This is Biden's America

The dirty side of this is the marriage between lenders and the schools.

Republican Candidates Split Over Ukraine-Russia Crisis

In Ohio, two Republicans running for Senate have taken sharply different positions, offering a clear view of the party’s rift over foreign policy.

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/02/22/us/politics/republican-candidates-split-over-ukraine-russia-crisis.html

By Blake Hounshell and Leah Askarinam
Feb. 22, 2022

You won’t find a clearer distillation of the Republican Party’s divide on foreign policy than the sparring that broke out this weekend in Ohio over Ukraine.

It’s a skirmish that pits Trump-style, “America First” isolationists against more traditional hawkish Republicans. And while strategists in both parties say voters are much more concerned about pocketbook issues like inflation than they are about national security, the contrasting messages reflect a Republican Party that remains deeply torn between a base still loyal to Donald Trump and an elite seeking to move beyond him.

On one side of the split is J.D. Vance, who has sought to parlay his celebrity as the author of “Hillbilly Elegy” into a Senate seat.

On the other is Jane Timken, a former state party chair who represents the closest thing in the race to an establishment candidate.

Timken has run a campaign focused on inflation, immigration, “parents’ rights” and crime. On Ukraine, she put out a statement Monday that was perfectly in tune with the Senate Republicans she hopes to join: supporting Ukraine’s sovereignty and calling for sanctions on Russia, while condemning Biden for what she called “weak and feckless leadership.”

But Vance, a Yale Law School graduate who served in the Marines in Iraq before becoming a venture capitalist, staked out a wildly different position.

“I don’t really care what happens to Ukraine one way or another,” Vance said in a podcast interview.

A retired Army general, Barry R. McCaffrey, blasted those comments on Twitter. “JD Vance is a shameful person unsuitable for public office. His comments are those of a stooge for Russian aggression,” said McCaffrey, who led an infantry division during the Persian Gulf war of 1991 and has since become a television news analyst, defense consultant and Trump critic.

To which Vance replied: “Your entire time in military leadership we won zero wars. You drank fine wine at bullshit security conferences while thousands of working class kids died on the battlefield. Oh, by the way, how much do you stand to gain financially from a war with Russia, Barry?”

The exchange might as well have been ripped from Trump’s playbook. Trump, of course, famously derided John McCain’s war record during the 2016 presidential campaign.

At a candidate event in Iowa in July 2015, Trump dismissed the Arizona senator’s service in Vietnam, saying, “I like people who weren’t captured.”

At the time, his statement was widely seen as a fatal blunder. What politician in their right mind would attack a decorated war hero, a man who withstood torture in a Vietnamese prison for 5 years? And in a Republican primary, no less?

What many pundits didn’t recognize at the time was how many Republican voters harbored a deep antipathy to foreign entanglements after years of overseas interventions that they saw as a failure.

“The G.O.P. base were the ones who saw their kids from red states die and get wounded in Iraq and Afghanistan,” said Ryan James Girdusky, an adviser to a pro-Vance super PAC. “How many Ukrainians would lay their life down to protect the U.S.?”

Debate over whether the G.O.P. should cater to that sentiment raged throughout Trump’s presidency. Trump’s frequent praise of President Vladimir Putin of Russia alarmed and appalled Republican senators, who often found themselves at odds with their own party leader on how best to deal with Moscow. The investigation of the Trump campaign’s ties to Russia dominated his first year in office. And a phone call with the president of Ukraine caused his first impeachment.

Surveys in recent years have shown that Republican voters are much less likely than Democrats to support an active U.S. leadership role in world affairs, and Trump’s pollsters have argued that the base is not interested in policing other countries. At the same time, establishment Republicans venerate the party’s Cold War stance of “peace through strength,” a position best articulated by Ronald Reagan.

“I think Ohio Republicans are of the same two minds that national Republicans are when it comes to how aggressive they should be in defending Ukraine,” said Mark R. Weaver, a Republican strategist based in Columbus.

Ohio has large and politically active Eastern European communities, including some 80,000 Americans of Ukrainian descent. But the state also has a history of supporting isolationism, dating back to the days of Robert Taft Jr., the senator who opposed U.S. involvement in World War II.

The question in Ohio’s Senate primary is: Which faction is larger?

“Vance is clearly assuming he turns more voters on than he turns off with this America First isolationism,” said Jeff Sadosky, a former adviser to Senator Rob Portman of Ohio. Sadosky is currently neutral in the race.

Portman, a Republican who is retiring this year, has made his bet: Last week, he endorsed Timken, and three other senators followed. Portman, who heads the Ukraine caucus in the Senate, remains popular in Ohio, and his imprimatur is likely to carry weight with Republican donors.

Vance has made a different calculation.

He’s been peppering his Twitter feed with comments on Ukraine for several weeks now, hitting several themes at once. First, that the fate of Ukraine is none of America’s concern. Second, that he’s more concerned about illegal immigration. And third, that corrupt elites have conspired to embroil Americans in pointless wars.

“Worth repeating: our leaders care more about Ukraine’s border than they do our own,” Vance wrote on Twitter.

“Billions spent on the Kennedy school, grand strategies seminars, and the Georgetown school of foreign service has bought us an elite that’s about to blunder us into a Ukraine war. Our country is broken, especially in how it trains its leaders,” he wrote in another. Vance expanded on his comments in a statement on Tuesday that took aim at Timken for “jumping on the America last bandwagon.”

Vance’s message is remarkably similar to the comments of Tucker Carlson, the Fox News host. In his hugely popular nightly broadcasts, Carlson has argued that Ukraine is of no consequence to the United States, that its government is corrupt and unworthy of U.S. support, and that Russia is not America’s enemy.

“He’s running for the Republican voters who listen to Tucker Carlson and Donald Trump,” Andrew Fedynsky, director of the Ukrainian Museum-Archives in Cleveland, said of Vance.
Russia divides, China unites

If Russia divides Republicans, two other issues bring them together.

There’s opposition to President Biden, whose handling of foreign policy has polled poorly since the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan.

Then there is China — a country seen on the right as responsible for everything from the coronavirus pandemic to the collapse of working-class jobs in states like Ohio.

“For all the left’s screaming about Russia, it’s China that sends fentanyl into their communities, buys up their farms, ships their jobs overseas, steals our technology, and poses the greatest long-term threat to the U.S.,” said Girdusky, the Vance super PAC adviser.

Trump has said little about the conflict in Ukraine, leaving many Republicans uncertain about what line to take. On Tuesday, he made remarks that suggested he was impressed by Putin’s move to back the independence of two pro-Russian enclaves within Ukraine, calling it “pretty savvy” during a cameo on “The Clay Travis & Buck Sexton Show.”

Fox News’s coverage of his comments focused on the more unifying topic with Republican voters: the need to defend Taiwan from a hypothetical Chinese attack.

“China’s going to be next,” Trump said. “Not with me, they wouldn’t have.”

Timken seized the chance to agree with the former president — at least in part.

“President Trump is 100% right,” she wrote on Twitter. “1. This never would have happened under his leadership. 2. China is watching Biden’s weakness and licking its chops.”

US truckers planning pandemic protest to begin heading to DC
The US convoys follow the recent Canadian truckers’ protests which shut down Ottawa and the busiest US Canadian border crossing.

https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2022/2/23/us-anti-covid-truckers-peoples-convoy-to-begin-heading-to-dc?fbclid=IwAR2v_WkiUScPYwzZ6TxnnkjjcD_jpA-AD2ZNopsvmJDRpRQsF7P4qCzVrdo&sf161034483=1

The world has gone absolutely nuts, Edgar. It is very sad.

Shaun King
71S1h707 8tg3nho99dair ·
This is ugly and extremely dangerous for families.⁣
⁣
Again, resist the urge to say this isn’t about you.⁣
⁣
It’s about all of us. Injustice ANYWHERE is a threat to justice everywhere.⁣
⁣
This is terrifying for so many families. ⁣
⁣
And if they can do this against those families, it creates a slippery slope for it to happen to any of our families. ⁣
⁣
It’s also why we need to elect ⁣@leemerrittesq as the next Attorney General of Texas.

Michael Cavolina
9 mins ·
A note to Mr. Biden. We are at a crossroads. Putin has done his worst and NATO is responding appropriately but you would never know it because the media doesn't do the mundane. It is time, sir, for the Fairness Doctrine to be reinstated, it is time for the DOJ to prosecute trump and all those who were in on the assault on the Capitol, and it is past time for you to get tough with the industrial robber barons who are making gouging look like inflation. You want to be reelected and pass all the wonderful proposals you made, I suggest you take off the effing gloves and lay down the law. Price gougers will be prosecuted. We are in need of leadership even if it means that some of what you demand will be overturned later. Remember, as my Old Man said many times, "it is easier to ask for forgiveness than to ask for permission."

US Version of Canadian Trucker Convoy Gets Off to Embarrassing Start
https://truthout.org/articles/u-s-version-of-canadian-trucker-convoy-gets-off-to-embarrassing-start/?fbclid=IwAR3Okhkc5A7cd-34VLSnarZs13KL-mkbjkSK7PF6xveZDCsPBN0KA7_Tkus

What the Sentencing of Kim Potter Said About a White Mother Being Denied Proper Justice for her Black Son

After a jury convicted ex-police officer Kim Potter of manslaughter and recommended she serve seven years in prison, Judge Regina Chu handed down a sixteen-month sentence.
Branden Janese

When the bodycam footage of former Brooklyn Center, Minnesota police officer, Kim Potter murdering Daunte Wright after a petty traffic violation went viral in April 2021, we witnessed something unusual in the case of police brutality; a white woman officer killing a white woman’s son. Everyone I spoke to about the tragedy was convinced that Daunte’s family would be granted justice like no other police shooting before him, simply because his mother would shed white woman tears and her sadness would matter more than anything Potter’s defense attorney could cook up. Furthermore, Potter was undeniably guilty and she proved her unfitness to wear a badge. During that traffic stop, a rookie cop named Anthony Lucke was in-training and watched Potter, a veteran officer, mistake a stun gun for a firearm. That mistake is almost impossible and happens less than one time per year according to ABC News. The best way to explain the rarity of a senior uniformed cop mistaking a stun gun for a firearm would be to think of a master chef training a sous-chef, and confusing the butcher knife for a soup spoon.

I hate to take it here but this is where it is at: every single news outlet that has covered the Kim Potter murder trial, including its Wikipedia page, identifies Daunte as a Black man. The truth of the matter is that he was bi-racial, born to and raised by a white woman. I just knew that when the trial ended and the jury came back with a guilty verdict that justice would be served. I assumed a precedent would be set for police officers taking accountability for their actions, whether those actions were mistakes or deliberate decisions. I was certain that Daunte’s white mother would be a saving grace in this specific battle for justice, and so did she. The most telling part of the entire trial was after the sentencing when Daunte’s mother cleared Judge Chu, saying that “White women’s tears trump justice, and I thought my white woman's tears would be enough.”

On February 18th, 2022 Judge Regina Chu handed down Kim Potter’s sentence with a soft, grief-stricken voice and with tears streaming down her face. She talked for over fifteen minutes, showering Kim Potter with adoration and praise. She stated over and over again how Potter tried to do the right thing, how she tried to make a proper arrest that day she murdered Daunte. She painted Potter as an upstanding woman with no flaws. She dryly and briefly acknowledged Daunte’s family, not even bothering to get their names right (she called Daunte’s mother ‘Mrs. Wright’ when her name is Katie Bryant) and said that she “could not understand the grief of losing a child.” Then Chu sentenced Potter with unmatched leniency to 2 years in prison, five years below the recommendation. Potter will be released after serving 16-months.

With that sentence Judge Chu committed an act of violence. Not only to Daunte’s family and friends, but to the Black community.

It’s a slap in the face to the jurors who labored over the evidence, spent time away from their families and work lives to serve on a devastating and emotionally draining manslaughter case. The jurors did their jobs only to have their hard work shitted on by a mockery of a sentence from a judge who cares more about saving the reputation of a fallen police officer than giving justice to a grieving family.

Judge Chu’s sentence is a defeat for women in power. A defeat for the tense relationship between Black and Asian American communities. A defeat for every judge on the bench who is supposed to be the most unbiased person in the courtroom.

To add insult to injury Judge Chu had the nerve to invoke the death of George Floyd, by saying Potter was a "cop who made a tragic mistake," not one who committed murder, citing the case of Derrick Chauvin. Chu also clumsily quoted President Obama’s line on empathy, “learning to stand in somebody else's shoes, to see through their eyes, that’s how peace begins.” The burning question is where was Potter’s empathy for the 20-year-old man she shot? Did Potter believe that her stun gun would bring peace to that traffic stop situation?

Or am I tripping? Am I asking for too much by expecting justice from nonwhite people who work in the criminal justice system? After scathing reports on Kamala Harris came out about her anti-Black and anti-transgender track record as attorney general in California, I felt nauseous voting her into office in November. Then Judge Chu, an Asian-American judge, chose to show more sympathy to a white woman who murdered a man than to the white woman who lost her son. Then the Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison, a Black man, said he has no plans to challenge Judge Chu's decision to hand down the lightest sentence possible to Kim Potter.

What’s interesting is that Minnesota historically has been a state where Black people have litigated for justice and freedom. The infamous cases of Dred Scot and Eliza Winston both took to the courts on Minnesota soil to demand their right to be unbonded from white man-traders. Both cases argued partly that their white bosses lost their privilege to own them as property once they set foot in the state of Minnesota, a free, nonslave holding state in the 1850s.

It’s frightening to know that in present-day Minnesota not even a white woman can lean on the law to get justice for her slain son. What was it about Katie Bryant that turned Judge Chu off? Was it her plump figure? Was it her cascading, hippy hair? Was it her white brethren who came to the courthouse with face tattoos? Or was it her Black husband?

This sentencing poses an incredible cultural question. Do white people lose their white privilege in the eyes of the law when they decide to procreate with a Black person?

Judge Chu’s disrespectful, shameless sentence answers that question.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Branden Janese is an artist. Her writing is published in The Wall Street Journal, Complex, Greatest, Flaunt and more. Her research appears in several documentary films and t.v series. She wrote and recorded two seasons of the podcast, Sick Empire. She lives in the Bronx

https://truthout.org/articles/the-push-to-expand-nato-could-cost-countless-lives-its-time-to-stop-it/?fbclid=IwAR3-KYzy9ltlU41TnlEp9qj14sM33issOeFQO94VxhlUceSYhAf_iyg3klA
During the last six decades, the religiosity of U.S. militarism has faded into a more generalized set of assumptions — shared, in the current crisis, across traditional political spectrums. Ignorance about NATO’s history feeds into the good vs. evil bromides that are too easy to ingest and internalize.

On Capitol Hill, it’s hard to find a single member of Congress willing to call NATO what it has long been: an alliance for war (Kosovo, Afghanistan, Libya) with virtually nothing to do with “defense” other than the defense of vast weapons sales and, at times, even fantasies of regime change in Russia.

The reverence and adulation gushing from the Capitol and corporate media (including NPR and PBS) toward NATO and its U.S. leadership are wonders of thinly veiled jingoism. About other societies, reviled ones especially, this would be deemed “propaganda.” Here the supposed truisms are laundered and flat-ironed as common sense.

Glimmers of inconvenient truth have flickered only rarely in mainstream U.S. media outlets, while a bit more likely in Europe.

“Biden has said repeatedly that the U.S. is open to diplomacy with Russia, but on the issue that Moscow has most emphasized — NATO enlargement — there has been no American diplomacy at all,” Jeffrey Sachs wrote in the Financial Times as this week began. “Putin has repeatedly demanded that the U.S. forswear NATO’s enlargement into Ukraine, while Biden has repeatedly asserted that membership of the alliance is Ukraine’s choice.”

As Sachs noted, “Russia has adamantly opposed NATO expansion towards the east for 30 years, first under Boris Yeltsin and now Putin. Neither the U.S. nor Russia wants the other’s military on their doorstep. Pledging “no NATO expansion” is not appeasement. It does not cede Ukrainian territory. It does not undermine Ukraine’s sovereignty.”

Speaking Monday on Democracy Now, Katrina vanden Heuvel — editorial director of The Nation and a longtime Russia expert — said that implementing the Minsk accords could be a path toward peace in Ukraine. Also, she pointed out, “there is talk now not just of the NATO issue, which is so key, but also a new security architecture in Europe.”

A new European security framework, to demilitarize and defuse conflicts between Russia and U.S. allies, is desperately needed. But the same approach that for three decades pushed to expand NATO to Russia’s borders is now gung-ho to keep upping the ante, no matter how much doing so increases the chances of a direct clash between the world’s two nuclear-weapons superpowers.

The last U.S. ambassador to the Soviet Union before it collapsed, Jack Matlock, wrote last week: “Since President Putin’s major demand is an assurance that NATO will take no further members, and specifically not Ukraine or Georgia, obviously there would have been no basis for the present crisis if there had been no expansion of the alliance following the end of the Cold War, or if the expansion had occurred in harmony with building a security structure in Europe that included Russia.” But excluding Russia from security structures, while encircling it with armed-to-the-teeth adversaries, was a clear goal of NATO’s expansion. Less obvious was the realized goal of turning Eastern European nations into customers for vast arms sales.

A gripping chapter in “The Spoils of War,” a new book by Andrew Cockburn, spells out the mega-corporate zeal behind the massive campaigns to expand NATO beginning in the 1990s. Huge Pentagon contractors like Lockheed Martin were downcast about the dissolution of the USSR and feared that military sales would keep slumping. But there were some potential big new markets on the horizon.

“One especially promising market was among the former members of the defunct Warsaw Pact,” Cockburn wrote. “Were they to join NATO, they would be natural customers for products such as the F-16 fighter that Lockheed had inherited from General Dynamics. There was one minor impediment: the [George H. W.] Bush administration had already promised Moscow that NATO would not move east, a pledge that was part of the settlement ending the Cold War.”

By the time legendary foreign-policy sage George F. Kennan issued his unequivocal warning in 1997 — “expanding NATO would be the most fateful error of American policy in the post-Cold War era” — the expansion was already happening. As Cockburn notes, “By 2014, the 12 new members had purchased close to $17 billion worth of American weapons.” If you think those weapons transactions were about keeping up with the Russians, you’ve been trusting way too much U.S. corporate media. “As of late 2020,” Cockburn’s book explains, NATO’s collective military spending “had hit $1.03 trillion, or roughly 20 times Russia’s military budget.”

So let’s leave the last words here at this solemn time to Bob Dylan, from another song that isn’t on radio playlists: “Masters of War.”

Let me ask you one question
Is your money that good?
Will it buy you forgiveness
Do you think that it could?

1. There is no such thing as white privilege. Just ask people that live in deep rural America, in towns left behind by railroads. This is something poor blacks in the inner city say out of jealousy. But this is what white houses look like in Appalachia.


I had black people ask me for handouts, deciding I was rich. Ummm, my family is doing okay. And they love me. So they help me out. But I had barely bus money in my pocket and this beggar took almost all of it to get himself a sandwich. And I had barely much more, not even able to pay my apartment without help.

2. What I will concede is true is not privilege but respect. That is, certain parties lose respect for you when you stray from their expectations. I've seen this happen to me. "Tolerant liberals" stopped being tolerant and called me a tranny and a racist when before they were so LGBT friendly. Until I revealed that I didn't vote for Hillary like a good little sheep, but decided I liked Trump's statements in regard to Orlando.

Joe Biden just nominated Kentanji Brown Jackson to the Supreme Court. She was the best choice among his finalists.

I agree.

After signaling willingness to back Biden's choice, I am beginning to wonder if the two rogue Democrats will actually do that.

I cannot imagine what excuse they’d use.

Obstructionism is in their nature. I hope I am wrong.

Cherry-picking, bulmabriefs144?

Here are some other examples of white houses in Appalachia:

White privilege doesn't mean that it's exhibited by every white person in every case. It's simply a pervasive phenomenon which needs to be exposed when and where it happens. It's not a guarantee that any individual white person will be affluent or avoid economic hardship.

I read one story a week or so ago that Manchin thought it should wait until after the election in November. (Given that the new court session will have already started this doesn't seem practical – I don't know what he was thinking.)



EDIT: Maybe he was thinking about a hypothetical second vacancy?

I've long viewed Manchin's actions as planned to time out Biden's term in the hope nothing "liberal" gets passed.