-Volodymyr Zelensky, on pleading with allies for help

Vladimir Putin’s criminal war against Ukraine may have led to serial episodes of humiliation for him this week, but don’t worry, he’s taking it all in stride. 

• Putin retaliated overnight against Ukraine for sinking Russia’s flagship cruiser, the Moskva, with missile strikes that triggered air-raid sirens all all across the country, and reports of enormous explosions in until-recently-pacified Kyiv—all of which is extremely rich, since the official Russian line is that the Moskva sank in an accident. 
   
• Russian state-media figures reacted with similar chill, arguing that their government should declare an official war against Ukraine, which would allow Putin to draw on more military resources. Other propagandists went arguably further, imploring the Kremlin to strafe Kyiv, to make it impossible for allied leaders to visit Ukraine, or meet Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, and even to insist that the destruction of the Moskva amounted to World War III against NATO. Very cool; very easy going. 
   
• Meanwhile the Russian government’s diplomatic arm sent an official démarche (fancy diplomat speak for “letter”) to U.S. counterparts complaining that stepped-up American military aid to Ukraine was “adding fuel” to the conflict there and could bring “unpredictable consequences”—a funny way of admitting that the Ukrainian military, with U.S. backing, is handing Russian troops their asses. Reports that U.S. diplomats responded, “U mad bro” could not be verified. 

If any part of Putin’s war is going well, it’s the one where he holds up a mirror to the American right.

• When it isn’t raising the specter of unprovoked nuclear war, Russian state media is quite frequently just rebroadcasting Fox News, including segments such as the one where Tucker Carlson attacked the American government for seizing Russian oligarch-owned yachts. According to the media-tracking company Zignal Labs, mentions of Fox News on various Russian media have soared a hilarious 217 percent in the first quarter of this year, nearly all of which was driven by post-invasion citations. 
   
• By contrast, Zelensky is doing interview rounds with real, independent media, from his fortified compound in Kyiv. He told CNN that the world should prepare itself for the likelihood that Putin will use chemical or even nuclear weapons against Ukraine because it doesn’t recognize Ukrainians as a real people (that last part is undeniably true) and his advisers provided the Atlantic with a list of military equipment and systems Ukraine would need to expel Russia from the east. 

Check out a brand new episode of X-Ray Vision! This week, Jason and Rosie discuss some comics news, including a new Avengers series, the title casting in Disney+’s recently announced Percy Jackson series, recap episode three of Moon Knight, and more. Plus, the award winning author of Ammonite, Hild, and the upcoming novel Spear, Nicola Griffith, joins to discuss her process as a writer, conducting research on Arthurian England, and writing with, and about, disabilities. New episodes of X-Ray Vision drop every Friday wherever you get your podcasts.

Thanks to the House January 6 committee, we’ve just learned more about how phony Constitutionalists in the GOP thought about Donald Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election: First, it was awesome. Then, when the heat got too hot, they tried to beg Trump off—but still hoped he’d prevail. Finally, they pretended that they’d been men of principle the whole time. Newly unearthed correspondence between then-White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows and two far-right Republicans—Sen. Mike Lee (R-UT) and Rep. Chip Roy (R-TX)—exemplify the pattern. Shortly after Trump lost, Roy wrote to Meadows, “We need ammo. We need fraud examples. We need it this weekend." Lee also texted Meadows to express his “unequivocal support for you to exhaust every legal and constitutional remedy at your disposal,” to steal the election. Both lawmakers continued to offer encouragement and support for an attempted coup behind the scenes, pushing the White House to work with disgraced Kraken lawyer Sidney Powell, then with John Eastman, the notorious pro-coup lawyer who drew up the election-stealing plan Mike Pence ultimately refused to execute. Only after things got out of hand did Lee and Roy chastise the White House and vote to certify the election. "The President should never have spun up certain Americans to believe something that simply cannot be,” Roy said, very earnestly trying to find the guy who did this.

• New Omicron subvariants just dropped! 🥴
   
• In related news, Gov. Gavin Newsom (D-CA) has delayed the state’s COVID-19 vaccination mandate for school children for a full school year, until July 2023.   
   
• The Biden administration will begin selling new oil- and gas-drilling leases on federal land for the first time in a century, but increase the royalty fees companies must pay to drill. 
   
• Disgraced former Democratic Party donor Ed Buck has been sentenced to 30 years in prison for luring two men back to his apartment and providing them with fatal doses of methamphetamine. 
   
• In less-accountable political parties, seven women, including a Republican state senator say prominent Nebraska Republican Charles Herbster groped them without consent—a firing offense in most professional capacities, but a ticket to GOP stardom. 
   
• Trump loyalists in the Ohio GOP are pulling out all the stops to convince the disgraced former one-term president not to endorse less-clearly-sincere fascist JD Vance for Senate. A real Let Them Fight situation in the Buckeye State.
   
• Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) defended her job performance and rejected calls for her to step down after the San Francisco Chronicle exposed widespread concern among her colleagues that she shows symptoms of dementia and can’t adequately represent the interests of California.  More like Dianne Defiant-stein, amirite? [Long, plaintive sob.]
   
• Twitter’s board has intervened to discourage a potential hostile takeover by Elon Musk. 
   
• “I think our democracy is in trouble because, unfortunately, we have charlatans like our former president who doesn't, in my view, really care about democracy but only about power,” said George W. Bush-appointed federal judge Reggie Walton, honestly, while overseeing an insurrection case. 
   
• Ohio right-wingers canceled a children’s author who write books for kids susceptible to bullying, accusing him of “coming with an agenda to recruit kids to become gay.”
   
• A Republican-dominated appeals-court panel ruled police officers can purposely inflict pain on (i.e., torture) improperly detained people (i.e., witnesses) in order to coerce them into coughing up information (i.e. evidence that should be inadmissible in court). 
   
• Rep. Madison Cawthorn (R-Alleged GOP Coke Orgies) is, politically speaking, going broke, haha. 
   
• President Biden won’t be traveling to Ukraine if his aides have anything to say about it, and may be forgiving student debt before the election, his press secretary said on America’s News Podcast™ (Live Edition).

Gov. Greg Abbott (R-TX), last seen shipping migrants across the country so they could be political props for Fox News, appears to have confessed to violating the Constitution and the law by disrupting international commerce and engaging in trade negotiations with Mexico. But though this is the kind of textbook illegality that the feds are well-suited to intervene against—as well as a bad-faith scheme to exacerbate inflation for GOP political gain—it’s unclear the Biden administration plans to do anything about it. 

It began with Abbott deploying Texas law enforcement to pretextually stop and inspect every commercial truck crossing the southern border into the U.S.—a violation of federal jurisdiction over national borders and trade, which created huge shipping delays and increased inflation nationwide. It veered further into illegality when Abbott used the trade crisis he’d provoked between the U.S. and Mexico to negotiate security agreements with Mexican governors—a patent violation of Article I Section 10 of the Constitution, which states: “No State shall, without the Consent of Congress…enter into any Agreement or Compact with another State, or with a foreign Power.” To tie a bow on it, Attorney General Ken Paxton (R-TX) admitted this was all part of a single scheme: “The governor has figured out we can stop trade along the border, slow it down, and it will create pressure on Mexico and some of their governors to work out a deal to help us with border security,” he said. Given all this malfeasance, the White House’s response has been to criticize Abbott, without accusing him of legal violations, or directly insisting he stop; and the Justice Department has said nothing.

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Iowa’s supreme court has overruled a Republican lower-court judge to restore Abby Finkenauer’s rightful place on the Democratic Senate primary ballot

Ohio’s supreme court has struck down the state GOP's unlawful partisan gerrymander for a fourth time.

This article about a Hasidic couple that planned to get married in Ukraine, but managed to relocate their ceremony to New York and even keep their wedding date, is probably the only good Vows story in the history of the section.   

U.S. industrial and manufacturing production have soared.