twitter.com/CanadianKobzar/status/1611219861362954242?s=20/photo/1
🧵 RT @WarintheFuture The announcements in the past day of infantry fighting vehicles being sent to #Ukraine represent an increase in capability for Ukraine’s soldiers, and a change in mindset in the Western leaders. What does this mean for 2023? 1/25
📌 https://twitter.com/WarintheFuture/status/1611118392299393024?s=20
⋙ WaPo: U.S. and Germany will send armored combat vehicles to Ukraine https://tinyurl.com/yeyt554m
// France has also pledged light tanks, as the West marks another major shift in military equipment for Kyiv
🐣 RT @tribelaw Oath-Keeper Caleb “Berry testified this week that the extremists hatched an explicit plan to enter the Capitol and stop the certification of Joe Biden’s presidential victory.” ¤ No riot gone awry but a premeditated plot — a seditious conspiracy.
⋙ WaPo: At trial, Oath Keeper alleges specific plan to stop vote count https://tinyurl.com/2yrbm5rc Caleb Berry, 21, “testified this week that the extremists hatched an explicit plan to enter the Capitol and stop the certification of Joe Biden’s presidential victory”
🐣 RT @WhiteHouse President Biden announced new actions today to limit illegal immigration, expand legal pathways to enter the U.S., and increase border security.
⋙ WhiteHouse: FACT SHEET: Biden-Harris Administration Announces New Border Enforcement Actions https://tinyurl.com/dsvvbk28
🐣 RT @Acyn Tucker: Every one of them wants to win elections. By that measure, Kevin McCarthy has underwhelmed, the red wave that we were all promised, remember that? It didn’t materialize. The midterms were a crushing disappointment.
💽 https://twitter.com/Acyn/status/1611168531487330304?s=20/photo/1
Politico: Biden to mark Jan. 6 anniversary by warning the Big Lie remains https://tinyurl.com/yth856np
// The president is planning a solemn address to mark the events of two years ago.
🐣 RT @djrothkopf McCsrthy is not a man, he’s a mouse. He folds whenever challenged. If somehow he ekes out a win he will have won nothing at all. He won’t be Speaker. He’ll be the Squeaker of the House.
😅 RT @Havoc_Six Ukraine officially responds to Putin’s request for a Christmas “ceasefire” (2023, colorized)
🖼 https://twitter.com/Havoc_Six/status/1611101735212154880?s=20/photo/1
// “Crossing the Delaware” with Zelensky as Washington
🐣 RT @wartranslated Igor Girkin is in shock over Putin’s “ceasefire” decision, wonders if the Russian Armed Forces will like it, says Putin’s path to Hague just got much shorter due to Ukraine being able to strengthen its positions in those 36 hours.
[TextLink:] https://twitter.com/wartranslated/status/1611134795299389440?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @MichaelPascoe01 “The Republican Party isn’t really a governing party anymore. It’s an incubator for right-wing celebrities.”
⋙ 🐣 RT @ AlfredSpellman “Republicans created a cult of personality around Trump. And now that Trump is off the main stage, the cult no longer has a personality. It’s just a cult with lots of zealotry but no actual tenets or beliefs.” — @MollyJongFast [link]
DailyMail [UK]: The race to overthrow Putin and take his Kremlin crown has begun, says former Russian defence minister who warned Russia is facing ‘military catastrophe’ https://tinyurl.com/3p3x96cx ‘The fight for the political Olympus has begun,’ former loyalist Igor Strelkov said
● Former loyalist Igor Strelkov said ‘the fight for the political Olympus has begun’
● He said various figures in the regime are already tussling for the top job
● Wagner private army head Yevgeny Prigozhin is one of those involved, he said
🐣 RT @Gerashchenko_en “We now have a united Ukraine. We will build a new state, a dream country” – President @ZelenskyyUa
💽 [tr] https://twitter.com/Gerashchenko_en/status/1610903927838445568?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @k_sonin A new dispatch by @KyivIndependent’s war reporter @IAPonomarenko from Bakhmut[.] I thought that the epoch of reporters-soldiers – think Churchill in India and South Africa in late 19th century – has been long gone, yet here is a fine example that it hasn’t.
⋙ KyivIndependent, Illia Ponomarenko: As the Battle of Bakhmut nears culmination, Ukraine’s artillery gasps for more ammo https://tinyurl.com/58wt63ht “The apocalyptic streets are empty and silent, except for the roar of artillery guns and the buzz of drones high above”
⭕ 4 Jan 2023
NYT, Michelle Goldberg: Leopards Eat Kevin McCarthy’s Face https://tinyurl.com/mpj6nm7n “As we approach the anniversary of the Jan. 6 attack, it’s been grimly amusing to see that the party of insurrection can’t even manage the orderly transfer of power to itself.”
WSJ: Ukraine Sees Signs of Russia Shifting Front-Line Firepower Away From Bakhmut https://tinyurl.com/yt7bjr95 “The Ukrainian commanders say Russia has instead repositioned armored vehicles and artillery fire toward the nearby town of Soledar”
// Resistance has forced Moscow to temper its assault on the eastern city and shift to surrounding areas, Ukrainian officers say
🧵 RT @Rail_splitter1 I want to make a point about something that is a bit subtle and not often well understood. It’s said that Putin is after resurrecting the Soviet Union. That isn’t the case. It’s actually worse than that.
📌 https://twitter.com/Rail_splitter1/status/1610648402882334720?s=20
[ThreadReader:] https://tinyurl.com/mbdh426p
⋙ 🐣 RT @Rail_splitter1 […] So this is why Putin hates the Soviet Union. He loves the dominance of the “Great Russian bullies” but he thinks it did not go nearly far enough. His vision is a profound danger to the world. He and those who this vision animates and inspires must be stopped. [End]
😅 RT @pourmecoffee
– Sculpture of Hunter Biden’s laptop in rotunda
– Kanye. Elon. Trump. to replace E Pluribus Unum on Great Seal
– Mandatory Measles and Whooping Cough parties
⋙ 🐣 RT @mkrajuNews: McCarthy proposes key concessions.
– allow just one member to call for a vote to oust a speaker, per two sources
– more members of Freedom Caucus to serve on powerful House Rules Committee
– Promises to vote on some bills like term limits and border security
w/ @MZanona
🐣 RT @McFaul Agreed. Time for Putin and the world to take @ZelenskyyUa’s peace formula seriously. ¤ The longer people wait, the more people will die.
⋙ 🐣 RT @AndriyYermak .@ZelenskyyUa’s peace formula is the way to end the war. It provides for 🇺🇦 victory, the return of 🇺🇦 territories, restoring justice and rules-based world order.
💙😅😜 RT @ryanjreilly Once described #SeditionHunters work as an interactive, high-stakes and soul-crushing version of Where’s Waldo, and now there’s this. ¤ The details! The research! Impressive.
🖼 https://twitter.com/ryanjreilly/status/1610757611317780483?s=20/photo/1
⋙ BrianMichaelWeaver[.]com: Sedition Hunters https://tinyurl.com/59m7965w
// tags: game puzzle poster: Where’s Waldo-like matching game about January 6th
[ See comments‼️]
This is a meticulously researched illustration/puzzle of the violence, ridiculousness, weapons, and people that took part in the January 6th Insurrection. Almost EVERYTHING you see here actually happened! EVERYONE you see here is an actual person that took part! See it BIG here! And see the Checklist BIG here!
It took me months not just because of the amount of drawing, but more so because I wanted to make sure that I got ALL the important facts, and people, right.
I’m revealing it just ahead of the two-year anniversary. And I’ll be releasing it as a poster and a jigsaw puzzle very soon, for purchase. Stay tuned for that!
And don’t forget to do the checklist! Tag me @brianmichaelweaver when you’re done! #insurrectionchecklist
⋙ 🐣 RT @capitolhunters It’s actually not bad! As long as you accept the creative license that the top half and bottom half of the picture are offset. They have several recognizable figures in more or less the right places and doing more or less what they did on Jan 6.
🐣 RT @ChuckPfarrer KREMENNA /2110 UTC 4 JAN/ N of Kremenna, the UKR Army’s 518th Field Batt is reported to be advancing on Pischane. S. of Kremenna, following heavy fighting near Bilohorvika yesterday, UKR’s 81st Air Mobile Brig. counter-attacked Wagner group units in the vicinity of Shypylivka.
🌎 https://twitter.com/ChuckPfarrer/status/1610743754519887873?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @ChuckPfarrer BAKHMUT AXIS /1510 UTC 4 JAN/ Heavy fighting is reported as RU forces have continue a series of company / platoon-sized engagements during the last 36 hours. N of the urban area, RU troops are assaulting Bakhmutse. RU units also attacked across the T-13-02 HWY toward Podhorodne.
🌎 https://twitter.com/ChuckPfarrer/status/1610653467344764930?s=20/photo/1
WaPo: As McCarthy struggles in House, McConnell to appear with Biden in Kentucky https://tinyurl.com/49dwxme3 ‘While McCarthy struggles to build support from hard-right members, McConnell is trying to promote bipartisanship and show that Republicans can govern’
// Allies see the Senate GOP leader showing a different vision for his party
⭕ 3 Jan 2023
Politico Mag, John Harris: After Another Failed Vote, McCarthy’s Speaker Bid Is Starting to Look Pathetic https://tinyurl.com/5c2dwazv “By any historical standard, … vivid evidence that one chamber of the national legislature is essentially ungovernable is a high-water moment.”
// A purely transactional approach to politics can only get you so far, especially in today’s Republican Party.
Politico: Biden world both humored and terrified by McCarthy meltdown https://tinyurl.com/43n3tuhu “[L]ast month’s passage of a $1.7 trillion omnibus spending package [was] an achievement propelled in large part by Senate Republicans who foresaw the coming chaos”
// The president’s aides saw the failed House speaker votes as a political opportunity for them, but also as an ominous sign of battles to come.
✛ “Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.), one of the hard-liners refusing to back McCarthy … belittled the coming GOP investigations of Hunter Biden and other matters as ‘theater pretending to be oversight’”
… For whatever headaches a Republican-controlled House will create for President Joe Biden through investigations and its ability to control the floor, the disorder and rancor likely to characterize the new GOP majority, administration aides believe, will benefit the president politically. …
Biden’s first big event of the year Wednesday, a trip to Kentucky to highlight a long-sought bridge repair alongside Senate GOP Leader Mitch McConnell, will typify his approach over the year ahead: focusing on the increasingly tangible benefits from the bipartisan 2021 infrastructure overhaul and last year’s bills to boost semiconductor manufacturing, lower drug costs and hasten the transition to electric vehicles and renewable energy. Two border-state governors, Kentucky Democrat Andy Beshear and Ohio Republican Mike DeWine, will also attend the event, allowing Biden to underline the bipartisan nature of the law responsible for fixing the Brent Spence Bridge.
And on Friday, the president will mark the two-year anniversary of the Jan. 6, 2021 insurrection with a speech at the White House. The occasion will provide another chance to articulate a view about the sanctity of American democracy — while reminding the country which party was responsible.
Staffers who spoke more candidly, on the condition of anonymity, acknowledged that bipartisan legislation will be more difficult with Republicans controlling the House, however narrow and fractious their majority. Debt ceiling fights become even trickier when there is no order at all.
That said, some aides remain cautiously optimistic that some GOP lawmakers from more competitive districts will be incentivized to work across the aisle. Deputy press secretary Andrew Bates wrote in a post-election bulletin to reporters that the House Republicans who voted for the president’s infrastructure law in 2021 all won reelection in November. …
If House Republicans follow through on promises to roll-back elements of the Inflation Reduction Act and weaken remaining abortion protections, the White House is confident that those efforts will benefit Democrats politically, not to mention be blocked by a Democrat-controlled Senate.
Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.), one of the hard-liners refusing to back McCarthy, dismissed such actions as “messaging bills” during a press conference Tuesday. And, in a comment sure to be clipped and saved by the White House press shop, belittled the coming GOP investigations of Hunter Biden and other matters as “theater pretending to be oversight.”
And there is no immediate threat of a government shutdown after last month’s passage of a $1.7 trillion omnibus spending package, an achievement propelled in large part by Senate Republicans who foresaw the coming chaos of a GOP-controlled House. In fact, as McCarthy struggled to secure the speaker’s gavel Tuesday, some Senate Republicans expressed vindication about having passed the bipartisan legislation last year, spiking the football on House Republicans harder than anyone at the White House did.
“I’ve been told you shouldn’t vote for the $1.7 trillion spending bill because the House is Republican, they’ll make it better,” said Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.). “I don’t think that theory is holding up too well.”
🐣 RT @EuromaidanPress More than a million Russians have called, texted or visited the website of a Ukrainian hotline that allows them to surrender, with many seeking a way to avoid going to war, since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine began, according to the hotline.
⋙ ABCNews: Ukraine offers Russian soldiers a hotline to surrender https://tinyurl.com/mr38d8fr
// Ukrainian drones greet Russian defectors as they cross into enemy lines.
NYT, Carl Hulse: Speaker Fight Reveals a Divided and Disoriented House Majority https://tinyurl.com/3y7b4b7d “[W]hoever emerges [as Speaker] will face deep-seated resistance when trying to shepherd spending bills and other measures that are fundamental to governance”
// In failing to coalesce around Kevin McCarthy for speaker, Republicans showcased divisions that portend real difficulties in governing.
🐣 RT @fasc1nate How Europe’s borders have changed over time
💽 🌎 🌀https://twitter.com/fasc1nate/status/1610481381770989570?s=20/photo/1
// timelapse map of Europe
🧵 RT @TheStudyofWar Russian Mobilization & Force Generation Update: Systemic failures in #Russia’s force generation apparatus continue to plague personnel capabilities to the detriment of Russian operational capacity in #Ukraine. http://isw.pub/UkrWar010323
📌 🌎 https://twitter.com/TheStudyofWar/status/1610471606442147841?s=20/photo/1
// Ru training failures, lack of ammo, equipment
WSJ: Ukraine Has Digitized Its Fighting Forces on a Shoestring https://tinyurl.com/3cu3c98c “Ukraine’s success cobbling together a virtual command-and-control system on the fly offers valuable lessons … , particularly about the need to experiment and include nonmilitary experts”
// Kyiv’s forces networked under Russian attack, achieving a cut-priced ‘MacGyver’ version of systems the Pentagon has spent decades developing
😅 RT @leahmcelrath “Are you not entertained?”
💽 https://twitter.com/leahmcelrath/status/1610398010864799744?s=20/photo/1
// meme from Gladiator
💙 KyivIndependent: Hell in high definition: Inside front-line aerial unit surveilling battle of Bakhmut https://tinyurl.com/y5bd5vzs ‘As Russia continues to assault Bakhmut, the site of some of the heaviest hostilities along the entire front line, drone teams are not short of work’
🐣 RT @grahworin Extremely insightful Bakhmut update from “Witch” 03-01-23. ¤ She tells us that Ukrainian positions are holding against the suicidal attacks of the invaders but it’s difficult. She also explains the reason behind such suicidal attacks and how the invaders have no other choice. 😳1/2
💽 https://twitter.com/grahworin/status/1610333385838182403?s=20/photo/1
⋙ 🐣 RT @grahworin part 2
💽 https://twitter.com/grahworin/status/1610334185297674244?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @auto_glam Bakhmut. Few people know that Bakhmut is a very old town and it was (AND IT IS) a fortress.
🌎 https://twitter.com/auto_glam/status/1610429972295946242?s=20/photo/1 -2
HuffPo: A Far-Right Gang Of House Members Will Hold Power Over Their Caucus — With A Megaphone https://tinyurl.com/2s4jh3f3
// The GOP lawmakers, who have spent years becoming far-right influencers, are poised to hold a concerning amount of control over the new Congress.
🔆 This❗️⋙ Reuters: Special Report: Pro-Putin operatives in Germany work to turn Berlin against Ukraine https://tinyurl.com/ycyutv5d “Reuters has established the identities of key figures involved in pushing a pro-Moscow stance inside Germany”
// In Germany some are clamouring for a change in course on Ukraine. Key figures in the campaign have links to the Russian state or far right, a Reuters investigation has found.
🐣 RT @BBCWorld Russia points fingers after deadliest Ukraine attack ¤ Participants lay flowers near the Eternal Flame memorial in Samara, Russia, January 3, 2023
⋙ BBC: Makiivka: Russia points fingers after deadliest Ukraine attack https://tinyurl.com/466xjm5d
// The deaths of dozens of Russian soldiers at Makiivka in Ukraine prompt recriminations in Russia.
🐣 RT @Bear_Faced Having just lost 600 of his soldiers billeted conveniently compactly altogether at a college in #Makiivka you wouldn’t think Sergui Shoigu would have much to sing about let alone be out of uniform. #Himars #SlavaUkraini
🐣 RT @ChuckPfarrer KREMENNA AXIS /1515 UTC 3 JAN/ West of the P-66 HWY, RU forces have attempted to stage attacks at Ploschanka. Shelling continues along the line of contact, following heavy fighting near Dibrova on 1-2 JAN. FEBA assessed to be E of Dibrova.
🌎 https://twitter.com/ChuckPfarrer/status/1610293123564838912?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @ChuckPfarrer IZIUM AXIS /1630 UTC 3 JAN/ RU has renewed a series attacks across the H-26 HWY NW of Svatove. The UKR Khartia Battalion is engaged heavily with 22nd Guard Spetsnaz Brigade in the vicinity of Kryvoshyivka. UKR UAV destroys RU ammo dump near Svatove.
🌎 https://twitter.com/ChuckPfarrer/status/1610308850468388864?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @ChuckPfarrer BAKHMUT AXIS / 1450 UTC 3 JAN/ On 2 JAN, RU forces staged an attack across the T-13-02 toward Krasna Hora. UKR troops were also reported in contact at Podhorodne. South of the H-32 HWY, RU forces continue attempts to register an advance in the western industrial area.
🌎 https://twitter.com/ChuckPfarrer/status/1610271273719943168?s=20/photo/1
TheGuardian: ‘Every house a fortress’: Wagner leader counts cost as Russia stalls in Bakhmut https://tinyurl.com/2em9k4pb “Yevgeny Prigozhin has said his fighters have sometimes spent weeks attempting to capture a single house in the key contested Donbas city”
// Grim footage shows Yevgeny Prigozhin visiting basement filled with dead fighters near Ukraine’s eastern front
🐣 RT @ NTenzer The litmus test for the US and the EU is now, not tomorrow: ¤ either we provide #Ukraine with all the military means to swiftly defeat #Russia, or we will be held guilty before history and humanity. ¤ We cannot remain halfway neither morally nor—maybe more importantly—strategically.
🐣 RT @ DefenceHQ [UK] Latest Defence Intelligence update on the situation in Ukraine – 03 January 2023 ¤ Find out more about the UK government’s response: http://ow.ly/s5V050MgXZK 🇺🇦 #StandWithUkraine 🇺🇦
[TextLink:] https://twitter.com/DefenceHQ/status/1610156607773544451?s=20/photo/1
[Text:] INTELLIGENCE UPDATE
● In mid-December, Russian military and Wagner proxy forces likely increased the frequency of their infantry assaults around the Donetsk Oblast town of Bakhmut. However, many of these operations were poorly supported.● Over the last ten days, Ukraine has committed significant reinforcements to defend the sector and the frequency of Russian assaults have likely reduced from the peak in mid December. Both sides have suffered high casualties.
● Russian offensive operations in the area are now likely being conducted at only platoon or section level. It is unlikely Russia will achieve a significant breakthrough near Bakhmut in the coming weeks.
🐣 RT @gchahal JUST IN: #BNNRussia Reports. ¤ The Russian military is experiencing difficulties with the capture of Bakhmut because of the “500 lines of defense” of the Armed Forces of Ukraine, said Yevgeny Prigozhin. ¤ #Russia #War #RussiaUkraineWar
🖼 https://twitter.com/gchahal/status/1610208546263822336?s=20/photo/1
‼️ 🐣 RT @NOELreports Prigozhin tells why they can’t take Bakhmut. “We storm every house for several days or even weeks, and there are 500+ of them. We don’t have the equipment and even hundreds of shells won’t make us move faster.” ¤ 👍
💽 https://twitter.com/NOELreports/status/1610209327851229186?s=20/photo/1
⋙ 🐣 RT @NOELreports Prigozhin has no clue how well Bakhmut is defended and how many soldiers are literally everywhere.
⋙ 🐣 RT @ danielberk10 “linia abarone” –> defensive line. ¤ I am so involved in this war that I am starting to understand Russian 🤔 ¤ Remarkable how honest Prigozhin is. Means he has no other option, because honesty is usually the very last path Russian leaders choose. So, this is good news!
🐣 RT @general_ben A reason I’m sure Ukraine will win…the Russian military is not a learning organization. Failing to ensure field discipline and force protection in the combat zone after ten months of heavy losses is evidence they have no good Sergeants or the culture to learn from mistakes.
⋙⋙ 🐣 RT @WarMonitor3 Ukrainian HIMARS continue to conduct strikes on large bases of Russian forces many kilometres behind the frontline. ¤ These bases often have large amounts of soldiers and equipment stationed at them with little regard for camouflage or dispersing sleeping quarters
⋙ 🐣 RT @general_ben Another reason Ukraine will win. Some fit-looking, military-age males there singing along with Minister Shoigu. Russians have no stomach for this fight; they lack the Will and are content to send plenty of men from areas far away from Moscow and St Petersburg to the meatgrinder.
⋙⋙ 🐣 RT @JayinKyiv As Russia spent $1,000,000,000 on a 2 day missle/drone barrage across Ukraine, and had 400 Russians soldiers HIMARS’d in Makiivka, billionaire Russian Defense Minister Shoigu was partying, nostalgic barbarian style at a Moscow restaraunt that only Putin cronies can afford.
💽 https://twitter.com/JayinKyiv/status/1609976577764515842?s=20/photo/1
⭕ 2 Jan 2023
(📊) ForeignPolicy, Raphael Cohen: The Myth of America’s Ukraine Fatigue https://tinyurl.com/2h6zrhjt “Russia’s invasion of Ukraine was more than just a dispute of borders and political allegiances: It was an attack on the liberal international order itself”
// No, the U.S. public isn’t giving up on Ukraine.
Much of the concern about the United States suffering from war fatigue stems from a series of polls of the American electorate that found popular support for Ukraine slipping. Separate surveys from the Wall Street Journal, the Chicago Council on Global Affairs, and the Ronald Reagan Presidential Foundation and Institute found that, while an overwhelming majority of Americans still backed Ukraine and believed Russia was the aggressor, a growing minority—particularly among Republicans—believed the United States was providing too much aid and that the war was costing the United States too much.
These numbers need to be taken in context. First, in absolute terms, support for Ukraine among Americans remains relatively robust—hovering at 57 percent or more, depending on the poll. This is a remarkable fact, particularly now that the war is nearly a year old. Nor is it unusual for there to be a partisan skew in opinion on a war. Conflicts—including in Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan—often begin with support from both sides of the aisle. But as wars draw on, and as the original motive for the intervention begins to fade from collective memory, partisan divides creep in.
Yet U.S. political support for Ukraine remains bipartisan. Congress passed multiple aid packages for Ukraine by bipartisan majorities multiple times this year, including another $45 billion as part of a broader government funding bill last week. And although there have been calls by some on the right for more scrutiny of Ukraine aid, Zelensky received a warm welcome from both sides of the aisle when he addressed a joint meeting of Congress.
Political support for Ukraine will in all likelihood continue. True, the Republicans won control of the House of Representatives in November, and likely Speaker of the House Kevin McCarthy promised that Ukraine would no longer receive a “blank check.” And yes, some of Ukraine’s staunchest legislative supporters will not return for the next congressional session. But at the same time, some of the candidates from the Republican Party’s isolationist wing lost their bids in November. And plenty of Republican leaders still support more Ukraine military aid, even if they want increased oversight about how that money is spent.
What’s more, U.S. foreign policy has rarely perfectly followed the polls. Although successive presidential administrations have complained about the “blob” or “deep state” that blocks their foreign-policy agendas, the fact remains that Americans, for the most part, have allowed their leaders more latitude on foreign than domestic matters. That’s partly because Americans tend to care less about foreign-policy issues than they do about domestic ones—particularly those that directly impact their pocketbooks. …
Another thing worth remembering is that Americans hate to lose. Case in point: Americans overwhelmingly approved then-President Barack Obama’s withdrawal of U.S. combat forces from Iraq in 2011—only to slam his handling of Iraq when the Islamic State nearly overran the country in 2014. President Joe Biden’s own tenure follows a similar course: Americans supported withdrawing from Afghanistan, but they blamed him for the debacle that followed. In war, from a purely political perspective, it’s usually safer for politicians to stay the course. …
Finally, the most important reason to be skeptical of Americans’ supposed Ukraine fatigue is, quite simply, that there is no such thing. Americans are not, in literal fact, exhausted by this war. With the possible exception of the handful of U.S. policymakers directly engaged in U.S. policy toward Ukraine, as well as those U.S. forces elsewhere in Europe providing security assistance and humanitarian relief, few Americans are actively engaged in the conflict. The United States is not suffering losses on the battlefield, nor is it enduring energy shortages. For most Americans, gas prices today average a few cents less than a year ago. And Americans aren’t paying higher taxes due to the war, either. Since Congress does not need to balance the federal budget, aid for Ukraine is not coming at the expense of domestic spending, at least for the moment. …
In other words, the United States’ Ukraine fatigue is more myth than reality. This has important implications for the war itself. Right now, Russia’s strategy seems to be largely based on protraction: Let the war grind on, and eventually the United States and its allies will lose interest, and the Ukrainians will cave. In all likelihood, this strategy will not work. If past is precedent, and present trends continue, it could be years before any of the declines in the American public’s support actually result in a change of policy.
At the same time, these polls should be a clarion call for U.S. leaders and the United States’ allies and partners all over the world. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine was more than just a dispute of borders and political allegiances: It was an attack on the liberal international order itself. To their great credit, democracies all over the world responded appropriately. As the war drags on, the leaders of the free world need to remind their publics what is at stake in Ukraine—not just for European and global security, but for democracy at large.
Zelensky’s visit to Washington was one important step in reminding Americans what is at stake, but it was only a beginning. The war in Ukraine, unfortunately, does not seem likely to end soon. As long as the fight continues on the battlefield, the battle for Western opinion must go on as well.
🐣 RT @igorsushko As always, retired 3-star General Ben Hodges @general_ben, who commanded US Army Europe until 2017, knocked it out of the park. Fantastic and succinct assessment of the situation in #Ukraine, and what must be done.
💽 [12.24m] https://twitter.com/igorsushko/status/1610173194077630464?s=20/photo/1
⋙ 🐣 it seems like the retired military leadership (at least those on Twitter and @msnbc), agree w @general_ben on most of these points: it’s the current leadership and the NSCouncil that I worry about, particularly @JakeSullivan46 and @thejointstaff #MarkMilley ¤ #SupportUkraine
🐣 RT @igorsushko As always, retired 3-star General Ben Hodges @general_ben, who commanded US Army Europe until 2017, knocked it out of the park. Fantastic and succinct assessment of the situation in #Ukraine, and what must be done.
💽 [12.24m] https://twitter.com/igorsushko/status/1610173194077630464?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @ChristopherJM .@FT editorial board: “The goal for 2023 must be to give Kyiv all the aid it needs to bring the conflict to an end—on its terms.” ¤ “Ukraine’s people were in 2022 an example to the world of fortitude and resilience. They deserve redoubled support in 2023.”
⋙ FT Editorial: Turning the tide in Russia’s war on Ukraine https://tinyurl.com/sspm3889
// Goal for 2023 must be to give Kyiv the means to end the conflict on its terms
NYT: Deadly Strike on Russians in Ukraine Exposes Moscow’s Military Failings https://tinyurl.com/ykphtv8b “Pro-war Russian bloggers and some government officials said the debacle was caused by the military’s own repeated and costly mistakes”
// A Ukrainian attack with U.S.-made rockets may have left hundreds of casualties, and pro-war Russians accused their military commanders of repeating fatal errors.
The strike by the HIMARS rockets killed 63 Russian soldiers in a building housing them in the occupied city of Makiivka, in eastern Ukraine, the Russian Defense Ministry said on Monday — an unusual admission for a military that has often refused to acknowledge serious losses. A former Russian paramilitary commander in Ukraine, Igor Girkin, wrote on the Telegram app that “many hundreds” were dead and wounded and that many “remained under the rubble.”
Ukrainian military officials said it appeared that “about 400” Russian troops had been killed, though they did not explicitly say that Kyiv was behind the attack. ¤ None of the claims could be independently verified, but even the lowest number would represent one of the worst Russian losses in a single episode in the war, and an embarrassment for President Vladimir V. Putin. He has vowed repeatedly to correct the glaring errors and weaknesses in his armed forces that the war has exposed, and in a New Year’s Eve speech filmed at a military base, Mr. Putin told the families of soldiers killed in the fighting, “I share your pain with all my heart.”
Pro-war Russian bloggers and some government officials said the debacle was caused by the military’s own repeated and costly mistakes, like garrisoning troops in a dense concentration within range of Ukrainian artillery, placing them in the same building as an ammunition depot, and allowing them to use cellphones, whose signals the Ukrainians can use to zero in on their target. ¤ “Our generals are untrainable in principle,” wrote Mr. Girkin, who has used the nom de guerre Igor Strelkov.
The deadly attack on Russian forces in Makiivka used the HIMARS rocket artillery to hit a vocational school where troops were housed, Moscow said. The Russian Defense Ministry said that four HIMARS rockets had hit the building, and that two others had been shot down by Russian air defenses. …
As pro-war bloggers and officials reacted with fury, video posted on social media showed firefighters amid the ruins of the structure, reduced to smoking piles of rubble. The bloggers have become influential opinion-makers in Russia amid the censorship of mainstream media. ¤ Mr. Girkin, the blogger and former paramilitary commander, wrote that the vocational school in Makiivka had been “almost completely destroyed” because “ammunition stored in the same building” detonated in the strike. …
The HIMARS system is most effective when used against stationary targets that can be identified in advance and pinpointed, such as ammunition dumps, infrastructure or troop concentrations. The United States has so far supplied Ukraine with at least 20 HIMARS systems, which are made by Lockheed Martin. …
⋙ 😅 a #NAFO fella made this (two step 2s prove it’s not CIA, (which doesn’t exist))
// “How to Build Your Own Russian Barracks”
🖼 ◕ https://twitter.com/Auriandra/status/1610172638692786176?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @nexta_tv 🤡”Life is vastly overrated” ¤ The propagandists continue to carry Putin’s philosophy that Russians have only one way – to the grave. ¤ But it is unclear why, if Solovyov thinks his life is overrated, he continues to sit in the studio instead of fertilizing the Ukrainian soil?
💽 [tr] https://twitter.com/nexta_tv/status/1609946945014874112?s=20/photo/1
😅 RT @visegrad24 Zelensky cracking some jokes after Putin stated that “Kyiv is the mother of Russian cities”. ¤ This was after Russia’s annexation of Crimea
💽 https://twitter.com/visegrad24/status/1610060458941190146?s=20/photo/1
WaPo: Dozens of Russian soldiers killed in massive Donetsk missile strike https://tinyurl.com/3wkexsws “Without claiming responsibility for the attack, Kyiv’s military command said that at least 400 soldiers were killed in the attack in Makiivka”; most were fresh conscripts
🧵 RT @TrentTelenko This is going to be an extended [thread] on consequences of Russian casualty rates on its culture and what it means for Russo-Ukrainian War termination. ¤ What was notable about the 2014-to-2015 Donbass War/ATO was that more Russian troops were killed than the total number of…1/22
📌 https://twitter.com/TrentTelenko/status/1610024657364598785?s=20
🐣 RT @MikeSington 2023 is going to be an amazing and historic year. Expect a former president of the United States to be arrested, put on trial, convicted, and incarcerated for the rest of his life.
🐣 RT @ Ukrainene Russian Rybar report At the moment, the most likely offensive site is the direction of #Kreminna. Now #UkrainianArmy is conducting an active counter-battery fight and searching for artillery firing points and air defense position areas. ¤ He believes that will soon begin 🇺🇦💪 ¤ ⌛⌛
🌎 https://twitter.com/Ukrainene/status/1609993823387783169?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @DancehallHeat BREAKING NEWS…. FREEDOM 🇺🇦🤘¤ Velikiy Potemkinsky Island, south of Kherson, returned to the control of the Armed Forces of Ukraine. From there, the city was bombarded with mortars. ¤ Today, Zelensky also signed a decree on the creation of the Oleshkiv city military administration
🐣 RT @MikeSington Hope Hicks’ post Jan 6 texts revealed: ¤ “All of us who didn’t have jobs lined up will be perpetually unemployed.” “I’m so mad and upset. We all look like domestic terrorists now.” “This made us unemployable, untouchable. God, I’m so fucking mad.”
🐣 RT @front_ukrainian Strelkov-Girkin [@girkingirkin] reports hundreds of deaths as a result of a strike on the location of Russian Chmobiks in Makeevka # Complains that the orcs thought of placing the BC in the same building, so the New Year’s fireworks were only brighter
[TextLink:] https://twitter.com/front_ukrainian/status/1609852300951953408?s=20/photo/1
[Text:] According to Makiivka, briefly: ¤ I received information about the defeat of the object around 01.12.2023 at one in the morning. ¤ The facility, which housed the N-th division, consisting mainly of mobilized citizens of the Russian Federation, was almost completely destroyed as a result of the detonation of the BC [ammunition] stored in the same building. Almost all the military equipment that stood right next to the building without the slightest sign of disguise was also destroyed.
In terms of the number of victims, there are still no final figures, since many people are listed as missing (remained under the rubble). In any case, the number of dead and wounded goes to many hundreds (approximate numbers of “200s are available, but I will not
voice them).
I was WARNED that this could happen again AT ANY TIME, since this is not the only such (extremely dense) deployment of personnel and equipment in the zone of destruction of Hymers missiles. And – yes – this is not the first such case – last year there were also quite a few of them. Although, as a rule, still with fewer victims. But our generals are untrainable in principle, although they themselves – after the summer “pogroms of headquarters” – prefer to stay away from the location of entrusted troops – outside the radius of destruction of enemy
missiles.
⭕ 1 Jan 2023
DailyBeast, Matt Lewis: Why Trump’s Reign of Republican Terror Is Really Ending https://tinyurl.com/564n3847 “The midterms turned out to be a repudiation of Trumpism, and the absence of a red wave was a breaking point for many Republicans … [L]osing elections was a bridge too far”
// He always seems to prove the haters wrong. Don’t count on that this time.
🐣 RT @Tendar The Russian base in Makiivka is but dust. HIMARS have delivered absolute carnage. An expected response for the Russian Shahed terror attacks on New Years Eve and the newest reminder that no matter where Russians position themselves, they are not safe. #Ukraine #Donetsk #Makiivka
🧵 RT @igorsushko Armed Forces of #Ukraine struck a large Russian base in #Makeevka in occupied #Donetsk, reporting that up to 400 Russian soldiers have been killed and another 300 injured. ¤ Excellent use of Precision Guided Munitions, probably #HIMARS or #M270.
📌 💽 https://twitter.com/igorsushko/status/1609688836967378950?s=20/photo/1
⋙ 🐣 RT @igorsushko UPDATE: Russian Army Command was stupid enough to gather countless hundreds of soldiers for the #NewYear celebration at School #19 in Makeevka in Donetsk. City occupied by #Russia since 2014. #Ukraine leveled the entire structure with multiple GMLRS strikes.
⋙ 🐣 RT @igorsushko UPDATE 2: It appears an entire Russian battalion based out of #Saratov was annihilated with this precision strike. ¤ Rumors non-dead Russian military commanders involved in planning the party are intending to commit suicide. ¤ Location only 12 miles from Ukrainian military positions.
⋙ 🐣 RT @igorsushko UPDATE 3: The precision strike took place at exactly 00:01 on January 1st completely leveling the 3-story building which sat on 12,750 ft2 (1,185 m2), with an entire Russian battalion from #Saratov gathered inside for a #NewYear party, just 12 miles away from the front.
⋙ 🐣 RT @igorsushko UPDATE 4: Of course there’s video of the #HIMARS launch that annihilated hundreds of Russian soldiers partying on #NewYear in occupied #Makeevka. Incredible.
// 💽 HIMARS with Christmas lights; soldier in Santa hat
🐣 RT @MuellerSheWrote WOW: A John McEntee hand-written note shows donald threatened to FIRE the secretary of the army if he made anymore statements saying the military doesn’t have a role in elections. I’m threading about this now and will release more shortly.
⋙ 🐣 RT @MuellerSheWrote Here’s the thread.
⋙⋙ 🧵 RT @MuellerSheWrote McEntees OWN NOTE said “Chris Miller spoke to McCarthy and anticipates no more statements coming out. If another happens, he will FIRE THEM”. McEntee doesn’t recall, but confirms it’s his handwriting. THE NOTE HAD BEEN TORN UP AND TAPED BACK TOGETHER BY ARCHIVES. 19/
📌 https://twitter.com/MuellerSheWrote/status/1608922431024140289?s=20
⋙ 🐣 RT @viccan1 [Reply To:] @MuellerSheWrote ‘Connect the dots’.. ¤ Christopher Miller, Trumps ‘acting’ SoD sent this memorandum to the SoA on..Jan 4th. ¤ He hobbled any possible National Guard response to the riot ¤ Miller is…COMPLICIT
[TextLink:] https://twitter.com/viccan1/status/1608974143466405892?s=20/photo/1
⋙ 🐣 RT @viccan1 [To:] @MuellerSheWrote ‘Connect the dots’.. ¤ Christopher Miller, Trumps ‘acting’ SoD sent this memorandum to the SoA on..Jan 4th. ¤ He hobbled any possible National Guard response to the riot ¤ Miller is…COMPLICIT
[TextLink:] https://twitter.com/viccan1/status/1608974143466405892?s=20/photo/1
[Text:] MEMORANDUM FOR SECRETARY OF THE ARMY
SUBJECT: Employment Guidance for the District of Columbia National Guard
This memorandum responds to your January 4, 2021 memorandum regarding the District
of Columbia request for District of Columbia National Guard (DCNG) support in response to
planned demonstrations from January 5-6, 2021. You are authorized to approve the requested
support, subject to my guidance below and subject to consultation with the Attorney General, as
required by Executive Order 11485.
Without my subsequent, personal authorization, the DCNG is not authorized the following:
• To be issued weapons, ammunition, bayonets, batons, or ballistic protection equipment
such as helmets and body armor.
• To interact physically with protestors, except when necessary in self-defense or
defense of others, consistent with the DCNG Rules for the Use of Force.
• To employ any riot control agents.
• To share equipment with law enforcement agencies.
• To use Intelligence, Surveillance, and Reconnaissance (ISR) assets or to conduct ISR
or Incident, Awareness, and Assessment activities.
To employ helicopters or any other air assets.
• To conduct searches, seizures, arrests, or other similar direct law enforcement activity.
• To seek support from any non-DCNG National Guard units.
At all times, the DCNG will remain under the operational and administrative command
and control of the Commanding General of the DCNG, who reports to the Secretary of Defense
through the Secretary of the Army.
You may employ the DCNG Quick Reaction Force (QRF) only as a last resort and in
response to a request from an appropriate civil authority. If the QRF is so employed, DCNG
personnel will be clearly marked and/or distinguished from civilian law enforcement personnel,
and you will notify me immediately upon your authorization.
[Signed:] Christopher C. Miller
Politico: Conservatives’ latest McCarthy ask: A broad Biden admin investigation https://tinyurl.com/5xme2ndu //➔The rightwing extremists w control over McCarthy need to look around & see that the country as a whole did not produce a “Red Wave” & rejected MAGAism: this will backfire
// Opponents and on-the-fence Republicans want him to set up a select committee that would probe what they term “weaponized government.”
Conservatives say they want to model the panel off the 1970s Church Committee, which conducted a landmark investigation that uncovered significant surveillance abuses among the intelligence community and the IRS, leading to the formation of the Senate Intelligence Committee. But it’s a high bar that’s almost certain to fall short. While the Church Committee was a bipartisan operation, Democrats have frequently criticized the GOP’s targeting of the FBI, and their party is highly unlikely to help fuel probes they’ve already derided as political sideshows.
And Democrats are already gearing up to rebut GOP investigations next year. Maryland Rep. Jamie Raskin, who will be on the frontlines as the top Democrat on the Oversight Committee, summed up how he views his party’s responsibilities as it deals with Republican probes: “a truth squad in the sense that we will have to debunk conspiracy theories.”
And a former senior aide to the Democratic senator who chaired the Church Committee has also criticized Republicans for trying to make the Church comparison specifically, accusing them of wanting to invoke “Church’s legacy not to push for real solutions … but to obtain impunity for themselves and punish their enemies.” …
🐣 RT @ RReverser This is so cringeworthy 😬 ¤ And, of course, on the very same New Year Eve, while everyone’s celebrating, they continued bomb attacks against civilians in Ukraine.
⋙ 🐣 RT @JuliaDavisNews During Russia’s New Year special on state TV, they openly addressed the West to say, “Like it or not, Russia is enlarging!” The rest of the clip should give you a general idea as to the mood in the studio.
💽 [tr] https://twitter.com/JuliaDavisNews/status/1609719192596381696?s=20/photo/1
🧵 RT @MaryLTrump At the end of every year since 2017, I’ve thought that the next year couldn’t possibly be worse. Obviously, after the 2016 election, we knew with crushing certainty that 2017 was going to be terrible. 1/
📌 https://twitter.com/MaryLTrump/status/1609732583151075328?s=20
⋙ 🐣 RT @MaryLTrump […] For the seventh year in a row I’m relieved to turn the page but this time it’s not because I believe that 2023 is going to be less awful, it’s because I honestly believe it’s going to be 𝙜𝙤𝙤𝙙. 8/
🐣 RT @RMCFigueiredo Glória a Ukraine 🇺🇦 paz 💝
🖼 https://twitter.com/RMCFigueiredo/status/1609294823902662656?s=20/photo/1
⋙ 🐣 I love this Annie Leibovitz photo … Z’s protectiveness toward Olena becomes a metaphor for protectiveness toward Ukraine; plus the fierceness of resolve in the eyes of both ¤ brilliant photo ♡
🐣 RT @NewVoiceUkraine President of Ukraine Volodymyr Zelenskyy thanked every Ukrainian for their contribution to future victory over Russia in his New Year’s address to the nation, which was broadcast in the last minutes of the war-torn year of 2022.
⋙ NewVoiceUkr: In historic New Year’s address, President Zelenskyy thanks Ukrainians for their courage https://tinyurl.com/2p88vsas
// tags: Zelensky New Year’s Speech Zelensky
💙 🐣 RT @kmathernova The New Year greetings of @ZelenskyyUa will surely be remembered as one of the greatest speeches in history! Slava Ukraïni! @MattiMaasikas @EUDelegationUA @MFA_Ukraine @eu_near @MaijaCelmina
💽 https://twitter.com/kmathernova/status/1609580161497792513?s=20/photo/1
// youtube Zelensky New Year’s speech
During a New Year's special on Russian state TV, they had the audacity to appropriate a Ukrainian song, "Chervona Ruta." The singer performing it was dressed as some kind of a madam. Backup dancers, unsuccessfully pretending to dance like Ukrainians, were grotesquely ridiculous. pic.twitter.com/0SK1PvUmYz
— Julia Davis (@JuliaDavisNews) January 2, 2023
🐣 RT @EuromaidanPress Ukrainian troops battling in the eastern Luhansk Oblast are focusing on Kreminna and nearby settlements. Seizing control of these key logistics points would solidify advances that began in the fall in Kharkiv. – by @rferl
🔊 [tr] https://twitter.com/EuromaidanPress/status/1609662749373603840?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @JuliaDavisNews New Year’s special on Russian state TV was creepy and surreal. Top pro-Kremlin propagandists were seated alongside military guests, whose presence was sure to remind the audience that at that very moment, Russia is bombing Ukrainian cities and slaughtering civilians next door.
💽 🎹 https://twitter.com/JuliaDavisNews/status/1609578087007621122?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @ChuckPfarrer BAKHMUT /1620 UTC 1 JAN/ RU has temporarily throttled back operations near Bakhmut. UKR forces drove away RU attacks at Bakhmutse, Podhorodne and east of the O-0507 cut-off in the industrial area. Early reports suggest Kurdiumivka has been liberated.
🌎 https://twitter.com/ChuckPfarrer/status/1609585672716689414?s=20/photo/1
TheTelegraph, Daniel Johnson: How Putin’s dream of a new Russian empire was destroyed on the fields of Ukraine https://tinyurl.com/2pvr6vwb “On paper Putin’s big battalions may outnumber Zelensky’s, but they are being outgunned, outfought and outthought”
// Far from restoring Russia’s greatness, the president’s war has reduced it to a third-rate power
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