How’s that war in Ukraine going, anyway?

It seems to have settled into a long deadly grind, with Russia committed to capturing the city of Bakhmut and Ukraine committed to defending it, with both sides pouring troops into the months-long battle, and what they’re getting out of it is a lot of dead people and a bombed out city. Russia says they’ve finally succeeded, while Ukraine says they’ve still got a toe-hold and are busy encircling the city. It sounds to me like they both lost.

Even if I grant the Russians their “triumph,” it doesn’t seem to have been worth it.

In a lengthy interview with Konstantin Dolgov, a political operative and pro-war blogger, Prigozhin, the founder and leader of the Wagner mercenary group, also asserted that the war has backfired spectacularly by failing to “demilitarize” Ukraine, one of President Vladimir Putin’s stated aims of the invasion. He also called for totalitarian policies.

“We are in a situation where we can simply lose Russia,” Prigozhin said, using an expletive to hammer his point. “We must introduce martial law. We unfortunately … must announce new waves of mobilization; we must put everyone who is capable to work on increasing the production of ammunition,” he said. “Russia needs to live like North Korea for a few years, so to say, close the borders … and work hard.”

Yikes. Russia started a war of aggression, and that’s what victory means — they have to become like North Korea? That’s a complete failure. Sure, close your borders, enslave your own population, alienate the rest of the world, and claim you won.

Of course, the people in charge will still get to live luxurious lives.

Citing public anger at the lavish lifestyles of Russia’s rich and powerful, Prigozhin warned that their homes could be stormed by people with “pitchforks.” He singled out Ksenia Shoigu, the daughter of Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu, who was spotted vacationing in Dubai with her fiancé, Alexei Stolyarov, a fitness blogger.

“The children of the elite shut their traps at best, and some allow themselves a public, fat, carefree life,” Prigozhin said in the interview, which was released Wednesday on video. “This division might end as in 1917, with a revolution — when first the soldiers rise up, and then their loved ones follow.”

I guess a Russian would know. Of course, Putin would know this too, and would know that he’s got to keep the pressure on, and that losing the war in Ukraine would possibly be the real trigger for revolution, more so than spoiled rich kids flaunting their wealth.

The Republican brand: incompetence and ideology

Ron DeSantis announced his presidential run yesterday, with Elon Musk at his side, using that technological marvel called Twitter. It did not go well.

Twitter’s livestream event with Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis crashed and was delayed on Wednesday as hundreds of thousands of users logged on to hear DeSantis announce his bid for the White House.

Sound from the livestream event — which was held on Twitter Spaces and hosted by owner Elon Musk and tech entrepreneur David Sacks — cut in and out in the first minutes after starting.

“We’ve got so many people here that we are kind of melting the servers,” Sacks said at one point.

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis at his election night party in Tampa, Florida, in November 2022.
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis announces he’s running for president in 2024
More than 500,000 Twitter users joined the event, which was ultimately ended and then restarted, delaying DeSantis’ announcement by nearly half an hour. When the event was relaunched using Sacks’ account, only around 250,000 users ultimately listened in.

Twitter has faced a variety of outages and technical issues since Musk took over the platform late last year. Shortly after acquiring the company, Musk laid off large numbers of technical and other staff and reduced Twitter’s server capacity in an effort to cut costs.

Oh please oh please oh please. May the right wing continue to rely on Elon Musk on technical issues. It’s like a perfect model of how Republican policies work. Errm, don’t work, that is.

Compare and contrast

Here’s the Republican party:

Meanwhile, the Minnesota Democratic party is actually being effective. Follow that link for the long, long list of progressive accomplishments we got just this past year. Democrats who actually fought for labor and education and immigrants and gun control and abortion and trans rights? Unheard of!

This is not a blanket approval for the national Democratic party, however. The article points out how other state parties have failed.

All told, it’s quite the record of accomplishment—all done in less than half a year, and with a governor, Walz, who was not notably progressive in his prior career in Congress. One wonders why it is so difficult to get anything even remotely similar done in solid-blue states like New York, where Gov. Kathy Hochul has been faceplanting on minor things like getting a state judge confirmed or passing moderate housing reform to bring down her state’s sky-high rents.

I suspect the difference is that Minnesota Dems had to run on a serious progressive agenda to win. By all accounts, the backlash to Dobbs was especially important in the 2022 midterms. Where New York Democrats generally win easily, and so the Democratic establishment focuses above all on maintaining its control of the party machine and associated patronage, Minnesota Democrats have to actually represent their constituents. It turns out when a political party has a coherent agenda that it actually tries to carry out, it can get a lot done.

Oh, a coherent agenda and also a sense that they have to live up to their promises. Those sound like good things for a political party. One of our American afflictions is parties whose main mission is to simply get re-elected year after year.

All it takes is a one-vote majority to do great things

Here’s a Twitter thread worth reading. Minnesota done good.

Pay attention, Democratic parties everywhere:

Among the many things accomplished, some were of personal interest: they increased education spending by 10%, and also made college tuition at our public colleges (like the one I work at!) free to all Minnesota families with income under $80K.

Brain bleach, stat

I’ve been poisoned with unwanted images of a corrupt 70-year-old Republican hopped up on Viagra demanding that a young woman service him, over and over.

Giuliani also took Viagra constantly. While working with Ms. Dunphy, Giuliani
would look to Ms. Dunphy, point to his erect penis, and tell her that he could not do any work until
“you take care of this.” Thus, Ms. Dunphy worked under the constant threat that Giuliani might
demand sex from her at any moment. Even when the Covid-19 pandemic halted Giuliani’s ability
to physically assault her, he demanded that she disrobe during their work-related
videoconferences.

It’s gross and disgusting and vile, but exactly what I should have expected of Giuliani.

A bombshell lawsuit out of Manhattan accuses Rudy Giuliani of forcing a former employee to submit to sex acts as a condition of her employment — including making her give him oral sex while he took calls from then-President Donald Trump on speaker phone.

“He often demanded oral sex while he took phone calls on speaker phone from high-profile friends and clients, including then-President Trump,” ex-staffer Noelle Dunphy claims in the 70-page lawsuit filed Monday.

“Giuliani told Ms. Dunphy that he enjoyed engaging in this conduct while on the telephone because it made him ‘feel like Bill Clinton,'” according to the lawsuit, which seeks $10 million in unpaid wages and damages.

Like the worst of Bill Clinton.

I don’t want to hear more about the sex stuff, but I do want the law to dig deeper into the money stuff.

The lawsuit also alleges — buried on page 25 — that Giuliani asked Dunphy for help “selling pardons” for $2 million a pop. Giuliani told her that he and Trump “would split” the fee, the lawsuit alleges.

“He also asked Ms. Dunphy is she knew anyone in need of a pardon, telling her that he was selling pardons for $2 million, which he and President Trump would split,” the lawsuit says.

Dunphy said she continued to work for Giuliani despite being “shocked and saddened by what had happened” because she feared losing the $1 million salary he had promised as well as free legal representation he had also agreed to give her.

It’s amazing how you can sit here thinking the crap from the Trump administration couldn’t possibly get worse, and then it does.

CNN’s hour of lies

Last night, CNN hosted a town hall for Trump. I didn’t watch it. My trust in the that news outlet was already low, but after they announced they were going to host this debacle, I’m writing the network off. The town hall was a catastrophe for the truth.

Donald Trump’s long-awaited return to CNN went off the rails almost immediately on Wednesday night, with the former president using the exclusive town hall event to repeatedly lie, mislead viewers, and steamroll CNN moderator Kaitlan Collins—all to the delight of a Trump-adoring crowd.

From the very first seconds of the town hall, Trump was lying. When Collins opened the event with a softball—“Why should Americans put you back in the White House?”—Trump immediately leaned into his normal election lies. He repeated debunked theories and passionately argued the election was stolen.

When he got his first question from the crowd—Will you suspend the “polarizing” talk about election fraud?—a question that had already been answered in the first minute of the town hall, Trump just pushed forward with more disproven election falsehoods.

Collins, by the way, was recruited from Tucker Carlson’s Daily Caller. The CNN executives had to know she was a poor choice, on top of knowing that Trump was going to lie non-stop, and that his audience was going to love it. They figured it out partway through (I knew what was going to happen last week when I heard about this nonsense — put me in charge of CNN, already, I’m smarter than anyone there.)

Halfway through the town hall, CNN staffers were acknowledging the event was a disaster for the truth.

“This is so bad,” one of CNN’s on-air personalities told The Daily Beast before the first commercial break. “I was cautiously optimistic despite the criticism… it is awful. It’s a Trump infomercial. We’re going to get crushed.”

“One of the worst hours I’ve ever seen on our air,” another CNN staffer told The Daily Beast.

And yet another on-air commentator for CNN was clear this wasn’t a good night for the cable news channel. “I’m floored by this whole evening,” this person said.

Right now, analysts at the network are reading over the viewership stats, and if this hour of non-news and MAGA propaganda was popular, you can expect to see lots more of it for the next year and a half.

Wait, I just realized the presidential race has already begun, and is going to go on interminably. Another reason to turn CNN off.

Fuck all of these guys.

I don’t want to be at the mercy of people like Harlan Crow

One of the excuses I’m seeing from defenders of Clarence Thomas and Harlan Crow is the claim that Crow was being generous and kind and you don’t want to discourage people from being kind, do you? Dahlia Lithwick is having nothing to do with that.

There’s also something specifically infuriating about the way defenders of the deep spiritual kinship between Harlan Crow and Clarence and Ginni Thomas root their argument in the fact that paying for an at-risk youth’s private school tuition is a noble act—“charity” even. The problem with that is, this is a conservative legal movement that is racing to subvert voting, public education, the administrative state, and (at present) the possibility of student loan forgiveness. So Harlan Crow’s replacement of an entire New Deal safety net with an ad hoc charitable benefits system administered by himself and directed only at the offspring of personal friends is specifically infuriating. Because the kids who receive the generosity of the Crow’s private charity are not yours, and the kids who receive the protections of EPA regulation are not yours, and the kids who receive the benefits of going to schools where nobody will shoot them are not yours. The beauty of Leonard Leo and Harlan Crow is that they always get to determine who benefits—and guess what? Unless and until you are related to a sitting Supreme Court justice: It will be not you.

The lesson we are learning from the new scandals at the high court go way beyond “ethics” reform. This is no longer an ethics problem. This is a democracy reform problem, and it signals first and foremost an effort to deform democracy to serve the Harlan Crows and the Leonard Leos of the world. It also signals a view of democracy in which they will determine whose private life is private and who are the “gossips.” (You may still know them as “journalists.”)

Right, let’s replace the social safety net with crony capitalism. That’s not generosity, that’s selfishness.

Guilty, but it won’t matter

Trump was found guilty of sexual assault on E. Jean Carroll, but keep in mind that this was a civil trial, not a criminal case, so he can’t be punished with jail time, only a fine. A $5 million fine. It will do nothing.

  • Trump won’t pay it. If we know anything of the man, it’s that he doesn’t pay his debts.

  • His audience of gullible authoritarian morons won’t care.

  • He’s going to continue his run for the presidency.

  • The media will continue to treat him as a serious politician, and court his approval.

It’s a moral victory, but Republicans don’t care about morality.

Every accusation a confession

See that guy draped with ammo for his gun? That’s Bryan Slaton, a Republican slimeball from Texas, who committed an act that finally got him ousted from the legislature.

A Republican Texas state lawmaker who once proposed to ban children from attending drag shows to supposedly shield them from being groomed for abuse has resigned after he was found to have engaged in inappopriate sexual conduct with a 19-year-old intern.

Bryan Slaton, 45, resigned Monday while facing mounting calls from the state’s Republican party and conservative groups to step down. A state House investigation last week determined that he supplied alcohol to the intern and another young staffer, had sex with the intern after she had become intoxicated, and later showed her a threatening email while saying everything would be fine if she kept quiet about the encounter.

He is not a nice man.

Slaton, who has called for abortion to be a capital offense, had unprotected sex with the young woman and procured Plan B pregnancy-prevention medication the next morning, according to a friend of hers.

By capital offense, of course, he means the woman ought to be executed, not the man who gave her Plan B to protect himself. In fact, he would probably find it useful to have his victims terminated the morning after.

Wait until you get a load of Slaton’s defense…

Proud East Texan Slaton, whose website credits him as having “values and principles that resemble(represent) the great people of East Texas,” (a designation with which the people of East Texas may choose to decline), has not expressed contrition for his acts. His lawyer instead said that “the complaints should be dismissed because the behavior occurred in Slaton’s Austin residence, not the workplace.”

Right. Rape is perfectly fine if you do it in the home you share with your wife and young child. And would you believe he is a devout Christian who has been fulsomely praised for his faith?

Born in Mineola, Texas, Bryan Slaton is a proud East Texan with values and principles that resemble(represent) the great people of East Texas. These values were formed as he grew up regularly participating in church and family gatherings. Bryan attended Ouachita Baptist University, where he earned a double major in Youth Ministry / Speech Communication. He then attended Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary and earned a Masters of Divinity with Biblical Languages. He served in the ministry as a Youth and Family Minister for 13 years.

Man, I look at that guy’s history, his record in office, his consistent sanctimony, and I think…that man’s a monster, I wouldn’t let my children anywhere near him. I bet the Texas lege is packed full of creatures exactly like him.