What? Seems like it solidified even more opposition to his effort internationally. Prevailing weather patterns in the Northern Hemisphere are westerly. If they had caused a meltdown and/or explosion, what country outside of Ukraine was going to take the brunt of radioactive materials? Russia, that’s who. If any Russians had doubt he was a direct threat to them, that’ll change their minds.
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Well, if there was any doubt remaining whether Graham is a useful idiot or a Russian asset, it’s now been erased.
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March 4, 2022 (Friday)
Just a few quick markers tonight because I need some sleep.
Russia’s war against Ukraine continues. Fourteen wide-bodied aircraft from the U.S. and the European Union delivered anti-tank missiles, rocket launchers, guns, and ammunition to Ukraine today to help it hold on against Russia. The extra aid was approved less than a week ago, and the munitions began flowing two days later.
Russia’s economy continues to nosedive. The Russian stock market has been closed all week, and yesterday, a Russian stock market analyst took out a bottle and drank to the death of the stock market on live television. According to CNN’s global affairs analyst Bianna Golodryga, the Moscow Stock Exchange will remain closed through next Wednesday, and possibly beyond. Russians are fleeing their country into Finland.
Britain’s Queen Elizabeth, who is bound to be strictly neutral on political matters, withdrew invitations for a diplomatic reception issued to Russian and Belarusian diplomats to show her disapproval of the attack on Ukraine. She also gave from her private funds a “generous donation” to Ukraine humanitarian aid.
The U.S. has swung against Russia after years in which members of the Republican Party in particular have spoken admiringly of Russian president Vladimir Putin’s strength and commitment to so-called conservative values. Former vice president Mike Pence was expected to try to open up some space between Putin and the Republicans, telling a gathering of Republican donors tonight, “There is no room in this party for apologists for Putin. There is only room for champions of freedom.”
Former president Trump, who still commands loyalty from party members, has spoken admiringly of Putin’s attack on Ukraine. Pence’s statement appears to be an attempt to recenter the party away from Trump.
And, speaking of Trump, a legal filing by the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the U.S. Capitol on Wednesday said that advisors repeatedly told the former president that he had lost the 2020 election and that he nonetheless insisted on pursuing the lie that he had won. In Salon, Amanda Marcotte pointed out that Trump apparently felt comfortable pursuing the lie because he did not believe there would be any consequences for his illegal behavior.
That conviction that the former president and his cronies were above the law clearly influenced Trump advisor Roger Stone, who permitted a Danish film crew to follow him around for more than two years, including during the days before January 6, 2021.
A stunning exposé in the Washington Post today by Dalton Bennett and Jon Swaine shows that Stone helped to coordinate the “Stop the Steal” protests and met before the January 6 riot with a member of the far-right Oath Keepers group who has since pleaded guilty to seditious conspiracy. Stone refused to let the filmmakers see him for about 90 minutes during the height of the violence on January 6—an aide said he was napping—but when the extent of the crisis became clear, he slipped out of Washington on a private plane, claiming he was afraid incoming attorney general Merrick Garland would prosecute him.
Stone then lobbied hard for a presidential pardon for himself and a number of Trump supporters in Congress for trying to overturn the election. When White House counsel Pat Cipollone opposed the requests, Stone texted a friend, “See you in prison.”
Stone has categorically denied all the conclusions drawn from the film footage.
On this date in 1789, the first U.S. Congress met for the first time, operating under the U.S. Constitution and cementing it into existence.
Pretty cool we’ve kept it going for 234 years.
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March 5, 2022 (Saturday)
Russia’s war on Ukraine continues.
If the broader patterns of war apply, Russian president Vladimir Putin is making the war as senselessly brutal as possible, likely hoping to force Ukraine to give in quickly before global sanctions completely crush Russia and the return of warm weather eases Europe’s need for Russian oil and gas.
Russian shelling has created a humanitarian crisis in urban areas, and last night, a brief ceasefire designed to let residents of Mariupol and Volnovakha escape the cities through “humanitarian corridors” broke down as Russian troops resumed firing, forcing the people back to shelter. This morning, Ukraine president Volodymyr Zelensky spoke to more than 280 members of the U.S. Congress to describe Ukraine’s “urgent need” for more support, both military and humanitarian.
Today, Putin said that the continued resistance of President Zelensky and his government threatens Ukraine’s existence. He also said that the sanctions imposed against Russia, Russian companies, Russian oligarchs and their families, and himself by the global alliance arrayed against him are “akin to a declaration of war.” (Remember, saying things doesn’t make them so; words are often a posture.)
The global economic pressure on Russia and the Russian oligarchs is already crushing the Russian economy—today Mastercard and Visa suspended operations in the country—while other countries’ refusal to sell airplane parts, for example, will soon render Russian planes useless, a major crisis for a country the size of Russia. Meanwhile, support is pouring into Ukraine: aside from the military support coming, yesterday the World Bank said it was preparing ways to transfer immediate financial support.
There are suggestions, too, among those who study military strategy that the Russian invasion has been far weaker than they expected. The Russian forces on paper are significantly stronger than those of Ukraine, and by now they should have established control of the airspace. Ground forces are also not moving as efficiently as it seems they should be.
Today, Phillips P. O’Brien, Professor of Strategic Studies at University of St Andrews, outlined how the Russian military, so impressive on paper, might in fact have continued the terrible logistics problems of the Soviet Union. On the ground, they appear to have too few trucks, too little tire maintenance, out-of-date food, and too little fuel. In the air, they are showing signs that they cannot plan or execute complicated maneuvers, in which they have had little practice.
Russia expert Tom Nichols appeared to agree, tweeting: “Ukrainian resistance has been amazing, but I am astonished—despite already low expectations—at how utter Russian military incompetence has made a giant clusterf**k out of an invasion against a much weaker neighbor.”
Meanwhile, Russians are now aware that they are at war—something that Putin had apparently hidden at first—and a number are protesting. The government has cracked down on critics, and rumors are flying that Putin is about to declare martial law. It appears he is already turning to mercenaries to fight his war. The U.S. government has urged all Americans to leave Russia.
And so, time is a key factor in this war: will Russian forces pound Ukraine into submission before their own country can no longer support a war effort?
Closer to home, the Russian war on Ukraine has created a crisis for the Republican Party here in the U.S.
Aaron Blake of the Washington Post reported on Thursday that after Trump won the 2016 election and we learned that Russia had interfered to help him, Republicans’ approval of Putin jumped from about 14% to 37%.
In the Des Moines Register today, columnist Rekha Basu explained how the American right then swung behind Putin because they saw him as a moral crusader, defending religion and “traditional values,” from modern secularism and “decadence,” using a strong hand to silence those who would, for example, defend LGBTQ rights.
Now, popular support has swung strongly against the Russian leader—even among Republicans, 61% of whom now strongly dislike the man. This is widening the split in the Republican Party between Trump supporters and those who would like to move the party away from the former president.
In a tweet today, Representative Liz Cheney (R-WY) referred to the “Putin wing” of the Republican Party when she shared a video clip of Douglas Macgregor, whom Trump nominated for ambassador to Germany and then appointed as senior advisor to the Secretary of Defense, telling a Fox News Channel host that Russian forces have been “too gentle” and “I don’t see anything heroic” about Zelensky.
Possibly eager to show their participation in Ukraine’s defense, when Zelensky spoke to Congress this morning, two Republican senators—Marco Rubio (R-FL) and Steve Daines (R-MT)—shared screenshots of his Zoom call while it was going on, despite the explicit request of Ukraine’s ambassador not to share details of the meeting until it was over, out of concern for Zelensky’s safety.
In an appearance on Newsmax, Trump’s secretary of state John Bolton pushed back when the host suggested that the Trump administration was “pretty tough on Russia, in a lot of ways.” Bolton said that Trump “barely knew where Ukraine was” and repeatedly complained about Russian sanctions. Bolton said Trump should have sanctioned the Nord Stream 2 pipeline between Russia and Germany, rather than letting it proceed, and concluded: “It’s just not accurate to say that Trump’s behavior somehow deterred the Russians.”
Still, the sudden attempt of the Republicans to rewrite history cannot erase the fact that every Republican in the House of Representatives voted against impeaching Trump when he withheld $391 million in aid for Ukraine that Congress had appropriated, offering to release it only on the condition that President Zelensky announced an investigation into Hunter Biden. That is, they were willing to look the other way as Trump weakened Ukraine in an attempt to rig the 2020 election by creating a scandal he hoped would sink his chief opponent.
Democrats supported impeachment, though, and the case went to the Senate to be tried. And there, every single Republican senator except Senator Mitt Romney (R-UT), who voted to convict him for abuse of power, acquitted Trump of the charges stemming from his attempt to hamstring Ukraine in the face of Russian aggression.
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it’s good that they both decided this independently on the same day. it shows they in no way collaborate on their decision making processes and indicates there is robust competition between the two companies which handle the vast majority of our everyday transactions
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March 6, 2022 (Sunday)
It was a beautiful sunny day today in Selma, Alabama, where thousands of people, including Vice President Kamala Harris and five other senior White House officials, met to honor the 57th anniversary of Bloody Sunday, when law enforcement officers tried to beat into silence those Black Americans marching for their right to have a say in the government under which they lived.
The story of March 7 in Selma is the story of Americans determined to bring to life the principle articulated in the Declaration of Independence that a government’s claim to authority comes from the consent of the governed. It is also a story of how hard local authorities, entrenched in power and backed by angry white voters, made that process.
In the 1960s, despite the fact Black Americans outnumbered white Americans among the 29,500 people who lived in Selma, Alabama, the city’s voting rolls were 99% white. So, in 1963, local Black organizers launched a voter registration drive.
It was hard going. White Selma residents had no intention of permitting their Black neighbors to have a say in their government. Indeed, white southerners in general were taking a stand against the equal right of Black Americans to vote. During the 1964 Freedom Summer voter registration drive in neighboring Mississippi, Ku Klux Klan members worked with local law enforcement officers to murder three voting rights organizers and dispose of their bodies.
To try to hold back the white supremacists, Congress passed the 1964 Civil Rights Act, designed in part to make it possible for Black Americans to register to vote. In Selma, a judge stopped voter registration meetings by prohibiting public gatherings of more than two people.
To call attention to the crisis in her city, voting rights activist Amelia Boynton traveled to Birmingham to invite the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., to the city. King had become a household name after the 1963 March on Washington where he delivered the “I Have a Dream” speech, and his presence would bring national attention to Selma’s struggle.
King and other prominent Black leaders arrived in January 1965, and for seven weeks, Black residents made a new push to register to vote. County Sheriff James Clark arrested almost 2000 of them for a variety of charges, including contempt of court and parading without a permit. A federal court ordered Clark not to interfere with orderly registration, so he forced Black applicants to stand in line for hours before taking a “literacy” test. Not a single person passed.
Then, on February 18, white police officers, including local police, sheriff’s deputies, and Alabama state troopers, beat and shot an unarmed 26-year-old, Jimmie Lee Jackson, who was marching for voting rights at a demonstration in his hometown of Marion, Alabama, about 25 miles northwest of Selma. Jackson had run into a restaurant for shelter along with his mother when the police started rioting, but they chased him and shot him in the restaurant’s kitchen.
Jackson died eight days later, on February 26. Black leaders in Selma decided to defuse the community’s anger by planning a long march—54 miles—from Selma to the state capitol at Montgomery to draw attention to the murder and voter suppression.
On March 7, 1965, the marchers set out. As they crossed the Edmund Pettus Bridge, named for a Confederate brigadier general, Grand Dragon of the Alabama Ku Klux Klan, and U.S. senator who stood against Black rights, state troopers and other law enforcement officers met the unarmed marchers with billy clubs, bull whips, and tear gas. They fractured the skull of young activist John Lewis, and beat Amelia Boynton unconscious. A newspaper photograph of the 54-year-old Boynton, seemingly dead in the arms of another marcher, illustrated the depravity of those determined to stop Black voting.
Images of “Bloody Sunday” on the national news mesmerized the nation, and supporters began to converge on Selma. King, who had been in Atlanta when the marchers first set off, returned to the fray.
Two days later, the marchers set out again. Once again, the troopers and police met them at the end of the Edmund Pettus Bridge, but this time, King led the marchers in prayer and then took them back to Selma. That night, a white mob beat to death a Unitarian Universalist minister, James Reeb, who had come from Massachusetts to join the marchers.
On March 15, President Lyndon B. Johnson addressed a nationally televised joint session of Congress to ask for the passage of a national voting rights act. “Their cause must be our cause too,” he said. “[A]ll of us…must overcome the crippling legacy of bigotry and injustice. And we shall overcome.” Two days later, he submitted to Congress proposed voting rights legislation.
The marchers were determined to complete their trip to Montgomery, and when Alabama’s governor, George Wallace, refused to protect them, President Johnson stepped in. When the marchers set off for a third time on March 21, 1900 members of the nationalized Alabama National Guard, FBI agents, and federal marshals protected them. Covering about ten miles a day, they camped in the yards of well-wishers until they arrived at the Alabama state capitol on March 25. Their ranks had grown as they walked until they numbered about 25,000 people.
On the steps of the capitol, speaking under a Confederate flag, Dr. King said: “The end we seek is a society at peace with itself, a society that can live with its conscience. And that will be a day not of the white man, not of the black man. That will be the day of man as man.”
That night, Viola Liuzzo, a 39-year-old mother of five who had arrived from Michigan to help after Bloody Sunday, was murdered by four Ku Klux Klan members who tailed her as she ferried demonstrators out of the city.
On August 6, Dr. King and Mrs. Boynton were guests of honor as President Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Johnson recalled “the outrage of Selma” when he said “This right to vote is the basic right without which all others are meaningless. It gives people, people as individuals, control over their own destinies.”
The Voting Rights Act authorized federal supervision of voter registration in districts where Black Americans were historically underrepresented. Johnson promised that the government would strike down “regulations, or laws, or tests to deny the right to vote.” He called the right to vote “the most powerful instrument ever devised by man for breaking down injustice and destroying the terrible walls which imprison men because they are different from other men,” and pledged that “we will not delay, or we will not hesitate, or we will not turn aside until Americans of every race and color and origin in this country have the same right as all others to share in the process of democracy.”
But less than 50 years later, in 2013, the Supreme Court gutted the Voting Rights Act. The Shelby County v. Holder decision opened the door, once again, for voter suppression. Since then, states have made it harder to vote. In the wake of the 2020 election, in which voters handed control of the government to Democrats, Republican-dominated legislatures in at least 19 states passed 34 laws restricting access to voting. As legislatures start their 2022 sessions, those in at least 27 states are considering more than 250 bills with restrictive provisions.
On this 57th anniversary of the Selma march, President Joe Biden vowed to continue to promote voting access through last year’s executive order and with the help of the Department of Justice, and he called, again, for Congress to pass the Freedom to Vote Act and the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, named for the young man on the Pettus Bridge who went on to serve 17 terms in Congress. Together, these acts would protect the right to vote.
“I will continue to use every tool at my disposal to strengthen our democracy and keep alive the promise of America for all Americans,” Biden said in a statement. “The battle for the soul of America has many fronts. The right to vote is the most fundamental.”
In Selma today, Vice President Harris told the people gathered: “Today, the eyes of the world are on Ukraine, and the brave people who are fighting to protect their country and their democracy. And, their bravery is a reminder that freedom and democracy can never be taken for granted by any of us.”
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March 7, 2022 (Monday)
For all the breathless reports of Russia’s war on Ukraine, it is unclear who is gaining advantage. This is in part because both sides are fighting the war with propaganda as well as with missiles, and it is hard to sort out what is real and what is not. Indeed, image and reality may merge, since images often shape what later becomes real. So, for example, the many stories of Ukrainian resistance feed that resistance, while the stories of Russian failures hurt morale.
One thing that is absolutely clear is that Russia is firing on civilian areas indiscriminately, creating horrific damage and humanitarian crises in urban areas that two weeks ago were normal city blocks. More than 1.7 million Ukrainians have had to flee their homes.
But the war is not proceeding according to Russian president Vladimir Putin’s plans. To control Ukraine, Russia needed to take it quickly, and although its military is 8 times the size of Ukraine’s, it has not managed to do so. The Russian government has admitted the loss of 498 soldiers; U.S. officials say the number is conservatively more than 3000, and Ukrainian officials estimate the Russian troop deaths at over 10,000.
According to a briefing by a senior U.S. defense official reported by Washington Post military reporter Dan Lamothe, the U.S. assesses that the Russian combat power massed at the Ukrainian border before the war is now fully committed, and there is no evidence they are moving in more troops, although there are reports that Russia is trying to recruit soldiers accustomed to urban combat from Syria. Without the troop power it needs or an effective air assault, Russia is using long-range, inaccurate weapons that create widespread devastation.
In the short term, the Russian invasion is going far more slowly than expected and economic sanctions are biting the Russian economy hard. Officials warn that Russia will continue to grind Ukraine down, but how much Putin can afford to do over time as the sanctions hurt more and more is not clear.
Outside of the horror that is happening within Ukraine, Russia’s apparent weakness and Ukraine’s strength will almost certainly rework geopolitics.
At the very least, the underperformance of the Russian military will enable opponents to exploit the holes it now sees (today, for example, it appeared that Russia’s boasted encrypted battlefield communications system doesn’t actually work).
More, though, the missteps of the Russian army have significantly weakened the country. Estonia’s chief of defense, Lieutenant General Martin Herem, told reporters “Today what I have seen is that even this huge army or military is not so huge.” Brigadier General Rauno Sirk, commander of Estonia’s air force, said of the Russian air force: “If you look at what’s on the other side, you’ll see that there isn’t really an opponent anymore.”
Andrei Kozyrev, Russia’s foreign minister from 1990 to 1996, tweeted: “The Kremlin spent the last 20 years trying to modernize its military. Much of that budget was stolen and spent on mega-yachts in Cyprus. But as a military advisor you cannot report that to the President. So they reported lies to him instead. Potemkin military[.]”
Perhaps the actions of Hungarian president Viktor Orbán, who is facing an election on April 3, reveal how that weakness might change political alliances. Orbán had brought his country close to Russia but now opposes the invasion.
If Putin’s authoritarian government has turned out to be weaker militarily than was expected, democracies have proved stronger.
Max Bergman, a senior fellow for Europe and Russia at the Center for American Progress, noted that U.S. security assistance to Ukraine appears to have been unusually effective because it did not focus on high-tech gadgets and bells and whistles, but rather on reforming what was in 2014 a corrupt military and on helping the Ukrainian forces with basic systems, like secure cell phones, stockpiles, and resupply. It wasn’t flashy, but it appears to have been effective, helping the Ukrainians to hold their own against the Russians. If this observation holds up, it could lead to a reassessment of foreign military aid.
Logistics seem to have been key to addressing the humanitarian crisis outside Ukraine as well, as 1.7 million Ukrainians have fled their country. In two weeks, that astonishing number of refugees has been absorbed by Poland (1,028,000), Hungary (180,000), Moldova (83,000), Slovakia (128,000), Romania (79,000), Russia (53,000), and Belarus (406), and others, according to the United Nations. The communications and plans necessary simply to move that many people, let alone feed and shelter them, show an astonishing level of cooperation. Secretary of State Antony Blinken yesterday was in Moldova, the small former Soviet state that borders Ukraine, where he pledged America’s support.
The ability of European countries to come together to stand against Russia, as well as the global cooperation in cutting Russia off from the world economy, has offered an illustration of how countries can enforce a rules-based world and showed the strength of democracies.
The widespread crackdown on illicit Russian money will have an equally important long-term effect. A recent study revealed that Russian money has corrupted British politics; now we are beginning to learn just how much of it has done the same in the U.S. A piece today in the Washington Post by Peter Whoriskey explained that, according to the Anti-Corruption Data Collective, oligarchs associated with Putin have donated millions of dollars to U.S. philanthropies, museums, and universities since Putin rose to power, using their money to buy access to elite circles. Also today, a former campaign staffer for Senator Rand Paul (R-KY) has been charged with funneling Russian money into the 2016 election.
Also clear over the past month is that the U.S. seems to have finally begun to take on Russian propaganda. The administration was ahead of every Russian false flag operation and warned the world what our intelligence community believed was going to happen. This took away the element of surprise that has worked so well for Putin in the past.
Even more, though, Ukraine president Volodymyr Zelensky and his administration have replaced Putin’s popular vision of an invincible Russia with one in which the Russians seem weak and Ukraine strong, its success inevitable. They have turned Russian propaganda on its head.
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I sincerely hope European and other governments are preparing properly for this massive diaspora right now. We desperately need to take care of the mental well-being of those refugees, especially of the children, we need language and integration courses, we need to give them an occupation until they want to return. Which may well be never. Oh, and of course we need to prepare for their very imminent needs. Especially in Germany, we also need educational work and integration courses for our own population, so that we don’t end up with situations like Hoyerswerda and the like again.
Sigh. I certainly hope so.
I also hope for more communication, across all parts of society. Especially the bureaucracy. But I am not holding my breath for cooperation even between the different branches of the same Ministry in the same state, as things stand.
I am not overly pessimistic, mind. What’s accomplished so far is not terrible. But this is just the beginning of the beginning…
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March 8, 2022 (Tuesday)
This morning, President Joe Biden announced an executive order that will ban the import of Russian oil, liquified natural gas, and coal to the United States, as part of a plan to cut Russia off from the world economy.
Biden did this under pressure from Congress, which was preparing its own bill for this outcome. The administration hesitated to take this step independently from other allies and partners. In 2021, the U.S. imported only 3% of its oil from Russia, and that number has been dropping in 2022, while Europe is not in a position to cut off Russian oil, although the European Union did offer a plan to cut Russian gas imports by two thirds this year, and Britain declared it would stop importing Russian oil in 2023.
According to a new Reuters poll, 63% of Americans approve of cutting off Russian oil despite expected price hikes. Still, rising gasoline prices are a big problem, and the optics of cutting off any oil supplies right now will hurt the administration.
The government has little to do with the cost of gasoline. Since our oil companies are privately owned, the cost of oil goes up and down according to supply and demand. That, in turn, can depend on disruptions to crude oil supplies, refinery operations, or pipeline problems, or even on what people think will be future demands. Last year, in the midst of the pandemic, the economic recession meant there was little demand for oil, and prices were very low. That meant producers reduced production, and they have not yet fully ramped it up again.
Even before Russia invaded Ukraine, the booming U.S. economy meant increased demand for oil and thus increased prices. U.S. companies increased their production, but perhaps not enough to address the imbalance between supply and demand that would address soaring gasoline prices. And in that gap, oil companies made huge profits.
On February 20, 2022, Tom Wilson of Financial Times reported that the seven top oil companies, including BP, Shell, ExxonMobil, and Chevron, would return a near-record $38 to $41 billion to shareholders through stock buybacks, after distributing $50 billion in dividends. The Wall Street Journal in January noted, “While that is good for investors in the company, there are mounting concerns that there isn’t enough investment in new fossil-fuel supply to meet growing demand.”
Low supplies are driving prices up, but Republicans are trying to turn those high gas prices into a culture war, blaming Biden’s cancellation of the Keystone XL pipeline for the nation’s high gas prices. Representative Jake LaTurner (R-KS), for example, has launched a paid ad on Facebook and Twitter saying that the Keystone XL pipeline “would have produced 830,000 barrels of oil per day, more than enough to offset what we import from Russia.” Others blame Biden’s cancellation of new oil permits in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge for high prices.
In fact, both of these points are misleading.
The Keystone Pipeline, which runs from oil sand fields in Alberta, Canada, into the United States and to Cushing, Oklahoma, exists and is fully operational. The XL Pipeline consists of two new additions to the original pipeline, together adding up to 1700 new miles. One addition was designed to connect Cushing to oil refineries in Texas, on the Gulf Coast. That section was built and went into operation in January 2017.
The second extension is the one that caused such a fuss. It was to carry crude oil from Alberta to Kansas, traveling through Montana and North Dakota, where it would pick up U.S. crude oil to deliver it to the Gulf Coast of Texas. (This would have had the effect of raising oil prices in the middle of the country.) This leg crossed an international border, and thus the Canadian company building it needed approval from the State Department. The proposed pipeline would threaten water supplies in the Northwest if it leaked, for it would run over a huge aquifer, and the people who lived downstream from the proposed route, including Lakotas and members of other Indigenous tribes, protested the pipeline’s construction.
The Trump administration approved this construction, and the opposition of environmentalists, Indigenous Americans, and Democrats to the pipeline enabled Republicans to turn it into a cultural symbol, suggesting that the opposition of these groups was hobbling the economy. In fact, the company behind the project was Canadian and wanted the extension to shorten transportation routes for its oil. The winners on the American side were the refinery owners; the jobs the project would create were primarily in the construction of the project.
As soon as he took office, Biden halted the construction. But blaming today’s high prices on the cancellation of this spur of the Keystone Pipeline is a resort to that culture war. Even if Biden had not overturned Trump’s approval of the project, it would not be completed yet, and even if it were completed, there is no guarantee that it would have delivered more oil to the U.S., rather than to the ports for export elsewhere. The U.S. exports about half of its oil production to other countries, both because the crude we produce is hard for us to refine and because of the demand for it overseas. The Keystone pipeline was designed for export.
The argument that Biden’s cancellation of new oil drilling leases on public property has driven prices up is similarly misleading. On November 17, 2020, after he lost the election, former president Trump abruptly allowed oil and gas companies to pick out land for drilling rights on about 1.6 million acres of Alaska’s Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. Biden froze those permits as soon as he took office. Only about 10% of drilling takes place on public land, and there are currently about 9000 permits already issued that have not been developed.
But oil drilling on public land returns huge sums of money to the states in whose boundaries the drilling occurs; at the hearing for the confirmation of Interior Secretary Deb Haaland, Senator John Barrasso (R-WY), the top Republican on the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, said that his state collects more than a billion dollars a year in royalties and taxes from the oil, gas, and coal produced on federal lands in the state, and warned that the Biden administration’s opposition to oil permits is “taking a sledgehammer to Western states’ economies.”
Oil prices are skyrocketing because of the dislocation of the pandemic, the Russian invasion, and the disinclination of countries to buy from Russia, even though oil sales have not yet been sanctioned.
To combat those prices, the Biden administration asked Saudi Arabia to increase production; the Saudis declined. On Saturday, U.S. officials met Venezuelan president Nicolas Maduro, who has run a brutal regime, is accused of human rights violations, and is aligned with Russian president Vladimir Putin. Venezuelan oil has been under U.S. sanctions since 2019, and with Russian assets frozen, Maduro needs financial support, while the U.S. and its allies need oil. After Saturday’s talks, the Venezuela government released two of six U.S. citizens from custody, apparently as a gesture of goodwill as talks go forward.
For all the fighting over oil, Biden pointed out today that we have an interest in stopping Putin’s aggression, and that the best way to reduce the price of oil is to shift to renewable energy. “[T]ransforming our economy to run on [electric vehicles], powered by clean energy, will mean that in the future, no one has to worry about gas prices.”
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Worth noting:
Domestic oil production declined as covid hit the economy, no big shock, but has been rising since. For all the rightwing talking points about Biden killing the oil industry, the crash, such as it was, occurred under Trump and has recovered under Biden. Not that facts mean anything to the GQP, but there actually are some.
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March 9, 2022 (Wednesday)
Yesterday, the Department of Justice indicted Henry “Enrique” Tarrio on a conspiracy charge in the January 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol.
Tarrio is a leader of the far-right extremist Proud Boys, the white supremacists that former president Trump told to stand back and stand by in his September 2020 debate with Joe Biden. Tarrio was not at the Capitol itself on January 6th because a court had ordered him to leave the city the day before after destroying a Black Lives Matter banner at an earlier protest.
The indictment charges that before leaving the city, Tarrio met with Oath Keepers leader Stewart Rhodes and others in a parking garage. He also texted with someone who talked about “revolution” and sent a plan called “1776 Returns″ that called for occupying “crucial buildings” in Washington with “as many people as possible.” Tarrio allegedly agreed with the texter and added “ I’m not playing games.”
The indictment of someone who was not physically present at the riot expands the circle of those identified as part of the conspiracy. Violating the law the indictment identifies carries a sentence of up to 20 years.
Also yesterday, the Justice Department prevailed in the first case against a January 6 defendant as a jury unanimously found Guy Reffitt guilty of obstructing an official proceeding. Prosecutors produced what the New York Times called “exhaustive” evidence, illustrating just how extensive their investigations have been.
The House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the U.S. Capitol has also been busy. It has been engaged in a legal fight with John Eastman, the lawyer who wrote the Eastman memo outlining a plan for then–vice president Mike Pence to overturn the 2020 election. Eastman has been fighting desperately to stop the committee from seeing his emails around the time of the insurrection, claiming that they are covered by attorney-client privilege and that former president Trump was his client. But the committee noted that there is no evidence there was such a relationship between the two of them, and that privilege doesn’t hold if it is covering up a crime or fraud.
Each time the court has sided with the committee, Eastman has thrown more sand in the gears to slow down or stop the document review. Today, a federal judge decided he would personally review 111 emails sent between January 4 and January 7, 2021, to see if they should be protected or given to the committee.
Also today, the January 6 committee issued a subpoena to an email fundraising vendor whose ads pushed the lie that the election was stolen. The committee wants to learn more about the ads and how they motivated rioters, as well as “the flow of funds, and whether contributions were actually directed to the purpose indicated.”
Trump advisor Stephen Miller today sued to block the January 6th committee’s November subpoena for his phone records. Miller is on a cell phone plan with his parents and says that the subpoena might pick up the other numbers on the account. He also says it violates his privacy rights because there are personal communications about his wife and newborn daughter.
On March 3, the January 6 committee subpoenaed Kimberly Guilfoyle, the fiancée of Donald Trump, Jr., since she was in “direct contact with key individuals, raised funds for the rally immediately preceding the violent attack on the United States Capitol, and participated in that event.” Committee chair Bennie Thompson (D-MS) noted that Guilfoyle had “backed out of her original commitment to provide a voluntary interview.”
Other people involved in the attempt to overturn the election are in more immediate trouble. Tina Peters, the Republican clerk of Mesa County, Colorado, along with her deputy, Belinda Knisley, has been indicted by a Colorado grand jury on a number of charges stemming from the release of confidential information from the county’s election systems. That information apparently got turned over to those “investigating” the election numbers. Peters says she is simply exposing the criminality of voting machine manufacturers and politicians. She is currently running for the office of secretary of state in Colorado.
Trump’s former lawyer Sidney Powell is also in the news, this time because a committee of the State Bar of Texas asked a district court to judge Powell for professional misconduct with regard to overturning the 2020 election and to “determine and impose an appropriate sanction.”
BuzzFeed broke the story tonight that Powell, whose nonprofit has raised significantly more than $15 million, has been paying the legal expenses for members of the Oath Keepers.
Another person pushing the lie that the 2020 election was stolen, Fox News Channel personality Tucker Carlson, paradoxically strengthened a lawsuit against the network. Smartmatic, a company that makes voting machines, has sued FNC over the many instances of FNC personalities falsely claiming that the voting machines had been part of a massive voter fraud in 2020. FNC says the lawsuit is “baseless” and an assault upon the First Amendment.
Today, New York Supreme Court Judge David B. Cohen ruled that the case against FNC can go forward because the statements of its personalities were baseless and reckless. One of the key points in the decision was Carlson’s own initial dismissal of Powell’s outrageous claims. Carlson’s repeated demands for proof of her claims and her inability to provide any suggest that FNC knew, or should have known, that Powell was lying.
And yet, for all the mounting evidence that there was a conspiracy surrounding Trump to overturn the will of the voters—the centerpiece of our governmental system—in the 2020 election, key Republicans are doubling down on him.
Trump’s attorney general William Barr has just published a book detailing how Trump lied about the election and threatened democracy. And yet, on a tour to sell the book, Barr on Monday told NBC’s Savannah Guthrie that he would nonetheless vote for Trump if he were the Republican nominee in 2024. “Because I believe that the greatest threat to the country is the progressive agenda being pushed by the Democratic Party, it’s inconceivable to me that I wouldn’t vote for the Republican nominee,” he said.
This same conviction that Democrats must be stopped at all costs is pushing the drive to destroy democracy by concentrating political power in state legislatures. In a dissent this week, four right-wing Supreme Court justices indicated they support a further step in that concentration, backing a legal argument that state legislatures have ultimate power to determine their own voting procedures, including the selection of presidential electors, regardless of what a majority of voters want.
Under the dressing of new legal terminology, this is, at heart, the old state’s rights argument. If a state’s legislature can determine who gets to vote, a minority can control that legislature and entrench itself in power, passing laws that keep the majority subservient to those in control. It was this very concept Congress overrode in 1868 with the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution, saying that no state could deprive a citizen of the equal protection of the laws.
Resurrecting it now would pave the way for a January 6th–type coup through the law, rather than through the plots of a ragtag mess of insurrectionists.
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March 10, 2022 (Thursday)
On June 5, 1944, the day before the D-Day operation in which the Allied forces in World War II invaded German-occupied western Europe, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt gave his 29th Fireside Chat.
Roosevelt told the American people that Rome had fallen to American and Allied troops the previous day. He used the talk not only to announce this important milestone in the deadly war, but also to remind Americans they were engaged in a war between democracy and fascism. And while fascists insisted their ideology made countries more efficient and able to serve their people, the Allies’ victory in Rome illustrated that the ideology of fascism, which maintained that a few men should rule over the majority of the population, was hollow.
Rome was the seat of fascism, FDR told his listeners, and under that government, “the Italian people were enslaved.” He explained: “In Italy the people had lived so long under the corrupt rule of Mussolini that, in spite of the tinsel at the top—you have seen the pictures of him—their economic condition had grown steadily worse. Our troops have found starvation, malnutrition, disease, a deteriorating education and lowered public health—all by-products of the Fascist misrule.”
FDR continued: “We and the British will do and are doing everything we can to bring them relief. Anticipating the fall of Rome, we made preparations to ship food supplies to the city…we have already begun to save the lives of the men, women and children of Rome…. This, I think, is an example of the magnificent ability and energy of the American people in growing the crops, building the merchant ships, in making and collecting the cargoes, in getting the supplies over thousands of miles of water, and thinking ahead to meet emergencies—all this spells, I think, an amazing efficiency on the part of our armed forces, all the various agencies working with them, and American industry and labor as a whole.”
“No great effort like this can be a hundred percent perfect,” he said, “but the batting average is very, very high.”
That speech highlighting logistics as a key difference between democracy and fascism comes to mind these days as we watch democracy and authoritarianism clash in Ukraine.
A report last month by Washington, D.C., nonprofit Freedom House, which studies democracy, political freedom, and human rights, painted a bleak picture. “Global freedom faces a dire threat,” authors Sarah Repucci and Amy Slipowitz wrote. “Around the world, the enemies of liberal democracy—a form of self-government in which human rights are recognized and every individual is entitled to equal treatment under law—are accelerating their attacks.”
In 2019, Russian president Vladimir Putin told the Financial Times that the ideology of liberalism on which democracy is based has “outlived its purpose.” Multiculturalism, freedom, and human rights must give way to “the culture, traditions, and traditional family values of millions of people making up the core population.”
Hungary’s Viktor Orbán has been open about his determination to replace western-style democracy with what he has, on different occasions, called “illiberal democracy,” or “Christian democracy,” ending the immigration that he believes undermines Hungarian culture and rejecting “adaptable family models” with “the Christian family model.”
According to President Joe Biden, Chinese president Xi Jinping believes that autocracies are “the wave of the future—democracy can’t function in an ever complex world.”
Freedom House documents that for sixteen years, global freedom has declined. Authoritarians are undermining basic liberties, abusing power, and violating human rights, and their growing global influence is shifting global incentives toward autocratic governments and away from democracy, “jeopardizing the consensus that democracy is the only viable path to prosperity and security, while encouraging more authoritarian approaches to governance.” Over the past year, 60 countries became less free, while only 25 improved.
“They’re going to write about this point in history," Biden told a group of news anchors in April 2021, shortly after he took office. “Not about any of us in here, but about whether or not democracy can function in the 21st century…. Things are changing so rapidly in the world, in science and technology and a whole range of other issues, that—the question is: In a democracy that’s such a genius as ours, can you get consensus in the timeframe that can compete with autocracy?”
The last few weeks have demonstrated the same advantage of democracy over authoritarianism that FDR saw in the fall of Rome. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine was supposed to demonstrate the efficient juggernaut of authoritarianism. But Putin’s lightning attack on a neighboring state did not go as planned. Ukrainians have insisted on their right to self-determination, demonstrating the power of democracy with their lives.
At the same time, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has shown the weakness of modern authoritarianism. Putin expected to overrun a democratic neighbor quickly, but his failure to do so has revealed that his army’s perceived power was FDR’s “tinsel at the top”: lots of bells and whistles but outdated food, a lack of support vehicles, conscripted and confused soldiers, and compromised communications. The corruption inherent in a one-party state of loyalists, unafflicted by oversight, has hollowed out the Russian military, making it unable to feed or supply its troops.
That authoritarian government, it turns out, depended on democracies. As businesses pull out of Russia, the economy has collapsed. The ruble is worth less than a penny, and the Russian stock market remains closed. Today, the Russian economic ministry announced it would take the property of businesses leaving the country. Notably, it claimed the right to take about $10 billion of jets that had been leased to Russian airlines, quite possibly a way to get spare parts for the airplanes the huge country needs and can no longer get.
Putin is trying to prop up his power by insisting his people believe lies: on Friday, he signed a law making it a crime for media to produce any coverage the government says is “false information” about the invasion. He is now pushing the false claim that the U.S. is developing biological weapons in Ukraine, and has requested a meeting of the U.N. Security Council tomorrow to discuss this issue. Pentagon spokesman John Kirby called the story “classic Russian propaganda.”
In contrast, democracies and allies, marshaled into a unified force in large part by Biden, Secretary of State Antony Blinken, and the U.S. State Department, have done the boring, complicated, hard work of logistics, diplomacy, and intelligence, a combination that has crushed the Russian economy and is enabling the Ukrainian army to hold off an army 8 times its size. While there is a horrific humanitarian crisis inside Ukraine, those over the borders have managed the extraordinary logistics of processing and moving 2 million refugees from Ukraine in two weeks.
In 1944, FDR pointed out that democratic government was messy but it freed its people to work and think and fight in ways that authoritarian governments could not. In Fireside Chat 29, he warned his listeners not to read too much into the fall of Rome, because fascism had “not yet been driven to the point where [it] will be unable to recommence world conquest a generation hence…. Therefore, the victory still lies some distance ahead." But, he added, “That distance will be covered in due time—have no fear of that.”
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OK, a couple generations hence, and that distance has yet to be covered. Our generation must leave a better legacy to our future than what Trump and Putin are presaging. “Once more, into the breach, dear friends. Once more into the breach.”
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March 11, 2022 (Friday)
If I took a night off last weekend, I don’t remember it, and I am tired, tired, tired.
So I’m turning tonight’s letter over to my friend Nadia Povalinska, who has recently fled her home in Ukraine, and who has graciously shared her love of her country with me over the years.
I love Nadia’s images of Ukraine, and this one especially. It is from before the war, just a few weeks and a lifetime ago.
I’ll see you tomorrow.
[Photo by Nadia Povalinska]
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March 12, 2022 (Saturday)
In our history, the United States has gone through turning points when we have had to adjust our democratic principles to new circumstances. The alternative is to lose those principles to a small group of people who insist that democracy is outdated and must be replaced by a government run by a few leaders or, now, by a single man.
The Declaration of Independence asserted as “self-evident” that all people are created equal and that God and the laws of nature have given them certain fundamental rights. Those include—but are not limited to—life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. The role of government was to make sure people enjoyed these rights, and thus governments are legitimate only if those they rule consent to that government.
The Founders’ concept that all men were created equal and had a right to consent to the government under which they lived, the heart of the Declaration of Independence, was revolutionary. For all that it excluded Indigenous Americans, Black colonists, and all women, the very idea that men were not born into a certain place in a hierarchy and could create a government that reflected such an idea upended traditional western beliefs.
From the beginning, though, there were plenty of Americans who doubled down on the idea of human hierarchies in which a few superior men should rule the rest. They argued that the Constitution was designed to protect property alone and that as a few men accumulated wealth, they should run things. Permitting those without property to have a say in their government would mean they could demand that the government provide things that might infringe on the rights of property-owners.
These undercurrents have always tossed our republic, but four times in our history, new pressures have brought these two ideas into open conflict. In the 1850s, 1890s, and 1930s and in the present, we have had to fit our democracy to new circumstances.
In the 1850s, the pressures of western expansion forced Americans to figure out what, exactly, they wanted the nation to stand for. Northern states, whose mixed economy needed educated workers, and thus widely shared economic and political power, opposed the hierarchical system of human enslavement. Southern states, whose economy rested on the production of raw materials by enslaved workers, opposed equality. Aside from occasional flare-ups, the two systems had muddled along together for sixty years, despite the reality that the enslavers were shrinking farther and farther into the minority as population in the North boomed.
The U.S. acquisition of western land with the 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo opened the opportunity for enslavers to address their weakening position by dominating the national government. If they could spread enslavement into the new territories, they could overawe the North in Congress and pass laws to make their system national. As South Carolina Senator James Henry Hammond put it: "I repudiate, as ridiculously absurd, that much lauded but nowhere accredited dogma of Mr. Jefferson that ‘all men are born equal.”’
When Congress, under extraordinary pressure from the pro-southern administration, passed the 1854 Kansas-Nebraska Act, overturning the Missouri Compromise and letting slavery spread into the West, northerners of all parties woke up to the looming loss of their democratic government. A railroad lawyer from Illinois, Abraham Lincoln, remembered how northerners were “thunderstruck and stunned; and we reeled and fell in utter confusion. But we rose each fighting, grasping whatever he could first reach—a scythe—a pitchfork—a chopping axe, or a butcher’s cleaver” to push back against the slaveowning oligarchy. And while they came from different parties, he said, they were “still Americans; no less devoted to the continued Union and prosperity of the country than heretofore.”
Slavery apologists urged white voters not to worry about Black Americans held in slavery, but Lincoln urged Americans to come together to protect the Declaration of Independence. "I should like to know if taking this old Declaration of Independence, which declares that all men are equal upon principle and making exceptions to it where will it stop?.. If that declaration is not the truth, let us get the Statute book, in which we find it and tear it out!”
When voters agreed with Lincoln and elected him to the presidency in 1860, southerners tried to create their own nation based on human inequality. As Georgia Senator Alexander Stephens, soon to be the vice president of the Confederacy, explained in March 1861: “Our new government is founded…upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery subordination to the superior race is his natural and normal condition. This, our new government, is the first, in the history of the world, based upon this great physical, philosophical, and moral truth.”
In office, Lincoln reached back to the Declaration—written “four score and seven years ago”— and charged Americans to “resolve that…this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom—and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”
The victory of the United States government in the Civil War ended the power of enslavers in the government, but new crises in the future would revive the conflict between the idea of equality and a nation of hierarchies.
In the 1890s, the rise of industrialism led to the concentration of wealth at the top of the economy. Steel baron Andrew Carnegie celebrated the “contrast between the palace of the millionaire and the cottage of the laborer,” for although industrialization created “castes,” it created “wonderful material development,” and “while the law may be sometimes hard for the individual, it is best for the race, because it insures the survival of the fittest in every department.” Those at the top were there because of their “special ability,” and anyone seeking a fairer distribution of wealth was a “Socialist or Anarchist…attacking the foundation upon which civilization rests.” Instead, he said, society worked best when a few wealthy men ran the world, for “wealth, passing through the hands of the few, can be made a much more potent force for the elevation of our race than if it had been distributed in small sums to the people themselves.”
Once again, people of all political parties came together to reclaim American democracy. Although Democrat Grover Cleveland was the first to complain that “corporations, which should be the carefully restrained creatures of the law and the servants of the people, are fast becoming the people’s masters,” it was Republican Theodore Roosevelt who is now popularly associated with the development of a government that regulated the excesses of big business. He complained about that “small class of enormously wealthy and economically powerful men, whose chief object is to hold and increase their power,” and ushered in the Progressive Era with government regulation of business to protect the ability of individuals to participate in American society as equals.
The rise of a global economy in the twentieth century repeated the pattern. After socialists took control of Russia in 1917, American men of property insisted that any restrictions on their control of resources or the government were a form of “Bolshevism,” but in the 1930s a worldwide depression brought voters of all parties behind President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who used the government to provide a “New Deal for the American people.” His government regulated business, provided a basic social safety net, and promoted infrastructure. Then, after Black and Brown veterans coming home from World War II demanded equality, that New Deal government, under Democratic president Harry Truman and Republican president Dwight D. Eisenhower, worked to end racial and, later, gender hierarchies in American society.
Now, once again, we are at an inflection point. The rise of global oligarchs and the internet, which enables those oligarchs to spread disinformation, has made significant numbers of American voters once again slide away from democracy to embrace the idea that the country would work better with a few leaders making the rules for the rest of us. In nineteen states, Republican-dominated legislatures have passed laws that restrict the vote and entrench minority rule, even up to allowing state legislatures to overturn election results. If that is permitted to stand, that minority can choose our president, and it is increasingly backing one single man, one individual, to rule over the rest of us.
If history is any guide, we are at the point when voters of all parties must push back, to say that we do, in fact, believe in the principles stated in the Declaration of Independence, that all people are created equal, and that our government is legitimate only if we have a say in it.
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March 13, 2022 (Sunday)
Russian president Vladimir Putin has asked China for help in his war against Ukraine, according to U.S. officials. Observers see this as a defining moment for China and the direction it wants to take in the twenty-first century. In what might be a sign of how China will react to that request, the spokesperson for the Chinese embassy in Washington said he had never heard of it. "The high priority now is to prevent the tense situation from escalating or even getting out of control,” he said.
Meanwhile, Russian forces struck a military facility in Ukraine about 15 miles from the Polish border. Poland is a member of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), and by the terms of the treaty establishing NATO, “an armed attack against one or more of them in Europe or North America shall be considered an attack against them all,” and the parties will retaliate accordingly.
Biden has repeatedly warned that NATO will respond to any attack on a member country, but Russian state TV continues to insist that no NATO country will actually help another. This assertion has observers concerned that Putin might widen the war to involve NATO, which would give him the legitimacy he needs to justify his war of aggression.
Others say that these events indicate weakness and frustration on Putin’s part. As the Russian invasion has gone more slowly than he had apparently anticipated, the Russian military is firing indiscriminately at civilian targets, evidently trying to terrorize the country into submission. But the troops are underfed and undersupplied, and there appear to be too few of them to subdue Ukraine. Ukraine’s Euromaidan Press says that Russia has opened 14 recruitment centers in Syria.
The strike in western Ukraine near the Polish border killed at least 35 people and wounded more than 100. The facility received western arms shipments. National security adviser Jake Sullivan said the strike “does not come as a surprise” but “shows…that Vladimir Putin is frustrated by the fact that his forces are not making the kind of progress that he thought that they would make against major cities including Kyiv, that he’s expanding the number of targets, that he’s lashing out and he’s trying to cause damage in every part of the country.”
Sullivan also said that the U.S. is very concerned that Russia will use chemical weapons. It has falsely accused Ukraine and the U.S. of preparing chemical weapons, which might well be a warning that Putin intends to use them himself.
Putin, of course, has used chemical weapons before, most recently against opposition leader Alexei Navalny. His goons also did so on March 4, 2018, in the U.K, in a poisoning of former Russian spy Sergei Skripal. That poisoning seemed to be a sign that Putin was confident enough in his power that he was willing to kill someone in England and dare then–prime minister Theresa May to do something about it.
What happened next seemed to illustrate Putin’s growing security in the face of weak U.S. and European resistance. May condemned the attack, as did U.S. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson. But May couldn’t do much because Brexit had isolated England and then-president Trump refused to back her. He promptly fired Tillerson, along with one of Tillerson’s deputies who contradicted the White House version of why Tillerson was out. Russian state TV then warned May not to threaten a country armed with nuclear warheads. And, just about then, Republicans in the House exonerated Trump from “colluding” with Russia in the 2016 election, outright rejecting the evidence and findings of our own intelligence community.
There remains a lot to learn not only about why former president Trump allowed such aggression, but also about why members of the Republican Party were willing to look the other way when U.S. policy under Trump benefited Russia—when the U.S. abruptly withdrew from northern Syria in October 2019, for example, or when Trump withheld money appropriated for Ukraine’s defense to pressure Ukraine president Volodymyr Zelensky into helping him rig the 2020 election.
At least part of the answer to that question is the disinformation campaign launched by Russia to undermine our democracy. False stories in the media have divided us and convinced many people in the U.S. of things that are simply lies.
Former representative Tulsi Gabbard (D-HI) released a video today echoing Russia’s false story of “25 to 30 U.S. funded bio labs in Ukraine,” and demanded a ceasefire to secure them.
Later this afternoon, White House press secretary Jen Psaki tweeted: "This is preposterous. It’s the kind of disinformation operation we’ve seen repeatedly from the Russians over the years in Ukraine and in other countries, which have been debunked, and an example of the types of false pretexts we have been warning the Russians would invent.” Senator Mitt Romney (R-UT) slammed Gabbard for “parroting false Russian propaganda.”
David Corn of Mother Jones today broke another news story: a Russian government agency distributed a 12-page document to media outlets telling them, “It is essential to use as much as possible fragments of broadcasts of the popular Fox News host Tucker Carlson, who sharply criticizes the actions of the United States [and] NATO, their negative role in unleashing the conflict in Ukraine, [and] the defiantly provocative behavior from the leadership of the Western countries and NATO towards the Russian Federation and towards President Putin, personally….”
The call to feature Carlson is in the section titled “Victory in Information War.”
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March 14, 2022 (Monday)
Today, Russia continued its offensive against Ukraine, striking hard at civilians in Kyiv and Mariupol. The Russian army is gaining ground, but it appears to be sustaining massive losses of personnel and equipment which, in turn, is making leaders focus on grinding Ukraine into submission through sheer brutality.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) and Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) announced that Ukraine president Volodymyr Zelensky will speak virtually to Congress on Wednesday morning. They said: “The Congress remains unwavering in our commitment to supporting Ukraine as they face [Russian president Vladimir] Putin’s cruel and diabolical aggression, and to passing legislation to cripple and isolate the Russian economy as well as deliver humanitarian, security and economic assistance to Ukraine. We look forward to the privilege of welcoming President Zelenskyy’s address to the House and Senate and to convey our support to the people of Ukraine as they bravely defend democracy.”
American focus on the horrors unleashed on Ukraine has clarified our own struggle between democracy and authoritarianism here at home.
In the Freedom House 2022 report on the dire threat to global freedom, released last month, authors Sarah Repucci and Amy Slipowitz noted that “democracies are being harmed from within by illiberal forces, including unscrupulous politicians willing to corrupt and shatter the very institutions that brought them to power.” Their primary example was that of the United States, which “has fallen below its traditional peers on key democratic indicators, including [presidential] elections, freedom from improper political influence, and equal treatment of minority groups.”
Repucci and Slipowitz explained that in the U.S. and elsewhere, “Undemocratic leaders and their supporters… have worked to reshape or manipulate political systems, in part by playing on voters’ fears of change in their way of life…. They have promoted the idea that, once in power, their responsibility is only to their own demographic or partisan base, disregarding other interests and segments of society and warping the institutions in their care so as to prolong their rule. Along the way, the democratic principles of pluralism, equality, and accountability—as well as basic stewardship and public service—have been lost, endangering the rights and well-being of all residents.”
To solidify their hold on power, they have spread distrust in elections, as former president Donald Trump famously did in the 2020 election season even before his loss to Democrat Joe Biden, claiming that he would only lose if there were fraud. National, state, and local officials lined up behind Trump to try to overturn the election results, spreading the Big Lie that Biden’s election was illegitimate. The result was the assault on the U.S. Capitol.
That failed, but those who backed it, as Repucci and Slipowitz note, “continue to exert significant influence on the US political system,” while those “who refused to display loyalty to the former leader faced political marginalization, severe intraparty pressure, and outright threats of violence.” They continue to push the lie that the Democrats stole the 2020 election and must be stopped before the 2022 midterms.
To that end, after Biden took office, 19 states passed 34 laws restricting access to voting, and six states launched illegitimate partisan reviews of election results. The trend continues: according to the Brennan Center for Justice, an independent, nonpartisan law and policy organization defending U.S. democracy and justice, as of January 14, 2022, lawmakers in at least 27 states have backed 250 bills with restrictive provisions. The Big Lie has also led to the replacement of nonpartisan election boards with partisans, changing systems in place for decades.
“It is now impossible to ignore the damage to democracy’s foundations and reputation,” Repucci and Slipowitz wrote in February.
But now, Putin’s war on Ukraine has clarified the contest between democracy and authoritarianism even as the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the U.S. Capitol is uncovering just how close we came to our own authoritarian coup.
This confluence is uncomfortable for a number of Republicans, who see Putin’s declared support for traditional values and the implicit white supremacy in that support as part of a global conservative movement they like. Since the 1980s, U.S. evangelicals have embraced Russian Orthodox leaders concerned with the falling birthrate of white people. Since at least 2013, when Putin formally began an attack on LGBTQ rights, sparking outrage in liberal democracies, that embrace has become more widespread. With that attack, Putin claimed he was putting Russia at the forefront of conservative opposition to “genderless and fruitless so-called tolerance” which he said “equals good and evil,” goals right-wing Americans applauded.
As Putin has come to represent to them an attack on the secular social norms and civil rights embraced by democracies, Republicans have increasingly openly admired his declared stand for “traditional values.” In 2014, shortly after the Ukrainians rose up and ousted Russian-allied president Viktor Yanukovych, who had been installed with the help of American political operative Paul Manafort, Republicans began to back Putin over then-president Barack Obama. Evangelical leader Franklin Graham praised Putin’s attack on gay rights for protecting children from “the damaging effects of any gay and lesbian agenda,” while Obama and his attorney general “have turned their backs on God and His standards, and many in the Congress are following the administration’s lead. This is shameful.”
Trump’s pressure to shift U.S. foreign policy away from our traditional democratic allies and toward Russia was almost certainly a reflection of the financial benefits of dealing with oligarchs and illicit money, but others undoubtedly were willing to follow because they believed they were defending “traditional values” and children, especially as stories of pedophilia rings flooded the internet.
But now, Putin’s vicious attack on Ukraine has stripped away the unspoken link between “traditional values” and authoritarianism.
Some right-wing leaders nonetheless cannot quit him: Fox News personality Tucker Carlson’s monologues are so supportive of Putin they are being replayed on Russian state television, Representative Madison Cawthorn (R-NC) has called Zelensky a thug and says democratic Ukraine is “incredibly evil and has been pushing woke ideologies,” and Representatives Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) and Paul Gosar (R-AZ) were part of a conference in which white nationalists cheered on Putin’s attack on Ukraine and chanted his name.
But others recognize that they have been caught on the wrong side of history. According to an Economist/YouGov poll, Americans believe by a margin of 70 to 11 that Putin is committing war crimes. At the same time, the findings of the January 6 committee reveal that the pro-Putin wing of the Republican Party appears to have been willing to overturn our own liberal democracy so long as it could get what it wanted.
A tape today revealed that Cawthorn called into a right-wing talk show on January 6th and said he had brought “multiple weapons” with him that day, suggesting he had known what was planned. Also today, Ginni Thomas, the wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, appeared to be trying to get ahead of a story about her participation in the events of January 6 when she told her story to the right-wing Free Beacon. It reported: “She did not help organize the White House rally that preceded the riot at the Capitol. She did attend the rally, but got cold and left early. And most importantly, in her view, her involvement with the event has no bearing on the work of her husband, Supreme Court justice Clarence Thomas.”
How will all this play out? Trump’s attorney general William Barr is currently trying to sell his new book on a tour trying to whitewash his own participation in the Big Lie, but while he blamed Trump for trying to overthrow our democracy, he nonetheless suggested he would vote for him if he were the Republican nominee in 2024, “because I believe that the greatest threat to the country is the progressive agenda being pushed by the Democratic Party.”
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March 15, 2022 (Tuesday)
“I want to thank the Russian Academy for this Lifetime Achievement Award.”
That was former secretary of state Hillary Clinton’s response to the news that her name was among those of the people Russia sanctioned today, forbidding their entry into Russia and freezing any Russian assets they might have. Clinton, of course, was the one who warned in 2016 that then-candidate Donald Trump would be “[Russian president Vladimir] Putin’s puppet” if he were elected.
What jumped out about that Russian announcement, though, was that it singled out not American lawmakers in general, but Democrats, and for that matter, Democrats who were targets of the right-wing propaganda machine. So the “sanctions” hit President Joe Biden (or, as White House press secretary Jen Psaki noted, his deceased father, since they missed that the current president is Joseph Robinette Biden, Jr.), Secretary of State Antony Blinken, as well as Psaki. They also covered former secretary of state Clinton and Joe Biden’s son Hunter Biden, both of whom are private citizens and involved in present-day politics only in that they are targets of the modern right-wing media.
The list made it clear that Putin and his U.S. supporters are engaged in a propaganda campaign.
In contrast, the U.S. extended sanctions today to Belarusian president Alexander Lukashenko, who turned to Putin to shore up his own waning popularity before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and who is now stuck on Putin’s side. The administration also sanctioned Lukashenko’s wife, Halina, and a number of Russians targeted for human rights abuses, along with 11 military leaders.
That the tide is turning against Putin was indicated today by former president Trump’s new tone on the Russian president today. While it was notable that Trump would never criticize Putin, even after his invasion of Ukraine, tonight Trump told Washington Examiner reporter David M. Drucker, “I think he’s changed. I think he’s changed. It’s a very sad thing for the world. He’s very much changed.”
The leaders of Poland, Czechia, and Slovenia thumbed their noses at Putin today when they visited Kyiv itself by train to show their support for Ukraine. They traveled to the city despite ongoing Russian shelling that has taken countless lives, including those of five journalists documenting the atrocities.
Those atrocities convinced the U.S. Senate today to pass a resolution condemning Putin as a war criminal, while a new U.S. funding bill appropriated an additional $13.6 billion in aid to Ukraine.
The attack on democracy at home is not being as clearly condemned.
We are starting to see the effects of Russian money on our own political system. Today, we learned that Russian oligarch Andrey Muraviev has been indicted by a federal grand jury for funneling $1 million in political donations through Lev Parnas and Igor Fruman, associates of Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani, to candidates in the 2018 election. A $50,000 donation apparently went to a political action committee called the “Friends of Ron DeSantis Political Action Committee” in June 2018. After DeSantis won the election, Muraviev and his partner texted congratulatons* to Parnas and Fruman on “victory in Florida.”
Today, the Republican National Committee sued its own email vendor, Salesforce, to try to block it from responding to a subpoena from the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the U.S. Capitol. The committee subpoenaed information about fundraising emails sent by Salesforce, soliciting money by lying that the 2020 election had been stolen. The committee is interested in seeing if any of that money actually went to the causes for which it was solicited, and in following how those emails, with their false, inflammatory messages, encouraged the attack on January 6. The RNC says it is suing “in order to protect the constitutional rights of the Republican Party and its millions of supporters.”
The Freedom to Vote Act would stop the flood of dark money into our elections by requiring the disclosure of the identities of any person or organization donating $10,000 or more to campaign activity. But while the Senate easily passed legislation today to make daylight saving time permanent beginning in 2023 by voice vote, it cannot pass voting rights legislation since all Republicans oppose it. (The daylight savings law will now go to the House.)
Ukraine president Volodymyr Zelensky will speak to Congress tomorrow morning and is expected to ask for more help. Lawmakers have expressed frustration that the Biden administration is not, in their view, moving quickly enough to defend Ukraine, and his speech is expected to increase criticism of the Biden administration.
That criticism is coming primarily from Republican lawmakers who, of course, refused to remove Trump when he withheld support for Ukraine in 2019 in an attempt to get Zelensky to attack Joe Biden, but who are now saying that Biden is not defending Ukraine powerfully enough. Their insistence that the U.S. move unilaterally against Russia plays to our natural sympathies for the suffering country of Ukraine, but it is also a back-door attack on Biden’s extraordinarily successful multilateral approach to Russia’s aggression.
The North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) makes decisions only through consensus. By moving without NATO, the U.S. would undercut NATO and the global consensus that Biden and Secretary of State Blinken have taken incredible care to create and that is now crushing the Russian economy and isolating Putin. The administration’s coalition against Putin is extraordinarily delicately balanced, and that balance will collapse if the U.S. heads off on its own in a resurrection of the unilateral action that the U.S. has embraced for the past forty years.
After Zelensky’s address, Biden is expected to announce another $800 million in security assistance from the U.S. to Ukraine, putting the total at $1 billion in the last week and $2 billion total since Biden took office. Biden announced today he will head to Brussels, Belgium, next week to meet with NATO leaders about Russia’s war on Ukraine. He is expected to reaffirm the U.S. commitment to NATO.
*I deliberately misspelled this word because it was triggering Facebook’s usual red boldface for when the word is used.
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This captures what angered me about that news yesterday. I hope it will be featured in campaign ads for GOP opponents. With the Putin supporters/apologists, misuse of campaign contributions, and Jan 6 planning/participation, there’s plenty of material to convince more voters that these pols aren’t acting in the interests of their constituents or the country.
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March 16, 2022 (Wednesday)
Today, Russia’s war on Ukraine gave us a penetrating snapshot of democracy and autocracy.
This morning, Ukraine president Volodymyr Zelensky addressed a joint session of Congress virtually; his speech was live streamed to the American people. Looking tired, he wore a green military tee shirt and was unshaven, sitting next to a large Ukrainian flag, a visual representation of his besieged country.
Speaking from Kyiv, Zelensky emphasized that he and Ukrainians were fighting to be free, to preserve their democracy, and he reminded Americans of our own declared principles.
“Russia has attacked not just us, not just our land, not just our cities. It went on a brutal offensive against our values, basic human values. It threw tanks and planes against our freedom, against our right to live freely in our own country, choosing our own future, against our desire for happiness, against our national dreams, just like the same dreams you have, you Americans.”
He urged Americans to remember our own darkest days, Pearl Harbor and 9/11, and begged for a no-fly zone. Knowing that is unlikely—it would initiate a world war—he asked for planes to protect the skies over Ukraine. He thanked the U.S. and President Joe Biden for their support, but asked for more. In addition to continuing economic sanctions, he called for new institutions and new alliances to respond to provocations more quickly than the world has done for Ukraine.
It is, indeed, unimaginable what destruction Putin has rained down on Ukraine in less than three weeks: just today we learned that Russians deliberately bombed a theater where more than 1000 people, including many children, had taken shelter, apparently revisiting the technique of targeting children and civilians he developed in Chechnya and Syria. Zelensky showed a six-minute video of the destruction in Ukraine, showing how a country that only three weeks ago was full of people just going about their lives has turned into a war zone.
“Peace in your country doesn’t depend anymore only on you and your people,” Zelensky said. “It depends on those next to you and those who are strong. Strong doesn’t mean big. Strong is brave and ready to fight for the life of his citizens and citizens of the world. For human rights, for freedom, for the right to live decently, and to die when your time comes, and not when it’s wanted by someone else, by your neighbor.”
“Today, the Ukrainian people are defending not only Ukraine,” Zelensky said, “we are fighting for the values of Europe and the world, sacrificing our lives in the name of the future. That’s why today the American people are helping not just Ukraine, but Europe and the world to give the planet the life to keep justice in history.” He called attention to how very young he is to be leading the global fight for self-determination, and the extraordinary weight he is bearing. “Now, I am almost 45 years old; today, my age stopped when the hearts of more than 100 children stopped beating. I see no sense in life if it cannot stop the deaths. And this is my main issue as the leader of my people, great Ukrainians.”
“And as the leader of my nation, I am addressing…President Biden, you are the leader of… your great nation. I wish you to be the leader of the world; being the leader of the world means to be the leader of peace. Thank you. Glory to Ukraine. Thank you for your support. Thank you.”
In contrast, Russian president Vladimir Putin gave a public speech that Russia specialists saw as the launch of a fascist dictatorship. He continued to defend his invasion of Ukraine and claimed he was in an existential war for his country’s survival. He warned his people that the West was counting on “the so-called fifth column, on national traitors,” to destroy Russia. He identified those people as a culturally weak global elite who did not identify “with our people, not with Russia.” They believe they are better than Russians, he said, and would do anything to keep their lifestyle.
The West, he said, is trying to split Russians and is using that “fifth column” to achieve its goal of destroying Russia. He called for Russians to distinguish true patriots from “scum and traitors”—political opponents and dissidents—and to get rid of the latter like bugs. “I am convinced that such a natural and necessary self-purification of society will only strengthen our country, our solidarity, cohesion and readiness to respond to any challenges.”
Russia specialist Anne Applebaum tweeted: "Putin’s call for a ‘self-purification’ of Russian society can have only one intention: To remind Russians of Stalin and his ‘purges.’ He wants them to be haunted by dark, ancestral memories, to remember their grandparents’ stories and to be petrified with fear.” Indeed, Russian authorities promptly launched a crackdown against anyone who showed any sympathy for western culture, beginning with a popular lifestyle blogger who had expressed opposition to the war on Instagram.
Putin’s show of force internally may well reflect his weakness externally. The Pentagon estimates conservatively that the Russians have lost a staggering 7000 soldiers in less than three weeks in the invasion of Ukraine, more than the U.S. lost in 20 years in Iraq and Afghanistan combined. Officials estimate they have an additional 14,000 to 21,000 injured, out of a deployed fighting force of 150,000. Evelyn Farkas, the top Pentagon official for Russia and Ukraine during the Obama administration, told New York Times reporters Helene Cooper, Julian E. Barnes, and Eric Schmitt, “Losses like this affect morale and unit cohesion, especially since these soldiers don’t understand why they’re fighting.”
Meanwhile, sanctions imposed by countries around the world are strangling the Russian economy. Reuters today reported that Russia is “on the brink of its first default on international debt since the Bolshevik revolution [of 1917].” A Russian political scientist tweeted: “I have collected some thoughts on the immediate impact of sanctions on the Russian economy.” The short version: “30 years of economic development thrown into the bin.” “All in all, no other economy in the world has experienced anything like this—extreme de-globalization in a matter of days.”
Today, Secretary of State Antony Blinken said that sanctions would remain until there is no chance that Russia could ever again launch the sort of invasion Putin has launched against Ukraine. The U.S. Departments of Treasury and Justice launched a task force with Australia, Canada, the European Commission, Germany, Italy, France, Japan, and the U.K. to freeze and seize assets of sanctioned oligarchs. The Treasury Department also began today to offer bounties of up to $5 million for information leading to “seizure, restraint, or forfeiture of assets linked to foreign government corruption.”
All but about 40 American companies have pulled out of Russia, according to Judd Legum and Rebecca Crosby of Popular Information. Koch Industries, the second-largest privately owned business in America, is staying put. Political groups affiliated with right-wing billionaire CEO Charles Koch oppose broad sanctions and have suggested the U.S. should remain neutral in the crisis.
Meanwhile, a deepfake video of Zelensky calling for Ukrainians to surrender to Russia made the rounds on social media today. The false video used artificial intelligence to graft words onto Zelensky’s image.
Tonight, Russia specialist Julia Ioffe told MSNBC: “Every time I’m asked by Americans do Russians really believe this stuff… as if we don’t have the same thing happening here. You have 40% of the American population that was convinced in just one year that Donald Trump actually won the 2020 election….”
And, indeed, Trump loyalists like Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) and Fox News personality Tucker Carlson continue to echo Russian talking points to undercut Ukraine’s war effort. Media scholar Eric Boehlert noted that “the anti-democratic, authoritarian bonds are becoming tighter as the Trump movement now turns to the Kremlin for its messaging cues. The overlap is undeniable, and the implications are grave.”
Even more striking was white nationalist Nick Fuentes’s encouragement for people to pray for what he called the brave Russian soldiers fighting to “liberate Ukraine from the Great Satan and from the evil empire in the world, which is the United States.” Fuentes is an extremist but not an isolated one; both Greene and Representative Paul Gosar (R-AZ) spoke at a recent conference he organized (Greene in person; Gosar virtually), and House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) took no action to disavow their participation.
After Zelensky spoke today, Biden announced another $800 million in military equipment for Ukraine, including 800 anti-aircraft systems. “What’s at stake here are the principles that the United States and the united nations across the world stand for,” he said. “It’s about freedom. It’s about the right of people to determine their own future.”
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