Now that Johnny Depp’s trial is over, maybe we can spend a few minutes on other issues not as important as celebrity mud slinging on national television.  A classified intelligence report is being talked about now in the press and it concerns Vladimir Putin, and it’s not pretty.  Intelligence officers who’ve read the report and who are talking to the press about it say this:

• In March, there was an assassination attempt on Putin by insiders.  Unfortunately it apparently failed.
• In April, Putin underwent treatment (some say surgery) for “advanced cancer”.  Physically he appears to be pretty frail and I recall video during his big Victory Day celebration last month he had a blanket over his lap.
• There are rumors (unconfirmed) of his impending death, and there is a lot of jockeying going on in the Kremlin.
• US intelligence is somewhat blinded now because of all the sanctions but they are staying very active as a power vacuum can be a very dangerous time.

I’ll bet that TFG is a little nervous at the prospect of losing his handler.  The new guys may not be as nice to him as Putin has.

This guy can’t die too soon, but it will be dicey when he finally does.

Besides blaming Biden for the rise in gasoline prices (which is false), right wing media is now howling about how the US has increased its imports of Russian oil in recent years.  We have indeed increased our imports of Russian oil, but most of it is actually not crude oil, but unfinished component products for making gasoline and diesel.  Why?  Interesting you should ask – imports of Russian oil and products increased when Venezuelan crude and products were banned by a US president.  Biden, you ask?  Nope – TFG.  In 2019.  At the time strongman Nicolas Maduro had seized the presidency of Venezuela after the election, and TFG’s handlers saw an opportunity to connect Democrats with “leftists” in Venezuela, attracting votes from a growing population of Venezuelans in Florida, and banned imports of the country’s crude and products.  All that accomplished was drive Maduro into the arms of Putin, AND forced US refiners to increase Russian imports to replace the lost Venezuelan product and keep supply of motor fuels flowing into US markets.

Since the war in Ukraine started, the Noise Machine has been howling about how Biden is responsible for rising prices and “increasing dependence” on Russian crude, which is all bullshit.  Even at it’s peak, Russian product has only made up about 4% to 8% of total imports into the US, and only about 2% of US consumption.  This is all a tempest in a teapot trying to blame the Biden administration for the price and demand crunches that exist through no direct actions of Biden, or any other president, for that matter.

The global energy markets are made up of millions of players in every energy consuming state.  The US government does not control US production which is controlled by private companies navigating shifting sands of economies, investors, and consumers.  Today, the Washington Post published a really good explainer of how gasoline prices are determined and worth the time of anyone not familiar with how the oil and gas industry actually works.

I don’t have to recount the thousands of times that all but a tiny handful of GOP politicians have praised, looked the other way, made excuses for or lied about the despicable and illegal conduct of TFG.  Goofballs, weirdos and Fox News talking heads called sensible public health policy “tyranny”, comparing wearing masks and getting vaccines to the Nazi run gas chambers during the holocaust.  Said goofballs also did the bidding of TFG  and attacked the US Capitol to stop the lawful certification of the presidential election.  Since the attack, every conservative talking head and politician have twisted themselves into pretzels downplaying the insurrection or trying to justify it because of the tyranny of a free and fair election that their guy lost.

Then comes the guy TFG loves, Vlad Putin.  Doing what TFG only dreams of, Putin completely controls the levers of power in Russia and its zone of influence, having destroyed the constitution that Boris Yeltsin pushed through to make Russia a democracy.  He decided that Ukraine, which has been an independent democracy since 1991 when the Soviet Union finally collapsed, was actually his in his fever dream of rebuilding the Soviet Union.  Violating a whole book full of international laws, Putin launched a full scale invasion of Ukraine last week, expecting the same tepid response of 2014 when he annexed Crimea and succeeded while Europe looked the other way and the US responded with limited sanctions (that Trump undid as one of his first acts in office).  TFG stayed in character this last week lavishing praise on Putin, followed by sycophants at Fox Noise, and the TFG wing of the GOP.

And then, Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky stood up, took off his suit, donned olive drab, declared he was not surrendering, and started rallying his people. When offered an evacuation by the US, he declined, saying, “I need ammunition, not a ride.”  Following his lead, thousands of Ukrainians have volunteered to defend their homeland, and even expat Ukrainians are returning to fight.  They’ve built barricades, made Molotov cocktails, taken up arms, and have steadfastly resisted the onslaught.

After witnessing Zelensky’s courage and the response of his people, the international community has responded in a way unseen since 911.  The EU banned Russian aircraft in their airspace; the US, with cooperation of allies, implemented sanctions on Putin and his henchmen, even including denying some Russian banks access to the SWIFT international payments system, which I believe hasn’t been done before and threatens to cripple the Russian economy.  Hundreds of thousands of Russians in large cities around the country, risking arrest and detention, publicly protested against Putin.  The EU offered to finance weapons into Ukraine, and then Fedex and UPS announced that they were halting all shipments into and out of Russia. Shortly after, BP announced that it was exiting its 20%, $14 billion position in Rosneft, the Russian national oil company.  Boom. In less than a week, Putin was isolated and now a pariah in global political and industry circles with few exceptions.  Even Putin ass-kisser Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro has announced that he is “neutral” about the attack on Ukraine.

The pressure on Putin is now so great that, after putting his nuclear assets on alert, he asked for talks with Ukraine through the president of Belarus.  So far the talks are said to be arranged on the border between Ukraine and Belarus, a Russian satellite state.  There are no real hopes for progress, but with Putin raising the specter of nuclear war, he is clearly on his heels.

This is how you deal with a despot.  When they threaten unlawful actions, you don’t appease.  You kick them in the groin and poke them in the eye.  This is not only how you deal with Putin, you do the same thing with shitbags like TFG, Bolsanaro, Kim Jong Un, and other despots around the world.  They rule with fear; they’re bullies.  When overpowered, they run.

There is a lesson being taught the world by the people of Ukraine.  I’m just hoping that many people, including TFG appeasers, are learning it.

Let’s all keep in mind that Putin killed a new democracy in its crib back in 2000 when he took over Russia after Boris Yeltsin.  Using the KGB skills he honed in Communist East Germany in the early 80s, Putin then created a Russia that is now more dangerous and rich than the previously known Soviet Union.  Putin was ashamed that the Soviet Union collapsed after the Berlin wall fell, and he wants it rebuilt, but not as the Soviet Union, but as an imperialist Russian Empire.  He doesn’t want to be president, he wants to be Czar.

He can do that now that Russia is one of the largest oil and gas producers and controls energy supplies into Europe.  He has rebuilt the Russian military, now has a warm water port after taking Crimea from Ukraine, quashed all opposition, changed the constitution so he can stay in power for life and has made elections there a joke.  Billionaire oligarchs support and protect him, and his drive to build a new Russian Empire is relentless.
And who’s happy about it?  TFG himself and his supporters. Last night Putin brazenly invaded Ukraine, even shelling facilities near Kyiv, and millions of Ukrainians, in disbelief that he actually attacked, are fleeing to the west.  On Tuesday, TFG call Putin a genius and said how smart he was to go in as a “peacekeeper”.  Last night, right before Putin launched attacks in to Kyiv and other cities, TFG did it again, praising Putin at a fund raiser at Mar a Lago, saying how smart Putin is, walking in “for two dollars worth of sanctions”, then ironically claiming that if he were in office,

“This would never have happened, ever in a million years, it would have never happened.  And I know him very well. I know him probably almost as well as I know anybody in this room other than Doc Ronny [Jackson].”

So, let’s be clear – TFG is characteristically praising, as he has for years, then tried to push blame onto Biden for Putin doing what he himself supports.  Of course, his sycophants fell in line, praising Putin and TFG, bashing Biden.

If anyone doubts what the US would look like during a second TFG term, just look at Russia today and listen to TFG’s actual words.  He dreams of being a dictator and almost accomplished that in 2020.  With the Republican Party in tatters and now virtually 100% aligned with TFG and Russia, the only thing standing in his way is the rest of us making sure he never gets close to the Oval Office ever again.

TFG and his supporters are using Putin to undermine Biden and the US government to his own advantage, and Putin is so long term focused and patient that I don’t have any doubt that another TFG victory in 2024 figures into his calculus in going after Ukraine today.  Even if he doesn’t succeed this time, he’ll just come back in 2025 as Trump holds the door open for him by lifting all sanctions (like he did in 2017) and undermining NATO while fantasizing doing the same thing to Mexico.

If one ever needed another justification for abolishing the Electoral College, TFG is it.

Trump has announced his new $3.9 billion toy, a new pair of Air Force One planes to take him around to his golf vacations.  These are actually the exact same planes that were on order when he came into office that he famously cancelled on Twitter.  Using Trump math, he claims that he saved the taxpayers $1.4 billion, but the original contract he “cancelled” was $4 billion (even acknowledged by him), and the new contract is $3.9 billion.  Of course; $4 billion – $3.9 billion = $1.4 billion in Tdollars.

The surprise, here, though, was not the new aircraft.  The surprise is that Trump’s throwing one more tradition onto the scrap pile, and that is the world famous paint job of Air Force One.  The polished aluminum, white, and sky blue paint job has been on every single Air Force One since JFK changed it from the original red and gold.  Kennedy believed that the previous paint job “looked too regal”.  So, Trump is doing exactly what you would expect, change the paint job.  But this time, he’s insisting on red, white and blue.  Patriotic, right?  Yes.  For Russia.  Here’s Vladimir Putin’s plane:

And now you know the rest of the story.

There is a place for anger, and THIS is it.

On Monday, while French kissing Putin on global television, Trump announced that Putin had proposed “an incredible idea” to him during their private session to address Russia’s interference in the 2016 election.  We now know what that “incredible idea” was, and I had to read it twice to believe it; the story was confirmed by Aunt Lydia Sarah Sanders yesterday in the first WH daily briefing held in two weeks.  The “idea”?  For Trump to allow Russian intelligence to question 11 American citizens, including former US Ambassador to Russia Michael McFaul, and businessman Bill Browder, whose attorney was murdered in a Russian prison.

This “incredible idea” cynical demand is nothing more than Putin’s chess move against legitimate indictments of Russian intelligence officials for hacking DNC servers and conducting cyber war against the United States.  Bill Browder has been a thorn in Putin’s side for years for pointing out the corruption in his regime.  The murdered attorney, Sergei Magnitsky, had been arrested for uncovering massive corruption in Russia which lead to hundreds of millions of dollars of laundered money being deposited in banks in the US and around the world.  The law passed in his name froze those assets and banned a number of Russian government officials and oligarchs from entering the US.  Putin and his gang hate that law, and have been trying to undermine it since its adoption.  Don’t forget that the meeting with Russian agents at Trump tower in the summer of 2016 was an effort to get the Magnitsky Act repealed.

The shocking thing about the current chapter in this entire sordid story of the love affair between Trump and his handler is that, instead of categorically condemning this demand, the White House IS ACTUALLY ENTERTAINING IT.  Are you kidding me?  And, of course, the invertebrates in Congress are responding as you would expect, mealy mouthed and cowering in the corner, terrified of Trump’s Twitterfingers.

There is a place for anger, and this is it.

UPDATE:  File this under “No Shit” – Saying he’s considering allowing Russian intelligence to interrogate former US ambassador Michael McFaul and others caused HUGE blowback yesterday and today around the world (especially from McFaul himself).  The invertebrates in Congress were actually able to pull themselves far enough vertical to raise their hands and were preparing a resolution condemning the idea when Aunt Lydia Sarah Sanders announced that Trump “disagrees” with the notion of handing Americans over to Putin’s Gulag.  Apparently, the WH now agrees that allowing US citizens to be interrogated by Russian intelligence is not a great idea.  To that we say, NO SHIT.