Putin’s pretext for invading Ukraine is every bit as flimsy and based on ego as our pretext for invading Iraq in 2003.

President Vladimir Putin railed against Ukraine in a televised address on Monday, saying that neo-Nazis were on the rise, oligarchic clans were rife and that the ex-Soviet country was a U.S. colony with a puppet regime.He described eastern Ukraine as ancient Russian lands and modern Ukraine as a state created by the Bolsheviks after the 1917 revolution.

He said that Ukraine never had a tradition of genuine statehood and complained that post-Soviet Ukraine had wanted everything it could from Moscow without doing anything in return.

Meanwhile back in the US of A…

More contagious version of the Omicron variant spreading in US

The independent republics recognized today by Vladimir Putin, are located inside of Ukraine. This is the invasion of Ukraine under the guise of a peacekeeping operation.

Terrible news. I have the same sick feeling I had when we invaded Iraq under a completely fraudulent pretenses.

It is a fucking miracle.

Welcome to the 8th week of 2022. I know. It feels like the 88th week, right? Did Russia invade last night? I’m typing this at 10:00 pm EST (That’s 5:00 am in Kyiv.)

Prior to jumping into the open thread, here are a couple of things to put on your “to do” list for this week:

1- Read and Support “The Call” I had to the privilege to attend a Delaware Call event this weekend, and it re-awakened my heart and soul to the potential power of leftist politics.

2- Listen to and Support the Highlands Bunker.  REV is getting shit done.

Toxic Centrism is worse than conservatism.  Here’s why.  Toxic centrism invalidates the very idea that finding the truth is possible. Coonsian Toxic Centrism refutes that notion that a “right” and a “wrong” choice is possible. Toxic Centrism as not interest in truth, right, justice, equity, fairness.  It is only concerned with luke warm mediocrity.

We re-learn that fact about Toxic Centrism today by observing the rejection of Toxic Centrism in Wyoming of all places.

Wyoming state representative Andy Schwartz explained to his colleague in the Wyoming legislature that presenting neutral both-side-ism around astoundingly important events in history is worthless. To truly understand the horrific nature of these actions one must find them uncomfortable.

Schwartz’s speech broke the Republican supermajority and they could not achieve a 2/3rds vote to pass their ban on Critical Race Theory. 60 of the 67 members of the legislature are Republicans.

JTA:

“In this bill, page 9, line 19 states, ‘The teaching of history must be neutral, without judgment,'” state Rep. Andy Schwartz said during debate. “Now, how can that be possible? If I were a Native American, I doubt I could accept the neutral, judgment-free approach about the relocation, the decimation of the Indigenous population. If I were a Black American, I doubt I could accept a neutral, judgment-free approach on the enslavement of millions of Americans.

“But I’m Jewish, and I cannot accept a neutral judgment-free approach on the murder of 6 million Jews in World War Two.”

Schwartz, whose Teton County district includes the city of Jackson, said that, to understand the depth of depraved actions, one must be discomfited by them.

“Going to page 8, lines 19 and 20, it says ‘no one should feel discomfort or distress,'” he said. “But in learning about the Holocaust, I have suffered a lifetime of discomfort and distress, and it’s essential that as students learn about this dark time in our history, they to feel discomfort in distress.”

 

“Is the law confusing?  Or is Trump maybe not smart enough to understand that taking classified documents out of the White House is illegal?”

That’s not spin.  That’s from an NPR host this weekend struggling to come up with some exculpatory explanation for Trump’s crimes.

TBH – I didn’t know it for sure.  That was a bit of a lucky guess.  I was just going for a southern/central (continent) country to reset in that part of the world.   But yeah…I’m hooked YOU BASTARD!!

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She is copying the Manchurian Pumpkin down to his fake spray tan.

The annual contentious hub-bub over municipal Saturnalia decorations would be MOSTLY solved if people just used a little goddam panache.

The Coonsian Center & DC-bubble Dems seriously need to be defunded.

The Losing Democrats Who Gobbled Up Money

Amy McGrath and other Senate candidates deceived donors to rake in far more cash than their Republican opponents. They got crushed anyway.

He has avoided so many consequences for so long that if avoiding consequences was an Olympic sport, Trump would be the Michael Phelps, Larisa Latynina, Paavo Nurmi, and Mark Spitz of it,  all rolled into one.

But when Mazars, (global audit, accounting and consulting group employing more than 42,000 professionals in more than 90 countries) decides that Trump is toxic – you have to wonder if it is really bad news.

(Trump) may finally have run out of enablers, blind groupies, pliable bureaucrats, and general scapegoats. Companies want to survive. People want to keep their jobs. Nobody wants to pay whopping fines or risk jail time. Not for him. Not anymore. A collective decision is being made that in many ways, including on the balance sheets, the former president* is simply not worth it.

Truth, Justice Settlements and the American Way

Remington settles with Sandy Hook families for $73 million – Prince Andrew settles with Virginia Giuffre for $? million(s)

• The civil court case in Connecticut centered on Remington’s marketing of the gun used in the 2012 massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School.
• The lawsuit tested the scope of the 2005 Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act, which grants gun manufacturers immunity from lawsuits related to crimes committed with their products.

For those of you too young to remember the events leading up the Viet Nam war – here is what happened. “…the North Vietnamese kidnapped 1,400 Americans and the United States had gone to war to retrieve them.”  That kidnapping was immortalized in the movie Rambo: First Blood Part II and National League of Families POW/MIA flag, often referred to as the POW/MIA flag.

Maybe that’s not exactly how it went down, but that is the story Nixon was telling in 1971 when he invented the cult of the “POW/MIA” in order to justify the carnage in Vietnam and to give himself a little bargaining power.

 “Never invest in a business you cannot understand”  -Warren Buffett 

Reuters:

The U.S.-based Cent executed one of the first known million-dollar NFT sales when it sold the former Twitter CEO’s tweet as an NFT last March. But as of Feb. 6, it has stopped allowing buying and selling, CEO and co-founder Cameron Hejazi told Reuters.

“There’s a spectrum of activity that is happening that basically shouldn’t be happening – like, legally” Hejazi said.

…

Hejazi highlighted three main problems: people selling unauthorised copies of other NFTs, people making NFTs of content which does not belong to them, and people selling sets of NFTs which resemble a security.

He said these issues were “rampant”, with users “minting and minting and minting counterfeit digital assets”.