The Big Flub

Gov DeSantis is in the process of declaring defeat in his stupid little tiff with Disney BTW.

Opinion - Jennifer Rubin

DeSantis’s flop on foreign affairs comes as no surprise

The idea of Florida Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis running for president has sounded swell to many Republicans desperate to find an alternative to defeated former president Donald Trump. The reality, as they are discovering, might be sobering and deflating.

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In the space of just a few days, DeSantis demonstrated his limitations when his state record comes under scrutiny and when he is compelled to opine on foreign policy.

This week, he began a national tour in New York City, presumably to tout his record on crime. In the minds of MAGA Republicans, crime is about not just public safety but also elites’ irresponsibility and the culture wars. DeSantis blamed New York’s bail laws “on Democrats trying to ‘out-woke’ each other,” as the New York Daily News reported. It’s far from clear what he means in this context by “out-woke” — a slur usually deployed to intimate that Democrats are catering to minorities and ignoring Whites’ legitimate concerns.

Regardless, any comparison between Florida and New York does not serve DeSantis well. In 2020, the homicide rate in Florida was 5.9 murders per 100,000 people, and the violent crime rate was 384 per 100,000, according to the Daily Beast, citing the FBI’s Uniform Crime Report. New York, meanwhile, had 4.2 homicides per 100,000 people and a violent crime rate of 364 per 100,000 people. New York City itself had a homicide rate of 5.6 per 100,000, slightly below the national average of 6.5 and half Miami’s rate of 12.8.

Meanwhile, DeSantis has wasted police resources on his election-crimes unit, whose cases have led to three dismissals and serious questions about whether other cases will ever come to trial.

Predictably, Eric Adams, New York’s law-and-order mayor, blasted DeSantis. “Welcome to NYC, @GovRonDeSantis, a place where we don’t ban books, discriminate against our LGBTQ+ neighbors, use asylum seekers as props, or let the government stand between a woman and health care,” he tweeted.

DeSantis’s crime foray, however, was not his worst moment on tour. At the moment President Biden was getting plaudits for venturing into a war-torn country to stand with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, DeSantis pandered to pro-Russian apologists.

“The fear of Russia going into NATO countries and all that and steamrolling, you know, that has not even come close to happening,” he said in an interview, neglecting to mention that it hasn’t happened because of the heroic efforts of Ukrainians and the alliance Biden stitched together. DeSantis went on, saying of Russia: “I think they’ve shown themselves to be a third-rate military power.” The third-rate power nevertheless has committed countless atrocities and devastated the economy and landscape of Ukraine.

DeSantis then reverted to an America First talking point about Biden: “He’s very concerned about those borders halfway around the world. He’s not done anything to secure our own border here at home.” In over his head, he muddled along: “And I don’t think it’s in our interest to be getting into proxy war with China, getting involved over things like the borderlands or over Crimea.”

Next he declared, “I think it would behoove them to identify what is the strategic objective that they’re trying to achieve, but just saying it’s an open-ended blank check, that is not acceptable.” The objective is a free and independent Ukraine without Russian troops, obviously.

Perhaps Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) — who told the Munich Security Conference that “Republican leaders are committed to a strong transatlantic alliance” and that “America’s own core national interests are at stake” — could help the governor understand.

DeSantis might be utterly uninformed on foreign policy, or he might be pandering to the MAGA base. Regardless, his tone-deaf, reflexive know-nothingism should set off alarms for Republicans. If they want to restore the party’s image as tough on national security and find someone to make Biden look feeble, they might want to look elsewhere.

It's A Fight

... because we can always find something to fight about.

Kennett High School student Ben Rieser, student Emma Gallant, art teacher Olivia Benish
and student Morgan Carr pose with the mural they painted for Leavitt’s Country Bakery (Justin Chafee)

First - The object in question is, IMO, a sign because it satisfies the description in the ordinance.

Second - So fucking what?

Third - Rules is rules

Let the wrangling begin.

Students painted a mural for a bakery. The town wants it removed.

In a small New Hampshire tourist town, the front of a roadside bakery is adorned with an image of the sun rising over a row of doughnuts, muffins and other pastries.

Whether that painting is a mural or a sign will determine whether the high school students who created it will see it taken down.

The Conway, N.H., community has been captivated for months by a dispute, previously reported by the Conway Daily News, over whether the art project is considered a sign under the municipal code. The town says yes, because the painting shows baked goods — and that the image exceeds the legal size limit for signs. The owner of Leavitt’s Country Bakery says no — and, in a federal lawsuit, contends the town ordinance violates the First Amendment.

“We didn’t want to take the mural down,” said the owner, Sean Young. “At first I was just upset for the kids, and I didn’t feel that they were right in telling us that it wasn’t art.”

Later, Young said, the disagreement became a matter of principle. In the lawsuit filed last month, he argues that the ordinance is unconstitutional. The suit claims that because the law defines a sign by what images it shows, it discriminates based on the content of the speech and the identity of the speaker.

Conway officials say they are upholding the will of the citizens who voted to pass the sign ordinance, and they point out that they have not enforced the rule against Leavitt’s through fines or other consequences.

The saga began last spring, when a friend of Young’s heard that another friend, local art teacher Olivia Benish, wanted to get her students involved in the town and noticed the bakery was essentially a blank canvas. Young had bought the decades-old Leavitt’s, once deemed “the unofficial town hall of Conway,” in 2021 and quickly led it to the prime spot on a list of best doughnuts in New Hampshire.

When he connected with the five Kennett High School students, he gave them free rein to create any image. The team talked about the need to avoid painting the Leavitt’s name or logo on the mural, Benish said. They did not want anyone to confuse it for a sign.

“I thought we were aware,” the teacher said. “Obviously, I was not completely aware, because I had never imagined it becoming what it has become.”

Benish brought Leavitt’s doughnuts to school one day, and the group began brainstorming. They considered ideas centered on the character of their northeast New Hampshire region, which attracts skiers in the winter and hikers and water tubers in the summer.

Maybe, the students thought, the mural could show people floating down the Saco River on doughnuts. Or it could display the sun as a doughnut over the White Mountains, which blanket roughly one-quarter of the state.

When the group landed on a design, they spent about five weeks painting it on exterior-grade panels and sealing them with primer. A community member hung the panels on Leavitt’s — the first time Young saw the image. He said he had not wanted to dictate to the students what they should create.

“There were plenty of people in town who wanted to be on committee to decide what the kids paint,” said Young, 51. “I said it was up to the kids.”

About a week after the painting’s unveiling, a municipal code enforcement officer stopped by Leavitt’s. He had seen an article about the painting in the local newspaper and felt compelled to act. The mural was actually a sign, he said, and it was roughly four times as big as was allowed.

Young could not afford the $275 per day that he could be fined for disobeying the statute. He was still finding his footing with the business, he said, and had not even paid himself a salary yet. He also did not want to risk being charged with a misdemeanor for violating the code.

So in August, Young urged Conway’s zoning board members to overrule the enforcement officer’s assessment that the painting was a sign. They denied his request.

Then Young requested a variance to keep the painting on the store. The board said no. When Young asked for a rehearing, the panel turned him down again.

To town leadership, getting Young to remove the painting is a matter of fairness to the residents who approved the zoning provisions. Zoning board chair John Colbath said the rule, as written, considers an image on a business to be a sign if it represents a product that the business sells.

“It’s a zoning ordinance, which was enacted by the legislative body, which are the voters of the town who are here,” he said at the August meeting. “And there is a process for changing it if they don’t like it.”

Luigi Bartolomeo, another zoning board member, said the ordinance is painfully vague. Still, he voted to uphold the code enforcement officer’s judgment that the painting is a sign.

They died leaving labors of love undone. Strangers complete their work.

Throughout the process, many in the community rallied behind Leavitt’s. More than a dozen customers each day have been expressing support, Young said. A local tattoo shop asked Benish if it could raise money for the high school art department. Residents packed the room for the August zoning board meeting.

“I just feel that the gray area of the sign definition — I don’t feel something related to kids doing artwork is the time to be trying to define that,” Shawn Foss, a longtime Leavitt’s customer, told the board.

Benish said she is disappointed by the controversy. She feels sorry for the students who poured their hearts into the painting, and she wonders whether she will get a chance to lead other public art projects.

One of Benish’s students who worked on the painting feels that the situation has dragged on for too long. Ben Rieser, 18, said that at first he loved seeing his work displayed in town. But he and the other students accidentally created a sign, and Leavitt’s should have taken it down as soon as the mistake was realized, Rieser wrote in an assignment completed for his English class and shared with The Washington Post.

“I don’t want to see it up there any more,” he wrote, “because it has turned into something political and not artistic.”

In early January, the lawsuit says, the town sent Young a letter threatening enforcement of the ordinance. Town attorney Jason Dennis said the municipality asked Leavitt’s to take down the painting temporarily and never got an answer.

With the help of the Institute for Justice, a libertarian-leaning public interest law firm, Young filed a legal challenge. A judge this month ordered the town not to enforce the ordinance until further notice.

Both sides of the dispute see a potential solution ahead: A proposed ordinance scheduled for a vote in April would define a graphic as a sign only if its main purpose is to advertise. Young and the town agree that if the rule takes effect, the students’ painting probably would no longer be considered a sign.

“For me, my legal opinion is that if this passes, Leavitt’s sign could stay,” Dennis said at a planning board meeting last month.

If voters reject the proposal, Young said, the lawsuit will continue. He sees the disagreement as a free-speech issue, and he does not want to let down the people who are rooting for him.

“Now that everyone’s watching,” Young said, “we have to follow through with this.”

Today's Pix

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Bamboozlement

Arizona’s top prosecutor concealed records debunking election fraud claims

Newly released documents show how Republican Mark Brnovich publicized an incomplete account of his office’s probe of the 2020 election in Maricopa County

PHOENIX — Nearly a year after the 2020 election, Arizona’s then-attorney general Mark Brnovich launched an investigation into voting in the state’s largest county that quickly consumed more than 10,000 hours of his staff’s time.

Investigators prepared a report in March 2022 stating that virtually all claims of error and malfeasance were unfounded, according to internal documents reviewed by The Washington Post. Brnovich, a Republican, kept it private.

In April, the attorney general — who was running in the GOP primary for a U.S. Senate seat — released an “Interim Report” claiming that his office had discovered “serious vulnerabilities.” He left out edits from his own investigators refuting his assertions.

His office then compiled an “Election Review Summary” in September that systematically refuted accusations of widespread fraud and made clear that none of the complaining parties — from state lawmakers to self-styled “election integrity” groups — had presented any evidence to support their claims. Brnovich left office last month without releasing the summary.

That timeline emerges from documents released to The Post this week by Brnovich’s successor, Kris Mayes, a Democrat. She said she considered the taxpayer-funded investigation closed and, earlier this month, notified leaders on Maricopa County’s governing board that they were no longer in the state’s crosshairs.

The records show how Brnovich used his office to further claims about voting in Maricopa County that his own staff considered inaccurate. They suggest that his administration privately disregarded fact-checks provided by state investigators while publicly promoting incomplete accounts of the office’s work. The innuendo and inaccuracies, circulated not just in the far reaches of the internet but with the imprimatur of the state’s attorney general, helped make Arizona an epicenter of distrust in the democratic process, eroding confidence not just in the 2020 vote but in subsequent elections.

Brnovich did not respond to questions about his conduct of the probe, his decision not to release additional documents or differences between his public statements and his office’s private findings.

The documents — two investigative summaries and a draft letter with edits, totaling 41 pages — are far from an exhaustive record of Brnovich’s investigation. But they fill in details about the sometimes-enigmatic actions of the state’s former top law enforcement officer.

Brnovich quickly affirmed then-President Trump’s loss in Arizona in November 2020, angering fellow Republicans. And he went on to resist Trump’s efforts to overturn the vote. Yet he flirted with claims of fraud as he courted GOP support over the subsequent two years, trumpeting his interim report on a far-right radio show and saying, “It’s frustrating for all of us, because I think we all know what happened in 2020.” It was only in the final days before the November 2022 midterm election, several months after Brnovich had lost his Senate primary, that he began to denounce politicians who denied Trump’s defeat, calling them “clowns” engaged in a “giant grift.”

In releasing materials that Brnovich’s administration had kept from public view, Mayes said she was reorienting the work of the attorney general’s office — away from pursuing conspiratorial claims of fraud and toward protecting the right to vote, investigating the few cases of wrongdoing that typically occur every election and preventing threats against election workers.

“The people of Arizona had a right to know this information before the 2022 election,” Mayes said in an interview. “Maricopa County election officials had a right to know that they were cleared of wrongdoing. And every American had a right to know that the 2020 election in Arizona, which in part decided the presidency, was conducted accurately and fairly.”

The records released this week represent a fraction of the thousands of pages produced by investigators and attorneys during the investigation, including additional material from drafts of reports and interviews and correspondence with witnesses and election officials. Mayes’s staff is reviewing those documents and is redacting sensitive information before making them public in the coming months, said Richie Taylor, her spokesperson.

Brnovich’s administration did not release the investigative summaries, which The Post requested under Arizona’s public records law before he left office in January. Brnovich and his staff said repeatedly throughout the investigation that they were limited in what they could disclose since the probe was ongoing.

But his office did on occasion make public some aspects of its findings. On Aug. 1, the day before the state’s primary election, Brnovich said his office had finished its probe of allegations that hundreds of votes had been cast in the name of deceased people. His office found one instance. In December 2022, as Brnovich was preparing to leave office, an executive assistant wrote in an email to The Post that “regardless of transition, we will continue processing and will release when completed.”

The 2020 election in Maricopa County drew intense scrutiny because it’s the state’s largest voting jurisdiction, home to more than half of voters, and helped swing Arizona to Joe Biden and deliver him the presidency. Brnovich launched the investigation shortly after Cyber Ninjas, a Florida-based firm hired by the GOP-led state senate, ended its own review of the election in September 2021. The months-long legislative review, which was roundly criticized by election experts, affirmed Trump’s loss in the state. Brnovich was competing at the time in a Senate primary contest against Trump-aligned candidates who said they would have taken steps following the 2020 election to thwart certification of Biden’s victory.

The attorney general’s probe stretched through 2022, as Brnovich’s office spent more than 10,000 hours examining claims of irregularities, malfeasance and fraud, records show. At one point, the office set up a command center, and “the review of the audit was made a singular, high-level priority; all hands were assigned to work exclusively on reviewing the audit with other matters being placed on hold unless a matter required immediate action on our part,” a report said. Mayes said the office has about 60 investigators, all of whom participated in the probe at some point, along with lawyers and support staff.

By September 2022, a year into the inquiry, the special investigations section had received 638 election-related complaints and deemed 430 of them worthy of investigation. Of those, just 22 cases were submitted for prosecutorial review; two cases involving felons who illegally sought to vote were prosecuted, leading to convictions.

note: in case you're wondering, those 430 instances deemed worthy of investigation means the election was 99.99% clean. These pricks aren't seriously asserting "the election was rigged". They're attacking our trust in democratic processes.

eg: raise the question of shenanigans, intimating there are massive problems, then move to solve those make-believe problems by proposing drastic measures that you say are meant to protect the system, while actually intending them to dismantle democracy altogether. Exactly the way they taught it at School Of The Americas, when we were training assholes like Pinochet and Noriega to seize power.

Brnovich never broadcast the full findings, declining to close the books on suspicions raised by an interim report with characterizations directly rebutted by his own office.

The interim report, delivered in the form of a letter to Karen Fann, then the Republican president of the state senate, was met by Trump allies as confirmation that voting in Maricopa County was corrupted. The letter, sent on April 6, highlighted management of early voting, saying, “We can report that there are problematic systemwide issues that relate to early ballot handling and verification.”

But Brnovich’s staff took issue with his criticism of the handling and verification of ballots, writing in a draft of the letter, “we did not uncover any criminality or fraud having been committed in this area during the 2020 general election.”

State investigators took issue with certain language included in an April 2022 draft of then-Arizona Attorney General Mark Brnovoch's interim report on his office's investigation of the 2020 election in Maricopa County, highlighting problematic text in yellow and offering corrections in blue.
State investigators took issue with certain language included in an April 2022 draft of then-Arizona Attorney General Mark Brnovoch's interim report on his office's investigation of the 2020 election in Maricopa County, highlighting problematic text in yellow and offering corrections in blue. (Arizona Attorney General)
The staff comments were made in blue type, below disputed statements highlighted in yellow, and included in a document sent by a chief special agent in the criminal division to several others in the office on April 1. That document was forwarded to Brnovich’s top aide. The subject line was, “Additional Considerations for Draft Interim Report.” It’s not clear who else reviewed the document.

The considerations were largely not reflected in Brnovich’s final version.

Brnovich speculated that a large number of early ballots in the 2020 contest may have prevented county officials from properly verifying signatures on the ballots, even though his staff advised him that the county had rigorous training and processes, as well as additional staff, to ensure proper verification.

Brnovich went ahead with his claim that “Maricopa County had not always timely and fully responded to our requests for records,” even though staff advised in the draft document that it was the “collective opinion of … investigators” that the county “was cooperative and responsive to our requests.”

State investigators took issue with certain language included in an April 2022 draft of then-Arizona Attorney General Mark Brnovoch's interim report on his office's investigation of the 2020 election in Maricopa County, highlighting problematic text in yellow and offering corrections in blue.

When Brnovich released his interim report, it was not accompanied by a fuller “Investigation Summary,” prepared by the assistant chief special agent and dated March 8. The 24-page summary described a range of allegations probed by the attorney general’s office, including improper signature verification, misuse of drop boxes and incomplete access to records for the state senate’s audit. That report was also shared with Brnovich’s top aide, Taylor said.

Virtually all allegations had been deemed unfounded, according to the summary. Several issues were listed as undetermined, including a claim by Cyber Ninjas that certain files had been deleted by the county; investigators had yet to review all archived data.

The summary revealed that there had been procedural violations in one instance — involving the retrieval of ballots from drop boxes. The state did not find that the county had mishandled ballots, according to the summary, but that it had not always properly recorded certain details, such as the time of retrieval.

Regarding signature verification, the issue highlighted in Brnovich’s interim report, the prepared summary found, “No improper Election Procedures were discovered during the Signature Verification review.”

Later the same year, Brnovich’s office came to further conclusions about the absence of any basis for claims of systematic fraud, but kept those findings private as well.

On Sept. 19, about a month after Brnovich had lost the GOP nomination for Senate to a MAGA-aligned candidate who insisted that “Trump won in 2020,” a memo summarized the work of investigators. The memo, drawn up by a chief special agent in anticipation of a final report, was not shared with office leadership since no such final report was ever drafted or requested, Taylor said.

The memo, titled “Election Review Summary,” emphasized that, “no evidence of election fraud, manipulation of the election process, or any instances of organized/coordinated fraud was provided by any of the complaining parties.”

A September 2022 memo summarizing the state probe of the 2020 election in Maricopa County went unreleased by the outgoing attorney general, Mark Brnovich

Of the more conspicuous claims examined by investigators — including those circulated by Cyber Ninjas, Texas-based True the Vote and others — the groups “did not provide any evidence to support their allegations,” the memo concluded. The information they did provide “was speculative in many instances and when investigated by our agents and support staff, was found to be inaccurate.”

The memo also reported that some high-profile Republican officials — who had publicly made fantastical claims of fraud — did not reiterate those assertions under questioning by agents, when they were subject to a state law prohibiting false reporting to law enforcement.

Mark Finchem, then a state representative who later ran unsuccessfully for secretary of state, had repeatedly claimed that a “source” told him that more than 30,000 fictitious votes had appeared during the general election in a county south of Phoenix. But when questioned by agents, he did not repeat the claim, “specifically stating he did not have any evidence of fraud and that he did not wish to take up our time.” Finchem provided four ballots that he said reflected a flawed voting process, but those ballots had not been counted and were unopened.

Sonny Borrelli, a GOP state senator who had alleged a coverup of election irregularities, did not repeat those claims during an interview but did provide what he said was the name of a deceased voter, the memo stated. Investigators learned that the alleged deceased voter was alive, had not voted and was not a resident of Arizona.

Investigators sought a meeting with Wendy Rogers, a Republican state senator and vocal election denier who now chairs the chamber’s elections committee. But Rogers refused to meet, the report said, “saying she was waiting to see the ‘perp walk’ of those who committed fraud during the election.”

No perp walk resulted from allegations presented to the unit, including that aerial objects flipped votes; that election workers scrubbed hard drives; and that satellites under the control of the Italian military penetrated vote-counting machines.

Today's Beau

Justin King - Beau Of the Fifth Column

Immunity from what, exactly?

Shifting The Blame

Typical. Instead of looking at Russia's invasion of Ukraine and seeing what an asshole Putin is for launching a war of conquest, China says we should look at it and see the big bad American boogey man.

Permanent Standard Disclaimer:

That's not to say the US has nothing to be ashamed of when it comes to fucking with things we have no business fucking with.

But this is not one of those things.

Yes, we have a vested interest in a free and democratic Ukraine, and helping Ukraine in service to that interest is good dual-purpose policy.

The spread of democracy is an all-round good thing in itself. And whenever democracy takes hold anywhere, it works against autocratic dickheads everywhere - like Putin and Xi. And also against plutocratic dickheads like most of the "conservatives" here in USAmerica, Inc.

As always, I maintain a firm belief that forces are at work all over the joint trying to move every country towards a global plutocracy. But that's a slightly different rant.

The focus here is on the way these dickheads try to deflect and shift the blame. They either blame the victim (Putin'a bullshit about "De-Nazification"), or they deflect to something like his secondary rationalization of "NATO is out to get us", which is what Xi is picking up on, with the variation of "everything bad that happens can be blamed on Washington".

Democracy in Ukraine is in fact a "threat to Russian", but it's only a threat to "Putin's Russia", and it's in Xi's best interest to lean in favor of a fellow-autocrat, while trying not to look like he's directly supporting Putin's war. And that's another exercise in selective reasoning because of Xi's ambitions of "taking Taiwan back".

It's been said that Geopolitics is a worldwide poker game where everybody's cheating and everybody knows everybody's cheating. So it should never come as a surprise when some event or series of events reveals what a fucked up mess it really is.

Anyway ...

A year later, China blames U.S. ‘hegemony’ — not Russia — for war in Ukraine

Ahead of the first anniversary of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, China has launched a public diplomacy offensive to wrest control of the narrative about its role in the conflict, trying to clear itself of accusations that it has sided with Russia while accusing the United States of turning the conflict into a “proxy” war.

Few of the positions staked out by Chinese officials in a flurry of speeches and documents this week are new, but they have underscored why Beijing continues to stand by Moscow even as it professes “deep concern” about the conflict: It considers the United States — not Russia — the progenitor of global insecurity, including in Ukraine.

Beijing insists it is neutral in the conflict, but those claims routinely clash with its rhetorical and diplomatic support for Russia.

That was illustrated this week, with China’s top diplomat, Wang Yi, arriving in Moscow in a show of solidarity with Russia — especially when contrasted with President Biden’s unannounced trip to Kyiv, where he walked the streets with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky.

The China-Russia relationship has stood the test of stormy international circumstances and remained “as stable as Mount Tai,” Wang told Russian President Vladimir Putin on Wednesday, using a Chinese idiom for rock-solid.

“Crisis and chaos appear repeatedly before us, but within crisis there is opportunity,” he said.

By actively responding to the challenges of the times, the two nations can bring about an even deeper comprehensive strategic partnership, and that relationship “will not be overpowered by a third party’s coercion or pressure” because it is built on a strong economic, political and cultural foundation, Wang added.

Chinese leader Xi Jinping is expected to visit Russia some time this year, but the Kremlin declined Wednesday to be drawn on reports that it could be as soon as April.

From the beginning of the war, China has tried to protect its rapidly deepening economic and political ties with Russia at the same time it tried to assure Western audiences that it wants peace and should not be a target for sanctions.

But as China’s role as a lifeline for an isolated Russia grows, it is becoming harder for Beijing to stay on the sidelines.

The Foreign Ministry in Beijing has declined to comment on reports that Xi will deliver a “peace speech” on Friday, exactly one year since Russia launched its invasion, saying only that China will issue a document clarifying its stance on the day.

The problem with China’s story of being an honest broker is that Russia remains a “key ally in the effort to push back against the U.S.-led order,” said Arthur Kroeber, partner at the research firm Gavekal Dragonomics.

“The true purpose of Xi’s speech” — assuming it takes place — “will be to drive a wedge between the U.S. and its European allies, by suggesting that China, not the U.S., is the real advocate of a peaceful resolution of the Russia-Ukraine war,” he wrote in a note on Wednesday.

The latest propaganda blitz also provides a clearer picture of Xi’s foreign policy priorities as he embarks on a third term in power. Bringing about an end to the war is only one item in Xi’s ambitious agenda to reshape the global order so that the United States and its allies cannot slow China’s rise or challenge its territorial claims. And to that end, China remains closely aligned with Russia.

An attempt to justify China’s stance on the war in Ukraine to a conflicted domestic audience, the new wave of propaganda is also a way to rebuff growing concern that Beijing will step up support for Putin’s war effort as it enters its second year.

Beijing has rejected U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s warning that China might be considering providing “lethal” support to Russia as a “wild accusation” and accused the United States of wanting Ukraine to “fight till the last Ukrainian.”

“It’s plain for the world to see who is calling for dialogue and striving for peace and who is adding fuel to the fire, handing out knives and instigating hostility,” Foreign Ministry spokesperson Wang Wenbin said on Tuesday.

Ding Chun, director of the Center for European Studies at Fudan University in Shanghai, said Blinken’s claim was a “strategic statement” meant to warn China. “It’s not a substantive accusation, but rather a part of U.S. strategy to tell China not to have the intention [to do so],” he said.

But it’s not just the United States that is concerned about China’s intentions. Zelensky told the German daily Die Welt this week that he hoped China would make a “pragmatic assessment” and avoid allying itself with Russia’s war effort, because if it did “there will be a world war.”

In response to fears that the conflict could expand, Wang Wen, a professor at Renmin University, said it was wrong for Zelensky to speculate about Beijing’s actions. Instead, “he should thank China for promoting humanitarian aid to Ukraine. If China really were to support Russia, then Zelensky’s life would get even worse,” he said.

(In the month after the invasion, China gave Ukraine $725,000 of humanitarian aid and $1.5 million in other forms of aid. It hasn’t announced additional support since then.)

Seeing the United States as a source of instability — while giving aggression from Russia and other authoritarian states a pass — is a longtime stance of the Chinese Communist Party. But under Xi, it is a worldview that has become more deeply embedded into China’s foreign policy and echoed by its national security establishment.

Lu Xiang, a researcher at the state-run Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, said the true threat to Ukraine’s autonomy is Western support. Having once been part of the Soviet Union means that “if a big country from outside the region uses Ukraine as a chess piece to weaken Russia’s strategic interests, then that means [Ukraine’s] sovereign interests will of necessity be suppressed,” he said.

At the core of Xi’s priorities for promoting China’s security is an effort to counteract the United States’ influence in the international order, often by enlisting countries that share similar grievances.

Chinese complaints about American “abuse of hegemony” in global military, political and economic affairs were listed in a five-page document issued by the Chinese Foreign Ministry on Monday, which called the Ukraine conflict a case of the United States “repeating its old tactics of waging proxy … wars.”

Separately this week, China issued a “concept paper” that staked out positions on global hot-spot issues, from the Israeli-Palestinian conflict to the Pacific islands.

China’s foreign minister, Qin Gang, released the document at an event in Beijing, running through a string of broad commitments to uphold the U.N. charter, reject the use of nuclear weapons and protect territorial integrity, while also taking thinly veiled swipes at the United States for “abusing unilateral sanctions” and building security blocs.

The document, which did not mention Russia, made only passing reference to the “Ukraine crisis” as an issue to be resolved through dialogue. It repeated that “legitimate security concerns of all countries” should be taken seriously — a phrase often used by Beijing in defense of Moscow.

Qin also used the event to call for countries to stop “clamoring about ‘Ukraine today, Taiwan tomorrow.’”

Since the start of the war, China has tried to draw a distinction between Russia’s actions and its own escalating military aggression in the Taiwan Strait. For many in the self-governed island democracy, however, the war has been a wake-up call for the need to be better prepared to repel an attack from China.

Missing from the newly proactive stance China laid out this week is any indication that Beijing is willing to take a leading role in peace negotiations.

“Neither Russia nor Ukraine can defeat each other completely in the short term,” said Fudan University’s Ding. “China has emphasized the need to stop the war and promote peace, but it has not explicitly said that it wants to be a mediator in this war, and it is very difficult to do so in practice. Although China has a better relationship with Russia, it is a question of to what extent Russia will listen to China’s thoughts.”

Putin Speaks

Early this morning, Vladimir Putin delivered more or less the Russian SOTU.

To save time, I've summed it up for y'all - here's what he said:

“The West wants us to suffer. They made us invade Ukraine. The conflict will never end. I'm gonna go play with my nukes for a while. Fuck everybody but us.”

And the crowd went wild!

Russian President Vladimir Putin suspended Moscow’s participation in the last remaining nuclear arms control pact with the U.S., announcing the move Tuesday in a bitter speech where he made clear he would not change his strategy in the war in Ukraine.

In his long-delayed state-of-the-nation address, Putin cast his country — and Ukraine — as victims of Western double-dealing and said it was Russia, not Ukraine, fighting for its very existence.

“We aren’t fighting the Ukrainian people,” Putin said in a speech days before the war’s first anniversary on Friday. “The Ukrainian people have become hostages of the Kyiv regime and its Western masters, which have effectively occupied the country.”

The speech reiterated a litany of grievances that the Russian leader has frequently offered as justification for the widely condemned military campaign while vowing no military let-up in a conflict that has reawakened fears of a new Cold War.

On top of that, Putin sharply upped the ante by declaring that Moscow would suspend its participation in the so-called New START Treaty. The pact, signed in 2010 by the U.S. and Russia, caps the number of long-range nuclear warheads the two sides can deploy and limits the use of missiles that can carry atomic weapons.

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In Case You're Wondering

... or not wondering, or whatever: No, I don't miss this phony bullshit at all.

Today's Quote

One single Anne Frank moves us more than the countless others who suffered just as she did, but whose faces have remained in the shadows. Perhaps it is better that way; if we were capable of taking in all the suffering of all those people, we would not be able to live.

-- Primo Levi

Today's Tweet

A bodyguard armed with - what? an Uzi? Fake lord have mercy.

The cult outside Mar-a-Lago today. pic.twitter.com/za32oHvo0s

— Ron Filipkowski 🇺🇦 (@RonFilipkowski) February 20, 2023