-Tucker Carlson, on Vladimir Putin's overlooked positive qualities

The crisis in and around Ukraine continued to escalate on Wednesday, as additional Western sanctions failed to slow Russia’s roll toward what could be the biggest conflict in Europe since World War II. 
 

• Ukraine’s parliament has voted to declare a nationwide state of emergency, amid fears that Russian President Vladimir Putin’s troop deployment into eastern Ukraine is just the beginning, not the end, of his aggression. Russia began evacuating its embassy in Kyiv, and Ukrainian leaders urged citizens in Russia to immediately return home. Government and banking websites in Ukraine were also hit with another major cyberattack on Wednesday.
   
• Ominous signs continue to pile up. The Pentagon said that 80 percent of the 190,000 Russian troops and separatist forces surrounding Ukraine are now in combat-ready positions, and ready to launch a large-scale attack when given the order. That order may be close at hand: the Kremlin claimed that separatist-held regions had asked Putin to “help beat back the aggression of the Ukrainian armed forces to avoid victims among the civilian population and a humanitarian catastrophe in the Donbas,” a tidy pretext to invade. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky made a direct appeal for peace in an emotional Wednesday night speech.
   
• President Biden announced new sanctions on the company building the Nord Stream 2 pipeline, which would have allowed the flow of Russian natural gas directly into Germany, in a reversal from the administration’s policy toward the project last year. “These steps are another piece of our initial tranche of sanctions in response to Russia's actions in Ukraine,” Biden said in a statement. “As I have made clear, we will not hesitate to take further steps if Russia continues to escalate.”

Beyond the horror of what a full-out assault would mean for the Ukrainian people, experts have warned that what happens in Ukraine might not stay in Ukraine. 
 

• Army Col. Jared Harper laid out in a Foreign Policy article how easily an invasion of Ukraine could spiral into a larger conflict between Russia and NATO. A takeover of Ukraine would almost certainly create a Ukrainian insurgency, and nearby democracies—NATO states like Poland and the Baltics—would almost certainly give safe havens to those fighters. Putin would be motivated to eliminate those safe havens, which could drag most of Europe into a terrible war. 
   
• So what does the-maybe-beginning-of-WWIII mean for Democrats in the midterms, you ask, as sensitively as possible? Probably nothing great! The same Republicans disparaging Biden as not being tough enough on Russia are also drooling in anticipation of sanctions driving up gas prices in the U.S. Just 26 percent of Americans say the U.S. should play a major role in the conflict, according to a vaguely-worded new A.P.-NORC poll that may or may not herald trouble. 

Western leaders’ united response to Russia’s aggression will already have economic consequences for Europe and the U.S., the unavoidable cost of standing up to Putin. If he proceeds with a large-scale invasion anyway, the costs may get much higher.

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Gov. Greg Abbott (R-TX) has directed state agencies to investigate instances of trans youth recieving gender-affirming health care as child abuse. Abbott cited a nonbiding opinion issued by notorious crook/Attorney General Ken Paxton (R-TX) a day earlier, which stated that certain gender-affirming treatments “can legally constitute child abuse under several provisions” of state law. Texas’s child-welfare agency said it will follow Abbott’s horrendous directive, but some prosecutors and county attorneys have announced they plan to ignore it. In other politically motivated cruelties, legislators in the Florida House on Wednesday debated two bills targeting discussions of race and sexual orientiation in the classroom, both of which are expected to pass shortly. (Republican leaders withdrew an amendment to the “Don’t Say Gay” bill that would have required schools to out students to their parents, after an intense backlash.)

• The two prosecutors leading the Manhattan district attorney’s inquiry into Donald Trump and his business practices have resigned, reportedly after their new boss, Alvin Bragg, signaled that he was reluctant to prosecute Trump. Haha, oh well!
   
• President Biden has reportedly interviewed at least three Supreme Court candidates: Ketanji Brown Jackson, J. Michelle Childs, and Leondra Kruger. The White House said that Biden was on track to make his selection by the end of the month.
   
• In more neat Greg Abbott news, the former head of Texas power grid testified in court that he was following Abbott’s orders when he kept power prices at the maximum cap for days during last winter’s blackouts.
   
• Pregnancy-related deaths rose sharply in the U.S. during the first year of the pandemic, especially for Black women, whose maternal death rate remained three times that of white women. 
   
• A group of Nazis interrupted a reading of The Communist Manifesto at a library in Providence, RI, on Monday night. 
   
• Former NYPD-union president Ed Mullins has been charged with defrauding the union and its members by submitting phony expense reports to steal hundreds of thousands of dollars. 
   
• The Pentagon has approved the deployment of 700 unarmed National Guard troops to Washington, DC, to assist with traffic control in the event that a trucker convoy materializes.
   
• Ginni Thomas, wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, was more involved in efforts to overturn the 2020 election than previously reported. She had a hand in the fake-electors scheme, which almost certainly would have wound up before the Supreme Court if it had worked.
   
• The USPS has finalized a contract to purchase a new fleet of mostly gas-powered trucks, ignoring the Biden administration’s pleas to change course. 
   
• Trump’s new Twitter knockoff, Truth Social, has had a seamless launch if you just look past the 300,000-person waitlist, 13-hour outage, and all the glitching.
   
• We've all been saying Lindsay Lohan's name wrong this whole time. (It's actually pronounced "keev.")

It appears that banning books about history or race is actually wildly unpopular, and it just might behoove Democrats to make a big stink about it! A new CBS News poll found that more than eight in 10 Americans don’t think books should be banned from schools for discussing race, criticizing U.S. history, depicting slavery, or containing political ideas they disagree with. That wide agreement held across party and racial lines, and whether or not respondents were parents. Large majorities also believed that schools should be allowed to teach about the history of race in America even if it “might make some students uncomfortable,” that those lessons make people more understanding of what others went through, and that racism remains a problem in the U.S. In other words, Democrats are in a terrific position to win Republicans’ own shitty culture war, if only they can uncurl from the fetal position and force Republicans to defend it to a disgusted electorate. 

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Kentucky Democrat Keturah Herron won a special election and will become the first openly LGBTQ member of the state House. 

New York state has pledged $10 million in funding for groups that support Asian American communities.

Howard University has received a $2 million grant to digitize its collection of more than 2,000 Black newspapers. 

The Baltimore Museum of Art has tapped 17 of its security guards to curate an exhibition.