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Archive for 2022
March 2, 2022
HMM: Why Isn’t Russia’s Bomber Fleet Attacking Ukraine In Mass?
These bombers have the entirety of Ukraine within range. They can fly in Russian air space, fire missiles, land, re-arm, and do it again, according to defense writer David Axe.
An unnamed U.S. defense official said that 75 Russian bombers fired cruise missiles and other types of air-to-ground missiles in the early days of the war. These sorties were targeted at Ukrainian command and control centers, radars, anti-aircraft systems, plus fuel and ammunition dumps.
If I had to guess, Russian bombers have seen limited use for two reasons: Readiness and a dwindling supply of missiles.
They shot off what they could early on but the Russian Air Force just didn’t have the spares or resupply to maintain the bomber offensive.
That’s yet another sign that Putin was counting on a quick and decisive Desert Saber-style attack.
So now the supposedly reformed and remodeled Russian Army is back to doing things the old way: Firing artillery at stuff until the rubble stops bouncing.
One last thought: If Russia’s bomber force simply isn’t up to a sustained offensive, that’s very good for Western war planners to know.
SALENA ZITO: The hypocrisy of Coca-Cola.
In March of last year, days after Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp signed new voting reform legislation, Atlanta-based Coca-Cola CEO James Quincey said, “This legislation is unacceptable. It is a step backwards … and needs to be remedied, and we will continue to advocate for it both in private and now even more in public.”
The massive soft drink company wasn’t alone — it brought a wave of corporate backlash aimed at Kemp, Georgia Republicans, and Republicans in general. Within days, Major League Baseball had pulled the All Star Game out of the state. Delta Airlines, Home Depot, Porsche Cars, and the Atlanta Falcons — all Georgia-based companies — also slammed the law based on false Democratic Party talking points about what it said and did.
And, of course, Coca-Cola also tweeted its displeasure with the law.
One year later, Coca-Cola is eerily silent on Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Russia is one of the company’s most profitable markets, as the soda giant operates out of the country as Swiss-based bottler Coca-Cola HBC. It announced last Tuesday they had contingency plans to cope with the crisis, which included stockpiling ingredients to limit any disruption in their massive Russian market.
Coca-Cola HBC gets approximately 21% of its volume from Russia and Ukraine, where it also has operations. The workers in Ukraine were sent home last week.
Earlier: Disney and Apple Admonish Russia, But What About China?
IF ONLY SOMEONE HAD WARNED THEM: Concerns grow over unvetted Afghan ‘suspected terrorists’ let into US.
WHEN THEY’RE SAYING IT IN THE ATLANTIC: Good Luck Convincing Anyone That The Economy is Strong.
Biden’s presidential-approval ratings are more tightly correlated with consumer confidence than Trump’s or Obama’s, in part because of Democrats’ dissatisfaction with how things are going. The chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan, the Delta and Omicron coronavirus waves, the sputtering of the Democrats’ election-reform and social-infrastructure bills, and, perhaps most of all, the false assurance that inflation would be “temporary”—all of those factors led Democrats and moderates to turn on Biden. “There’s no way for Biden, and Democrats generally, to offer a counternarrative that’s going to be as attractive as the bad news,” Sides told me. “It’s been very hard for Democrats to feel optimistic.” . . .
Twenty bucks more on groceries, a hundred more on rent, a thousand more for a used car. Such price increases add up, and hit low-income families much, much harder than high-income ones. Bigger shares of poor families’ budgets go to necessities, and it is easier for the wealthy to trade down or comparison shop. (Switching out Whole Foods for Safeway is simple; switching out Family Dollar for anything cheaper is close to impossible.)
Yep.
KRUISER’S MORNING BRIEF: Biden’s SOTU—Hey Racist Terrorists, Let’s Try Unity and Stuff. “A lot of the reports were mentioning Biden’s call for unity, which is impossible to take seriously coming from a man who calls his political opponents racists and terrorists and uses his Dept. of Justice to silence them.”
JEFFREY CARTER: Taking An Attack Column to Task. “Instead of the blogpost being a good lesson on accounting, it is a great lesson in politically biased writing. She makes a lot of innuendos that have no merit in fact.”
UPDATE: Link was bad before. Fixed now. Sorry!
WELL, YES: GOP to Biden: Drill, Baby, Drill.
WAS IT OVER WHEN THE IRANIAN PEOPLE BOMBED PEARL HARBOR? Joe Biden flubs speech appearing to call Ukrainians ‘Iranian people’ during State of the Union.
Related: “Go Get Him!” Final 3 words of Biden’s State of the Union speech have people guessing.
UKRAINE WAR: Shocking Lessons U.S. Military Leaders Learned by Watching Putin’s Invasion.
Other military observers are flabbergasted that a Russian invasion force, fully prepared and operating from Russian soil, has been able to move just tens of miles into an adjoining country. One retired U.S. Army general told Newsweek in an email: “We know that Russia has a plodding army and that Russian military force has always been a blunt instrument, but why risk the antipathy of the entire planet if you have no prospect of achieving even minimal gains.” The Army general believes that the only explanation is that the Kremlin overestimated its own forces.
“I believe that at the heart of Russian military thinking is how Marshall Zhukov marched across Eastern Europe to Berlin,” a former high-level CIA official told Newsweek in an interview. Zhukov’s orders were to “line up the artillery and … flatten everything ahead of you,” he says. “‘Then send in the peasant Army to kill or rape anyone left alive.’ Subtle the Russians are not.”
In the short term, Russia’s military failures in Ukraine increase the threat of escalation, including the possibility of the use of nuclear weapons. But in the longer term, if escalation doesn’t worsen and the Ukrainian conflict can be contained, Russian conventional military weakness upends many assumptions that geopolitical strategists—even those inside the U.S. government—make about Russia as a military threat.
I wrote a couple of weeks ago that Putin going to war in Ukraine risked “showing for all the world to see his military’s real limitations.”
Maybe Putin should read a little more VodkaPundit and a little less of his own press clippings in Russia Today.
THEN THEY MAY HAVE TO GET RID OF HIM: Even Russia’s oligarchs can’t get Putin to change his mind.
Related: CNBC: Ruble crashes again, “standard of living” now at risk.
THE STRATEGIC THREAT FROM “NET ZERO” EMISSIONS.
JOHN PODHORETZ: According to Joe Biden, everything is going great.
The crisis in Ukraine changed that somewhat, because it has given his presidency a new purpose and direction. But you could see the outlines of the effort to change gears in the surprising passage about policing, in which he made a slight feint toward a Sister Souljah moment in taking on his own radicals.
He spoke movingly about the two young NYPD officers shot in cold blood in January and then insisted that “we should all agree: the answer is not to ‘defund the police.’ The answer is to FUND the police with the resources and training they need to protect our communities.”
Even so, you can tell that Joe Biden thinks his presidency is going swimmingly. His words weren’t defensive. They were triumphalist. He even seemed to promise he would bring the opioid epidemic to an end and, for good measure, would also end cancer “as we know it.”
The immodesty of these ambitions, as we stumble out of the COVID era into an uncertain future in which the dollars in our pocket are worth less every week while Europe faces a continental war and a potential refugee flood of colossal size, had a somewhat delusional aspect.
We’re in an unprecedented crisis abroad, following our unprecedented health crisis over the past two years and an inflationary spiral we haven’t seen the like of in four decades.
Maybe we should, you know, focus on those things.
As someone Steve linked to last night in his drunkblog noted, “This speech sounds like it was written by pollsters — politically terrified pollsters.“
HE’S A SURVIVOR: Manchin Lines Up With GOP Against Bill to Codify Abortion Into Law.
HAVE YOU NOTICED LEFTISTS ARE ALWAYS GOING AFTER PEOPLE FOR TELLING THE TRUTH? Seattle Antifa Leftists Target TV Reporter for Telling the Truth About Drugged Out ‘Homeless.’
WE CAN HOPE: Coalition for TJ v. Fairfax County School Board: The Shape of Things to Come?
Nevertheless, just as fundamental economic realities exist regardless of contrary wishful thinking, those who have adopted the Kendian concept of “equity” as official policy are learning that the law is not so easily ignored. An excellent example of this occurred last week in the case of Coalition for TJ v. Fairfax County School Board, where a federal court entered a summary judgment declaring such a Kendian program flatly illegal.
The case arose out of a new admissions program for Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology (“TJ”), a highly regarded public high school in affluent Northern Virginia, a suburb of Washington, D.C.. Historically, admission to TJ has been extremely competitive, with applicants having to satisfy certain minimum requirements (such as a minimum core GPA of 3.0 and scores above certain thresholds on three standardized tests) to be eligible to apply for admission. As with many other STEM-focused programs, this merit-based admission process resulted in large numbers of Asian-American students at TJ: the 2020-21 class was 71.79% Asian-American, 18.34% white, 3.05% Hispanic, and 1.77% Black, whereas the overall student population of the area was 36.8% white, 27.1% Hispanic, 19.8% Asian-American, and 10% Black. . . .
A coalition of local parents (including many parents of Asian-American students) sued, claiming the Board’s actions constituted illegal racial discrimination. The Court found that the evidence was uncontroverted that the Board did in fact act with racially discriminatory intent, and thus the Court was required to examine the policy under strict scrutiny analysis. As typically occurs once strict scrutiny is invoked, the Court found that the Board did not meet the exceedingly high bar that the law requires for intentional racial discrimination (i.e., existence of a compelling interest and means that are narrowly tailored to achieve that interest). The Court notably rejected the typical word game of recasting discrimination as “pursuing diversity.” . . .
The Court thus recognized what Judge Ho and many other commentators have been saying for years: the Kendian concept of viewing every racial “imbalance” as sufficient justification for positive discrimination to achieve “balance” or “equity” is illegal under very well settled law. To me, the Court’s decision in this case was easy, and I hope it will inspire others to file similar challenges against DEI programs.
“Antiracism” is various flavors of stupid and evil, and it is absolutely unAmerican.
FROM PAM UPHOFF: Murder at Kozlov House. #CommissionEarned.
A Murder Mystery in the Fall of the Alliance series.
A Garden Party at Kozlov House, the Host murdered! Detective Inspector Smirnov is back to find the killer. Was it the angry Wife? A Political Rival? The son? The professor? Or . . . something more sinister?
WITH A CHAIR AND A WHIP, IN MY CASE: Psychologist reveals how to train your brain to sleep better.
In my case? Step 1 – Remove Marxists from positions of power. Step 2- Educate people about the horrors of Marxism, so it can never happen again.
I’d sleep like a baby. Like a baby, I tell you.
I AGREE, BUT IF VARIOUS LATIN GOP GROUPS STOP TRYING TO RECRUIT ME TO RUN, I’LL BE VERY GRATEFUL: New Blood Needed.
D*mn it, Jim, I’m a fiction writer, not a politician. I might or might not be a polemicist. Look, it’s late, and I don’t have to confess. I’d plead the fifth, but I haven’t unpacked the Devil’s Cut yet and I’d hate to open the brand new bottle of Writers’ Tears.
A GUN BEHIND EVERY BLADE OF GRASS: The Ukrainian People’s Struggle Reminds Us Why We Need the Second Amendment.
If Russia thinks that the Ukraine is tough going, perhaps they shouldn’t even consider touching the USA. In fact, don’t even think about us, Ivan. Because you don’t have enough nukes. And our gun industry is going brrrrrrrt so hard that you should be able to feel it in Moscow. Heck, the guns we’ve lost while taking them for jaunts on our lakes and rivers and streams are more than you can even think of in your most sanguinary moments. And if those aren’t enough, our kids spend their waking hours day dreaming of 3-d printable guns.
Ignore America. The rest of the world might buy your bullsh*t. With us? It’s no sale all the way. Yes, I know what the Junta has told you. Look at the collective derpiness of them. Would you trust these people to tie their own shoes without help? I assure you though that’s not America. In America we keep our demented, stupid and delusional in DC. The rest of the country will make you think the thing with Ukraine was a picnic for kiddies, in the park.
Ignore the encouragement of the Junta. We do.
IF ALL YOU HAVE IS A HAMMER AND SICKLE: NYT’s Nikole Hannah-Jones blasts ‘racialized’ coverage of Ukraine war.
DRILL, BABY DRILL: It’s Time For US To Re-Establish Energy Dominance.
PERHAPS THEY OUGHT COMPLAIN TO PUTIN – I’M SURE HE’D BE SYMPATHETIC: Russian porn stars moaning after they’re banned from OnlyFans during Ukraine invasion.
Short form: Liberals project like an IMAX.