Senate GOP leader Mitch McConnell has been out of the public eye for weeks, following a serious fall that hospitalized him. Now multiple sources confirm that Senators John Barrasso of Wyoming, John Cornyn of Texas and John Thune of South Dakota are actively reaching out to fellow Republican senators in efforts to prepare for an anticipated leadership vote — a vote that would occur upon announcement that McConnell would be retiring from his duties as leader, and presumably the Senate itself.
One source says that Cornyn has been particularly active in his preparations, taking fellow senators with whom he has little in common to lunch in attempts to court them.
Requests are being targeted at a plethora of conservative senators, including the sixteen who voted to delay the leadership election earlier this year, a proxy for opposition to McConnell’s leadership. Rick Scott, the Florida senator and former NRSC head who challenged McConnell, ultimately received ten protest votes. These members could prove key to determining the next Republican leader. Queries are also being made internally about the rules regarding replacement, and how the contest would be structured given the lack of an obvious heir apparent.
McConnell fell at a dinner event for the Senate Leadership Fund on March 8 at the Waldorf Astoria, formerly the Trump Hotel, in Washington, DC. He suffered a concussion, and only after being treated at a hospital and at his home did murmurs begin that he might be unable to return to the Senate. These discussions increased in volume based on the inability of other senators to do their jobs — with California’s Dianne Feinstein missing votes due to a shingles diagnosis and John Fetterman of Pennsylvania’s hospitalization for depression.
McConnell has guided the Republican Senate since 2007, and his role at the top of the party has been enormously significant.
Indeed.
This link comes from Ace of Spades, who is quite enthusiastic about McConnell being shown the door. “You need to spend some more time with your Chinese donors and corporate bagmen, Mitch.”
I’m a bit more sanguine.
The job of the Senate Majority/Minority leader is to be the hated asshole. (Lyndon Baines Johnson is widely regarded as the most effective Senate leader of the 20th century, and he was an absolute fucking tool.) Herding cats in the Senate requires the leader to be the heavy, and the balancing act means that partisans will always be disappointed in a leader’s actions. After all, disappointment is steeped into the Senate by design, as the cold saucer to cool the hot tea of the House.
Cornyn is one of my senators, and I’m not enthused about him taking office. Scott would be better. Thune used to be solid but has turned squishy. I don’t know much about Barrasso, but his Heritage Action rating (a quick-and-dirty rating, but better than nothing) is 85%, which seems low for Wyoming.
Whoever does replace McConnell as GOP leader in the Senate, it’s almost a certainty that we’ll be comparing him unfavorably to McConnell within a year.
Next to the idea that a man can magically become a woman by declaring himself one, and the idea that criminal should be set free because they’re actually victims of whiteness/capitalism/etc., “reparations” are one of the most absurd and counterproductive ideas floated under the banner of “social justice.” the idea that people who were never slaves should extort money from people who were never slave owners is an unconstitutional absurdity that no one should take seriously.
Which is why this story warms the cockles of my heart.
A Target security guard punched a customer during a confrontation that was sparked when she asked for “reparations” while at a checkout line with more than $1,000 in groceries, according to a police report.
The ugly incident happened in October at the megastore in Blue Ash, Ohio, and began when Karen Ivery asked a cashier for their manager regarding the bill and reparations, according to the police report reviewed by The Post.
Social Justice Karens are worst Karens.
The cashier alleged to authorities that Ivery brought up reparations several times during their brief encounter before the manager arrived, the report states.
When speaking with the manager, the customer first asked for reparations and grew angry as she walked “aggressively” toward the manager, according to the report.
“Ivery kept berating her about reparations and her privileged life,” the report alleges as the patron kept walking toward the manager.
That’s when Zach Cotter, a loss prevention officer, intervened and asked Ivery to calm down and leave the store, the report states.
But she allegedly began screaming at Cotter and followed him to his office.
When he tried to shut the door, Ivery allegedly forced her way in and Cotter threw a punch, according to the report.
Surveillance footage of the incident reported on by the Daily Mail shows the staffer’s punch caused the woman to hit the floor.
After reviewing footage of the incident, authorities wrote that they determined Ivery was the “aggressor” and she was placed under arrest.
Good. Deluded people who demand free money for breathing should be derided and ignored, and aggressive people who barge into offices making threats have well earned a five-finger reparation to the face.
How severe? How about $105 billion drop in loans in just two weeks.
“This credit crunch greatly increases the chances that America is going to have a deflationary recession or depression at some point in 2023. And, in fact, we could already be in it.” Ya think?
“We’re going to see the unemployment rate start to spike in America in the second half of 2023, In fact, we’re already seeing a big increase in unemployment claims data from the Federal Reserve shows that continued unemployment claims has surged since September.”
“We’re seeing a big surge in mortgage defaults right now across America, particularly on what’s called FHA mortgages. FHA mortgages are these first-time home buyer loans that the US government sponsors and allows people to only put three to five percent down. Well, these loans now have a 12% default rate in the most recent month of February 2023.”
Debt-to-income ration is now higher than it was at the pre-subprime meltdown peak in 2008.
“The Biden Administration has been very aggressive in wanting to expand mortgage access to low-income borrowers who can’t afford these mortgages. And they do this under the guise of expanding the benefits of home ownership to everyone, but really what they’re doing is they’re saddling at-risk economic households with a lot of debt near the peak of a housing bubble.”
“When banks tighten the belt and businesses can no longer get loans, businesses have to shut down, or what businesses have to do is, they have to start liquidating their holdings and taking whatever cash they have and use it to pay expenses. This is actually a concern of mine.”
“This bank credit crunch which is occurring right now could cause even more bank runs in the future” as people pull money out of the bank to cover expenses.
Quantitative tightening is back on.
“Mortgage application demand is on par with what we saw basically in the worst of the last housing crash in 2008, 2009, 2010, and so, no, there is no recovery.”
“The regular home buyer is still out of the housing market and is not returning.”
“The money supply in America is contracting…every other time in history it contracted, which was four times, we had a depression, a panic and a banking crisis.”
Cheerful enough. But if you’re a car dealer, things are even worse:
Banks are cutting off backing loans and providing credit to dealerships.
Not just used car dealers, but even national brand, nameplate dealerships.
This all started back in 2020, when banks started lending way too much money on cars that simply aren’t worth it, to consumers that simply couldn’t afford these payments, and shouldn’t have got the car in the first place…Let’s fast forward to 2023. We’re seeing record high repossession rates, and we’re seeing record high portfolio sell-offs, where people are just liquidating their paper because they don’t want to take on the risk of all these really bad auto loans, because they owe too much money. People are not making payments and they see the value of cars going down.
The fewer banks dealers can pit each other against for loan terms, the higher the interest rate consumers have to pay.
Dealers (not the banks) are also the ones who get screwed if a customer misses their first through third car payment.
Texas car dealer: “He was floored because he sells a lot of trucks between $45- and $65,000 trucks. Four of his banks told him that they’re no longer lending over twenty five thousand dollars.” (Previously.)
“I promise you this: it’s only gonna get worse.”
But wait! It gets worse!
“Capital One is going to start pulling their floor plans from dealers.”
“Floor plans” are the lines of credit dealers use to purchase cars to populate their lots, even the big nameplate dealers.
“Dealers are overexposed right now. They have paid way too much for their inventory and now they are having a hard time selling it.”
“It is so much harder now than it has been in the last two years to get people approved for loans to be able to sell these vehicles.”
“[Banks] do not want to get stuck holding the bag on these cars.”
“Dealers have been stupid. They have overpaid and they have too much inventory right now.”
“Some of these dealers, if they’re having cars 60, 90 days and maybe they’re getting a little bit behind on their payments [the] floor plan company will actually go to these dealers lots and they will take these cars that have been sitting too long, they’ll take them to the auction.”
“If they didn’t have the cash, the liquidity, to begin with, then they have to start liquidating cars, and they have to liquidate them fast to be able to pay their flooring lines…if they lose these flooring lines, they might as well not be in business, they don’t have the cash to be able to buy more inventory to be able to sell it to make more money.”
Banks pulling their floor lines could potentially crash the whole car market.
Things are going to get worse for car dealers before it gets better, and six months from now might be a great time to buy a car, assuming you’re not too busy shooting starving looters trying to steal your canned goods…
A century ago, the Klu Klux Klan was the most prominent anti-Catholic organization in America.
Political cartoon of the Klan fighting the Pope, brought to you by the kind of deep research only skimming a Wikipedia entry can provide.
The Klan stood ready to defend America against sinister conspiracy of the Bishop of Rome and his swarthy, dual-loyalty followers with vowels at the ends of their names.
I was thinking you have to go pretty far to style up the Pope’s hat more than in real life, but no, this 1943 Klan-affiliated cartoon is actually parodying the Papal Tiara, only used for coronations and which was abandoned by Pope Paul VI in 1964. Also, I’m going to go out on a limb and suggest that we had bigger foreign rulers to worry about than the Pope in 1943…
Well, times change and the Klan is a dead letter. Today, thanks to modern efficiency and social justice, the fight against the dread hand of Rome is carried out by none other than the FBI.
As part of its effort to identify extremists in the Catholic Church, the FBI recruited at least one “undercover employee” to “develop sources among the clergy and church leadership,” Representative Jim Jordan (R., Ohio) revealed Monday.
Jordan, the chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, issued a subpoena demanding FBI director Christopher Wray testify and provide more information to Congress about the federal agency’s intelligence-gathering initiative targeting Catholic Americans.
“This shocking information reinforces our need for all responsive documents, and the Committee is issuing a subpoena to you to compel your full cooperation,” Jordan claimed in the letter.
“Americans attend church to worship and congregate for their spiritual and personal betterment,” the letter added. “They must be free to exercise their fundamental First Amendment rights without worrying that the FBI may have planted so-called ‘tripwire’ sources or other informants in their houses of worship.”
The weaponization committee demanded that the FBI turn over information related to its investigation of Catholics after a former FBI agent leaked a memo entitled, “Interest of Racially or Ethnically Motivated Violent Extremists in Radical-Traditionalist Catholic Ideology Almost Certainly Presents New Mitigation Opportunities.” The memo, issued by the bureau’s Richmond field office, relied on information compiled by the biased Southern Poverty law Center about alleged “extremist” Catholic communities that prefer the Latin Mass and hold to conservative social teachings.
Presumably also “extremists” who believe that there are two biological sexes, or that dare to disagree with the policies of Obama the Lightbringer (PBUH).
As Russia enters the 14th month of its 72 hour campaign to take Kiev, there are signs that its meat-grinder approach to combat is depleting the exact resources it needs to win.
First up: Anders Puck Nielsen on Russia’s likely manpower shortage:
He looks at various how and low counts for determining Russian casualty rates, then builds his arguments around one in the middle.
There is a rule of thumb that is often mentioned, that for every dead soldier there are three wounded. So if we take some round numbers, and remember it’s not actually important if they are a little bit off. It doesn’t change the point that I am getting to if you think real the number is a little lower. But say that on average about 500 Russian soldiers have been killed every day since the mobilization in September, when Russia also really started to have very big attrition numbers. And if we then make a conservative estimate and say that for every dead soldier, there have been two wounded, then we get that the Russian fighting force has been decreased by about 1500 soldiers every day. Then we can divide 300,000 by 1500, and we get that they have soldiers for about 200 days, until the Russian army will have consumed all those mobilized soldiers. This is not exact science. It’s just a rough estimate to illustrate Russia’s manpower problem. Putin announced the mobilization on 21 September, and incidentally 200 days after that is about now. It’s on 9 April 2023.
“Putin probably should have announced the second wave of mobilization months ago, but he didn’t. So that is why military analysts are talking about a Russian manpower shortage.”
“Those 300,000 soldiers that Russia mobilized in the fall are probably not there anymore.”
Second up is a report that both sides are rationing artillery shells in advance of Ukraine’s anticipated counteroffensive.
Artillery units on both sides of the line, despite the continued duels, are reportedly dialing back fire missions to save up ammunition for the long-awaited Ukrainian counteroffensive.
Russian milblogger Alexander Khodakovsky claims that those Russian units not involved in ongoing offensives have had ammunition supplies seriously curtailed. Khodakovsky attributed the rationing to concerns about the potential offensive.
At the same time, a frontline account from the Washington Post highlighted Ukrainian artillery crews similarly conserving shells. While embedded with an artillery platoon in Ukraine’s 56th Motorized Brigade, Isabelle Khurshudyan and Kamila Hrabchuk reported the unit’s 152mm howitzers used to fire more than 20-30 shells a day. That number has dwindled to fewer than three.
The nearby units equipped with NATO 155mm caliber guns are reportedly facing less of a shortage than the Warsaw Pact-era guns. Citing an anonymous Ukrainian military official, the report claimed Ukraine is still firing 7,700 shells a day. Russian shelling reportedly dwarfs even that figure. Ukraine’s incredible artillery consumption remains a concern for NATO as Western production lines struggle to keep supplies moving.
Russia’s grinding style of combat requires a fresh supply of bodies and artillery shells to function, and those are the things (along with money, high tech munitions and global sympathy) that Russia seems to be running short on…
Chris Copson of The Tank Museum has an in-depth look at the RPG-7 and its history as an effective hand-held tank-killing weapon and poor man’s artillery.
Some highlights:
How a HEAT RPG charge works: “There is a trumpet-shaped liner in this section inside an aerodynamic fairing. And behind that is a copper cone, and underneath that is the RDX explosive charge. When that detonates, it fires what’s effectively an enormously powerful bolt of kinetic energy forward. That’s what’s called the Munroe effect, and it will penetrate up to 260mm of rolled homogeneous armor.”
The Russians were thought to have lost over 100 tanks in Grozny during the first Chechan War.
Seven of eight U.S. helicopters brought down in Afghanistan were from RPG fire.
Four Black Hawk helicopters taken down in Mogadishu were taken down by RPG fire.
Methods evolved to combat RPGs include explosive reactive armor, improvised outer armor, and slat armor.
“Can an RPG 7 round penetrate the composite frontal armor of the modern main battle tank? No, it can’t. But it was never intended to.” But the more modern RPG-29 can.
Happy Good Friday! The Biden Recession continues it’s downward spiral…
…a deep dive into how the Russian Conspiracy Hoax has corrupted institutions, Chicago doubled down on failure, and unions want to take your packages away. It’s the Friday LinkSwarm!
“Small Businesses File For Bankruptcy At Record Pace, Surpassing COVID Crash.” So much for a Biden presidency helping the little guy…
They could either keep doing what reporters had done since the beginning of time, confining themselves to saying things they could prove. Or, they could adopt a new approach, in which you can say anything is true or confirmed, so long as a politician or intelligence official told you it was.
We know how that worked out. I was never invited back, nor for a long time was any other traditionally skeptical reporter, while Nance — one of the most careless spewers of provable errors ever to appear on a major American news network — became one of the Peacock’s most familiar faces.
I don’t know Malcolm and don’t mean to get nasty about this, but: even before that January 2017 broadcast, he had an extraordinary record, one that should have scared away any retraction-averse producer. On August 20th, he went on with Joy Reid and said the Green Party’s Jill Stein “has a show on Russia Today.” This wasn’t true, as Stein quickly pointed out, but MSNBC refused to acknowledge the error. Media watchdog FAIR repeatedly asked for a correction, as did friend Glenn Greenwald at The Intercept, but they refused to budge.
This may not seem a big deal, but at the time it was still weird and something of a pioneering move for a major news organization to just refuse to fix a clear error.
Nance went on to make a lot more, some I would classify as important. A tweet of his in late 2016 was a major source for the pre-election misconception that the Wikileaks-leaked emails of Clinton campaign chief John Podesta were “riddled with forgeries” and “#blackpropaganda.” He would regularly make all sorts of claims without evidence, like that the K.G.B. had “been surveilling Donald Trump since 1977,” and that “little” comes from Trump’s mouth that isn’t “carefully planned to benefit the Russian Republic,” and all sorts of other nonsense.
I was quiet until he said Glenn “shows his true colors as an agent of Trump and Moscow,” “reports in to his masters in Russia,” and is “deep in the Kremlin pocket.” This was outrageous. I was shocked MSNBC didn’t fire him on the spot. Still, I voiced objections in a measured way I hoped might get through, either to Nance or to someone at the network. “I’ve been on the air with Malcolm Nance and he seemed like a nice guy,” I tweeted, “but this awful practice of calling people traitors and foreign agents based on no evidence has really gotten out of hand.”
Nance’s response was “Ok, you’ve convinced me. You need to be blocked. #Bye.” He remained a regular guest on the network, which didn’t cool on booking him until the Russia story fell apart with the release of the Mueller report the next year.
The Nance situation was symbolic of what happened at the network from the beginning of Trump’s term, really beginning in early 2017. It went from being a place where you had to be at least in the ballpark of demonstrably true to being a place where the factual standard was, “Whatever dogshit drops out of the mouth of any hack or spook.”
Moreover the network didn’t just re-report this stuff, it became the favored launching pad for all the most blatant blue-Anon disinformation, like California congressman Adam Schiff saying he had “more than circumstantial” evidence of collusion, or former Obama defense official Evelyn Farkas suggesting the Trump administration would try to destroy evidence if they “found out how we knew what we knew about the Trump staff’s dealing with Russians.” Farkas later testified under oath that she “didn’t know anything” about collusion.
Snip.
As we later found out, among other things via Jeff Gerth’s gigantic piece in the Columbia Journalism Review, the FBI said nothing about many stories it knew to be wrong, including the influential New York Times exposé, “Trump Campaign Aides Had Repeated Contacts With Russian Intelligence.” The possibility that officials can lie to us in this way — leaking, asking that attribution be limited to uncheckable “sources familiar with the matter,” then saying nothing as stories start taking water — is exactly why we don’t stick our necks out for such people.
Snip.
the network doubled down, seemingly hiring as contributors every unemployed prosecutor or natsec official they could find, especially from failed Russiagate probes. They’d already spent on names like ex-CIA head John O’Brennan, former assistant FBI counterintelligence chief Frank Figliuzzi, House Intel Director of Investigations and future congressman Dan Goldman (who met Adam Schiff in an MSNBC green room), and federal prosecutor Glenn Kirschner. Now, they added cadaverous Mueller sidekick Andrew Weissmann and, astonishingly, Weissmann’s deputy, the fired FBI lawyer Lisa Page. They also began bringing in Page’s lover, fellow FBI firee Peter Strzok, as a commentator.
America became familiar with Page and Strzok after their texts — referring to the Trump-Russia investigation as an “insurance policy,” and ripping “sandernistas,” among other things — became public. These were living monuments to press excesses of the Trump era. As Gerth wrote, Strzok quietly reported to bosses after the Times’s “repeated contacts” story came out, saying, “We are unaware of ANY Trump advisers engaging in conversations with Russian intelligence officials.” Strzok in other words was exactly the kind of person to whom Rachel might have been referring when she rhapsodized about FBI “not saying anything” to dissuade us from believing errors.
Page on April 10, 2017 got a text from Strzok, saying he wanted to talk to her “about [a] media leak strategy with DOJ.” This was a day before a Washington Post story that cited “law enforcement and other U.S. officials” in saying the secret FISA court found probable cause to believe former Trump aide Carter Page (no relation) was an “agent of a foreign power.” Whoever leaked this was sabotaging not just the Post, but every downstream media org picking up the story, because the story at its roots was wrong: Carter Page was not an “agent of a foreign power,” as the FISA court had been misled, by Steele and the FBI. MSNBC was one of the first outlets to regurgitate this thing.
When sources lie to you, you should be mad. At minimum, you should be ripping their names out of your Rolodex (or modern equivalent). MSNBC did the opposite, hiring seemingly everyone who’d helped them down this reputation-tarnishing path.
MSNBC bet everything on its switch in 2017, and though it paid handsomely at first — in spring of 2017 they became the first cable network in two decades to unseat Fox for the #1 spot, with Rachel owning the top-rated non-sports program on cable — the collapse of the Mueller investigation triggered a long, frankly earned, post-trout-fishing slide. No doubt the indictment of Donald Trump will reanimate things, but prior to that it was grim, as Fox was beating CNN and MSNBC combined by the end of January. The ratings picture for March showed that MSNBC’s top show was The Last Word with Lawrence O’Donnell, rated 11th, followed by The Beat With Ari Melber at 16th.
After all this, after throwing away all their standards, clowning themselves with years of wrong stories, doling out rice bowls to the procession of spooks who now clog their airwaves, and watching as their ratings predictably collapsed, now they want to give me a hard time. Not because I got anything wrong, but because they don’t like my opinions, or where things like the Twitter Files reports came from.
Stuck on stupid. “Far-Left Democrat Brandon Johnson Wins Chicago Mayoral Race.”
Johnson, 47, is a Cook County commissioner, a former social studies teacher, and a paid lobbyist for the radical Chicago Teachers Union. He ran as a decidedly far-left activist, and was backed by Bernie Sanders and the Democratic Socialists of America.
Johnson campaigned on promoting racial justice and uplifting the working class. He is an opponent of charter schools. In order to pay for a variety of new social programs, he has called for increased taxes on large corporations, wealthy residents, and suburbanites who visit the city. During his campaign, Johnson promised $1 billion in new spending.
Because Lori Lightfoot’s administration wasn’t enough of a disaster…
Speaking of unions behaving badly, the Teamsters are planning a UPS strike.
Yet another reason for the Trump charges to be thrown out. “The progressive daughter of judge presiding over Donald Trump’s hush money case in Manhattan who worked for Kamala Harris and Joe Biden…Manhattan Judge Juan Merchan’s daughter, Loren, 34, works for progressive digital strategies firm Authentic Campaigns. She was a digital director for Vice President Kamala Harris’ 2020 presidential campaign and has worked for a slew of other Democratic campaigns.”
Dispatches from the Soros-funded decline of New York City: “On Saturday, the New York Police Department announced that a man who shot a thief in self defense will be charged with attempted murder despite being shot twice and having to wrestle the firearm away from the thief.” (Update: Soros tool Alvin Bragg changed his mind.) (Hat tip: Ed Driscoll at Instapundit.)
“Texas Bill Would Create State-Issued Gold-Backed Digital Currency.” This would be a super-interesting story if I thought there was a snowball’s chance in hell of this passing and the Federal Reserve not quashing it.
The Democratic Party may not be any good at cultivating a healthy economy, governing, or protecting the rights of average Americans, but they excel in all forms of election cheating.
But don’t think Democrats are content with merely sucking up illegal American contributions. No, Democrats have also mastered the art of illegally sucking up illegal campaign contributions from foreigners abroad.
Actor Leonardo DiCaprio took the stand and testified in the federal trial of Prakazrel “Pras” Michel, founder of the hip hop band Fugees, and his alleged involvement in a money laundering scheme that included a huge — and illegal — donation to Barack Obama’s 2012 re-election campaign.
DiCaprio recalled a conversation with Malaysian financier Jho Low, who mentioned that he was looking to donate millions of dollars to the Obama campaign by giving the money to Michel and having him pass it to Obama’s people.
Fast Facts:
Low was sentenced — in absentia — to a 10-year sentence in a Kuwaiti court for his role in laundering roughly $1 billion of the almost $4.5 billion worth of Chinese currency he allegedly swindled in what’s known as the 1Malaysia Development Berhad scandal.
Low claimed he wanted to donate between $20-$30 million dollars to Obama.
It is illegal for American presidential candidates to accept donations from foreigners.
The DOJ charged Low for trying to donate money to lobby the Trump administration, hoping to have the charges against him relating to the 1Malaysia Development Berhad scandal dropped.
Low is on the lam and is believed to be hiding in China or Macau. China denies harboring him.
“It was a significant sum, something to the tune of $20-30 million,” DiCaprio testified in court. “I said, ‘Wow that’s a lot of money!’”
Additional witnesses testified that they were wired money from Low and asked to forward it to the Obama campaign.
Michel allegedly took the mad stacks from Low and used them to lobby Obama’s government on behalf of Low and the Chinese Communist Party.
He distributed $21.6 million to American straw donors who would then donate it to the Obama campaign, concealing the fact that the money came from Low.
But just because Democrats seem to love sucking up money with people connected to communist China, don’t think that they’re not looking at other foreign Sugar Daddys.
The Berger Action Fund is a nondescript name for a group with a rather specific purpose: steering the wealth of Hansjörg Wyss, a Swiss billionaire, into the world of American politics and policy.
As a foreign national, Wyss is prohibited from donating to candidates or political committees. But his influence is still broadly felt through millions of dollars routed through a network of nonprofit groups that invest heavily in the Democratic ecosystem. Such groups don’t have to disclose the source of their funding — or many details about how they spend it.
Newly available tax documents show that his giving through the Berger Action Fund, which describes itself as advocating for “solutions to some of our world’s biggest problems,” swelled in 2021 to $72 million, cementing Wyss’ status as a Democratic-aligned megadonor.
Representatives for Wyss insist they comply with laws governing the giving of foreign nationals and have put in place strict policies limiting the use of donations to “issue advocacy” — not partisan electoral activities. But the fact that the money cannot be publicly traced highlights the difficulty of putting such assertions to the test.
Those same groups have helped to bankroll efforts to lift President Joe Biden’s agenda and paid for TV ads promoting Democratic congressional candidates ahead of last year’s midterm elections.
I’ve posted a lot of videos to help people understand the war in Ukraine. This is another one, though I’m not sure much understanding will ensue, as the tactics of both sides seem strange for those familiar with modern western combined arms combat.
It’s an interesting video because so much about it doesn’t make sense. (I believe it’s the one a commenter mentioned.) It shows a Ukrainian tank clearing a trench of Russian soldiers near a village with the mouthful name of Verkhn’okam’yans’ke (near Severodonetsk).
The video starts with two Ukrainian tanks advancing on a trench, one following the other’s tread tracks. (That part makes sense, as a way to pass through a minefield.) After that, a whole lot of the video seems very strange.
It’s a stark reminder, yet again, that the map is not the territory. We see the front lines on various map sites like Deep State, but the Russo-Ukrainian War is taking place across vast areas, some of which are quite thinly populated with troops. This tiny skirmish is probably more indicative of average troop density across the entire front line than dense urban areas like Bakhmut.
Save a trailing BMP and the hovering drone recording the footage, there’s no sign of Ukraine conducting any sort of combined arms operation for the trench clearing. (Though there are some artillery strikes in the background.)
In an age of automatic range finders and fire control computers, it’s something of a surprise to see both sides struggle to find their proper range, misses from each at about 3:45 in.
The tank continues to fire it’s main gun as it approaches, but doesn’t seem to use it’s secondary machine gun for supressing fire.
For those used to the mechanized maneuver warfare on display in Iraq, the approach the tank takes to the trench seems unusually slow and methodical.
Not sure what the tank is firing at 7 minutes in. Maybe part of the trench?
The same lack of combined arms is evident on the Russian side as well. Where are their own tanks? Their artillery support? Air support? Their own anti-tank weapons beyond that initial miss? None are in evidence.
In fact, nothing the Russians do as a tank approaches and blows up large chunks of their trench makes sense. They don’t run. They don’t use any anti-tank weapons. Maybe “vodka” is the reason they seem incapable of taking action.
They don’t retreat and flee, they only huddle further back in the same trench the tank has been methodically blowing up.
At around 10:07, one of them throws a grenade, which is not only a futile gesture on a tank, but the grenade isn’t even tossed in the right direction, but simply off to the side, like he was too scared to even look at the tank.
By the end of the video, I’m pretty sure every Russian in those trenches were goners.
As I was finishing this up, the Daily Mail put up a follow-up video. In that one the tank drove over the trench, just to make sure everyone there was dead…
Smoothly-run offices have high retention rates and low attrition rates. So what does it tell you that Texas Democratic State Rep. Jolanda Jones has a 100% attrition rate in her senior staffers last week?
The senior staff for Democrat State Rep. Jolanda Jones of Houston announced their resignation over her ‘toxic and unethical’ behavior Thursday.
A Democrat behaving toxicly and unethically?
Jones, a freshman in the Texas House and former contestant on the reality show Survivor, reportedly “actively covered up [her] son Jio’s inappropriate relationship with one of [her] interns, who is significantly younger than him and is in a power imbalance, and [is] now using [her] position to intimidate and silence [her] own staff members.”
Nepotism? Check. Sexual harassment? Check. Also, Jiovanni Jones is evidently out on bail on felony drug charges. Criminal charges? Check.
According to Jones’ senior staff, she “continued to endorse, encourage, and create an abusive and hostile work environment in the workplace without accountability for [her] or [her] relatives’ actions.”
Jones’ chief of staff, legislative director, and district director told her to “own your S.H.I.T.,” in reference to Jones’ book titled “Owning My S.H.I.T.: Suffering Hardship Internalizing Trauma.”
Social justice warrior on social justice warrior fratricide? Check.
The staff’s resignation letter, which can be read in full below, focused mainly on an alleged inappropriate relationship between Jones’ son, Jiovanni Jones, and an intern in the office:
“Jio is not only your son, but General Counsel at Elite Change Inc. (registered lobbying firm and also the financial vehicle of your campaign manager, Dallas Jones).
More nepotism plus a mechanism to rake off campaign donations into your family’s pockets? Check.
This inappropriate relationship may constitute as sexual harassment or a conflict of interest between his office of employment and your state office.
“It is concerning that you have not taken any steps to address his behavior, and instead have chosen to put everyone in the office at risk,” said the senior staff. “Your son is an absolute liability, and his behavior is now affecting the livelihoods and credibility of everyone on your payroll. It is so disappointing to see that while you build your profile on overcoming abuse, you cannot stand up to the abuser that you raised. You are holding a legal case hostage over your son’s girlfriend because you allow him to gaslight and emotionally and physically abuse all the women in his life – work and personal – while dragging your entire office through it.”
Funny how when you start digging into charges of cronyism against a Democratic office holder, a whole host of other unsavory activity comes tumbling out into the open…
