I don't know if this story would be a story at all without the epilogue. A Russia Today reporter (well, "presenter") strongly criticized Russia's "uncontested arrival" into the Crimea.

This isn't such a huge deal because Russia Today is the English-language propaganda arm of Russia. It's not primarily for broadcast into Russia, but intended as an arm of pro-Russia indoctrination for areas of the English-speaking world that don't receive the New York Times.

A bit of background on the station, and the reporter:

The English-language Russia Today is widely perceived as the voice of the Kremlin, with Reporters Without Borders describing it as a "step of the state to control information."

It is often anti-American in its coverage and has been accused of ignoring a number of human rights abuses in the country, as well as controversial issues such as the prison sentences given to punk ban[d] Pussy Riot.

Her bold statement contrasted with the station's usual coverage of the Ukrainian crisis, which broadly reflects MoscowÂ’s position.

In its reports it has described new Ukranian prime minister Arseny Yatseniuk as "self-imposed" and is sympathetic to the Russian-backed ousted president Viktor Yanukovych.

Miss Martin, who has previously labelled the US government's version of 9/11 as "propaganda", criticised the coverage of the escalating crisis from all sides of the media spectrum as "disappointing.. and rife with misinformation".

But even a dummy like Martin understands that the Crimean invasion is wrong.

So here's the epilogue. Here's what Russia Today says about her off-message messaging:

"We respect her views, and the views of all our journalists, presenters and program hosts, and there will be absolutely no reprimands made against Ms. Martin.
"In her comment Ms. Martin also noted that she does not possess a deep knowledge of reality of the situation in Crimea. As such weÂ’ll be sending her to Crimea to give her an opportunity to make up her own mind from the epicentre of the story."

Miss Martin however told the Telegraph: "I am not going to Crimea despite the statement RT has made."

By the way, Time Magazine just reported that "not only would Russia never invade Crimea, it would also never send a reporter to a warzone just for criticizing Russia."

And then they won a Peabody.

Posted by: Ace at 11:04 AM | Comments (401)
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Jim Geraghty has a round-up.

Several important things. First, from Larry O'Connor:

Their mission? Disarming Ukraine.

DONETSK, Ukraine – U.S. Senators Dick Lugar (R-IN) and Barack Obama (D-IL) called for the immediate destruction of 15,000 tons of ammunition, 400,000 small arms and light weapons, and 1,000 man-portable air defense systems (MANPADS) or shoulder missile launchers that are often sought by terrorists.

Lugar and Obama toured the Donetsk State Chemical Production Plant, a conventional weapons destruction facility where the U.S. has taken the lead in a three-year NATO program to destroy the weapons. Another 117,000 tons of ammunition and 1.1 million small arms and light weapons are slated for destruction within 12 years.

If you remember, to the extent that Obama had any foreign policy experience at all, it was all based on his gadflying about with Dick Lugar on these feel-goody disarmament initiatives.

One wonders if this destruction of basic tools of self-defense will wind up seriously harming the Ukrainians. Doubtless, some things like MANPADS are a security risk for the US and we should put our interest above theirs -- but why all the destruction of routine small arms and ammo?

He also catches this prediction from a Time foreign policy expert, from a week ago: No, Russia Will Not Invade the Ukraine.

Well done, Time Magazine.

I'm leaving behind the rest of his post, including Tom Clancy being all psychic and writing a novel in which a Russian tyrant still, get this, has a revanchist interest in taking back the Ukraine.

What a silly conservative chowderhead.

James Kirchick writes in the Daily Beast of all the alleged foreign-policy "realists" who premised all of America's foreign policy on the odd notion that war-mongering tyrants would stop being tyrannical and mongering for war if we just sweet-talked them with Pure Reason.

He dismantles an NYU professor who wrote at the nation, shortly before the invasion of Ukraine, that Russia would not invade the Ukraine, and claims to the contrary were due to a biased, anti-Russian, anti-Putin media.

The most noxious of these figures is New York University professor and Nation magazine contributor Stephen Cohen. His recent opus, “Distorting Russia,” will go down in history as one of the most slavish defenses of Putinism. “Mainstream American press coverage of Russia,” Cohen writes, has been “shamefully unprofessional and politically inflammatory.” Western readers, he complains, have been subject to a “relentless demonization of Putin, with little regard for facts.” Putin—a man who presides over a rubber stamp parliament, subjects his political opponents to show trials, dispatches riot police to beat peaceful protestors, and has restricted freedom of speech and association by banning pro-gay language and demonstrations—is unfairly portrayed as an “autocrat,” Cohen says (scare quotes original).

On the contrary, the Russian president is something of a hero..... Cohen asks, “Should not Obama himself have gone to [the] Sochi [Olympics]—either out of gratitude to Putin, or to stand with Russia’s leader against international terrorists who have struck both of our countries?”

The problem with the realists is that they fail to see the moral, tactical and legal disparities that exist between the aims and methods of East and West.

As for Ukraine, Cohen believes Russia is protecting a set of legitimate interests in that formerly sovereign nation and the West is engaging in imperialist meddling. To engage in such sophistry, he has to portray the criminal former Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych—who ordered the murder, in broad daylight, of dozens of his own citizens—as a decent ruler. In January, without any public hearing or parliamentary debate, the Ukrainian legislature adopted, and Yanukovych signed, a set of 10 laws that collectively smothered freedom of speech, press and association, a draft of regulations that led Yale University professor and Ukraine expert Timothy Snyder to conclude that, “On paper, Ukraine is now a dictatorship.” Cohen furiously defended Yanukovych, writing that, “In fact, the ‘paper’ legislation he’s referring to hardly constituted dictatorship, and in any event was soon repealed.” Like Putin releasing the prisoners he should never have jailed, Cohen wants us to give credit to a dictator for (temporarily, and only to save his own skin) undoing a trapping of dictatorship. The dictator giveth, and the dictator taketh away.

Eggs, omelets.

It's worth a read.

Posted by: Ace at 10:01 AM | Comments (342)
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He literally makes mockery of the Constitution.

He is in fact trying to "fix things" -- elections, for example. His latest unilateral rewrite of American law is so transparently a purely political one that even left-leaning media says so. From the Hill:

he Obama administration is set to announce another major delay in implementing the Affordable Care Act, easing election pressure on Democrats.

As early as this week, according to two sources, the White House will announce a new directive allowing insurers to continue offering health plans that do not meet ObamaCareÂ’s minimum coverage requirements.

Prolonging the “keep your plan” fix will avoid another wave of health policy cancellations otherwise expected this fall.

The cancellations would have created a firestorm for Democratic candidates in the last, crucial weeks before Election Day.

He'd previously unilaterally, unconstitutionally delayed this mandate until January 15, 2015, in order to keep it from going into effect until after the November midterms. Only later did they realize that a January 15, 2014 date mean that notifications of cancelled plans would be going out October or so, just before the elections.

I remember discussing this on the podcast, and someone saying "This is going to hurt Obama," the notifications going out in October. And I said something like, "Oh that's not going to happen. Steal little, steal big."

more...

Posted by: Ace at 08:33 AM | Comments (431)
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In 2012 the GOP actually managed to pass a bill to reform the outdated and heavily in debt flood insurance program. Less than two years later they are desperately trying to undo the market oriented reforms they've already passed.

Reforms to flood insurance approved by Congress in 2012 would be scaled back under a deal reached Monday by House Republicans and Democrats.

The rare bipartisan deal, which GOP leaders plan to bring to the floor for a vote on Tuesday, responds to complaints from flooded-out constituents who said the 2012 law would require them to pay much more for federal flood insurance.

...

Conservative groups have accused GOP leaders of backing away from reforms that were meant to slowly reduce the $24 billion in debt racked up by the National Flood Insurance Program (NFIP).

Several conservative groups are calling on members of the House to vote down the bill, and say the 2012 reforms should stay in place to help reduce the NFIP's debt. Groups like the Heritage Foundation, the Club for Growth, the National Taxpayers Union and others have come out against the bill.

What kind of reforms are the GOP so desperate to repeal?

Congress took steps in 2012 to reduce the subsidies and require rates to be based on a property’s degree of flood risk—an essential element of viable insurance. The Biggert–Waters Flood Insurance Reform Act established a multi-year phase-out of premium subsidies for commercial properties and vacation homes, and for primary residences after ownership changes.

Members of the “flood caucus” and others are now attempting to renege on the reforms at the behest of local politicians and property owners who complain that their premiums are too costly. The $1.1 trillion omnibus spending bill approved in January prohibits the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) from implementing some rate changes for one year. Meanwhile, the Senate approved legislation this month to delay the subsidy phase-out for four years.

The anti-reform campaign is largely fueled by claims that legions of property owners are suffering calamitous premium shock. In fact, only 8 percent of the 5.5 million policyholders face an imminent increase, which will phase in over several years.

So the GOP manage to pass a bill that would require people to pay fair market value for insurance based on the actual risk the insured faces and phase out federal subsidies for premiums and they are feverishly working to undo that less than two years later?

It seems making it cheaper for people to live in flood prone areas is a core GOP value. Maybe even a constitutional right!

And you think they are actually going to do something about ObamaCare if you just leave them alone and stop supporting conservative challengers?

We keep hearing how the House can't do anything because it's just 1/2 of Congress. But this is a case where they DID something and could just sit back. But no, they are working hard to find away to hand back what they've already achieved. You know, like the sequester.

The best part of the big GOP wins this November will how shocked, SHOCKED some people are when electing the same old go along, get along Republicans doesn't lead to conservative action.

Sure it's cold comfort but it's better than nothing at all.

Posted by: DrewM at 07:28 AM | Comments (311)
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Sorry, just got access to a computer. Consider this an open thread. more...

Posted by: Open Blogger at 05:21 AM | Comments (453)
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Happy Tuesday.

According to Hill sources, Obama administration is going to announce yet another Obamacare delay to help Democrat electoral chances.

Obama will unveil a budget proposal that won't go anywhere in Congress, but is also aimed at boosting the Democrats' 2014 chances. I doubt it will help them much.

These are all pretty bad, but the last two are really bad.

Keep sending those Ask the Blog questions.

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Posted by: Gabriel Malor at 02:45 AM | Comments (313)
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I just exhaustedly made it back to my hotel room so I guess you know where I'm going with this excuse....

Mind the Gap: Why Income Differences Don't Matter

An absolutely excellent essay on why the left's complaints about income inequality are really based on cloudy thinking and basic fallacies and a whole lot of emoting. I'd excerpt the whole thing but laziness and fair use laws but mostly laziness prevent me.

Like chess or painting or writing novels, making money is a very specialized skill. But for some reason we treat this skill differently. No one complains when a few people surpass all the rest at playing chess or writing novels, but when a few people make more money than the rest, we get editorials saying this is wrong.

Why? The pattern of variation seems no different than for any other skill. What causes people to react so strongly when the skill is making money?

I think there are three reasons we treat making money as different: the misleading model of wealth we learn as children; the disreputable way in which, till recently, most fortunes were accumulated; and the worry that great variations in income are somehow bad for society. As far as I can tell, the first is mistaken, the second outdated, and the third empirically false. Could it be that, in a modern democracy, variation in income is actually a sign of health?

Quote of the Day: Shockingly Russians Are Interested in Russia's Interests

And will pursue them as far as they can get away with i.e. the Krauthammer explains Political Reality 101:

Remember the speech he gave at the U.N. when he started his administration? He said no nation can or should dominate another. I mean, there's not a 12-year-old in the world who believes that. And he said the alignment of nations rooted in the cleavages of the long ago Cold War make no sense in this interconnected world.

As our Secretary of State said today, or yesterday, after all this, this is a 19th century action in a 21st century world. As if what he means his actions where governments pursue expansion, territory domination, no longer exist in this century, as if that hasn't been a constant in all of human history since Hannibal.

They imagine the world as a new interconnected world where climate change is the biggest threat and they are shocked that the Russians actually are interested in territory.

No matter how '19th century' acting in your own self-interest is.

Apropos that warm water port, a liberal asked me "Why is Putin doing this?"  My response aside from the obvious "because he can," was "because he wants a warm water port."  The liberal sneered at me that this isn't the 19th century anymore.  I suspect that he hadn't read that Lurch er . . . Kerry said exactly the same thing.  Instead, this is just a default Leftist sneer.  In fact, as I noted above, a warm water port is an excellent thing for the Russians and Putin knows it.  He is therefore following State Craft Rule 101:  act in your own self-interest.  As Tom Rogan explains, no airy-fairy theory in the world will override this number one rule of governance.

Posted by: Maetenloch at 06:48 PM | Comments (600)
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Catching up late to this story. Althouse introduces an excerpted transcript of Issa on the Chris Wallace show.

The Fox News moderator, Chris Wallace, quoted the report by the Republicans on Issa's committee, which said that Lerner "was keenly aware of acute political pressure to crack down on conservative-leaning organizations." Who put this pressure on Lerner?

ISSA: That's one of our questions. She says things like they put pressure. So e-mails indicate that there was pressure. We don't know whether it was the president shaking his fingers at the House, the Senate, and the Supreme Court over Citizens United or whether it was...

WALLACE: During the State of the Union Address?

ISSA: During the State of the Union, where she felt the pressure. Only she can tell us where she thought that pressure was.

WALLACE: The report also cites a newly discovered e-mail from September 16th, 2010, in which Lerner discusses how to check whether groups seeking tax exempt status are engaged in improper political activity. This is an e-mail to other people in the IRS. And she says, quote, "We need to have a plan. We need to be caution so it isn't a per se political project." What do you think that e-mail shouts?

Open thread.

Posted by: Ace at 04:12 PM | Comments (342)
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Well, that's what this guy says Putin's "Eurasian Union" is ultimately about.

I don't know if that's true-- it could be that Putin is just using that term ("Eurasian") and this other character uses it for his weird Soviet Nazi hybrid.

Worth reading, though.

Putin is sometimes described as a revanchist, seeking to recreate the Soviet Union. That is a useful shorthand, but it is not really accurate. Putin and many of his gang may have once been Communists, but they are not that today. Rather, they have embraced a new totalitarian political ideology known as “Eurasianism.”

The roots of Eurasianism go back to czarist émigrés interacting with fascist thinkers in between-the-wars France and Germany. But in recent years, its primary exponent has been the very prominent and prolific political theorist Aleksandr Dugin.

Born in 1962, Dugin was admitted to the Moscow Aviation Institute in 1979, but then was expelled because of his involvement with mystic neo-Nazi groups... after which he became a founder and chief ideologue of the Eurasianist National Bolshevik Party (NBP) in 1994.

Nazism, it will be recalled, was an abbreviation for National Socialism. National Bolshevism, therefore, put itself forth as an ideology that relates to National Socialism in much the same way as Bolshevism relates to Socialism. This open self-identification with Nazism is also shown clearly in the NBP flag, which looks exactly like a Nazi flag, with a red background surrounding a white circle, except that the black swastika at the center is replaced by a black hammer and sickle.

...

The core idea of Dugin’s Eurasianism is that “liberalism” (by which is meant the entire Western consensus) represents an assault on the traditional hierarchical organization of the world....

In order to be so united, this Eurasian Union will need a defining ideology, and for this purpose Dugin has developed a new “Fourth Political Theory” combining all the strongest points of Communism, Nazism, Ecologism, and Traditionalism, thereby allowing it to appeal to the adherents of all of these diverse anti-liberal creeds. He would adopt Communism’s opposition to free enterprise. However, he would drop the Marxist commitment to technological progress, a liberal-derived ideal, in favor of Ecologism’s demagogic appeal to stop the advance of industry and modernity. From Traditionalism, he derives a justification for stopping free thought. All the rest is straight out of Nazism, ranging from legal theories justifying unlimited state power and the elimination of individual rights, to the need for populations “rooted” in the soil, to weird gnostic ideas about the secret origin of the Aryan race in the North Pole.

Uh, I did not quote one important part of this, because of fair use, and because it was so Crazy Crank I felt embarrassed even having it on the site.

But it goes like this: This guy Dugin claims that there has been a battle since the beginning of time between the evil, cunning agents of Atlantis (yes, that Atlantis), who today make up all the world's maritime and mercantile peoples, and the good land-based farmer folk of the inland parts of the world.

Almost all of the world's conflicts of the past 10,000 years, he thinks, were really proxy wars between the Atlanteans and the Land People.

This is where I started to think, "There's no way Putin believes this."

But then, Hitler is said to embraced lots of crazy Blavatskyan mystical hokum, so there is precedent, I guess.

(Actually I think there's some debate on this, and while this idea that Hitler was "just crazy about the occult" is popular (and is of course the foundation of the plot of Raiders of the Lost Ark), I don't know if it's established that Hitler himself was a member of the Thule Society and all that. I mean, he was obviously a lunatic, but I don't know if it's as true as popular culture tells us that he was into runes, Atlantis, and all the other sort of theosophical crap that had been bubbling up since the 1870s.)

Posted by: Ace at 02:24 PM | Comments (367)
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Volunteers are still adding in the results- Pinellas is just rollling them in, but Jolly has won the race. We are canvassing and updating precincts now, but there's nothing left for Sink

Also- big kudos to Pinellas County: even with 15 volunteers hammering away, over 180,000 votes reported in under a half hour!

AOSHQDD lives again. Follow live, minute-by-minute returns here.

We will also be tweeting out results at @AOSHQDD

Our official prediction is Sink winning in the low single digits (2-3 points now), but an upset would be nice.

I want to thank JohnE for rebuilding the site, Joel Fagin (@ningrim) for designing our source sheet, and all of the horde who are volunteering. We will make a call as soon as we are confident.

Posted by: CAC at 02:46 PM | Comments (833)
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