drray23
drray23's JournalI've yet to see Manchin converse with a democrat.
He is not even pretending to be a Democrat anymore. He is mingling with the gop senators, flanked by Mitt Romney.
Putin is precipitating an end to Russia and its satellite countries
Or at least an end to their hegemony in eastern Europe. His actions unified Europe like never before, NATO is strengthened and the international community at large is imposing crushing sanctions making Russia a de facto Pariah on the world stage both politically and economically.
Client states of Russia like Belarus who are getting dragged in it will suffer the backslash as well. I suspect that the political and economic pressure will be so big that their economies will collapse accelerating the protests that are already taking place there and ultimately leading to the overthrow of these dictators.
As for Russia, Putin will end up being "retired" in a Datcha somewhere while somebody else takes over and hopefully steer that country to a more reasonable direction.
Anyhow, we will see how this unfolds soon enough or if my analysis is just completely off base.
Looks like Ukrainians maybe blowing up fuel depots.
There was a huge serie of explosions on the outskirts of Kyiv at a military airport installation.
You can see that on the clips CNN showed. Some experts are saying it could be deliberate to deny Russians from fuel for their tanks. It would be a smart move, cut their supply lines and they will fail. Napoleon ran into this issue fighting Russia of all places..
Price of oil and Ukraine
I am wondering if Putin's strategy is not to actually invade Ukraine but instead make it look like he will in order to drive the price of oil. Its Russia's main source of income. I am not an expert in geopolitics, so I looked it up.
It does look like some analysts have been considering this possibility. For example, the financial review has an article about it:
https://www.afr.com/politics/federal/oil-prices-surge-as-world-on-edge-over-ukraine-20220213-p59w2i
After all, the cost of a long and sustained war in Ukraine could be devastating to the Russian economy.
Raising the prospect of a war however has immediate benefits such as making the cost of oil skyrocket, making Putin look strong domestically and may be enabling him to extract concessions from NATO.
We shall see in a few days if that was the goal all along or if instead, he really wants to invade and recreate the eastern block.
Why is the media still carrying the narrative that the GOP will win the house in 2022 ?
I understand that initially it was reported that the gerrymandering was such that it gave them a huge advantage.
However, it is turning out that it is not so cut and dry and the democrats may actually hold an edge instead of being heavily handicapped.
So why is this narrative still prevalent? Is it just because the media is too lazy to reassess, that they are going with the usual "the party in power loses the midterms" or something more nefarious? (Maybe to drive down democratic voter participation?)
The Trump strategy to get away with crimes
Commit so many infractions that you overwhelm the system. Clog it by filling frivolous appeals.
Go from one scandal to another one by constantly spewing bullshit to keep the media off balance.
The poor DOJ and 1/6 committee keep having to issue more subpoena, talk to more witnesses because Trump and his crew raised the bar to a level that is order of magnitudes worse than Watergate.
Hopefully this will run to an end eventually and Trump will be caught. This strategy has worked all his life so far.
So what is the DOJ able to say on investigations?
Each time somebody posts here how frustrated they are that Trump or any of the big players are not being investigated, they are told that the DOJ would never divulge that anyway and therefore we should be patient and not worry. Fine, I can see the argument.
However, what are we then supposed to make of the fact that the deputy AG just publicly commented on the fact that prosecutors are looking at the fake elector debacle and considering whether to charge.
See for example this thread:
https://www.democraticunderground.com/100216287011
Why did the DOJ divulge that and yet has not taken similar steps on other investigations?
covid death count in Florida is suspicious
Today 3 dead, yesterday as well. Meanwhile they are posting tens of thousands of new cases and presumably have quite a few in the hospital. Their daily death count has been in the single digits for a while. This is strange considering that most other states have an order of magnitude more daily.
Maybe Floridians are super-duper resistant to covid?? More likely the reporting is suspicious.
question: When a bill does not pass during a specific congress does it have to be reintroduced
in the next congress or can it carry on ? Meaning if it passed the house but was not voted in by the senate.
Senator Schumer is not being fooled by McConnel offer
to move on reforming the electoral count process. He sees it clearly for what it is, a fake.
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