Not watching the Jackson confirmation hearings. Not, not, not. I am having enough trouble just dealing with the news stories about it. Someone would have to pay me big bucks to watch it.

For example, I’m reading Ryan Bort at Rolling Stone, Marsha Blackburn Lectures First Black Woman Nominated to Supreme Court on ‘So-Called’ White Privilege.

Sen. Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.) went so far as to suggest to Jackson, a Black woman, that white privilege doesn’t exist in America, a country where of the 114 justices to have been confirmed to sit on the highest court in the land, only two have been Black.

“You serve on the board of a school that teaches kindergartners, five-year-old children, that they can choose their gender, and that teaches them about so-called white privilege,” Blackburn said after bashing the “radical left.”

Blackburn continued to drill down on critical race theory, the GOP’s culture-war topic du jour. “You have praised the 1619 Project, which argues the U.S. is a fundamentally racist country, and you have made clear that you believe judges must consider critical race theory when deciding how to sentence criminal defendants,” she said. “Is it your personal hidden agenda to incorporate critical race theory into our legal system?”

You will probably not be surprised to learn that Blackburn was lying when she said “you have made clear that you believe judges must consider critical race theory when deciding how to sentence criminal defendants.” Here’s a fact check from the Associated Press:

Blackburn appeared to be referring to a speech in which Jackson described how she encouraged students to study federal sentencing policy as an academic area implicating many topics.

“Sentencing is just plain interesting on an intellectual level, in part because it melds together myriad types of law — criminal law, of course, but also administrative law, constitutional law, critical race theory, negotiations, and to some extent, even contracts,” Jackson said in her speech. “And if that’s not enough to prove to them that sentencing is a subject … worth studying, I point out that sentencing policy implicates and intersects with various other intellectual disciplines as well, including philosophy, psychology, history, statistics, economics, and politics.”

In other words, she indicates that “critical race theory” might be one of many potential factors at play in sentencing, not a mandatory consideration.

Per the AP, Blackburn also falsely accused Jackson of wanting to mass release all criminal defendants in the custody of the D.C. Department of Corrections because of the covid pandemic, but again, that’s not true, either. Blackburn was misquoting a decision by Jackson in which she refused to release a prisoner because of the covid pandemic.

The lies keep coming, Sen. John Cornyn claimed that Judge Jackson once accused President George W. Bush and his SecDef, Donald Rumsfeld, of war crimes. Alas, she did not.

Back to Ryan Bort:

Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) spent most of his opening statement whining about Democrats’ treatment of Justice Brett Kavanaugh after they wanted to question the then-nominee after he was credibly accused of sexual assault, but he also echoed widespread GOP concern that Jackson’s skin color had more to do with her nomination than her credentials. “I want the Supreme Court to look more like the country, but I want it to operate within the confines of the Constitution,” he said.

The Washington Postpointed out on Sunday that, if confirmed, Jackson would be the only active Supreme Court justice to have attended an Ivy League law school, clerked for a Supreme Court justice, served as a public defender, served on the sentencing commission, served as a U.S. District Court judge, and served as a U.S. Court of Appeals judge.

She seems to be qualified.

It wouldn’t matter to Republicans how qualified she is. She’s a black woman. Therefore, she’s, um, suspicious.

Miz Lindsey actually “stormed out” of the hearing at one point, although exactly why isn’t clear. Every news story I look at gives a different reason. This may be it, from the New York Daily News:

There is a growing consensus among military experts that Russia has already lost the Ukraine War it had planned to have. This is not to say Ukraine is “winning,” but that the original Russian plan — a quick strike to topple and replace the government — is now irretrievably out of reach. So Russia now seems to be determined to bomb, destroy, and besiege Ukraine into oblivion. Once the cities are destroyed and most of the population has either fled or been killed, then the Russian boots on the ground can march and seize control of territory. See How Putin Bungled His Invasion of Ukraine at Foreign Policy.

And this is all because Vladimir Putin doesn’t dare admit defeat in his vanity war. Russian leaders who are defeated tend to get deposed.

U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin said yesterday that the Russian invasion was stalled.

Austin shared his assessment during an interview with CBS’s “Face the Nation” that aired on Sunday. Referring to Russian President Vladimir Putin, Austin said the situation has “had the effect of him moving his forces into a wood chipper.”

“The Ukrainians have continued to attrit his forces and they’ve been very effective, using the equipment that we provided them, and armor weapons and aircraft weapons. And again, significant resolve on the part of the Ukrainian people,” he added.

The U.S. Defense Department estimates that about 7,000 Russian troops have been killed so far, with tens of thousands injured.

It’s very frustrating to watch a mass atrocity happen and not do more to stop it, even though the reasons for standing back are valid. The Wall Street Journal reports that “The U.S. is sending some of the Soviet-made air defense equipment it secretly acquired decades ago to bolster the Ukrainian military as it seeks to fend off Russian air and missile attacks, U.S. officials said.” Well, that’s something.

The Ukraine War ought to have caused a whole lot of people to re-evaluate a whole lot of assumptions. But I don’t think it has. Instead, it has weirdly brought the pro-Putin MAGA heads and the democratic socialist Left closer together in the same ball park, although they’re sitting in different sections.

On the Right, you’ve got Christian nationalists who see Putin as an ally — he’s a homophobe, after all — and who think the Ukraine War is a fulfillment of Old Testament prophecy (see Those Who Look to Big Daddy Putin). And you’ve got those in love with authoritarianism who want America to be led by a white macho dictator who will restore white male hegemony. And then you’ve got people who just reflexively use whatever is at hand to bash Democrats. War in Ukraine? It must be Joe Biden’s fault, because he’s weak. And even with all the atrocities and inhumanity being displayed in the news day after day, I don’t see them budging from those views.

What’s really terrifying is that Francis “end of history” Fukuyama was on teevee last week saying that no way would Vladimir Putin resort to nuclear weapons. This means it’s a good time to build a bomb shelter and stock up on iodine pills.

But I am also fed up with a lot of Lefties who believe that this war must be America’s fault, somehow. Before the invasion I heard people ask “Why is Joe Biden trying to start a war?” Huh? Apparently warnings from the administration that a Russian invasion of Ukraine was imminent was “war mongering,” while the Russian troop buildup around Ukraine was not. I also saw much speculation that the CIA was somehow behind Russia’s invasion.

Many are still blaming NATO. I learned only recently that the platform of the Democratic Socialists of America for some time had called for the dismantling of NATO.

To me, the DSA official position on the Ukraine War just plain reeks of privileged naïveté.

There is no solution through war or further intervention. This crisis requires an immediate international antiwar response demanding de-escalation, international cooperation, and opposition to unilateral coercive measures, militarization, and other forms of economic and military brinkmanship that will only exacerbate the human toll of this conflict.

DSA reaffirms our call for the US to withdraw from NATO and to end the imperialist expansionism that set the stage for this conflict. We call on antiwar activists in the US and across the world to oppose violent escalations, demand a lasting diplomatic solution, and stress the crucial need to accept any and all refugees resulting from this crisis. Much of the next ten years are coming into view through this attack. While the failures of neoliberal order are clear to everyone, the ruling class is trying to build a new world, through a dystopic transition grounded in militarism, imperialism, and war. Socialists have a duty to build an alternative. 

I want them to go stand in the streets of Kyiv and read that. See how Ukrainians react.

Eric Levitz writes at New York magazine,

Within the small world of self-identified American leftists, however, the DSA’s substantive positions are far from marginal. Indeed, a large contingent of prominent left-wing writers, activists, and organizations have argued in recent days for ending indiscriminate U.S. sanctions against Russia, withholding military aid from Ukraine, and immediately dismantling NATO. This contingent’s perspective deserves to be taken seriously. For one thing, its analysis spotlights many inconvenient truths that few other American political factions wish to acknowledge. As importantly, however, the weakness of some of its arguments reflect genuine pathologies within the U.S. left’s foreign-policy thinking — above all, an ideological rigidity that leaves American socialists ill-equipped to interpret the emerging multipolar world order, and therefore, to change it.

The “many inconvenient truths” appears to refer to the Maidan Revolution of 2014, which was either a U.S. backed far-right coup or the Ukranian people ousting an authoritarian pro-Russian government, depending on whom you choose to believe, I guess. I wasn’t there; I have no idea. It’s fairly clear that the enormous majority of Ukrainians don’t want to be part of Russia now, and that’s what I know.

And then there is NATO. NATO expansion is to blame, we are told. Poor Vladimir Putin didn’t have a choice but to invade Ukraine because someday it might join NATO. And it’s true that a lot of foreign policy experts way back in the 1990s warned that former Soviet nations joining NATO was unnecessarily provocative to Russia. Even the likes of Thomas Friedman and Henry Kissinger (and when did the Left listen to Friedman and Kissinger?) warned us about this. Eric Levitz continues,

It is perfectly natural for foreign-policy “realists” like Kissinger to disdain heedless affronts to Russia’s “sphere of influence,” or to insist that Ukraine must give Putin’s kleptocratic regime veto power over its foreign policy. But socialists do not generally recognize the legitimacy of imperial orbits, nor counsel acquiescence to relations of domination for the sake of conflict avoidance.

In particular:

Meanwhile, the notion that Russia’s opposition to NATO expansion was rooted in its “legitimate security interests” — as a segment of leftists routinely avow — is hard to credit. Surely, a nation’s only legitimate security interests are defensive ones. And Russia’s nuclear arsenal was always sufficient to deter the threat of an invasion (as we are now seeing, that arsenal is menacing enough to stop Western leaders from entertaining so much as a no-fly zone for Ukraine, never mind an offensive invasion of Russian territory).

In brief,

But if the Putin of 2022 believed that invading and occupying Europe’s second-largest country was a good idea, then there was no basis for believing that Western imperialism was the chief obstacle to a diplomatic resolution of the Russia-Ukraine conflict.

Well, yeah.

America could not cajole the Zelenskyy government into suicide. If Putin wanted to install a puppet regime atop Kyiv’s ruins, then decrying “U.S. brinkmanship” and NATO’s “imperialist expansionism” would not qualify as a remotely serious response to the crisis. Thus, when the DSA IC condemned those forces in a late January statement — which included not a single criticism of the Kremlin — the committee also lambasted the “sensationalist Western media blitz” that was “drumming up conflict” through its histrionic predictions of an impending Russian invasion.

When Putin actually invaded, then, how did the DSA respond? It hasn’t changed its position blaming the U.S. and NATO at all. Eric Levtiz points out that many eastern European leftists “consider NATO a vital bulwark against their republics’ subjugation to a reactionary autocracy, a conviction that became difficult to dismiss once Putin launched a war of imperial conquest.” And by now it should be plain that Putin is the one with imperialist ambitions.

“Instead of grappling with these complexities, however, many leftists have simply pretended that they do not exist,” says Levitz. Further, “In the actually existing Russia-Ukraine conflict, however, it is a Russian military victory that threatens to plunge a nation into ungovernability and civil strife, irrespective of U.S. policy.”

To me, the “Russia had to invade because Ukraine might join NATO” argument never held water, for the simple fact that Ukraine has been trying to join NATO for a very long time, since at least 2008, and I don’t see that anything had changed that made a NATO membership for Ukraine any more imminent in 2022 than it was in 2009. What is different now from 2009 is that Donald Trump spent four years in the White House working to undermine NATO and kiss Putin’s behind, and according to much data Joe Biden is weak and unpopular. And Trump might very well be re-elected in 2024. To Putin, it probably seemed just the right time to do something he’d been wanting to do for years, which is take back Ukraine. It was now or never.

There probably is a legitimate discussion to be had about whether U.S. and E.U. attempts at using “soft power” to exert influence in Ukraine was a good idea. However, I can’t imagine Putin would have respected neutrality. He wants a pro-Russian government in Ukraine, or he wants Ukraine, period.

See also A Note from Finland at Talking Points Memo. The link should get you through the subscription firewall even if you aren’t a subscriber. The writer, from Finland, explains how Russia set us up to not get in the way of his plans.

I understand you would like to see your heroic country as the navel of the world and as the main focus of any operation, but I am sorry to inform that, in this case, you are only cheap tools. You had to be weakened (and Britain manipulated to Brexit etc) in order to facilitate invasions to Ukraine, Belarussia and a list of other neighboring pieces of land in Putin’s future Menu.

So, as a KGB officer would plan, they came exactly from the opposite direction than where they were expected. They professionally built an operation web among the rural redneck cowboys, evangelical christians, the NRA, the most republican of all republicans, your law enforcement, some military people, big business etc etc. They popped up to the surface from within the “core americans”, but their long dive before that was planned and had started from the Kremlin’s operation board.

They nearly succeeded with Trump/GOP in January 6th, by focusing and coordinating the heat of seemingly “spontaneus”, “random” protest movements and legal tricks and corrupt politicians like a welding flame to the same point and to the same moment. They just barely failed – for the time being!

Had Trump succeeded to keep in power, the march of Putin to various targets in the Eastern Europe would have been more like an easy summer parade. Nato would be partally paralyzed by his loyal friends in the White House (who likely would have got their personal share of the profits).

That’s not nearly as crazy as believing the invasion of Ukraine is part of biblical prophecy.

Sen. Hee-Hawley has outdone himself this time. He’s attacking Supreme Court nominee Ketanji Brown Jackson with the entirely fabricated lie that she is “soft” on sex offenders, child pornographers in particular. See Glenn Kessler, Josh Hawley’s misleading attack on Judge Jackson’s sentencing of child-porn offenders and Ruth Marcus, How low will the GOP go in taking on Ketanji Brown Jackson? Josh Hawley lets us know.

And here’s Ian Millhiser, Josh Hawley’s latest attack on Ketanji Brown Jackson is genuinely nauseating, at Vox.

The senator’s misleadingaccusations can be broken down into three parts. First, he claims that a scholarly article that Jackson wrote while she was still a law student “questioned making convicts register as sex offenders.” In reality, the article examines a constitutional question that was unresolved in 1996, when Jackson published it: under what circumstances are laws that apply retroactively to convicted sex offenders permissible under the Constitution.

In other words, she wasn’t opposed to people having to register as sex offenders, she was asking a constitutional question. Jackson’s paper has been cited in real-world court cases. This includes a unanimous opinion by the Wyoming state supreme court.

The second prong of Hawley’s attack on Jackson is less of a factual allegation and more of an expression of incredulity. He criticized Jackson because, as a member of the Sentencing Commission, she once probed whether some child pornography offenses should be considered “less-serious” than others.

For example, one perpetrator in Jackson’s court was a teenager who shared some child porn with an undercover detective, but the psychologist who evaluated him decided the kid was just curious and not a pedophile. Jackson sentenced him to three months in prison and several months’ probation. But she sentenced an adult who was a sure-enough child pornographer to six years in prison.

The third prong of Hawley’s attack on Jackson appears to be literally true, but only because Hawley uses very precise wording — he claims that Jackson “deviated from the federal sentencing guidelines in favor of child porn offenders” in seven cases where she sentenced child pornographic offenders.

While Jackson did, indeed, sentence these seven offenders to less time in prison than these sentencing guidelines recommend, Hawley’s allegation leaves out some important context. The guidelines’ approach to most child pornography offenders is widely viewed as too draconian by a bipartisan array of judges, policymakers, and even some prosecutors.

According to a 2021 report by the US Sentencing Commission, “the majority (59.0%) of nonproduction child pornography offenders received a variance below the guideline range” when they were sentenced (“nonproduction” refers to offenders who view or distribute child pornography, but do not produce new images or videos). And, when judges do depart downward from the guidelines, they typically impose sentences that are more than 50 months lower than the minimum sentence recommended by the guidelines.

Indeed, guidelines sentences are so harsh that even many prosecutors advise judges not to follow them. As Berman, the sentencing law professor, notes in his own examination of nine child pornography cases heard by Judge Jackson, “in a majority of these cases (5 of 9) the prosecution advocated for a below-guideline sentence and in three others the prosecution advocated for only the guideline minimum.”

Hawley sits on the Senate Judiciary Committee, so he’s going to be asking question during Jackson’s confirmation hearing. In the next few days we’ll see the entire right-wing media infrastructure label Jackson a friend to child pornographers.

I agree with what Greg Sargent says here regarding President Zelensky’s address to Congress today:

This is already being portrayed as an effort to shame Biden into plunging deeper into the conflict. But in a way, both men are right.

Zelensky is unquestionably right that the United States and its allies could do more. Yet Biden is also right to be proceeding with extreme caution, and media coverage that obscures the complexities of that calculus is not exactly enhancing the long term prospects for humanity.

Regarding the fighter jets, as I understand it, the hang up seems to be how to get the jets into Ukraine and into the hands of Ukrainians without involving NATO pilots. This doesn’t seem to me to be an unsurmountable obstacle, but maybe there’s something I’m not seeing. U.S. military people have been arguing that Ukraine doesn’t really need the fighter jets, but Ukrainians insist they do, and I wish they could have them.

Greg Sargent quotes Sen. Chris Murphy saying “A no-fly zone is the United States declaring war against Russia.” Right; the no-fly zone can’t be enforced by the U.S. or a European country without risking escalation of war. But if the no-fly zone is being enforced by Ukrainians, why would that be true? Why would providing jets for Ukrainian pilots to fly be a different magnitude of help than providing anti-tank weapons for Ukrainians to fire? Help me out with this one, please.

Sargent continues,

Here’s the larger context. At a time when the United States and its allies are attempting a fiendishly difficult balance — between aiding Ukraine and inflicting sanctions on Russia without provoking World War III — the pressure on Biden to overreach is intense from the media, from Republicans and from certain foreign policy voices.

From the media, President Biden is being peppered with questions about the no-fly zone, even though the answer is always the same, that we don’t want World War III. Sargent continues,

In some cases, questions echo GOP talking points: One reporter asked whether Biden is “showing enough strength against Putin.” Similarly, a New York Times piece intoned that if Biden doesn’t honor Zelensky’s demands, it could open him up to GOP charges that he’s “soft on Russia” and treated that argument respectfully.

This sort of thing lets Republicans get away with calling for more “toughness” without accounting for the obvious world-historical downside risks of too much “toughness.” This effectively launders bad-faith posturing and confuses the debate with simplistic framing rather than illuminating its complexities and trade-offs.

It’s cheap and easy to thump your chest and declare you’d be tougher on Putin when you’re not the one making the decisions, and you’re not the one who’d be blamed if Europe and then the world is dragged into a world war. And, of course, cheap and easy is what Republicans do.

Waldman goes on to quote a historian who notes that younger people don’t remember the Cold War. Putin is “a madman,” the historian says, and no one should assume he wouldn’t resort to nukes if backed into a corner. So let’s not assume that.

There is also talk that Putin has asked China for more weapons. China has denied this, but of course nobody believes China. I’d be a tad surprised if Xi Jinping agrees to giving Russia military aid, because Xi Jinping seems mostly concerned about making China the world’s biggest economic power. And how much does China need Russia? Well, okay, it needs Russian oil. China would be much less vulnerable than Russia to the effects of sanctions, but I doubt Xi Jinping wants to risk losing business from Europe and the U.S. just the same. But anything could happen.

Peace talks between Russians and Ukrainians are centering on a 15-point plan. As I understand it, the plan thus far calls for Ukraine to promise not to join NATO and be officially neutral between Russia and the West. The deal calls for Kyiv renouncing its ambitions to join NATO or host foreign military bases or weapons. In exchange, Moscow would declare a ceasefire and withdraw. Ukraine would also have to accept limitations on its own defense forces but could seek protection from allies such as the US, UK and Turkey.

Ukraine has experience with how much such guarantees are worth. Per the Budapest Memorandum of 1994, Russia was supposed to leave Ukraine alone. I wouldn’t accept this if I were Ukraine, but then I’m not the one being bombarded right now.

Meanwhile, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken says sanctions will not be lifted until there is an irreversable Russian withdrawal from Ukraine. A cease fire alone won’t do it.

He insisted that U.S. sanctions against Russia are “not designed to be permanent,” and that they could “go away” if Russia should change its behavior. But he said any Russian pullback would have to be, “in effect, irreversible,” so that “this can’t happen again, that Russia won’t pick up and do exactly what it’s doing in a year or two years or three years.”

Probably the war in Ukraine won’t end anytime soon.

Volodymyr Zelensky

If you missed Chris Hayes last night, please do watch this first segment.

In brief, a bonkers QAnon theory about bioweapons labs in Ukraine is being mutually affirmed and amplified by Russia and Tucker Carlson, along with other right-wing U.S. media. Yesterday the Russian ambassador to the UN called a Security Council meeting and presented the biolab theory as a justification for Russia’s invasion, claiming that the presence of these labs had been corroborated by the U.S. State Department. But it was not. If you want to see how this alleged corroboration was fabricated by Tucker Carlson, it’s in the Chris Hayes video. See also Steve M.

Tucker really isn’t another Tokyo Rose. He’s worse.

In other news — The Jerusalem Post reports that Israel has been attempting to mediate a cease fire between Russia and Ukraine. But this is not going well.

According to the report, the Ukrainian president and his people did not like the advice.

“Bennett told us to surrender,” said the official. “We have no intention of doing so. We know Putin’s offer is only the beginning.”

In the past two weeks, and especially since Bennett’s visit to Moscow, the prime minister’s office and the Foreign Ministry have been claiming that Israel’s mediation efforts force them to keep an even more cautious and balanced approach. This message was also passed quietly to Zelensky’s office. The official also said that Israel asked Ukraine not to request more military and defense aid because such a request could harm the mediation efforts.

Remind us not to ever ask Israel to mediate anything.

Ukrainian officials believe that Bennett’s involvement in diplomatic efforts comes from his not wanting to take a clear stance regarding the Russian invasion for fear that it will harm Israel’s ties with Russia.

Just stop. Go home, and keep your damn ties with Russia.

Will rising oil and gas prices ultimately just benefit the fossil fuel industry, or will it move us toward alternative energy? Who knows? It could go either way from here.

Here is what I do know. Republlicans refuse to budge from “drill baby drill.” They are striving mightily to hang rising gas prices around President Biden’s neck, even though there’s not a whole lot he can do about them (and what little he can do, he’s trying to do). At the same time, they are ignoring wholesale the need to invest in other energy technology. Instead, they are taking advantage of the moment to gaslight the nation about oil.

For example, according to Paul Waldman, South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem recently said “President Biden’s Green New Deal destroyed our energy surplus and it turned it into an energy crisis.” I haven’t found this quote elsewhere; she may have said this at the recent CPAC convention. But it’s an astonishing thing to claim for a bill that was never even voted on, much less became law, and which I don’t believe President Biden supported. Just saying the words “green new deal” causes oil deposits to dry up, apparently.

Of course, nobody can beat the former guy when it comes to stupid.

OMG I’m dying!!! On a UFC podcast today, Trump is asked how he sees the war in Ukraine playing out and he launches into a riff about windmills! pic.twitter.com/S2nV6hLIbP

— Ron Filipkowski (@RonFilipkowski) March 10, 2022

At Mother Jones, Chris D’Angelo lists The GOP’s Four Biggest Lies About Joe Biden and Fossil Fuels. They are:

1. The administration “destroyed” our energy industry

2. Biden “ended” oil and gas drilling on federal lands

3. Biden “shut off” the Keystone XL pipeline

4. Biden “destroyed American energy independence”

And, they are indeed all lies, as D’Angelo explains. But here’s the money quote:

The GOP campaign to blame Biden for both Russia’s war and high gas prices has included misleading statements and outright falsehoods, as well as circulating lists of demands that closely mirror those of the fossil fuel industry. It is being led by some of Washington’s largest beneficiaries of industry campaign donations. And it comes on the heels of the latest dire climate report from the United Nations, which warns that the window for reining in greenhouse gases in order to “secure a livable and sustainable future” is rapidly closing.

Recently White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki shot down questions about Biden’s alleged refusal to allow oil companies to drill by noting that the oil companies are sitting on 9,000 approved drilling permits that are not being used. D’Angelo continues,

The goal, of course, is to leverage the crisis in Eastern Europe to provide more access and regulatory relief to an oil and gas sector that is already very profitable, heavily subsidized, has enormous sway in Washington, and is sitting on unused permits to drill across millions of acres of land and water. …

… In reality, the US produced more oil and gas during Biden’s first year in office than during Trump’s, and crude oil output is forecast to reach a record high in 2023, according to the US Energy Information Administration.

And the other goal is to undermine the Biden Administration, because they’d rather see the U.S. fail during a time of crisis than pass up an opportunity to bash Democrats.

Now, Mike Pence’s PAC is running a television ad with this voiceover:

“Before Russian bombs began to rain on Ukraine. Before hundreds of innocent Ukrainians lost their lives. A horrific decision had already been made. Joe Biden caved to the radical environmentalists and stopped America’s Keystone pipeline and dramatically increased Americans’ dependence on Russian oil, endangering America’s security 

Do read all of Glenn Kessler’s fact check of the ad, and other Republican talking points. Here is more about the ad:

Text appears at one point: “U.S. reliance on Russian oil hits record high.” And then another text appears: “U.S. ‘paying Putin to invade’ Ukraine.” That is attributed, oddly, to “Oil analyst, Fox News.” (It turns out to be Stephen Schork, a onetime commodity trader and research analyst who writes a newsletter.)

We’re hearing incessantly about Joe Biden cancelling the Keystone XL pipeline, and that’s why oil is so expensive. Kessler:

The net metering bill was basically written by Florida Power and Light. Documents obtained by the Miami Herald showed that its lobbyist delivered the text to the state senator who would introduce it in the legislature; two days later FPL’s parent company also delivered a $10,000 contribution to her PAC.

See also Jeff Goodell, Putin Is a Fossil-Fuel Gangster. Clean Energy Could Cut Him Off at the Knees at Rolling Stone.

As Ukrainian scientist Svitlana Krakovka put it in remarks during an Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change forum held (coincidentally) as Russian soldiers marched over the border: “Human-induced climate change and the war on Ukraine have the same roots: fossil fuels.”

The urgency of the climate crisis was underscored by the latest IPCC report, which, with doomsday levels of irony, was released the same week that Putin invaded. “The rise in weather and climate extremes,” the report notes, has already led to “irreversible impacts.” Heat waves have become more extreme, droughts deeper, wildfires more frequent, sea levels are rising faster. These changes are “contributing to humanitarian crises” that are driving people from all regions of the world out of their homes. Those who have done the least to cause the problem are likely suffering the most from it. So far, the feeble attempts to adapt have been pathetically inadequate and “focused more on planning rather than implementation.”

What else is new?

Predictably, Republicans and their corrupt band of climate crooks and deniers immediately used the invasion of Ukraine as an excuse to deepen our dependence on fossil fuels, not free ourselves from it. They willfully ignored the simple truth that there are better, cheaper ways of powering our world than with oil, gas, and coal. To them fossil fuels are the energy equivalent of testosterone. Florida Sen. Marco Rubio tweeted that Biden’s “war on American oil and gas” made Putin stronger. South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem told Fox News that “from the very day [Biden] got into the White House, he gave Putin all the power.”

Goodell writes that the battle of economic power is shifting away from the fossil fuel and toward renewable energy. That may be more apparent in Europe than the U.S., because I’m not seeing that here.

The Democrats need to go on offense against this garbage, and they need to do it yesterday.

The Wall Street Journal reported today that leaders of Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates have refused to take phone calls from President Biden, who wanted to talk to them about supporting Ukraine and, yes, oil prices. I can’t get past the WSJ subscription firewall, but I picked up the details elsewhere. Josh Marshall:

The WSJ reports tonight that Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates have both signaled to Washington that they won’t help ease the global squeeze on gasoline supplies and surging prices unless the Biden administration falls into line on Yemen and other regional issues — one of these being immunity for Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman in the murder of Saudi dissident Jamal Khashoggi. The specific hook of the article is that the leaders of Saudi Arabia and the UAE have both declined calls from President Biden in recent weeks.

Well, bleep them. Crown Prince MBS is one who specifically refuses to talk to the President, btw, according to other sources. Josh Marshall continues,

It has seemed clear to me since early 2021 that the Gulf states have been working to undermine the Biden administration in part because of these issues in the Gulf and also because of their close ties with ex-President Trump and Jared Kushner. But over the course of the year energy prices have become a key driver of inflation. Now the Russian invasion of Ukraine has made the need to open up new supplies of oil a matter of acute urgency for the United States and really much of the globe. What it amounts to is that at a moment of acute and profound economic and geopolitical need they’re squeezing us.

Saudi Arabia and UAE are sovereign states. Yemen and Iran are huge issues for them. They’re entitled to make their choices. But it goes without saying that the U.S. has directly and indirectly underwritten their security for decades. It is a reminder that they are on Team Autocracy. And in a moment when autocracy versus civic democracy is suddenly the central factor in global politics, we shouldn’t forget that. They produce products that the whole world is deeply dependent on but which are also driving the global crisis of climate change.

Yes, we should not forget this. The Daily Mail (UK) reports that MBS is asking Wall Street to bankroll a new project of his, “a $500 billion futuristic city-state, powered by robots and artificial intelligence, that would cover 10,000 square miles of Saudi Arabia‘s Tabuk province.” I seriously hope no one invests a penny. Arms sales? Nope. See also The top 11 favors the Trump administration has done for Saudi Arabia from 2019.

Business Insider:

MBS’s snub of Biden’s phone call is perhaps not surprising.

Since becoming president, Biden has made clear that he did not see the crown prince — the de facto ruler of the country — as an equal and that Saudi Arabia was a US partner, not an ally. Russia and Saudi Arabia, meanwhile, have strengthened ties.

On the campaign trail in 2020, Biden promised to make Saudi Arabia a “pariah” over the murder of the Washington Post writer Jamal Khashoggi and the war in Yemen.

After Biden took office, the White House effectively demoted MBS to the rank of defense minister, and the two leaders have not spoken.

The news of the snub came in the wake of the publication of a rare interview with MBS in The Atlantic, in which the crown prince made clear his view of Biden and the US.

 

Here is a link to the Atlantic article, which I have not read. I do not care to know what this depraved piece of crap thinks about anything.

Ezra Klein interviews Fiona Hill about what Putin is really up to. There’s a transcript if you aren’t into podcasts.

See also Jennifer Rubin, The GOP: An unending display of toxic masculinity.  If she ever goes back to being an apologist for Republicans I’m going to miss her. 

President Biden dropped the big one today and banned import of Russian fossil fuels. The UK is banning oil imports but hasn’t banned gas yet.

Paul Krugman explains why China can’t save Russia’s economy, even if it wants to. And it may not.

Paul Waldman says Liz Cheney nails the truth about ‘the Putin wing of the GOP.’

Which companies have stopped doing business in Russia, and which are still there? Here’s the list of both as of March 8.

I understand the trucker convoy is driving laps around the Beltway again today, for no discernible reason other than showing off. See Absurd trucker convoy jamming up the Capital Beltway has me rooting for higher gas prices by Rex Huppke at USA Today.

I had said in an earlier post that the only way you could track the convoy was through local news stories, not national. The national news has been pretty much ignoring the truckers. According to Paul Waldman, even Fox News is paying little attention to them.

We seem to be living in a time of revelations. No, I don’t expect to see angels with trumpets anytime soon. Rather, we’re seeing things exposed for what they are rather than what they are marketed to be.

Let’s start with the Russian military. I’ve been cruising around reading op eds by military officers and experts. And they are uniformly stunned at how badly the Russian military is doing.

Max Boot is positively gloating.