Fascist Dem’s FBI POLICE Invade President Trump’s Florida Residence! Is Moron Twit Joe Biden Responsible?

 AUGUST 8, 2022 BY JOHN HINDERAKER at Power Line:

THE FBI RAIDS TRUMP

The New York Times reports that the FBI has executed a search warrant on Donald Trump’s Florida estate, Mar-a-Lago.

Former President Donald J. Trump said on Monday that the F.B.I. had searched his Palm Beach, Fla., home and had broken open a safe — an account that, if accurate, would be a dramatic escalation in the various investigations into the former president.

The FBI has openly become an arm of the Democratic Party. This will not serve the Bureau well in years to come. But what was the pretext for the raid?

The search, according to two people familiar with the investigation, appeared to be focused on material that Mr. Trump had brought with him to Mar-a-Lago, his private club and residence, after he left the White House. Those boxes contained many pages of classified documents, according to a person familiar with their contents.

Mr. Trump delayed returning 15 boxes of material requested by officials with the National Archives for many months, only doing so when there became a threat of action being taken to retrieve them.

That is classic NYT “news” reporting. The Times cites the fact that Trump took a while to send documents to the National Archives–which he did some time ago–as justification for today’s raid.

“After working and cooperating with the relevant Government agencies, this unannounced raid on my home was not necessary or appropriate,” Mr. Trump said, maintaining it was an effort to stop him from running for president in 2024. “Such an assault could only take place in broken, Third-World Countries.”

“They even broke into my safe!” he wrote. “What is the difference between this and Watergate, where operatives broke into the Democrat National Committee? Here, in reverse, Democrats broke into the home of the 45th President of the United States.”

Good question, although, to be fair, the FBI had a search warrant issued by a compliant authority. But anyone who wonders whether the FBI’s leaders should be identified as Democrats hasn’t been paying attention.

Trump is certainly correct that all of this–the absurd “January 6” committee hearings, threats of criminal prosecution, and now this raid on his Florida home–is driven by the 2024 election. The Democrats impeached Trump twice, but that didn’t work. He leads Joe Biden in every 2024 presidential preference poll I have seen. So now they want to up the ante by arresting or indicting him on some trumped-up charge. That this is 100% about presidential politics, no one doubts.

I think this is unfortunate not only because it betrays our status as a banana republic, as Trump said, but also because it increases the likelihood that Republicans will rally behind Trump and he will be the Republican nominee in 2024. Given the disaster of the Biden administration, many think the Republican nominee will be a shoo-in in 2024, no matter who he or she might be. I disagree. I think that Trump might drag behind him so much baggage that he could be the only Republican likely to lose in 2024–not to Joe Biden, obviously, but to whomever the Dems nominate.

If I thought the Democrats were this well-organized, I would suspect that today’s raid was part of their plot to ensure that Donald Trump is the Republican nominee in 2024.

Have You Ever News From Havana? It used to be in the bad print daily!

Inferno: Another massive explosion at Cuban oil facility

JOHN SEXTON Aug 08, 2022 5:00 PM ET at HotAir:

The tweet below reads “Terrible images come to us from Matanzas where a new explosion has just taken place.”

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Here’s another angle on the latest explosion:

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The fire started Friday night after lightning struck the facility. Since then, more than 100 firefighters have been injured trying to put it out.

As of Monday morning, 125 people had been injured, 17 firefighters were missing, and one responding officer was dead. At least 24 people remained hospitalized, five of them in critical condition, officials said.

The fire broke out around 7 p.m. Friday when lightning struck one of the crude storage deposits at a supertanker base in northwestern Cuba, some 55 miles east of Havana. The flames quickly spread to a second tank, setting off multiple explosions. It also prompted the evacuation of nearly 5,000 people from the neighboring region, Matanzas Gov. Mario Sabines Lorenzo said, according to state media.

But Sunday brought worsening conditions when strong winds fanned the flames, according to Cuba’s Ministry of Energy and Mining. As night fell over the island, the second tank to catch fire exploded and collapsed, spewing burning oil and flames into surrounding vegetation and setting a third tank ablaze.

So as of last night a third tank was in danger and today Reuters reported it had collapsed. But the Post contradicted that report and said the tank hadn’t collapsed but was “under risk.” Now I’m wondering if the latest explosion seen in the video above was the third tank. Here’s what the blaze looked like Sunday.

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This image of firefighters at the scene is incredible.

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This clip shows the fire when this all started on Friday.

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Mexico and Venezuela have now joined the efforts to fight the fire. The situation is dire enough that Cuba has even accepted help from the United States.

The Cuban government said it has accepted “technical guidance” offered by the United States to help the island’s authorities put out a raging fire that threatens to engulf an oil storage facility at the port of Matanzas, in what could be one of the few examples of cooperation between the two countries in recent years.

“We deeply appreciate the condolences and expressions of help from people and organizations in the U.S. regarding the #Matanzas incident, including from the U.S. government, which offered technical advice, a proposal already in the hands of specialists for proper coordination,” Carlos Fernández de Cossío, Cuba’s vice minister of foreign affairs, said on Twitter.

Cooperation between the US and Cuba is something you don’t see very often but this is really a worst case scenario. Matanzas is Cuba’s largest facility for receiving oil from tankers and if that’s destroyed by fire it could take a long time before Cuba can restore it to operation.

Just last month I wrote about the series of blackouts that much of Cuba has been experiencing. When there were blackouts last summer it started a series of protests against the government. The ruling communists rolled out Raul Castro to try to quiet the outrage. But when the blackouts started again this summer, there were once again thousands of people in the streets to protest. The communist revolution in Cuba has survive a lot of things but cutting off people’s power in the middle of summer may be the last straw.

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But all of that was happening before this fire. You can imagine how much worst the situation is likely to become now that the supply of oil has been effectively cut off for the foreseeable future.

Residents expressed fear that the crisis will worsen as the hottest months of the year bear down.

“Oh my God, no lights and no gas, that is what this means,” Havana resident Pia Ferrer exclaimed in an upscale neighborhood of Havana.

Havana has been mostly spared from the blackouts in the past. Some have claimed that was a strategic choice made by the government to keep residents of the capital on their side. They won’t be able to do that for much longer. This disaster could become a turning point for the future of Cuba.

Forever Lefty Murray NO LONGER ENDEARING?

Patty Murray is no longer endearing

Once the Washington senator had a comic touch but now she’s just embarrassing

August 4, 2022

US Sen. Patty Murray speaks about reproductive rights during a news conference outside the U.S. Capitol August 2, 2022 in Washington, DC (Getty Images)

Someone once asked Johnny Depp about the secret of good acting, and he replied: “I pretty much try and stay in a constant state of confusion just because of the expression it leaves on my face.”

Okay, maybe Depp’s not someone to hold up as a sage on the human condition. But I think we can at least agree that he knows what he’s talking about when it comes to projecting the sort of halfway engaging befuddlement that earned him a reported $90 million as Captain Jack Sparrow in Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales.

I mention all this only in so far as it applies to seventy-one-year-old Patty Murray, Democrat from Washington state. Murray won her primary election on Tuesday ahead of what could be a sixth consecutive term in the US Senate. Judging from her habitual expression, she, too, appears to exist in a state of pervasive mental fog. The problem is that while Depp may be quite good at projecting a faux-naif charm to audiences, in the senator’s case, there’s nothing artificial about it. Murray may be just a few fries short of a Happy Meal. She cannot cope, some say. Taken as a whole, her career demonstrates the impossibility of being simultaneously grown-up and an opponent of term limits.

The proud holder of a physical education degree from Washington State University, Murray started out teaching a “parenting class” at a Seattle-area community college before deciding to run for public office amid the Bill Clinton sweep of 1992. She likes to remind people she was prompted to stand after an unnamed (male) work colleague told her she was unelectable because she was “just a mom in tennis shoes.” The exact provenance of the quote still remains fuzzy, but Murray has used it in every one of her campaigns over the last thirty years. In her mind, she’s forever the plucky outsider battling the cruel misogynist establishment, all alone in the world with just her staff, free travel, subsidized healthcare, and $174,000 annual salary.

Unsurprisingly, Murray was woke even before the word entered our public discourse as an adjective. She’s for a woman’s unfettered access to abortion, the full spectrum of LGBQT rights, more government fiscal regulation, and “clean power”; and against Republican-backed overseas wars, big business, and anyone so much as tainted by association to our 45th president. In one of those through-the-looking-glass moments that so enliven our nation’s public affairs, the functionally innumerate Murray was at one time appointed co-chair of the Senate’s dog-and-pony “deficit reduction” commission, which would be akin to asking Henri Toulouse-Lautrec to complete an Olympic decathlon. The whole thing predictably ended in tears. Murray and her GOP counterpart issued statements blaming one another for the failure. It was a perfect illustration that the consensus view of Washington — as a place where nothing can be accomplished even when the consequences of inaction are so visible — is absolutely on point.

But perhaps Murray’s real moment to shine came some years earlier, when, in the confusion following the 9/11 attacks, she was somehow allowed out to share her views with a group of impressionable high school students. One of them had the good sense to ask exactly why Osama bin Laden was apparently so popular throughout the Muslim world. Murray replied that it was because the genocidal maniac had helped to pay for schools, roads, and even daycare centers. “We haven’t done that,” she said. “How would they look at us today if we had been there helping them with some of that, rather than just being the people who are going to attack Iraq and invade Afghanistan? What would bin Laden and his followers have done then?” (“Still bombed the crap out of us” would suggest itself.)

Murray later insisted she was misquoted. Or maybe taken out of context. Or set up by one of those perfidious teenagers clearly in the pay of Don Rumsfeld. It’s true that bin Laden ventured a portion of his inherited $5 billion in wealth to cultivate a reputation as a philanthropist. You could also describe Hitler as a decent watercolorist and Mussolini as a better than average newspaper editor.

Many people around Seattle, where I live, tell me that at one time they found Murray rather endearing. She and her tennis shoes brought a welcome comic touch to politics. One thought of her alongside Eddie Murphy as a star of The Distinguished Gentleman, released in the year she first went to Washington, or as the suitably po-faced foil to Sacha Baron Cohen. Someone once remarked that Bernie Sanders needed only a little milk spilled at his feet to be mistaken for a bowl of Froot Loops. Murray looks incomplete without a custard pie.

But over time the joke thinned as she helped steer the federal budget towards collapse while mouthing platitudes about “trusting the science.” It faded completely when she recently made the inevitable distraught speech about Republicans “dragging the country backwards by half a century” and “wanting to jail women who get abortions.”

Murray’s likely GOP opponent in November’s election is a thirty-nine-year-old self-described farm girl with the striking name Tiffany Smiley. She’s a political outsider who actually seems interested in people other than herself. Of course, this is Washington State, meaning Murray will almost certainly be re-elected. In which case Murray reminds me of a senatorial version of Tony Curtis reflecting on his dazzling early breakthrough in Hollywood: “Everyone was crazy about me. I was nuts about me.”

By Christopher Sandford at realclearpolitics.

When Does Fascist Russia TELL THE TRUTH?

Is Russia threatening to blow up a Ukrainian nuclear plant?

JOHN SEXTON Aug 08, 2022 3:05 at HotAir

Last week I wrote about the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power station which is the biggest nuclear reactor in Europe. The operational plant is located on the front lines of the ongoing battle between Ukraine and Russia. The people operating the plant are Ukrainians but the area around it has been seized by Russian forces and there are reports the Russians have been setting up their artillery near the plant as a way to shield it from any return fire.

The Russians have been firing from the cover of the Zaporizhzhia station since mid-July, Ukrainian military and civilian officials said, sending rockets over the river at Nikopol and other targets.

It is, in effect, a free shot. Ukraine cannot unleash volleys of shells in return using American-provided advanced rocket systems, which have silenced Russian guns elsewhere on the front line. Doing so would risk striking one of the six pressurized water reactors or highly radioactive waste in storage. And Russia knows it.

The chief of the International Atomic Energy Agency warned last week that the situation was “completely out of control.” He demanded that his teams be allowed to access the site to ensure the operation was still being operated safely. But over the weekend the situation got worse when there was shelling near the plant. Both Russia and Ukraine are blaming one another for the strikes.

On Friday, explosions rang out at Zaporizhzhia nuclear power complex, the biggest of its kind in Europe, reigniting fears of a potential disaster.

Moscow and Kyiv have accused each other of shelling the plant, which was taken over by Russian forces in early March, along with the town of Enerhodar, where the complex is located.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky blamed Moscow for the attack, calling the strikes a “brazen crime” and an “act of terror.”

“Today, the occupiers created another extremely risky situation for everyone in Europe,” he said in his nightly address on Friday.

The Russian defense ministry denied the claim, saying the Ukrainians had carried out three artillery strikes on the plant and surrounding area.

A strike which hit one of the operating reactors could potentially lead to radiation being spread into the atmosphere or even to a meltdown of one of the reactors. Today the IAEA called the shelling “suicidal.”

United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres called for international inspectors to be given access to the sprawling nuclear site as fears grew of a disaster after the weekend strikes left the plant damaged but still operational.

“Any attack to a nuclear plant is a suicidal thing,” he said Monday in Tokyo after attending a ceremony in Hiroshima to commemorate the 77th anniversary of the world’s first atomic bombing.

However, Ukraine’s desire to see the plant demilitarized isn’t purely about safety. Russia has been firing missiles at Ukrainian positions from the site, making it more difficult for Ukrainian soldiers to advance on Russia positions. So they have a strategic interest in making this into a crisis that could result in additional pressure to force Russia away from the plant. Keep that in mind because this next claim is coming from the Ukrainian energy company that is operating the nuclear plant. Energoatom claims Russia is prepared to blow up the plant rather than leave the area:

Energoatom claims that the head of the radiation, chemical and biological protection troops of the Russian armed forces, Major General Valerii Vasyliev, who now commands the garrison at the Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant, told his soldiers that “there will be either Russian land or a scorched desert here”.

The press release quotes Vasyliev as telling his troops, “As you know, we have mined all the important facilities of the Zaporizhia Nuclear Power Plant. And we’re not hiding it from the enemy. We warned them. The enemy knows that the station will be either Russian or no-one’s.”

Is this true? Is it a bluff by the Russians to maintain control of a site from which they can attack without repercussions? Or is Energoatom making this claim to apply pressure to Russia and potentially force them out of the area? At the moment it’s hard to tell which side is telling the truth since both sides stand to benefit strategically from the version of events they are presenting. Obviously if it is true then Russia is holding Ukraine and potentially part of Europe hostage. Would Putin be crazy enough to create Chernobyl on purpose?

ABSURD DEMS OF THE INFLATION ‘REDUCTION’ ACT!

AUGUST 8, 2022 BY SCOTT JOHNSON at Power Line:

REDUCTION AD ABSURDUM

The political news of the day is the passage of the shove-it-down-your-throat absurdity of the Inflation Reduction Act. What this country needs is a vastly expanded Internal Revenue Service! (said no sane man or woman ever).

Adding to the insufferable stupidity and deceit of the bill’s provisions is the insufferable stupidity and deceit of the media coverage of the bill itself. Feel the excitement coursing through Politico Playbook’s “How it really happened: the Inflation Reduction Act.”

Who in his right mind believes that the tax-and-spend extravaganza will have a salubrious effect on the inflation ignited by the Biden administration? And I wonder if we can get a fact-check on the name of the bill.

Who in his right mind thinks that the bill’s climate provisions will have a salubrious effect on the climate? Speaking of stupid media coverage, I cite Politico’s “Historic climate bill to supercharge clean energy industry.” I would like to say Jonathan Swift, call your office, but this stuff is beyond satire.

There is much more to be said and much more to come. I leave the subject this morning with the true question posed by the Inflation Reduction Act. Is the Democrats’ profound faith in the stupidity of the American people inflated or will it be vindicated in the midterm elections at which the bill is aimed?

Thank God FOR COMMON SENSE!

August 8, 2022

If Trump is Irrelevant, Why is He Still Such a Political Force of Nature?

By Brian C. Joondeph at American Thinker:

Gas lighters in the media and in Washington D.C. continue to tell the few who still listen to their words that former President Donald Trump is irrelevant.

One Trump-loathing Republican-in-name-only, final-term Rep. Adam Kinzinger, declared, “Trump is becoming irrelevant.”

In a Sunday news/snooze fest interview he told ABC’s This Week, “I am hearing a lot of anecdotal stuff, around the edges, of people who’ve been hardcore with Trump who now just can’t stand him.”

I suspect he is hearing his “anecdotal stuff” from his January 6 co-NeverTrumper Rep. Liz Cheney or other former conservatives in Washington, D.C., grasping for relevance, such as Bill Kristol, Max Boot, Jennifer Rubin, or George Will.

Outside of D.C., the GOP elites have the same attitude.

As reported by the Trump- and Republican-hating New Yorker, Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp also believes Trump to be irrelevant: “Every speech that the governor of Georgia gives is intended as a little shove, to push the former president a little more emphatically into the past.”

A photo appears in the article of Kemp and former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, which says it all.

Remember how failed presidential candidate Christie was photographed sunbathing his svelte physique on a Jersey Shore beach that he closed to the hoi polloi, but not to his family? 

And he thinks Trump is irrelevant, calling for a “smaller Trump presence”?

A good measure of Trump’s continued political relevancy is the value of his endorsements. Last week’s primary elections, Trump endorsed candidates made a clean sweep in Arizona, despite efforts and delays aimed at denying the GOP gubernatorial primary victory to Kari Lake.

A former Michigan Republican Party chairman and GOP consultant astutely observed: “Trump is still the 800-pound gorilla. He has significant influence.”

Breitbart reported after last week’s primaries,

Candidates backed by former President Donald J. Trump are now 172-10 in statewide and federal races in 2022 after a perfect night in Kansas, Michigan, and Missouri. His candidates are undefeated so far in Arizona – but results are still pending in the gubernatorial race – while he also has two candidates in Washington whose races are still awaiting results.

Subsequently, Arizona became a clean sweep. Washington state is still too close to call. What irony it is that virtually every country in the world, far more populous than Washington or Arizona, can hold an election and know the results hours after the polls close, whereas these states need days or weeks to count (or manufacture) votes. No wonder only half of Americans believe our elections are fair.

Don’t forget J.D. Vance and Dr. Oz, both jumping in the polls and winning their U.S. Senate primaries after receiving a coveted Trump endorsement.

Aside from endorsement success, Trump is currently the most popular politician in America.

As Breitbart reports,

According to the latest polling from Harvard Caps Harris Poll, despite seven years and billions of corporate dollars spent to destroy him, despite two fake impeachments and this Kangaroo January 6th Committee, Trump’s favorable rating is higher than any other politician in America—including politicians the fake media have spent billions of dollars propping up—like Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-Fascist).

CNN, in a rare moment of journalistic honesty and integrity, reported: “Donald Trump has become more popular since the January 6 Capitol attack.” How could this be? CNN notes,

A majority of Americans (55%) now believe that Trump was either not or only partially responsible for the rioters who overtook the Capitol, according to a recent NBC News poll. That’s up from 47% in January 2021.

Today, Trump’s polling position with Americans overall is one of his best, and he remains the front-runner for the 2024 Republican nomination.

In raw numbers, Trump’s been ahead in more polls against Biden over the past few months than he was for the entirety of 2020.

Trump also handily won last weekend’s CPAC straw poll, beating his closest rival, Florida’s governor, Ron DeSantis, by almost a three to one margin with the rest of the GOP contenders at this point in the very low single digits.

Everything the left has thrown at Trump since his 2015 escalator ride at Trump Tower has either not stuck or backfired, bigly. Two nonsensical impeachment efforts, failing to remove Trump from office, are prime examples. So is the January 6 insurrection fiction, whose sole purpose is to indict and prevent Trump from running for president in 2024.

If Trump is an irrelevant buffoon as his opponents on both sides of the political aisle claim, why are they so worried about him?

I don’t see similar worry from the GOP over “holy spirit” Trump-slayer Michael Avenatti, being pardoned by Biden and released from his long prison sentence to run against Trump. Yet Democrats are obviously worried about and afraid of Trump running again.

And winning.

Democrats are so worried that in their spite for Donald Trump, they now love the Cheney family, specifically Dick and Liz. Once upon a time, Dick Cheney was Darth Vader. Now the left is gushing over the Cheney’s as they did jailbird Michael Avenatti.

Liz is the supposed leading voice of reason and fairness on the January 6 committee, hoping to see Trump behind bars. Father Dick, who famously led the “Saddam has WMDs” fable, getting America into a needless and expensive war in Iraq, now calls Donald Trump “a coward.”

Cheney went on, “In our nation’s 246-year history, there has never been an individual who is a greater threat to our republic than Donald Trump.” Trump is an ex-president. He holds no political office and is as relevant as Barack Obama, George W. Bush, or Bill Clinton in running the nation.

As to the “coward” label, Cheney managed to avoid serving in the Viet Nam war, telling the Washington Post, “I had other priorities in the ‘60s than military service.” Irony knows no bounds with the Cheney family.

Suddenly, “the enemy of my enemy is my friend” Dick Cheney is the darling of Morning Joe and his gaggle of Trump haters. On a recent MSNBC panel, their dour faces speak volumes about the state of the Democrat party and prospects in November 2022 and 2024.

If no one likes Trump and he is such a reprobate, why are they so worried and why do his endorsed candidates keep winning? As usual the media is gas lighting the nation, but the voters are no longer falling for it.
Trump’s “Great Red Wave” strategy is working. The America First-MAGA coalition is large and motivated, enough of an electoral tsunami to overwhelm the ruling class elites of both parties, the uniparty that views Trump and his supporters as an existential threat to their wealth and power. Perhaps this is “The Storm” that Trump once cryptically referred to. Fasten your seatbelts for a wild ride.
 
 
 
Brian C Joondeph, MD, is a physician and writer.
Follow me on Twitter @retinaldoctor
Truth Social @BrianJoondeph
LinkedIn @Brian Joondeph
 
 

“A desperate Vladimir Putin is considering turning to North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un for help.”

Coming soon to Russia’s war in Ukraine: North Korea?

ALLAHPUNDIT Aug 05, 2022 at HotAir:  

AP Photo/Wong Maye-E, File

Behold the nuttiest rumor of the war, made nuttier by the fact that it seems to have originated in Russia itself. I would have guessed at first glance that it was Ukrainian propaganda: “Putin is so strapped for manpower that he’s willing to deploy malnourished slaves on loan from Kim Jong Un.”

North Korea’s army might be the only major force on Earth that’s less well equipped for modern warfare than the Russians themselves.

A desperate Vladimir Putin is considering turning to North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un for help in his invasion of Ukraine, and is willing to offer energy and grain in return for 100,000 soldiers, according to reports in Russia.

North Korea has made it clear through ‘diplomatic channels’ that as well as providing builders to repair war damage, it is ready to supply a vast fighting force in an attempt to tip the balance in Moscow’s favour, reported Regnum news agency.

They would be deployed to the forces of the separatist pro-Putin Donetsk People’s Republic [DPR] and Luhansk People’s Republic [LPR], both of which Kim has recently recognised as independent countries.

Nothing says “Russia and Ukraine are one people” like deploying troops from another country halfway around the world who speak a different language to keep the peace in occupied parts of the Donbas.

It’ll never happen, and not just because it would be a looooong trip for North Korean troops through Russia. I think Kim Jong Un would fear the reaction of his men once they got to see firsthand how relatively well Ukrainians in the Donbas live. There were reports earlier in the war of Russian troops marveling at how much higher the standard of living in Ukraine is compared to where they’re from, which explains the phenomenon of appliances like washer-dryers being looted. If kids raised in rural Russia think Ukraine is a first-world paradise, imagine what those raised in Kim’s gulag would think.

The first rule of cults is that no one gets to leave and see how good people have it on the outside. Same here, I’m sure.

The fact that Russian state TV is willing to entertain this idiocy, though, is another sign of how pressed they are for reinforcements. If the success of your war depends on being bailed out by North Korea, good luck.

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Even Korotchenko’s colleagues couldn’t suppress a laugh at the thought of North Korean “volunteers” but they’ll take ’em if they’re offered given the dearth of alternatives. Putin is desperate to avoid a mass mobilization of Russian society for fear that doing so will galvanize anti-war sentiment, which means all other options are on the table. “To make up the manpower shortfall, the Kremlin is relying on a combination of impoverished ethnic minorities, Ukrainians from the separatist territories, mercenaries and militarized National Guard units to fight the war, and promising hefty cash incentives for volunteers,” the Times reported recently. Some recruits are middle-aged.

Those who take the money and enlist can expect only the most perfunctory training before seeing action:

Desperate to reinforce its battered forces in Ukraine, the Kremlin is raising scores of volunteer battalions—and plans to rush them to the front after just 30 days of training.

A month isn’t enough to train an individual recruit in a soldier’s individual tasks—to say nothing of training the battalion as a whole to fight and survive against battle-hardened Ukrainian formations.

“This drive will likely produce ‘soldiers’ of lower quality than the normal conscripts,” the Washington, D.C.-based Institute for the Study of War explained…

A month of training isn’t enough to prepare a recruit for the rigors of mechanized warfare. For comparison, a U.S. Army infantry recruit endures more than five months of training before arriving at their first battalion, where the unit-level and pre-deployment training then continues. It’d be unusual for an American infantryman to deploy for combat with less than a year of training.

How badly is Russia hurting for troops? One member of Congress told the Times last week that the latest estimate from U.S. intelligence officials is — wait for it — 75,000 Russian soldiers are either KIA or wounded since the start of the war. The initial invading force was “only” 150,000 or so. Typically losing 10 percent of a battalion is enough to render it ineffective in combat. Russia might be looking at losses of 50 percent.

The real threat to Ukraine isn’t North Korea joining the battle, it’s China seeking to punish the U.S. for Pelosi’s trip to Taiwan by boosting military aid to Putin. Tom Friedman’s piece last week about the folly of Pelosi’s visit pointed out that the White House had warned China early in the war not to get involved on Russia’s side — and China had heeded that warning. Now all bets are off. Which, I assume, is why Zelensky is suddenly urgently seeking to connect with Xi Jinping for direct talks. “The Russians are the invaders … this is a war on our territory, they came to invade. China, as a big and powerful country, could come down and sort of put the Russian Federation [in] a certain place,” he told the South China Morning Post. “Of course, I would really like China to review its attitude towards the Russian Federation.”

I doubt he believes he can talk Xi into pressuring Putin. What he wants is to talk him into not punishing Ukraine by helping Russia arm up simply to spite the United States. It’s Ukrainians who’ll die if they do, not Americans.

I’ll leave you with this satisfying clip of the latest handiwork from U.S. HIMARS systems. That’s a lot of Russian ammo that’s up in smoke.

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That Fascist Dem INFLATION ‘REDUCTION’ ACT!

AUGUST 8, 2022 BY SCOTT JOHNSON at Power Line:

REDUCTION AD ABSURDUM

The political news of the day is the passage of the shove-it-down-your-throat absurdity of the Inflation Reduction Act. What this country needs is a vastly expanded Internal Revenue Service! (said no sane person ever).

Adding to the insufferable stupidity and deceit of the bill’s provisions is the insufferable stupidity and deceit of the media coverage of the bill itself. Feel the excitement coursing through Politico Playbook’s “How it really happened: the Inflation Reduction Act.”

Who in his right mind believes that the tax-and-spend extravaganza will have a salubrious effect on the inflation ignited by the Biden administration? And I wonder if we can get a fact-check on the name of the bill.

Who in his right mind thinks that the bill’s climate provisions will have a salubrious effect on the climate? Speaking of stupid media coverage, I cite Politico’s “Historic climate bill to supercharge clean energy industry.” I would like to say Jonathan Swift, call your office, but this stuff is beyond satire.

There is much more to be said and much more to come. I leave the subject this morning with the true question posed by the Inflation Reduction Act. Is the Democrats’ profound faith in the stupidity of the American people inflated or will it be vindicated in the midterm elections at which the bill is aimed?

Trouble In “River City”

AUGUST 8, 2022 BY SCOTT JOHNSON at Power Line:

DEAD AND GONE

We are close to the end of this song of the day series featuring Minnesota musicians, but I may indulge myself one more time tomorrow. If you have followed along, you may have noticed that I have excavated songs with an upbeat tone or feeling. In the spirit of the Inflation Reduction Act, the time has come for music in a more desperate mood.

With my friend Scott Sansby I saw just about all the good Twin Cities groups of the ’60’s. Indeed, Scottie was in a few of them. Many of the Twin Cities bands we saw had regional hits on Soma Records, the handiwork of Amos Heilicher. They are memorialized on the vinyl double album The Big Hits Of Mid-America: The Soma Records Story 1963-1967.

My favorite band was The Underbeats. They lead off the Soma collection. We saw them many times. They had the vocal group harmony thing nailed and were excellent instrumentalists to boot.

They headed out to Los Angeles at the end of the decade and landed a job as the house band at the Whiskey-a-Go-Go. Both Atlantic Records and Metromedia offered to sign them and they chose to sign with Metromedia. They came out with their self-titled debut — a double album — in 1970.

The double album was a mistake for a debut, but it was full of good songs composed by guitarist Rico Rosenbaum. My favorite was the suite “Dead and Gone” over on side 4. Rico planted a love song in the middle of the suite. I think the whole thing still sounds pretty, pretty good after all these years.

Rick Shefchik tells the story of the band in his excellent, scrupulously researched, well-written history Everybody’s Heard About the Bird: The True Story of 1960s Rock ’n’ Roll in Minnesota (University of Minnesota Press, 2015). Rick’s account raises the question whether the choice of Metromedia over Atlantic was a mistake for the band.

Gypsy’s story is not happy, but the music lives. On WUMB’s Highway 61 Revisited show this past weekend, I was more than a little surprised to hear host Albert O play a track from In the Garden, the band’s 1971 follow-up to Gypsy. Maybe not “Dead and Gone” after all.

DEM FASCISTS PASS THEIR “DICTATIONS” NAZI-LIKE!

The real impact of the energy provisions in the “inflation reduction” bill

by JAZZ SHAW Aug 08, 2022 at HotAir: 

(AP Photo/Charlie Neibergall)

The so-called “Inflation Reduction Act” looks as if it’s going to make it into law now that it slithered out of the Senate on a 50-50 vote. We’ve already covered the negligible or even negative impact the bill will have on actual inflation here, but there is plenty more tucked away in the bill that many voters likely didn’t see coming. There are all sorts of climate change antics included in the bill’s language, but another portion of it directly impacts the energy sector and you should not anticipate it doing anything to address the Biden energy crisis. The Institute for Energy Research has finished a full review of the portions of the bill impacting energy policy and the news is not good. There are massive extensions of existing tax credits and subsidies for wind and solar energy, while nothing will be done to help sustain the country’s oil and natural gas supplies. Given that far more than half of the country’s energy grid relies on these supplies, the math simply does not add up.

The Federal government has already spent well over $100 billion on renewable credits for electricity production since their enactment three decades ago, and the “Inflation Reduction Act” will cost taxpayers another $98 billion. The proposed bill is full of incentives for renewable energy technologies, chief among an extension of wind and solar tax credits significantly increasing subsidies for them, provided additional criteria are met during construction. It also offers new tax credits for domestic manufacturing of solar panels and wind turbine parts as well as energy storage projects sited separately from renewable generation facilities.

Wind and solar projects would effectively get an extension on tax credits for production and investment, as would stand-alone energy storage projects. If Senator Joe Manchin wanted to handicap natural gas and coal generators and force more retirements, this is certainly a way to do it. The United States would be forcing renewable energy in the same fashion as Europe has been doing.

Read the last two sentences of the excerpt carefully. Joe Manchin is being called out for cutting a deal that secured another pipeline for his home state but it will further handicap the natural gas and coal generation plants around the nation. The government is yet again following the European model of forcing the development of renewable energy resources to the detriment of traditional, reliable fossil fuel plants. And you’ve already seen how well that’s working out for Europe.

The specifics of the energy credits all push the nation in a single direction. The Production Tax Credit (PTC) and the Investment Tax Credit (ITC) are being modified. Tax credits for new wind and solar plants are being extended through 2025. (The original credits were to have expired this January.) The base production tax credit for new renewable energy projects would, at least on paper, be cut from .15 cents per kilowatt hour to .03 cents. But they are automatically restored to the original rate if the projects meet certain government requirements. What sort of requirements are those? Are they mandating efficiency rates or reliability? Nope. They have to meet certain “wage and apprenticeship” requirements. In other words, they’ll have to use union labor to qualify.

The Production Tax Credit for wind projects had originally been slated to be phased out, starting with a forty percent reduction next year. That “phase out” has quietly been removed so that the cash will continue to roll for new wind farms. The list goes on with the same types of changes to other credits, handouts to unions, and Democratic wishlist items.

As IER explains, this is really a fiscal shell game being played by the federal government. Renewable energy facilities are expensive to build and maintain and their reliability is questionable at best. But Washington is making these projects artificially cheaper by using these massive tax credits. But they’re not actually any cheaper. The cost is simply being transferred to the taxpayers. At the same time, making them appear cheaper allows these projects to be more competitive with natural gas or oil projects, neither of which are receiving any help from Uncle Sam.

The oil and gas industry has already essentially stopped building new refineries and is taking others offline. The energy grid is already at the point of buckling and rolling blackouts are increasingly common. This bill will only ensure that the industry has no chance of making a profit from any future refineries, so they won’t be taking the risk. I’m sure that was the underlying goal of the Biden administration to begin with, but they’re going to have a lot of angry people demanding answers when the lights go out.