quakerparrot67

Completely not true.  Just a few GOPers could simply vote to pass the aid.  Last I checked 6 out of ~218 GOPers is all it takes.  Might make folks feel better to blame it on the crazies, but then why don't the allegedly sane major of GOPers simply vote to do the right thing?   The reality is that they vote as a block and simply refuse to do the right thing.

He's frustrated, understandably.  No reason to accuse him of right-wing talking points as if he is spouting Tuckerisms. 
This thread tends to get way over dramatic too often.

You do understand that longing for a government where the leader has unrestricted power is the type of government one finds in Russia currently. As Winston Churchill purportedly once said, Democracy is a terrible way to run a country, but it's far better than anything else that's been tried.

It's not slumbering.
It's swallowing fistsfull of pentobarbital, and washing them down with vodka.

In the case of Europe I'd say UKR is cut off not due to political will (or lack thereof), but lack of means. The last aid package from Germany mentioned 2500 artillery shells. That's one day of firing and this was a couple of weeks back. And last time I checked, UKR seems to be losing around 3 artillery guns, self-propelled and otherwise, every other week. Europe can't replace those. Shell production will eventually reach useful levels (although we don't know how many of those will actually end up in UKR hands), but I am afraid they will have run out of guns at that point.
 
From what we know, Russia is recruiting 20k (GUR estimate) to 35k (Medvedev bragging) men per month. Their losses are obviously high, but I'd guess given these numbers they are ultimately sustainable, not so for UKR it seems. And how many brigades were they able to smash against Avdiivka, one after the other? If they can keep this up, they'll whittle UKR down eventually this way, if they don't get a grip on their own issues.

Called it! Also how they took out the Ivanovets -  I think that was up to 10 drones involved f and at least 2 hit the same spot. 
No ship at sea can resist being hit repeatedly and quickly in the same exact hull section. Not guaranteed to sink but very guaranteed to lose mobility, which is death in a swarming attack.
Even a carrier would feel the effects and anything quick and serious enough to hit that would do an enormous amount of damage with compounding kinetic energy, especially I suspect, on the second hit. 
Some Observations:
It's a very gentle sea state 1,

With clear weather and clear of the coast. The mad bounce of the drones is a reflection of their speed rather than the waves. 
(The image above is very nicely accurate to the drone v ropucha size comparisons) . 
Despite the loss of previous lone ships, including a missile corvette (!)  the Kunnikov was not escorted. No search lights, very little point defense and no air cover. 
Why was it alone? Why has the BSF not yet enacted convoy-ing? Why does such a large an important vessel have no air cover on call? Why is the AVFR not immediately strafing? The ship wasnt far from shore, easily within coverage range for extended overwatch. Doesn't have to be this ship in particular, just an area/corridor with attached air assets. 
There have been exercises against drones that developed effective counter-tactics. Improved point defense and observation for sure, but also travelling at least in pairs, using organic air assets (if you dont have a helo then a ship you're with should have one (ideally 2) and also launching small boat counter attacks. There is a serious concern with the last about confliction (point defense on the ship could hit your own boats) but that is still solvable with good fire command and training.
Any one of these would have impeded the attack and stacked together would have seriously degraded the chances of success.
There's a LOT the Russians could have done with the assets and existing tech they have that would have been vastly more effective than just sailing a non-upgraded HVT unescorted in open waters and clear weather through a war zone with a previously successful known enemy attack tactics. 

They just got done swatting down a border bill that had everything they were asking for, because Trump needs that issue to run on to scare older white folks who live nowhere near a good Mexican restaurant. He has no other issue to really campaign for. 
The US mis leadership class, if willing to just allow a two bit conman to become dictator, proves that this system and those that defend it deserve every heap of scorn that radicals put on them.  
I'm not going to accept American Putinism, even if they win the election. I will not comply and I hope most of the civil service and military defies him and his thugs, openly and directly.
 
 

Moscow in FLAMES as huge inferno burns through largest oil refinery in Russian capital (msn.com)
Russia’s largest oil refinery, which supplies half of Moscow’s fuel needs, has erupted in flames.
The fiery glow over Gazprom Neft was first reported at around 2.30am, by residents in the districts of Kapotnya, Maryino and Brateevo.
Footage of the blaze was posted by the pro-Kremlin news outlet Shot, before being taken down later.
The Ministry of Emergency Situations said: “There are no active fires in Moscow.”
It added: “An oil refinery torch frightened residents of south-east Moscow.
“The glow was visible at night in different areas of the southeast of the capital. A column of fire rose from the chimney of the Kapotnya refinery; residents mistook the outbreak for a fire.
“The flare was explained by planned work at the plant.”
 

Hmm I’ll keep that in mind next time my Pixeltruppen in CM flee TOWARDS the enemy when they clearly should’ve just stayed put.
You know, this war has been a great showcase of how really stupid things can happen in modern warfare. And every time this is the case it becomes easier to forgive the mechanics of Combat Mission when it results in outcomes that seem either unrealistic/unfair.

What will have changed is that trump will have learned that he can act with impunity and no one will stop him.  Jeebus F-in' Kristo, he actually led a coup against the elected gov't and nothing has been done about it as people quibble and wet their pants over legalisms that trump shredded already.  It's insane. 
The supreme court has no executive authority, how would they make trump comply with anything?  Congress, if there's enough snakes to not impeach (probably will be), then what are they gonna do?  Call out the army on the white house? -- the army doesn't answer to congress.
Seriously, if 2nd term trump in unimpeachable, then he can do anything he wants that is within his power.  And within his power he has the military, homeland security, the justice dept, and many other agencies that answer directly to him.  Our country is very much ruled by norms as much as laws and Trump will know neither apply to him.
Trump is actively, both in legal filings and in speeches, making the case that the president can do anything he wants, commit any crime, and without that power then it destroys the presidency.  It's bat**** but that is what he is currently arguing.  An appeals court just shot that ludicrous position down, thoroughly and sternly, but it's headed for the supreme court, who hopefully will simply refuse to hear it, letting the appeals court ruling stand.  Seriously, why does any think that someone who holds the position that they are above the law worry about the law?
Just like why do his supporters think it's impossible that he sexually assaulted a woman even though he was recorded bragging about grabbing women by the p--y and how because he's a tv star no one could do anything about it.  He literally bragged about sexually assualting women, yet someone his cult can't believe he'd actually assault a woman.  
Jesus, just take the f--er at his word and you can see how dangerous he is.

An' I said, “Litterin'.”
An' they all moved away from me on the bench there, an' the hairy eyeball an' all kinds of mean nasty things.
...Til I said, “*And* creating a nuisance.”
An' they all came back, shook my hand, an' we had a great time on the bench, talkin' about crime, mother stabbin', father rapin', all kinds of groovy things that we was talking about on the bench, an' everything was fine.

Sorry for the length but this is well worth reading: 
 
Less Than Meets the Eye - Parsing Tucker's Putin Interview
JOHN GANZ
I was probably one of the relatively few people that sat through the entire two hour Tucker Carlson interview with Vladimir Putin. To call it an “interview” is not quite right: Carlson essentially allowed Putin to discourse at length and only occasionally tried to prod him in the direction of his own preferred talking points about the war in Ukraine. Any appearance of tension or journalistic effort only occurred because Carlson seemed to have the expectation that Putin would cooperate with his own line and appeared frustrated (“annoyed,” he said in his prefatory remarks) when it immediately turned out Putin seemed to have his own ideas . Essentially, the interview consisted of a melange of multiple, sometimes contradictory, lines of propaganda about the war. But to say that it was “propaganda” also might gave a misleading impression: it suggests that there is a “real” underlying motivation for the war, while the justifications are merely self-serving deceptions for public consumption. But what it actually might reveal is superficiality and incoherence of the case for war itself. Instead, there were a number overlapping and shifting messages to different constituencies. is not a single overarching ideology at play, but rather a succession of “ideologemes,” little snippets of ideology: themes from Russian nationalism, Western far right cultural pessimism, anti-colonialism, and Soviet nostalgia all crop up—even little remnants of Putin’s Marxist-Leninist training appear, like when he talked about the “excessive production capacities” of the West. Putin doubled down on the theme of “denazification”—evidently somewhat to the irritation of the America Firster Carlson —while at the same time offering a revisionist picture of the start of World War II, sympathetic to Hitler’s territorial aims and essentially blaming the war on Polish intransigence, saying “they pushed Hitler to start World War II by attacking them.” This speaks to the awkward position of Russia claiming simultaneously claiming to embody the continuation of the Great Patriotic War’s anti-fascist crusade while being the darling of a far right at home and abroad, which views it as the last remaining hope of “white civilization.” 

This synthetic, “postmodern” quality does not reflect devilishly clever strategy, rather its incoherence directly reflects the fragility and fragmentation of Russia’s entire post-Soviet political project. The Ukrainian sociologist Volodymyr Ischenko writes of “a crisis of hegemony” in the post-Soviet world and that both Putin’s authoritarian, “Bonapartist” rule and its consequent war arise from the same “incapacity of the ruling class to develop sustained political, moral, and intellectual leadership.” His regime is ad hoc: a cobbled together arrangement of veterans of the security services and the rent-seeking oligarchs who accepted Putin’s settlement. Prighozhin’s mutiny made this provisional and brittle nature of “the state” clear. Rather than reflecting position of strength the strongman antics of Putin reveal fundamental political weaknesses and failures. As Ischenko put it in an interview with The New Left Review:

"Putin, like other post-Soviet Caesarist leaders, has ruled through a combination of repression, balance and passive consent legitimated by a narrative of restoring stability after the post-Soviet collapse in the 1990s. But he has not offered any attractive developmental project. Russia’s invasion should be analyzed precisely in this context: lacking sufficient soft power of attraction, the Russian ruling clique has ultimately decided to rely on the hard power of violence, starting from coercive diplomacy in the beginning of 2021, then abandoning diplomacy for military coercion in 2022."
The political fragility and insecurity of the ruling class, its cliquishness and insularity, its inability to shape a single coherent narrative of national development, its preoccupation with finding tactical expedients to avoid the chaos of the 1990s and the humiliations of the collapse are all wedded to the cult of “special services,” from the former KGB officer Putin on down. As early as the 2000s, Dimitri Furman noticed this aspect of the regime, writing in his Imitation Democracy: The Development of Russia’s Post-Soviet Political System, that a growing number of “activities, essential to the maintenance of the system, were in essence ‘secret special operations.’ Rather than rare exceptions, they were fast becoming crucial and lasting dimensions of all political activity.” With that in mind, it’s worth noting Putin’s insistence on calling the war in Ukraine, not a war at all, but a “special military operation” and its simultaneous development of contradictory propaganda campaigns directed at different audiences rather than a single, articulable vision of Russia’s role in the world. Putin can’t escape looking at everything as an “op.” (Not for nothing, this confusion of war, propaganda, and secret police subterfuge along with the subordination of politics to the needs and views of the national security apparatus is something usually associated with totalitarian states.)

In so far as anything approaching a worldview emerges from the interview, it is Putin’s preoccupation with the central role “special services” purportedly play in world affairs, particularly his apparent belief that the United States is not governed by its political leadership but by its national security bureaucracy, which accords with Carlson’s view of a “deep state.” This is less of ideology than Putin’s own déformation professionnelle, one that’s so deeply rooted that he felt the need to bring up Carlson’s onetime attempt to join the CIA. (He even seemed to coyly suggest that Tucker might actually work for the CIA, which I’m sure Carlson found flattering.) 

From the very beginning, Carlson’s generously offered Putin the chance to present the war in defensive terms, asking,

"On February 22nd, 2022, you addressed your country in a nationwide address when the conflict in Ukraine started, and you said that you were acting because you had come to the conclusion that the United States, through NATO, might initiate a “surprise attack on our country”. And to American ears, that sounds paranoid. Tell us why you believe the United States might strike Russia out of the blue. How did you conclude that?"

Instead of taking that route, Putin immediately launched into a nearly half hour disquisition on Russian history, the point of which was to stress the original unity of the Ukrainian and Russian peoples. Carlson averred in his opening remarks that he was “shocked” by this, but Putin has been harping on this theme since before the war. In July 2021, he published his essay “On the Historical Unity of Russians and Ukrainians,” which states “true sovereignty of Ukraine is possible only in partnership with Russia.” Of course, “sovereignty in partnership” is not really sovereignty at all. Despite Putin’s open and lengthy statement of what the Old Bolsheviks would’ve called “Great Russian chauvinism,” Carlson came away from the interview stating, “Russia is not an expansionist power. You’d have to be an idiot to think that.” From both Putin’s rhetoric and his behavior, you’d have to be an idiot to think otherwise. Carlson is just employing the propagandist’s trick of employing abuse and invective when the facts clearly oppose their case. But, as Michael Tracey’s recent Substack post makes clear, Putin’s open statements of Russian grand imperial ambitions are troubling for Westerners otherwise predisposed to be sympathetic and who have spent a great deal of time rationalizing Russia’s actions or presenting them in a defensive light. 

In the minds of the Russian ruling class, there’s really no contradiction between defensive and offensive conceptions of the war: they both involve securing of their system, and in moments of more grandiose transport, their civilization, against Western encroachment. The other overriding theme of Putin’s discourse, connected to the fixation on “special services,” is the characterization of the Maidan as a “coup d’etat.” The fear is that the example of success of Ukraine’s political revolution might spread to Russia itself. This concern on the part of the Russian elite is not new: it has its origins in the collective trauma of the Soviet collapse. More proximately, it dates back to the “Color Revolutions” of the 2000s that toppled Leonid Kuchma in Ukraine, Askar Akayev in Kyrgyzstan, and Eduard Shevardnadze in Georgia. As Furman writes, 

"These men had headed systems highly comparable to Russia’s, if substantially weaker, and their ousters aroused an irrational panic of the kind seen in tsarist circles after the French revolutions, or in Soviet circles in the run-up to the Prague Spring. To acknowledge the naturalness, the predictability of these regimes’ collapsing would mean acknowledging the inevitability of the collapse of Russia’s regime, too – an impossibility. Those in power in Russia thus concluded instead that these revolutions were all the work of Western security services (very much as Soviet leaders had blamed similar forces for unrest in Hungary, Czechoslovakia, and Poland)."

Since that time, Russia’s foreign policy in its “near abroad” has since been fundamentally counter-revolutionary. As Ischenko notes the tempo of revolt had been picking up in the run up to the invasion:

"Such uprisings have been accelerating on Russia’s periphery in recent years, including not just the Euromaidan revolution in Ukraine in 2014 but also the revolutions in Armenia, the third revolution in Kyrgyzstan, the failed 2020 uprising in Belarus, and, most recently, the uprising in Kazakhstan. In the two last cases, Russian support proved crucial to ensure the local regime’s survival. Within Russia itself, the “For Fair Elections” rallies held in 2011 and 2012, as well as later mobilizations inspired by Alexei Navalny, were not insignificant. On the eve of the invasion, labor unrest was on the rise, while polls showed declining trust in Putin and a growing number of people who wanted him to retire. Dangerously, opposition to Putin was higher the younger the respondents were."
Again, the war is a piece of domestic policy as much as it is foreign policy: an attempt to consolidate a regime that feels itself to be vulnerable. The acquiescence of the population and the resilience of the Russian economy in the face of sanctions may prove that it was a successful expedient, at least temporarily. It would be dangerous indeed if Russia’s regime concluded that such “operations” redounded mostly to its benefit. 
 
 
 

Regarding Trump, hi from Latin America (Argentina) land of great football and sometimes populist egomaniacs...
I´ll just paste something I wrote in January of 2017 on another forum:
"Coming from a country with it´s fair share of populists in it´s history, let me tell you a couple of things about what will happen:

First: it´s not about policies, it´s not about facts, now it´s only about power and how to keep it

Second: the only thing that will be rewarded is loyalty, it may or may not align with skills, it doesn't matter any more

Third: it´s not about liberal and conservative, It´s not about democrat or republican, now it´s about trump or anti trump, there will be no middle ground to hide, both coalitions will have members of previous coalitions, those won´t matter much anymore, more republicans will be on Trump´s coalition because he was elected as one of course

Fourth: his only objective is reelection, and after that a third mandate, and a fourth and so on, to this end he will push any policy he deems useful, left wing or right wing, won´t matter, he sometimes will be align with former liberal/democrat ideas, he will take ownership of anything that promotes him, claiming it was his idea all along

Fifth: any source of check and balances will be targeted as traitorous, anti american, etc., this includes the press, other parties, the supreme court, whatever, anyone he sees as a member of the anti trump coalition is now a target, for now of rhetoric only, time will tell how far he will be allowed to go, and don´t think for a second there is something he won't do, or that he has any moral limit, he doesn't

Good luck trying to rationalize his government into anything other than an ego trip

His only weak point is succession, like every populists he hates the idea of giving power up, to anyone, even his children, he won´t groom a successor and get mad every time this point comes up

I sincerely hope current checks and balances work, but I´m not optimistic, lots of people will come under the spell, it´s tough times for anyone that can´t escape facts, reason, science, for those are now the enemies of the US government."
 
Not spot on in every point, but It came close to happen the first time around, now he has evolved and learned, it will be worst.
The paradox is that it was in the hands of Republican Senators to impeach and keep him out of office for good, they failed.
 
 

Others already brought it up, but the defensive lines are a thing again. They are REALLY a thing when you have NATO airpower to hammer any breakthroughs. The big question is are they willing to start laying mines in time. It is the mines that make everything else work.
They way to avoid a LARGE train wreck is to beat Trump at the ballot box. Their are three things on the side of sanity, Trumps is losing it before our eyes, his speeches are deteriorating by the week. The entire Republican side has been so busy grifting and feuding that many parts of their system are flat broke and disorganized, and the abortion decision is still savagely unpopular. It should be enough, just. Vote and donate like civilization depends on it, because it does.
 
Grigb is back, HURRAY!
 

I would strongly recommend Paxton's "Anatomy of Fascism" or John Ganz's online writings about anti-Dreyfusard and/or Boulangiste France. The model of fascism represented by Mussolini or Hitler is not quite what's happening to the GOP, subject as it is to the cultural and political mores specific to the United States. On the one hand, that's a good thing because the essentially immigrant/moderate/revolutionary/democratic foundation of the state makes blood and soil dictatorship a much harder prospect. But on the other, the United States also contains within it strains of racism and violent action that, should they ignite fully, can be positively Balkan. 
Luckily, there's one simple and decisive thing Americans can do. Vote. Vote for the current administration even if it isn't your cup of tea. Because if nothing else, it will remain within the normal bounds of politics. And (to remain on topic)...because it is far more likely to see the war in Ukraine to a positive conclusion. 

Put very simply, the attitudes and staff that were in the first Trump administration simply won't be there any more. There won't be a Pat Cippoline telling Trump he simply can't do certain things. You won't have a Esper counter programming Trump at the Pentagon, You will lhave instead Jeffery Clark, Kash Patel and Steven Miller calling the shots and Trump is openingly advertising a potential administration about 'retribution'. And the tools exist to make that happen short of a full scale dictatorship. For instance: 
https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2023/11/07/trump-power-grab-00125767
So no, Trump doesn't need all three branches. 

I mean, without Congress taking their part of the balance of power seriously, what is the Executive Branch to do? A functioning Legislative branch has been a pipe dream for a decade and a half.
This is a good and interesting question- and you are right, it’s a lot less than the right claims. Not to sidetrack too much, but…
I would argue Biden’s election mandate was “Just don’t be Trump”, where “Trump” isn’t exactly a hard right Republican. The rich west coast liberals I know had basically hoped for a centrist government, so basically “Same same but not Trump”. Which it is in many foreign policy respects (China, Afghanistan), but not being a giant orange douchebag.
Unfortunately, on the domestic front there was definitely a push towards several different things, maybe not all true “left”, but definitely not “center” or “right” as far the usual US policy spectrum goes:
- Petroleum production (cutting thereof)
- Explicitly following a racial quota for his supreme court pick (I’m actually very happy with the idea of a public defender being on the court to be fair)
- Student loan forgiveness
- Giant economic stimulus
- etc etc
The problem is less perhaps left vs right and that a lot of it was kind of a mess. I think both left and right have appetite for an intelligent approach to immigration reform, and insurance, and many other things. But Biden’s team somehow felt he needed to please everybody, where really all he needed to do was not make mistakes, especially in an era of high inflation, and sell himself better (which is hard, cause he is the worst public speaker we’ve had as a president in my lifetime). Maybe that’s the problem: We have a lot of populist problems, and Trump appeals to those people, and even one semi-decent administration just can’t fix enough things to satisfy the demand.

"NATO not paying their fair share" is just trump's excuse to do putin's bidding.  It's all bull**** and it plays into MAGA's ever present fantasy that everyone except them are 'takers', stealing from the MAGA folks, the world's only hard working, tax paying 'Murican's in the world.  It's not about the money.  Trump is just playing them as the fools they actually are.
It's similar to when Sen Rand Paul spins his bull**** about caring about whether US aid has proper oversight.  Everything else out of Paul's mouth on the subject shows that he thinks Putin should have UKR and is totally justified in his invasion.

He is beating the NATO “pay up” drum again.  It is BS and dumb. NATO is the major arms customer for the US defence industry.  Letting “Russia do whatever to those ‘who don’t pay’” could mean NATO allies start buying Russian…and I am damn sure he cares about that.
Whatever. This is telling a poorly aware mob what they want to hear.  Now State Dept and DoD will be doing damage control.

hOKAY. Well, Steve, there's your bait. 
Byebye dummy.

How does telling lies on TV for years, lies that actually kill people (vax disinf), along w election lies, jan 6 lies, 'prepare' anyone for anything?  What the hell do you think fox news is?  It's a lie machine.

he was prepared, this was always just a moment for Putin to say whatever he wanted.  Tucker isn't an investigative reporter.  He is simply a useful idiot and his time on Fox prepared him to do exactly what he did.

you're f--ing kidding right?  TC is an experienced interviewer?  He's the paid shill of a mass murdering monster.  WTF?  You actually sound like you think this sick farce is real?  
(sorry for the tone, but can we please not treat this seriously and waste discussion on it)

I second this!