Right Wing Smokes Crack

Anarchy? 10-4 | The Seattle Times

[…]
The protesters in Canada’s capital represent only a fraction of truckers, let alone Canadians, the vast majority of whom have gotten vaccinated and support government efforts to stop the spread of COVID-19. Yet, they are calling for an end to all pandemic-related restrictions, as well as the resignation of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and his government.
Their demands are absurdly presumptuous, and the aggressive behavior exhibited by some of the protesters against the people of Ottawa is outrageous. In a different world, this small mob in their big rigs would have remained a local annoyance, but, in the interconnected world of the internet, not only has their bellicosity been hugely amplified on social media, they have received millions of dollars to sustain their effort through crowdfunding sites.
Canadian authorities strongly suspect that much of that support comes from right-wing extremist groups that are well-organized and financially robust, as well as from foreign entities that target Western democracies whenever they find a ripe opportunity. Those bad actors easily hide in the murky corners of cyberspace, but not every backer of the truckers shuns attention. Donald Trump, Texas Sen. Ted Cruz and other Republican leaders have rushed to find a spotlight in which they can echo the truckers’ cry for “freedom.”
The freedom the truckers and their cheerleaders insist upon is the liberty of a spoiled child or a schoolyard bully. They want to be able to do whatever they want, no matter how much it may endanger the people around them. There is another name for that kind of freedom: anarchy.

uh oh

US orders evacuation of embassy in Kyiv amid threat of Russian invasion | TheHill

The U.S. State Department issued a travel advisory early Saturday morning, announcing that the American embassy in Kyiv had been evacuated amid the threat of Russian invasion.

“On February 12, 2022, the Department of State ordered the departure of most U.S. direct hire employees from Embassy Kyiv due to the continued threat of Russian military action,” the travel advisory read.

The level four advisory also urged U.S. citizens not to travel to the area and those who remain in the country to depart “immediately.”

The State Department added that on Sunday, the embassy in Kyiv will halt all consular services, and the embassy will “maintain a small consular presence in Lviv, Ukraine to handle emergencies, but will not be able to provide passport, visa or routine consular services.”

[continues]

as the major league pitcher preacher roe once opined: “some days you eat the bear and somedays the bear eats you…”

roe went on to say: “yesterday the bear ate us.”

that bear better beware of a mighty case of indigestion in re ukraine snack attack.

@PentagonPresSec.@SecDef has ordered the temporary repositioning of @FLGuard troops out of Ukraine. Abundance of caution, safety and security of our personnel his paramount concern. We remain committed to our relationship with the Ukrainian armed forces.9:13 AM · Feb 12, 2022·Twitter for iPhone

for all Al fans out there here’s an excerpt from

Transcript: “Capehart” with Al Franken – The Washington Post

MR. CAPEHART: […]  Now, of course, Senator Kirsten Gillibrand was the one who led that effort to get you to leave the Senate. You recently said that you would not run for Gillibrand’s seat in the Senate. But this leads to a Twitter question that came in, that asks, “Are you going to run again?” Do you have it in your bones or in your blood to jump back into the political arena and run for elective office again?
MR. FRANKEN: I don’t know. I certainly loved my time in the Senate. I loved the job. I got a lot done. I was able to accomplish things I couldn’t accomplish anywhere else, I don’t think. So yeah, it would be tempting to try to do that again.
MR. CAPEHART: Mm-hmm. At some point.
MR. FRANKEN: Yeah.
MR. CAPEHART: Perhaps.
MR. FRANKEN: I’m only 70, so I’ve got–let’s see. Grassley’s running for reelection.
[Laughter]
MR. CAPEHART: So you’ve got all the time in the world–
MR. FRANKEN: I do.
MR. CAPEHART: –to run again.
MR. FRANKEN: You know that when someone is 87 and they won’t stand up–even though he denounced Trump early on, then he hugged him on the stage–you know that if he won’t kind of go down on principle at 87 he’s not going to do it at probably any other time.
MR. CAPEHART: So we’ve gotten to my list of questions here that was getting into political stuff. We talked about the discomfort bill in Florida. You jumped ahead on that. But, you know, you’re a former politico. What grade would you give President Biden?
MR. FRANKEN: I think grading people is kind of silly. Asking the question, perfectly valid.
MR. CAPEHART: Okay. All right. So you’re not going to answer the question. So don’t grade him. What do you think of how he’s done so far? It’s been a year and a month.
MR. FRANKEN: Well, he’s had some ups and downs. What I hope is, is that by November he’ll have accomplished a lot of things, including a lot of the elements of Build Back Better. Because I think that there’s been a little bit of a disservice, and it’s been all around, in terms of, especially in the media, of instead of–I think the Washington media does this a lot, which is it gets into inside baseball and horse race and doesn’t cover the content of these bills.
So what I would suggest now for the Senate is for Chuck Schumer and for the rest of my Democratic colleagues and former colleagues there is to put the elements of Build Back Better onto the floor, at least the ones that Manchin and Sinema at least would consider backing. For example, Manchin has said he is for expanded pre-K, universal pre-K. That would be a great thing. Americans would be for that. You put that on the floor, Americans want that, and if Republicans vote against it, if we don’t get 60 votes, we put it in a reconciliation package. But at least Americans know what we’re fighting for.
The same on extending–or subsidies for childcare. That would be wildly popular. You know, in Europe the average country subsidizes the average kid $14,000 for childcare, and in the United States we do $500. $500. And that would be wildly popular. It would also make sure that people could go to work, that moms could go to work or dads could go to work, and actually would help maybe bring down a little bit of the inflation on salaries and wages, because more people would be able to go out into the workforce.
There’s a whole bunch of stuff like this. Getting costs down on prescription drugs, on insulin, on child tax credit. My God. If you put that out there–and I don’t understand why we just don’t put one after the other out there so the American people can see what the elements of this are, because if they did, we could pass this stuff. And I wish it had been done sooner. I wish that some of this stuff, people could see the results of it before November. But I think people will see what Democrats are for, and it would help us a lot in November.

‘Anyone who has ever looked into the eyes of our soldiers knows for sure that the aggressor will not take Kyiv, Odesa, Kharkiv or any other city’ – a joint statement of Minister of Defence of Ukraine and Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces | Міноборони (mil.gov.ua)