It’s doubtful that Ukraine’s President Zelensky will remain in power, or indeed, live to the conclusion of Putin’s War. There’s a very good likelihood he will not physically survive this weekend, but he’s been remarkably courageous in the face of all this. Ukraine posted a video in which Zelensky said, when the US offered him safe passage out of the country:
“I need ammunition, I don’t need a ride.”
We knew Zelensky had guts because he stood up to Trump when Trump attempted to blackmail Ukraine into sabotaging Joe Biden’s campaign in 2020; but his strength now is at a different level. Three years ago, he was playing a president in a popular television comedy. Today, he’s confronting Russia’s military, having become his TV character in real life.
We’re so used to posturing, talking points and brand management by politicians that it’s almost breathtaking to witness actual courage, resolve, and leadership. Zelensky is rising to this moment.
Many “wise” western pundits have been saying that the guy was hopelessly in over his head. But clutch moments show us to be who we are. And there he is: Not running. Compare that to America’s former ally, the last President of Afghanistan, Ashraf Ghani, who got the f outta Dodge at the first hint that things were going south.
Very few of us will ever face Zelensky’s situation. But we all have moments where we must face our fears and live out our principles or run. Zelensky is passing that test. On to cartoons, all about Putin.
Putin’s War has some support:
It’s hard to campaign when your leader undermines the message:
Sedona, AZ dusted in snow- February 2022 photo by Valentina Tree
Late on Friday, the US, Britain and EU said they will sanction Russian President Vladimir Putin and Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov. This is the third round of Biden’s sanctions, and blocks the Russian president from any economic activity within the American financial system. White House press secretary Jen Psaki indicated the US would also implement a travel ban for Putin.
These sanctions effectively place Putin in the same category as North Korea’s Kim Jong Un.
As with other Russian sanctions, it isn’t clear how effective the Putin asset freeze will be. According to the Pandora Papers investigation, Putin appears to control assets in Europe, but the amounts are trivial compared to estimates of his wealth. The travel ban is significant. It says that the West considers Putin to be an international pariah. Earlier, Biden also announced a second round of sanctions against Russia.
The challenge facing Biden is how to avoid either starting or losing, a World War. He’s done a decent job rallying other nations towards a common viewpoint about Putin’s War. Putin believed he could at least neutralize certain allies within both NATO and Europe, along with some politicians and the public in a few EU countries.
But thus far, Biden’s had success at undercutting Russia’s efforts. He has been able to achieve broad unity by making it clear that Russia is an unprovoked aggressor. Yet Kyiv may soon fall to the Russian invaders. Addressing his nation, Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky said the Russians are coming after him specifically:
We can’t ignore what’s happening, but the US won’t risk all-out war over Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. We hope to avoid these choices by imposing sanctions that might turn the Russian people against Putin, by depriving Russia of cash and other resources. The sanctions are impressively multilateral.
However, the new sanctions have some loopholes. Adam Tooze reports that the sanctions specifically exclude energy: (emphasis by Wrongo)
“Energy is the really critical issue in the sanctions saga for both sides. It is what will hurt Russia most. It is also what is most critical for Europe. And, on energy… Biden…made this aside:
‘You know, in our sanctions package, we specifically designed to allow energy payments to continue.’”
Really Joe? The sanctions say that as long as your energy-related transactions are channeled through non-sanctioned, non-US financial institutions, for instance a European bank, buying gas from Russia is peachy. So, all of the payments for Russian gas will be paid free of problems for as long as sanctions are in place.
“The German government has pushed for an exemption for the energy sector if there is a move to block Russian banks from clearing US dollar transactions….other major western European nations hold similar views.”
It gets worse. The carve-out isn’t limited to energy, it also applies to Russia’s agricultural commodity exports. So long as those transactions run through non-US, non-sanctioned banks, the US sanctions will not apply.
This shows how dependent our European partners are on Russia for gas and agriculture. It also shows how hollow the sanctions are, and how they will not be the “punishing” sanctions Biden promised.
It’s useful to remember that Germany’s use of Russian gas has been a completely tenable and a mutually beneficial relationship for 40+ years.
Finally, Biden didn’t announce excluding Russia from the SWIFT global financial payments system because Italy, Germany, and Cyprus weren’t willing to do it. Part of this has to do with buying Russian gas. It also has to do with how dependent their economies are on exports to Russia. Although, as Biden noted, full blocking of Russian financial institutions should achieve the same, or even greater, effect as a SWIFT ban.
Except for that gas and agriculture thingy, so not the same at all.
The question is whether the EU and NATO are truly willing to bear the costs of inflicting pain on Russia in order to end the Russian invasion of Ukraine. As of today, it seems that they are not.
Time to take a break from geopolitics and whether Lindsay Graham will support Biden’s new Supreme Court nominee, Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson. It’s time for our Saturday Soother, where we turn away from the news and focus on trying to calm the f down.
Today is a typical winter day in Connecticut. It’s chilly and there’s snow on the ground, but far less than predicted.
Since Putin is acting like the Honey Badger, let’s start by upping your honey badger game by brewing a mug of Honey Badger Espresso from Intelligentsia Coffee. They’re a Chicago-based chain with locations in Chicago, Los Angeles, Austin, Boston, and NYC. Leave the intelligentsia and take the honey badger.
Now grab a seat by a window and listen to Handel’s “Ombra mai fu”, known as Handel’s Largo of Love, it’s the opening aria in the 1738 operaXerxes. Here it is performed in 2017 by Czechoslovakia’s Janacek Chamber Orchestra with soloist soprano Patricia Janečková:
Rio Grande, near Taos, NM – February 2022 photo by Augustine Morgan
“God created war so that Americans would learn geography” ― Mark Twain
Yesterday we woke up to a new world order created by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Details are still sketchy, but it seems that Russia attacked from the north, east and south. Cruise missiles hit targets even in western Ukraine. The NYT provided this early map of reported Russian attacks:
The shaded areas on the right are Donetsk and Luhansk, the Ukrainian provinces that Russia recognized a few days ago as independent republics. The smaller area inside is the area currently controlled by the Russian separatists.
This news and Putin’s kabuki play leading up to the invasion obscures the fact that we’re now seeing the revival of war as an instrument of statecraft. History shows that wars of conquest used to be common. In the 19th century, that’s what strong states did to their weak neighbors. Since the mid-20th century, wars of conquest are the exception not the rule. Russia has now brought wars of conquest back on the geopolitical stage.
Putin’s attack has the goal of regime change, plus the annexation of the breakaway provinces. While NATO and the US seem to have no real countermeasures, other than sanctions. That demonstrates another of Russia’s goals: exposing NATO’s impotence.
NATO’s late-stage impotence has many causes.
The collective defense provisions of Article 5 of the NATO Charter has held the alliance together. It provides that if a NATO ally is attacked, all members of the Alliance will consider it an armed attack against them and take action to assist the attacked ally.
For much of the Cold War, (including when Wrongo served in Europe) NATO had a standing army prepared to deter an attack by the Soviets and/or its Warsaw Pact allies. NATO also maintained significant air and naval forces to confront Soviet aggression. NATO’s forces were anchored by a massive US military presence in Europe, including hundreds of thousands of troops, tens of thousands of armored vehicles, thousands of combat aircraft, and hundreds of naval vessels.
All of this gave Article 5 teeth.
When the Cold War ended in 1990-91, this combat-ready military force was gradually dismantled. Now, if there were to be a conventional fight in Europe, the Russian military is much stronger. It would defeat any force NATO could assemble.
Today the ability to deter a potential adversary from considering military action against a NATO member is no longer a certainty. That means the notion of NATO providing European collective self-defense is questionable.
In the past, NATO planned on countering the Soviet Union’s weapons and manpower superiority with tactical nuclear weapons. But The Heritage Foundation says that we can’t do that because there’s an imbalance in our nuclear arsenals:
“While the US and Russia have a similar number of deployed strategic (i.e., high-yield) nuclear weapons as limited under New START, Russia has a 10:1 advantage over us in nonstrategic (i.e., low-yield) nuclear weapons—aka tactical or battlefield nukes.”
They report that Russia has about 2,000 nonstrategic nuclear weapons, while the US has about 200. Half of them are in the US and half are with NATO, so we have about 100 tactical nukes on the ground in Europe. You might say no one is ever going to use nukes in Europe, but on Wednesday Putin warned: (emphasis by Wrongo)
“Anyone who tries to interfere with us, or even more so, to create threats for our country and our people, must know that Russia’s response will be immediate and will lead you to such consequences as you have never before experienced in your history.”
Putin’s threat could mean anything from cyber-attacks to nuclear war. But Global Security Review reports that the current edition of Russian military doctrine says that Russia:
“…reserves the right to use nuclear weapons to respond to all weapons of mass destruction attacks…on Russia and its allies.”
That significantly lowers the threshold for the use of nuclear weapons. The idea is Russia might employ tactical nuclear weapons during a conventional conflict with NATO forces to prevent a defeat, to consolidate gains, or to freeze a conflict in place without further fighting. The last two could happen in Ukraine.
Given that the disparity between Russian and European tactical nuclear weapons is so large, Moscow probably thinks any potential NATO nuclear response to their threat of using nukes isn’t credible.
This means NATO today can no longer stave off a Russian threat in Europe without using strategic nuclear weapons, a major escalation. That would be a very unlikely scenario if Russia is taking small bites of Western territory, as in Ukraine:
(hat tip, Monty B.)
Since World War II, the US has reserved the right to the “first use” of nuclear weapons should the need arise. But in January, several Democrats urged Biden to promulgate a “no-first-use” policy for US nuclear weapons. Eleven Senators and 44 House members signed a letter urging Biden to accept the policy. Imagine the consequences if a policy of no-first-use was in place, given what’s happening in Ukraine. Or what might happen if the fight was with a NATO member.
We’re now in a place where the West either accepts Russia’s new European order, or we gear up to make them recalculate Putin’s strategy.
If we choose to oppose the new Russian order, the US and Europe will incur costs. It will hurt our economies, since while sanctions will hurt the Russians, we’re hoping they will not hurt us as much, or more. Russian cyber-attacks may seriously hurt our infrastructure. The West will be forced to provide large levels of military and humanitarian support to a damaged and smaller Ukraine, possibly for years.
We will see increased defense spending. Our military will once again be deployed to Europe where they will serve as a tripwire against Russian aggression like they did in the Cold War.
This will require a unified NATO to work together for many years. Is that a realistic plan, given that different US presidents, like Trump, may not support the goals of this new NATO?
We’re in a different world now. This war will almost certainly be transformative for Europe and the world. The full effects of Russia’s attack on Ukraine will play out not just for years, but for decades.
Let’s close with the Beatles “Back in the USSR”:
Lyrics:
Well the Ukraine girls really knock me out,
They leave the West behind
And Moscow girls make me sing and shout
That Georgia’s always on my mind
(The hosting service for the Wrongologist continues to have intermittent problems with the RSS feed that sends subscribers an email version of the column in the morning. Please go to the website to see earlier columns.)
The tense standoff between Ukraine and Russia took an ominous turn towards war when, as Wrongo forecasted on Feb 14, Putin recognized the independence of the two breakaway eastern Ukraine provinces:
“Wrongo has no crystal ball but thinks that Russia will formally recognize Ukraine’s disputed Eastern provinces of Donetsk and Luhansk as independent states….But Ukraine doesn’t recognize these provinces as independent….Ukraine could be lured into trying to regain control of both provinces. At that point Russia would help defend them against Ukraine, most likely assuring that they would remain independent, although still technically part of Ukraine.”
Putin also said that he was ordering “peace-keepers” into both provinces. That effectively blunts most military responses that Ukraine might attempt.
One way to look at the situation is that Putin didn’t “invade” Ukraine. Instead, using this pretext, Russia is prepared to fight on behalf of two independent Republics who asked for Putin’s help. By recognizing Donetsk and Luhansk, Putin is following the model of how Western nations handled the 1990s breakup of Yugoslavia into three separate republics, ending communist rule in the nation.
This is a watershed moment for European security. Russia has dared Ukraine and the West to attack the breakaway provinces in the face of Russia defending them. The absolutely central question is: What aid and comfort are NATO and the US going to give Ukraine?
Biden has announced what he called the “first tranche” of sanctions on Russia, targeting two Russian banks, VEB and Russia’s military bank, along with the country’s sovereign debt. That means Russia can no longer raise money from the West and will not be able to trade its debt in US or European markets.
Biden also said sanctions on Russian elites and their families members would be rolled out starting tomorrow.
Wrongo doubts that Russia will move significant numbers of its forces into the two “independent” regions unless Ukraine attempts to re-occupy them. If Ukraine does that, it’s likely that a general war between Ukraine and Russia will begin.
Americans (specifically Republican chicken hawks) should remember that eastern Ukraine is very remote in logistical terms. Even if the US wanted to help defend Ukraine’s east, the logistics of movement and supply would be absurdly difficult.
We should immediately implement our strongest sanctions. Biden shouldn’t meet with Putin, although Blinken and Lavrov should meet. Diplomacy should determine if recognition of Donetsk and Luhansk is what Putin will settle for. If so, the task is to see if Ukraine would be fine with that. If both agree, so should the West and the US.
One thing NATO could do is close the Bosphorus, the narrow straits between the Black Sea and the Mediterranean Sea. NATO member Turkey controls access to the Bosphorus under a 1936 treaty called the Montreux Convention. In wartime, Turkey is authorized to close the straits to all foreign warships. It can also refuse transit for merchant ships from countries at war.
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan recently has emphasized his support for Ukraine. Erdogan has said Turkey will do what is necessary as a NATO ally if Russia invades, without elaborating. But Turkey is also reliant on Russia for energy and tourism. It has forged close cooperation with Moscow on energy and defense, even deploying Russia’s S-400 missile air defense system.
Imagine the pressure on Putin if Russia couldn’t send warships or merchant ships through the Bosphorus so long as the Ukraine crisis is hot.
In effect, Ukraine lost its Eastern territories along with Crimea, eight years ago. If Russian forces now start patrolling the line of contact with the new “Republics”, that will probably end the shooting. People on both sides of the border could then get back to a more normal life.
It would still leave an unstable Eastern Front for NATO and an unstable Western Front for Russia. That is something diplomacy could work on solving. Russia would have to deal with a Western-facing Ukraine integrating even more deeply into the EU. NATO would remain in Eastern Europe from the Baltics to the Balkans. NATO would then have a true mission, rather than floundering around without purpose.
Putin won’t be totally happy with this. But right now, he isn’t getting his demands met, even though he has more than half of his army on the Ukrainian border.
Let’s close with a tune. Here’s 1974’s “You Ain’t Seen Nothing Yet” from Bachman Turner Overdrive, because in Ukraine, you ain’t seen nothing yet:
(New columns will be light and variable for the rest of the week. Wrongo’s having cataract surgery today)
Last week, the Labor Department published data that showed consumer prices rose 7.5% in January from a year earlier, the biggest increase in decades. This brought all of the economic know-nothings who have pundit positions in the media to say that Biden’s presidency is in grave danger.
David Axelrod, former senior adviser to Obama, has an op-ed in the NYT that suggests Biden needs to show humility in his upcoming state of the union speech on March 1:
“…recognize that we are still in the grips of a national trauma. Polls show that the vast majority of Americans believe we are on the wrong track, and people will have little patience for lavish claims of progress that defy their lived experiences.”
It’s true that Americans have been through hell in the past two years. It’s also true that they have been helped in their negative thinking by the media. Despite all the bad news on high inflation since August, Bloomberg reports that US consumers don’t expect sky-high inflation levels to last:
“…the January consumer survey from Federal Reserve Bank of New York…showed that the median one-year-ahead inflation expectations fell for the first time since October 2020, to 5.8%. The outlook over three years dropped even more sharply, and the decline was broad-based across age, education and income.”
Bloomberg says that in that recent Fed survey, the median three-year ahead inflation expectation decreases to 3.5%.
Politically, that could still be a potential crisis for Democrats. While there’s no question America is creating jobs at a record pace and GDP growth bounced back faster than anyone imagined possible, the public is quite grumpy about the state of the economy. Rising costs for groceries and gas are points of economic pain, and good economic news is always trumped by anger about high inflation.
“Democrats should consider turning the entire conversation around inflation into an argument for populist economics….[they should] expose Republicans for siding with highly profitable corporations.”
Pfeiffer says that Democrats should focus on a message on inflation that in polling seems to work:
“President Biden says that we need to bring back manufacturing jobs in the United States to drive down prices. Our supply chains need to be housed here at home, rather than outsourced abroad.”
Pfeiffer adds that this is a big point of contrast with the message Republicans are using. The 2018 Trump Tax law rewarded companies that shipped jobs overseas. That fact can give Democrats an opportunity to punch back with an argument about how Republicans have made the problem worse.
A poll by Data for Progress showed that the Republicans have an eight-point advantage over Democrats on which Party can better control inflation. But Democrats have a nine-point advantage on “cracking down on corporate abuses and corruption.” Other polls show that most voters cite increased government spending as the leading cause of inflation. This is what Republicans are saying, but it isn’t completely correct.
We know that corporations are reaping record profits while prices are rising. CEOs are bragging about how they’re able to use inflation as a cover for their price hikes. These higher prices are adding to inflation, while shareholders are seeing record profits.
There’s a sense that Democrats won in 2018 because they ran on “kitchen table issues”, specifically, on health care, and some Dems want to go back to that. It’s partially true. But 2018 was also a referendum on Trump, and Democrats turned out in large numbers to vote against him and his fellow traveler Republicans.
In November, some Republicans will run away from Trump. But for most of them, he can be made to be an anchor on their coattails.
As Axelrod says, the country is still traumatized by the pandemic and the economic challenges that came with it. But it’s also traumatized by what Trump did, and what the Republicans are doing now to our democracy. If the Dems fail to address both they will look completely out of touch to most voters who aren’t huge partisans.
Both Biden’s State of the Union address, and the Party’s mid-term messaging needs to also focus on the state of our democracy because it’s in danger. Americans are struggling and many, many are angry, so Biden needs to accept responsibility for high prices. But he must also spell out specifically where Republicans bear responsibility for obstruction.
If Democrats tell themselves that inflation is the only important issue, and ignore the Republican threat to democracy, they will lose.
The messaging choices Democrats make right now will determine the country’s future.
Have you given any thought to the inconsistency between how Whoopi Goldberg was treated for her comment about the holocaust, and how Joe Rogan has been treated for his um, body of work? Whoopi was condemned by the left and right. She was appropriately suspended from her position as a host of ABC’s The View. She later apologized for the hurtful inference in her remarks.
With Rogan, after the flap over his COVID misinformation, it came to light that dozens of his episodes were quietly removed from Spotify because they featured Rogan using the N-word. To date, Spotify has yanked more than 100 of his episodes. But Rogan wasn’t suspended or “cancelled” by Spotify. Still, he’s held up on the Right as another victim of leftist cancel culture.
The artists who left Spotify weren’t trying to “cancel” Rogan. They just wouldn’t continue being associated with a platform that promoted him. Both the artists and Spotify are making free-market business decisions that they have every right to make.
That’s an idea that you’d think would be vigorously supported by Conservatives.
The outcry on the Right about “cancel culture” comes at a time when they are working to outlaw Critical Race Theory, overturn elections, enact legislation to deny the vote to millions of Americans, and ban books. It’s clear who’s doing the cancelling in America.
Those who defend Rogan say he’s simply providing a forum. Sure, he interviews kooks and sleazes, but he also interviews some reasonable folks. So he’s presenting “both sides“. The other side of a fact is a lie. And if you put a lie on an equal footing with the truth, you give the lie credibility. This is a cardinal sin that the media have been committing for decades. On to cartoons.
The massive self-deception the Right Wing practices while copying Nazi tactics:
Trump’s monument on the Mall:
RNC censures two of its own, says many of its own are totally fine:
Mitch the turtle takes RNC to task for its censure, also says Trump is wrong:
Russia’s about to bite off more than it can chew:
The end of mask mandates is political signaling. We’ll soon know if this calculated risk works:
Sunrise, Camden Harbor, ME – February 2022 photo by Daniel F. Dishner
(For email subscribers: Below in this email is a link to Monday’s Wake Up Call. It wasn’t sent on Monday morning)
“If everyone is thinking alike, then somebody isn’t thinking,” ̶ Gen. George S. Patton
Last Friday, the Republican National Committee (RNC) passed a resolution that claimed that the House Select Committee was seeking to punish ordinary people for engaging in “legitimate political discourse.” This came days after Trump suggested that, if re-elected in 2024, he would consider pardons for those convicted in the Jan. 6 attack. He also said that his goal on Jan. 6 was to “overturn” the election results.
“The Republican National Committee on Friday approved an astounding resolution that…condoned the attack on the US Capitol last year. In doing so, it’s given up any pretense that the party stands in opposition to the violence that then-President Donald Trump inspired.”
“The RNC resolution illustrates the death grip Trump has on the GOP….Trump’s repeated insistence that Mike Pence could have awarded the election to Trump finally provoked Pence to declare that “Trump is wrong”….Pence’s statement provoked a vigorous defense of Trump from Matt Gaetz, Steve Bannon, and Roger Stone—a rogues gallery of felons, targets of grand jury investigations, and recipients of presidential pardons.”
“WHEREAS, Representatives Cheney and Kinzinger are participating in a Democrat-led persecution of ordinary citizens engaged in legitimate political discourse, and they are both utilizing their past professed political affiliation to mask Democrat abuse of prosecutorial power for partisan purposes…”
So, Republicans think that what the insurrectionists did by bashing in cops’ brains with flag poles is legitimate political discourse? Smearing feces on the walls of Congress was legitimate political discourse?
CNN quoted a Republican who said the resolution was “watered down” because it didn’t demand that Kinzinger and Cheney be expelled from the GOP. That says what passed is the GOP version of a more moderate resolution supporting the coup.
That phrase “ordinary citizens engaged in legitimate political discourse” goes beyond just defending Trump or faulting Cheney and Kinzinger for defying the Party. It sanctions the actions of insurrectionists who wanted to overturn a legitimate election.
The resolution shows that the RNC (and therefore most Republicans) have effectively joined the insurrectionists. The important thing is that it wouldn’t matter what their intent was. The Republican Party is whitewashing the riot:
We know that the Right-wing media continues to spread misinformation about Jan 6.
We know that those arrested for participating in the Jan. 6 violence are getting sympathetic responses from many Republicans.
We know that for the overwhelming majority of elected Republicans, the only thing they truly regret about 1/6 is that it failed.
This means that Republican candidates will have to campaign in the 2022 mid-terms by supporting violent insurrection and a failed coup. That will appeal to most Republicans, but on its face, it will repel the strong majority of Democrats and Independent voters.
Speaking of the mid-terms, let’s spend a few words on Liz Cheney. Had you said a few years ago that the straight daughter of Dick Cheney would become a pariah in the Republican Party in 2022, you would have been laughed off your bar stool.
What kind of a world do we live in when Liz Cheney isn’t evil enough for the Republican Party?
Cheney’s Congressional seat is important: If the next presidential election were to be decided by the House of Representatives, each state would get a single vote. If Cheney was Wyoming’s sole Representative, she would have the same clout as California or New York.
That’s a relatively unlikely future scenario, but Wyoming is an open primary state, meaning that Democrats could cross the aisle and vote for her, possibly making a difference in whether she wins the primary. She couldn’t win the mid-term because Dems would go back to their candidate, and the anti-Cheney Republicans would stay home. In that scenario, the seat might flip to the Democrats.
Cheney is what the GOP used to be, or pretended it was: stalwart, principled, with deeply-held convictions, and unwavering loyalty to the country and the rule of law.
She’s also a reminder of how far the GOP has fallen.
Know your enemy. Dems think they’re in a battle of tweets armed with binders of position papers and outrage. That won’t be enough in November.
The Republicans are doubling down on the coup. Democrats need to double down on registration, turnout, voter protection, and sure, some outrage at Republicans.
According to Worldometer data, the US Covid death toll is now at 924,000. Last year, on June 1, 2021 the US death toll was 615,000. That’s the minimum number of deaths we could have suffered prior to the widespread availability of Covid vaccines in the US.
That 600,000± pre-vaccine death toll is comparable to the deaths that occurred in the Civil War. We’ve studied the Civil War for generations, although it’s doubtful that the Republican Right wants America to study all that much about Covid. On to cartoons.
As someone (?) once said, it takes a village, and we don’t have one:
The Olympics are on TV. Should we watch? Views differ:
Supreme Court nominations of women through time:
Biden’s alternate nominating strategy:
Trump doesn’t care who knows:
Putin and Biden ridin’ around the Ukraine speedway:
The NYTsaid on Saturday that portions of the Russian army near Ukraine have reached full combat strength. No one knows what will happen next, but there seem to be two likely outcomes. First, that any conflict is limited to Ukraine territory or second, that it moves beyond Ukraine to other parts of Europe.
If it goes beyond Ukraine’s borders, we could quickly find ourselves again on the threshold of nuclear war, since that’s a red line for NATO. But Russia also has other cards to play. They could launch massive cyber-attacks on the US, attacking and disabling our power grids, communications systems, and/or our financial system.
We would try to do the same inside Russia.
Wrongo isn’t trying to spread fear. He’s expressing the hope that we can get past all of the hollow political posturing and take a cold, hard look at what we’re truly trying to achieve if we decide on military intervention on behalf of Ukraine.
In a sense, the world changed on Friday when China’s Xi and Russia’s Putin met in Beijing. Their joint statement is unequivocal. China & Russia are now explicitly willing to at least challenge or possibly replace, Pax Americana, in Eurasia.
Borrowing from ancient history, in 560 BC, King Croesus was considering war on Persia. He consulted the Oracle at Delphi. Famously, the Oracle’s forecast was “If you make war on the Persians, you will destroy a great empire”. Let’s hope that Biden is receiving less ambiguous advice.
Valley of Fire SP, NV – January 2022 photo by Robert E. Ford
Glad to see January go, with it being the anniversary of the Jan. 6 coup attempt and all that came after it. What isn’t going away is the slow and continuing fracture of America’s social cohesion. We also remember that it was FIVE years ago that Trump was inaugurated. That was a sorry time, since it made it clear that he would get to appoint several Supreme Court justices.
The partisan rancor brought to Supreme Court appointments has become another fault line in our social cohesion. That’s due in part to changes in Supreme Court.
One recent trend in these appointments is how much younger appointees are: The typical tenure for Supreme Court justices in the 19th and early 20th centuries was around 15 years. But as the lifespan of American adults has lengthened over the past century, so has tenure on the Court. Since 1975, the average justice has retired from the court after serving 27 years. Breyer, who was sworn in on Aug. 3, 1994, matches the average perfectly. Soon it will be longer than 30 years.
Another issue is the hubris of elderly Justices. Justices Brennan and Marshall, both about 70 years old at the time, decided not to retire when Jimmy Carter was president, thinking he wasn’t liberal enough to appoint their replacements. They decided to wait for a more left-leaning Democratic president that they presumed would come next.
Liberals got lucky when Brennan retired in 1990,and David Souter replaced him. They weren’t as lucky when Marshall was replaced by Clarence Thomas in 1992. Thomas, the first GOP Justice was selected explicitly for his race and youth (he was 43) and still sits on the Court today, 30 years later.
The same scenario played out less than two years ago with Justice Ginsburg. She refused to retire during Obama’s presidency (after a direct appeal from Obama in 2013) when he correctly feared losing the Senate in 2014. She died in 2020 and was immediately replaced by the 48-year-old Conservative Justice Barrett.
Another trend is Judicial Supremacy. Once Justices realized that their power was almost completely unchecked under the Constitution, it wasn’t a big leap to find them ruling according to personal preference.
The Framers never foresaw how formidable the judiciary would become. Once the Supreme Court successfully claimed the right of judicial review — the power to strike down laws it deemed unconstitutional — it went from being the weakest branch to the strongest. Today, virtually every important political controversy eventually comes before the Court.
The public’s opinion about the Court has never been lower. A Gallup poll last September (just before the Texas abortion cases) found that just 40% of Americans say they approved of the Court’s job. This represents a new low in Gallup’s polling, which dates back to 2000.
The chart below shows the results of a new ABC News / Ipsos Poll asking if the Supreme Court’s rulings are partisan:
(Hat tip: Jobsanger) The poll was conducted January 28-29, 2022 and has a ± 4.9% point margin of error.
It’s clear that a plurality of Americans no longer trust the Court with their lives, or with the direction of the country. That’s what makes selecting a Supreme Court nominee such a high-stakes game.
If Supreme Court vacancies were more frequent and regular, confirmation battles would be much less likely to turn into political Armageddon every time. We should be asking whether life tenure for Supreme Court justices still is legitimate, regardless of which Party controls Congress or the White House.
The Framers of the Constitution feared that the judiciary would be the weakest of the federal government’s branches and the most susceptible to political pressure. They therefore sought to bolster the Court’s independence by ensuring justices could stay on the bench for as long as they wished.
But the only alternative to a bad Court decision today is for 2/3rds of both Houses of Congress followed by 3/4ths of all States to change it by Constitutional Amendment. A nearly impossible and time-consuming process.
Instead, we should enact term limits for the Supremes. With nine Justices, one Justice’s position should expire every two years (essentially giving each an 18 year term). After serving on the Court they could fulfill their lifetime appointment by continuing to serve as “Justices Emeritus” on one of the regional Courts of Appeal.
This isn’t a partisan idea. Many Republicans endorse term limits. Among those who have endorsed it is Justice Stephen Breyer. Numerous polls in recent years show widespread support across Party lines for limiting Supreme Court justices’ terms. Everyone can tell that life tenure on the Supreme Court isn’t working. It’s time we replaced it with something better. America’s social cohesion depends on it.
Speaking of social cohesion, spend a few minutes watching this affecting commercial for Heineken. It celebrates communication, listening, and getting to know others who have different viewpoints:
Anyone else thinking that our national party bus is about to stall out in the slow lane on America’s Boulevard of Broken Dreams?
Here’s an under-the-radar story: In 2020, the Trump administration hatched a plan to gradually transition traditional Medicare over to private firms. It’s called Direct Contracting (DC) and is operated by Direct Contracting Entities (DCEs). Currently, there are 53 of them in Phase One of an experimental program operated by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS).
Under the program, the DCEs receive a fixed amount of money annually to cover care for each traditional Medicare enrollee whose primary care doctor (or group) has signed up with that DCE. The DCEs must pay for all of the care of those people assigned to them. To date, the CMS has auto-assigned hundreds of thousands of people to DCEs.
Since no one on Medicare has voluntarily signed up to work with a DCE, it’s unlikely they know of, nor understand what’s happening. And the CMS doesn’t require DCEs to tell people that they have the right to opt-out.
The idea behind DCEs is to shift a portion of the financial risk of the elderly’s medical care away from traditional Medicare by capping the payments to a third party that’s responsible to pay for it. This is the latest in many efforts by CMS and Congress to control the rising costs of healthcare.
Wrongo and Ms. Right have recently noticed a blizzard of direct mail offers to convert our traditional Medicare to an all-in insurance program. It’s probable that some of these are from DCEs.
The anticipated advantage of the DCE experiment is that Medicare’s out-of-pocket costs will be capped. The DCEs contract with CMS is for an agreed-upon annual payment. They have to pay for care and also make a profit based on that fixed revenue amount from the government. In addition to the normal profits from providing services, DCEs can keep as much as 40% of the money they don’t spend on care.
But there’s no such thing as a free lunch, and it seems to Wrongo that this creates yet another financial incentive to deny otherwise necessary treatments. It’s possible that the DCEs could pay doctors to steer patients away from specialty care. This means that someone enrolled in a DCE has reason to worry that their primary care doctor might limit their access to more costly care.
Congress did not authorize the wholesale overhaul of traditional Medicare, so why is this happening? And so far, the Biden administration appears to be willing to continue playing Trump’s cards.
Many of the DCEs are owned by Private Equity (PE) firms. It doesn’t take a chess master to see that the PE firms will ultimately sell out to the insurance industry. And it wouldn’t be a big leap from that to fully privatize Medicare.
Time to wake up America! Did we elect Biden to privatize Medicare? The word “privatize” should scare the hell out of Americans. But unfortunately they’ve been fooled into believing that by some magic miracle of economics, it’s to their benefit.
This was an easy business decision for Spotify. They picked the popular podcaster Rogan with the $100 million-plus exclusive deal, over the cranky 76-year-old rocker whose last gold album was nearly two decades ago. Someone who hasn’t been on the Billboard charts since 1982.
Joni Mitchell and Dave Grohl have now said they will follow Young in leaving Spotify.
Let’s watch and listen to Neil Young playing “Hey Hey, My My” at Farm Aid in Champaign, Illinois on September, 1985. Young is a co-founder and board member of Farm Aid, along with Willie Nelson and John Mellencamp:
Neil won’t burn out or fade away.
Sample Lyric: Out of the blue
and into the black
You pay for this,
but they give you that
And once you’re gone,
you can’t come back
When you’re out of the blue
and into the black.
“You pay for this, and they give you that”. Listen up Medicare!
Valley of Fire SP, NV – January 2022 photo by 
