The article itself was pretty clearly a piece of satire, one which mocked the idea that we were still buying oil from Russia rather than drilling in places like Alaska.
“Folks, nobody wants to ruin America’s beautiful Alaskan wilderness with oil trucks and drilling rigs, come on!” said President Biden in response to questions he thought were coming from a house plant in the West Wing. “But I’ve never had a problem getting oil from Russia, so there you go, go get him.”
Jen Psaki praised Biden’s brilliance in finding a solution that would prevent an energy crisis while also preventing new drilling on American land. She pointed out succinctly to journalists, “You see, it’s not American land anymore; it’s Russian land.”
Apparently USA Today thought someone reading that might get confused. Yesterday they published a fact-check of the article. And, yes, this is very real.
Based on our research, we rate SATIRE the claim that Biden plans to sell Alaska to Russia. The claim stems from an article published by The Babylon Bee, a satire website. There is no evidence Biden plans to sell Alaska.
As mentioned above, this isn’t the first time USA Today has fact-checked the Babylon Bee. They previously ran a fact check on an article titled “Ninth Circuit Court Overturns Death Of Ruth Bader Ginsburg.” Here’s a sample of that one:
Ginsburg will still be considered “alive” by the law, the article says. As to how the court will accomplish this feat, Wardlaw admitted, according to the article, “We’re still figuring that part out.”
Any attempt to fill the vacancy left by Ginsburg will be blocked by the 9th Circuit until she can be cloned or resurrected, according to the article…
There is no record of any Wardlaw opinion on Ginsburg’s death on the website for the 9th Circuit, but she participated in a panel discussion Friday about Ginsburg’s life produced by the UCLA School of Law. There was no mention of “reviving” Ginsburg during the discussion.
The first time I wrote about something like this was back in 2018 when Snopes fact-checked a Babylon Bee story headlined “CNN purchases industrial-sized washing machine to spin news before publication.” Facebook then put a warning on the article based on the Snopes fact-check.
I really don’t get why USAToday is doing this. Do they genuinely think people are so dumb that they can’t tell these articles are satire? Or do they just want to generates clicks from people like me who can’t believe they keep publishing these?
There may be some instances of satire which is subtle enough that people really can’t be sure what’s true and what’s not. I don’t think anything the Babylon Bee publishes is walking that line. Their pieces are clearly aiming at a level of absurdity intended to make people laugh and also maybe point out some social hypocrisy. What I don’t think they’re trying to do is trick anyone.
Finally, there’s a new story on the Bee today that USAToday might want to look into. I think it’s satire but I’m not sure.
If you thought the IRS audited complicated, high-dollar tax returns, think again. It turns out that the poorest among America’s taxpayers are the most likely to be audited. According to the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC), an organization dedicated to giving Americans information about what their federal government does and how much it costs, America’s lowest income earners are five times more likely to be audited than wealthier people.
TRAC reported that the IRS audited 0.4% of the 160 million individual income tax returns it processed each year. Most of these audits were accomplished by “correspondence audits.” This means that the IRS sends a letter to the taxpayer asking for documentation proving a specific line item in the return. Of the 659,003 audits the IRS conducted last year, 85% of them were correspondence audits.
What’s noteworthy is the targets of these very simple audits:
[O]ver half of these correspondence audits were targeted at the small proportion of workers with incomes so low they had claimed an anti-poverty earned tax credit to offset the tax otherwise due on their modest earned income. To repeat: over half — fully 54 percent — of all correspondence audits last year targeted the small proportion of returns with gross receipts of less than $25,000 claiming an earned income tax credit.
Even taxpayers with total positive income from $200,000 to $1,000,000 had only one-third the odds of audit compared with these lowest income wage earners. A total of nearly 9 million taxpayers reported these high-income levels. Yet less than 40 thousand of their returns were audited by the IRS in FY 2021 — just 4.5 out of every 1,000 of these returns. [Citation omitted.] This contrasts sharply with 13.0 out of every 1,000 of these lowest income returns that were audited last year by the IRS.
An advocate for taxpayers, Erin M. Collins, filed a report with Congress stating that the problem is that the IRS is insufficiently staffed. This means that people were unable to get the help they needed when preparing their taxes, which would have helped them to avoid an audit.
Another factor has to do with the nature of IRS staffing. Over the last ten years, the staffing has shifted from IRS revenue agents, who have the training and experience to audit complex tax returns, to IRS examiners, who earn less money, are less knowledgeable, and can do only the tightly targeted correspondence audits.
For these examiners, the best way to get their work done is via these letters, which are essentially form letters, with only the recipient’s name, the line item, and the dollar amounts being different. Once the examiner has completed a letter, there’s little left to do. In most cases, the frightened recipient, if the amount demanded isn’t too overwhelming, will just pay it. After all, the person, being poor, can’t afford a lawyer or accountant and certainly isn’t going to fight the IRS. I’m betting these letters have a huge and easy closure rate.
The IRS’s ability to target people is aided by the tax code’s overwhelming complexity, which only begins with having a progressive tax code rather than a simple flat tax. A flat tax would have a huge impact on the IRS and the economy. It would put a lot of accountants and IRS agents out of business, so it could, perhaps, be phased in slowly.
The beauty of a pure flat tax is that everyone would pay the same percentage. The money spent on paperwork, attorneys, accountants, and audits could be used to make businesses grow, fund home purchases, and raise families. The government, too, would benefit from real money flowing in because it would no longer have to spend massive amounts of money to chase after money.
Another (and, to my mind, better) way is a national sales tax instead of an income tax. Because rich people consume a great deal more than poor people, they would pay significantly more. In addition, a national sales tax would mean that every American contributes to the economy, rather than the situation we have now, in which around 60% of American households pay no taxes. It’s very dangerous to have a society in which well over half the people are takers, not contributors. People who have a stake in something (and don’t feel cheated by it) tend to be more committed to keeping the system functioning.
The world was startled and impressed two weeks ago when Germany announced in the immediate aftermath of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine that it would increase its defense spending substantially, keep some coal-fired power plants running that would otherwise have been replaced with Russian natural gas, and rethink its plan to shut down its remaining nuclear power plants.
Well, they’ve done their rethinking on nuclear power, and decided—”Never mind: we’re going ahead with our nuke shutdowns after all.”
The German government citing technical reasons for not restarting three nuclear plants that shut down on December 31 of last year, or extending the life of their remaining nuke plants scheduled to be shut off permanently starting at the end of this year. Supposedly a lack of future uranium fuel supplies, and the arduous process of re-certifying the plants, constitute an insuperable obstacle.
The government’s enquiry concluded on Tuesday (8 March) that keeping the country’s remaining nuclear power fleet online was “not recommended” at this stage and that it was too late to reactive the plants that had already been shut down.
“We have again examined very carefully whether a longer operation of the nuclear power plants would help us in this foreign policy situation,” German Vice-Chancellor Robert Habeck said in a statement on Tuesday. “The answer is negative – it would not help us,” he concluded. . .
Germany’s negative assessment on nuclear cited legal and practical uncertainties as the basis for the decision. The permit to operate the three plants that were shut off on 31 December could not be reactivated in a “legally certain way,” the ministries explained in a statement.
Keep in mind that Germany had great difficulty assembling a government after last fall’s election generated no clear majority, or a path to a coherent majority. So the government now led by Chancellor Olaf Scholz includes the Green Party in its coalition. The Green Party was founded first and foremost in opposition to all things nuclear, whether electricity or bombs. They were awarded finance and the environment for their support of Scholz.
And guess which ministries performed the feasibility review of Germany’s nuclear power plants?
The assessment was conducted by the economy ministry held by Habeck and the environment ministry headed by Steffi Lemke, who are both from the Green party.
So what will Germany do to keep the lights on and their factories running?
Pressure is mounting on Germany to halt imports of Russian energy, which critics say is financing the Kremlin’s war in Ukraine.
But German Chancellor Olaf Scholz said continued imports of Russian energy are “essential” for German citizens. “Europe’s supply of energy for heat generation, mobility, power supply and industry cannot be secured in any other way at the moment,” he said.
A total embargo on Russian imports carries a “real danger of energy undersupply in certain sectors,” Habeck said on Tuesday.
Prediction: Germany intends to shut down all of its coal-fired power plants by 2030, but I suspect they will be burning coal well after 2040.
Let’s see whether they keep to their pledge to increase defense spending. Chalk it all up as another cost of what ought to be called green fundamentalism.
The confusion over providing fighter jets to Ukraine underscores a dangerous reality: NATO has no end-game and no off-ramps for this war.
Aremarkable exchange took place earlier this week between the United States and Poland, which shares a long border with Ukraine and likely would be first to get hit by Russian forces if the war expands beyond Ukrainian territory. The exchange was not only embarrassing, highlighting the U.S. State Department’s incompetence, but it underscores what can only be described as a complete absence of strategy among the NATO allies, which appear to have no end-game and no off-ramps in mind for Ukraine and Russia.
Here’s what happened. Secretary of State Anthony Blinken said Sunday that Poland has a “green light” to provide fighter jets to the Ukrainian air force, adding that the U.S. was working with Poland to find a way to replace MiG-29 jets (which Ukrainian pilots are trained to fly and fight) that might be sent to Ukraine with American F-16s.
News quickly spread on Monday that the U.S. and Poland had reached such a deal, and that dozens of Polish MiG-29s were in fact going to supplement Ukraine’s war effort. If true, that would have been a shocking escalation on the part of NATO. It’s easy to see how Russia could then claim that Poland, by putting its own warplanes in the fight, was now a belligerent in the conflict, and then justify expanding the war into Eastern Europe.
But it wasn’t true — not quite. Poland, acutely aware of what Moscow’s likely response would be if dozens of Polish warplanes flown by Ukrainian pilots crossed from Poland into Ukraine and started hitting Russian targets, issued a curious statement on Tuesday. The Polish Foreign Ministry said it was ready to deploy, free of charge, all their MiG-29 jets to the Ramstein Air Base in Germany, “and place them at the disposal of the Government of the United States of America.”
The statement went on to request that the U.S. “provide us with used aircraft with corresponding operational capabilities. Poland is ready to immediately establish the conditions of purchase of the planes. The Polish Government also requests other NATO Allies — owners of MIG-29 jets — to act in the same vein.”
This move by Poland apparently caught the U.S. State Department completely off-guard. Later on Tuesday, Pentagon spokesman John Kirby responded to the Polish proposal, which he said, “shows just some of the complexities this issue presents.”
The prospect of fighter jets “at the disposal of the Government of the United States of America” departing from a U.S./NATO base in Germany to fly into airspace that is contested with Russia over Ukraine raises serious concerns for the entire NATO alliance. It is simply not clear to us that there is a substantive rationale for it. We will continue to consult with Poland and our other NATO allies about this issue and the difficult logistical challenges it presents, but we do not believe Poland’s proposal is a tenable one.
What can we conclude from this bizarre back-and-forth? First, that Blinken’s “green light” comment Sunday was made without consulting Poland or our other NATO allies. Second, that Poland’s statement Tuesday was a not-too-subtle attempt to shift the responsibility for the entire scheme to the United States. Essentially, Poland was saying that if the U.S. government wants to aide Ukraine by giving it warplanes, Poland would not be the one to transfer or even facilitate the transfer of those aircraft onto the battlefield. They would have to come from a U.S. air base, not Poland.
Lastly, the U.S. response reveals that despite Blinken’s reckless comment, the U.S. has not thought seriously about how any of this would work, and what might or might not give Moscow a casus belli to attack Polish or NATO targets in Eastern Europe.
In other words, there is no NATO strategy, either to assist Ukraine in a way that would turn the tide of the war or to imagine an end-game that’s something less than a total Russian defeat. Last week, Blinken articulated what can best be described as a maximalist policy for the war: “We have to sustain this until it stops, until the war is over, Russian forces leave, the Ukrainian people regain their independence, their sovereignty, their territorial integrity. We’re committed to doing that.”
So the apparent position of the U.S. government is that it must help Ukraine to bring about a complete humiliating Russian withdrawal, something like the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan in 1989 — or the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan last year, for that matter. If the NATO allies are worried that Russia will widen the war over a couple dozen Polish MiG-29s, what do they think the Kremlin will do to avoid the kind of defeat that Blinken has laid out? Have they thought about the possibility that Russia would use tactical nuclear weapons to avoid that kind of defeat? It sure doesn’t seem like it.
Setting all that aside, though, the U.S. and our NATO allies have just demonstrated to Russia and the entire world that we have no plan to provide Ukraine with warplanes, let alone tanks or troops or other advanced weapon systems. The NATO allies obviously don’t even agree on how that might be done in theory, and they apparently are not talking to one another about it behind closed doors but issuing embarrassing and contradictory statements in public.
As my colleague Eddie Scarry notes, all of this blows up the polite fiction that President Joe Biden is providing strong NATO leadership, and that the alliance is solid and united in confronting Russian President Vladimir Putin.
It also blows up the notion, increasingly popular among neocons in the corporate press and in Washington, that NATO is able to impose a no-fly zone over Ukraine and can be pressured into doing so. If the Poles won’t even allow its MiG-29s to be transferred to Ukraine via Polish airspace, why would they agree to send sorties out from Poland to engage and shoot down Russian warplanes? Why would smaller NATO allies in the Baltics?
They won’t — and they shouldn’t, because doing so would be an act of war that would pull the entire NATO alliance into an armed conflict with Russia. Likewise, funneling warplanes and other heavy weapons into Ukraine will bring NATO right up to and arguably well past the line of belligerence. To paraphrase the Pentagon, the proposal is not a tenable one.
Has the level of public discourse ever been lower? The Biden administration’s energy policies have been a disaster, as an overwhelming majority of Americans recognize. So the Democrats are flailing wildly, trying to blame exploding energy costs on Vladimir Putin, while suggesting that their own failed policies demonstrate the need to stop pumping oil altogether and shift to wind and solar power, fueling electric vehicles.
This view was expressed by Senator Chris Murphy, who offered the following twisted logic:
Murphy said, “I think there’s a moral imperative for the United States to not send money to fund Putin’s war. But we are a very small share of Russia’s exports.”
That’s right, and the only reason we are importing Russian oil at all is that we irrationally cut down on our own production.
Murphy said, “The reality is if we’re not getting this from Russia, we’re likely going to be importing more from another brutal dictator, in Saudi Arabia, for instance, or we may have to go to Venezuela.
Actually, we should be getting it from Texas, New Mexico, North Dakota, etc. That is what would happen if the Democrats would get out of the way. This is the kicker:
“We should learn our lesson here and become energy independent and choose to invest in clean domestic energy, so we never have to choose between one dictator versus another.” *** Murphy concluded, “Renewable energy stays in the United States. When we are producing energy from solar panels or wind turbines — that stays on the American grid, if you really care about keeping American energy in the United States, you should be investing in renewables.”
This is literally one of the dumbest things I have ever read. “Clean domestic energy” means wind and solar. Will wind and solar energy make us “energy independent,” like fossil fuels did until Joe Biden took office? No.
Where does Murphy think we get our solar panels? China controls over 70% of the world market, and that isn’t going to change–it’s hard to compete on price with slave labor. How about wind turbines? Seven of the ten largest wind turbine manufacturers are Chinese, and China controls 60% of global wind turbine production.
Perhaps the dimwitted senator might suggest that we carry out a Manhattan project-style effort to promote solar panel and wind turbine manufacture here in the U.S. Only it isn’t that simple. Apart from being inherently unreliable and unreasonably expensive, both solar panels and wind turbines require extraordinary amounts of copper, nickel, cobalt, rare earths, lithium (for the mythical “batteries” that greenies are always talking about) and other minerals. Where do you suppose those minerals are mined and processed? In the U.S.? No:
The reality is that relying on wind turbines, solar panels and batteries means turning our entire energy sector–our whole economy, really–over to the Communist Chinese Party. It is the exact opposite of energy independence. And that isn’t going to change, since Senator Murphy and other members of his party wouldn’t dream of allowing the U.S. to mine its own copper, nickel, and cobalt, not to mention the other minerals where we lack adequate deposits.
It isn’t unusual to see bad arguments made in the political arena, especially when parties are desperate as the Democrats are today. But what they are now saying about energy policy represents an intellectual nadir.
Far from rallying the free world as its leader in reacting to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, President Biden’s diplomatic team has been publicly snubbed and humiliated by even putative allies. Rather than “restoring respect” for the U.S., as Biden promised to do, his administration has severely damaged America’s standing as a country to be heeded.
You would not know it from the saturation-level media coverage of the ongoing crisis, focused as it is on demonizing Putin for the crime of invading a sovereign neighbor. But without even so much as defending our own border, much less invading another country, the Biden administration has managed to alienate a large share of the world.
Two serious public rebukes from allies Tuesday are signaling to the world community that America’s views and initiatives don’t matter as much as they used to barely over a year ago.
Poland, a vital and well armed ally, humiliated Secretary Blinken after he tried to force it to provide Soviet-era Mig fighters to Ukrainian pilots who were trained in them. Rather than send the jets to Ukraine, Poland offered to transfer them to U.S. ownership (free of charge if the U.S. replaced them with equivalent American used fighters) at Ramstein Air Force Base in Germany (in the opposite direction of Ukraine), leaving it up the U.S. if it wanted to send them to Ukraine on its own responsibility. Sundance summarizes:
Earlier this afternoon, Poland called Secretary of State Anthony Blinken’s bluff, over the U.S. claims that Poland was going to send fighter jets into Ukraine. This followed Sunday’s announcement where Poland said the U.S. State Dept was lying.
Blinken on Face the Naiton (YouTube screen grab).
Earlier today, Poland said they would give the U.S. the planes if Blinken and Biden wanted to start World War III, but Poland wasn’t going to help the U.S. create a war with Russia. This put the U.S. in a ‘put up or shut up’ position. Well, Blinken and Biden just folded, per the Pentagon:
Pentagon – We are now in contact with the Polish government following the statement issued today. As we have said, the decision about whether to transfer Polish-owned planes to Ukraine is ultimately one for the Polish government. We will continue consulting with our Allies and partners about our ongoing security assistance to Ukraine, because, in fact, Poland’s proposal shows just some of the complexities this issue presents.
The prospect of fighter jets “at the disposal of the Government of the United States of America” departing from a U.S./NATO base in Germany to fly into airspace that is contested with Russia over Ukraine raises serious concerns for the entire NATO alliance. It is simply not clear to us that there is a substantive rationale for it. We will continue to consult with Poland and our other NATO allies about this issue and the difficult logistical challenges it presents, but we do not believe Poland’s proposal is a tenable one. (read more)
Serious as is Poland’s mockery, the rebuke suffered from our key Middle East Arab allies is perhaps even more devastating. In an exclusive story, the Wall Street Journal has revealed that leaders of Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates are refusing to take Biden’s personal calls. This is the very definition of a snub.
The White House unsuccessfully tried to arrange calls between President Biden and the de facto leaders of Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates as the U.S. was working to build international support for Ukraine and contain a surge in oil prices, said Middle East and U.S. officials.
Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman and the U.A.E.’s Sheikh Mohammed bin Zayed al Nahyan both declined U.S. requests to speak to Mr. Biden in recent weeks, the officials said, as Saudi and Emirati officials have become more vocal in recent weeks in their criticism of American policy in the Gulf.
“There was some expectation of a phone call, but it didn’t happen,” said a U.S. official of the planned discussion between the Saudi Prince Mohammed and Mr. Biden. “It was part of turning on the spigot [of Saudi oil].”
These two countries virtually alone have the capacity to increase oil output to replace the Russian oil Biden announced a boycott of, and to make up for the restrictions on U.S. oil production that Biden began implementing on Day One of his presidency. Both countries are being hugely enriched by the run-up in oil prices (as are Putin, Maduro of Venezuela, and the mullahs of Iran). But other actions Biden has taken have also alienated them:
The Saudis have signaled that their relationship with Washington has deteriorated under the Biden administration, and they want more support for their intervention in Yemen’s civil war, help with their own civilian nuclear program as Iran’s moves ahead, and legal immunity for Prince Mohammed in the U.S., Saudi officials said. The crown prince faces multiple lawsuits in the U.S., including over the killing of journalist Jamal Khashoggi in 2018.
The Emiratis share Saudi concerns about the restrained U.S. response to recent missile strikes by Iran-backed Houthi militants in Yemen against the U.A.E. and Saudi Arabia, officials said. Both governments are also concerned about the revival of the Iran nuclear deal, which doesn’t address other security concerns of theirs and has entered the final stages of negotiations in recent weeks.
Other friendly, if not formally allied, major countries also are not on board with Team Biden’s plans to cripple Russia. ZeroHedge reports:
First, Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro declined to condemn the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Then, India followed suit — as the Modi government attempted to balance its historic ties with Moscow and its strategic partnership with Washington. (snip)
So for those keeping track, while the west has continued to insist that Russia is isolated — and make no mistake, these sanctions will be immediately crippling — if one considers the population and resources which originate in China, India, Brazil and the Middle East kingdoms — basically half the world’s population and those who control most of the world’s commodities aren’t on board with punishing Putin or easing the situation to the west’s benefit. (emphasis in original)
The magnitude of incompetence on display in Biden diplomacy is staggering. An old saying from Harvard Business School is “As hire As. Bs hire Cs.” But when the commander in chief is a D, whom does he hire? The answer is Ron Klain, Antony Blinken, and Jake Sullivan.
They’re still talking about the caravans: the miles-long lines of cars, their passengers waving American flags, Cuban flags, and Donald Trump banners, that painted streaks of red, white, and blue down Calle Ocho and around Little Havana, bringing much of Miami to a halt for hours at a time ahead of the 2020 election. On a recent trip to the city, those I spoke with—Republican operatives and supporters, as well as more impartial observers of Miami’s political scene—described these demonstrations vividly. The multinational, multilingual expressions of support for a Republican presidential candidate were unmistakably Miami. They displayed a flavor of GOP enthusiasm that couldn’t happen anywhere else, at least not on this scale. The demonstrators took cues from the city’s proud anti-Communist past. Some of the organizers of the events—officially known as the “Anti- Communist and Anti-Socialist Caravans for Freedom and Democracy”—included groups established to fight the Cuban dictatorship. The parades were a rejoinder to pollsters who warned not to read too much into enthusiastic displays of support for a given candidate. Miami was the site of major political change in 2020, and if you watched the car parades, you saw the indicators earlier than most.
Miami-Dade, Florida’s largest county, is two-thirds Hispanic and shifted dramatically toward the Republicans in the last election. In 2016, Hillary Clinton won by 64 percent to Trump’s 35 percent in the county. Four years later, Joe Biden triumphed, but in a much closer contest: 53 percent to 46 percent. That huge swing in such a big county was key to Trump’s relatively straightforward Florida win. In raw numbers, Trump nearly doubled his vote count in Miami-Dade, from 333,000 in 2016 to 617,000 in 2020. His statewide margin of victory, under 120,000 in 2016, more than tripled, to 372,000 in 2020.
The changing habits of voters in Miami are perhaps the most important part of the story of why what was once the most coveted swing state in the Electoral College has taken on a reddish hue. What’s true on a presidential level is true on a gubernatorial level. Ron DeSantis sneaked into office by just 30,000 votes in 2018. Since then, his stock has soared; his 2022 reelection seems likely. The swing in 2020 was also enough to flip two South Florida House seats from blue to red.
It soon became clear that the Miami results were indicative of a national story of Hispanic voters shifting rightward in 2020. Latino-heavy precincts everywhere from the Rio Grande Valley, Texas, and Clark County, Nevada, to Paterson, New Jersey, and Milwaukee saw a marked move to the right. According to a Pew survey of validated election voters, the nationwide Democratic margin of victory among Hispanic voters dropped from 38 points to 21 points from 2016 to 2020, with 38 percent of Hispanics voting for a second Trump term.
Florida’s growing less white and more conservative offers Republicans nationwide a feel-good story. Florida senator Marco Rubio, himself a Cuban-American from Miami, has argued that the lesson from 2020 is that his party must be built on a “multi-ethnic, multi-racial, working-class coalition.” It’s not hard to see the appeal of this vision, undercutting, as it would, Democratic assumptions about the party’s rainbow coalition.
Adding to this demographic and electoral shift are the results that Republicans in power have delivered in recent years. DeSantis has overseen a practical approach to the pandemic that—at least according to the revealed preferences of exiles from Democratic states—is what many Americans wanted. According to the state’s Office of Economic and Demographic Research, Florida grew by an estimated 329,717 new residents in the 12 months to April 2021. Meantime, Miami’s Republican mayor, Francis Suarez, has hustled his city onto the tech hub map, doing all he can to lure talent and capital from Silicon Valley and New York. (See “America’s Tomorrow City.”) Thanks to policymaking at a city and state level, Miami has become perhaps the most prominent counterexample to instances of Democratic dysfunction.
The Miami lesson is also about how much Republicans stand to gain if they don’t neglect cities. The urban Republican has become something of an endangered species lately; at times, it can feel like the GOP has given up on serious attempts to win votes in the country’s major cities. But Miami underscores the prominent role that cities can play in Republican victories. The party doesn’t need to win majorities in densely populated areas for an improved urban performance to count: it just needs to pick some low-hanging electoral fruit, make inroads into large Democratic margins in metropolises, and then the path to statewide victory for Senate, gubernatorial, and presidential candidates suddenly looks clearer.
The question is whether Republicans in other cities can learn anything from South Florida. Is Miami a road map? Or do its idiosyncrasies—especially its Cuban population, a self-selecting group that fled Communism—make it a special case?
A1930s guide to Florida, published as part of the Federal Writers’ Project, notes the miracle of Miami: “In less than a quarter century, miles of rainbow-hued dwellings, bizarre estates, ornate hotels, and office buildings have grown from a mangrove swamp, jungle, coral rock, and sand dunes.” Then a resort town, Miami, the guide reports, is, in the sporting season, “100 days of perpetual carnival.” Of busy racetracks, the author writes, “the playboy and the plowboy, the dowager in pearls and the sylph in shorts, the banker on vacation and the grifter on the prowl keep turnstiles clicking and feed staggering sums into the pari-mutuels.”
The city is 60 times more populous today—and no less miraculous. The same quality is still identifiable almost a century later: an ebullient cross-section of America chasing riches and the sun and having fun along the way.
For all this continuity, the biggest change in the last century has been demographic, which started with the influx that followed after Fidel Castro took control of Cuba in 1959. It transformed Miami, though what today is an essential feature initially seemed an aberration. “When a prince builds a palace, he does not intend a shelter for paupers. When men built Miami they did not see it as journey’s end for a tide of empty-handed refugees,” mused the New York Times in 1961. “There is perhaps no large city in the nation less suited by temperament and resources to take in the destitute.” The new arrivals would soon rewrite that economic story and outperform gloomy accounts of their predicament.
“The Miami lesson is also about how much Republicans stand to gain if they don’t neglect cities.”
After a decade or so, Cuban-Americans had figured out how to flex their political muscles. By the early 1970s, they were a voting bloc that politicians couldn’t ignore. Eventually, that political power took on national significance. When Ronald Reagan came to town in 1984 and promised that “someday, Cuba itself will be free,” he was the first president since JFK to visit Miami and directly appeal to Cubans.
The late Joan Didion started her 1987 book-length account of Miami in a graveyard. “Havana vanities come to dust in Miami,” she wrote. If you want to explain Miami’s weirdness, Woodlawn Park Cemetery is still a good place to start. Among those buried there: Cuban presidents and senators, Nicaraguan leaders, Latin American first ladies, and Bay of Pigs veterans. The graves are a reminder that city politics and geopolitics cannot be separated in Miami. It was Miami’s status as a stage on which Caribbean and Central American politics played out that made it, in Didion’s words:
A settlement of considerable interest, not exactly an American city as American cities have until recently been understood but a tropical capital: long on rumor, short on memory, overbuilt on the chimera of runaway money and referring not to New York or Boston or Los Angeles or Atlanta but to Caracas and Mexico, to Havana and to Bogotá and to Paris and Madrid. Of American cities Miami has since 1959 connected only to Washington, which is the peculiarity of both places, and increasingly the warp.
Today, memory has displaced rumor. Once a site from which to launch invasions, coups, and counterrevolutions, Miami knows what other American cities have forgotten, or never properly understood. Anti-Communism is hard-wired into this town.
Florida Democrats have long bet on a new generation of Cuban-Americans letting bygones be bygones, and forgiving the party of Kennedy, a villain in Miami ever since he abandoned 1,500 Cuban exiles in the botched Bay of Pigs invasion. But it hasn’t worked out that way. More than 60 years have passed since the exodus from Cuba to Miami, and Cuban-Americans remain a distinct—and conservative—electoral bloc.
It isn’t just Cubans who are frustrating Democratic assumptions about Latino voting habits, however. Today, Venezuelans and Nicaraguans, informed by political failures in their own countries of origin, are crucial parts of a bloc of Hispanic Republicans. Add to that smaller cohorts of Latin American–origin voters who also swung rightward in the last election, and something broader is happening.
When I met Suarez, the mayor of the City of Miami (the municipality covers only the downtown of what today is a sprawling city) in his waterfront office, I asked him whether such a thing existed as Miami Republicanism, a brand of politics unique to the city.
“I think there is,” explained the trim 44-year-old over cafecito. “And I think it stems from the fact that a lot of us are exiles. We’ve seen firsthand the destructive power of Communism. And we know how it promises the world and delivers misery. So I think that is the base of how this Miami movement and formula is created. It is a rejection of an ideology that is probably one of the largest frauds perpetrated on humankind.”
From that hard-earned anti-Communism flows much else. “We are a city that believes in capitalism,” says Suarez. “That believes in innovation as a means of democratizing opportunities.”
Last March, Suarez was maybe the first public official with any real national profile to catch the coronavirus. Nearly two years on, he has emerged as one of the big political winners from the pandemic. The son of Xavier Suarez, Miami’s first Cuban-American mayor, Francis’s first foray into city politics was at two years old, when he appeared in one of his father’s campaign commercials. “Vote por Papi, por favor,” was the toddler’s polite request.
Suarez, a registered Republican, was elected to the nonpartisan mayoralty himself in 2017. Since 2020, he has been unapologetic about the opportunities that emerged for his city because of the coronavirus. At times, Suarez’s techno-optimist hustle feels gimmicky—to demonstrate his determination to make Miami the crypto capital of America, he is planning to pay city employees in bitcoin. But as mayor, he doesn’t enjoy as many executive powers as his counterparts in other U.S. cities, so boosterism is one of the few ways he can move the dial.
And the hype, Suarez argues, can be backed up by results. “All of these ingredients have now created a quantifiable narrative,” he says. “Before we were talking about all the migration that was happening. Now we have a lot of statistics to back it up.” He cites more than $1 trillion in total value in assets under management of companies that recently moved to the city. Many new businesses have launched, and a study of LinkedIn data found that Miami experienced the largest percentage increase in software and IT services workers of any American city.
Suarez was reelected in November with 79 percent of the vote. Away from the flashy tech hub sales pitch, he pushes an agenda that focuses on low taxes, combating homelessness, and encouraging school choice and a well-funded police department. In January, Suarez takes over as chairman of the Conference of Mayors, an organization of city leaders. From that position, he hopes to push his center-right brand of urban policy on a national stage.
Some of this, he concedes, is not replicable—palm trees wave outside his office, as if a reminder of the city’s natural advantages were needed—but part of it is. “Miami has changed in the last ten years,” says Suarez. “It’s become the prototypical city, the city that you want to be like.”
Miami Republicanism comes in many varieties. Suarez is at one end of the spectrum: a centrist, business-friendly fixer who has frequent tussles with the more populist governor. Though not from Miami, DeSantis embodies a more raucous, brash Republicanism, as does the former president, who now lives 70 miles up the coast. But there seems to be an accommodation between the city’s GOP factions often lacking in the rest of the country.
The Republicans I spoke with along this spectrum, whether red-hat wearers or metropolitan Suarez supporters, identified two binding agents that keep Miami Republicans pulling together: patriotism and a firmly held belief in freedom and opportunity.
“In the end, everyone wants the same thing, which is a home, opportunities for prosperity and growth, and freedom,” says Ileana Garcia, the founder of Latinas for Trump and a state senator who flipped a central Miami district in the November 2020 election. “People are keen to stigmatize support for Trump and the Republican Party, including from Latinos, as a cult,” says Garcia. “But we’re not cultish at all. What motivates us is freedom: freedom to live your life according to your values, freedom to do what you want with your money and freedom to live in a country where you don’t have to have government hovering over you and telling you what to do all the time.”
Miami-Dade, Florida’s largest county, shifted dramatically toward the Republicans and Donald Trump in the last election. (MARK PETERSON/REDUX)
Armando Ibarra, chairman of Miami Young Republicans, says that the lesson from Miami is a focus on enterprise, patriotism, and the American dream. “A lot of Latinos and Hispanics are very optimistic and we love this country,” he says. “We believe in its ideals. When the Left and the Democratic Party attacks our country or attacks our ideals or presents this very pessimistic view of America as inherently racist and a place where you can’t get ahead, we know all of these things not to be true.”
Cuban-American writer Alex Perez, a Miami native who has written for City Journal, explained to me that the city is “old-school American,” more so than much of the rest of the country these days. Another Miami native made a similar point. “This is the least woke city in America,” she told me, referring to the city’s boisterous, politically incorrect spirit. Miami scrambles the progressive Left’s preferred racial classifications. Instead of a hierarchy of intersectional identities that pits “people of color” against whites, the city is a patchwork of national identities and often competing loyalties: Cubans, Haitians, Venezuelans, Nicaraguans, Dominicans, Colombians, Jamaicans, and others. The notion that American politics can be reduced to a coalition of people of color taking on white supremacy looks silly when viewed from Miami.
“Our heritage is always front and center,” says Garcia. “But if you ask any non-English-speaking Hispanic in Miami what they are, they will tell you ‘soy Americano.’ I’m American.” The frequent progressive use of the term “Latinx”—a gender-ideology-compliant neologism that only 4 percent of Hispanics say they prefer—encapsulates how the Democrats’ increasing adoption of identity politics turns off many nonwhite voters, especially among the working class.
It is a cliché in Washington to claim that Hispanic voters (or, for that matter, any demographic bloc) are “not a monolith”—but it rings particularly true in Miami GOP circles, where Republicans have actually acted on this insight. “A lot of people don’t want to be a generic Latino,” says Ibarra. “What we [Miami Young Republicans] did is embrace the customs, the parts of the culture that they enjoy, that they love. Because they are proud. If you’re Cuban or any other national background, you’re proud of your family’s customs and heritage. I think our ability to connect with them on that basis was really key.” In that sense, Miami’s voting blocs resemble the white-ethnic voting groups that once dominated U.S. urban politics. And the party that treats them as such could gain the most at the ballot box.
Miami Republicanism is at ease with the populist style but more optimistic and forward-looking than recent populist currents. (The “American carnage” theme of Donald Trump’s inaugural speech, for example, would have little resonance in a city full of strivers like Miami.) It is infused with a patriotism that only a few years ago was uncontroversial in public life—and resolutely anti-woke. It has the instinctive libertarianism of the small-business owner and a confidence that can find expression in two kinds of Miami newcomer: the venture capitalist backing a fresh idea or the recent arrival to the U.S. betting his future on the American dream. It is not an angry cry from those on the “wrong side of history,” nor is it shy about fighting the culture wars. It takes aim at a liberal political and cultural elite that describes a country that Miami denizens don’t recognize.
Miami is a reminder that the rising support in 2020 for the GOP among nonwhite voters, and Hispanics in particular, cannot be disentangled from the party’s performance in major cities. According to surveys, a Latino voter is roughly as likely as a white voter to describe himself as conservative. But for decades, traditional solidarities have trumped ideology, with conservative Hispanics reliably voting Democrat. That may be changing, with nonwhites starting to sort themselves more according to ideology. If that proves a real trend, it would create new opportunities for the GOP. A recent Manhattan Institute report sketched the outlines of a “metropolitan majority”: a cohort of voters in America’s large and growing cities that is ethnically diverse (survey respondents were nearly one-quarter Hispanic or Latino) and politically moderate. Their biggest worries, the polling found, are the cost of housing, homelessness, the coronavirus, traffic, public safety and crime, and high taxes. And the survey finds a very limited appetite for some of the most prominent progressive policies being pushed at a state and city level.
All this suggests that Miami may not be an aberration but a sign of a more competitive urban politics. Miami’s various Latino blocs, drawing on a fervent anti-Communist tradition, swung rightward earlier and further than nonwhite voters in other cities, and the city’s unique history meant that it had an active, engaged local Republican Party ready to capitalize on the opportunity. But brave is the Democrat who waves away Miami as a stand-alone case. And foolish is the Republican who believes that something similar couldn’t happen elsewhere.
Oliver Wiseman is the author of The Spectator’s “DC Diary” and a 2020–21 Novak Journalism Fellow.
As you may recall, Jussie Smollett was convicted on five of six felony counts of disorderly conduct back in December. The evidence of his guilt was overwhelming. Prosecutors had testimony from both of the Osundairo brothers saying Smollett had hired them to fake the hate crime attack. They also had video of Smollett driving the brothers to the scene of the attack a day before it happened, part of a “dry run.”
Today the NY Times reports that some of Smollett’s famous friends have written letters to the judge in advance of his sentencing tomorrow, begging for mercy on his behalf.
Ahead of a sentencing hearing on Thursday, celebrities and racial justice advocates like Samuel L. Jackson and his wife, the actress LaTanya Richardson Jackson; the Rev. Jesse Jackson; and Derrick Johnson, the president of the N.A.A.C.P., have written letters pleading for leniency for Jussie Smollett, the actor convicted of falsely reporting that he was the victim of a racist and homophobic attack.
“Jussie has already suffered,” the Rev. Jackson wrote to the judge handling the case. “He has been excoriated and vilified in the court of public opinion. His professional reputation has been severely damaged.”…
In their letter to Judge Linn, Samuel L. Jackson and LaTanya Richardson Jackson said they have known Mr. Smollett since he was a child and later through charitable work. The Jacksons asked Judge Linn for “mercy” and argued that Mr. Smollett “used his celebrity to impact community outreach work,” including to aid people in Flint, Mich., during the water crisis.
In his letter, Rev. Jesse Jackson wrote that he worried about Mr. Smollett’s safety in prison as a “well-known, nonviolent, Black, gay man with Jewish heritage.”
Jackson’s letter is the perfect coda to this story. The man who lied about the race of his attackers, suggesting white racists wanted to lynch him because he’s black and gay, is now too delicate for prison because he’s black, gay and Jewish.
Of course the idea of mercy is that one need not deserve it. Sometimes mercy is extended because mercy is a good thing in itself. But I don’t think Jussie Smollett deserves mercy and here are my two reasons.
He inflamed racial tensions nationwide based on a lie and he did it purely for selfish reasons.
If Smollett had faked a hate crime out of some purely altruistic motive (i.e. to raise consciousness about an issue) that would still be a despicable act but it would at least be selfless one. But no, Smollett’s motive was to get more attention for himself, to make himself a celebrated victim. And he was willing to invent a pair of white racist attackers to do it. The alleged hate crime was touted far and wide by politicians on the left as an example of the kind of hate that needed to be stamped out.
This quickly became a partisan talking point and everyone knew who the bad guys were. Only there weren’t any bad guys except Smollett himself, a pampered TV star looking for more attention.
Still, some will say that no one was really hurt in this hoax and Smollett isn’t a big league criminal so why not let him walk? And that brings us to point two.
Smollett lied then and has continued to lie ever since
Smollett has been lying about this case for three years. He lied to the entire nation during a TV interview about the attack. He lied to the jury. He is still claiming to this day that there was no hoax, only a real attack.
Even people who commit serious crimes can be shown mercy by a judge when they show some genuine remorse for their actions. Remorse requires some expression of contrition and shame. A murderer can show remorse and that can be factored into his sentence.
Jussie Smollett is not that person. He’s the person who tried to pull one over on the entire nation and when he got caught he just kept lying, leaning on his team of lawyers and his celebrity friends. Despite the fact that he’s not facing much time even under the worst case scenario, Smollett won’t admit what he did.
Who knows, maybe tomorrow he’ll come to court and confess what he did and ask for mercy. If so, that’s a different story. But as it stands now, I hope the judge throws the book at him and sentences him to a year in prison followed by some community service and probation. He’ll still be out in a matter of months but he’ll at least have some time to think about what he did wrong.
Low public interest in foreign policy and a biased media resulted in little scrutiny of Joe Biden’s extensive foreign policy failures.
HELEN RALEIGH at the Federalist:
American voters usually prioritize domestic issues over foreign policy during presidential elections. But several major blunders just in President Biden’s first year show the danger of not closely scrutinizing presidential candidates’ records on foreign policy.
During the 2020 election, foreign policy-related questions barely came up in any of the debates between President Donald Trump and Biden. The presidential debate commission in fact pulled foreign policy from their debate topics, perhaps to hide Biden’s weakness.
A YouGov survey in 2020 showed that 77 percent of Americans believed domestic issues were more important than foreign policy when choosing the next U.S. president. Additionally, people may have assumed foreign policy was Biden’s strong suit, since he was a U.S. senator for three decades and vice president under President Obama for eight.
Such an assumption couldn’t be further from the truth. Robert Gates, a defense secretary in the Obama administration, said Biden has “been wrong on nearly every major foreign policy and national security issue over the past four decades.”
Trump Was the Clear Foreign Policy Champ
In contrast, foreign policy was one of the bright spots in the Trump presidency. He orchestrated the historical Abraham Peace Accords among Israel, the United Arab Emirates, and Bahrain. His pivot to the Indo-Pacific was far more successful than President Obama’s pivot to Asia initiative.
Under Trump, the United States took a hard line on China, improved its relationship with India (the only Asian power that could check China), and expanded cooperation with allies by establishing the Quad, an unofficial alliance with Australia, India, and Japan. However, since most corporate media were anti-Trump, few wanted to give him any credit for his foreign policy accomplishments.
Instead, major media criticized Trump for being “soft” on Russia for his entire presidency. After Trump left the office, Fareed Zakaria of CNN finally admitted, “the Trump administration was pretty tough on the Russians. They armed Ukraine. They armed the Poles. They extended NATO operations and exercises in ways that even the Obama administration had not done.”
The combination of low public interest in foreign policy and a media that was willing to do everything to get Biden elected resulted in little scrutiny of Biden’s extensive foreign policy failures.
Joe Biden Botched Things From His First Day
During his campaign, Biden promised the American people that he would “go toe-to-toe” with Russia. But just within his first 48 hours in office, Biden delivered two gifts to Russia.
First, he rescinded the permit for the Keystone XL pipeline project, which would have created tens of thousands of jobs for American workers and delivered 830,000 barrels of oil daily from Canada. The cancellation of Keystone was the first of a series of the Biden administration’s “war on fossil fuel” policies that have strangled the U.S. energy industry and ended U.S. energy independence.
Biden’s second gift to Putin was to extend the New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty, or New START, with Russia for another five years without fixing the treaty’s many flaws. For example, it doesn’t limit Russia’s capacity to pursue nuclear weapons outside the treaty. And China isn’t part of the agreement, even though China has been rapidly building its nuclear weapon capacity.
On Iran, rather than taking advantage of the leverage gifted by the Trump administration’s “maximum pressure” economic sanctions, Biden jumped right back to the disastrous 2015 nuclear deal. His appointment of Robert Malley as his special envoy to Iran — a man with a long history of sympathy to Iran’s authoritarian regime and overtly anti-Israeli sentiments — signals that appeasement is now U.S. foreign policy.
Groveling Before China and Russia
China is the most significant strategic rival of the United States, and the Biden administration’s China policies are full of contradictions. It extended some of the Trump administration’s policies, such as adding Chinese companies to an economic blacklist over alleged human rights violations and imposing a diplomatic boycott of the Beijing Winter Olympics. Yet Biden’s secretary of state refused to call China’s treatment of Uyghur Muslims a “genocide,” and the U.S. Department of Justice quietly shut down its China-focused anti-espionage investigation.
The first sign of how Biden’s domestic policy would affect his foreign policy occurred during a high-level Sino- U.S. meeting in Alaska in March 2021. Biden and his team have often publicly criticized the United States, and through an executive order, Biden promised to address systemic racism in the country. China’s diplomats employed that same rhetoric to dress down American diplomats and attack America’s moral leadership in Alaska. The U.S. diplomats couldn’t mount a strong rebuttal because Democrats believe it.
All these were early warning signs that Biden’s foreign policy would end up empowering America’s adversaries at our expense. Then came the Biden administration’s disastrous withdrawal from Afghanistan. It revealed how incompetent and unfocused the Biden administration is. After it, Biden’s approval rating dropped 8 percent.
Americans don’t like to see our military and government humiliated by a group of ragtag militants. We were distraught over the loss of 13 American soldiers during the withdrawal. America’s embarrassing retreat from Afghanistan emboldened adversaries from Moscow to Beijing to Tehran to achieve their aggressive geopolitical goals.
Now Comes Russia’s Invasion of Ukraine
Biden’s poor handling of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is a perfect example of how one foreign policy failure led to another and Biden’s domestic agenda constrains his foreign policy. Biden waited until Russia attacked Ukraine to impose his first round of economic sanctions.
After Germany announced it will finally increase its defense budget, Biden followed by stepping up new rounds of severe sanctions. However, he initially exempted Russia’s energy sector from sanctions, hoping energy imports from Russia would help check U.S. gas inflation caused by Biden’s anti-energy policies. Putin uses every dollar we pay for his oil and gas to finance his war on Ukraine as energy prices continue to rise.
Only after huge domestic pressure did Biden announce he will finally ban Russian oil imports. This means even more pain for Americans, as it will likely hike gas prices even further, and gas prices affect the price of just about everything Americans buy.
Yet as recently as his State of the Union speech Biden has made it clear that he remains committed to his “green energy” agenda that means strangling U.S. energy, causing high prices for Americans. Rather than rescinding his ruinous energy policies, the Biden administration is actively courting other authoritarian regimes from Saudi Arabia to Venezuela, hoping to increase their oil imports.
One Horrific Failure After Another
Even more incredibly, while sanctioning Russia over its invasion of Ukraine, the Biden administration reportedly has relied on Russia to negotiate a nuclear deal with Iran, which would shower another murderous regime with billions of dollars with no guarantee of any change of behaviors. Mikhail Ulyanov, Russia’s chief negotiator, openly bragged that Iran has gotten more than it had expected.
The Biden administration has refused to share any details with the U.S. Congress and the American people. But we can be sure that any good deal for Iran’s mullahs will harm Americans’ safety, our national security, and peace in the Middle East.
Biden’s foreign policy blunders have weakened America’s international standing and sped up America’s decline. Biden’s flaws, especially his stubbornness and refusal to change course even when proven wrong, have become a significant obstacle to America’s prosperity and security.
As the saying goes, “Elections have consequences.” One of the biggest lessons learned from the Biden presidency is that foreign policy and domestic issues are often closely intertwined.
Biden’s presidency still has three long years to go and will encounter many more foreign policy challenges, including the biggest one: China’s likely invasion of Taiwan. If past history is an indicator of the future, thanks to too many Americans’ foolish votes for a known foreign policy bungler, China may end up replacing the United States as the dominant superpower in the new autocracy-friendly world order at the end of Biden’s first term.
After nearly two weeks, the conflict between Russia and Ukraine continues with the Russian military steadily gaining ground and methodically taking control of key assets such as highways, bridges, airports, and power plants. As the Russians advance, they are also encircling and cutting off the main concentrations of the Ukrainian military. If those encirclements are completed, it could get ugly.
It’s into that cauldron that U.S. Representative Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.) would plunge the United States. On “Face the Nation” last week Cheney was nothing short of bellicose calling for escalation across the board.
Cheney wants Biden to expand already sweeping sanctions and seize the Russian Central Bank’s foreign reserves. Weaponizing the dollar and the banking system in this way, she apparently fails to realize, carries with it risks to dollar-supremacy and the global dominance of American financial institutions. As other nations watch America use the dollar and important elements of the international banking infrastructure such as the SWIFT system as weapons, they will realize their own vulnerability and take steps to protect themselves from U.S.-dominated financial systems. China already offers alternatives and Biden’s actions are the best advertising for those systems they could ask for.
There is also an immediate threat of a trust crisis in the European banking system, which has significant exposure to Russia. This could cause a contagion-effect that negatively impacts American banks and financial markets and through them, the lives of ordinary Americans. Remember what happened in 2008.
But economic war, which would be bad enough, is not enough for Cheney. When asked, she refused to rule out direct American military intervention with Russia and, in fact, urged deploying American troops close to the Russian border and flooding Ukraine with weapons. Though many Americans favor “arming the Ukranians,” we should learn from rather than repeat past mistakes where we have followed this policy and enabled years-long civil wars as in Libya, Syria, and the former Yugoslavia—to say nothing of Iraq and Afghanistan.
Americans are generally unaware that there has been ongoing war between Ukraine and ethnic Russians in the Donbass regions of Donetsk and Luhansk since 2014. That war, which already has claimed 14,000 lives, has been carried on in part with American complicity and American weapons. A policy like Cheney’s, which aims to turn all of Ukraine into a long-term, low-intensity, battlefield like the Donbass has been, is cruel in that it can serve only to increase the butcher’s bill paid by ordinary Ukranians.
Cheney was also surprisingly blasé about the prospect of this regional conflict escalating to the point of nuclear war. Rather than trying to de-escalate the situation, it’s clear that Cheney is more interested in nuclear brinkmanship, which carries with it no potential upside but very significant risk for Americans.
MN Prager Discussion Group 
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