On The Elon Musk Razzmatazz

Posted on by Josh Marshall

I was disappointed to see Elon Musk purchase Twitter. On most of the big questions and conflicts in the world today, he’s on the wrong side. It would probably be better for me if Twitter did not exist. But it does. I have what can only fairly be described as an addiction to it. In any case, it would remain a professional obligation to use Twitter even if I didn’t — it’s how I help distribute what we publish at TPM. The best prediction I’ve seen about what is likely Twitter’s future is neither the optimistic nor the extreme pessimistic views but rather that it will be mostly the same but go back to the less governed model of half a dozen years ago in which there was more harassment, neo-Nazis and government-backed disinformation campaigns. The simple truth is that content moderation is much, much less about “free speech” or unpopular opinions than some random guy DMing pictures of his penis every day for a year to a woman he’s harassing, or hoaxes about people dying, or copyright infringement. Of course, as Musk knows as well as anyone, Twitter is also a great tool for market manipulation and securities fraud. In other words, it’s less about “speech” than the digital amplification of the predatory dimensions of people’s personality disorders.

Here is what caught my eye this morning.

Continue reading “On The Elon Musk Razzmatazz” →

Reality Check: Seven Times Texas Leaders Misled the Public About Operation Lone Star

Posted on by John Light

This article is a collaboration between ProPublica, The Texas Tribune and The Marshall Project.

Earlier this month, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott ratcheted up pressure on President Joe Biden’s administration by expanding the state’s sweeping border crackdown, announcing that he would bus immigrants to Washington, D.C., after they were apprehended for illegally crossing the border, as well as search commercial trucks entering Texas from Mexico.

During an April 6 press conference launching the additional efforts, Abbott did not explain that the busing is voluntary for immigrants. Texas cities and counties where migrants seeking to stay in the country are dropped off by the federal government must also request such a transport out of state before it occurs.

Then, about a week after his directive for vehicle safety inspections drew criticism for hampering border commerce, Abbott rescinded it, saying he’d reached agreements with four Mexican governors to strengthen security south of the border. The agreements mostly included measures already in place, but the governor claimed on social media last week that they demonstrated Texas had accomplished more to secure the border in two days than Biden had done during his time in office.

The measures are the latest examples of how Abbott and other state officials have used incomplete and sometimes misleading statements when promoting the purpose and effectiveness of Operation Lone Star. Abbott launched the initiative in March 2021, stating that it would help stop drug and migrant smuggling. In the past year, the governor has deployed more than 10,000 National Guard members, along with state Department of Public Safety troopers, to patrol the border, build barriers and arrest some migrant men on state criminal trespassing charges for crossing into the U.S. through private land.

The result has been a multibillion-dollar operation that has counted arrests for crimes with no connection to the border and included tallies of drugs captured across the state in communities that received no additional resources from the initiative, ProPublica, The Texas Tribune and The Marshall Project found. The news organizations’ investigation showed that while Abbott initially said the operation would focus on targeting Mexican cartel members and smugglers, misdemeanor trespassing charges soon accounted for the largest share of arrests.

The governor’s office has hailed the operation as a success, repeatedly saying that it has captured criminals and deadly drugs.

As part of the investigation, reporters identified instances in which Abbott and DPS officials pointed to goals and accomplishments that lacked important context or did not match reality. Here’s some of what we found:

Trespassing Charges Against Immigrants

Last May 31, Abbott signed a border disaster declaration, giving him expansive power similar to what he would have after a natural disaster. Among other things, the declaration of a disaster automatically increased penalties for trespassing to up to a year in jail. Three days later, the governor promoted the effort on Fox News during an interview with host Sean Hannity.

Statement: “I follow the law, and the law that I’m going to use will be legal ways in which Texas is going to start arresting everybody coming across the border. Not just arresting them, but because this is now going to be aggravated trespass, they’re going to be spending a half a year in jail, if not a year in jail.” — Abbott, Fox News, June 3, 2021

What Happened: Texas did not, in fact, arrest everyone coming across the border. Since Abbott announced the effort, more than 2,900 people have been arrested by state police for allegedly crossing into Texas via private property. Most of the arrests occurred primarily in two rural counties in the southwest part of the state, according to DPS data. Leaders of the state’s biggest border counties have declined to participate, saying in interviews that they urged comprehensive solutions, rather than the criminalization of immigrants. The news organizations found that misdemeanor trespassing charges made up about 40% of Operation Lone Star’s arrests from July through February. Hundreds of immigrants have since had their trespassing charges dismissed or rejected. Prosecutors and judges deemed certain arrests questionable after some immigrants said DPS troopers marched them through private property. State police and Border Patrol officials have denied the allegations. Body camera footage confirmed at least one of those accounts. Other charges were dismissed because people sought asylum. Democratic elected officials and attorneys have questioned the legality of the trespassing arrests and asked the Justice Department to investigate alleged human rights violations related to Operation Lone Star. The governor’s office has maintained the arrests are “fully constitutional.”

700 Gang Members

DPS officials and Abbott have often insisted on social media and during interviews on Fox News that the operation targets cartels and violent gangs such as MS-13.

Statement: “The Texas Department of Public Safety, during #OperationLoneStar have encountered over 700 criminal gang members.” — Texas DPS Facebook page, Sept. 7, 2021

What Happened: DPS officials have not provided any proof of the department’s citation of hundreds of gang arrests. The department denied a public records request from ProPublica, the Tribune and The Marshall Project, saying gang affiliation is not a metric that is tracked. The agency said that in some instances those people arrested have “active warrants, previous records, etc. that indicate certain gang affiliations.” The news organizations found multiple examples in arrest data and drug seizure information that raised questions about claims that the operation focused on dangerous cartels and smugglers. Among those examples were arrests with no links to the border.

Haitian Immigrants

In September, up to 15,000 Haitian immigrants camped under the international bridge in Del Rio, a small border city about 150 miles west of San Antonio, to ask for asylum. Their arrival followed the assassination of Haiti’s president, an earthquake that killed thousands and economic instability in Latin American countries where some Haitians had previously migrated after a previous earthquake struck Haiti in 2010. DPS troopers and Texas National Guard members lined up vehicles along the bank of the Rio Grande and formed what officials called a “steel barrier” to stop immigrants from crossing.

Statement: “[Border Patrol agents] said the surge of migrants across the border was stopped only when the Texas Department of Public Safety and the National Guard showed up to provide a steel barrier to prevent the migrants from coming across. As soon as the National Guard and the Texas Department of Public Safety showed up, literally with hundreds, if not thousands, of vehicles, that is when the illegal migration stopped. That is exactly what the Biden administration could do if they wanted to.” — Abbott, Fox News, Sept. 26, 2021

What Happened: Customs and Border Protection and Immigration and Customs Enforcement expelled or deported thousands of Haitian immigrants, clearing the bridge within a week. Mexican officials blocked others before they reached the border. The role of DPS and the National Guard in stopping the Haitian migrants is unknown. Neither Texas agency made arrests. It’s unclear how many people the agencies referred to federal officials for deportation during that period. Neither DPS or CBP responded to questions.

Spending on Border Security

Last year, Texas lawmakers tripled the amount the state spends on border security, with the bulk of the budget going to Operation Lone Star. The governor’s office received the largest share. The state later shifted nearly $500 million away from other agencies, including the Texas Department of Criminal Justice, to help pay for the National Guard deployment after costs exceeded what the Legislature had approved.

Statement: “Texas as a state is deploying more resources to the border than the United States of America as a country. Texas taxpayers alone, in just the next two years, we are spending $3 billion to secure a border. I think that’s far more than what the federal government is spending here in Texas, or here in the United States.” — Abbott, Fox News, Jan. 28, 2022

What Happened: CBP’s annual budget for fiscal year 2022 is more than $16 billion, compared with the more than $3 billion Texas budgeted for border security over a two-year period. The federal agency declined to provide a specific breakdown for its expenditures in Texas. As of January, CBP had more than 8,000 Border Patrol agents in Texas. The figure does not include the number of customs officers stationed at international ports of entry in the state, which CBP did not provide.

Fentanyl Seized

Marijuana made up more than three-quarters of illegal drugs captured under Operation Lone Star from March 2021 to January, but Abbott has focused on fentanyl seizures while touting the initiative’s success. At a February event in Austin that featured his Democratic opponent Beto O’Rourke, staff for Abbott’s reelection campaign handed out prescription bottles with fliers stuffed inside that claimed the effectiveness of the operation in capturing fentanyl.

Statement: “Amount of fentanyl caught from Operation Lone Star: 887 lbs” — flyers stuffed into pill bottles labeled “fentanyl” and handed out by Texans for Greg Abbott at a Beto O’Rourke speaking event in Austin in February

What Happened: Abbott and his reelection campaign are citing figures that reflect fentanyl seizures across the state, including those that would have occurred without the operation. Of the 887 pounds of fentanyl that Abbott credited to Operation Lone Star in February, only about 160 pounds were seized in the 63 counties that the state included as part of the initiative. El Paso County accounted for all but 12 pounds of the fentanyl captured as part of Operation Lone Star. The county was among several that declined to sign on to the governor’s border disaster declaration and, as of November, when most of the fentanyl was seized, had not received extra resources as part of the program.

Immigrant Apprehensions

A year into Operation Lone Star, Abbott touted a reduction in immigrant apprehensions during an interview with the conservative news site Breitbart. He said the decrease showed that the operation was working.

Statement: “Working collaboratively with local law enforcement, we have now been able to cut in half the number of apprehensions of people coming across the border illegally in the Rio Grande Valley Sector. … The bottom line is the cartels have realized it’s a money-losing proposition for them to try to cross the border in Texas.” — Abbott, Breitbart, March 17, 2022

What Happened: Abbott correctly stated that the number of immigrants caught entering the Rio Grande Valley sector, which includes 19 counties in South Texas, fell by about 46% after the start of the operation. In March 2021, Border Patrol apprehended 62,685 immigrants. A year later, the apprehension numbers in that region had dropped to 44,073. But Abbott’s statement failed to acknowledge that the number of immigrants Border Patrol agents took into custody across the state remained at its highest levels in at least two decades, averaging about 110,381 a month since the operation launched. DPS has claimed reductions in immigrant apprehensions as a sign of the operation’s success and also, at times, said such decreases were something over which the state’s efforts had little control. In November, agency officials told the news organizations that DPS defined success as fewer migrants coming across the border. They later said a decline in apprehensions is not considered a measure of success because many factors can come into play, including policy decisions in Washington or an increase in the number of immigrants seeking to surrender to Border Patrol.

Busing Immigrants to Washington

Early this month, the Biden administration announced that it would discontinue Title 42, a Trump-era pandemic health order through which federal authorities turned away most immigrants at the border, even those seeking asylum. After the decision, Abbott announced a plan to bus immigrants to Washington, D.C.

Statement: “BREAKING: Governor Greg Abbott JUST ANNOUNCED that Texas is going to use charter buses to DROP OFF BIDEN’S ILLEGAL IMMIGRANTS in Washington, DC. We want to MAKE SURE that Biden knows JUST HOW REAL this crisis is.” — Abbott’s campaign fundraising appeal on April 6, 2022

What Happened: The busing program is optional for immigrants, and Texas cities and counties where the federal government drops off migrants seeking to stay in the country must also request the transport. The program pays for buses and chartered flights for immigrants who have been released by the federal government and want to leave the state for Washington, D.C. In a statement, Customs and Border Protection Commissioner Chris Magnus said Abbott is making CBP officials’ jobs more difficult by transporting migrants far from their immigration proceedings and not coordinating those moves with the federal government.

Our Investigation Into Operation Lone Star Also Found:

What Academics Focused On Improving Americans’ Diets Got Wrong

Posted on by John Light

This article is part of TPM Cafe, TPM’s home for opinion and news analysis.

As policy concepts go, the term “food desert” had a good ride, but it is time to think bigger. The fight for healthier options was never only about food.

Just a decade ago, many in the academic community thought we had it all figured out when it came to geography and health. Researchers assumed that higher numbers of close, cheap fast-food restaurants must have been the cause of higher rates of obesity, diabetes, and hypertension in poor, urban neighborhoods. Food oriented think tanks were convinced that an abundance of nearby convenience stores, and relatively few grocery stores, meant people were lured away from what nutritious options did exist.

In 2011, the Obama administration ushered in an ambitious “Healthy Food Financing Initiative” that has since distributed hundreds of millions of dollars to improve access to healthy food in underserved areas across the country. Subsidizing supermarkets was seen as the big fix, but smaller options like farmers’ markets, community gardens, and urban farms were funded, too. 

But now we know that distance doesn’t determine people’s diets in the ways that we thought. A number of people got it wrong. I was one of them.  

When I began my research on the topic, I was so fixated on getting healthy, local, and organic food into poor neighborhoods that I lost track of the bigger problem, too. The reason why installing new grocery stores did not change people’s diets was that people in “food deserts” weren’t asking for help to change the way they ate. What they wanted was investment in their communities. 

To understand how I had gotten it so wrong, I sat and spoke with 100 people in Greenville, South Carolina, about how they shopped for food. After spending time in their kitchens and on their front porches, I came to see the food desert concept as inextricably flawed; living far from a grocery store is just one of multiple barriers to healthy eating. 

It took me a while, but I eventually came to see how the “healthy food” framing of the issue distracted us from the bigger problem. While focusing on the public health dimensions of this debate was an expedient way to get politically minded foodies to join the fight, this strategy was short sighted. Although these new white and middle-class allies brought a good deal of political capital to the cause, spending so much time talking about fruits and vegetables was also a way to sidestep tougher conversations about racism and poverty. 

The geographic distribution of high-quality retail in America is not random. The movement of retail out of the urban core started in the 1960s and ‘70s when the U.S. government engaged in what is now referred to as “urban renewal” style revitalization.

Community organizers today have begun switching to the term “food apartheid” to underscore how the food landscape in America was created by institutionally racist public policies of the past. And they are right. But that terminology doesn’t go far enough, either. Because the issue is bigger than food and it always has been. It is about all forms of commerce. It is about retail inequality.

The geographic distribution of high-quality retail in America is not random. The movement of retail out of the urban core started in the 1960s and ‘70s when the U.S. government engaged in what is now referred to as “urban renewal” style revitalization. At the time, urban infrastructure post World War II had decayed considerably across the country. Good paying manufacturing jobs had started to disappear and the housing stock in many cities had fallen into a state of disrepair. Rather than reinvest in crumbling neighborhoods, the government chose wholesale demolition of entire city blocks. Instead of rebuilding neighborhoods, state and federal agencies divided them with highways that paved the way to the suburbs. Households with the means to leave — often white — saw the writing on the wall and started leaving in droves, kickstarting an era of white flight away from city centers. Retailers, too, saw where the money was going and started pulling up stakes. 

This racialized movement of wealth and population from the urban core left segregated and concentrated poverty in its wake. The largely Black population left behind without the means to escape were, in many cases, crammed by city officials into dense public housing and left to fend for themselves. Divested and depleted, these neighborhoods struggled to support the familiar corner stores that had catered to their needs for generations. The few mom-and-pop ventures that held on were eventually crushed by the emergence of big box stores that set up shop outside of town.

As a nation, we’ve decided it is morally appropriate to subsidize the retail sale of healthy food in areas still struggling to rebuild from that era. That is what the Healthy Food Financing Initiative was designed to do. But we shouldn’t stop there. Eligibility for the grants, loans, and tax breaks we offer to build grocery stores and support farmers’ markets should be expanded to a wider spectrum of retail offerings. Locally owned businesses operated by and for nearby communities are a necessary public good. 

Supermarkets are important, but sustainable communities need affordable hardware stores, credit unions, and family-style restaurants. But without enough population density and disposable income in the area, businesses in poorer zip codes cannot compete against the national chain stores that stick to high-traffic roads on the way out of town. In that vacuum, these communities are inundated with “bad retail” that too often exploits the vulnerable (liquor stores and payday lenders top this list). These neighborhoods are tired of being the dumping grounds for these kinds of storefronts. They simply want a say over what can be bought and sold in their communities.

It is time to think bigger than the Healthy Food Financing Initiative. The fight over local food options isn’t new and it was always about more than food anyway. Look back to an earlier battle over food access: the lunch counter sit-ins of the Civil Rights movement. Those protests weren’t about what was on the menu. They were about justice and equality. 

These communities need a neighborhood retail financing initiative that can level the playing field. For better or worse, in our consumer-based society, local retail serves as a symbol of a community’s worth to the outside world. Exclusionary retail, be it prohibitively expensive or culturally tone-deaf, sends the message that nearby residents don’t matter. They deserve better. They deserve retail that is built around their wants and needs.

By investing in these communities now, we can move toward a reality in which they can support quality retail on their own terms. Until then, a neighborhood retail financing initiative can bridge the gap. We’ve funded efforts to improve access to healthy food, now we should take the next step and expand those efforts to include more diverse forms of retail. Through such an initiative, urban communities could be redeveloped, and we can begin to put an end to decades of retail inequality. 

Kenneth Kolb is Professor of Sociology at Furman University. His is the author of Retail Inequality: Reframing the Food Desert Debate.

Gaetz Fires Back At House GOP Leaders Over Newly Revealed Private Rebukes

Posted on by Cristina Cabrera

A lot of things happened. Here are some of the things. This is TPM’s Morning Memo.

Knives Out

After New York Times reporters Alexander Burns and Jonathan Martin released new phone call recordings of House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) and Minority Whip Steve Scalise (R-LA) privately calling out Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-FL) as a security threat in wake of the Jan. 6 Capitol attack, Gaetz put out a statement on Tuesday night mocking the two leaders for “holding views” about him and Trump “that they shared on sniveling calls with [then-House GOP conference chair] Liz Cheney, not us.”

  • “This is the behavior of weak men, not leaders,” Gaetz said.
  • McCarthy and Scalise made the comments during a private call on Jan. 10, saying Gaetz was “putting people in jeopardy” with his active role in helping Trump incite the Capitol attack.
  • The two Republican leaders also called out Rep. Mo Brooks (R-AL) in the call, with McCarthy opining that the Alabama lawmaker had acted worse than Trump on Jan. 6.

Here’s one of the call tapes:

Why Does Cawthorn Keep Bringing Guns And Knives To Restricted Areas?

Rep. Madison Cawthorn (R-NC) was cited for bringing a loaded gun to Charlotte Douglas International Airport on Tuesday, per multiple reports that were later confirmed by the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Police Department.

  • It was the second time Cawthorn tried to bring a gun to an airport. The TSA at Asheville Regional Airport found a Glock 9 millimeter handgun in the GOP congressman’s carry-on bag at a security checkpoint in February last year.
  • Then we’ve got the knives: Cawthorn allegedly carried a knife on school property at least three times last year.

US Finally Out Of COVID-19 Pandemic Phase, Fauci Says

Biden’s chief medical adviser and infectious diseases expert Dr. Anthony Fauci had some much-welcome news on Tuesday: The country is “certainly” now “out of the pandemic phase.”

  • The U.S. is at a “low level” of hospitalizations and deaths from COVID-19, according to Fauci.
  • Nearly one million Americans have died from the virus, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). More specifically, the death toll is at 988,991 as of Wednesday morning.

More Than Half Of US Population Got COVID

60 percent of Americans had been infected with COVID-19 at least once by February, according to new data from the CDC. 75 percent of American kids had been infected, the agency reported.

Harris Tests Positive For COVID

Vice President Kamala Harris’s press secretary announced on Tuesday that she had tested positive for COVID-19 earlier that day. She isn’t exhibiting symptoms and hasn’t been in close contact with Biden or First Lady Jill Biden, according to Harris’ spokesperson.

  • That means Democratic senators won’t have Harris’ tie-breaking vote to give them an edge in the 50-50 split Senate until the vice president can work outside her home.
  • Senate Democrats are also out two members thanks to COVID-19: Sens. Ron Wyden (D-OR) and Chris Murphy (D-CT).

Russia Cuts Off Gas Supply To Poland

Russia took a direct shot at Europe, which relies heavily on Russia’s energy supply, on Tuesday by shutting down natural gas deliveries to Poland and Bulgaria in retaliation for Europe’s assistance to Ukraine amid Russia’s brutal assault on the country.

Biden Uses His Clemency Powers For The First Time

On Tuesday, the President granted clemency for the first time since he took office, issuing three pardons and 75 sentence commutations.

  • The 75 commutations were for people who’d been convicted for nonviolent drug offenses.
  • One of the three pardons went to the first-ever Black Secret Service agent to serve on presidential detail who had been convicted for allegedly trying to sell a copy of a Secret Service file, despite key witnesses who had testified against him in the case admitting that they had lied.
  • The other two pardons went to a Texas woman who was convicted for possession with intent to distribute crack cocaine and a Georgia man who was convicted for allowing dealers to use his business to sell marijuana (he himself didn’t sell it).

Extremely Online Conservatives Try To Own WaPo Reporter With Magnificently Stupid Billboard Stunt

Conservatives on the internet are still big mad at Washington Post reporter Taylor Lorenz for last week’s report on the woman who runs the Libs of TikTok Twitter account, a story conservatives on the internet claim was a nefarious “doxxing” (which in this context means they’re accusing her of publishing private information about the Twitter user) operation.

So in the spirit of their principled stance against public exposure, right-wing YouTuber Tim Pool and Jeremy Boreing, the CEO of the conservative Daily Wire, paid an obscene amount of money to do……this:

Imagine being so mad that you pay for an entire billboard in Times Square that would be completely incomprehensible to everyone but the terminally online. Imagine being a French tourist trying to catch a matinee of the Lion King while surrounded by off-brand Sesame Street characters, looking up and seeing that incomprehensible billboard and moving on with your life because that isn’t anywhere near the weirdest thing you’ve seen that day.

Delta Will Start Paying Flight Attendants During Boarding, Which Apparently Wasn’t Already A Thing

Attempting to fend off a union push, Delta Air Lines announced on Tuesday that it’s going to start paying its flight attendants during boarding, which would make Delta the first major U.S. airline to do so. 

  • Yep, cabin crew members don’t start getting paid for their work until the plane’s doors close. It’s a total mystery why flight attendants are trying to unionize.

Must-Reads (Animal Edition)

Do you like Morning Memo? Let us know!

Bonkers

Posted on by Josh Marshall

Here’s just the latest revelation from these Jan 6th related texts we keep hearing about. In a way it’s more of the same but the details are telling. This one turns on Rep. Scott Perry (R-PA), yet another far-right House member, now the head of the Freedom Caucus. In the days after Biden was declared the winner of the 2020 election he was texting Mark Meadows insisting that Meadows get DNI John Ratcliffe (another House right-winger who Trump had installed as chief of U.S. intelligence based on essentially no professional background) to have the NSA “immediately seize and begin looking for international comms related to Dominion.” Basically he was pushing the idea that China had hacked Dominion’s voting machines to make Biden the winner.

Continue reading “Bonkers” →

While Fuming Over Trump, McCarthy Privately Rebuked Far-Right GOPers After Jan 6

Posted on by Summer Concepcion

Days after the deadly Capitol insurrection, House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) wanted to rein in several far-right lawmakers who pushed then-President Trump’s efforts to subvert the 2020 election results, out of concern that they would incite violence against other lawmakers, audio recordings of a Jan. 10 call with GOP leaders obtained by the New York Times detail.

Continue reading “While Fuming Over Trump, McCarthy Privately Rebuked Far-Right GOPers After Jan 6” →

Where Things Stand: Raskin Keeps Nodding At Significance Of Pence Not Getting In Car On Jan 6

Posted on by Nicole LaFond

Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-MD) has been a consistent, public voice of authority on the Jan. 6 panel’s work since the committee first began its investigation into the insurrection and broader efforts by Trump and his allies to subvert the 2020 election.

But lately he’s given a series of blunt remarks, honing in on the events surrounding former Vice President Mike Pence’s decision to not get into an armored vehicle as Secret Service attempted to evacuate him from the U.S. Capitol. Raskin is interested in why the vice president so strenuously objected.

Continue reading “Where Things Stand: Raskin Keeps Nodding At Significance Of Pence Not Getting In Car On Jan 6” →

Biden Described New Openness To Forgiving Student Loans In Meeting With Dems: Reports

Posted on by Summer Concepcion

President Biden reportedly spoke with Democratic lawmakers about his openness to forgiving tens of thousands of dollars in student loan debt in the coming months, according to CBS and the Washington Post.

Continue reading “Biden Described New Openness To Forgiving Student Loans In Meeting With Dems: Reports” →

The Unstable Danger of Russian Weakness

Posted on by Josh Marshall

I recommend reading Josh Kovensky’s run-down on Russian threats to expand the Ukraine War to the breakaway region of Transnistria. To understand just what this is about you have to have a grip on the geography. So I’m going to momentarily focus on that. But I do so to illustrate a larger point about the state of the Ukraine war.

To start off, Transnistria is another of those breakaway separatist statelets which is recognized by Russia and basically no one else. It’s part of Moldova, another former Soviet successor state couched, landlocked, between Ukraine and Romania. Transnistria is a stretched-out slice of land along Moldova’s border to Ukraine, which is to the east. So to situate ourselves in some ways it mirrors the separatist statelets Russia sponsored along the Russian border in eastern Ukraine. Only in this case the separatist statelet in the eastern part of Moldova borders not Russia but Ukraine.

Continue reading “The Unstable Danger of Russian Weakness” →