Anti-gay folks in Arizona aren’t done! They’ve got another anti-gay law they won’t to try and want a second chance.
Lawmaker regrets asking why men can’t rape women if the women can get abortions.
The GOP’s greatest fear in Mississippi, Sahil Kapur reports, might just be a Democrat running for Senate who’s “pro-gun, pro-life, and was endorsed by the NRA.”
President Obama to appear in the White House briefing room at 4:45 ET to address the situation in Ukraine. Watch live here.
Not making this up. McCain declares: “We are all Ukrainians.”
Unquestionably, we’ve got a dangerous and unpredictable situation unfolding in Ukraine – and a taste of the reinforcing mix of authoritarian tendencies and aggressive behavior that has persistently characterized Russia through the eras of autocracy to totalitarianism and on to the present one of pseudo-democracy. That said, we shouldn’t be blind to the downsides of the current situation for Russia.
One part of the unfolding crisis in Ukraine that in part obvious but can also escape notice is that a key driver of the current situation is the lack of any effectively functioning government in Kiev. There is a nominal head of state in place. In practice there is a power vacuum at the apex of the Ukrainian state. Its ability to react effectively to the situation in Crimea, given the huge Russia military presence already there and the pro-Russian population, would be quite limited in any case. But the fact that the state structure itself is still half-decapitated gives the Russians an even greater ability to dictate the course of events than they might otherwise have.
This article in the Times has details on just how Ukraine’s military would stack up against the Russian Army in battle. In Crimea, Ukraine had only token forces. It was Russia’s for the taking. And Ukraine has no realistic way to dislodge them. The Times piece seems contradictory though on how Ukraine would fare in the rest of the country.
They quote Western sources saying that Ukraine’s military could hold its own and even expose deficiencies in the Russian Army which the one-sided fights in the Caucasus did not. But they have Russian sources suggesting Ukraine’s military is hollowed out and saddled with obsolete weaponry.