Here we go

Another great big surge in military violence in Ukraine. I hope Ukraine takes back the occupied land, but citizens must be exhausted from all the back-and-forth, if they’re not dead already.

The Ukrainian troops include specialized attack units armed with Western weapons and trained in NATO tactics. The attacks on the country’s southeast mark a significant push into Russian-occupied territory.
Russian military bloggers also reported heavy fighting in the Zaporizhzhia region, a part of the front line that has long been seen as a likely target of the new Ukrainian campaign. By cutting south through the flat fields of Zaporizhzhia, Kyiv’s forces could aim to sever the corridor of land that connects mainland Russia to the occupied Crimean Peninsula, cutting off crucial Russian supply lines. It could also attempt to liberate the city of Melitopol, which Russia has established as the region’s occupied capital, and Enerhodar, where the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant is located.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky visited parts of the southern region of Kherson on Thursday, touring disaster-hit areas and speaking with evacuated people after damage to the Kakhovka dam caused devastating floods and left many homeless.

I imagine American military leaders are salivating over the prospect of testing Western military gear, doctrine, and tactics against the Russian boogey man.

People used to live here.

There are consequences?

Chris Licht, the former head of CNN who pushed that disastrous, mismanaged Trump town hall on us, seems to have faced some kind of rebuke from the men who control the pursestrings. He has undergone some ambiguous lateral transfer or downgrade — he’s not in charge anymore.

Anyway, the guy made no friends with his “let Republicans lie” brand of journalism because, really, that’s not what journalism is supposed to be. It’s supposed to inform people of the truth. CNN’s staff hated what Licht was trying to do. The viewers hated it, and left in droves. Freaking Newsmax started beating CNN in ratings. And the business suits hated it, because if money isn’t being made, what’s the point? In short, he shit the bed.

It’s not much of a consequence, but it’s something. If nothing else, all his rich friends know that he is in disgrace, which is probably what hurts him most. Being outright fired would hurt him better, though.

Tom Morello is too mean to Nazis

The NY Post claims — consider the source, and be skeptical — that Tom Morello is being canceled by his fans for being against Nazis. Tom Morello! Rage Against the Machine Morello! He said something on Twitter.

Rage Against The Machine rocker Tom Morello, 59, is getting blasted on Twitter for sharing an anti-Nazi quote…

Wait for it,  w a i t  for it…

…with fans accusing him of fascism and intolerance.

“Fans.” I don’t think actual fans would be mad at Tom Morello for being aggressively anti-Nazi. Have they listened to any of his music? Especially since this is the quote they found offensive.

German saying: If 9 people sit down at a table with 1 Nazi without protest, there are 10 Nazis at the table

Uh, yeah? That’s right. The people who are complaining are the “change my mind” folks. The debate bros.

“While that sounds principled, it isn’t,” one Twitter user wrote. “It’s a mechanism to stop conversation. 9 people can sit down at a table with 1 Nazi and talk and educate said single Nazi on the issues and the truth with evidence and convert that Nazi. It’s called diplomacy.”

“So do you think it’s impossible to politely converse with someone to change their mind?” another asked.

You can’t debate Nazis, full stop.

Hey, man, shouldn’t you go back to listening to Hootie & the Blowfish? Rage Against the Machine isn’t your jam.

Backlash incoming?

How about some optimistic news? These right-wing idiots have become caricatures of themselves, fulminating over the most absurd and trivial things, and believing that they are justified in radical action against fundamental American ideals, like schools and libraries. Stories about school board meetings where some angry nitwit stands up to rant about the “wokes” are commonplace, like this one in Florida.

At the meeting, right-wing parents and a minority of the school board amplified the usual attacks: Pornography in classrooms, indoctrination, wokeness. Watching them, it was impossible to avoid the sense that they were relishing every second of the tumult they’ve unleashed.

At the meeting, Shannon Rodriguez — a favorite of the right wing Moms for Liberty that led the attack on the Disney movie episode — kept robotically repeating phrases like “woke ideologies” and “woke agenda,” not even slightly disturbed by any sense of obligation to define their meaning. She proudly brandished her solidarity with boycotts of Bud Light and Disney as a badge of anti-woke heroism. Another conservative parent practically shouted, “You have awakened the entire alpha male blood of this country!”

It’s all fury for the sake of fury — they’re getting high on their own outrage. It has an effect, though. Fifty teachers in Hernando County, where this meeting took place, are resigning (come to Minnesota, we’d love to have you here). Ron DeSantis is basically destroying the educational infrastructure of the state, all in the name of stoking that moronic subset of the population that vote for him, and there are signs that the citizens are waking up.

But the real story of the night was the response. Again and again, parents and students forcefully defended teachers. They cast the right’s attacks, the censoring of educators and the removal of books as the real threats to education.

“War on woke?” one student said pointedly. “More like war on your children’s future.”

“It’s me and my fellow students who are feeling the effects of this,” said a second student. A third said the removal of books from classrooms is what’s really “indoctrinating students.”

Things like this are happening all over. As Sarah Jones of New York magazine reports, liberal parents in states as far-flung as New York, North Carolina and Montana are organizing local groups, pressuring school boards and running for office to challenge the right’s education takeover.

We can’t get too over-confident, though. Keep in mind that Hernando County elected DeSantis with a 41 point margin, and would probably re-elect him if a vote were held today. It would probably be by a smaller margin, though, and that’s where we are at — we need to keep chipping away, pointing out how incompetent and destructive the Right has been, and try to get incremental advantages that weaken them.

I guess these are the kinds of people who run the country now

American Idiot

You may have heard that the state of Florida banned a poem by Amanda Gorman from grade school libraries. What’s chilling is that this was triggered by one person complaining, a woman named Daily Salinas. She is a real piece of work.

In a series of screenshots tweeted by the group Miami Against Fascism, Salinas appears to be photographed in several Proud Boys events. In one photo, Salinas appears to be standing next to Enrique Tarrio, the far-right group’s neo-fascist leader who was found guilty of seditious conspiracy last month. “Freedom to choose,” said Salinas’s T-shirt.

In another post that featured a picture of Tarrio, Salinas appeared to hail the Proud Boys, writing, “Los mejores,” or “The best” in Spanish, adding, “My Proud boys,” alongside emojis of the American flag, a heart, a flexed arm and prayer hands.

Miami Against Fascism also posted pictures of Salinas’s apparent involvement with CCDF, also known as County Citizens Defending Freedom USA, a controversial Christian nationalist organization.

The outlet Jewish Telegraphic Agency also reviewed a Facebook account that appeared to be Salinas’s. The account featured a series of rightwing and antisemitic posts, including one about the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a fabricated Russian antisemitic text originally published in 1903 about a purported Jewish plan to dominate the world.

According to JTA, the post about the Protocols showed a list of steps on how “Jewish Zionists” would dominate the world.

Not only is she a bigot, she is a nearly illiterate dumbass.

“I see the word ‘communism’, and I think it’s something about communism,” she told JTA, adding, “I didn’t read the words.”

Salinas added that she is Christian, has Jewish friends and enjoys watching the Israeli Netflix series Fauda.

She also revealed that she only read snippets of the books that she sought to ban at the education center. The books include The ABCs of Black History, poetry by Langston Hughes and books on Cuba, all of which she has criticized for “indirect hate messages”, references to critical race theory and gender indoctrination.

“They have to read for me because I’m not an expert,” Salinas told JTA. “I’m not a reader. I’m not a book person. I’m a mom involved in my children’s education.”

The state of Florida allows an idiot who doesn’t read to dictate the contents of school libraries.

Maybe they should only accept criticisms of books from people who pass a test of basic literacy and who can actually demonstrate that they read and understood the whole book in question. But that would be un-American!

I hope you choke on your birthday cake, Henry

Today is an evil birthday, a reminder that the universe is not fair and just.

Henry Kissinger is turning 100 this week, and his centennial is prompting assorted hosannas about perhaps the most influential American foreign policymaker of the 20th century. The Economist observed that “his ideas have been circling back into relevancy for the last quarter century.” The Times of London ran an appreciation: “Henry Kissinger at 100: What He Can Tell Us About the World.” Policy shops and think tanks have held conferences to mark this milestone. CBS News aired a mostly fawning interview veteran journalist Ted Koppel conducted with Kissinger that included merely a glancing reference to the ignoble and bloody episodes of his career. Kissinger is indeed a monumental figure who shaped much of the past 50 years. He brokered the US opening to China and pursued detente with the Soviet Union during his stints as President Richard Nixon’s national security adviser and secretary of state. Yet it is an insult to history that he is not equally known and regarded for his many acts of treachery—secret bombings, coup-plotting, supporting military juntas—that resulted in the death of hundreds of thousands.

The news, as usual, was sickening. Kissinger is generally treated as distinguished, honorable statesman, and his crimes are glossed over because, obviously, he’s a very old man and he’s celebrating a birthday. You don’t want to ruin his birthday, do you? (Yes, I do.) So the Washington Post runs a piece written by Kissinger’s son, David, that


tells us all about his secret for living so long — a diet heavy on bratwurst and Wiener schnitzel, a career of relentlessly stressful decision-making, and a love of sports purely as a spectator, never a participant. He forgets never having a speck of empathy for others, and never ever facing the consequences of his decisions. He has seen some of those consequences, but they do not deter him.

As a refugee from Nazi Germany, he had lost 13 family members and countless friends to the Holocaust. He returned to his native Germany as an American soldier, participating in the liberation of the Ahlem concentration camp near Hannover. There, he witnessed the depths to which mankind can sink unconstrained by international structures of peace and justice. Next month, we will return to Fürth, where he will lay a wreath at the grave of his grandfather, who did not escape.

That’s so sad. If only the lesson he’d learned from his personal experience that murdering civilians is an evil act. At least the Intercept has a lengthy article on the civilian experience in Cambodia and Kissinger’s war crimes.

To Nixon and Kissinger, Cambodia was a sideshow: a tiny war waged in the shadow of the larger conflict in Vietnam and entirely subsumed to U.S. objectives there. To Cambodians on the front lines of the conflict — farming folk living hardscrabble lives — the war was a shock and a horror. At first, people were awed by the aircraft that began flying above their thatched-roof homes. They called Huey Cobra attack helicopters “lobster legs” for their skids, which resembled crustacean limbs, while small bubble-like Loaches became “coconut shells” in local parlance. But Cambodians quickly learned to fear the aircraft’s machine guns and rockets, the bombs of F-4 Phantoms, and the ground-shaking strikes of B-52s. Decades later, survivors still had little understanding of why they were attacked and why so many loved ones were maimed or killed. They had no idea that their suffering was due in large part to a man named Henry Kissinger and his failed schemes to achieve his boss’s promised “honorable end to the war in Vietnam” by expanding, escalating, and prolonging that conflict.

Kissinger doesn’t understand the meaning of “honor.” He’s a butcher who promoted the impersonal use of technology to lay waste to villages — he established an American tradition continued to this day, using drone strikes to wage bloody war with no clear idea how flattening farms and blowing up children will end a war.

Mother Jones summarizes Kissinger’s place in history.

It’s easy to cast Kissinger as a master geostrategist, an expert player in the game of nations. But do the math. Hundreds of thousands of dead in Bangladesh, Cambodia, and East Timor, perhaps a million in total. Tens of thousands dead in Argentina’s Dirty War. Thousands killed and tens of thousands tortured by the Chilean military dictatorship, and a democracy destroyed. His hands are drenched in blood.

Yet he will be feted today, and every simpering politician who praises this man is an accomplice.

I wish there were a grave that they could lay a wreath on, and that the rest of us could piss on.

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.