Vlad the Invader, Inside Putin, Zelensky Inspires, Ukrainians Suffer & Die, GOP

Police are heroes because they are willing to do exactly this, and occasionally they are called upon to do exactly this.

  • The two year period between 1989 and 1991 began with the tumbling of the Berlin wall and ended with the fall of the USSR. It is remembered by much of the world as a brief time of hopeful joy. The Palmer Report compares Vladimir Putin’s reaction to that time with that of another historical figure to another historical downfall. It may help explain a combative personal view that sees the world only in hostile nationalistic and racial terms.
     
  • In Letters from an American, Heather Cox Richardson has us remember FDR’s fireside chats, in which he explained the war by contrasting the growing philosophy of fascism with that of democracy.
     
    She suggests that Vladimir Putin may have provided a similar service in advance of his latest invasion.

    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.”

    Outmoded democracy and freedom must give way to what he sees as more traditional racial and ethnic family values.
     
    We can see how the Putin side of that contrast might appeal to a few media personalities and political figures here in America.

  • The Moderate Voice presents the speech by Ukraine’s President Zelensky to the British Parliament that inspired a standing ovation, along with a series of individual reactions.
     
  • This not fun and games. Hackwhackers displays three photos showing frantic efforts to prevent, then reactions to, a singularly tragic death in Ukraine.
     
    Putin is a murderer.
     
  • Nojo doesn’t catch much cable news and so misses the enthused drama. But he sees the reaction of friends, and catches what is on line and in print about the forty mile Putin army convoy stalled on the way to Kiev. He greets reports with a degree of skepticism.
     
  • Infidel753 explains with patient care, so even the dimmest bulbs among us can glow brighter with new understanding of why, no, we won’t have a no-fly zone over Ukraine. Spoiler alert: has to do with the end of the world as we know it.
     
  • M. Bouffant at Web of Evil explains that, while many major corporations are pulling out of Russia, Mr. Trump’s former bank says it would be impractical to give up all those profits.
     
  • Author John Scalzi has books that sell worldwide, including in Russia. So what are his thoughts on that, now that Putin has invaded Ukraine? Well… he does have a three point plan.
     
  • Andy Borowitz reports that Putin is upset to find Ukrainians are less obedient than his friend Trump.
     
  • Putin is having trouble invading Ukraine, but Dave Dubya explains how he had no trouble at all taking over the Republican Party.
     
  • Remember, when Donald Trump was President Trump, how he all but tripped over his tongue gushing love and servitude toward Vlad Putin, Kim Jong Un, and every other dictator and near-dictator he stumbled into? He admired and envied tough guys who could subdue their societies and kill their critics.
     
    tengrain at Mock Paper Scissors brings us the latest explanation from Donald Junior, Son of Don. Seems that gushing was all a trick to get on their good side and get them to agree to – well – things. Had me fooled. How about you?
     
  • I usually suspect at least a little exaggeration from anyone discussing someone from the opposition. I have heard that Trump was asked about Ukraine and went to windmills. He had to have given a few sentences to the question, then rapidly and awkwardly transitioned. But NOOooooo…. News Corpse has the video. Sure enough, the friendly, fawning interviewer asks Mr. Trump what he thinks will happen in Ukraine. Mr. Trump’s very next words are:
     
    Well, and I said this a long time ago, if this happens, we are playing right into their hands. Green energy. The windmills don’t work.
     
    Then he stumbles on about birds and visual landscapes and environmentalists. Yikes.
     
  • Ant Farmer’s Almanac has the headline as Mr. Trump has a new worry about the name of his new social media platform and Mr. Putin.
     
  • Pravda is the Russian word for Truth! Our favorite Earth-Bound Misfit takes an old Russian saying about the official Putin News Agency and applies it to the Fox network.
     
  • Ted McLaughlin at jobsanger goes all third-party Elizabeth Barrett Browning on Putin lovers in the Republican party: counting all the ways they love him using their own words. Oh how they twist about in the aftermath of the current stalled Putin invasion. Ted does express the forlorn hope that they’ll take Russia’s Ukraine debacle as an object lesson and rethink their own hostility to democracy. But he is afflicted with more realistic expectations.
     
  • CalicoJack in The Psy of Life applies principles of group think to the actions of, and support for, Vlad Putin on the part of some.
     
  • Iron Knee at Political Irony sees some flipping and flopping as some Republicans try to figure out how to Putinize with support/oppose/predict he won’t/knew he would confusion about the invasion.
     
  • YellowDog Granny does seem to notice observations that possess the virtue of accuracy:
     

     
  • A prominent Republican, favored to become the GOP nominee for a Congressional seat in Michigan, boasts of advising his daughters, if rape becomes inevitable, to lie back and enjoy it. Yeah, he says it on video, in public, in front of God and everybody. Vixen Strangely at Strangely Blogged suggests this is just the latest manifestation of a growing Republican philosophy, and relates her own father’s very different advice.
     
  • Wisconsin conservative James Wigderson seems skeptical:

  • Sometimes accidents become iconic. Like when then President Eisenhower was asked what valuable advice his Vice President Dick Nixon had provided during his 8 year administration. Ike promised he would come up with an example if given a few days to think of it. Frances Langum relates how Laura Ingraham of the Fox Network gets tired of all the fault finding of our previous president, and wants to list of all the good things Donald Trump did in office. As she speaks, the on-screen chyron shows only BLANK SPACES..
     
  • Max’s Dad is back YAY!! He is known for some of the best informed, educational, often very funny rants on the net! He is not at all impressed with any of the three most likely candidates for governor of Nebraska.
     
  • Ted Cruz has a Trumpian style tale about tearful airline personnel hugging him, and CATO’s Julian Sanchez notices something oddly humorous:

  • They didn’t actually have a lot of participants, but they sure had some big trucks. Green Eagle wonders just why the Trucking Convoy, protesting waddya-got, came so close to DC without actually entering. The large green bird has little evidence, but lots of logic to support a plausible explanation.
     
  • Class Act! -> Tommy Christopher reports as President Joe Biden gently makes fun of Republicans who opposed, with all their strength, the bill to repair and expand infrastructure in the United States, and now are struggling just as hard to claim credit for what it does.
     
  • Libertarian Michael A. LaFerrara is against forgiving student debt, partly because it would be a gift to the affluent. He’s also against forgiving student debt for those who are impoverished, mostly because people organize their lives around economic realities, so it’s unfair when those realities are changed.
     
  • Here, right here in the show-me state, Missouri politicians have gone deadly crazy yet again. And, yeah, that is deadly true. PZ Myers shows us the actual legislation. House Bill 2810 specifically targets ectopic pregnancy. That is a pregnancy where the fetus moves out of the uterus to another part of the body and dies. It usually ends up in a fallopian tube. In 6 to 16 weeks the pressure ruptures and kills the woman.
     
    The bill describes the conditions in which that woman will be guilty of a felony and will go to prison.

    The offense of trafficking abortion-inducing devises or drugs is a class A felony if…
     
    …The abortion was performed or induced or was attempted to be performed or induced on a woman who has an ectopic pregnancy.

    Related legislation will make it illegal for the woman to travel outside of Missouri, where abortion is legal, if she gets the life-saving abortion, removing the deceased fetus.

  • Elie Mystal has written a book on the Constitution, Allow Me to Retort, subtitled A Black Guy’s Guide to the Constitution. Legal expert Imani Gandy interviews the author and introduces the book this way:
     
    I Agree With Elie Mystal. The Constitution Is Trash
     
    and explains:
     
    Why should a document drafted by 30-something-year-old slavers influence policies and practices that govern the lives of Black people in this country today?
     
    I suppose there is a bit of hype involved here. A writer has to live, and books have to sell for that to happen. Elie often appears on talk shows as a provocateur, although a generally sensible instigator.
     
    In fact, Elie Mystal provides a fair response to the introduction himself early on:
     
    I don’t care about the original intent of the people who wrote whatever they wrote. Because if you go far back enough, and if you go deep enough, you’re always going to find something kind of icky and awful about the people of the past and what they believed. And that’s why I don’t see why any of that should matter, in the same way that people in the future might find things that we believe icky and ridiculous and use it to suggest that their laws cannot be expansive and awesome and beautiful. And I wouldn’t want them tied to our stupid beliefs. Just, you go on and do what’s best for your society.
     
    The discussion gets somewhat specific, with three amendments that apply to Imani Gandy’s primary interest: abortion rights.
     
    A good discussion and, very probably, a good read.
     
  • driftglass objects to yet another biography that casts Abraham Lincoln as the major centrist of his day. It remains a distortion of modern historical research that comes from a can’t-we-all-get-along post Civil War period in the late 1800s. The reconciliation was, sadly, applied to White Americans who were okay with abandonment of Black freedom. I’ve written a little about this as well.
     
  • Nan’s Notebook contains an account of a dangerously disruptive, dangerously armed, woman who eventually surrenders to police. Nan considers the gentle treatment by police, and takes a wild guess about the woman’s race.
     
  • The Onion hosts video proof that all the world’s problems were solved overnight while you were sleeping.
     
  • In The Life and Times of Bruce Gerencser, Bruce notices a couple of characteristics in some of my brothers and sisters in Christ. We may not know everything, but we know everything that matters. Bruce, on the other hand, is an atheist and therefore knows nothing.
     
    Bruce is right, of course. We are too often insufferable.
     
    Sometimes I do wonder how my God can tolerate those of us who live in faith.
     
  • If we tire until we collapse under the sheer weight of inhumanity we can see and hear and sense around us, North Carolina pastor John Pavlovitz empathizes. Yet he also sees that same weariness as a sign of hope.
     
  • Ah family life: WhiskeyWhistle98, the mother formerly known as @momwino98, seems amazingly calm and happy considering she has had no sleep.
     

    @whiskeywhistle98 Colds for everyone!!! #tiktokmom #colds #fyp #OutlanderChallenge #coffee #tiredmom ♬ original sound – @Whiskeywhistle98-

  • SilverAppleQueen goes poetic about justice, love, and finances.
     
  • Reductress teaches us how to show everyone you denounce the prophesiesof the Groundhog!!
     

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