Today's Tweet

Okay, look, I was an NCAA Div1 student-athlete — I respect physical fitness.

But I don’t choose Presidents based on pushups or pectorals, any more than I’d choose my quarterback based on his economic policies. 🙄

Can everyone STOP BEING STUPID, please?!#VoteBlue #Biden2024 pic.twitter.com/zxs0v6pVZM

— Mindful Primate (@MichellesDude) June 27, 2023

Today's Wingnut

I'm not a racist, but ...

I'm not a misogynist, but ...

We're not creating a theocracy, but ...

Russian Leadership

There has to be more and better people who keep the joint running - as well or as badly as it does.

But let's take a look at the guys at or near the top of the power pyramid as it stands now.

Putin, of course, was a career KGB apparatchik, who cut his teeth on small-time scams in Leningrad, figuring out how best to steal from Russian citizens, and beating up the ones who squawked about it. He's done pretty well for himself, becoming quite possibly the richest man in the world (before his stupid little war anyway). 

Prigozhin (The Butcher Of Bakhmut) is the kind of guy who throws his people into the meat grinder with scant training, no real tactical leadership, and precious little ammo - shooting the ones who are caught retreating - and then angrily rants and raves about "needless casualties", blaming Shoigu and Gerasimov.

Lovely fellow.

And then there's this little beauty:

Dmitry Utkin

Mr Utkin is a co-founder of Wagner, and basically Prigozhin's main guy. Utkin named the gang "Wagner" because Richard Wagner was Adolph Hitler's favorite composer.

Quite a guy.

If Putin is Overthrown, These Five People Could Replace Him

As Russian President Vladimir Putin's war against Ukraine falters eight months into the conflict, speculation is growing about who could replace the Russian leader should he be overthrown.

The Russian president, who turned 70 on October 7, failed to achieve the swift victory he sought to secure when he announced a special military operation on February 24.

Months later, Ukraine is recapturing swathes of its territory in the south and northeast.

The setbacks have sparked rare displays of criticism among his top allies, including Chechen leader Ramzan Kadyrov, and Yevgeny Prigozhin, founder of the Russian mercenary outfit, the Wagner Group, while Ukrainian intelligence has alluded to a possible coup within his military.

Prominent Kremlin officials have been tapped as would-be candidates, as independent Russian outlet Meduza reported that Kremlin insiders are privately discussing a list of potential successors in the event Putin is ousted over Ukraine war.

Dmitry Medvedev

Russian Security Council Deputy Chairman and former President Dmitry Medvedev grimases during a meeting on the military-industrial complex at the Kremlin, September 20, 2022, in Moscow, Russia.

The former Russian president, ex-prime minister, and deputy chair of the Security Council is one of a number of potential successors being discussed by Kremlin officials.

The 57-year-old has been extremely vocal throughout the war, making over-the-top, hardline comments on foreign policy issues, the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, a U.S. think tank, assessed.

On Monday, Medvedev landed himself on Kyiv's wanted list.

Ukraine's SBU security service said he was wanted under a section of the criminal code dealing with attempts to undermine Ukraine's territorial integrity and the inviolability of its borders.

Sergey Kiriyenko

The 60-year-old is the first deputy chief of staff of Putin's office, and he has been credited with launching Putin's career by handing him the top job at Kremlin's principal security agency, the Federal Security Service (FSB).

Kiriyenko is now in charge of overseeing and administering the annexation of Ukraine's Donetsk, Luhansk, Zaporizhzhia and Kherson regions, a task that comes as the international community decries referendums held in the areas as illegitimate.

"He's constantly in the public eye and says what the president likes [to hear]," a Kremlin source told Meduza.

Dmitry and Nikolai Patrushev

Dmitry Patrushev, Russia's agriculture minister, is son of Russia's head of Security Council, Nikolai Patrushev. The pair's names have been mentioned as potential successors.

Stephen Hall, lecturer in politics at the University of Bath, told Newsweek that the Kremlin have been talking about the pair "for a very long time."

"Nikolai Patrushev has been very good in the past of manipulating what is necessary, and he's very good at playing all sides off and retaining his power. So it is strongly possible [that he could succeed Putin]," Hall said.

Sir Richard Dearlove, who served as head of the British Secret Intelligence Service from 1999 to 2004, also said in July that Nikolai Patrushev, a longtime Putin ally, is the most likely candidate.

Prigozhin (see above), founder of the Wagner Group, has made headlines in recent weeks for publicly ridiculing Putin's military amid a series of successful counteroffensives conducted by Kyiv in Ukraine's south and northeast.

Hall, responding to Russian military expert Oleg Zhdanov's assessment that Prigozhin could turn on Putin, said he may "go behind the scenes as it were, as a puppet master."

Prigozhin could also insert Medvedev as a puppet president while he acts behind the scenes, Hall said.

"We're seeing this possibly, he's got his own paramilitary group, the Wagner Group, and they are a law unto themselves, because he does have a problem, constitutionally and of course, the Constitution can be changed. No one with a criminal record can be president," Hall said.

Could Putin Be Overthrown?

Political commentators are mixed on whether the Kremlin chief will be ousted over his handling of the Ukraine war.

Kasia Kaczmarska, lecturer in politics and international relations at the University of Edinburgh, told Newsweek she still sees Putin as "relatively secure" in his 22-year reign.

"I don't think any individual from within the regime is capable of taking on Putin. His allies would have to join forces to challenge his leadership," she said.

"However, continuous and ever louder disputes between the state structures and Putin's client networks hinder the emergence of an anti-Putin coalition."

Florea assessed that if Russia were to lose the eastern Donbas region and/or Crimea, which Russia annexed in 2014, the prospects for regime change will be much higher.

"With such sweeping battlefield losses, Putin will likely find himself in the position of ordering a large-scale military mobilization which is likely to attract the ire of the large, urban Russian population," he said.

Large-scale mobilization will likely plunge the country into a severe economic crisis, will likely lead to broad discontent and public upheaval, and, ultimately, defections from the regime itself and the periphery—the regional governors who have so far largely remained loyal to Putin—Florea argued.

"Under these circumstances, the power struggle inside the Kremlin will likely intensify," he added.

Today's Keith

People who are prob'ly likely hopefully totally fucked:

• Jenna Ellis
• Rudy Giuliani
• Jeff Clark
• Sidney Powell
• Michael Roman

And also too:

Pro-RFK Jr. Super PAC Has Deep Ties to Marjorie Taylor Greene, George Santos

The Super PAC is just one example of the nominally Democratic candidate running a campaign that's awash in support from backers of Donald Trump

LAST MONTH, SUPPORTERS of Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s presidential bid created a Super PAC titled Heal the Divide. On its website, the group — whose name is borrowed from Kennedy’s own campaign slogan — advises voters that “Only Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. can unite the Nation to start healing America,” and allows visitors to donate both in dollars and cryptocurrency.

There’s nothing abnormal about a candidate getting a Super PAC, even a candidate making a long-shot bid like Kennedy’s. What is abnormal, however, is that Kennedy is running as a Democrat in the Democratic primary, while the creators of the Super PAC have a deeply pro-Donald Trump bent — including ties to arch-MAGA officials such as Marjorie Taylor Greene, George Santos, and Herschel Walker.

Federal Election Commission filings list Jason D. Boles of RTA Strategy as its treasurer and use RTA’s website and mailing address. In 2022, Greene’s campaign and leadership PAC, Save America Stop Socialism, paid the firm more than $372,000 for work on her 2022 congressional race, according to data compiled by OpenSecrets.

The Georgia-based RTA, founded by political consultant Rick Thompson, also worked for Walker in his failed 2022 Senate race in Georgia. Thompson served as custodian for Walker’s campaign committee and Boles worked as treasurer of the committee, earning the firm roughly $50,000, according to campaign-finance records. More recently, Boles and Thompson have signed on as treasurer and designated agent, respectively, for the embattled Santos after the indicted congressman struggled to find personnel to handle his campaign finances. 

Reached by phone, Thompson declined to comment on the Kennedy Super PAC. “We have a strict policy at our firm that we don’t discuss our clients,” he tells Rolling Stone. And the Heal the Divide site does not advertise its Republican backing. But a mistake on the group’s website gives away its origins: The site’s terms of service appear to have been copied and pasted from MAGA PAC, a Trump Super PAC, and incorrectly refers to the Heal the Divide site as MAGApac.com. 

It’s not just one MAGAfied Super PAC, however, that’s backing Kennedy’s run against President Biden in the Democratic primary. His bid is awash in support from Donald Trump’s allies in MAGA World, conservative media, and some of the Republican-donor elite. Broadly, they’re hoping Kennedy will make Biden look weak in the primary, hurting his chances against Trump — or whichever candidate emerges from the GOP primary.

MAGA influencers and longtime Trump associates such as Roger Stone have praised Kennedy’s candidacy as a way to “soften Joe Biden up.” Former top Trump political adviser and campaign strategist Steve Bannon also reportedly spent “months” encouraging Kennedy to run in order to energize anti-vaxxers who make up much of Trump’s base, according to CBS News.

Kennedy’s campaign did not immediately respond to a request for comment, and the candidate has denied that he’s effectively aimed at torpedoing Biden. He has at times criticized Trump, while also praising the former president on things like his draw among middle-class voters. And he has consistently attacked Biden on foreign policy and other subjects. “Our internal poll numbers are showing me stronger against both Republican candidates than President Biden,” Kennedy claimed to Fox News host Harris Faulkner early this month. “Democrats are going to want somebody who can beat Governor DeSantis and who can beat President Trump.”

But whether he wants pro-Trump support or not — he’s certainly getting it.

At Fox News, three staffers and a producer tell Rolling Stone that some higher-ups have privately discussed how much they value not just interviewing Kennedy on the network, but featuring segment after segment about his candidacy and his unexpected poll numbers in the 2024 Democratic field. “Management loves RFK [Jr.] coverage because it makes Biden look weak. You can expect a lot of it,” the Fox producer says.

 

Before Tucker Carlson was fired by Fox in April, the network’s then-top host would promote Kennedy and argue that the candidate somehow wasn’t an extremist. “So, at this point, the question isn’t who in public life is corrupt? Too many to count. The question is, who is telling the truth? There are not many of those. One of them is Robert F. Kennedy Jr.,” Carlson said on Fox earlier this year.

In the time since, other hosts have praised or interviewed Kennedy, though some not quite as sympathetically as Carlson once did. Still, Kennedy has continued to enjoy a wellspring of backing from influential right-wing media outlets, including among the top tier at Fox. 

Pete Hegseth, another Fox News host who, like Carlson, has privately advised Donald Trump on policy over the years, defended Kennedy in an April segment, saying: “The establishment will do whatever it takes to keep Biden in the White House. You know that. He’s very useful to them.… The deep state gets deeper every day. They work quietly while Joe does other things. They’re already trying to kneecap Joe’s primary opponents. Robert F. Kennedy Jr. — he’s surging in the polls.… Now that he’s a threat, [the mainstream media is] going for his throat.”

Meanwhile, Trump and some of his senior aides have delighted in Kennedy’s presence in the 2024 race, viewing him as a useful anti-Biden agent of chaos, according to three sources on and close to the Trump campaign. The ex-president and 2024 GOP front-runner briefly praised Kennedy during this month’s interview with Fox News’ Bret Baier, while getting his name wrong, calling Kennedy “very nice” and a “very, very fine person” who Trump knows “very well.”

Members of Trump’s team are also pushing the message that Kennedy’s candidacy is a sign of Biden’s weakness. “The fact is, President Biden is a very weak incumbent. He’s just fortunate more opponents have not entered the primary. Ironically, the last time America had a failed Democratic incumbent president, Ted Kennedy ran against Jimmy Carter. Now, Robert Kennedy Jr. is running against Joe Biden,” says John McLaughlin, one of Trump’s top pollsters. “RFK Jr. is on a mission, and Joe Biden is weak and vulnerable. His poll numbers are extremely soft.”

Wealthy right-wing donors and activist groups have also pitched in to support and amplify the long-shot presidential campaign. 

David Sacks, the South African-born venture capitalist who has donated to Ron DeSantis’ gubernatorial campaign and hosted his campaign launch on Twitter, recently held a fundraiser for Kennedy last week. He was joined by fellow venture-capital investor Chamath Palihapitiya. The event included “Democrats, Republicans, and Independents,” according to Palihapitiya.

The far-right anti-gay group Moms for Liberty has also scheduled Kennedy to speak at its annual summit in Philadelphia next week. In advertising the summit, the group leads with a quote from conservative 2016 presidential-primary candidate Ben Carson: “A lot of individuals in the room have decided to get up and do something about what they believe because that is what is going to save us as a nation.”

Kennedy’s claim that he’s running to defeat Trump contrasts with his stance when the 45th president was first heading to the White House. During the Obama-Trump presidential transition in January 2017, Kennedy visited the then-president-elect at Trump Tower in Manhattan — for a job interview.

According to a former senior Trump transition official, Kennedy “wanted to have some kind of role in vaccine research and the questions he raised about the safety of the vaccines,” and had been following some of what Trump had been saying about vaccines, including regarding the widely debunked theories about links to autism. Just after Kennedy left this meeting, Trump said to staff, “Oh, he’s gonna help us with vaccines,” according to the former official. (Kennedy in 2005 popularized some of his anti-vaccine rhetoric in a since-debunked article in Rolling Stone. He has recently attacked the publication, falsely claiming editor-in-chief Noah Shachtman somehow played a hand in the story’s retraction in 2011 and subsequent removal from its website. Shachtman began his tenure in 2021.)

Kennedy’s senior role on so-called “vaccine safety” never happened in Trump’s four years in office. Several of Trump’s closest advisers during the transition and early administration urged him never to appoint Kennedy to that kind of position, arguing that Kennedy had too much baggage and would be too much of a public-relations nightmare for the young presidency, former White House aides say. “It took longer to talk him out of it than it should have,” says a former senior administration official, who recalls trying to talk Trump out of officially appointing Kennedy in the Oval Office. But ultimately, Trump got talked out of it. In the years since, Kennedy has publicly trashed Trump for helping to launch the “tyranny” of Covid-19 vaccination. 

The 2024 campaign is far from the first time that Kennedy has rubbed elbows with MAGA donors. Prior to the Covid-19 pandemic, Kennedy’s political ecosystem often tilted to the fringes of the left, capitalizing on liberal skepticism of large pharmaceutical companies. But as Trump pushed Covid-19 myths and attacked public-health experts in 2020, the far-right swelled the ranks of anti-vaccine conspiracy theorists and offered Kennedy a new audience.

In particular, Kennedy has courted Ty and Charlene Bollinger, two pro-Trump political activists who held a rally outside the Capitol on Jan. 6 to promote Trump’s lies about a stolen election. The couple, labeled as members of the “Disinformation Dozen” for their prominence in posting vaccine myths on social media, have featured Kenendy in an interview on their United Medical Freedom Super PAC, and as a speaker at their Truth About Cancer Live anti-vaccine conference alongside Eric Trump.

David and Leila Centner, two big-dollar donors who forked over $1 million for Trump’s 2020 reelection campaign and attended the former president’s Jan. 6 Stop the Steal rally on the mall, also briefly served on the board of Kennedy’s Children’s Health Defense nonprofit.

But for all of the support and hype from the right wing, Kennedy polls at 14 percent, according to the RealClearPolitics polling aggregator, 50 points behind Biden’s 64 percent average. 

Russia

For me, the big takeaway on this one is that when you put real pressure on Putin, he dives for cover behind his negotiators, and his first move will likely be to buy you off.

Bluff-n-Bluster. But then the problem is: If Putin is exposed as a paper tiger, who's going to step up to take his place? And will that guy be more reasonable and easier to deal with, or will he be determined to show everybody what a hard-ass he can be because that Putin guy turned out to be such a total pussy?

It would seem Mr Putin isn't able to impose his will with anywhere near the certainty everybody (including me) had thought - not anymore anyway.

One other little detail that popped up in the last coupla days: Russian cops raided Prigozhin's HQ in St Petersburg, finding some gold bullion, several passports with aliases, and more than $40M in cash. Now that's probably just one of his bug-out stashes, so maybe it's not that big a deal, but it's not something you leave behind to throw off the bloodhounds either. Mr Prigozhin's exit seems to have been quite a bit more frenzied than I had thought.

If this follows the usual pattern, it's bound to be an Either-or-Neither proposition.

Dictators can't operate for long with a viable - and very popular - challenger waiting in the wings, so Mr Prigozhin is a prime candidate for Peter Pan lessons in the relatively near future.

But Putin has been shown up as having a potentially fatal flaw.

So the "smart play" is to wait for (and to help) Putin as he tries to snuff Prigozhin, then move against Putin - possibly using Putin's "illegal" elimination of the heroic Wagner leader as pretext.

To be sure, I DON'T KNOW - and nobody else knows either. I'm just Magic-Eight-Ballin' here.

Officials question whether truce will hold in Kremlin, Wagner standoff

Many are watching to see if Vladimir Putin sacks his military leadership — and if Yevgeniy Prigozhin remains quietly in exile

As the dust settled on the most serious challenge in decades to Russian President Vladimir Putin’s authority, Washington and its allies struggled to make sense of a head-spinning series of historic events that saw mercenary forces race up a highway to within 120 miles of Moscow on Saturday, then abruptly turn back after their leader, Yevgeniy Prigozhin, agreed to stand down and go to Belarus for an uncertain exile.

On Sunday, intelligence officials and diplomats — unsure if they had just witnessed an aborted coup or a thwarted mutiny — were left to parse official Kremlin statements and re-watch blurry videos posted on Telegram, the social network that Prigozhin has used to try to convince the Russian people that the war in Ukraine has been a strategic disaster led by incompetent commanders and political sycophants.

Publicly, U.S. officials have highlighted the possible benefits to Ukraine from the chaos in Russia. Secretary of State Antony Blinken said Sunday that the brief Wagner revolt, and how it was ultimately if tentatively resolved, showed “cracks in the facade” of Putin’s authoritarian leadership.

“Think about it this way: 16 months ago, Russian forces were on the doorstep of Kyiv in Ukraine, believing they would take the capital in a matter of days and erase the country from the map as an independent country. Now, what we’ve seen is Russia having to defend Moscow, its capital, against mercenaries of [Putin’s] own making,” Blinken said on NBC News’s “Meet the Press.”

“Certainly, we have all sorts of new questions that Putin is going to have to address in the weeks and months ahead,” Blinken added.

Officials in the United States and around Europe said they were unsure of what comes next and were concerned about the instability that could follow an effort by Putin’s rivals, including Prigozhin, to unseat the president at a vulnerable moment.

High on the list of questions policymakers are now putting to their intelligence analysts is whether Prigozhin has managed to shake the foundations of the Kremlin so strongly that Putin will feel compelled to sack top generals or ministers leading the war, as Prigozhin has repeatedly demanded.

Putin rules by showing strength. Russia’s crisis exposed his weakness.

More immediately, though, there’s another question: What just happened? One minute, Prigozhin had taken over a key military headquarters in the south running Russia’s war machine in Ukraine. The next, he had agreed to a truce brokered by Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko, who’s more accustomed to playing second fiddle to Putin than intervening between warring factions.

“Why did it calm down so quickly, and how come Putin’s puppet Lukashenko got the credit?” asked one senior European diplomat, who like others spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe private discussions. “What impact will it have on Russia’s defenses, and are there going to be any personnel changes in the military leadership?”

Western officials also were unsure about what terms had been reached between Putin and Prigozhin to end the rebellion, and whether the peace would hold.

One Western intelligence official was skeptical that Prigozhin would remain quietly in Belarus, echoing speculation that he will either be killed or will continue to challenge Russia’s military establishment from abroad.

Watching the Wagner column head toward Moscow on Saturday, the official had predicted that Russian troops were unlikely to put up much resistance if they had been persuaded by his arguments that military leaders were to blame for the disastrous war. Prigozhin had said on social media that the Russian public hadn’t been told the truth about the setbacks in Ukraine, including about the extraordinarily high number of dead Russian troops. U.S. military figures have estimated casualties in the hundreds of thousands.

Bob Seely, a member of British Parliament who serves on the foreign affairs committee that has been investigating Wagner for two years, wondered if Putin feared his own military might not carry out his orders to stop Wagner forces from entering the capital. Earlier on Saturday, before the truce, Putin had described the Wagner fighters as traitors during a televised address to the nation.

“Would Putin have been able to order a lethal airstrike?” Seely asked. “Could Putin have actually killed Prigozhin on route? Or was it so bad for Putin that he couldn’t,” meaning that his grip on power was too tenuous? If Putin demanded that Russian forces attack and the answer was no, Seely said, “then Putin was in a desperate stage.”

“I can’t see this peace lasting,” Seely added, “because either Prigozhin is unstable and will continue to attack and seek to finish Putin off, or Putin will silence him in some way — financially, politically or physically.”

Yevgeniy Prigozhin, leader of the Wagner Group on a street in Rostov-on-Don, Russia, on Saturday, seen leaving an area of the headquarters of the Southern Military District. (AP)
A Ukrainian intelligence official, who was likewise unsure why Prigozhin had stood down, saw signs that the mercenary leader may not have been confident in his prospects.

“I think he miscalculated in his expectations of military support,” the Ukrainian official said, taking a different view than some of his European counterparts. The revolt Prigozhin may have hoped for in Moscow failed to materialize, the official noted.

He added that there were indications Prigozhin may even have tried to phone Putin directly but received no answer. This sent a “very strong signal” to Prigozhin, the Ukrainian official believes: Putin would not simply acquiesce to his demands.

Another senior European diplomat said that allies hope to understand what Putin will do domestically in response to the unrest, especially with respect to any next steps in the stalemate on the Ukraine war front. The diplomat joked that even as Ukraine’s Western backers raced to decipher what had occurred, Russian intelligence probably did not have much of a head start.

“I think even Russian services are scratching their heads,” the diplomat said. “We will need some time to digest and also to see where things are moving.”

On the Sunday morning talk shows, Republican and Democratic lawmakers agreed that the events had weakened Putin and strengthened the United States’ resolve to continue supporting Ukraine. Later on Sunday, President Biden spoke with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to discuss the current counteroffensive against Russia and committed to continue U.S. support for Ukraine, the White House said in a statement.

But intelligence officials cautioned that it remains to be seen whether Prigozhin’s challenge truly weakened Putin — and if the Russian leader believes it did. U.S. and Western analysts have long described Putin as isolated, surrounded by yes-men and blind to the challenges his forces face.

The Russian intelligence agency primarily responsible for understanding Ukraine, the FSB, failed to neutralize the government in Kyiv and foment any pro-Russian opposition to disrupt Zelensky’s hold on power, The Washington Post previously reported, based on intelligence material obtained by Ukrainian and other security services.

Putin has been misguided by advisers who may now try to convince him that he won in a standoff with Prigozhin, some officials said. That may only embolden the Russian leader, even if he is not as strong as he thinks.

Officials said that, in the near term, they will watch closely for any signs that Putin may replace two of the top leaders who have been the targets of Prigozhin’s Telegram rants: Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu and Gen. Valery Gerasimov, the chief of the general staff. Prigozhin had demanded an audience with both men as his forces marched across Russia.

Sacking the military bosses might not mean that Putin is giving in to Prigozhin, but rather that he realizes the Russian elite have lost confidence in their leadership. Prigozhin, some Western officials said, was only saying out loud what many around the Kremlin privately think.

“If Putin replaces Shoigu, it will not be because Prigozhin demanded it, but because Shoigu is weak,” the Ukrainian official said.

As for Prigozhin’s next move, U.S. and Western officials were keenly interested in whether the rift with Putin will prompt him to distance the Russian government from Wagner and withdraw support for its extensive operations in Africa and the Middle East, where the group offers security and military assistance and tactics on campaigns to influence governments facing rebellions or instability, in return for resource contracts such as gold in regions that are too unstable to attract Western corporations.

Though Prigozhin’s company seeks to turn a profit wherever it operates, its action often advances a Kremlin agenda and undermines Western interests. For those reasons alone, some Western officials believe Putin will probably continue supporting Wagner’s operations, but recent events may set back its future potential.

“I think Wagner will have their wings curbed heavily,” said a senior European intelligence official. That may come at a cost for Putin. “Prigozhin has been the gateway for Moscow in many places in Africa, and Moscow counts on African support more than ever,” the intelligence official said. But, he acknowledged, the Russian president has more pressing concerns, such as political survival.

“Faced with last weekend’s events, issues like Russian influence in Africa have a secondary weight for Putin.”

What Coup?

I've been trying to do two things

1. Wait for more info - early reports are always wrong
2. Figure out what some of the different alternative story-lines might be

Jake Broe asks a coupla perfect questions:

What the fuck just happened? 

Why Lukashenko?

Warthog Defense

The Butcher Of Bakhmut is celebrated as a conquering hero.

To The Point

We're at a point now where the only sure way to win a Republican primary election is to stake out positions that will all but guarantee you'll lose in the general election.

I'd normally say it doesn't really hurt my feelings to watch Republicans shooting themselves in the foot, but it makes for a very unsustainable political system, so I have to keep trying to convince Republicans to knock that shit off.

Call me Sisyphus.

WASHINGTON, June 24 - Former President Donald Trump said the federal government has a role in regulating late term abortions, but declined to provide specifics on what that role was in a speech to a conservative audience on Saturday night.

Trump has been relatively quiet on the issue of abortion throughout his campaign for a second term, putting him at odds with other Republican presidential hopefuls including his current biggest threat to the party nomination, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, who enacted a six week ban on abortions in his state.

When the guy takes every opportunity to go out of his way to brag about how he overturned Roe v Wade, I don't quite get how he's been "relatively quiet" about it, Reuters.

"There of course remains a vital role for the federal government in protecting unborn life," Trump told attendees at the Faith and Freedom Coalition's annual conference in Washington, D.C., on Saturday night. "We will defeat the radical Democrat policy of extreme late term abortion."

Late term abortions, which take place after 21 weeks, are extremely rare, representing just 1% of all abortions, and are often due to fetal abnormalities or threats to the mother's life.

Trump touted his record of appointing three judges to the Supreme Court, which gave the court the conservative majority needed to overturn Roe v. Wade, the landmark 1973 case which created federal protections for abortion.

The issue of abortion is likely to become a defining one of the 2024 election. Republican candidates are wooing far right Christian voters with commitments to ban the medical procedure - South Carolina Senator Tim Scott has said he would ban it at 15 weeks, and former Vice President Mike Pence has committed to signing a federal ban on it entirely.

A Reuters/Ipsos poll conducted April 11-12 found that 56% of respondents said they would be less likely to vote for a politician who supports legislation limiting access to abortion, while 28% would be more likely to.

Some Beau On A Sunday

Bad guys telling us good guys are doing bad things, and good guys telling us bad guys are doing good things.

... or any combination of good guys, bad guys, good things, bad things.

When it's this difficult to figure out who's who or what's what, then you know there's some big-time fuckery going on, and it's going to be a while before we can settle on any reliable conclusions about anything.

Beau Of The Fifth Column

Jan6 Stuff

Borrowing, stealing outright, and manufacturing victimhood - that's what comprises one of the hallmarks of how The Daddy State operates.

Once you've convinced people they've been wronged, the guard rails are down and they can rationalize their way into doing just about anything you even vaguely suggest you want them to do.

It's the Voltaire thing: “Whoever who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities. If the God‐​given understanding of your mind does not resist a demand to believe what is impossible, then you will not resist a demand to do wrong to that God‐​given sense of justice in your heart.” 

New video undercuts claim Twitter censored pro-Trump views before Jan. 6

In the internal video call from Jan. 5, 2021, workers were told not to take tougher action against a growing wave of tweets they feared were veiled incitements to violence.

On Jan. 5, 2021, the lawyers and specialists on Twitter’s safety policy team, which set rules about violent content, were bracing for a day of brutality in Washington. In the weeks since President Donald Trump had tweeted a call for his supporters to gather in the nation’s capital for a protest he promised would be “wild,” the site had erupted with pledges of political vengeance and plans for a military-style assault.

“I am very concerned about what happens tomorrow, especially given what we have been seeing,” said one member of the team, Anika Collier Navaroli, in a video call, the details of which are reported here for the first time. “For months we have been allowing folks to maintain and say on the platform that they’re locked and loaded, that they’re ready to shoot people, that they’re ready to commit violence.”

Some participants in the call pushed the company to adopt a tougher position, arguing that moderators should be able to remove what they called “coded incitements to violence” — messages, such as “locked and loaded,” that could be read as threats. But a senior manager dismissed the idea, saying executives wanted them to take action against only the most flagrant rules violations, adding, “We didn’t want to go too far.”

“What if there’s violence on the ground?” responded another team member in Twitter’s Dublin office. “Would we take action … or do we have to wait for violence — someone getting shot?”

The next day, a mob of Trump supporters stormed the U.S. Capitol, leaving five people dead and more than 100 police officers injured.

Two and a half years after those events, the role of social media companies in fomenting the violence remains a volatile topic. Twitter’s current owner, Elon Musk, commissioned a series of reports intended to reveal how the company had previously sought to squelch conservative speech, and a Republican-led committee in the House of Representatives is working to build the case that the tech giants have been digitally weaponized against conservative ideas.

But the video and other newly obtained internal Twitter records show that, far from working to censor pro-Trump sentiment in the days before the Capitol riot, the company’s leaders were intent on leaving it up — despite internal warnings that trouble was brewing.

Congressional Republicans, Trump supporters and Musk allies have condemned the company for suspending Trump’s account in the riot’s aftermath, saying its employees were too quick to punish the former president because of their liberal prejudice.

But the records reveal a company that fought until the end to give some of Trump’s most belligerent supporters the benefit of the doubt, even as its internal teams faced an overwhelming volume of tweets threatening retribution in line with Trump’s lies that the election had been stolen.

They also show that Twitter’s leaders were reluctant to take action against Trump’s account two days after the insurrection, even as lawyers inside the company argued that his continued praise of the Capitol rioters amounted to “glorification of violence,” an offense punishable then by suspension under Twitter’s rules.

Trump’s 88-million-follower account was ultimately suspended on the night of Jan. 8, hours after he’d tweeted that “great American Patriots … will not be disrespected or treated unfairly in any way, shape or form!!!” The suspension, the records show, was taken only after employees had assembled for executives a list of examples in which Twitter users responded to Trump’s tweets with calls for further violence across the United States.

The records also undercut claims that Twitter had worked on behalf of the Biden administration in freezing Trump’s account, as Trump claimed in a lawsuit against Twitter that was dismissed last year by a federal judge.

What the Jan. 6 probe found out about social media, but didn’t report

None of the records obtained by The Washington Post — including the 32-minute video, a five-page retrospective memo outlining the suspension discussions and a 114-page agenda document detailing the safety policy team’s meetings and conversations — show any contacts with federal officials pushing the company to take any action involving Trump’s account.

The records were part of a large set of Slack messages, policy documents and other files given to the House Jan. 6 committee in preparation for its landmark hearings, though the committee never made them public. The Post obtained the records from a person connected to the investigation, and their authenticity was confirmed by another person with knowledge of their contents.

The Post is not naming employees cited in the records due to the sensitivity of the matter. The Post was able to view the full video, whose existence, along with a partial description of its contents, was first reported by Rolling Stone.

Navaroli, who declined to comment, ultimately testified before Congress that Twitter’s reluctance to take action earlier had been fueled by anxiety over both the political and financial consequences of pushing out one of the platform’s biggest attractions.

Another former employee, who testified before the committee under the pseudonym J. Johnson, said “Twitter was terrified of the backlash they would get if they followed their own rules and applied them to Donald Trump.”

A former Twitter executive, who spoke on the condition of anonymity due to fear of harassment, said the leaders believed the company’s policies as they stood already applied to “coded” threats.

Investigators for the Jan. 6 committee wrote in a memo that Twitter had played a key role in helping provoke the Capitol riots by hosting and amplifying Trump’s incendiary statements about his 2020 election loss and that Twitter leadership had “hesitated to act until after the attack on the Capitol” and “changed course only after it was too late.”

The memo was circulated among committee members but was not made public due to hesitations about taking on issues that could divert the focus from Trump, three people familiar with the matter told The Post earlier this year.

On the night of Jan. 6, after law enforcement officials had fought to regain control of the Capitol grounds, Twitter briefly suspended Trump’s account but said it would allow him to return after 12 hours if he deleted three tweets that broke Twitter’s “civic integrity” rules against manipulating or interfering in elections. One tweet included a video in which he called for peace from the “very special” rioters who he said had been “hurt” because the “fraudulent election … was stolen from us.”

The former Twitter executive said the company sent Trump’s representatives an email on Jan. 6 saying that his account would face an immediate ban if he broke another rule and that the executives hoped, with a 12-hour time out, Trump would “get the message.”

I hear the echoes of Susan Collins: "I think the president has learned his lesson."

Trump deleted the tweets and, on Jan. 7, posted a conciliatory video in which he said “this moment calls for healing and reconciliation.” The next day, however, he tweeted a more fiery message about how the “American Patriots” who voted for him would “not be disrespected” and announced that he would not attend Joe Biden’s inauguration.

The tweets set off new alarms inside Twitter, according to a postmortem document written by Navaroli that detailed the company’s deliberations for the purpose of internal review.

In a Slack channel where the safety policy team discussed “escalations” requiring high-level consideration, members initially agreed that the tweets had not broken Twitter’s rules because they offered no clear “call to violence” or “target of abuse,” the document states.

The members drafted a short advisory memo saying as much, which was then passed to other departments, including to Twitter’s general counsel, Vijaya Gadde, and its chief executive, Jack Dorsey, who was working then from a French Polynesian island.

One of those departments, a team of internal lawyers that advised the safety policy team, wrote back with a different argument: that the “American Patriots” of Trump’s tweet could refer to the rioters who had just ransacked the Capitol, an interpretation that would violate Twitter’s “glorification of violence” policy, according to Navaroli’s document.

“They see it that ‘He is the leader of a violent extremist group who is glorifying the group and its recent actions,’” one employee wrote on Slack, describing the lawyers’ assessment. The message was first reported in the “Twitter Files,” a cache of internal documents Musk made available to a select group of writers.

“They now view him as the leader of a terrorist group responsible for violence/deaths comparable to Christchurch shooter or Hitler and on that basis and on the totality of his Tweets, he should be de-platformed,” the employee added.

The lawyers, according to the postmortem document, argued that the tweets should not be assessed in isolation but as part of “a continuation and culmination of rhetoric that led to deadly violence days before.”

Twitter moderators at the time had recorded many instances of pro-Trump accounts continuing to call for violence, including “additional occupations” of federal and state government buildings, the document said. Others were citing Trump’s commitment not to attend the inauguration as an indication that the event would be ripe for attack.

At the lawyers’ recommendation, members of the safety policy team drafted a second assessment ruling that Trump’s tweets had broken the rules against glorification of violence and recommending that his account be permanently suspended.

Twitter’s online competitors had already taken similar action. On Jan. 6, Facebook and Instagram suspended Trump’s accounts for 24 hours, and the next morning Facebook chief Mark Zuckerberg announced that the suspensions would be extended indefinitely, saying the risks of him using the sites after having incited and condoned a “violent insurrection” were “simply too great.”

And inside Twitter, everyone seemed to be on edge. Thousands of employees, most of whom were not involved in content-moderation decisions, had spoken out on Slack threads and video calls, urging the company to take stronger action against Trump and saying they were worried about their personal safety.

Still, some Twitter executives voiced hesitation about taking down Trump’s account, arguing that “reasonable minds could differ” as to the intentions of Trump’s tweets, according to Navaroli’s document. Twitter had for years declined to hold Trump to the same rules as everyone else on the basis that world leaders’ views were especially important for voters to hear.

At a 2 p.m. video call on Jan. 8, which was described in the document but not viewed by The Post, top officials in Twitter’s trust and safety team questioned the “glorification of violence” argument and debated whether the company should instead wait to act until Trump more blatantly broke the platform’s rules.

Reasonable people are always a bit hesitant to take action they think may be just as draconian as the authoritarians they're trying to combat. Asshole Daddy-Staters know this, and they count on it. That's how we get big fat juicy rationalizations like, "Well, at least he's not all weak and wishy-washy - he's decisive and bold, and a strong leader."

Navaroli argued that this course of inaction had “led us to the current crisis situation” and could lead “to the same end result — continued violence and death in a nation in the midst of a sociopolitical crisis,” the document shows.

In another call, around 3:30 p.m., after safety policy team members had compiled examples of tweets in which users detailed plans for future violence, Twitter’s top lawyers and policy officials voiced support for a “permanent suspension” of Trump’s account. One note in the safety policy agenda document read that there was a “team consensus that this is a [violation]” due to Trump’s “pattern of behavior.”

Their assessment was sent to Dorsey and Gadde for final approval and, at 6:21 p.m., Twitter’s policy team was notified over Slack that Trump had been suspended. A company tweet and blog post announced the decision to the world shortly after.

Dorsey later tweeted that he regretted having to approve a move that would “limit the potential for clarification, redemption and learning” but that he ultimately believed “we made a decision with the best information we had based on threats to physical safety.”

The suspension, as it turned out, was not permanent. Trump’s Twitter account was reinstated late last year at the direction of Musk, who has called the suspension tyrannical.

In February, executives at Facebook and Instagram parent company Meta also ended Trump’s two-year account suspension, saying they’d surveyed the “current environment” and determined that “the risk has sufficiently receded.” And this month, YouTube said it would no longer remove videos that falsely claimed the 2020 election had been stolen, arguing that the removals could curtail “political speech without meaningfully reducing the risk of violence.”

Trump has yet to use his restored Twitter account, choosing instead to post messages, known as “truths,” to a website he owns called Truth Social. But it is there, if he ever wants to, and still has 86 million followers.

Today's Pro Left Podcast

Yesterday's, actually.

Plenty of rakes, and more than enough Republicans to step on all of 'em.