ACCORDING TO AXIOS, THE Emir of Qatar will meet with President Biden Monday at the White House in part to discuss contingency plans to supply natural gas to Europe in the event of a Russian invasion of Ukraine. Russia provides 40% of Europe’s natural gas needs. In addition to whatever possible interruption of supply might be caused by actual hostilities, gas supplies are a key lever Russia could use in any tit for tat of sanctions or economic hostilities that could follow a land invasion. The global economy is already struggling with pandemic driven supply chain woes and inflation which is driven in significant part by high energy prices. A cut off of fuel supply to Europe or more likely just a major price shock could wreak havoc on the global economy when it is already highly strained and vulnerable. Qatar is one of the world’s top producers of natural gas. So it’s uniquely positioned to ramp up supply to ward off or cushion any supply shocks.

I don’t want to get myself tagged as the guy who thinks Trump’s done. Far from it. I’m just pointing out what may be some fissures in the edifice. There’s one dimension I wanted to add. Everything Trump talks about now is in the past and about him: The Big Lie, Russia, Tony Fauci. When was the last time you heard him talk about the wall or crime or whatever other rightist nationalist applause lines? There are some. But not much. In a way this started in the earliest days of his Presidency when he became obsessed with how his 2016 victory wasn’t sufficiently appreciated, how the Russia probe was trying to steal it from him, etc.

THIS IS ONE OF the most interesting Twitter threads I’ve read in some time. I’m sure it’s gotten lots of discussion in specialist circles. But it hasn’t been much a part of the general news coverage of COVID. Basically new strains of the flu tend to evolve from recent dominant strains. So people build up an immunity to the Flu A that was big last year and Flu A evolves into Flu B that might get a lot of people sick two or three years in the future. But COVID isn’t working that way, at least not so far. Omicron didn’t evolve from Delta. And Delta didn’t evolve from the Alpha, Beta or Gamma lineages, says Adam Kucharski.

Our most consistent failure of perception is the tendency to project the realities or trends of the present indefinitely out into the future — like with ex-President Trump. Most of us assume that the 2024 GOP nomination is Trump’s for the taking if he decides to run and that he will run. That’s still the best assumption and it’s my assumption. But over recent weeks and with a burst of commentary in recent days it’s no longer the only assumption. There are at least some cracks — seeming cracks? — in Trump’s hold and they center for now on Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida.

Newt Gingrich, who is advising the House GOP leadership, is now threatening jail time for the members running the select committee investigation of the January 6th insurrection. “I think when you have a Republican Congress, this is all going to come crashing down,” Gingrich told Maria Bartiromo. “The wolves are gonna find out they’re now sheep, and they’re the ones who are, in fact, I think, going to face a real risk of going to jail for the kind of laws that they’re breaking.”

Amidst all the disappointment and tribulation of recent days please join me in taking a moment to step back, in a posture of mindful gratitude, to contemplate the fact that Kyrsten Sinema’s career in electoral politics is already over. Yes, the damage she’s already done will be difficult to remedy. She still has three solid years to do yet more damage. And she probably will. But none of that damage, none of the hijinks and characteristic game-playing to come, will or can change her electoral fate. In political terms, she’s already dead senator walking. And the most perplexing but paradoxically delightful part of it is that she doesn’t even seem to realize it yet.

How can I be so sure she’s a goner in such an uncertain time and in a reelection campaign almost three years away? It’s not just the increasingly likely primary challenge, which could end her Senate career on its own. Her problem runs much deeper. She has already made herself essentially unelectable, whether her quest for reelection ends in a primary or the general election.

We have another ‘Stolen Infrastructure Valor’ All Star in the form of Rep. Ashley Hinson of Iowa. Hinson voted against the Bipartisan Biden Infrastructure Bill which passed late last year. In a press release from November 8th Hinson denounced the bill as a “socialist spending spree” and “Washington Gamesmanship, Spending at its Worst.” But she’s letting bygones be bygones. Or I guess she was just against it before she was for it. Because now Rep. Hinson seems to think it’s seriously awesome. And she’s bragging to constituents about almost a billion dollars she claims to have “secured” for upgrading locks and dams on the Upper Mississippi River.

We’re now watching the final parts moving into place as two Senate Democrats making a unmovable stand in favor of preserving the filibuster. You can see our live-blogging of the nitty gritty details here. I want to return to a more general point. Filibuster or no filibuster is not a binary choice. The current filibuster is the product of an incremental evolution over many decades. To the extent it matters, the framers of the constitution never envisaged anything like it. We know this because they included a few special cases where a super-majority would be required – for treaties, for removal from office, etc. If they thought it should be required for ordinary legislation they would have said so. But again, it’s not a binary choice.

I was scanning through my email this morning when I found this article from Roll Call rounding up what was new in ex-President Trump’s rally Saturday in Arizona. The claims about white people being replaced or deprived of COVID medications in favor of Blacks or Hispanics have gotten more focused and intense, which isn’t terribly surprising based on what I told you back on the 5th; efforts to stop “amplifying” Trump have largely allowed him to further radicalize without any scrutiny. But I really got interested after I read way down into the piece and saw that Trump is now explicitly exhorting his supporters to cheat in elections to counter Democrats’ (of course non-existent) cheating.

I hope you’ll take a moment to read this amazing piece by Josh Kovensky. In short, the Oath Keepers – the group at the center of the insurrection whose leaders were just charged with seditious conspiracy – got the idea for storming the Capitol from a Serbian scientist living in Europe who said that Trumpers could use the model of the ouster of Slobodan Milosevic to overturn the election of Joe Biden. It came in the form of a viral video and the Oath Keepers went from there.

Certainly the Oath Keepers didn’t need a lot of encouragement to get violent on behalf of Trump. But the viral video encouraging Trumpers to drive Biden from power like Milosevic seemed to coalesce their thinking into a plan of action and gave them a historical antecedent that showed the good guys winning. The Serbian scientist, Aleksandar Savic, relocated to Texas not long after Joe Biden’s inauguration and Josh Kovensky tracked him down for a conversation. Read it here.