EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE

Blogging will be light for the next several days, due to obligations of one sort or another. Regularly-scheduled features are in the queue.

Comment moderation will also be delayed from time to time. For reasons known to regulars, here, I am not going to switch on comments. It's easier to delete sewage than it is to clean it up.

(Those pumping out effluent know who they are.)

Can We Now All Agree that Rep. Paul Gosar (Q-AZ) is a Nazi?

[Arizona] Republican Congressman Paul Gosar is set to be a “special guest” with the white nationalist American Populist Union at an event that will be on a date popular among white nationalists and Neo-Nazis: Hitler’s birthday.

The American Populist Social will be held in Tempe [AZ] on April 20, a date revered by white supremacists and Neo-Nazis.

The American Populist Union is closely aligned with groypers, a group of white nationalists who strive for their ideas to become a part of the Republican mainstream and are largely followers of 23-year-old white nationalist Nick Fuentes. In 2021, Gosar was the first elected official to speak at Fuentes’ America First Political Action Conference in 2021. This year, the conference saw speeches by Gosar, Rogers and U.S. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene.

The funny thing about American Nazis is that they are fans of Putin, who likely regards them as useful idiots. Otherwise, if he could, he'd have them all killed.

The Illegitimate Supremes

The "conservatives" keep using the shadow docket to make rulings without having to have full arguments and suchlike. They did it again today.

Funny thing: For decades, self-styled conservatives have been yammering about judicial activism and how, if their guys were on the court, that things would be different.

Not so much, it seems. So when conservatives talk about legal principles and how their side adheres to them, you can take it for granted that they are full of shit.

The Supremes have no army, they have not budgetary ability. All they have is their rulings. If people begin to truly believe that they are just another ideologically-based branch of government, then fewer and fewr people will pay deference and more will be following the possibly apocryphal words of Andrew Jackson.

Tennessee Republicans are Pro-Child Marriage

If you want to avoid charges of child molestation by marrying your victim, then move to Tennessee.

Russia Proclaims Itself to be the Victim, Here, and Asserts That the Ukrainians Intended to Conquer the World

No, Gentle Reader, that is not hyperbole. That is what the Russians are telling their own people. The Russians are telling their people that Ukraine intended to conquer the world. Their plan for Ukraine was to stamp out any hint of Ukrainian identity, essentially put most of the population into forced labor camps and execute anyone who even looked up in protest. They are telling their people that Russia is doing the world a great favor and willingly shouldering the entire cost of eliminiating the Ukrainians as a people.

The Russians believe that the remaining people in Ukraine will be grateful to be incorporated into a kleptocratic, authoritarian Russian state, rather than live in a nation that is part of a free and prosperous European Union.

Don't believe me? Go read their justification for yourself.

Nobody believed the Nazis when they said what they intended to do. The politicians of other nations (now known as "the appeasers") all said that the ravings of Hitler and his cronies were all for domestic consumption, that the Nazi state would be reasonable in its dealings with other nations because it was in their economic interests to do so.

We should believe the Russians when they say what they will do. If you believe that the article is the opinion of only one person, think again. Nothing like that would be published in Russia without the approval of the government.

Actions in Russian-occupied territory in Ukraine, territory that has been liberated by Ukrainians, has shown that the Russian article is pretty accurate as to what the Russians intend to do: Level the country and kill almost everyone in it.

Almost every resource that can be supplied to the Ukrainians should be supplied.

Voter Fraud Perpetrated by Republicans, Again (And Guess Where the Murders Are)

A former Trump administration official now running for Congress in New Hampshire voted twice during the 2016 primary election season, possibly violating federal voting law and leaving him at odds with the Republican party’s intense focus on “election integrity”.

Matt Mowers, a leading Republican primary candidate hoping to unseat the Democratic representative Chris Pappas, cast an absentee ballot in New Hampshire’s 2016 presidential primary, voting records show. At the time, Mowers served as the director of former New Jersey governor Chris Christie’s presidential campaign in the pivotal early voting state.

Four months later, after Christie’s campaign fizzled, Mowers cast another ballot in New Jersey’s Republican presidential primary, using his parents’ address to re-register in his home state, documents the Associated Press obtained through a public records request show.

That's the way it seems to be going, Republicans vote fradulently and then complain about Democrats doing it.

Meanwhile, it seems that the states with the highest murder rates are, wait for it, red states:

We found that murder rates are, on average, 40% higher in the 25 states Donald Trump won in the last presidential election compared to those that voted for Joe Biden. In addition, murder rates in many of these red states dwarf those in blue states like New York, California, and Massachusetts. And finally, many of the states with the worst murder rates—like Mississippi, Kentucky, Alabama, South Carolina, and Arkansas—are ones that few would describe as urban. Only 2 of America’s top 100 cities in population are located in these high murder rate states. And not a single one of the top 10 murder states registers in the top 15 for population density.

No surprise there. Projection is how the GOP rolls.

Dabbing These Down, Here

Is China Done?

An argument that they are, or soon will be.

Labor costs are skyrocketing, but productivity is not matching it.

For all the talk of the PLA growing in size and effectiveness, China's oil supply depends on the United States Navy to keep the peace. They don't have the power to protect it. A blue-water navy is not something that can be orderd from shipyards and put into service in five or ten years.

The United States would face similar demographic issues as does China (and Russia and Japan), but it doesn't. The reason for that is immigration. If immigration is choked off, then the United States will go down the road being trod by those other nations.

And that is the point that the Trumpanzees and the xenophobic lobby keeps willfully ignoring.

Tulsi and Tucker, This is Your Guy's Work

Moscow faced a new wave of revulsion and accusations of war crimes Monday after the Russian pullout from the outskirts of Kyiv revealed streets strewn with corpses of what appeared to be civilians, some of whom had seemingly been killed deliberately at close range.

The images of battered bodies out in the open or in hastily dug graves also led to calls for tougher economic sanctions against the Kremlin, namely a cutoff of fuel imports from Russia.

The mayor of a small town, Motyzhyn, was tortured, she and her family were killed and tossed into a shhallow grave by the Russians because they would not collaborate with them:

People tied up and then murdered.

The Russians, of course, deny it, saying, in effect, "who you gonna believe, us or the evidence?"

If you go looking around, you'll find people saying that we'll have real peace if we only give the aggressor the Sudentenland, or some other territory.

Oops, wrong war. But the principle applies. Aggression is not ended by appeasement. We will not achieve a lasting peace by giving Putin the eastern regions of Ukraine, or all of Ukraine. Haven't we learned that the hard way? Putin wants every square inch of the Russian Empire restored, he wants western Europe supine and at his feet and he wants the United States to withdraw from the continent.

I once thought that admitting the Baltics into NATO was a mistake. I was wrong. It's probably evident, now, that the only thing that keot Putin from first marching to the Baltic Sea was NATO. The Baltics have a third of the area of Ukraine and about 1/8th the population. They might have been an easier nut to crack, rather than invade the second-largest nation in Europe.

But I digress.

History is clear on one point: You cannot appease a dictator. You cannot appease a tyrant who is set on conquering his neighbors, and then the neighbors after that.

Putin is not hiding who he is. The fellow-travelers, the collaborators, they all need to be called out.

And the Ukrainins need to be given every tool that they can use to fight this war. The countries taking in Ukrainian refugees need to be assisted.

We can't undo the mistakes that were made in Europe during the 1936-1938 timeframe. But we damned sure don't need to repeat them.

A Decade On

George went over the Rainbow Bridge.

He was my first cat. He was also a cat who was bottle-fed as a kitten, so he had some peculiar ideas about what it meant to be a cat. I always thought that George thought that he was human, albeit cursed with no real vocal range and a lack of opposable thumbs. He wanted to eat human food and he would not touch meat if it hadn't been cooked.

In the car, although he usually rode in his carrier, the door was open and he'd lie elsewhere if he felt like it. More than once, he stood in my lap with his front paws on the windowsill.

He was pretty unique, so far as cats go. I miss him a lot.