Tracker

The Times @thetimes · Mar 24, 2022 Replying to @thetimes The Ukrainian army has released intercepted communications from the Russian army, which suggest the invading forces are suffering heavy losses outside the Ukrainian capital The Times @thetimes In one call, a soldier in a trench outside the city tells his superior that the Russians are unable to sleep because of the constant Ukrainian attacks and says that most of his unit’s casualties are only 19 or 20 years old 4:47 PM · Mar 24, 2022

Foo Fighters Drummer Taylor Hawkins Died With 10 Drugs in His System, Authorities Say R.I.P. Colombian authorities say toxicology tests on Taylor Hawkins preliminarily found marijuana, benzodiazepines and opioids.

The Free Press today had an article on the popularity of the provincial PCs and Premier. The article explored the implications of the poll which was described as "catastrophic" in the article and showed the PCs falling to the point where they are barely ahead of the Liberals.

Putin or his advisers have seemingly conceded that they cannot roll right over Ukraine and have retreated tot he relative safety of the Donbas region. Their strategy now is to kill as many people and destroy as much of Ukraine as possible with missiles and artillery. This is punishment for not acquiescing to Putin, and can be done from distances where their casualties will be minimized.

Ginni Thomas’ Election Fraud Guru Claims He Arrested Pope As Ginni Thomas, a prominent conservative activist and the wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, made the case to overturn the election to a top adviser to former President Donald Trump in the days after the 2020 election, she cited several conspiracy theories popular with the president’s most deluded supporters In her messages, published Thursday by CBS News and the Washington Post, Thomas urged then-White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows to look into the claims of Steve Pieczenik, a little-known conspiracy theorist whose ideas are often too crazy for even Alex Jones. Thomas appeared to have wholly embraced Pieczenik’s off-the-wall claims in her texts, including the idea that Trump’s election defeat was really a ruse meant to entrap Democratic voter fraudsters. “If you believe what Steve Pieczenik has to say, you have completely lost all touch with reality,” said Jordan Holmes, a comedian who follows InfoWars and its guests, including Pieczenik, on his Knowledge Fight podcast. Pieczenik has a history of lying and often claims to have worked throughout the national security bureaucracy—including in classified positions, all of which makes it difficult to discern what’s true about his identity. He emerged in the media in the late 1980s as an expert on the psychology of hostage-taking. In the 1990s, Pieczenik launched a series of novels with national-security thriller author Tom Clancy. Whatever grip Pieczenik had on reality began to slip decades ago, when he began to appear on InfoWars. Pieczenik became known for claiming that a tragic event, often a mass shooting, was in fact a false flag event or even faked entirely. He’s argued that the 9/11 attacks, the Sandy Hook shooting, and Pearl Harbor were all false flags. Among other claims, Pieczenik insists he once arrested Pope Francis. https://www.thedailybeast.com

Apparently the Ukrainian Army picked off another Russian general today, but this is not confirmed.

Just a matter of time before his charges will become "Heroes".

Rep. Mo Brooks Says Trump Is 'Still' Demanding That The 2020 Election Be 'Rescinded' Rep. Mo Brooks (R-Ala.) was on the attack against Donald Trump again Thursday, insisting that the former president is “still” demanding that the 2020 election be “rescinded.” It wasn’t clear if Brooks was saying he had just recently been told that yet again by Trump — or if he meant that Trump was continuing to demand that others carry out the unconstitutional action. Trump announced Wednesday that he was withdrawing his endorsement of Brooks in his Alabama Senate race because the lawmaker had stopped calling for tossing out Joe Biden’s presidential victory. Not defying the election results made Brooks “woke,” the former president claimed in a widely mocked statement. That’s when Brooks first said that Trump had repeatedly pushed him to somehow “rescind” the presidential election and keep him in the White House. Brooks said Thursday on CBS affiliate WIAT-TV in Birmingham that Trump “always brings up ‘We got to rescind the election. We got to take Joe Biden out and put me in now.’” (Reality for some is inconvenient and to be ignored)

The problem for the UPC party is that any credible candidate for the leadership party will be immediately torpedoed by the Wild Rose nutbars. Doubtless, there are members of the party and MLAs who have difficulty reconciling the extremist, racist, misogynist tone the UPC party has devolved into with both their own rational views and their knowledge of what that has done and is doing to their election chances and the culture of their province. I would bet that there will be a lot of infighting within the UCP and maybe even a divorce.

I was in Costco (St. James Street) yesterday and about 2-thirds or more customers had masks on. Encouraging.

Trucker Convoy Leader Says Truckers Are Peeing Their Pants In D.C. Traffic (When they said they’d be livestreaming, this isn’t what they had in mind.) The remaining truckers in Washington, D.C., who gathered for a “convoy” earlier this month are apparently having trouble finding places to relieve themselves as they circle the D.C. Beltway. So much so that they’re peeing their pants with some regularity. “Truckers speaking with [People’s Convoy co-organizer Ron] Coleman say that other truckers haven’t been able to ‘go to the bathroom’ while circling the Beltway,” Daily Beast reporter Zachary Petrizzo relayed via Twitter, “which has left ‘people having actually pissed their pants!’” What’s more, Petrizzo says, the truckers believe the ultimate blame for their predicament lies with Washington Mayor Muriel Bowser and the D.C. Metropolitan Police — and so, they’ve mulled over making “citizen’s arrests” of Bowser and police officers in response. https://www.huffpost.com/entry/dc-trucker-convoy-peeing-pants_n_623ca0efe4b0c727d489760a

UK Government Signals Mercenary Group Is On A Mission To Kill Ukrainian Leader Zelensky The United Kingdom’s Foreign Office signaled Thursday that it believes Russia is using the Wagner Group, a shadowy Kremlin-linked mercenary organization, to hunt down and kill Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy. Since the start of the war, Zelenskyy has said he is Russia’s “No. 1 target,” and U.S. officials have voiced repeated concerns about his safety. But the Ukrainian leader has refused to flee his country, choosing instead to stay in Kyiv, the capital, as it continues to ward off a Russian takeover. The alleged founder and leader of the Wagner Group, Dmitry Utkin, is believed to have Nazi sympathies ― an irony if true considering how Russian President Vladimir Putin has justified his aggression in Ukraine by claiming it needs to be “de-Nazified.” British Foreign Secretary Liz Truss announced that the Wagner Group numbered among dozens of individuals and businesses to be newly sanctioned, describing it as “the organisation of Russian mercenaries reportedly tasked with assassinating President Zelenskyy.” Also facing sanctions are Alfa Bank, five other financial institutions and a variety of individuals, including Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov’s stepdaughter, who reportedly lives in a multimillion-dollar London flat. The European Union slapped sanctions on the Wagner Group and other entities accused of funding it back in December, citing serious human rights abuses by members. Russia says it does not use the mercenary group, which it refers to simply as a private company. According to the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a Washington-based think tank, that plausible deniability comes in handy: “The Russian government has found Wagner and other private military companies to be useful as a way to extend its influence overseas without the visibility and intrusiveness of state military forces.” European security officials suggested in February that hundreds of Wagner Group fighters had been trickling into eastern Ukraine to lay the groundwork for the war, according to The New York Times. Ukraine’s defense ministry said on Sunday that a new group of Wagner mercenaries had entered the country with the aim of targeting the president and other high-ranking Ukrainian officials. https://www.huffpost.com/entry/british-government-signals-mercenary-group-mission-kill-zelenskyy_n_623cd3bbe4b0c0781ab8838d

So much for competition in internet and cable services.

POLITICS: Ginni Thomas Exchanged Dozens Of Texts Urging Top Trump Aide To Overturn 2020 Election Ginni Thomas, wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, sent nearly two dozen text messages urging former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows to aggressively move to overturn the 2020 presidential election, according to copies of the missives obtained Thursday by The Washington Post and CBS News. Ginni Thomas sent the messages over a three-month period, from November 2020 to January 2021, adding new detail to her efforts to fiercely support then-President Donald Trump after his election loss to Democrat Joe Biden, all while espousing conspiracy theories about a stolen election. “Help This Great President stand firm, Mark!!! ...You are the leader, with him, who is standing for America’s constitutional governance at the precipice,” she wrote in one of the messages to Meadows on Nov. 10, shortly after Biden was projected to defeat Donald Trump. “The majority knows Biden and the Left is attempting the greatest Heist of our History.” The Post and CBS note the texts, 29 in total, do not directly reference her husband’s work on the Supreme Court. But they show the extreme influence she wields in the capital and underscore her access as a major conservative activist embedded in Washington’s elite. In the messages, Ginni Thomas repeatedly pressed Meadows to reverse the 2020 election results, touting conspiracy theories about voter fraud and right-wing falsehoods about Biden and his family members. “Do not concede,” she wrote Meadows on Nov. 6, 2020. “It takes time for the army who is gathering for his back.” A few days later, Meadows replied to another message: “I will stand firm. We will fight until there is no fight left. Our country is too precious to give up on. Thanks for all you do.” https://www.huffpost.com/entry/ginni-thomas-texts-2020-election_n_623ced1be4b030e7392cc089

Nunn's CV is impressive- fast, fights for the ball (and gets it) and hard to knock off his feet. Rutledge-hard to judge.

One of the biggest obstacles to 'E-cars is the cost of replacement batteries. They will get better and cheaper, but a set of replacement batteries for a Tesla can be as high as $22,000.00. That's a LOT of depreciation.

It ain't over 'til its over. Still wearing my mask when in stores and such.

To put a slightly different slant on this debate about the costs of a dental and pharmacare program, a couple-three decades ago, when the idea was first broached, I saw a pretty credible report that examined the pluses and minuses of these. It was proposed that these were actually "upstream" programs with the likelihood of actually saving money in healthcare costs when fully implemented. Untreated dental carries can affect or create a lot of health problems, like heart disease and GI concerns. Moreover, some HMOs in the US actually provide prescription drugs to their subscribers for free as their own studies showed that early dispensing of these prevented more severe and therefore more costly medical interventions later.

Well, apparently James did have the time.

But it would be both hilarious and revealing to have Trump on the stand. The presiding judge could get so irate that the defendants could be awarded staggering costs. This would provide material for Colbert, Kimmel, Noah and Myers with grist for their mills for many, many shows and expose Trump for what he is- a developmentally delayed brat cushioned by wealth and privilege all of his life.