The Washington Post offers tips on how to keep your EV battery running in frigid temperatures. The link at the end of this graf is supposed to be a "gift link" (from me, Marie Burns, the giftor!), meaning that non-subscribers can read the article. Hope it works: https://wapo.st/3u8Z705
Saturday
May072022
May 8, 2022
Late Morning Update:
Darlene Superville of the AP: "Jill Biden made an unannounced visit to western Ukraine on Sunday, holding a surprise Mother's Day meeting with first lady Olena Zelenska to show U.S. support for the embattled nation as Russia presses its punishing war in the eastern regions. Biden traveled under the cloak of secrecy, becoming the latest high-profile American to enter Ukraine during its 10-week-old conflict with Russia.... Biden spent about two hours in Ukraine, traveling by vehicle to the town of Uzhhorod, about a 10-minute drive from a Slovakian border village where she had toured a border processing facility. Zelenska thanked Biden for her 'courageous act.'... Earlier, in the Slovakian border village of Vysne Nemecke, [Biden] toured its border processing facility, surveying operations set up by the United Nations and other relief organizations to assist Ukrainians seeking refuge. Biden attended a religious service in a tent set up as a chapel...."
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The New York Times' live updates of developments Sunday in Russia's war on Ukraine are here: "President Volodymyr Zelensky is scheduled to meet virtually with the leaders of the world's biggest economies on Sunday, following weeks in which the United States and its allies have promised billions of dollars in military aid to tip the war against Russia in Ukraine's favor.... The apparent Russian pullback from the area around Kharkiv, Ukraine's second-largest city, contradicted the Russian narrative of victory in Ukraine and illustrated the complicated picture along the 300-mile front in eastern Ukraine.... C.I.A. Director William J. Burns said that Mr. Putin is 'in a frame of mind that he thinks he cannot afford to lose,' and so the stakes are high." ~~~
~~~ The Washington Post's live updates for Sunday are here: "Maj. Serhiy Volyna, whose forces are trapped at the Azovstal Iron and Steel Works under a constant barrage of Russian fire, made a plea on Facebook for 'everyone to make the maximum effort to evacuate the military.' He described life at the plant as 'some hellish reality show.' Meanwhile, Russian forces bombed a school in Luhansk, leaving as many as 60 people trapped under the rubble and presumed dead, Ukrainian officials said."
Andrew Kramer of the New York Times: "The Kremlin entered the war expecting a quick and painless victory, predicting that the government of President Volodymyr Zelensky would fracture and that leading officials in the largely Russian-speaking eastern region would gladly switch sides. That has not happened.... In all but a tiny number of villages, Russia failed to flip local politicians to its side. The Ukrainian authorities have opened 38 cases of treason, all targeting low level officials in individual instances of betrayal.... Prominent, once Russian-leaning politicians including Ihor Terekhov, the mayor of Kharkiv, and Hennady Trukhanov, the mayor of Odesa, also remained loyal and became fierce defenders of their cities." Assuming Ukrainian leaders in Russian-speaking areas would turn on their own country, Russians did little, if anything, to recruit those leaders' support.
David Stern, et al., of the Washington Post: "All women, children and elderly people had been evacuated from the Azovstal Iron and Steel Works plant in Mariupol, officials said Saturday, concluding one chapter of a harrowing drama where thousands of civilians had been trapped for weeks amid an intense Russian assault.... Ukrainian fighters are still holed up at the sprawling complex, and a regional police leader told The Washington Post that three were killed Friday during the civilian evacuation. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said Saturday that diplomatic efforts were underway to try to free the remaining fighters as well as medics and the wounded. though he acknowledged that such a move 'is extremely difficult.'"
Marie: This makes me scream. The Washington Post is concerned that Bart O'Kavanaugh's neighbor Lacie Wooten-Holway "is breaking an unspoken contract of civility" by leading silent protests in front of I Like Beer's Chevy Chase house. Civlity??? Bart is about to take a profound civil right from millions of women & their families, and Wooten-Holway should be demure, ladylike and, as the WashPo puts it, "genial"? Fucking genial? The neighbors say should not be so "disrepectful" and steer clear of "bitter Washington politics"?
Maureen Dowd must have the New York Times' legal team on high alert this weekend as she muses about the sexual fantasies of repressed Supremes. Why, she describes Clarence Thomas a "pervy liar."
Way Beyond the Beltway
Afghanistan. AP: "Afghanistan's Taliban rulers on Saturday ordered all Afghan women to wear head-to-toe clothing in public -- a sharp, hard-line pivot that confirmed the worst fears of rights activists and was bound to further complicate Taliban dealings with an already distrustful international community. The decree says that women should leave the home only when necessary, and that male relatives would face punishment -- starting with a summons and escalating up to court hearings and jail time -- for women's dress code violations. It was the latest in a series of repressive edicts issued by the Taliban leadership, not all of which have been implemented. Last month for example the Taliban forbade women to travel alone, but after a day of opposition, that has since been silently ignored." ~~~
~~~ Marie: I checked an English-language translation of the Taliban's decree. Not surprisingly, the footnotes are full of Sam Alito citations.
Northern Ireland. Amanda Ferguson & Karla Adam of the Washington Post: "Sinn Fein on Saturday became the first nationalist party to dominate in Northern Ireland, while Prime Minister Boris Johnson's Conservative Party lost hundreds of seats in local elections seen partly as a referendum on his leadership. Sinn Fein won the largest number of seats in the Northern Ireland assembly, official results showed -- and along with that the power to name its leader Michelle O'Neill as first minister in the regional power-sharing government.... A Sinn Fein win doesn't have immediate implications for unification. Any changes to the status of Northern Ireland would require referendums on both sides of the border, and public support for a unified island isn't yet there. But Sinn Fein hopes it can build support over time."
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Reader Comments (12)
Unsurprisingly, the Party of Traitors will use the Taliban’s latest “Crush all women” decree as a bludgeon against Joe Biden, blaming our departure from Afghanistan (a move long advocated by their leader, the Fat Fascist) for this latest misogyny.
It will be a handy way for them to try to sidestep their own jaunt down the same path via The Trump supremes’ theocratic jiggery-pokery, shedding a waterfall of crocodile tears at the fate of Afghan women consigned to this horrible fate by Let’s go Brandon.
In other words, Sam who?
The itinerant preacher missed a few Sundays, but he's back in town for this one.
"We’ve all experienced sticker shock recently. Everything from gas to food costs more, some prices jumping from week to week.
One pasta sauce that for years cost 99 cents a can soared to $1.29 in only a month, and the medium grade wiper blades I bought for my car last week cost nearly twice as much as similar blades did two years ago. My Social Security check, huffing and puffing, is not nearly keeping pace.
What’s going on? Some say that Biden’s Build Back Better infrastructure plan (passed with some Republican support) piled on top of two massive Covid relief measures adopted by the Trump and Biden presidencies tapped debt so massively and rapidly they cheapened the dollar’s value overnight.
There’s some truth in that analysis, but only some.
Supply chain problems associated with our two-year bout of Covid have also had a great effect. By themselves, supply bottlenecks combined with suddenly increased demand as the Covid shutdown eased also shot prices skyward.
More truth, but still hardly all of it.
Economic disruptions caused by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine have also affected prices. Because Russia and Ukraine supply much of the world’s wheat and oil, in March wheat futures climbed over twenty percent and gas prices over seventeen (nytimes.com).
Ah, but there’s more.
Sunday’s Skagit Valley Herald, which ascribed rising fertilizer prices to the Russian-Ukraine conflict, failed to point out forty to sixty percent of current inflation is due to record corporate profits (substack.com and tradingeconomics.com) or, in this instance, that fertilizer giant Nutrien’s post-pandemic profits shot up by about $1.2 billion on “higher selling prices” (theguardian.com)
I expect inflation stories will continue as long as consumers complain about skyrocketing prices.
But they’d present a fuller, more honest picture if accompanied by displays of the parallel ascension of corporate greed."
Last night sought the best of both worlds.
Those here know I like to pick on Douthat but find reading him painful, so last night I commented on what he had to say about the leaky Alito without reading more than the headline.
"At least the original decision attempted to 1) allow women to decide if they wished to carry a fetus to term, 2) allow families to make such critical and personal. decisions together, 3) allow consultation with medical professionals, 4) make the law regarding abortion uniform across the land and 5) in the increasingly rare instances in which abortion is chosen to have qualified medical professionals perform the procedure.
Alito and his unimaginative cohort on the Court (and you) have apparently decided that such difficult matters should be decided by state legislatures....
Seems to me that the Alito allied justices simply don't have the courage to assume responsibly for making a tough decision, and have therefore handed it off to the states.
Pontius Pilate (if you want a religious reference) comes to mind."
The experiment worked. I checked this morning and no one seems to have noticed.
Ken,
Your list of excellent reasons for not taking away such an important human right as being allowed to make decisions about one’s own life reminds me that the oft used reference to those who would have it so are, or must be, “pro-abortion”. The other side, of course—the saintly anti-abortionists—is “pro-life”.
Here, once again, the sloppy terminology fails to properly describe what’s really happening, in favor of some easy “this side, that side” expression: you’re either for life or against it.
No. Those who benefitted most from Roe—women, and men—are pro-choice. The decision to end a pregnancy or not should be made by those directly involved. That’s the choice. If it were so that the choice would always be abortion, then “pro-abortion” would be an accurate term. But it’s not.
On the other side, let’s look at those in the (ahem) “pro-life” camp. They have made a fetish out of their sanctimonious self-righteousness when it comes to attacking a woman’s right to choose. Does this fetish for life obtain across the board? Let’s see, shall we?
What can be said about this same group who demands the death penalty, at all costs, even when thousands of wrongly convicted citizens have been imprisoned over the years, a number of whom have been wrongfully execute? Pro-life?
Or the mania for making sure everyone, even mentally disturbed assholes, are kept heavily armed? Pro-life?
What about the obsession with demanding that an ignorant con man who ensured the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Americans be returned to power, not to mention the culpability of many of them in maintaining the lies about Covid and the effectiveness of masks, social distancing, and vaccination? Pro-life?
And leave us not overlook the fact that denying all women a choice directly affects their quality of life, some of whom may die in the process or be condemned to a life of enforced poverty and misery for themselves and their children. Also pro-life?
The hypocrisy is astonishing, but not surprising. Hypocrisy is an existential element in the modern confederacy, in which Blow-up Doll Boy Douthat is a smarmy mandarin.
I could easily see the Right forcing women to cover up, for their own good of course. But they would have to change the name. Burqa is too foreign, but maybe sanctity sheet. It will help women from tempting all those vulnerable men.
Charles Stross says we should pick a more universal fight to control our own bodies. As AK points out we need to stop fight on the enemy's terms. Everyone has a body and therefore skin in the game.
"Big idea here: The US right’s war on abortion is part of a bigger fight—their war on the Enlightenment era concept of rights. (Alito’s ruling puts a lot of other rights at risk, not just abortion.) The solution is a basic right to bodily autonomy and self-determination.
The right to bodily autonomy means that you, and nobody else, have the right to control your own body. Nobody should be allowed to torture you, harvest your organs, perform surgery on you without consent, force you to be pregnant against your will, or brainwash you.
I think [almost] all of us can agree that the right to bodily autonomy is desirable for ourselves? If it is a universal right then the right to abortion is a natural consequence of it. So is the right to contraception. Transgender rights too. It’s a wellspring of rights."
Since it's Mother's Day could we say all women have the right to become mothers when and if they choose–- Period––full stop. The fact that we are still grappling with this issue tells us that women are still fighting for their rights––are we surprised?–– and bless SNL for shoving that fact freely and correctly into the faces of "thems" that don't agree.
And once again Jane Mayer gives us the skinny on leaks and leakers therein. The first Roe V. Wade leak happened fifty years ago–- good story:
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2022/05/16/scooping-the-supreme-court
And just as Ken reads––or skims––Dough--Nut, I do the same with Maureen whose keen eye coverage rarely disappoints even when I disagree. Today she hits a home run.
A little history of Mothers' Day
They wanted some control over their lives after going through the Civil War, but for the little men sharing power meant losing power.
Since I'm running into trouble posting, I'll try another one, this by Ezra Klein.
Thought it contained much to chew on.
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/05/08/opinion/tiktok-twitter-china-bytedance.html
RAS,
Great idea for expanding the fight against right-wing retrenchment on human rights. But as with so many other things, there are rights for some (wingers) but not for others (the rest of us). Bodily autonomy is the battle cry for those who claim that being forced to take action (vaccination or social distancing) against a worldwide pandemic is perfectly reasonable. But bodily autonomy claimed by a woman impregnated by rape or incest or accident, is an attack on Jesus, and punishable by imprisonment.
RAS,
“Sharing power means losing power”.
For the right, as we’ve often observed, every aspect of life is a zero sum game, but only if it involves them. If a hungry person is fed, I get fewer steak dinners. If a homeless person is sheltered, I can’t buy that new vacation home. If a naked person is clothed, I’d have to gone up a new suit of clothes.
If we allow women control over their own lives, what’s gonna happen when I demand the right to fuck who I want, without worrying about consequences?
Nuance is not a word you’ll find in the Traitor lexicon. If a democrat wins an election, and my side loses, it’s an abomination and can’t be true, therefore, that election was stolen.
There are only grey areas if it involves a member of the Traitor Class. So okay, he killed his wife. So what? He’ll still make a great government official.
Sorry about what may turn out to be a double post. Must as I like the preacher, one does of him was surely enough.