Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

I see no possible difficulties whatsoever with this fool-proof plan.

Republicans: slavery is when you own me. freedom is when I own you.

Jesus, Mary, & Joseph how is that election even close?

American History and Black History can not be separated.

I conferred with the team and they all agree – still not tired of winning!

“Cheese and Kraken paired together for the appetizer trial.”

Too often we confuse noise with substance. too often we confuse setbacks with defeat.

Cole is on a roll !

Marge, god is saying you’re stupid.

Good lord, these people are nuts.

“In the future, this lab will be a museum. don’t touch it.”

If senate republicans had any shame, they’d die of it.

One of our two political parties is a cult whose leader admires Vladimir Putin.

“But what about the lurkers?”

So it was an October Surprise A Day, like an Advent calendar but for crime.

Oh FFS you might as well trust a 6-year-old with a flamethrower.

if you can’t see it, then you are useless in the fight to stop it.

When do we start airlifting the women and children out of Texas?

Even though I know this is a bad idea, I’m off to do it anyway!

If you’re pissed about Biden’s speech, he was talking about you.

Let’s finish the job.

Within six months Twitter will be fully self-driving.

Biden: Oh no. We’ve upset Big Pharma again.

Fight for a just cause, love your fellow man, live a good life.

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Late Night Open Thread: Once You Really Get to Know Him, Though…

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Poor Ukraine!

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It’s not enough that Donald Trump extorted Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelensky, to manufacture dirt on the Bidens if he wanted the military aid he desperately needed to continue to defend eastern Ukraine. To add insult to injury, a bunch of American journalists who know nothing about Ukraine have descended on Kyiv to report on how all this affects the United States, with maybe a little local color and perhaps a misstep from Zelensky.

Christopher Miller, who is based in Ukraine and has been reporting from there for years, has had it with the parachuted-in journalistic troops.

Besides hounding Zelensky, reporters have also bombarded those of us who’ve reported in Ukraine for years. “Hey! Love your Ukraine reporting! Wanna grab a coffee or a drink?” they’ve said — code for “Tell me all your secrets and give me your sources, and I’ll put your $1 Lvivske beer on the company card.” And when we’ve offered contacts — some whose trust we’ve spent years trying to earn — these outsiders have bombarded them with queries too, and often mischaracterized their words, actions that ultimately forced many underground.

The reporters come flying in like flaming meteorites. And they leave with the earth scorched behind them.

Do they even care? That’s not me wondering (although I do wonder); it’s the many Ukrainians whom I see every day asking me for insight into just what the fuck is going on. They’re worried about the picture that reporters and talking heads are painting of their country of 40 million people, which is struggling to root out corruption, trying to jumpstart its economy, and fighting for literal survival in a war fueled by an authoritarian ruler — Russia’s Vladimir Putin — who is hell-bent on seeing it collapse. And a scan of US media suggests their concerns are warranted.

I have great sympathy for this, having been anywhere from annoyed to horrified at articles on Estonia, a place I know quite a bit about that is perhaps even more obscure to American reporters than Ukraine. I’m having a flashback to a New York Times article about Sillamäe, the town where I helped get an enormous tailings pond cleaned up. There were a number of things wrong or questionable about the town and the processing plant that had caused the environmental problems – I don’t recall them all. The most inexcusable error, though, was the claim that the reporter had seen the lights of Narva across the bay from Sillamäe. Nope. No way. He never even looked at a map.

Highway 1 (E20 in Russia) goes more or less straight east to Narva, the town that our newsies like to use as the place that the Russian invasion/ subversion will take place. I disagree with that, but will do so at length some other time.

What probably confused our intrepid reporter was that the lights he saw were from Narva-Jõesuu, which means “the mouth of the Narva River,” which he would have known if he had learned just a little bit of Estonian. (“Is it like Russian?” “No.”)

Narva-Jõesuu is a resort town, and Narva is a typical city. Narva-Jõesuu lost much of its clientele when the border between Estonia and Russia (the Narva River in this area) became less passable. Narva has a couple of cool castles glaring across the river at each other, though.

Anyhoo, take what American reporters write about Ukraine with a grain of salt, and think about the real people who live in Ukraine and are trying to deal with some very difficult issues.

Open thread!

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Foreign Affairs Guest Post: Brexit Election News – “I DON’T KNOW WHERE YOU’RE GOING TO, BUT I WOULDN’T START FROM HERE”

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Boosted from the comments section, blog favourite Tony Jay:

And they’re off!!!

Yes, finally, about bloody time as well. As what will almost certainly be the most important national election in British History since 1979 gets underway the presumed frontrunner, a much-fancied thoroughbred with an awful lot of big money riding on his ample posterior, has already emptied his bowels straight out of the gate, slip-slid on skittering legs straight into the very first fence and now lies, twitching and whinnying, on the much befouled track as multiple sobbing Paramedi(a)cs try desperately to get him back in the race, while from the stands a grim faced Judge begins his descent, mercy-piece cocked and at the ready.

Is that a metaphor or an analogy? Why don’t I understand things? I blame someone.

If you’ve been listening to British Media outlets cover the topic of UK politics at any point over the last millennium (has it only been two years? Really? Is that all?) you’d almost certainly have come away with the distinct impression that this Election was very much a dead rubber. Labour were totes doomed, the Liberal Democrats were on the surge and, though the SNP were due to wipe out all the other parties in Scotland with their message of “Drank mah pish, y’anglash cants”, the only thing standing between the Tory Party of Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson and an absolute majority in Parliament was the foreign-backed influence project known colloquially as ‘The Brexit Party’ and its intermittently confrontational national Gauleiter, Nigel Farage. This narrative wasn’t just set in stone, it was perma-frozen there by an unchallenged certainty that “Boris”, as his journalistic fans insist on calling him, was simply far too witty and nimble and beloved by the Average Voter for his impression of a jolly decent cove just trying hard to do the absolute best he could on behalf of Queen and Country for anyone on the Opposition benches to lay a glove on him. He’d have this all wrapped up in a matter of days and the only question was how big his win would be.

It would be an understatement of pron-cocktacular proportions to say that this narrative has proven to be, ahem, somewhat flawed.

Where do we even start with the meth-brained way the Tories have gone about the relatively well-defined business of getting themselves elected by actual living voters rather than the access-journalists they used to go to school with?

Let’s begin with Jacob Rees-Mogg, the huffily anachronistic Tory spokesman for the Department of Why Good Blood Will Out, Sirrah!, who took time away from lurking noncorporeally in the blighted ether twixt Dream and Nightmare to go on the radio and pronounce in clipped tones of flat finality that the many of the 72 poor, foreign-born peasants who burnt to death in the Grenfell Fire Tragedy back in 2017 had only themselves to blame for lacking the simple common-sense to ignore the Fire Brigade’s clear instructions to remain in their homes and instead move downstairs, perhaps to the shelter of the family crypt, or possibly the main wine-cellar, where they could have at least enjoyed a nice glass or two of Merlot while awaiting rescue. It didn’t take long for the stench of Rees-Mogg’s comments to breed pushback from the lower classes, and soon he was forced to release a statement in which he clarified that he was, of course, terribly sorry to have been unclear in his original wording and had in fact meant to say entirely the opposite of whatever it was the peons had taken offense to.

Ever the good little Conservative the BBC’s Political Editor Laura Kuenssberg was quick to praise Moggy for the speed of his apology after his ‘gaffe’. I’m sure you meant well, you bargain-basement Halbermann, but I’m afraid you didn’t help. ‘Gaffe’? People asked. What ‘gaffe’? Sneering at dead people for not having the intelligence to ignore mere functionaries isn’t a gaffe, it’s what you do when you’re a Tory scumbag trying to redirect blame away from the private contractor who broke the law to clad the building in cut-price flammable material and the local Tory council who studiously ignored all of the warnings and complaints from the tenants because they didn’t have any financial incentive to give a shit what the serfs were jibber-jabbering about.

Obviously, the next step was to bring in a professional crisis-manager, someone with the nous and the guile to pluck Rees-Mogg from the jaws of peril and fob-off the angry common folk until the Media had got bored and moved on. Obviously, yes, but that bit of common-sense didn’t occur to the mavens down at Conservative Central, because instead they wheeled out oyster-mouthed Brextremist wind-instrument and all-round blistering fuckwit Andrew Bridgen, a sad-trombone sound effect of a man who knows he was lucky to feature in the first series of the inexplicably popular reality-show ‘Britain Does Brexit’ and is so desperate to eke out his 15-minutes of fame that he’ll appear on late-night Japanese TV with a live squid hanging out of his rectum if that’s what it takes to stay ‘relevant’. His argument was that, while Rees-Mogg’s comments were “uncharacteristically clumsy”, his good friend was so “intelligent and compassionate” that what he’d clearly meant to say was that he would simply have given the residents better advice than those know nothing “experts” with their “plans” and “regulations”. Trust a Brextremist to advocate blind obedience to the ill-informed, that’s more or less their native credo. Sorry, Andrew, you’re never going to get that invite to Moggy’s country estate. You’re neither wealthy nor well-born enough, and under that cheap cologne you smell like a prole.

Moving on, there’s the matter of the Intelligence Report on Russian Interference in British Politics, including but not confined to the 2016 Election, which should have been released weeks ago but is now being kept on the down low until after the 2019 Election. Everyone involved in its creation and clearance has affirmed that it’s gone through all of the necessary stages of expert classification and is ready to be released to Parliament and the public in time to be useful, what with a General Election only weeks away. So, what’s the problem? Johnson, of course. He won’t release it. Various BS reasons have been advanced, none of them lasting very long under the intense heat of very mild questioning, and it’s coming down to the simplest of Occam’s Razors: it’s not being released because Johnson and his advisors (mainly long-term Russophile Dominic Cummings) are petrified of what’s in it.

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Mikhail Gorbachev, Hero

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As the world watched the Soviet Union breaking apart in the late 1980s – early 1990s, there was much fear that things could go badly wrong and even escalate to nuclear war.

Mikhail Gorbachev, who had become the First Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in 1985, had introduced reforms that he believed would reinvigorate the Soviet economy. But movements in the satellites, like Solidarity in Poland, wanted independence. There were similar movements in the Soviet republics. Those movements used Gorbachev’s reforms for their own interests.

This month is the 30th anniversary of Gorbachev’s releasing the satellites – Poland, Czechoslovakia (now Czech Republic and Slovakia), Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, and East Germany – from Soviet rule. Two years later, the 15 Soviet republics became independent countries.

Hard-liners in Moscow would have used force to prevent those outcomes. There were some clashes with the Soviet internal police, OMON, and military forces were ordered into some of the republics as demonstrations took place. But Gorbachev decided against major force and allowed the Soviet Union to dissolve, even though it was not the outcome he wanted.

The United States has become too accustomed to using force to solve problems. Russia has become an international spoiler, looking for ways to create chaos. With 14,000 nuclear weapons between them, this is unsustainable.

Gorbachev is speaking out.

And Don’t build a wall between Russia and the West.

He will always be a hero to me for handling the Soviet Union’s breakup peacefully. Not so much in Russia, where that breakup led to misery for many.

What he’s saying isn’t outstandingly new, but it’s always worth hearing, especially from someone who stared war in the face and walked away.

 

 

 

 

 

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Trump & the Trumplodytes Open Thread: Resentful Losers Run Amuck

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The story is members-only, but the teaser tweet did remind me of a certain notorious American personality who’s spent the last quarter-century complaining that nobody appreciates him like he DESERVES…

… Mr. Trump, whose own tweets have warned of deep-state plots against him, accused the House speaker of treason and labeled Republican critics “human scum,” has helped spread a culture of suspicion and distrust of facts into the political mainstream.

The president is also awash in an often toxic torrent that sluices into his Twitter account — roughly 1,000 tweets per minute, many intended for his eyes. Tweets that tag his handle, @realDonaldTrump, can be found with hashtags like #HitlerDidNothingWrong, #IslamIsSatanism and #WhiteGenocide. While filters can block offensive material, the president clearly sees some of it, because he dips into the frothing currents and serves up noxious bits to the rest of the world.

By retweeting suspect accounts, seemingly without regard for their identity or motives, he has lent credibility to white nationalists, anti-Muslim bigots and obscure QAnon adherents like VB Nationalist, an anonymous account that has promoted a hoax about top Democrats worshiping the Devil and engaging in child sex trafficking…

To assess this unprecedented moment, The New York Times examined Mr. Trump’s interactions with Twitter since he took office, reviewing each of his more than 11,000 tweets and the hundreds of accounts he has retweeted, tracking the ways he is exposed to information and replicating what he is likely to see on the platform. The result, including new data analysis and previously unreported details, offers the most comprehensive view yet of a virtual world in which the president spends significant time mingling with extremists, impostors and spies.

Fake accounts tied to intelligence services in China, Iran and Russia had directed thousands of tweets at Mr. Trump, according to a Times analysis of propaganda accounts suspended by Twitter. Iranian operatives tweeted anti-Semitic tropes, saying that Mr. Trump was “being controlled” by global Zionists, and that pulling out of the Iran nuclear treaty would benefit North Korea. Russian accounts tagged the president more than 30,000 times, including in supportive tweets about the Mexican border wall and his hectoring of black football players. Mr. Trump even retweeted a phony Russian account that said, “We love you, Mr. President!”…

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Why Ukraine?

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As the corruption of the Trump administration is exposed, I keep two questions in mind: Why Ukraine? and Why energy? The simple answer is that they are where the money is. The more extended answers will be more interesting.

Natural gas seems to be the current focus in energy, but Michael Flynn had a bizarre plan to partner with the Russians to sell nuclear reactors in the Middle East and continues today in Rick Perry’s dealings with Saudi Arabia.

Information on Ukraine seems to be coming together now, although we almost certainly don’t have the final word. And energy plays a part.

Russia has always wanted buffer areas between its heartland and its neighbors. Ukraine is more than that, though. An origin story of the Russian empire put it in Ukraine. Vladimir Putin played up that story earlier on in his quest to bring Ukraine back into Russian influence. Ukraine was the Soviet Union’s breadbasket, being further south than most of the Russian Republic and thus more effective at growing wheat. Its factories built Soviet missiles.

Ukraine’s proximity to Europe and other markets made it the center of natural gas distribution for the Soviet Union. That centralization also made it easy for Vladimir Putin to cut off natural gas to Ukraine, although the cutoff had the unwelcome side effect of keeping some of Russia’s gas from being sold to Europe. So Russia is building the Nord Stream 2 pipeline to bypass Ukraine.

For Ukraine to be a buffer for Russia, it must be a weak state, subservient to Russia. But part of Ukraine’s value to Russia is also what could give it independent strength: its farming and industrial sectors, along with Black Sea ports for trade.

Ukraine was one of the fifteen independent countries to emerge from the Soviet Union. Although it is close to Europe, its path since 1991 has been less successful than that of the Baltic states. That is largely because of corruption in its government.

The Ukrainian people since then have moved against corruption in fits and starts. Viktor Yushchenko became president in 2005 on a reform agenda. During his campaign, he was poisoned, probably by Russia, but survived. His presidency was unsuccessful and followed by that of Viktor Yanukovych, who leaned toward Russia and brought back corruption in a big way.

In February 2014, Yanukovych was run out of office by popular demonstrations and fled to Russia. A few months later, Russia occupied the Crimean Peninsula and started a war in the eastern provinces of Ukraine, known collectively as the Donbas.

If Ukraine couldn’t be kept down by corruption, Russia would act more directly.

The next president, Petro Poroschenko, managed the loss of Crimea and the war in the Donbas while introducing anticorruption measures. But Russia’s military actions necessarily slowed down his ability to deal with corruption.

Volodymyr Zelensky was elected president in April of this year. Russia still occupies Crimea, and the war in the Donbas continues. To that has been added an American president who uses military aid as a lever to force Zelensky into a corrupt scheme for his advantage in the American elections. David Ignatius speculates that Poroschenko may have been subjected to this kind of corruption too. Maksym Eristavi, a Ukrainian journalist, points out that this American behavior looks a lot like the bad old Ukrainian behavior.

From the American side, the connections are not clear. Trump’s former lawyer, Michael Cohen, now in prison, has been rumored to have connections to Ukrainian and Russian organized crime through his father in law, but this has not been proved.

Two middlemen, Lev Parnas and Igor Fruman, have been working for both Rudy Giuliani and Dmytro Firtash. Firtash is under house arrest in Austria and has been involved with both natural gas companies in Ukraine and Russian organized crime.

Secretary of Energy Rick Perry has urged the Ukrainian government to put a couple of Americans on the board of the state natural gas company.

Paul Manafort, also in prison, worked for Viktor Yanukovych before he worked for Donald Trump. And, like Rudy Giuliani, he charged Trump nothing for his services. Firtash has been connected to Manafort.

Not all these dots are connected yet. It’s possible that people simply saw a weak state with illicit money flowing into it from Russia and decided to take advantage. Or we may learn more as Congressional hearings continue.

 

Cross-posted to Nuclear Diner

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Late Night Open Thread: Au Revoir, Little Red Sparrow

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One day you’re the NRA’s top pin-up girl, the next you’re (allegedly) fighting for food in an American prison:

… Eagerly anticipating Butina’s impending liberation, Russian state media outlets expected to live-stream her release, but U.S. authorities had other plans. Having traveled to the Tallahassee Federal Correctional Institution from Atlanta, Georgia and Jacksonville, Florida, Russian state TV stringers were stranded for hours filming traffic, building exits and geese on the lawn. Meanwhile, Butina was quietly whisked out of the facility and transferred to the custody of ICE for a speedy deportation back to Russia…

Appearing on 60 Minutes—the most popular news talk show in Russia—the correspondent of Russia’s state-TV channel Rossiya-24 Valentin Bogdanov pointed out that the Western media no longer dares to call Butina a spy. “They’re being careful,” Bogdanov said, speculating that media outlets are afraid of being sued for using the wrong language. In the Kremlin-controlled Russian media, Butina is being described mainly in glowing terms…

Working at the direction of a Russian government official, Alexander Torshin, Butina infiltrated Republican political circles and the National Rifle Association around the time of the 2016 election in order to promote Russian interests. In September of 2019, an investigation by Senate Democrats determined that the NRA has acted as a “foreign asset” in providing Russian officials access to US political organizations.

In court documents, prosecutors argued that Butina’s efforts had the hallmarks of a Russian espionage operation, suggesting that she was acting as a “spotter” by identifying people who have the ability to influence policy in Russia’s favor, as a set of targets Russian spies could potentially cultivate. Investigators from special counsel Robert Mueller’s team questioned Butina on only one occasion for approximately an hour. Her name was left out of the final version of the Special Counsel’s redacted report. Many questions about the full scope of Maria Butina’s activities in the United States remain unanswered…

There is little doubt that Maria Butina will be actively used by Russian state media for anti-American propaganda. Butina also has other plans. In April, she told CNN that she might start tutoring Russian students who want to study in America.

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