I'm guessing working from Starbucks/public wifi spot between 9:15-1:45 isn't an option.

Translate this into kitchen table.

Because until then, it's inside baseball, and unless inside baseball leads to a perp walk, no one outside the Beltway cares.

Republicans kept right on voting. Didn't stop over 50 years. Didn't fall for third party siren songs.

Nope, they kept pulling at the lever, and now they're going to succeed past their wildest dreams.

Until they won't.

The only thing Americans hate more than an expansion of the welfare state is a rollback of the welfare state.

I've never said this before about a pol from either party.

But if a sitting Congressman is legit going to try and go on a Aaron Hernandez-style murder spree, it will be this guy.

Boebert, Greene, Kosar, and the like know the deal - they say crap (half of which they don't really mean) and get money. There's scads of Youtubers, bloggers, etc., that pull the same grift. But Cawthorne seems to be in a different league.

Patrice Cullers-Khan started doing that on the left with her claimed overlordship over BLM, but I haven't read of say Jaime Harrison's SC-Sen campaign getting siphoned away the same as say Kolfage's "build the wall on private" land fundraiser - which really did have some potential if non-crooks had run the thing.

And yes, GOP leaders are feeding the media - right and left - stories. They want him gone, because they view him as dangerously erratic.

Cast every vote you can for Maryland's Sisqó in today's fifth heat of the American Song Contest. His new song "It's Up" will be performed tonight.

No need to actually watch the show or listen to the other songs, unless you really want to. (It's on at 8, if you care to watch it.)

Three ways to vote:
1) NBC app
2) Via https://asc.vote.nbc.com/
3) Via that Tok-Tik app I keep hearing about. My daughter tells me no Boomer blood is required anymore, and since I'm a Boomer to her, it should be perfectly safe to use.

Again, cast every vote you can for Maryland in today's fifth heat of the American Song Contest.



Small clip of the rehearsals:

Well, we may get to find out what happens when zero COVID is breached in China.

China just moved past 1,000 cases for the first time in two years. Multiple cities and provinces affected.

https://www.cnn.com/2022/03/11/china/china-covid-jilin-university-mic-intl-hnk/index.html

Anonymous wrote:This is an utterly worthless thread. Useless. No facts. Just buncha guesses and wishes. Wait for the facts.

Yes, we're theorizing on a discussion board. Some folks here might have military experience on a relevant level, and others might at least be educated laymen. What's your point in trying to squelch a discussion that has been largely polite and informative?

I will say this. If the cyber front has some sysadmins and firewall admins flip, Russia's networks can be rekt.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Meh.....they sent in a bunch of teenagers and early 20s somethings (kids) conscripts with crappy supplies and weapons to serves as fresh meat to be turned into ground beef. They were used to soften up the Ukraine. Russia's advanced weaponry and elite divisions till haven't really been deployed yet. People shouldn't get confident at all that Russia has been 'struggling'. They are just getting warmed up, so I wouldn't extract a whole lot from the first week of combat.

So they sent in their 3rd string bench warmers just to confused the US military and intelligence officers?

Makes a lot of sense.

Russia does not wants to limit the loss of their most advanced equipment and heavy armor. Force the Ukrainians to use up all of their anti-tank weapons, stingers, etc. on junk equipment operated by a bunch of kids forced to enlist. Ukraine will be out of ammo soon. Molotov cocktails don't work against fearsome T90s. And who knows if they start field the T14. It's a beast.

They are still field testing the T14. We might - might - see the T14 show up later this year.

More and more anti-tank weaponry is getting shipped to Ukraine. Their bigger concern is keeping cities fed if they are under siege.

Russia being on the offensive, have to worry about keeping their military fed and equipped. Failure to do so would put a damper in their plan to turn Ukraine into a set of Groznys if the ammo trucks get stuck in traffic on the E-95.

Remember, all supplies must be trucked in, Ukraine cut off all rail entries.

The 80s equipment could surely be used to help patrol the countryside in an occupation situation. I guess a rope-a-dope situation might make some sense, but any Ukrainian entity will continue to have international support and thus military supply.

It seemed like Putin tried to do a quick beheading strike against Kyiv. That ... did not work. He's had the most success in the South so far, with Mariupol besieged or nearly so. Some combination of air bombing and shelling to force a capitulation will be attempted. If the most the Russians can come up with is Yanukovich or some mayor of a city of 25k, s/he will have no credibility. Unless Putin WANTED to see his army get killed, he'd have tried fifth column activities before the war - we heard NOTHING. No plots, nothing.

Of course the Ukrainian infantry have handheld SAMs and artillery emplacements have to be protected.

Russia is trying to operate in hostile territory and further from their bases than they have in previous wars. Georgia - they went in maybe 10 miles from Abkhazia and South Ossetia and didn't seriously try to attack Tblisi. Ukraine I - only tried to take Crimea and Donbass. Chechnya - didn't have to advance as far and Grozny was about 1/8 the size of Kyiv, with better-armed defenders and FAR more international aid/sympathy. Also this is the smart phone era. We will see Russians committing even more human rights violations in real time.

Anonymous wrote:Russia invades Crimea and China invades all of the South China Sea under Obama. Russia invades Ukraine under Biden. The whole world knows that when Democrats are in charge in the US the US turns into a spineless, gutless coward. Democrats have zero spine to stand up for anything.

It's so funny going back to watch the debates between Romney and Obama. Remember how the Democrats and liberal media incessantly blasted Romney when he stated that Russia remained the US' biggest foreign threat while Obama said Al Qaeda? What a joke. Romney was right by a country mile. Obama was extremely weak when it came to foreign affairs. He let Russia and China run laps around him. He was too busy drone bombing goat herders than focusing on more important geopolitical threats from major rivals.

The biggest mistake of this century wrt foreign affairs was the time Obama said that the US would lead the world from behind. WTF???? That sent major signals to bad actors that the US is spineless.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/the-obama-doctrine-leading-from-behind/2011/04/28/AFBCy18E_story.html

Sort of like how Dubya tossed the Georgians overboard and Trump tossed the Kurds overboard?

Putin I'm guessing would tolerate Finland being democratic but super duper neutral with a slight pro-Russian bias. Sort of what it was in the Cold War era.

Russia is well along the way to becoming South Africa in the 70s and 80s.

I think people were so used to the idea that Putin and Xi are playing 21-dimensional chess that the idea that they might make a massive strategic miscalculation has evaded them.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I know that Putin is looking at everybody putting the Ukrainian flag on their Facebook profile and is quaking in his shoes.

Not really. But babushkas on the metro with no war stitched on their handbags, oligarchs at threat of losing billions, battalions surrendering and thousands on the streets protesting in Russia do. Why is he begging for negotiations just two days into his glorious invasion?

Good question.. Also he stopped the invasion in 2014 after negotiations called Minsk accord. Some agreements were reached, why are these agreements no longer viable? What is really prompting him to invade this time when he could have just continued back in 2014 when inconvenient to him government took over? And if he is ready for negotiations now, that's great, let's end this, what's the hold up?

The hold up is dear old midget Putin. He can't find the shoes that make him look taller.

I don't know what prompted him to order this disastrous invasion. Radiation poisoning, syphilis, small penis, ego? It's clearly not about Russia's security, people or lol denazification. What does your commissar tell you today?

Is there any indication that he won't get exactly what he wants? The Ukrainian 'victories' all over twitter and reddit amount to nothing. The Russian tanks are still advancing from the East and North and there is no suggestion that the Ukrainians are capable of actually stopping them.

At some point either this weekend or early next week, they will need to take a logistical pause, unless they've adopted some sort of means of supplying fuel and ammo and rockets via underground Earth bending. We will also see what the extent of Ukrainian stay behind operations are. The Russian conscripts need to eat, have weapons, and get from Point A to Point B. Even if they defeat the Ukrainians, they then have to ensure the continuity of their puppet government - and that depends on (among other factors) the stability and presence of Zelensky's government and military forces, the presence of a contiguous area under Zelensky's occupation, and the situation in Occupied Territories.

At a minimum the Russian hope for a quick decapitation of Zelensky's gov't failed when the Spetznaz were beaten back from that airport.

Russian Army is advancing further in than they EVER did in Georgia and their aims in Crimea/Donbass were FAR more limited.

On the flip side, Putin has his T-84, T-90, and the few dozen latest tanks in reserve (maybe if NATO actually does intervene? Maybe to soak up Ukraine's Javelin supply?) He's launched nothing across the western end of the border.

tl;dr version: the fear is that direct NATO intervention will lead to World War III. Biden's strategy takes a longer time to work. Russia and Ukraine will also need to consider supplies after this weekend.

There's also the hope that Ukraine will hold out longer than Afghanistan's government did last summer; at least with say Kiev holding out until late March and the Ukrainian government holding together along with a large conventional force until April/May. If they can do that, Russia's military would need to resupply (vulnerable to partisan and stay-behind operations) and occupy (there's plenty of people who wouldn't kill a soldier but would be willing to blow up a railroad, send videos clandestinely, host a nice polite young man without questions, etc.)

Likewise, Ukraine will need its own resupply, but the ports of Odessa and (AFAIK) Mariupol remain open, as do the land borders to Romania, Moldova (Transnistria might stop that), Poland, Hungary, and Slovakia.

Putin is driving for Kiev, and hoping to decapitate Ukraine in one blow and install some puppet to "surrender". From there he is hoping it will be like France after the fall of Paris in 1870 and 1940, with Ukraine meekly falling into line, with any resistance movement fading away through military defeat + mistakes on the part of the resistance + a global wish to just move on.

Because the alternative (for him) is 5x worse than Afghanistan - a protracted occupation which will end any impulse to end the sanctions and put Russia into South Africa in the 70s and 80s territory. Russian retaliation (not known for its restraint) and such will get immediate play worldwide.

He's also hoping that he is de facto forgiven as he was after Georgia in 2008 (Russia didn't have any major goal of actually going into Tbilisi and so Putin's aims were 100% achieved) and after Crimea in 2014 (Russia occupied regions that were 80-90% in the tank for Russia). But his aims at least so far seem broader than they were in Georgia and Crimea - his armies have progressed further into Ukraine - and in a few days will need resupply. This article talks about the challenges Russia faces in invading the Baltics, but the supply capabilities remain the same.

https://warontherocks.com/2021/11/feeding-the-bear-a-closer-look-at-russian-army-logistics/

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:
I guess you imagine yourself to be the Twitter version of the Wolverines?

I have no idea what that means. But it is pretty clear that these trucker protests taking place world wide are coordinated.

Highly suspicious that someone accusing others of being foreign agents would miss this cultural reference.

Meh, it's a 40 year old movie at this point.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:
I guess you imagine yourself to be the Twitter version of the Wolverines?

I have no idea what that means. But it is pretty clear that these trucker protests taking place world wide are coordinated.

Reference to Red Dawn, to the HS students that resisted the Russians.

Remember a few things, though:
1) Russians will try and glom onto existing movements.
2) Russians had all sorts of groups in the runup to 2016: left-wing groups, BLM groups, and I wouldn't doubt for a minute that they're trying to create left-liberal groups. I'm not sure where their innocuous meme posting groups played into their masterplan.
3) My point is that they cannot do bupkis without tapping into veins of already-present discontent. Dismissing this, or anything as "just Russian pyops" is overly glib/facile.