BEN RHODES SMILES: Negotiator Says Two Countries Will Benefit From Biden’s New Nuke Deal with Iran — Neither of Them Are the U.S.

As I pointed out on Friday, Old Joe Biden’s handlers, in yet another of their endless series of decisions that could easily have catastrophic consequences for ordinary Americans, has turned over the leadership of the Iran nuke deal negotiations in Vienna to a Russian diplomat, Mikhail Ulyanov. What assurance do the blinkered Secretary of State Antony Blinken and his hopelessly America-Last subordinates have that Ulyanov (who, incidentally, shares a name with none other than Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, founder of the Soviet Union, whose original surname was Ulyanov) will fight for the best interests of the United States? None, of course. And now Mikhail Ulyanov has explained, in a video that surfaced on Twitter Sunday, that the deal is shaping up to be terrific — for the Islamic Republic of Iran and the People’s Republic of China.

China and Iran, you say? What would the blustering Joe Biden of 1997 say to the sclerotic old “Trunalimunumaprzure!” Biden of 2022?

WATCH 🚨 When Russians told Biden in 1997 that NATO expansion would force Russia to look to China, Biden replied, "Good luck." (Video: C-SPAN) pic.twitter.com/YynC7FhiWd

— Insider Paper (@TheInsiderPaper) March 8, 2022

(Updated and bumped.)

REPORT: Ukraine Parents Rush 18th-Month-Old Baby to Hospital; Boy Hit by Shrapnel Amid Russian Shelling of Port City of Mariupol (Video).

BURIED LEDE: CBS reports news harmful to Democrats: The hit to your pocketbook from higher gasoline prices: $2,000 a year.

UPDATE (FROM GLENN): Now do groceries.

IMPEACH BIDEN:

So the precedent is firmly established, thanks to Nancy Pelosi, Adam Schiff, et al. But the Republicans don’t need to ground an impeachment effort in petty allegations that amount to little more than policy differences. The Republicans could justify an impeachment based on a host of Biden policies that violate the Constitution and are clearly impeachable offenses. The GOP has a duty and an obligation to hold Biden accountable.

But there is no rush. Impeachment hearings should last as long as necessary—say, six months or so—so that every American will know about Biden Administration’s unprecedented assault on our constitutional rights in time for 2024. Impeachment needs to be used as an educational tool to inform undecided and low-information voters about the real criminal nature of the Biden regime.

Under the Constitution, impeachable offenses include treason, bribery, and “high crimes and misdemeanors.” The last phrase is generally thought to mean “an abuse of public trust” such as violating the Constitution and endangering our national security. As Senator Ted Cruz (R-Texas) points out, there are “multiple grounds” to impeach Biden. Here are a few:

Flashback: The Democrats damned Biden by impeaching Trump. “These are the consequences Joe Biden’s party has reaped — the eventual impeachment of every president going forward should the opposing party control the House. The Democrats are going to have to live with their actions, norms be damned, as they were warned. Joe Biden really shouldn’t be impeached for the conditions he set on that phone call, but that no longer matters. The game has new rules, and he is going to be made to play by them. Should Biden be impeached over that phone call, or more appropriately for the avoidable deaths of 13 Americans, the most in a single day in Afghanistan since 2011, his party and their media allies will surely call it a sham and a political stunt. However, they won’t be able to say they weren’t warned.”

FALCONS WR CALVIN RIDLEY SUSPENDED FOR 2022 SEASON FOR BETTING ON NFL GAMES.

GALAXY BRAIN: Oblivious to Consequences, Hostin Calls for Ukraine No-Fly Zone on The View.

RUSSIA-UKRAINE WAR: NYC on ‘ultra-high alert’ amid increased risk of Russian retaliatory cyberattack.

AMERICA’S NEWSPAPER OF RECORD: Biden Sells Alaska Back To Russia So We Can Start Drilling For Oil There Again.

LET’S DISCUSS WHAT’S HAPPENING IN RUSSIA: “To put it simply, it’s going full fascist. Authorities launched a propaganda campaign to gain popular support for their invasion of Ukraine and they’re getting lots of it. You can see ‘Z’ on these guys’ clothes. What does it mean?”

Well-illustrated Twitter thread that should be read in full.

IT’S COME TO THIS: New York and Chicago look at “platform doors” to stop subway attacks.

The New York subway began in 1904. As Jazz Shaw writes, “Part of me wonders why nobody thought of this before now. I’ve used the subway in Gotham many times, but I don’t think it ever occurred to me to ask why the rail platforms just suddenly end with an abrupt drop down onto the tracks with no sort of safety barrier in the way. I suppose people just assumed that this is how it’s always been and that must be for a reason…The danger levels have been seriously amplified by the proliferation of mentally unstable homeless people and gang activity. The very idea of randomly shoving someone down into the path of an oncoming train should have always been unthinkable for any sane, rational person. But the percentage of sane, rational people hanging out in the metro systems around our country clearly seems to be decreasing.”

HOW IT STARTED: Canceling The Keystone Pipeline And Reducing U.S. Arms Are Biden’s First Two Major Gifts To Russia.

—The Federalist, January 26, 2021.

How it’s going: Biden may travel to Saudi Arabia in quest for oil, report says, as Russia ban remains possibility.

—Fox Business, today.

And if Saudi Arabia doesn’t work out: ‘Just a complete circus:’ Joe Biden fights climate change by considering easing sanctions on oil from Venezuela (no, we still can’t drill here).

As Bryan Dean White tweets, “Joe Biden is frantically searching the globe to see if anyone but Texas might have some spare oil.”

Hard to believe that prior to 2021, “the United States was a net exporter of oil and natural gas. When operating at capacity – which requires the cooperation of the government on a number of fronts – we have more than enough fuel to meet all of our needs. We’re just not doing what needs to be done to get it to all of the places where it’s needed. So yes, Joe Biden has significant (though not complete) control over energy prices.”

Related: Biden tormented by Republican guerrilla campaign and ‘I did it’ stickers.

Also: 100Pcs I Did That Biden Funny Car Stickers. #Resist #CommissionEarned

UPDATE: “Saudi Arabia isn’t having it. Because the left, in another Get Trump operation, attempted to make Saudi Arabia a ‘pariah’ over the claimed assassination of Qatar spy Jamal Khashoggi…Bin Salman isn’t making it easier on Biden to repair their relations. He appeared to go out of his way to aggravate the White House during an interview with the Atlantic published last week. ‘We don’t have the right to lecture you in America,’ he said. ‘The same goes the other way.’”

Stay tuned.

(Updated and bumped.)

KAROL MARKOWICZ: Why we must demand that leaders who got COVID wrong admit it and apologize.

As COVID restrictions end around the country, and Democratic politicians pretend that something about the science has changed instead of their poll numbers being in the dirt, Americans must first demand: apologies.

Here, I’ll even go first. I spent much of 2020 and 2021 writing again and again arguing for the opening of schools throughout the country. But in March 2020, I was one of the leading voices urging schools to close.

It made no sense to me that my husband had stopped going into the office because of the mysterious new virus but my children continued to go to school. People were dying in large numbers in Italy and I was afraid.

I never imagined that “two weeks to slow the spread” would turn into two years, and counting, of pausing the lives of children to accommodate hypochondriac adults.

I was wrong. I’m sorry.

Now you go.

Related: The Democratic Party’s emerging priority: Save the governors.

The photo of lockdown-obsessed Gretchen Whitmer atop the Politco’s article says everything, but as we saw with the attempt to recall Gavin Newsom, there are plenty of blue state residents with a severe case of Stockholm Syndrome.

JIM TREACHER: The Russian Jimmy Kimmel Has More Integrity Than the Actual Jimmy Kimmel. But then, who doesn’t?

Also:

Police officers in Moscow today are stopping people, demanding to see their phones, READING THEIR MESSAGES, and refusing to release them if they refuse. This from Kommersant journalist Ana Vasilyeva. https://t.co/E8oBw3XPz1 pic.twitter.com/rxk7AmdzOp

— Kevin Rothrock (@KevinRothrock) March 6, 2022

As Treacher writes, “Damn. Where do they think they are, Canada?”

MICHAEL WALSH: How We Got Here.

The seeds of the conflict in the Ukraine, now the subject of both a shooting war and a ferocious propaganda barrage on both sides—and by “both sides” I mean Russia vs. the West, using Ukraine as its proxy—were sown more than 30 years ago, in the aftermath of the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the collapse of the Soviet Union on Boxing Day in 1991. At what seemed almost a single stroke, the goal of American foreign policy for the previous four decades had been achieved. The mother church of Marxism-Leninism had fallen, the Evil Empire destroyed, and the brave new world of “the end of history and the last man” was dawning.

Although Ronald “we win, they lose” Reagan was out of office, this was the Gipper’s triumph. Playing poker against the Soviets’ aging and disillusioned chess masters, Reagan bet the house on the Strategic Defense Initiative—widely opposed and even mocked by the pro-Russian Leftist press, led by the New York Times (who else?), as “Star Wars”—and essentially bankrupted the Kremlin. Unfamiliar with the concept of a bluff, Mikhail Gorbachev turned over his king and walked away from the board.

I vividly recall standing outside in the freezing cold of a mid-February day in Dresden, on the 40th anniversary of the firebombing of the city by British and American bombers in 1945. Standing in front of the newly restored Semper Opera House, Erich Honecker, the East German party boss, gave a stemwinder of a speech, inveighing against the very “Star Wars” (that was the term he used: Sternkriege) the Times was mocking stateside. “I think Star Wars is bullshit,” whispered a German-speaking American colleague of mine, “but it sure has these guys scared.” Within six years, both the German Democratic Republic and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics were gone.

Read the whole thing.

RADICAL CHIC, THE TRUNALIMUNUMAPRZURE YEARS: New Documents Show NBC Promised To Go Easy On Biden Official’s Domestic Terrorism.

New documents obtained through a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request by the government watchdog Protect the Public’s Trust shared exclusively with The Federalist show NBC News sought to downplay a key Biden nominee’s links to domestic terrorism.

As President Joe Biden’s pick to lead the Bureau of Land Management (BLM), Tracy Stone-Manning, faced controversy for her involvement with a 1989 Idaho tree spiking case last summer, NBC’s Josh Lederman sought comment from the Interior Department whether the administration stood by its nominee for the preeminent land agency.

Stone-Manning had been granted immunity in the case when she agreed to testify against her co-conspirators that she had retyped and sent an anonymous letter to the Forest Service for her friend and former roommate, John T. Blount. The letter warned of 500 pounds of “spikes measuring 8 to 10 inches in length” driven into trees of the Clearwater National Forest targeted for harvest. Such spikes can kill and maim foresters, firefighters, and animals.

“We will not go overboard on it or anything,” Lederman promised Interior Spokeswoman Melissa Schwartz on July 8. “It’s a legitimate story given the position to which she has been nominated. But we will point out that a) she did not participate in spiking trees herself, b) she was not charged, c) this was decades ago when she was in her early 20s, and d) her record is otherwise unblemished.”

Just think of the media as Democratic Party operatives with bylines, and it all makes sense.

Evergreen:

Flashback: White House ‘working behind the scenes’ with media to get positive coverage.

COVERING THE IMPORTANT STORIES: Star Trek Fan Launches Petition To Have Alex Kurtzman’s Star Trek Designated As Non-Canon.

UNEXPECTEDLY: Russia Cracks Down on the Free Press, Bans ‘False’ Reporting About Ukraine War. “One of the most annoying things during the Trump presidency was mainstream media journalists crying ‘press freedom’ when the former president was mean to them or criticized their coverage. Now, amid Russia’s terrible invasion of Ukraine, we’re seeing what a crackdown on press freedom actually looks like—and it ain’t pretty.”

DON SURBER: Trumpenfreude for Twitter.

BBC, Bloomberg and CNN are shutting down their bureaus to avoid the law. Their call. They don’t always stand up to censorship. From 1991 to 2003, CNN kept its bureau open in Baghdad by acquiescing to Saddam Hussein’s demands. No one in the media batted an eye when CNN finally admitted it as the Hussein regime fell.

So really, I don’t want to hear media complaints about Putin, who may or may not be as bad as Hussein.

I ain’t a farmer but I hear you reap what you sow.

And this crop of Trumpenfreude tastes mighty good.

Read the whole thing.

Related: Putin Is Doing All He Can to Shut Down the News, but CNN Just Did Him a Favor.

JUST AS LONG AS SLIM PICKENS ISN’T IN THE COCKPIT: Take a peek inside the massive “Stratofortress” B-52s currently doing laps around Eastern Europe.

THAT SHOULD DO IT: Biden OKs release of 30 million barrels of oil from Strategic Petroleum Reserve.

Earlier: The Strategic Petroleum Reserve only covers a fraction of US energy demands.

“WHAT IS BAD FOR THE REDS IS GOOD FOR ME:” Sarah Weinman on the Not-So-Unlikely Friendship Between Vladimir Nabokov and William F. Buckley, Jr.

“Let me simplify matters by saying that in my parlor politics as well as in open-air statements . . . I content myself with remarking that what is bad for the Reds is good for me,” Nabokov told the New York Times in 1968. Nabokov, of course, was not answering this question off-the-cuff over a telephone line, but in a carefully composed written response to queries sent in advance. Which is perhaps why the continuation of his answer went into more detail without giving too much away:

I do not have any neatly limited political views or rather that such views as I have shade off into a vague old-fashioned liberalism. Much less vaguely—quite adamantically, or even admantinely—I am aware of a central core of spirit in me that flashes and jeers at the brutal farce of totalitarian states, such as Russia, and her embarrassing tumors, such as China. A feature of my inner prospect is the absolute abyss yawning between the barbed-wire tangle of police states and the spacious freedom of thought we enjoy in America and Western Europe.

What Nabokov did not reveal to the paper was that, by this point, he had been such an avid reader of National Review that William F. Buckley had given him and his wife, Vera, a lifetime subscription. (“The National Review has always been a joy to read . . . and your articles in the Herald Tribune counteract wonderfully the evil and trash of its general politics,” Nabokov wrote Buckley in 1973.) A couple of years later, in August 1970, Vera Nabokov sent a check for $49.95 (nearly $360 in today’s dollars) to cover a two-year subscription to the magazine. “As long as I am alive, you will receive National Review with my compliments because you made the mistake of being so generous with me,” Buckley replied a month later.

The Buckley-Nabokov friendship dated to the late 1950s, around the time of the American publication, and astounding success, of Lolita. The novel’s triumph after several frustrating years of limbo, including its original, error-filled, argument-inciting 1955 publication by the Olympia Press, was the culmination of the Nabokovs’ time in the United States, a far cry from their imperiled emigre status escaping the Nazis in 1940. Lolita meant freedom, not just from tyranny, but from having to earn a living in academia. The novel’s success eventually afforded Vladimir and Vera the means to leave Ithaca, New York, where Nabokov taught literature at Cornell University, for Montreux, Switzerland, in 1961.

Read the whole thing.

WHY IS THE LEFT SUCH A CESSPIT OF RACISM? UC Berkeley Prof. Zeus Leonardo: Abolish Whiteness, Abolish White People.

VISA, MASTERCARD GRANT ZELENSKY’S REQUEST, BAN ALL OPERATIONS IN RUSSIA.

The Breaking News Online (by way of the Wall Street Journal) reports, “Visa and Mastercard cards account for 74% of payment transactions in Russia.”

Similarly: Paypal Shuts Down Services in Russia Over Ukraine Invasion.

UPDATE: Russian Banks to Switch to Chinese Card System after Visa, Mastercard Suspend Operations in Russia. “Multiple Russian banks on Sunday announced plans to begin issuing cards using a Chinese card operator’s system with Russia’s Mir network after Visa and MasterCard pulled out of Russia. Sberbank, Alfa Bank and Tinkoff all said they would begin using the Chinese UnionPay system, according to Reuters.”

MORE: American Express Suspends Operations in Russia and Belarus.

(Updated and bumped.)

IN ACCORDANCE WITH THE PROPHECY:

Here’s the underlying Free Beacon article: As Russia Wages War, US Army Trains Officers on Gender Identity.

MR. SULU HAS SPOKEN: George Takei says Americans should consider paying higher gas and food prices to be a ‘patriotic donation in the fight for freedom’ (and people have thoughts).

Of course, some people can absorb those “patriotic donations” much more easily than others:

Or to put it another way: