Taxing Times

speaking of critterville wannabes

Sarah Palin Announces She’s Running for Congress in Alaska – The New York Times (nytimes.com)

Sarah Palin, a former Alaska governor and the Republican nominee for vice president in 2008, said Friday that she was entering the race for Alaska’s lone congressional seat, marking her return to national politics after she helped revive the anti-establishment rhetoric that has come to define the Republican Party.
She will be joining a crowded field of nearly 40 candidates to fill the House seat left vacant by Representative Don Young, whose unexpected death last month has spurred one of the largest political shifts in the state in 50 years.
Ms. Palin said in a statement that she planned to honor Mr. Young’s legacy, while painting a dystopian picture of a nation in crisis and criticizing the “radical left,” high gas prices, inflation and illegal immigration.
A special election will be held on June 11. The top four candidates who get the most votes move ahead to the special general election on Aug. 16. The state will be using a unique “top four” system for the first time. The regular open primary for Mr. Young’s seat and the special general election are being held on the same day, a move that might lead to confusion.
Ms. Palin will face a host of both far-right and establishment Republican rivals, including Nick Begich III, the Republican scion of Alaskan political royalty; State Senator Joshua Revak, an Iraq war veteran who previously worked for Mr. Young; and Tara Sweeney, who served in the Trump administration as assistant secretary of the interior for Indian affairs.
Ms. Palin will also have some formidable progressive challengers, including Al Gross, a former orthopedic surgeon who ran unsuccessfully for Senate in 2020 and is running as an independent, and Christopher Constant, an openly gay Democrat who is a member of the Anchorage Assembly.

Russian Mines Left in Kyiv Retreat a ‘Disaster’, Zelensky Claims (msn.com)

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said in a video address that retreating Russian forces are causing a “complete disaster” and accused them of leaving behind landmines, even “mining” the bodies of the dead as they retreat from Kyiv.

Zelensky made the claim early on Saturday morning as Ukrainian forces were reportedly advancing around Kyiv amid a Russian withdrawal from the vicinity of the capital city.

The Ukrainian president told his citizens that they should wait until the mines were cleared before trying to resume their normal lives.

“They are mining the whole territory,” Zelensky said. “They are mining homes, mining equipment, even the bodies of people who were killed. There are a lot of trip wires, a lot of other dangers.”

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The ‘Zelenskyy cocktail’ – a drink fit for a president (Picture: Jane Millichip/Getty)

only sarah silver lining i can see is that Tina Fey will be back on SNL more.

the hill:

VALLETTA, Malta (AP) — Pope Francis said Saturday he is studying a possible visit to Kyiv and he blasted Russian President Vladimir Putin for launching a “savage” war. Speaking after his arrival in Malta, he delivered his most pointed and personalized denunciation yet of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

Francis didn’t cite Russian President Vladimir Putin by name, but the reference was clear when he said that “some potentate” had unleashed the threat of nuclear war on the world in an “infantile and destructive aggression” under the guise of “anachronist claims of nationalistic interests.”

“We had thought that invasions of other countries, savage street fighting and atomic threats were grim memories of a distant past,” Francis told Maltese officials and diplomats on the Mediterranean island nation at the start of a weekend visit.

Francis has to date avoided referring to Russia or Putin by name. But Saturday’s personalization of the powerful figure responsible marked a new level of outrage for the pope.

“Once again, some potentate, sadly caught up in anachronistic claims of nationalist interest, is provoking and fomenting conflicts, whereas ordinary people sense the need to build a future that will either be shared or not be at all,” he said.

The Vatican tends to not call out aggressors in hopes of keeping open options for dialogue. The Vatican, which in recent years has forged unprecedented new relations with the Putin-allied Russian Orthodox Church, had offered itself as a potential mediator but to date has been largely left on the diplomatic sidelines.

Francis told reporters en route to Malta that a possible visit to Kyiv was “on the table,” but no dates have been set or trip confirmed. The mayor of the Ukrainian capital had invited Francis to come as a messenger of peace along with other religious figures.

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hmmm, sounds like some of that antler blood might’ve gone bad and not set too well with vlad.

maybe francis should pack an extra “last rites” kit to double team with the orthodox head in case he needs to add a moscow leg on his journey to kyiv.

“… he wouldn’t give a quarter of a shit about deer he’s torturing for a bath” 

pogo, nor would he care what happens when he presses that red button probably.  an alternate version of  “L’État, c’est moi” (substituting world for state) if he goes so should the world.

‘They called her crazy’: Watergate whistleblower finally gets her due | Watergate | The Guardian

The phone call came five days after the Watergate break-in. Martha Mitchell began telling a reporter that she would leave her husband, former US attorney general John Mitchell, if he did not quit the “dirty business” of politics.
But the conversation ended abruptly and Mitchell was heard shouting: “You just get away – get away!” Then the line went dead. She had been accosted by a former FBI agent and would be forcibly tranquilized and held captive for days.
Mitchell would also see her reputation destroyed by loyalists to the then president, Richard Nixon, because of what she knew about Watergate – dooming her to become one of the hidden figures of the biggest political scandal of the 20th century.
That is now about to change. The 1970s celebrity socialite will next month be played by the Hollywood actor Julia Roberts in Gaslit, an eight-part TV drama co-starring Sean Penn as John Mitchell and Dan Stevens as the White House counsel, John Dean.
The series on America’s Starz network – riding a wave of books, exhibitions and films marking the 50th anniversary of the break‐in and burglary of the Democratic national headquarters at the Watergate complex – illuminates the mostly forgotten role of a woman who paid a tragic price for trying to raise the alarm about Nixon’s skulduggery.
[…]
Mitchell was a garrulous bon vivant on the Washington social scene with a penchant for drinking whisky and calling journalists late at night. Born in Arkansas, she earned the nickname “the Mouth of the South”, while the New York Times once called her “the most talked about, talkative woman in Washington”.
Garrett Graff, author of the recently published Watergate: A New History, said: “Martha Mitchell is one of the most significant figures of the Watergate age and has been largely lost to history for most of the intervening 50 years. She was in many ways the first conservative political pundit, the forerunner of outspoken voices like Rush Limbaugh or Sarah Palin.
“During the Nixon administration, she was the second most in-demand figure for Republican events after the president himself and was this larger-than-life, colourful, outspoken woman in Washington at a time when most cabinet wives were seen, not heard.”
[…]
After the burglars were caught red-handed, Martha Mitchell was astonished to learn that the CRP’s security director, James McCord, a former CIA officer who had worked as her personal security guard, was among those arrested. From a hotel in California she phoned Helen Thomas, a journalist at United Press International, to discuss what she knew.
But the conversation was cut short when an ex-FBI agent, Steve King, instructed by John Mitchell to keep his wife away from the media, yanked the phone out of the wall. Thomas tried to call back but was told by the switchboard operator that Mitchell was “indisposed and could not talk”.
Thomas then tried John Mitchell, who casually dismissed the incident, saying of his wife: “That little sweetheart, I love her so much. She gets a little upset about politics, but she loves me and I love her and that’s what counts.”
Martha Mitchell later accused King of assaulting, kidnapping and sedating her. During their struggle, her hand smashed a window and required stitches. Five men held her down on a bed while a doctor injected her with a tranquilliser. In 1975 McCord admitted “basically the woman was kidnapped”.
When Mitchell returned to Washington, she told Thomas: “I’m black and blue. They don’t want me to talk.” But the media paid relatively little attention and Nixon loyalists, desperate to conceal the White House’s role in the break-in, set about discrediting her as a say-anything alcoholic and therefore unreliable witness.
[…]
“Her husband basically told everyone that she was mentally unwell and an alcoholic and not to put too much stock in her. She was one of the first voices to try to warn the country about the corruption at the centre of the Nixon administration and was really laughed at.”
Mitchell’s candor made her popular with reporters before Watergate. Sally Quinn, an author and journalist, talked to her many times. She recalled: “She said exactly what she thought all the time and was very clever and very witty and very smart.
“She realized right away the crowd she was traveling in and she didn’t like it. She put up with it for a while and then she just kind of thought, ‘I can’t do this any more’, and she started speaking out.
“They had to figure out a way to deal with her so what they did was they said she was crazy. She wasn’t crazy. It turns out because she was right: they locked her in a room, they kidnapped her. When they did what they did to her, you realize she really wasn’t crazy at all.”
[…]
Martha Mitchell called for Nixon’s resignation as early as May 1973; the president was eventually forced to step down in August 1974. Nixon later told interviewer David Frost: “I’m convinced if it hadn’t been for Martha – and God rest her soul, because she in her heart was a good person. She just had a mental and emotional problem that nobody knew about. If it hadn’t been for Martha, there’d have been no Watergate.”
Mitchell died of bone marrow cancer in 1976 at the age of 57. Quinn commented: “She’s an absolute tragedy. One of the Washington people who end up being just ground up and spat out, and she had a tragic ending. She wasn’t crazy. She was brave. She called it like she saw it and and she paid for it.”
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