And he so, so profoundly unserious. In his position, it’s a problem. He should be a clown on a public-access children’s show that nobody watches.
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It has nothing to do with support. It has everything to do with fear. Propaganda isn’t persuasion.
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Yes, but it’s not in the round-up for TPM Morning Memo.
My opinion is that it’s pretty important, but it didn’t make the cut for the round-up on this site.
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DeSantis whines
This about sums the guy up.
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There’s a lot of “analysis” of this fiasco but it seems to boil down to a ce4ntral theme. Putin is NOT a genius, his army is NOT bad ass and most of what we heard about Russia’s vaunted military capability was bullshit. Experienced military folks watching this say much the same thing: the soldiers do not appear to be well trained, their equipment is older than thought and prone to failure and morale is so low soldiers my be sabotaging their equipment to avoid fighting what they consider a brother. Putin’s original surgical blitzkrieg plan has failed due to unexpected Ukrainian heroism so he’s resorting sledge hammering out a victory with massive firepower and destruction.
He must not have paid much attention to the USA’s catastrophe in Iraq.
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I’m not sure if it’s a net victory, but the only rationale would seem to be to reinforce the idea that Putin’s capable of using nukes, that he wouldn’t necessarily shrink from that. NATO might be tearing him a new one within minutes if we knew otherwise. At the very least we’d be giving the Ukrainians all the warbirds they could fly and anything else they wanted.
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Then why am I not afraid?
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Well, yeah, considering we’ve reached the criterion for full employment, which is UE less than 4%.
And this was as of December. It’s probably lower than 3.9% now.
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CNN: America added 678,000 jobs in February
FOX: OH CRAP! but wait a minute … were there any non-whites hired? What were their credentials? Can we see the SAT scores & grade transcripts…
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It was the lead story yesterday and it’s still on the home page today. Just saying.
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Short of doing what the NATO and other allied countries in the EU and elsewhere are currently doing there’s not much else to do but wait and hope. Yes, we could seize more yachts, BoJo could work harder at constraining the Oligarchs from liquidating their UK property, Macron could step up his “giving Putin a piece of his mind” campaign. Undoubtedly other actions involving confiscations and shunnings, are possible but regardless of what the UA foreign minister wants, everyone knows that NATO will not get involved unless a member state gets attacked. Both the combatants knew this from the beginning. It feels like watching someone getting mugged and not being allowed to intervene. We’re all just observers. And by the way, like Jedi mind tricks, propaganda works on the feeble minded.
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I think 3.8 now.
And January numbers were revised upward to 481,000 new jobs and the labor force participation rate ticked up to 62.3 percent.
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The German side of my family often ask me why I haven’t visited for over a decade. The truth is I don’t like Germany. I’ve witnessed and experienced the hate they have for foreigners several times. It’s the only country outside of Israel that I’ve experienced it.
This gives me another reason.
The stockpile of missiles Germany plans to give to Ukraine to help it fight back against Russian invaders is partly made up of unusable old rockets left over from the East German army in the 1980s, according to reports. German newspaper Der Spiegel reported that some 700 of the 2,700 anti-aircraft missiles promised to Ukraine can’t be used and are stored in boxes that are so moldy they have to be handled with protective equipment. Citing the report, Bild noted that the rockets are at least 35 years old and were deemed unusable in 2012 due to “microcracks in the ammunition’s propellant charge, which led to corrosion/oxidation.” According to Bild , Germany’s Federal Security Council has yet to approve the delivery of the 2,700 shoulder-fired weapons, which are known as Strela.
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Amazing read, and pretty damning. There’s a 90-minute window at the height of the siege where the filmmakers weren’t allowed to see him as the Willard because he was “napping”. Along with a few other very juicy nuggets.
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Some of the MSM fuels that propaganda victory, of course. The Russian troops occupy the plant, but the Ukrainians are still operating the plant.
Will that change? At some point it’s nearly certain, but for now at least, the guys pushing buttons and flipping switches are still the ones with the know-how.
Not trying to quibble, but I felt that was an important bit of info.
ETA: I see that with my slow cellphone posting, @ralph_vonholst has that precise info
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I hope the Feds can nail this fucker to the wall, right through his Nixon tattoo.
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Don’t think a bunch of Ukrainian hostages being used as forced labor is exactly something to celebrate?
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