Month: March 2022

Why Ukraine keeps calling for a no-fly zone.

Less than 10 miles. A missile strike on a military base close to the Polish border follows Russian declaration that supply lines from Ukraine’s western border are legitimate targets in an invasion it insists is only a “special military operation.” The attack killed on the arms transit point 35 and injured 134, says the governor of the Lviv region.

Russian aircraft fired over 30 cruise missiles at the base.

Allies supply Ukraine with thousands of anti-tank and anti-aircraft missiles via country’s western reaches. Russian ground forces are concentrated for now to the east and south.

The Guardian:

Large explosions were seen on Sunday at the base in Yavoriv, a garrison city less than 10 miles from the Polish border. The rocket attack took place at 5.45am.

“My windows shook. The whole house vibrated. It was dark. The sky lit up with two explosions,” said Stepan Chuma, 27, an emergency worker, who hurried to the scene with his colleagues.

The facility has previously hosted foreign military trainers from the UK, US and other countries but it is not clear that any were at the base. Ukraine held most of its drills with Nato countries there before the invasion with the last major exercises in September.

“Russia has attacked the International Centre for Peacekeeping & Security near Lviv. Foreign instructors work here. Information about the victims is being clarified,” the Ukrainian defence minister, Oleksii Reznikov, said in an online post.

When Russia bombed the base near Lviv last night, it had to assume Americans were likely to be killed or injured. A coordinator of foreign volunteers in Ukraine told me the base was a hub for 1000s of them, coming from all over to help Ukraine. I met some from US, UK, Australia.

— Simon Shuster (@shustry) March 13, 2022

New York Times:

ODESSA, Ukraine — A Russian airstrike killed nine civilians on Sunday in the southern Ukrainian port city of Mykolaiv, the region’s governor, Vitaliy Kim, said in a video statement, making it one of the deadliest attacks on a residential area in the city since the war began more than two weeks ago.

Details about the strike were not immediately available. Mr. Kim said the attack on a residential area in the north of the city appeared to have been carried out by Russian fighter jets.

“These scum are bombing our city to seed panic,” he said of the Russian forces.

CNN:

Polish President Andrzej Duda said on Sunday that if Russian President Vladimir Putin uses any weapons of mass destruction, it would be a “game-changer” and NATO would have to think seriously about what to do.

Speaking in an interview with the BBC, Duda said: “Of course, everybody hopes that he will not dare do that, that he will not use weapons of mass destruction, neither chemical weapons nor biological weapons, nor any form of nuclear weapons. Everybody is hoping that this is not going to happen.”

Would targeting civilians with chemical or biological weapons be a red line for NATO that bombing and shelling them is not? Duda said NATO leaders would have to sit down and talk about it.

Evelyn Farkas, former deputy assistant secretary of defense for Ukraine and the region argues in the Washington Post that there is more Europe can do to aid Ukraine without escalating to World War III. If supplying Ukraine with shoulder-launched Javelin and Stinger missiles to kill Russians is not crossing a red line, why is supplying aircraft riskier, Farkas asks:

Russia is fully aware that lethal weapons furnished by the NATO powers are being used to kill Russian troops and destroy their equipment, quite effectively in some cases. And those weapons travel over borders from NATO countries to Ukraine, just as any new donations of aircraft would. Russian President Vladimir Putin hasn’t responded to those arms deliveries as if the United States were entering the war directly, even though Pentagon officials estimate conservatively that at least 3,000 Russian troops have died already. Moreover, Putin and his advisers have their own reasons not to engage in a war with a militarily superior NATO. That suggests there is an opportunity to do more to help Ukraine — and to more quickly end the war with a stalemate or a Russian retreat.

Fighter aircraft or surface-to-air missile systems would help without upsetting the balance of power “and therefore shouldn’t be viewed as escalatory — but it would save lives.” At least, civilian ones.

And, Farkas does not say, perhaps further delay Russian conquest long enough for western economic sanctions to bite deeply and for mounting Russian casualties to alter the calculus in Moscow.

Ultimately, we must weigh the dangers of escalation against what is at stake: the real possibility — given the brutal nature of the war so far — of the slaughter of civilians that could rise to the level of genocide. And we should weigh those dangers against what the United Nations calls the “responsibility to protect.” While there are risks in helping Ukraine survive the Russian onslaught, there are also risks in letting Putin’s expansionist aggression go unchecked. If he sees that NATO will sit back and let him take Ukraine, he is likely to turn next to other neighboring former Soviet republics that aren’t in the alliance, such as Moldova and Georgia (which he already invaded once, in 2008).

Like the early ratcheting of economic sanctions, there is still room for expanded military aid without direct conflit between NATO and Russian forces, Farkas argues. Doing too little is itself a risk.

“By publicly dithering about providing fighter jets, and rejecting out of hand even limited humanitarian no-fly zones, we are setting unnecessary limits on ourselves and deferring to Putin — while the Russian army remorselessly kills Ukrainian civilians,” Farkas writes.

Sometimes all your options are bad ones. I’m not buying MREs and iodine pills quite yet, but the unease deepens. Escalation might be in the eye of the guy seeing his dreams of being the next Catherine the Great slipping away.

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Francis Fukuyama writes about the Ukraine war:

Russia is heading for an outright defeat in Ukraine. Russian planning was incompetent, based on a flawed assumption that Ukrainians were favorable to Russia and that their military would collapse immediately following an invasion. Russian soldiers were evidently carrying dress uniforms for their victory parade in Kyiv rather than extra ammo and rations. Putin at this point has committed the bulk of his entire military to this operation—there are no vast reserves of forces he can call up to add to the battle. Russian troops are stuck outside various Ukrainian cities where they face huge supply problems and constant Ukrainian attacks.

He thinks Putin won’t survive as leader. Wouldn’t that be nice? And how about this sunny prediction?

The invasion has already done huge damage to populists all over the world, who prior to the attack uniformly expressed sympathy for Putin. That includes Matteo Salvini, Jair Bolsonaro, Éric Zemmour, Marine Le Pen, Viktor Orbán, and of course Donald Trump. The politics of the war has exposed their openly authoritarian leanings….A Russian defeat will make possible a “new birth of freedom,” and get us out of our funk about the declining state of global democracy. The spirit of 1989 will live on, thanks to a bunch of brave Ukrainians.

Wow. That really is looking on the bright side. And I do hope he’s right! If Putin has managed to destroy the global right wing populist (fascist) movement with this invasion, then maybe something good will eventually come of this. But watching this carnage makes it very hard to be optimistic about anything. War is always so insane in the nuclear age, and this latest gambit makes me wonder if humankind can be counted upon to save itself at all.

But hey, keep hope alive.

This is just so typical of Republicans and if it isn’t stopped we’re are going to end up a full-fledged, Putin-style, corrupt kleptocracy. We’re already halfway there:

Crime has long been a fruitful fixation for Republicans. From Richard Nixon to George H.W. Bush, “law and order” posturing from the right has sent Republicans to the White House and put Democrats on the defensive. Trump’s evocation of a mobocracy is couched in similar terms, but this time his party’s ambitions are grander and more dangerous. The Republicans are no longer trying to merely win elections with cynical, racially inflected campaigns. They are in the midst of enshrining that message’s logical extreme: a climate so paranoid that their own misdeeds seem not only reasonable by comparison but necessary.

This dynamic is nowhere more evident than in the blithe way that Trump and his allies appear to commit crime after crime themselves. There is now evidence that Mark Meadows, Trump’s White House chief of staff, committed voter fraud in 2020. Charles Bethea at The New Yorker found that Meadows and his wife, Debra, both Republicans, registered to vote using the address of a mobile home in Scaly Mountain, North Carolina. Neither of them lived there. This was September, two months before the election that Trump claimed was stolen and that Meadows spent months trying to overturn using allegations of — what else? — voter fraud.

Meadows’s response so far has been silence, so we are left to speculate about why he claimed to live somewhere he did not. Bethea suggested he wanted to make it appear that he lived in the state in case he decided to run for the Senate there. Glenn Kessler at the Washington Post offered that Meadows’s role in the White House — “an important job for the federal government” — might have kept him from establishing an actual residence. “Perhaps that’s a possible excuse,” Kessler wrote, “but he did sign the form.”

Meadows doesn’t really deserve the benefit of the doubt. If anyone was still skeptical back in 2012 that racism would attract Republican voters, his birtherist congressional campaign proved the opposite. A co-founder of the right-wing Freedom Caucus, he voted against federal relief for victims of Hurricane Sandy and helped engineer a shutdown of the government. As White House chief of staff, he was even less of a check on Trump than his predecessors. When lawmakers asked Meadows to help with their investigation into the January 6 attack on the Capitol, he refused to testify in person. If charged, he would become the only former U.S. representative to be held in criminal contempt of Congress.

His silence is not only about self-preservation as criminal allegations mount. It also expresses a coherent ideology. To people like Meadows, criminality is rampant in America, but only among their social inferiors. The idea that they might not be so different merits contempt.

Even by this double standard, his conduct was brazen. It is hard to imagine a less plausible home for him to claim as his own. Debra Meadows appears to have rented the modest 14-by-62-foot domicile once. But it looks like her husband has never been there, and they certainly did not own it. The registration card they submitted to local officials lists their move-in date as the day after they filed to vote there. The post-office box they put down as their mailing address is about 70 miles away from the property.

The home also departs glaringly from the Meadowses’ usual lifestyle: “Not the kind of place you’d think the chief of staff of the president would be staying,” the owner told Bethea. That would seem to go double for a couple whose former 6,000-square-foot residence in Jackson County sold for almost $1.3 million in 2016 and who bought another 6,000-plus-square-foot house in South Carolina for almost $1.6 million last year, according to Kessler.

Meadows had good reason to think he would get away with such blatant dishonesty. He was part of a heist attempt that much of his party approved of. In December, he published a memoir in which he claimed that Republicans would dominate elections if “everyone else who votes was alive, a real person, and an actual resident of the state they were voting in” — conditions that, if Bethea’s report is to be believed, do not apply to him. He saw the biggest civil-rights protest in American history give way to a GOP push to turn street crime into a partisan wedge issue, only to have the Democrats follow its lead. If the response to cynicism was not just support but emulation, why stop?

Trump lost the election, and his coup attempt imploded, but the GOP retained its brand as the “law and order” party. It was too easy. For all our recent reckonings, a critical mass of Americans can still be convinced that crime is a matter of the actor rather than the act. This is a good deal for Meadows. We have been told all our lives what real criminals look like, the ones we need protection against, and they do not look like him. Finding them can be as easy as following Trump’s map of fraud: Atlantans, Detroiters, Philadelphians, any other euphemism he could think of for “Black.”

This all bodes poorly for forthcoming elections. With the 2022 midterm and 2024 general races approaching, we should expect less emphasis from Republicans on winning than subverting the results they do not like. The GOP effort to install favorable state electors and election administrators after 2020 has left the party in a stronger position than last time to influence outcomes on the margins. And there is little reason to believe that pressure from Trump to deliver unearned victories to his allies and himself, should he run for president again, will be any less intense than before. The fact that their previous attempts have gone unpunished and galvanized their supporters will only embolden them further.

Meadows’s hypocrisy is part and parcel of this rapacious drive. He is not only a poster boy for the GOP’s anti-democratic turn but a model of what it seeks to make irreversible: a caste marked by impunity. We have watched Republicans grow bolder in their efforts, from the trailer in Scaly Mountain to the steps of the U.S. Capitol. They came perilously close to overturning the last election, and many of that misadventure’s main characters are poised to try it again. Meadows has yet to explain himself for 2020. The next time, it might not even be a question.

This was Trump’s chief of staff, not just some low level GOP functionary. He was the head of the House Freedom Caucus. And despite Republicans bellowing for years about voter fraud and Trump’s Big Lie, he just went ahead and blatantly voted illegally. I can hardly believe the sheer chutzpah of it.

But why shouldn’t he do it? The only Republicans who are ever held to account for their crimes (and even then, rarely) are pedophiles and once in a while someone gets caught being sloppy with their insider trading. Other than that, the more hypocritical the better — it owns the libs.

We want it to be but it clearly isn’t. Let’s just hope that Omicron B turns out to be a dud and we at least have a few months of breathing room before some new variant finds its way here.

China is currently battling its biggest COVID-19 wave since the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, signaling that the coronavirus outbreak is far from over.

China reported 1,100 new COVID-19 cases Thursday. That’s a higher case number in China, which has focused on limiting the spread of the coronavirus, CNN reports.

The daily case number was the highest since the virus started to spread in Wuhan — where researchers documented the first case in late 2019 — at the beginning of the pandemic.

 China has been focused on a “zero COVID” policy since the pandemic began.

China has implemented “strict social distancing, mass testing, lockdowns and largely closed borders” which “have been effective at preventing the coronavirus from overwhelming the hospital system,” The Washington Post reports.

This article from The Gothamist last week shows that we need to keep paying attention here in the US as well:

Just as New York case rates drop and officials roll back health requirements for schools and businesses, another coronavirus variant is showing signs of derailing the state’s recovery from the winter COVID surge.

Known as BA.2, this virus is an offshoot, or sublineage, of the omicron variant that just swept through New York State. It’s like a kid sister, and some experts even call it “Omicron 2.” But it spreads about 30% faster than its sibling — BA.1 — and is just as severe, according to the World Health Organization.

Data from the New York State health department shows that BA.2 is quickly moving to dominate its viral kin. BA.2 is doubling in proportion statewide every two weeks and represents about one in 10 sequenced cases. This trend is backed up by similar data compiled by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention for the New York and New Jersey region.

The pattern is mind-boggling given what New York experienced this winter. Since omicron’s discovery in late November, the state has recorded 2.2 million COVID-19 cases — its biggest surge of the pandemic. Despite the immunity from those infections and 75% of New York residents being fully vaccinated, BA.2 is finding space to thrive. Wastewater surveillance in New York City is now showing an increase in coronavirus readings over recent weeks.

The question now is whether BA.2 will stay in the background as New York’s winter surge peters out or lengthen the wave just as life is getting back to normal. This sister variant has been known to global scientists since mid-November but has just lingered on the sidelines in some places. When BA.2 hit Denmark this winter, for example, it caused a second surge and lifted daily deaths to a new summit — mere weeks after the country had peaked with its sibling. But BA.2 is also spreading through the U.K. and South Africa without reversing progress against the disease. (Update: After lingering in the background for weeks, new data shows BA.2 is now contributing to an uptick in cases and hospitalizations in the U.K.)

Some health experts think BA.2 won’t cause much harm in New York because of the area’s vaccination rate and because it is gaining ground so soon after the last surge.

“I don’t think it means a lot because there’s pretty good cross-immunity between BA.1 and BA.2 and because the omicron wave was so recent,” said Dr. Bruce Farber, chief of public health and epidemiology at Northwell Health and the chief of infectious diseases at North Shore University Hospital and LIJ Medical Center. “People clearly have good immunity. It’s very good immunity for 90 days. It’s probably decent immunity for six months.”

But other researchers worry BA.2 could prey upon unvaccinated groups such as children and people who have not been boosted. Only 33% of New York residents have received a booster shot. So few health care workers have taken their additional doses that the state health department postponed the enforcement of a booster mandate for this workforce, citing fears of staffing shortages.https://datawrapper.dwcdn.net/suOiu/4/

Sure, these omicron variants are milder than their predecessor, the delta variant, which caused havoc last summer. But they’re also three to five times deadlier than pre-delta variants, according to a recent study from the CDC.

“Spread of the BA.2 subvariant could extend the winter surge,” said Bruce Y. Lee, a public health policy expert at CUNY and executive director of the research group PHICOR. “We know that cases have been going down, but the cases are still happening at a reasonably high level right now.”

COVID-19 risk is considered low in most of New York state and across the five boroughs, but its abundance is still much more than we’ve seen during past low points in the pandemic. The state, for example, is still averaging about 1,800 cases daily. During last summer’s lull, this average was six times lower.

The BA.2 subvariant has also weakened our ability to treat the disease. Earlier this winter, its potent sibling knocked out two of the four monoclonal antibody drugs used to remedy infections in high-risk individuals. Recent evidence from New York University suggests that BA.2 can bypass a third drug, sotrovimab.

“So it’s possible that we have even fewer resources for treating infections, say, in immunocompromised individuals or individuals that otherwise have a breakthrough infection,” said Dr. Sam Scarpino, the managing director of pathogen surveillance at the Rockefeller Foundation’s Pandemic Prevention Institute.

On the positive side, such breakthroughs in vaccinated people don’t appear more prevalent with BA.2 and reinfections overall appear to be rare. But every case of the coronavirus offers an opportunity for developing chronic symptoms — or long COVID.

Lee said New York could not rule out any future possibility with BA.2 at the moment. He, other health experts and city officials explained what people should know in the meantime and how to determine if a region is truly free from the clutches of the coronavirus.

How will we know if BA.2 is creating a surge?

Earlier this year, Gothamist reported on how the daily number of COVID tests was shrinking faster than ever before in New York City. That pattern has only deepened. The city started February giving out 60,000 PCR tests per day. By the end of the month, this number had almost been cut in half — to fewer than 40,000 daily tests.

The city has never seen a testing drop like this one, and it could be due to more people using at-home kits instead of going to clinics — or fewer concerns about the milder-but-not-mild omicron variant.

Michael Lanza, a spokesperson for the New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene, said the department still feels confident in its ability to monitor trends using the current surveillance data. He said the city relies on multiple lines of data to monitor the trajectory of community transmission, such as lab tests, hospital reporting and public health surveillance of emergency department visits.https://datawrapper.dwcdn.net/pXzfi/2/

The city has also adopted the CDC’s new color-coded system for judging a community’s risk of severe disease. It places a larger emphasis on hospital burden rather than the past habit of mostly focusing on case rates.

But some health experts worry this new system comes with blindspots, namely by ignoring the test positivity — the percentage of tests that come back showing an infection.

“I do worry that there’s no test-positivity percentage here. One way to keep your numbers is just not to test,” Dr. Daniel Griffin, MD, PhD, infectious disease clinician and researcher at Columbia, told the This Week In Virology podcast on Saturday.

The test positivity used to be a check on deflating COVID risk because when it rises above 5%, it offers a signal for judging when a community is overburdened with coronavirus transmission.

Under the new color-coded system, a locality could just avoid testing to stay below high-risk cutoffs.

NEW: Using our COVID-19 alert level system, the current alert level in NYC is low. This means there is lower community spread of #COVID19: https://t.co/BLAsCRVWfh pic.twitter.com/ScJed2cW9H

— nychealthy (@nycHealthy) March 4, 2022

“Well, it might keep you below the cutoff but then you might get hit with these lagging indicators,” Griffin said, referencing how COVID hospitalizations and deaths tend to lag behind infection spikes by a few weeks.

To avoid the pitfalls of the testing drop, leaders and the general public could turn to the sewers. Because infected people poop and pee out remnants of the coronavirus’s genetic code, wastewater surveillance has shown itself to be a reliable way to catch coronavirus spikes in New York weeks in advance.

“What we’ve seen is there’s a good two-week early warning sign,” said Dan Lang, who runs strategic operations for the New York State Department of Health’s Center for Environmental Health. “When [coronavirus in] wastewater starts to go up and we can confirm that the trend is going up, two weeks later, we’ll have an increase in cases.”

The wastewater dashboard for New York state shows most counties are improving though some areas around Warwick are seeing slight increases in coronavirus intensity. New York City doesn’t report to the state dashboard, but it is a part of a national tracker recently launched by the CDC.

On Monday when this story was first published, this federal tracker wasn’t reporting recent data from New York City. As of Wednesday, it is showing that most city wastewater sites have recorded an increase in coronavirus genetic material over recent weeks — from February 19th to March 5th. Half of the sites are reporting a 10-99% increase in RNA levels, spread across parts of Manhattan, Staten Island, the Bronx, Brooklyn and Queens.

“Wastewater surveillance data have been consistent with our clinical testing data,” said Lanza.

What’s at stake?

The New York City health department has reported an uptick in pediatric COVID-19 deaths since the start of the new year. Since then, the city’s death toll for kids rose by a half dozen — from 29 to 35 children over the course of the pandemic.

The rise comes after no fatalities had been recorded for this age group for months. In early October, the city raised the tally to 30 before dropping it back to 29 a month later. Regardless, six deaths in two months when the coronavirus hadn’t taken any children’s lives in nearly half a year speaks to the intensity of the omicron surge.

 Any death is tragic, but even more so when it is one of our littlest New Yorkers.  Michael Lanza, New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene

“Any death is tragic, but even more so when it is one of our littlest New Yorkers. These deaths were related to the very large surge of cases during the omicron wave,” said Lanza from the city health department. “Although severe outcomes among children are rare, the very high level of transmission and unprecedented number of cases unfortunately resulted in some severe outcomes among children.”

These deaths are a reminder of what happens when a community cannot keep the coronavirus in check. But pandemic interruptions to education and business have consequences, too, and people are ready to move on from the pandemic. Public polling shows the New York public is split on the removal of COVID restrictions. About half of voters are ready to lose indoor masks and half want to keep them.

But with vaccination rates stalling and BA.2 lingering in the background, Scarpino, from the Rockefeller Foundation’s Pandemic Prevention Institute, is worried about the nation being caught off guard again. He said a turning point last year revolved around mask mandates ending last summer even though the U.S. had missed its vaccination goals.

People were told to go about their lives if they were vaccinated, but so many people still lacked their shots, that the delta variant took off once everyone started mixing again.

“My biggest concern about BA.2 Is the potential erosion of trust in public health,” Scarpino said. “If we get this one wrong again, it kind of feels like replaying the tape that happened with the Delta variant.”

He said places like the U.K. may have escaped a BA.2 surge because the Brits have a higher rate of booster shots (50%) than the U.S. (28%). Another hypothesis is places that experienced big delta waves over the summer, such as the U.K., might be better protected against BA.2 than locations that didn’t.

“There’s a lot of difference across the U.S. in terms of the potential risks for a BA.2 variant,” Scarpino said. “While it may not cause a national surge, there could be surges that occur locally — that could still lead to spikes in hospitalizations.”

If you haven’t been boosted, please do it. It’s so worth it.

This piece by Michelle Goldberg says it all. Something fundamental has shifted. We knew it had to happen. The old order was unstable. (I mean, the world’s only superpower electing and orange ignoramus for president was a big clue.) I don’t know where it will all end up but it’s going to be different:

BERLIN — Nils Schmid, a member of Germany’s Parliament and a foreign policy spokesman for the Social Democratic Party, was explaining to me what a minor role the military plays in his country’s politics.

“The average Bundestag member does not have this normal contact with the military he has with almost every other layer of society,” Schmid said, referring to members of Parliament. Germany may be a major arms exporter, but in terms of total German manufacturing, he said, “the arms industry is not really relevant,” and representatives don’t cater to it. There is a “huge distance, vis-à-vis all things military, in German society,” he said.

That could soon change. Shortly after Vladimir Putin invaded Ukraine, Germany’s Social Democratic chancellor, Olaf Scholz, announced a radical shift in his country’s national security stance. Germany, he said, will arm Ukraine, ending its policy of not sending lethal weapons to conflict zones. It will ramp up military spending to more than 2 percent of its gross domestic product. “It is clear that we must invest much more in the security of our country,” he said.

Schmid described the message German politicians now need to convey to the public. They must explain, he said, “that the military is part of the state and should be equipped accordingly,” just like schools and universities. For an American, this challenge — getting people to take warfare as seriously as education — has a through-the-looking-glass quality. But it’s a sign of how profoundly Putin’s aggression stands to alter German society.

Germany is not alone in ramping up its defense. Denmark has announced plans to increase military spending to 2 percent of G.D.P., a target set by NATO that most member states haven’t hit. Sweden, which is not a part of NATO, also intends to increase military spending to 2 percent, and the country’s prime minister said that young people should be prepared to do military service.

But Germany’s sudden foreign policy transformation is particularly astonishing. Since World War II, militarism has been deeply taboo in Germany. And the country has felt a special responsibility to Russia because of Soviet losses in that war.

“That’s something that I feel like Americans are really underplaying,” said Susan Neiman, the Berlin-based author of “Learning From the Germans,” a book about Germany’s reckoning with its genocidal past. “Because when they think of the Second World War, they think of two things. They think of the Holocaust, and then they think of Western Europeans: Anne Frank and Paris and so on.” But it was the Soviet Union that suffered the most deaths in that war, an estimated 26 million.

For years, Schmid said, there was an implicit bargain in Germany’s relationship with Russia: “We acknowledged our responsibility from history, and the Soviet Union and then Russia sort of granted us the benefit of accepting that this is a new Germany and that we could enter into a normal relationship.” In “Putin’s World,” Angela Stent’s 2019 book about Putin’s foreign policy, Stent wrote that German leaders since Willy Brandt, who became chancellor in 1969, “have been determined never to repeat the pattern of Russo-German enmity.”

Putin’s attack on Ukraine has made that determination void. Now many compare the feeling in Germany to that in the United States after Sept. 11, minus the patriotic chest beating. (I’ve seen far more Ukrainian flags in Berlin this week than German ones.) “I have never seen a kind of cloud of uncertainty and a sense of feeling lamed descend over this city before,” said Neiman, who serves as director of the Einstein Forum, a German cultural institute.

In the United States, Putin’s aggression and Ukraine’s heroic resistance have elicited horror but also strains of triumphalism. After years of American decline and self-doubt, a period when political momentum at home and abroad seemed to be with pro-Putin authoritarian populists like Donald Trump, some seem to welcome a renewed sense of moral clarity. “Among the many positive consequences of the Ukraine crisis is the death of wrongheaded and ultimately dangerous Republican nostalgia for isolationism,” The Washington Post’s Jennifer Rubin wrote.

I don’t think there’s much talk of positive consequences in Germany. “Europeans know there is no complete security in Europe against Russia,” said Klaus Scharioth, who served as Germany’s ambassador to the United States during both the George W. Bush and Barack Obama presidencies. “You can unite, we all do that, which is absolutely necessary, but if Russia stays on the current path, then nobody is secure, because they have all these tactical nuclear weapons. They have also intermediate-range nuclear weapons. And they can, if they want to, they can destroy any European city within minutes.”

Germany has reason to be proud of its reception of Ukrainian refugees, reprising the “willkommenskultur” that led it to accept a million Middle Eastern and North African refugees in 2015. A large section of the Hauptbahnhof train station has been transformed into a makeshift refugee processing center. On Wednesday evening, countless volunteers — wearing yellow vests if they speak only German or English, orange if they speak Russian or Ukrainian — helped new arrivals navigate toward free accommodations in Berlin or buses onward. But the scene is still unspeakably sad. Hundreds of people newly forced from their homes milled around, some laden with baggage, others with only rolling suitcases. Families were slumped on the floor. Some people clutched pets. The catastrophe they’d fled wasn’t that far away; Berlin is closer to Lviv than to Paris.

“We live in a different world now,” said Ricarda Lang, a co-leader of the German Green Party, when I met her at a pro-Ukraine demonstration outside the Russian Embassy. “I, as a person who was born in 1994, I grew up in a peaceful Europe. For me, peace and democracy in many ways were something that was taken for granted.” Such assurance, she said, has now disappeared. Putin has murdered a whole constellation of post-Cold War assumptions. No one knows what new paradigms will replace them.

Chris Geidner looks at the latest “Handmaid’s Tale” proposal coming out of Missouri that would ban pregnant women from traveling outside their states to get an abortion if the Texas law is upheld by the Supremes. It may be totally nuts on the surface but he notes that the new conservative majority might not think so:

Coleman’s amendment, which has been attached to three pieces of legislation still pending in the state House, prohibits people from performing abortions on Missouri citizens or residents, or helping them to obtain an abortion, “regardless of where the abortion is or will be performed.” The legislation also, as noted, includes a Texas S.B. 8-style provision, asserting that it will be “enforced exclusively through the private civil actions” — in other words, private lawsuits.

An aim of this scheme — as was successful in the case of S.B. 8 — is to prevent what are called “pre-enforcement challenges” to the law. Pre-enforcement challenges allow people to sue before a law takes effect to prevent any harm coming from an unconstitutional law passed by a legislature. In such challenges, a government official is ordered by a court not to enforce the law. With no government officials enforcing the law, the logic goes, there’s no one to order not to enforce it ahead of time. (What’s more, the measure also has made it more difficult to advance any broad legal challenges once the law goes into effect because there is no clear government official charged with enforcing the law to sue. Just this week, with S.B. 8, the Texas Supreme Court ruled that even state medical licensing officials do not enforce the law — one area where the Supreme Court had allowed challengers to move forward with litigation against the law.)

The Missouri amendment lays out a broad array of areas where the restrictions apply, including many kinds of “aid” outside of any actual medical procedure, including “providing transportation,” money or insurance coverage for an abortion; “giving instructions” to help a person with a medication abortion; or even “hosting or maintaining a website” that helps someone obtain an abortion.

Because the Supreme Court allowed S.B. 8 to go into effect last September — when the six-week abortion ban in the law was clearly unconstitutional — and the federal case from abortion providers challenging the law appeared to reach its end this week when the Texas Supreme Court ruled that the licensing officials don’t enforce the law, it should be expected that lawmakers will continue to attempt ever-more-aggressive measures to advance their policy aims.

Mallory Schwarz, the executive director of Pro-Choice Missouri, said that her organization believes that at least one of the underlying bills containing Coleman’s amendment — which relate to use of fetal tissue, payments for prescription drugs and use of state funds regarding abortion — “absolutely will pass the House, and the real fight will be in the Senate.” The legislative session goes until May, she said, although the lawmakers are now on break.

“What Mary Elizabeth Coleman is doing, and what these anti-abortion politicians are doing, is trying to use the power of the state, the power of their office to manipulate, to isolate and coerce people who are seeking abortions to maintain their own power and control,” she said.

The extreme nature of the legislation is underscored by the number of caveats written into the amendment itself. Many laws have what are referred to as “severability” provisions — language that asserts that, should part of a law be struck down as unconstitutional, it can be severed from the rest of the law, which will remain in effect. This amendment has an extensive severability provision, but it also does more.

In attempting to prevent portions of the law from being declared unconstitutional, it asserts that, despite its terms, it does not prohibit “speech or conduct protected by the First Amendment” or other conduct that the Constitution or federal law would bar Missouri from restricting. In other words, if the Supreme Court says that something that would appear to be covered by the language of the amendment is unconstitutional to prohibit, then the law doesn’t prohibit that specific speech or conduct. If the Supreme Court wanted to strongly protect the types of speech and conduct covered by the law, that could result in some big limits being placed on the amendment should it become law. But if the Supreme Court is willing to overturn Roe, and given the way it treated Texas’ S.B. 8, it might very well also allow this amendment, if enacted, to be broadly enforced by simply concluding that many, if not all, of the limits covered by the provision’s terms are constitutional.

All of that sounds — and is — extremely complicated. But that’s just the beginning.

David Cohen, one of the other co-authors of the forthcoming “New Abortion Battleground” article, explained why.

“I think that a lot of people are under the impression that things will be simpler if Roe is overturned because each state will just have their own policy, then you follow the policy of that state,” he said. “But our argument, and Missouri’s amendment introduced … is proof of what is going to happen. States are going to try to start controlling behavior outside of their states, and that’s going to pose really tricky, complicated questions — questions that we think have answers that should make them unconstitutional.”

Cohen, Rebouché and their co-author Greer Donley discuss how states could use existing criminal laws to enforce abortion restrictions after a decision overturning Roe — without even needing to pass new legislation like Coleman’s measure. As Rebouché noted, many states have laws that make clear that abortion will no longer be permitted or will even be criminalized should the Supreme Court overturn Roe.

Cohen, noting that all states already have broadly applicable laws banning aiding or abetting criminal activity, continued: “I think we will see a lot of state variation … but all it takes is an aggressive local prosecutor to try things.”

The underlying issue with what is referred to as “extraterritorial enforcement” of state laws, Rebouché said, is that the case law is “underdeveloped” in this area — particularly when it comes to abortion. There just aren’t a lot of cases addressing this issue, and supporters of legislation like Coleman’s argue that the Supreme Court language most directly addressing it — from a 1975 case — is “dicta,” meaning it’s not precedent because it wasn’t actually necessary to the court decision where the language appeared.

In any event, given the current Supreme Court majority’s willingness to overturn or ignore long-standing precedent, that might not matter.

“We think that things like the right to travel and national citizenship mean you should be able to take advantage of laws in other states,” Cohen said, “but we have no confidence that this Supreme Court would agree with that.” He said that concern is multiplied when it comes to abortion litigation and said his fear is that this could “result in a butchering of what we think are some basic principles of federalism and a unified country.”

It’s not only abortion where these issues could be raised. Legislation that passed the Idaho House earlier this week would criminalize providing gender-affirming care for minors in the state as a felony, with sentences of up to life in prison. The bill amends this new ban into existing law banning female genital mutilation, a law that also criminalizes taking a child out of the state for any such act. Although some advocates and reporting — including local reporting — stated that the travel prohibition would apply to gender-affirming care as well, the language passed by the House does not appear to have expanded that criminality to the gender-affirming care section. (Advocates have suggested this likely was a drafting error and that the aim was to prohibit travel for gender-affirming care.) The possibility and uncertainty nonetheless raised concern from many supporters of gender-affirming care in the wake of the House passage.

Either way, Cohen concluded that in light of these two proposals, “I think what we’re going to see is conservative legislators who are not satisfied with stopping certain actions in their home state.”

These lawmakers, he continued, appear to be willing to take steps outside of the norm to ensure that their conservative policies “have as broad effect as possible. … They can’t stop an abortion provider in New York from providing an abortion to a New Yorker, but maybe they can stop someone from Missouri from going to New York, or someone from Idaho from going to San Francisco, to get gender-affirming care.”

Schwarz also noted the cumulative effects of past laws with these new proposals, saying that it is those already most affected by Missouri’s existing abortion restrictions — only one abortion provider remains in the state — who will find themselves even more disadvantaged should Coleman’s amendment become law.

Highlighting the effects on low-income individuals — as well as young people, rural residents, people of color and LGBTQ people (groups that already face systemic issues of access to and discrimination in care) — Schwarz said, “These are the people already suffering with the existing barriers because they have to travel out of state as it is right now, and what [Coleman]’s trying to do is take away any kind of access to abortion but also any kind of support, any kind of emotional support for folks.” That is, Coleman’s amendment would place restrictions on family, friends and community members attempting to help those seeking abortions with money, travel assistance or even information.

Because the Supreme Court allowed Texas’ S.B. 8 to take effect despite its clear unconstitutionality, lawmakers aligned with those ideologies are going to be emboldened.

“What we have always known in Missouri is what the rest of the nation is starting to see now,” Schwarz said. “It’s that the courts won’t save us. We keep us safe.”

More broadly, regardless of what the courts do, the Supreme Court’s new majority is encouraging this sort of legislation, which Rebouché noted means instability will continue as litigation proceeds.

“Even if something is struck down as unconstitutional, there’s going to be years of confusion, of uncertainty that I think we can expect to see,” she said.

As long as that continues, lawmakers like Coleman will keep proposing new legislation testing the boundaries until they find a limit.

So much for keeping the government out of our lives.

I have always known that the reversal of Roe was just the beginning. It would go from being one battle to 50 battles which will keep the anti-abortion zealots in business for a long time to come. And the terrorizing of women will come from dozens of different directions. I have no doubt that a widespread criminalizing of women who attempt to obtain abortions will be on the table before long.

Estonian Prime Minster Kaja Kallas gave MSNBC’s John Heilemann a Baltic-states assessment of how the Russian invasion of Ukraine must end. Her mother and grandmother survived a Siberian gulag. Russian dictatorship is very real for her. “For us, Putin has to lose this war.”

Some partitioning of the country will only whet his appetite for more. The frontline states are very clear-eyed about the threat. Putin has nibbled back portions of the former Soviet Union already.

“They have seen [Putin] take these little bites and get something for his trouble in all these cases,” Heliemann says. If Ukraine falls or gets partitioned, they are next on the menu.

After Moldova.

https://twitter.com/DeadlineWH/status/1502429289794441224?s=20&t=k9SV9d9BHqPp-_ulqq46Ug

Teacherken (Ken Bernstein), a former Marine and Quaker, finds the Ukraine dilemma challenging his committment to nonviolence. He explains at Daily Kos:

The Russian military doctrine and practice makes clear their willingness under Putin to violate the rules of war which prohibit targeting civilians and civilian infrastructure to win militarily.  We have seen this practiced in Grozny in 2008 and in Syria more recently (think of their air support to Assad in what was done to Aleppo).  We are already seeing it in Kharkiv and in Mariupol, and we are beginning to see it elsewhere.

I think Adam at my website is right we have now entered the phase of the war in Ukraine is that Putin is just going to level the entire nation because if he can’t have it no one can

— John Cole (@Johngcole) March 12, 2022

Declaring “no American boots on the ground” and refusing to impose “a no-fly zone even to protect humanitarian relief columns” may keep NATO out of WWIII but allow Putin near-free-rein to lay waste to Ukraine for resisting him.

At some point Western leaders, including Biden, have to recognize that drawing lines beyond which we will not go gives Putin license to do more.  IF we say “no American boots on the ground” and refuse to allow for a no-fly zone even to protect humanitarian relief columns we give Putin license to operate with near impunity, to prevent humanitarian aid, to strafe and bomb civilian targets. to starve people.

What is our red line, Ken asks. Nukes? Biological or chemical? We’ve already stood by doing nothing when they’ve been used elsewhere.

If we do not want to put troops on the ground or planes in the air, should we already beusing our substantial cyber capabilities, perhaps to disable the Russian rail system (and that of Belarus) to prevent them from moving more armor?  If they take out electricity and heat and water in Ukrainian cities, should we because that is a war crime cripple their infrastructure?

Or are we going to leave it to Anonymous to do it for us?

As I wrestle with these questions, I admit that last sentence shames me.

In another “Deadline White House” segment, Alexander Vindman states that Putin lacks the troops to occupy the country and will resort to aerial bombardment. He wonders if it is not America wishful thinking that we might keep this conflict at arm’s length. We will eventually get involved, he believes. Vindman misattributes to Winston Churchill that familiar phrase, “The Americans will always do the right thing… after they’ve exhausted all the alternatives.”

“First Since Nazi Invasion”: Ukraine Says Girl Dies Of Thirst Under Rubble

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“Russian forces have not achieved anything resembling a strategic military victory since the first days of the war more than two weeks ago, and have turned to attempts to flatten whole sections of cities,” writes Marc Santora for the New York Times.

BBC’s summary this morning:

• A military airfield south of Kyiv is hit by missiles as reports suggest the bulk of Russian forces are just 25km from the city
• Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky says the Russian army is sending in new troops after suffering its largest losses in decades
• French President Emmanuel Macron and German Chancellor Olaf Scholz hold a call with Russian President Vladimir Putin
• A mosque in the southern port of Mariupol, where 80 civilians were sheltering, was shelled by Russian forces, Ukrainian officials say
• People in the city are said to be enduring freezing temperatures with no power, and little food and water
• Russia has accused Ukraine of rejecting nearly all its offers to provide humanitarian corridors from flash-point towns

“Many report having no food for children.”

An International Committee of the Red Cross worker in Mariupol describes conditions there:

“People report varying needs in medicine. Especially for diabetes and cancer patients.

But there is no way to find it anymore in the city.

People are getting sick already because of the cold.”

— ICRC (@ICRC) March 12, 2022

“We brought all the food that we have in our homes.

We also visited the destroyed and damaged houses of our colleagues to pick up remaining food there.

We will have food for a few days.”

— ICRC (@ICRC) March 12, 2022

"We have now approximately 65-66 people in our building.

Plus, we also give a host to half of the people who are located in the same building.

So their small children can sleep in the basement because people are afraid.”

— ICRC (@ICRC) March 12, 2022

Alexey Kovalyov fled Moscow last week for Latvia. A former editor for the Moscow Times, he now works for Lativa-based, independent news site, Meduza. Sean Illing of Vox spoke with him to get his impression of what is happening in Russia as Vladmir Putin attempts to flatten Ukraine. Even more stringent press restrictions drove Kovalov and western journalists out of the country.

Amid bank runs and shortages, what explanations are everyday Russians hearing for them? Government polling is completely unreliable. Government media does not even use the word “war” in reference to Putin’s “special military operation” in Ukraine. 

The alarmists were right all along

Putiin is enforcing a full-Orwellian control of perceived reality, as Illing sees it:

Alexey Kovalyov

Yeah, absolutely. There has definitely been a shift. And I have to be honest, there were a handful of people here who have been warning about this for a long time, who were telling people like me that this was going to be a fascist dictatorship one day, and we’ve been dismissing these people. We were like, “Come on, Putin is a cynic, he’s evil in so many ways, but at least he’s a rational guy. All he wants to do is get himself insanely rich. He’s not going to do anything really drastic.”

But we were all fucking wrong. The alarmists were right all along, and almost every one of them is either dead or in jail or exiled.

Thers is no one to push back, and the few protests too small and too isolated to loosen Putin’s grasp.

Sean Illing

People outside Russia are seeing the videos of people protesting on the streets in Moscow and St. Petersburg, and I think a lot of us want to believe that Putin can’t contain this, that there will be a revolt. But I worry that that’s mostly wishful thinking. Are you convinced that this will put a real dent in Putin’s regime?

Alexey Kovalyov

No, not really. What you’re seeing from these protesters on the streets is possibly the bravest thing I’ve seen, and it’s mostly women who are facing real violence and serious prison time. These people are getting the shit beat out of them by the police. They’re the bravest people in Russia right now because they know what they’re facing.

But we’re talking about a few thousand people in a country of over 140 million people. It’s not nearly enough to even put a dent in Putin’s regime. What it’s really going to take is the silent majority, or Putin’s passive electorate, who for all these years have just been doing what they’re told, they’re going to have to make a stand. But I have no idea what it would take for these people to wake up. I really have no idea.

All I know is that we’re in uncharted waters. All these major foreign media outlets, like the New York Times and the BBC, are fleeing Moscow. That’s never happened. The New York Times has had a bureau in Moscow throughout the entire 20th century, including three revolutions and two world wars and the entire Cold War. But now Moscow isn’t safe for the New York Times. I really don’t have the words to describe how unpredictable this situation is.

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P22, the Brad Pitt of mountain lions:

On Tuesday night, a quiet street in the Silver Lake neighborhood of Los Angeles had a rare celebrity visitor. P22, the city’s most famous mountain lion, was spotted around 7pm on Berkeley Circle, about three and a half miles south of his home in Griffith Park. The National Park Service later confirmed his presence through a radio collar.

Residents shared photos from doorbell cameras and grainy pics from inside their homes. “Ultimately, it’s pretty awesome,” one resident told the LA Times. “The whole neighborhood’s excited.”

The sighting marked a unique outing for the beloved lion, who is hardly spotted in public despite living in an urban park that’s visited by millions of people, and whose enigmatic and attractive nature have earned him the nickname “the Brad Pitt of mountain lions”.

P22’s presence is also a potent reminder that these large cats live cheek-and-jowl with the megacity’s human inhabitants, though they generally keep to the coastal scrub brush chaparral of the mountains and rarely enter human developments.

It’s not clear why P22 left his home range of Griffith Park, but it’s also not the first time: in January he appeared on the deck of a house in Beachwood Canyon, caught on video by a camera. He also hid under a house in Los Feliz in 2015 and mauled a sleeping koala at the LA zoo the following year.

A study published by the National Park Service in September 2021 analyzed data from 29 GPS-collared adult and subadult mountain lions in the Santa Monica Mountains, Simi Hills, Santa Susana Mountains and nearby areas. They used 128,133 locations to estimate home range size and evaluate how they used the landscape, including investigating which parts of it mountain lions prefer to spend time in.

Most of the creatures avoided human areas, or came close only at night. There were two exceptions in the study – P41, a male cat in the Verdugo Mountains area, and P22, who possessed the smallest home range ever recorded for an adult male: just nine square miles surrounded by freeways and residential areas in and around Griffith Park.

These two males also ventured into residential areas far more than any other mountain lions, though the park service researchers note that even for them, 90% of their locations were in natural areas.

“Interestingly, these two males exhibited strong differences in selection relative to time-of-day that appeared to be responses to human activity,” said John Benson, senior author and an assistant professor of vertebrate ecology at the University of Nebraska, Lincoln, in a statement.

“When we analyzed selection on an individual basis, we found that these two males altered their behavior towards avoidance of developed and landscaped areas during the day, but towards selection of those areas at night.”

This February marks the 10th anniversary of P22 wandering into Griffith Park as a young lion and making it his home. He has plenty of deer to eat, no male competitors in his territory, but also no hope of finding a mate.

“A city long bashed for being a concrete jungle full of smog proves the world wrong by making a home for a mountain lion,” Beth Pratt, California director for the National Wildlife Federation, recently told the Guardian, adding that she loved how the city had embraced an apex predator. “The LA area possesses a value of coexisting with wildlife that I celebrate – people share their Ring videos of P22 making an appearance in their back yard with excitement, not fear.”

Good news!

Two nights ago, we tracked P-22, a 12-yo mountain lion we’ve been studying for the last decade, in Silver Lake, the furthest south he’d ever ventured since living in Griffith Park. We’re happy to report he’s made it back to his regular stomping grounds in Griffith Park! pic.twitter.com/uO5aYSvxVQ

— Santa Monica Mtns (@SantaMonicaMtns) March 10, 2022

He’s a beautiful boy.

Following up on the Margaret Sullivan piece I discuss below, here’s an example of theuseful idiocy required to make propaganda work:

Carlson opened w/claims about Biden "funding a number of secret bio labs in Ukraine" conducting "experiments on highly dangerous pathogens." These claims, which have been pushed by Russian media, are false. The US has worked w/Ukrainian labs, but on normal public health research. pic.twitter.com/Zn4Y4aeByi

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) March 11, 2022

Carlson, no doubt aware of him flimsy his claims are, almost immediately moved the goalposts. His monologue culminated with insinuations that any sort of scientific research on deadly pathogens is inherently suspicious. pic.twitter.com/vcjvVAOZ1U

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) March 11, 2022

Greenwald's interview ended with him layering distortion upon distortion and suggesting the US is funding biolabs in Ukraine because it wants "to be provocative toward the Russians" — a talking point also pushed by the Kremlin pic.twitter.com/ndDMOf6yDY

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) March 11, 2022

One person calling for a no-fly zone immediately became "INCREASED CALLS FOR A NO-FLY ZONE." Transparent dishonesty. pic.twitter.com/6NLNZ6ijJf

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) March 11, 2022

There are actually quite a few calls for a no-fly zone but I wouldn’t characterize them all as war hawks and their reasoning isn’t what Tucker says it is. For the record, I’m also against a no-fly zone because I’m very opposed to nuclear war. Duh. The US didn’t do it when Russia rolled into Hungary and Czechoslovakia during the height of the Cold War and the logic of that decision hasn’t changed for good reason. It’s awful but there simply isn’t any way we can take that risk.

Anyway, Tucker is an ass regardless:

Carlson then accused Kamala Harris of "inciting" Russia's invasion of Ukraine. All of the above happened before the first commercial break. pic.twitter.com/NJ00qRachV

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) March 11, 2022

maybe just don't brutally invade your neighbors for no reason — you won't have to worry about sanctions then pic.twitter.com/NIvuhL87hZ

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) March 11, 2022

And then there’s this:

Not a day without Tucker Carlson on #Russia's state TV. Here's another clip being used by the Russians to promote their disinformation about #Ukraine allegedly creating "bio-weapons" in its lab. #TuckyoRose delivers again. pic.twitter.com/CP8m0aXSPh

— Julia Davis (@JuliaDavisNews) March 10, 2022

This is just so bizarre to me. Tucker can say what he wants and his drooling followers are free to believe him. But the idea of supposed isolationist/pacifists justifying Putin’s brutal invasion on the basis of this blatantly fatuous propaganda is pretty stunning.