3.28 Federal Judge David Carter wrote in a ruling that [Attorney John] Eastman‘s strategy was “a coup in search of a legal theory” and that “[b]ased on the evidence, the Court finds it more likely than not that President Trump corruptly attempted to obstruct the Joint Session of Congress” and conspired with Eastman to defraud the United States.
3.27 Coda wins Best Picture. Jessica Chastain wins Best Actress. Will Smith wins Best Actor, but not before he slaps Chris Rock for making a joke about Smith’s wife Jada Pinkett Smith. “Keep my wife’s name out of your fucking mouth!”
3.27 Ross Douthat in the Times: “”We aren’t just watching the decline of the Oscars; we’re watching the End of the Movies. That ending doesn’t mean that motion pictures are about to disappear. Just as historical events have continued after Francis Fukuyama’s announcement of the End of History, so, too, will self-contained, roughly two-hour stories — many of them fun, some of them brilliant — continue to play for people’s entertainment, as one product among many in a vast and profitable content industry.No, what looks finished is The Movies — big-screen entertainment as the central American popular art form, the key engine of American celebrity, the main aspirational space of American actors and storytellers, a pop-culture church with its own icons and scriptures and rites of adult initiation.”
3.27 Megan McArdle in the Washington Post: `”As social psychologist Jonathan Haidt puts it, the difference in mainstream reporting is the difference between can and must. When it comes to stories that flatter Democrats, we often ask “Can I believe it?” If it’s not obviously false, we do. But if the story flatters the right, we are more likely to ask “Must I believe it?” If we can find any reason to disbelieve, we take it — and keep the story off our pages. The obvious retort is that the same thing is happening on the right, only more so. And indeed, some right-wing media has gone much further with crazy election conspiracies than any mainstream outlet ever did with Russophobia. But pointing that out doesn’t do a thing to solve the problem. An actual solution will require the recognition that we in the mainstream media are part of the problem: We are not trusted because we are not entirely trustworthy. That is not the only thing that will have to be fixed to heal our epistemic divide. But it would make a very good start.”
3.26 Biden: “For God’s sake, this man cannot remain in power.”
3.23 Madeleine K. Albright, the first woman to serve as secretary of state, dies at 84.
3.22 Gov. Spencer Cox of Utah vetoes a bill banning transgender youth from school sports. “”I am not an expert on transgenderism. I struggle to understand so much of it and the science is conflicting. When in doubt however, I always try to err on the side of kindness, mercy and compassion. I also try to get proximate and I am learning so much from our transgender community. They are great kids who face enormous struggles. Here are the numbers that have most impacted my decision: 75,000, 4, 1, 86 and 56.
• 75,000 high school kids participating in high school sports in Utah.
• 4 transgender kids playing high school sports in Utah.
• 1 transgender student playing girls sports.
• 86% of trans youth reporting suicidality.
• 56% of trans youth having attempted suicide.
Four kids and only one of them playing girls sports. That’s what all of this is about. Four kids who aren’t dominating or winning trophies or taking scholarships. Four kids who are just trying to find some friends and feel like they are a part of something. Four kids trying to get through each day. Rarely has so much fear and anger been directed at so few.”
3.16 Biden on Putin: `”I think he’s a war criminal.”
3.16 Zelensky to Biden: “You are the leader of the nation, of your great nation. I wish you to be the leader of the world. Being the leader of the world means to be the leader of peace.”
3.16 Zelensky, in a video address to Congress: “I am almost 45 years old, but my age stopped when the heart of more than 100 children stopped beating. I see no sense in life if it cannot stop the deaths.”
3.16 Brian Klass in The Atlantic: “Autocrats such as Putin eventually succumb to what may be called the “dictator trap.” The strategies they use to stay in power tend to trigger their eventual downfall. Rather than being long-term planners, many make catastrophic short-term errors—the kinds of errors that would likely have been avoided in democratic systems. They hear only from sycophants, and get bad advice. They misunderstand their population. They don’t see threats coming until it’s too late. And unlike elected leaders who leave office to riches, book tours, and the glitzy lifestyle of a statesman, many dictators who miscalculate leave office in a casket, a possibility that makes them even more likely to double down. Despots sow the seeds of their own demise early on, when they first face the trade-off between allowing freedom of expression and maintaining an iron grip on power. After arriving in the palace, crushing dissent and jailing opponents is often rational, from the perspective of a dictator: It creates a culture of fear that is useful for establishing and maintaining control. But that culture of fear comes with a cost. For those of us living in liberal democracies, criticizing the boss is risky, but we’re not going to be shipped off to a gulag or watch our family get tortured. In authoritarian regimes, those all-too-real risks have a way of focusing the mind. Is it ever worthwhile for authoritarian advisers to speak truth to power? As a result, despots rarely get told that their stupid ideas are stupid, or that their ill-conceived wars are likely to be catastrophic. Offering honest criticism is a deadly game and most advisers avoid doing so. Those who dare to gamble eventually lose and are purged. So over time, the advisers who remain are usually yes-men who act like bobbleheads, nodding along when the despot outlines some crackpot scheme.”
3.14 Maria Ovsyannikova, an editor at Russian state television burst onto the set of a live broadcast last e, yelling anti-war slogans and carrying a sign that read: “Don’t believe the propaganda. They’re lying to you here.” After momentarily disrupting the heavily censored broadcast, she was arrested, and could face up to 15 years in prison. In a pre-recorded video, Ovsyannikova said she was “very ashamed” of working for “Kremlin propaganda” for so many years, and called for Russians to join anti-war protests. “What is happening in Ukraine is a crime and Russia is the aggressor,” she said. “Only we have the power to stop all this madness.”
3.14 Richard Fontaine, head of the Center for a New American Security, in The Wall Street Journal: ”Putin sought to stop NATO expansion, roll back the alliance’s deployments and dominate what he considers Russia’s sphere of influence. But the opposite outcome is more likely. His war could ultimately leave NATO larger, more unified, better armed and with military deployments placed closer to Russia. For decades, EU members divided largely over how to deal with Russia. Now that problem is a source of common action. A land war on the continent may well have helped to birth a new Europe.”
3.13 National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan, on CNN: “We have communicated to Beijing that we will not stand by and allow any country to compensate Russia for its losses from the economic sanctions.”
3.13 Tom Brady says he is returning to Bucs.
3.13 William Hurt dies at 71.
3.10 The third week of the Russian invasion of Ukraine begins. Former Pentagon official Barry Pavel: “The word I’m hearing from everybody in the government who is watching this is ‘surprising.’ My own word is ‘shocking. It’s shocking how incompetent the Russians are in the basics of joint military operations by an advanced country.”
3.9 The wreck of Ernest Shackleton’s Endurance, the ship at the heart of one of the world’s greatest survival stories, was discovered in the seas off Antarctica this week, more than a century after it was crushed by pack ice and sank in 1915.
3.9 Last night’s dream: I had just finished writing the State of the State Address and was hurrying to take it to the Governor. The Governor was not in the Capitol or at 633, but in a school–a building that looked like a suburban school. I didn’t know where to find him. I asked a group of burly security guards, but they offered no help. I then asked a group of young women–Teachers? Aides?–who smiled sweetly, but who offered no aid. I kept looking and looking without result. I then went to call the office to report my situation, only to find that both of my phones were dead. At this point, I realized that the Governor was actually Sister Agatha, the obese, cruel nun I had in eighth grade. I then woke up, gasping.
3.8 Volodymyr Zelensky, in a video address to the British Parliament: “The question for us now is to be or not to be. This is the Shakespearean question. For 13 days, this question could have been asked. But now I can give you a definitive answer. It’s definitely yes, to be.” Simon Godwin, the director of the Shakespeare Theater Company: “He has become, in a way, the world’s greatest actor engaged with the world’s deepest truth, using a piece of poetry to express this truth in a forceful context.”
3.6 Sixty degrees at Vischer’s Ferry, but the Mohawk is still frozen.
3.5 At a dinner for Republican donors, Trump mused that the United States should label its F-22 planes with the Chinese flag and “bomb the shit out of Russia.. . . And then we say, China did it, we didn’t do it, China did it, and then they start fighting with each other and we sit back and watch,”
3.5 Robert Frost: “A liberal is a man too broadminded to take his own side in a quarrel”
.3.4 William Barr on NBC: “I do think [Trump] was responsible in the broad sense of that word in that it appears that part of the plan was to send this group up to the Hill. I think the whole idea was to intimidate Congress, and I think that that was wrong.”
3.3 Lindsay Graham on Twitter: Is there a Brutus in Russia? Is there a more successful Colonel Stauffenberg in the Russian military? The only way this ends is for somebody in Russia to take this guy out. You would be doing your country – and the world – a great service.
3.2 The House select committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol said in a 221-page court filing that evidence shows former President Donald Trump and his associates engaged in a “criminal conspiracy” to prevent Congress from certifying the election results. It’s the committee’s most formal effort to link Trump to a federal crime, although lawmakers do not have the power to bring charges on their own and can only make a referral to the Justice Department Neal Katyal on Twitter: “This is big. 1/6 committee just said they have a good-faith belief that Trump committed crimes. I cannot remember the last time a Congressional Committee accused a President–in a court filing–of committing felonies. This isn’t loose talk, it is a solemn court document, subject to all sorts of sanctions for misrepresentations, and backed by evidence they have uncovered.”
3.2 Jimmy Kimmel on the boorish behavior of “congressdemons” Lauren Boebert and Marjorie Taylor Greene during the State of the Union speech: “As irritating as their behavior was, we do have freedom of speech in this country, which means I can remind you that Lauren Boebert is married to a guy who went to jail for showing his penis to a teenager in a bowling alley. . . .Marjorie Taylor Greene spent last weekend speaking at a conference organized by a pro-Putin white nationalist. Klan Mom, this woman, has so many issues when it comes to people wearing masks. When it comes to people wearing hoods, none at all.”
3.2 Thomas L. Friedman in the Times: If Putin goes ahead and levels Ukraine’s biggest cities and its capital, Kyiv, he and all of his cronies will never again see the London and New York apartments they bought with all their stolen riches. There will be no more Davos and no more St. Moritz. Instead, they will all be locked in a big prison called Russia — with the freedom to travel only to Syria, Crimea, Belarus, North Korea and China, maybe. Their kids will be thrown out of private boarding schools from Switzerland to Oxford. Either they collaborate to oust Putin or they will all share his isolation cell. The same for the larger Russian public. I realize that this last scenario is the most unlikely of them all, but it is the one that holds the most promise of achieving the dream that we dreamed when the Berlin Wall fell— a Europe whole and free, from the British Isles to the Urals.
3.2 Jennifer Rubin in the Post: A parade of GOP lawmakers has attempted the impossible: to clamber onto the pro-Ukraine, pro-democracy bandwagon without repudiating Russia’s favorite enabler and ongoing PR helper, former president Donald Trump. The majority of Republicans — from Sen. Tom Cotton to Sen. Marco Rubio to House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy— have twisted themselves into pretzels. They denigrate President Biden for weakness (despite orchestrating the most robust sanctions in history) while refusing to acknowledge Trump’s role (and thereby their own complicity) in enabling Putin, sowing dissension in NATO and undermining Ukraine. (Certainly, Senate Republicans must recall acquitting Trump for extorting Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky by threatening to withhold vital military aid.)
3.1 Remigijus Simasius, the mayor of the Lithuanian capitol Vilnius sprayed “Putin, the Hague is waiting for you” on a road opposite the Russian embassy.
3.1 Anne Applebaum in The Atlantic: Across Europe people are realizing that they live on a continent where war, in their own time, in their own countries, is no longer impossible. Platitudes about European “unity” and “solidarity” are beginning to have some meaning, along with “common foreign policy,” a phrase that, in the European Union, has until now been largely fiction. . . . Now everything is suddenly different. “Deep concern” has been exchanged for real action. Less than a week into the invasion, the EU has not only announced harsh sanctions on Russian banks, companies, and individuals—sanctions that will also affect Europeans—but has also offered $500 million of military aid to Ukraine. Individual European states, such as France and Finland, are sending weapons as well, and applying their own sanctions. The French say they are drawing up a list of Russian oligarchs’ assets, including luxury cars and yachts, in order to seize them.Europeans have also dropped, abruptly, some of their doubts about Ukraine’s membership in their institutions. On Monday, the European Parliament not only asked Zelensky to speak, by video, but gave him a standing ovation. Earlier today the parliamentarians, from all across the continent, voted to accept his application for EU membership for Ukraine. Accession to the EU is a long process, and it won’t happen immediately, even if Ukraine emerges intact from this conflict. But the idea has been broached. It is now part of the continent’s collective imagination. From being a distant place, badly understood, it is now part of what people mean when they say Europe.
3.1 Kori Schake in The Atlantic: Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has unleashed a chorus of despair—beyond the cost in Ukrainian lives, the international order that the U.S. and its allies built after World War II is, we are told, crumbling. The writer Paul Kingsnorth has declared that the liberal order is already dead. The Indian journalist Rahul Shivshankar has argued that “in the ruins across Ukraine you will find the remains of Western arrogance.” Even the brilliant historian Margaret MacMillan has written that “the world will never be the same. We have moved already into a new and unstable era.” The reverse is true. Vladimir Putin has attempted to crush Ukraine’s independence and “Westernness” while also demonstrating NATO’s fecklessness and free countries’ unwillingness to shoulder economic burdens in defense of our values. He has achieved the opposite of each. Endeavoring to destroy the liberal international order, he has been the architect of its revitalization.
3.1 Eliot A. Cohen in The Atlantic: “The surprises come thick and fast. Vladimir Putin was supposed to be a master chess player, but he has shown himself to be erratic, grandiose, and willful in a self-destructive way. Instead of taking Ukraine one bite at a time, a strategy the NATO powers might have found difficult to cope with, he launched a massive invasion that has left his country isolated in ways unimaginable two weeks ago. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky was supposed to be out of his depth. But the former comic is an inspirational war leader, at home and abroad. The Russian army, supplied with new weapons and coming off of (exaggerated) successes in Georgia, Crimea, Syria, and elsewhere, has revealed itself as a mediocre military, filled with bewildered 18- and 19-year-olds, inept at protecting its supply lines, and seemingly incompetent at combined-arms warfare on the tactical level. General Valery Gerasimov, the chief of the general staff, who has served for a decade, has long been treated with respect in the West as a major conceptualizer of modern hybrid warfare. Yet he finds himself in a war in the information domain in which victories have gone to Western intelligence agencies (accurately predicting every move) and Ukrainian public-relations experts who shame their enemy by letting captured soldiers call their mothers, while inspiring their countrymen with videos of civilians confronting the uneasy invaders. The European states, paralyzed, some thought, by greed and naivete, turn out to have remarkable willpower: The Swedes are shipping thousands of anti-tank missiles to Ukraine, while Germany—pacific, commercial, Russia-understanding Germany—has announced that it will cancel the Nord Stream 2 pipeline, arm Ukraine, and pour more than twice its annual defense budget into that country’s rearmament. Above all, the United States, under the leadership of a supposedly failing and confused old man, whose team botched the withdrawal from Afghanistan, has brilliantly assembled a European and indeed a global coalition to punish and isolate Russia. Asian countries, including Taiwan, Australia, and Japan, are joining in, and the Kenyan representative to the UN denounced the invasion.
3.1 The cargo ship Felicity Ace sank 220 nautical miles off the coast of Portugal’s Azores Islands after catching fire a week ago. The cargo, consisting of roughly 4,000 Volkswagen AG vehicles, including VW, Porsche, Audi, Bentley and Lamborghini-branded models. The cargo was valued at approximately $438 million, $401 million of which were cars.