“France supported the fledgling continental army for about four years with supplies, weapons, advisors, men; you know, [the army got many of its words from the French]. Yeah, I don’t recall France ever telling the U.S. they should just surrender to England. You don’t bend the knee to Communists and dictators…you punch them in the face until they stop. If we bend the knee to Russia now, how long will it be until we beg the dragon that rises in the East to please eat us last?”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m-QXz9wotrU
Russian victory is not inevitable. Russian territorial progress has been slow, by May 9th Russian will have lost a million soldiers killed or wounded, Russia has about a year’s worth of armored vehicles left, Russian logistics is using: civilian vans, golf buggies, and donkeys, and the Russian economy is making huge sacrifices to support the wartime economy.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CMI6tc05Jzk
“The 43 days of his second term have revealed a president in the grip of a set of large ideas that were an occasional but far from a paramount feature of his first term. This version of Trump is more serious — determined to dismember large parts of the federal government and upend relations between the United States and the rest of the world on trade and security. He is ready to pursue these ideas in a sustained and pitiless way, all the while asserting vast new powers for himself as president.”
https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2025/03/05/donald-trump-address-ideologue-column-00205559
“Vance’s gamble to temporarily step into the limelight has paid off in at least one significant way. After Zelenskyy left the West Wing without signing a highly anticipated mineral rights deal, the White House responded by adopting one of Vance’s signature foreign policy initiatives: a total pause on U.S. military aid to Ukraine.”
https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2025/03/05/jd-vance-ukraine-aid-zelenskyy-00211618
““He could be misinterpreted that vitamin A will save your suffocating suffering child,” Brett Giroir, a first-term Trump health official now advising Kennedy on infectious disease policy, wrote in a post on X. “It will not.”
In Texas, some local officials have grown concerned that Kennedy’s messaging risks diluting their own communication efforts. They warn that his equivocations could undermine their only hope of ending the outbreak: persuading people to get the measles vaccine.
“We don’t want to diminish the primary message,” Phil Huang, director of health and human services in Dallas County, Texas, said in an interview. “It’s the vaccines that are the most important.”
Katherine Wells, director of public health for the city of Lubbock, Texas, echoed that sentiment.
“We need to make sure that we’re all talking about the importance of vaccination, and although there’s some focus on treatment, preventing the disease in the first place is really what public health works on.”
Since President Donald Trump nominated him to run HHS late last year, Kennedy has labored to convince skeptics that he is not anti-vaccine, despite his past as an activist who repeatedly raised doubts about the safety and effectiveness of various immunizations.
As recently as 2021, Kennedy suggested without evidence that measles outbreaks may have been fabricated to “inflict unnecessary and risky vaccines on millions of children.” But now confronted with a high-risk, real-world opportunity to demonstrate whether his views have changed, the HHS secretary has instead appeared to seek a middle ground — calling the measles vaccine protective for individuals and broader communities, yet stopping well short of the full-throated endorsement public health experts say is necessary from the nation’s top health official.
“What he should be saying is that these kinds of outbreaks are fully preventable and unacceptable, and that as secretary he will do everything in his power to ensure the public that it never happens again,” said Lawrence Gostin, director of Georgetown University’s O’Neill Institute for National and Global Health Law. “It’s the first major public health crisis that he’s had to face, and he hasn’t reassured doubters about his ability to get on top of it.””
…
“Most importantly, health experts said, Kennedy could simply hit the bar already set by health officials in Texas: Declaring unequivocally that vaccination is the central way to contain the outbreak.”
https://www.politico.com/news/2025/03/05/rfk-measles-scrutiny-00214952
“Following swift market backlash, Trump on Wednesday announced a one-month reprieve for autos and auto parts from the sweeping 25 percent tariffs he levied one day earlier. In doing so, he signaled an openness to hearing appeals from other industries for additional exemptions to the Mexico and Canada tariffs. It’s a stark contrast to the approach he is taking with the American people, whom he is asking to shoulder the risk of higher prices as a result of the tariffs, in exchange for the promise of longer-term economic benefit.
“I don’t know what the administration’s plan is,” said Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.). “If they’re using [tariffs] as leverage, seems to me it would be better to threaten them, negotiate and you put them on or not on.”
Together, the conflicting actions reflect the president’s dual impulses: longstanding sensitivity to stock market fluctuations — which he has long read as Nielsen ratings for his performance — and a love of tariffs as a primary instrument to get what he wants from foreign governments.
That tension is also reflected within Trump’s circle of advisers, who spent much of Wednesday debating whether and how far to mitigate the impacts of a trade war on American industries and consumers.
“It’s the greatest show on Earth. We’ll put tariffs on tonight, but tomorrow we’ll tell you we may negotiate and take them off,” a person close to the administration, granted anonymity to discuss internal conversations, told POLITICO. “But stay tuned, because you never know what tomorrow’s gonna bring.”
The self-inflicted economic uncertainty comes as Americans remain concerned about high prices, with polling showing that people don’t think the administration is doing enough to address the economy even as they are pleased with its performance on other issues. It also comes amid growing frustration on Capitol Hill, particularly among Republican senators from farm states, who fear the ripple effects from the tariffs on their local economies.
And it’s adding to confusion about whether the new tariffs on Canada and Mexico are truly aimed only at stemming the tide of fentanyl flowing across the U.S. border — a message Trump’s lieutenants have underscored far more firmly than the president himself — or reflective of the administration’s broader protectionist goals. The new tariffs, after all, are only a prelude to the more sweeping reciprocal tariffs the president has promised will take effect April 2 — and it’s unclear even to many of the president’s close allies what actions Canada and Mexico could take at this point to lift the tariffs entirely.”
https://www.politico.com/news/2025/03/05/trump-tariff-war-political-risk-00214567
‘Free Speech’ Grifter Shares Oligarch’s Demonic Vision For America’s Future
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qTLWMrAycF8
“We’ve studied democratic erosion in countries around the world, and our research has found that the most important bulwark against an elected leader undermining democracy doesn’t come from opposition parties or pro-democracy activists. It comes from the ruling party — and particularly the powerful elites in that party — and their efforts to constrain their own leader.
The danger to democracy is particularly acute in political systems led by parties where leaders wield disproportionate influence relative to the political parties that back them — as is now the case in the Republican Party. Our data on all democratically elected leaders around the globe in the 30 years since the end of the Cold War show that where leaders dominate the parties they lead, the chances of democratic backsliding increase, whether it’s through gradual democratic decay or a rapid collapse.
In the United States, we tend to assume that constitutional checks and balances, including the powers vested in Congress or the Supreme Court, play the central role in constraining a rogue executive and any power grab they might attempt. But we’ve found that institutions can do so only if the members of the president’s party inside those institutions are willing to use their authority in the face of executive abuses or overreach.
The reason that often doesn’t happen is because when a political party becomes dominated by the leader as an individual, party figures view their political fates as directly tied to that of the leader, not to the long-term reputation of the party, and so they are unwilling to push back against the leader’s actions. In these “personalist” political parties, the party elite are even willing to go along with a leader’s abuse of power if they see that doing so is advantageous for keeping their jobs.
The impact affects more than just the political class. When prominent party figures tolerate — or indeed even support — a leader’s anti-democratic actions, it fosters public acceptance of those actions among party supporters, as people take important cues from their elected officials. High levels of polarization and the resulting disdain for the other side only make matters worse, as partisans are willing to accept abuses of power if it means keeping the other side out of office. Indeed, even when there remains a high level of public support for democracy, our research shows that societies can slide down a non-democratic path simply because they don’t want the other side to win.”
https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2025/01/12/republicans-save-democracy-trump-00197613
Russia is suffering from a deep deficit, high inflation, and high interest rates due to sustaining their invasion.
Russia is hurting and could decide that the war is not worth it if Ukraine had consistent backing.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kse-o0Oz2AI
Trump’s speech was filled with falsehoods. Does he lie to make Republicans repeat what they know is a lie as a sign of loyalty? Is he flooding the zone with bullshit to overwhelm society so that it can’t effectively fact check him? Could he possibly believe all the falsehoods he says?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gsvHHkGYi_A