Month: February 2022

The invasion has begun and it’s not just some little incursion in the “newly independent states.” They are shelling Kyiv. And tanks are rolling from Belarus to the capitol.

I’m sure you’ll all be following this on TV and we’ll have a lot more news tomorrow. In the meantime, here’s Aaron Rupar on how the right is covering it:

Trump on Fox News:

[Putin] sees the weakness and the incompetence and the stupidity of this administration. As an American I am angry about it and saddened by it. And it all happened because of a rigged election. This would’ve never happened. That includes inflation and that includes millions of people pouring in on a monthly basis, far more than three million people, they are coming from 129 different countries. We have no idea what’s happening and they are destroying our country. 

If that sounds like the rantings of a madman, things only got weirder from there.

Ingraham at one point mentioned a report she heard about Russian troops making an amphibious landing at Odessa. But the former president thought she was talking about American troops making a landing in Ukraine to fight Russians, and started criticizing the military for not maintaining better operational secrecy.

“You know what’s also very dangerous is you told me about the amphibious attack by Americans. You shouldn’t be saying that, because you and everybody else shouldn’t know about,” Trump said. “They should do that secretly, not be doing that through the great Laura Ingraham.”

Ingraham corrected him.

“No, those are the Russians,” she said.

“Oh, I thought you said that we were sending people in,” he said. “That’ll be next.”

While it’s hard to believe someone who was president just 14 months ago really thought American troops are fighting Russians in Ukraine, it was easy to foresee that Fox News’s primetime lineup would make plenty of excuses for Putin while trying to pin blame on Biden or, in Ingraham’s case, on Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, who she accused of a “pathetic display” by making a speech that represented a last-ditch effort to persuade Putin not to invade.

But Ukraine, of course, is a democracy, with a democratically elected government that has been trying to gradually move the country further away from authoritarian Russia and closer to the West. Trump, Carlson, and Ingraham, meanwhile, seem to prefer Putin to Biden — and they’re getting closer and closer to just coming right out and saying it.

Three hours before the invasion began I got this sobering message here in Ukraine from a senior pentagon official “You are likely in the last few hours of peace on the European continent for a long time to come. Be careful “

— Martha Raddatz (@MarthaRaddatz) February 24, 2022

It sure looks like it. I don’t know if we’ll ever know what happened here but I I certainly hope we do:

The two prosecutors leading the Manhattan district attorney’s investigation into former President Donald J. Trump and his business practices abruptly resigned on Wednesday amid a monthlong pause in their presentation of evidence to a grand jury, according to people with knowledge of the matter. The stunning development comes not long after the high-stakes inquiry appeared to be gaining momentum, and throws its future into serious doubt.

The prosecutors, Carey R. Dunne and Mark F. Pomerantz, submitted their resignations after the new Manhattan district attorney, Alvin Bragg, indicated to them that he had doubts about moving forward with a case against Mr. Trump, the people said.

Mr. Pomerantz confirmed in a brief interview that he had resigned, but declined to elaborate. Mr. Dunne declined to comment.

Without Mr. Bragg’s commitment to move forward, the prosecutors late last month postponed a plan to question at least one witness before the grand jury, one of the people said. They have not questioned any witnesses in front of the grand jury for more than a month, essentially pausing their investigation into whether Mr. Trump inflated the value of his assets to obtain favorable loan terms from banks.

The precise reasons for Mr. Bragg’s pullback are unknown, and he has made few public statements about the status of the inquiry since taking office. In a statement responding to the resignations of the prosecutors, a spokeswoman for Mr. Bragg said that he was “grateful for their service” and that the investigation was ongoing.

Why am I not surprised?

Giving Bragg the benefit of the doubt, maybe he just felt the case was too hard to prove. Or maybe Donald Trump is just honest as the day is long and these people were harassing the poor man for political gain. Most likely, in my opinion, Bragg just didn’t want the political headache which would be immense.

Perhaps the IRS could do something (but they won’t.) Or maybe the Georgia prosecution will go some place. But sad to say, it appears that the Trump Organization and the family are probably free from any criminal exposure for their crimes. Trump may end up suffering some small financial loss in the civil case but he just considers that the price of doing business.

The sad truth is that Trump bought protection with his MAGA cult. Nobody wants to cross it.

Lol:

Since leaving office, former President Donald Trump has made no mystery of his desire to exact revenge on Mitch McConnell, by rallying pro-Trump senators to block McConnell from returning to his perch as majority leader. But the ex-president has been tight-lipped about who, exactly, he would want to back as McConnell’s prospective dethroner.

However, in private conversations with close associates over the past several months, at Mar-a-Lago and elsewhere, Trump has batted around a handful of GOP senators’ names in his quest to stick it to the riot-averse “dumb son of a bitch” McConnell. Since at least late last year, Trump has been asking a recurring question.

“Do you think Lindsey could do it?” he has asked advisers, according to two sources who’ve heard him pose this same question at different points over the past four months.

He was, of course, referring to Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC), who was one of Trump’s preferred golf buddies and confidants on Capitol Hill during his four years in the White House.

[…]

At this stage, a handful of visible right-wing primary contenders, such as Eric Greitens in Missouri and Kelly Tshibaka in Alaska, have pledged to vote to dump McConnell should they end up on Capitol Hill. But according to three people familiar with the matter, Trump’s flurry of calls and meetings looking for ways to expel McConnell from a leadership position have yielded unimpressive results, so far.

“If I’m being honest, it’s not going well,”one of the sources, who has tried to help the ex-president on his vengeful quest, conceded, noting that there is scant appetite among Senate Republicans, and among many top-tier conservative candidates, to go along with this. Various Trump allies and lawmakers have already told the former president that it would be a bad idea to try to oust McConnell, which would risk sparking further intra-party tumult at this point in the Biden era.

It also doesn’t help that Graham, one of the senators on Trump’s shortlist of preferred leaders, says he isn’t even interested in taking Minority Leader McConnell’s former job, and literally laughed off the idea when asked about Trump’s proposal for his future.

Reached by phone on Monday, Graham said, “I know [Trump] is not pleased with Sen. McConnell,” but claimed that in Graham and Trump’s conversations, “he has not gone down that road with me.”

Asked if he’d want to assume the leadership post, Graham simply replied, “not me” and “no,” while audibly chortling on the call.

Trump’s going to have to give up some of that cash if he wants Senators to dump their generous Senate leader. But I don’t see that happening, do you?

Krugman takes on his fellow liberal economists for refusing to endorse economic policies that are popular. And he is particularly critical of those who are arguing against placing some of the blame for inflation on price gouging by greedy corporations. It’s true!

During the Trump years, Republican economists, even those you might have expected to be concerned about their professional reputations, rushed to embrace extravagant and implausible claims about what Donald Trump’s tax cuts would achieve. Some were even willing to abase themselves in ways reminiscent of Putin cronies. Remember when Tomas Philipson of the University of Chicago declared that Trump had economic instincts “on par with many Nobel economists I have worked with”?

Democratic economists, by contrast, often seem eager to display their independence by criticizing Biden administration policies. And while intellectual integrity is a good thing, I’d argue that sometimes the desire to seem independent leads Democratic economists to overdo it — to criticize arguments or policy proposals that actually make sense, perhaps especially if these proposals would be politically popular.

Let me give you two examples, one minor and one much bigger.

The minor example is proposals for a temporary cut in gasoline taxes to reduce inflationary pressures. There are some good arguments against doing this; in the long run we want to discourage people from burning fossil fuels, not make them cheaper. But I’ve been astonished to encounter Democratic-leaning economists and economics writers asserting that a gas-tax cut wouldn’t help consumers and that it would simply increase oil company profits.

What? The price of crude oil is set on world markets and can’t be much influenced by U.S. policy. But there’s no world market for retail gasoline; Europeans can’t fill their tanks at American gas stations. There are, in fact, large international differences in gasoline prices, precisely because tax rates are so different. And the data suggests a roughly one-to-one effect — that is, higher or lower fuel taxes are fully passed on to consumers:

Why assert anything different? I can only guess that it’s an instinctive reaction against anything that sounds crowd-pleasing.

The same thing is, I suspect, going on when Democratic-leaning economists summarily reject suggestions — most notably by Elizabeth Warren — that corporate abuse of market power may be one factor in inflation, or (not quite the same point) that stepped-up antitrust efforts might be a useful part of anti-inflation strategy. These views have wide public support, but the Biden administration has been diffident about advancing them, reportedly because its economists are reluctant to challenge the professional orthodoxy that such things can’t happen.

I understand where that orthodoxy is coming from. It’s not a naïve denial that corporations are greedy or have price-setting market power. It comes, instead, from the assertion that corporations have always been greedy and had market power, and there’s no reason to believe that these problems have suddenly gotten worse.

This argument, however, misses two important points.

The first is that market power gives businesses some wiggle room on prices. Yes, there’s a profit-maximizing price, but the cost to a business of charging somewhat less than its profit-maximizing price is small, because lower margins would be offset by increased sales. (To be formal about it, the losses caused by deviating from the optimal price are second-order.) This wiggle room means that corporate pricing may be strongly influenced by intangible considerations, like fear of alienating buyers. A similar argument helps explain why social pressure and prevailing norms seem to have a strong effect on wage rates, and a related argument helps explain why minimum wages don’t seem to reduce employment.

Given this reality, it’s not foolish to suggest that some corporations have seen widespread inflation as an opportunity to jack up prices by more than their costs have increased without experiencing the usual backlash. And it’s not just liberal politicians saying this: Recently the market analyst Edward Yardeni, explaining why profits soared in 2021, declared that “it kind of became culturally acceptable to raise prices” because everyone knew that costs were going up. This phenomenon may, for example, explain recent huge price increases in the meatpacking industry.

Nobody sensible would argue that opportunistic exploitation of market power is the main factor behind recent inflation. But contrary to what some people might want you to believe, economic theory by no means rules out the possibility that it may be a factor.

And perhaps an even more important point, cracking down on excessive industrial concentration and market power would help reduce inflation, regardless of the role market power played in causing inflation in the first place. As an old line puts it, you don’t have to refill a flat tire through the hole.

Now, it would clearly be a mistake to make a campaign against price gouging the core of America’s economic strategy. But nobody is suggesting doing that. At this point, monetary policy is bearing the main burden of inflation-fighting, and the Biden administration — unlike its predecessor — has been careful about not placing pressure on the Federal Reserve to keep interest rates low. Republicans may portray Joe Biden as the second coming of Hugo Chavez, but he isn’t even the second coming of Richard Nixon, who tried to fight inflation with price controls while a complaisant Fed, probably trying to ensure his re-election, helped create an unsustainable boom.

In fact, Biden has been far less forthright about condemning corporate power than John F. Kennedy, who publicly berated the steel industry over what he considered excessive price hikes.

Why, then, are Democratic-leaning economists coming down so hard on the Biden administration’s modest, intellectually defensible attempts to highlight the role of abusive corporate pricing? As I said, I suspect that the desire of Democratic experts to avoid being seen as hacks is causing them to overcompensate, dismissing ideas that actually make sense.

So here’s a plea to my fellow wonks: Evaluate economic ideas on their merits. You don’t want to endorse bad policies because they’re popular, but you don’t want to reject policy ideas simply because they are popular, either.

Just because there is a populist mood out there in the country doesn’t mean it’s completely wrong. Corporations are taking advantage of this situation and they should be called out for it.

I read that the White House is divided on this issue. Let’s hope that Krugman’s column is read by some of the political people with clout. It couldn’t be more important.

It’s always distasteful to speak about war and peace in political terms but it’s just as inevitable. Politics are involved whether we like it or not. And in America for the past 60 years or so, it has usually broken down on predictably partisan lines. The hawks have tended to be on the right and the doves tended to be on the left, with some notable exceptions in both cases. Centrist Democrats have often been hawkish and on occasion we would see left wing Democrats support humanitarian interventions and far right Republicans agitating against war from an isolationist viewpoint.

But over the last quarter century we’ve seen those lines break down, particularly on the right.

Back in the 1990s when NATO intervened in the Baltics many of the usual hawks were suddenly unwilling to support military action as they usually did (and had just done a few years earlier in the first Gulf War) because they just couldn’t get worked up about a strongman dictator committing genocide in Europe. In that respect, they resembled their “America First” forebears in the 1930s. And after decades of support for all wars, big and small, in the name of anti-Communism, this stance came as something of a shock. One of the GOP congressional leaders at the time, Rep. Tom Delay, R-Tex., an aggressively hostile right-winger, remarked on the House floor:

“Bombing a sovereign nation for ill-defined reasons with vague objectives undermines the American stature in the world. The international respect and trust for America has diminished every time we casually let the bombs fly. We must stop giving the appearance that our foreign policy is formulated by the Unabomber.”

Hard right Senator Trent Lott, R-Miss., actually said “give peace a chance.”

Not long after that came 9/11 and the entire GOP reverted back to its usual warlike attitudes, supporting the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq under a Republican president with savage fervor, cheering on the “Shock and Awe” bombing campaigns and enthusiastically supporting torture and rendition. (Of course, the enemies in those cases weren’t their kind of guys, if you know what I mean, like Serbian dictator Slobodan Milošević.)

Then after years of endless jingoistic warmongering, the GOP seemed finally to run out of gas in 2016 when they voted in Donald Trump who swaggered around on stage like Benito Mussolini but also promised to “end the forever wars” suggesting that America’s adversaries would simply swoon and surrender at the mere sight of his manly visage. At the same time, he and his followers, were likewise swooning over Russian leader Vladimir Putin, a man they’d been warming to for over a decade, largely on the basis of his muscular domestic leadership, which they greatly admire, and as a continuation of their domestic opposition to Democratic President Barack Obama. 

The leadership of the Republican Party stood silently by as President Trump basked in extravagant flattery and flamboyant pageantry from dictators and tyrants around the world who knew they had the man’s number. It was so very easy to get him to do their dirty work for them, they had no need to take action. He was more critical of his own country than they were.

Now that Trump is out of office, the Republicans are confused and off balance when it comes to Vladimir Putin. They want to say he is a bad man taking advantage of a feeble Joe Biden but it’s uncomfortable because they like him so much. More importantly, their own Dear Leader does too. As Salon’s Igor Derish reported on Tuesday, Donald Trump finally weighed in with his views on the Russian invasion of Ukraine on a podcast.

“I went in yesterday and there was a television screen, and I said, ‘This is genius.’ Putin declares a big portion of Ukraine — Putin declares it as independent. Oh, that’s wonderful. I said, ‘How smart is that?’ And he’s gonna go in and be a peacekeeper. … We could use that on our southern border.”

He also called him very savvy, which echoes the words of his former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo who has been extolling Putin’s virtues to anyone who will listen, including Russian television:

Mike Pompeo asked to describe Putin: “Very shrewd, very capable. I have enormous respect for him .. he is very savvy.” pic.twitter.com/cmNZbytPaf

— Ron Filipkowski (@RonFilipkowski) February 20, 2022

And then there’s the MAGA Muse, Tucker Carlson, insisting daily that Vladimir Putin is nothing more than a docile pussycat, even as he declares Canadian president Justin Trudeau to be a ruthless authoritarian tyrant. Last night he suggested in his usual oleaginous way that mean people on Twitter are worse than a dictator who poisons and imprisons his political adversaries.

Tucker: It may be worth asking yourself… why do I hate Putin.. Has Putin ever called me a racist? Has he threatened to get me fired for disagreeing with him? pic.twitter.com/0jlXfS0PYy

— Acyn (@Acyn) February 23, 2022

Still, some elected Trumpers don’t seem to have gotten the memo:

Biden has been more critical of unvaccinated Americans than Vladimir Putin.

— Sen. Marsha Blackburn (@MarshaBlackburn) February 22, 2022

Meanwhile, Ohio GOP Senate candidate J.D. Vance says “I gotta be honest with you, I don’t really care what happens to Ukraine one way or another,” while Pennsylvania GOP Senate candidate Mehmet Oz declares “Putin is a thug who has violated the sovereignty of a free country…The U.S. and our allies must take immediate actions to cripple his regime.”

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell and House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy both railed against Biden’s “appeasement” while GOP Wyoming Rep. Liz Cheney blamed it all on Donald Trump:

“Former President Trump’s adulation of Putin today — including calling him a ‘genius’ — aids our enemies. Trump’s interests don’t seem to align with the interests of the United States of America.”

Trump activist Candace Owens, went the other way:

I suggest every American who wants to know what’s *actually* going on in Russia and Ukraine, read this transcript of Putin’s address. As I’ve said for month— NATO (under direction from the United States) is violating previous agreements and expanding eastward. WE are at fault. https://t.co/NDmou8I36H

— Candace Owens (@RealCandaceO) February 22, 2022

I can’t help but be reminded of a very famous speech by former UN Ambassador during the Reagan administration, Democrat Jeanne Kirkpatrick, who spoke at the 1984 Republican Convention and said her fellow Democrats “always blame America first.” Conservatives often referred to liberal critics of American foreign policy as the “blame America first crowd”, even as recently as 2020 in the Wall St. Journal — long after Donald Trump infamously said, “there are a lot of killers. You think our country’s so innocent?” when questioned about Putin’s penchant for killing his enemies. Now the Wall St. Journal is running op-eds with headlines like “How the U.S. and Europe Lost the Post-Cold War.”

The Republicans are confused about who they are in many ways and they are all over the place with their reaction to this aggression by Russia. But the rest of us shouldn’t be. The various factions in the party have one thing in common and only one thing: oppositional partisanship. If the Democrats are for it, they are against it and vice versa.

But there is a very strong strain within that group that really, really likes a white, nationalist strongman, whether it’s Slobodan Milošević, Viktor Orban or Vladimir Putin. That group is gaining power within that coalition and they are yearning for someone with more Putinesque gumption than the aging brand name in a baggy suit and red tie they had to settle for. I sense there are quite a few young up and comers who are closely observing this phenomenon and will be ready to deliver when the time comes.

Salon

Greg Sargent has some news for Democrats:

As Democrats debate the GOP’s all-culture-war-all-the-time campaign strategy, here’s a maxim worth remembering: If you’re wasting political bandwidth denying lies about yourselves, you’re losing.

A new CBS News poll offers data that should prod Democrats into rethinking these culture-war battles. It finds that surprisingly large majorities oppose banning books on history or race — and importantly, this is partly because teaching about our racial past makes students more understanding of others’ historical experiences.Opinions to start the day, in your inbox. Sign up.

The poll finds that 83 percent of Americans say books should never be banned for criticizing U.S. history; 85 percent oppose banning them for airing ideas you disagree with; and 87 percent oppose banning them for discussing race or depicting slavery.

What’s more, 76 percent of Americans say schools should be allowed to teach ideas and historical events that “might make some students uncomfortable.” And 68 percent say such teachings make people more understanding of what others went through, while 58 percent believe racism is still a serious problem today.

Finally, 66 percent say public schools either teach too little about the history of Black Americans (42 percent) or teach the right amount (24 percent). Yet 59 percent say we’ve made “a lot of real progress getting rid of racial discrimination” since the 1960s.

This hints at a way forward for Democrats. Notably, large majorities think both that we’ve made a good deal of racial progress and that we should be forthrightly confronting hard racial truths about our past and present, even if it makes students uncomfortable.

That shouldn’t be too hard a balance to strike. But it’s exactly the balance that some Republicans who seek to restrict teaching about race seek to remove from the agenda entirely.

Democrats have got to stop running from these culture war issues and face them. There is a sub-group of right wing activists who are making a lot of noise. But they aren’t representative of the country. There is a common sense approach to most of these issues if Democratic politicians would just stop being so spooked by the screaming right wing fringe. They need to recognize this and act accordingly.

It’s rare that conservative opinion writer Brett Stephens catches my attention. But at a time like this, with conflict imminent in Eastern Europe, there remain a few, even on the right, who still want to believe in who we profess to be when belief itself is out of fashion.

Stephens confesses to the country’s past mistakes. They are many. “Who are we … to hold ourselves up as paragons of freedom and human rights?” he asks, with our history of “slavery and discrimination,” with our record of “supporting friendly dictators, and the ongoing injustices of American life.”

Stephens does not go so far as to call for direct U.S. military engagement to preserve Ukraine. But he acknowledges that our cautiousness born of past errors empowers Russia. Putin wants Ukraine and will pay a higher price to get it than the West will to protect it. “Putin wants to change the geopolitical order of Europe and is prepared to take large risks to do it,” Stephens writes. Lacking formal defense agreements, the West is unsure Ukraine is worth fighting for.

Massive accumulation of Russian tanks and howitzers in the Novooskolsky district in Belgorod oblastpic.twitter.com/dS7QRJLpRz

— marqs (@MarQs__) February 23, 2022

Chalk it up to too much “intellectual humility” born of past mistakes leading to “moral confusion” and “a fear of unknown risks.” Vladimir Putin’s appetite for reclaiming the Russian empire may be reprehensible, Stephens explains, but stems from strong self-belief.

Stephens dodges saying so, but the Ukraine challenge comes, conveniently, during post-Jan. 6th moral confusion. Many Americans demonstrated that they yearn more for an authoritarian strong man than for defending democratic self-rule at home except as public charade. Why would they do so abroad? Putin’s advance on Ukraine now is not a product of alleged weakness on the part of President Joe Biden. It is the result of another serious American mistake Stephens fails to acknowledge: electing an anti-democratic authoritarian in 2016.

Putin’s self-belief is his strength, and our lack of it his asset:

The United States used to have self-belief. Our civilization, multiple generations of Americans believed, represented human progress. Our political ideals — about the rule of law, human rights, individual liberties, democratic governance — were ideals for all people, including those beyond our borders. Our literature spoke to the universal human experience; our music to the universal soul. When we fought wars, it was for grand moral purposes, not avaricious aims. Even our worst blunders, as in Vietnam, stemmed from defensible principles. Our sins were real and numerous, but they were correctable flaws, not systemic features.

It goes without saying that this self-belief — like all belief — was a mixture of truth and conceit, idealism and hubris, vision and blindness. It led us to make all sorts of errors, the acute awareness of which has become the dominant strain of our intellectual life. But it also led us to our great triumphs: Yorktown and Appomattox; the 13th and 19th Amendments; the Berlin Airlift and the fall of the Berlin Wall; the Marshall Plan and PEPFAR.

These victories were not the result of asking, “Who are we?” They came about by asking, “Who but us?” In the crisis of Ukraine, which is really a crisis of the West, we might start asking the second question a little more often than the first.

Trumpism’s response is “not our problem.” Putin’s actions may in fact help Republicans rescue their party from it.

#Ukraine 🇺🇦: large column of Russian tanks on the move through separatist territory towards the front near #Mariupol.

Some tanks carry separatist flags pic.twitter.com/O2BkhSdf5t

— Thomas van Linge (@ThomasVLinge) February 23, 2022

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For The Win, 4th Edition is ready for download. Request a copy of my free, countywide get-out-the-vote planning guide for county committees at ForTheWin.us. This is what winning looks like.

Trumpublicans have gone down the rabbit hole, deeper, deeper, through the middle of the Earth, and out the other side. Into Bizarro World.

Bess Levin at Vanity Fair:

For many weeks now, Republican lawmakers have been criticizing Joe Biden for supposedly being too weak to stop Vladimir Putin’s actions in Ukraine, which on Tuesday the White House officially declared an “invasion.” It’s a peculiar stance for conservatives to take given that Donald Trump spent four years acting like the Putin was his boss, and on Tuesday, literally praised the Russian president and called his actions in Ukraine “genius.” No, really!

During an interview with a conservative radio hosts, and after his traditional evocation of a stolen election, Donald Trump praised Vladimir Putin for his tactical brilliance. Declaring a portion of Ukraine independent was “wonderful,” “genius,” and “savvy.”

“I said, ‘How smart is that?’” Trump added.

“And he’s gonna go in and be a peacekeeper. That’s the strongest peace force. We could use that on our southern border. That’s the strongest peace force I’ve ever seen. There were more army tanks than I’ve ever seen. They’re gonna keep peace all right.”

Tanks. Lots of tanks. Way more strongly than AR-15s in Trump’s authoritarian mind. When Russian tanks are rolling down the streets of Kyiv, Trump will no doubt watch them on playback as he did rioters on Jan. 6, 2021.

And the reaction from other Republicans?

Several Republicans insisted Tuesday that Ukraine is all President Biden’s fault and “never would have happened under their big, strong piece of man meat, Donald Trump,” wrote Levin in a second post:

Claiming that “Biden becoming president is the best thing that ever happened…for Vladimir Putin,” Senator Ted Cruz told Fox News on Sunday that “Europe is on the verge of war because of the weakness, the fecklessness of Joe Biden.” The Texas lawmaker, who has been happy to do his part to spread Russian propaganda that benefits a man who claimed Cruz’s own father helped kill JFK, followed that up with a press release on Monday declaring that “Biden–Harris officials are to an enormous extent directly responsible for this crisis.”

Echoing those comments on Monday was Marco Rubio who, incidentally, has reportedly been happy to accept political donations from Len Blavatnik, a billionaire with “longstanding ties to oligarchs close to” Putin. Without referring to the president by name, though the reference was more than clear, the senator from Florida tweeted: “Weakness always invites aggression. And weakness in response to aggression always invites others to be aggressive as well.” Senator John Barrasso told Fox News last week that Biden “talked tough but Putin doesn’t respect statements, he only respects strength,” claiming the president of Russia “views President Biden as weak and ineffective and indecisive.” In January, Senator Tom Cotton blamed Putin’s aggression on “a year of Joe Biden’s impotence and incompetence towards Russia in particular and in foreign policy more generally,” somehow forgetting that Trump spent four years passionately kissing Putin’s ass.

Less-crazy House Republicans used their media access to condemn Putin’s invasion of Ukraine as “reprehensible” before blaming Biden for choosing appeasement over actions (Trump clearly would not have taken). Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell and Republican Senator Lindsey Graham were more focused on stopping Putin. Graham shook off his Trumpophilia long enough to lend his support to Biden.

“We have one president at a time,” Graham said. “President Biden is the president of the United States. And to the extent that I can help him push back against Putin and bring stability to the world, I will gladly do so.”

Meanwhile, in Bizarro World….

Fox News, Rupert Murdoch’s conservative propaganda network, began Tuesday by blaming Putin’s aggression on President Biden. But by Tuesday evening, Tucker Carlson was defending Vladimir Putin’s character. He blamed Americans’ supposed “hatred” of Putin on domestic propaganda, and Putin-hatred for sparking what could become the largest land war in Europe since 1945. Carlson implied viewers should turn their hatred for Putin onto fellow Americans.

No word yet if Carlson plans to begin labeling broad swaths of Americans “cockroaches.”

Update: Missed this.

Just in the past few days:

Trump praises Putin. Mike Pompeo praises Putin. JD Vance praises Putin. Tucker Carlson daily pushes pro-Russian propaganda. Candace Owens praises Putin & blames America.

That’s just 5. There’s lots more. The GOP is anti-democracy & pro-authoritarian.

— Joe Walsh (@WalshFreedom) February 22, 2022

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Axios reports:

A new poll from Gallup and the Knight Foundation finds that younger Democrats are driving a huge decline in national news consumption in the U.S.

It marks the first time since the study began in early 2018 that Democrats report having less interest in national news than Republicans and independents.

While respondents across the political spectrum all reported a decline in interest in national news over the past year, Democrats’ interest has declined the most, with just 34% saying they paid a great deal of attention to national news in 2021, compared to 69% in November 2020.

The decline among Democrats ages 18-34 is staggering. Roughly a quarter (24%) said they paid a great deal of attention to national news in 2021, compared to 70% in November 2020. Those ages 35-54 also tuned out significantly.

Independents that lean Democrat are also paying less attention to national news than Independents that lean Republican, the survey found.

Partisans generally tend to tune in more to national news when the opposing party is in office, according to Gallup.

But in this case, anxiety about the state of affairs during the Trump era, and specifically 2020, may have driven Democrats to consume an outsized amount of national news.

But, as you can see, it’s not just Democrats:

Similarly, news fatigue following the pandemic and a chaotic election year is forcing Republicans to tune out more than expected.

Instead of consuming more news during the Biden Administration, the data shows a marginal decline in interest in national news from Republicans. Many right-wing outlets have seen traffic declines during Biden Administration, likely due to overall news fatigue, as Axios has previously reported.

Overall, the study found that fewer Americans are paying attention to national news “than at any time since early 2018.” Last month, Axios reported that news engagement fell off a cliff in 2021, citing significant declines in viewership across digital, television and social media. National news attention peaked in March 2020, at the onset of the pandemic, and again in November 2020, during the presidential election.

What about the news junkies like us? Well, we’re hanging in there:

While interest in national news has declined significantly, the percentage of Americans who said they pay “a great deal” of attention to local or international news, has remained consistent year-over-year.

I can understand why normal people would tune out. The news is just exhausting and after five years of the Trump Show, people are tired. There doesn’t seem to be any end to … any of this. The pandemic is still with us, the economy is a mixed bag, the right is even crazier than they were before and now we have foreign policy crises popping up all over the place.

I hate to say it, but that’s always how it is after the Republicans trash the place and Democrats have to clean up the mess. It’s been the pattern now for 30 years.

Hopefully, this will not translate into Democrats failing to come out to vote. Even if they’re sick to death of all of this, there is no other option.

It never fucking fails. In an interview today, Trump said Putin’s military move on Ukraine is “genius.” “Putin is now saying, ‘It’s independent,’ a large section of Ukraine. I said, ‘How smart is that?’ And he’s gonna go in and be a peacekeeper… We could use that on our southern border.”

“Here’s a guy who’s very savvy.”

I just can’t. The man is a monster.