A quick followup on the news from last night that the Jan. 6 committee claims it has a good faith basis for believing President Trump broke the law when he pressured Mike Pence to reject the electoral vote count.
As I explained in the Morning Memo, this arose in the context of the committee trying to overcome an attorney-client privilege argument being raised by John Eastman, the Trump adviser who is fighting a committee subpoena for his emails.
Continue reading “Unpacking The Big Jan. 6 News”A lot of things happened. Here are some of the things. This is TPM’s Morning Memo.
In an important new court filing last evening, the House Jan. 6 committee alleged that President Trump committed crimes in pressuring Vice President Pence to overturn the result of the 2020 election.
Trump’s criminal culpability, according to the committee, includes: (i) obstruction of an official proceeding, (ii) conspiracy to defraud the U.S., and (iii) common law fraud.
Why now? Some context:
To be clear, the alleged crimin’ by Trump and Eastman were not the centerpiece of the Jan. 6 committee’s filing, but it’s an explosive argument and the most newsworthy.
More than a year after the near-coup, with no public sign that the Justice Department is investigating the higher-ups in the conspiracy to subvert the 2020 election, the Jan. 6 committee is laying down an important marker for judging the performance of Attorney General Merrick Garland. Is he up to it?
On Wednesday, an Oath Keeper named Joshua James became the first person in all the Capitol insurrection criminal cases to plead guilty to seditious conspiracy in the attack.
Today marks one week since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and more than 1 million Ukrainians have fled the country since then, according to the U.N.’s refugee agency.
The North Carolina voters who mounted a legal challenge against far-right Rep. Madison Cawthorn’s (R-NC) candidacy are starting over after the North Carolina State Board of Elections pulled the plug on their first attempt last week.
The Senate Judiciary Committee announced yesterday that the confirmation hearings for Supreme Court Justice nominee Ketanji Brown Jackson will start on March 21 and wrap up on the 24th.
Fox News host Tucker Carlson is demanding to see Jackson’s LSAT score so the Black lady can prove whether she really belongs on the Supreme Court.
Former Trump trade adviser Peter Navarro didn’t show up for his scheduled deposition with the House Jan. 6 committee yesterday, claiming that he is an Executive Privileged Boi who won’t let the committee “bully” him with its subpoena, no sir!
Mexican smugglers have cut through the ex-president’s “very powerful” wall more than 3,000 times over the past three years, according to U.S. Customs and Border Protection records obtained by the Washington Post.
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) had this very normal reaction upon seeing a group of students wearing masks at his press conference at the University of South Florida yesterday:
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It’s now been almost one week since Russia invaded Ukraine.
Since then, the Kremlin has failed to take the country’s two biggest cities, Kyiv and Kharkiv. Both have faced assaults from Russian troops invading from the nearest borders, 20 miles away in the case of Kharkiv and roughly 60 miles away from the Belarusian border, in the case of Kyiv.
Over the past several days, Russia has began to bomb government buildings and civilian infrastructure. The mayor of Mariupol, a city on the Sea of Azov in Ukraine’s east, told Ukrainian TV that an entire residential block was flattened by an artillery strike during heavy fighting.
“We cannot even take the wounded from the streets, from houses and apartments today, since the shelling does not stop,” he said.
Kharkiv, an old capital of Ukraine, has also faced periodic missile strikes and heavy rocket bombardments.
With all that, U.S. officials appear to have changed their assessment of how long the Ukrainians may hold out. When the war began, they predicted that Kyiv would likely fall within four days of the invasion.
Now, per CBS News, Pentagon officials briefed lawmakers that Russia could take Kyiv in 30 days, and that a “tactical seizure” of Ukraine may be complete in six weeks. From that point, lawmakers were told, the war could last from 10 to 20 years.
“She was just annoyed at having to see her ex-lover’s face on billboards as she drove around Plano.”
According to the Dallas Morning News, that was Plano, Texas resident Tania Joya’s justification for spilling the beans about an affair she had with incumbent Rep. Van Taylor (R-TX) to one of his opponents ahead of Tuesday’s primary.
Look, we’ve all been there.
But there’s a lot of other stuff going on here — far more, in fact, than Joya’s very valid logic. Let’s unpack.
Continue reading “Where Things Stand: Complicated, 11th Hour Affair Allegation Ends Texas GOP Incumbent’s Reelection Bid”Your briefing on developments in the Supreme Court confirmation battle.
Ladies and gentlemen, we have a schedule.
Continue reading “The Four-Day Supreme Court Confirmation Gauntlet”This article is part of TPM Cafe, TPM’s home for opinion and news analysis. It was first published by The Conversation.
A curious new church was dedicated on the outskirts of Moscow in June 2020: The Main Church of the Russian Armed Forces. The massive, khaki-colored cathedral in a military theme park celebrates Russian might. It was originally planned to open on the 75th anniversary of the Soviet Union’s victory over Nazi Germany, in May 2020, but was delayed due to the pandemic.
Conceived by the Russian defense minister after the country’s illegal annexation of Crimea in 2014, the cathedral embodies the powerful ideology espoused by President Vladimir Putin, with strong support from the Russian Orthodox Church.
The Kremlin’s vision of Russia connects the state, military and the Russian Orthodox Church. As a scholar of nationalism, I see this militant religious nationalism as one of the key elements in Putin’s motivation for the invasion of Ukraine, my native country. It also goes a long way in explaining Moscow’s behavior toward the collective “West” and the post-Cold War world order.
The Church of the Armed Forces’ bell tower is 75 meters tall, symbolizing the 75th anniversary of the end of World War II. Its dome’s diameter is 19.45 meters, marking the year of the victory: 1945. A smaller dome is 14.18 meters, representing the 1,418 days the war lasted. Trophy weapons are melted into the floor so that each step is a blow to the defeated Nazis.
Frescoes celebrate Russia’s military might though history, from medieval battles to modern-day wars in Georgia and Syria. Archangels lead heavenly and earthly armies, Christ wields a sword, and the Holy Mother, depicted as the Motherland, lends support.
The original plans for the frescoes included a celebration of the Crimean occupation, with jubilant people holding a banner that read “Crimea is Ours” and “Forever with Russia.” In the final version, the controversial “Crimea is Ours” was replaced by the more benign “We are together.”
When Russia annexed the Crimean Peninsula from Ukraine in 2014, the Russian Orthodox Church celebrated, calling Crimea the “cradle” of Russian Christianity. This mythology draws on the medieval story of Prince Vladimir, who converted to Christianity in the 10th century and was baptized in Crimea. The prince then imposed the faith on his subjects in Kyiv, and it spread from there.
The Russian Orthodox Church, also called the Moscow Patriarchate, has long claimed this event as its foundational story. The Russian Empire, which linked itself to the church, adopted this foundational story as well.
Putin and the head of the Russian church, Patriarch Kirill, have resurrected these ideas about empire for the 21st century in the form of the so-called “Russian World” – giving new meaning to a phrase that dates to medieval times.
In 2007, Putin created a Russian World Foundation, which was charged with promotion of Russian language and culture worldwide, such as a cultural project preserving interpretations of history approved by the Kremlin.
For church and state, the idea of “Russian World” encompasses a mission of making Russia a spiritual, cultural and political center of civilization to counter the liberal, secular ideology of the West. This vision has been used to justify policies at home and abroad.
Another planned mosaic depicted the celebrations of Soviet forces’ defeat of Nazi Germany – the Great Patriotic War, as World War II is called in Russia. The image included soldiers holding a portrait of Josef Stalin, the dictator who led the USSR during the war, among a crowd of decorated veterans. This mosaic was reportedly removed before the church’s opening.
The Great Patriotic War has a special, even sacred, place in Russians’ views of history. The Soviet Union sustained immense losses – 26 million lives is a conservative estimate. Apart from the sheer devastation, many Russians ultimately see the war as a holy one, in which Soviets defended their motherland and the whole world from the evil of Nazism.
Under Putin, glorification of the war and Stalin’s role in the victory have reached epic proportions. Nazism, for very good reasons, is seen as a manifestation of the ultimate evil.
The rhetoric of this militant religious nationalism has been on display as Russia threatened to and ultimately did invade Ukraine. During a speech on Feb. 24, 2022, Putin bizarrely called for the “de-nazification” of Ukraine. He also spoke of fraternal relationships between Russian and Ukrainian people and denied the existence of the Ukrainian state. In his view, Ukraine’s sovereignty is an example of extreme, chauvinistic nationalism.
Putin’s claim that Ukraine’s government is run by Nazis is absurd. However, the manipulation of this image makes sense in the framework of this ideology. Painting the government in Kyiv as evil helps to paint the war in Ukraine in black and white.
Tangible geopolitical issues may be driving Putin’s war in Ukraine, but his actions also seem motivated by a desire to secure his own legacy. In his vision of “Great Russia,” restored to its former size and influence, Putin is a defender who must vanquish its enemies.
The Russian president himself appeared in earlier versions of the cathedral’s frescoes, along with Minister of Defense Sergei Shoigu and Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov. However, the mosaic was removed after controversy, with Putin himself reportedly giving orders to take it down, saying it was too early to celebrate the country’s current leadership.
Patriarch Kirill, who has called Putin’s rule a “miracle of God,” said the new cathedral “holds the hope that future generations will pick up the spiritual baton from past generations and save the Fatherland from internal and external enemies.”
This volatile religious nationalism manifests itself in the militarism unfolding in Ukraine.
On Feb. 24, 2022, the day the invasion began, Patriarch Kirill called for a swift resolution and protection of civilians in Ukraine, while reminding Orthodox Christians of the fraternal connection between the two nations. But he has not condemned the war itself and has referred to “evil forces” trying to destroy the unity of Russia and the Russian Orthodox Church.
Lena Surzhko Harned is an assistant teaching professor of political science at Penn State.
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
In the weeks before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Western intelligence fixated on gaming out Russian President Vladimir Putin’s plan for the country.
Continue reading “What Happened To Russia’s Supposed Puppet Leaders Of Ukraine?”For Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, life indeed imitates art.
Continue reading “The Best 5 Clips From Zelensky’s Past Life As An Entertainer”The Supreme Court heard a bizarre case Monday that dealt with the Environmental Protection Agency’s power to regulate greenhouse gas emissions from power plants. A coalition of red states and coal companies are gesturing towards a rule that is no longer on the books — Obama’s Clean Power Plan — as a way to bring before the conservative court questions of how the EPA can act on climate.
Continue reading “Democratic Senators See Writing On The Wall After Supreme Court Hears EPA Case”I’ve mentioned this a few times already. But I remain stunned at the number of people I’m generally used to seeing decrying “forever wars” and the military industrial complex insisting the time has come for us to intervene militarily in Ukraine. The favored demand seems to be a “no fly zone” either over Kyiv or the entirety of Ukraine — which in case you haven’t reviewed the maps is a very large country. The preference for “no fly zones” is itself a reminder that the U.S. public has virtually no living memory of war with a peer military force or even one that can put up any kind of fight. The word gets tossed around as though it described a kind of high tech forcefield the U.S. deploys when we’ve gotten fed up with the pictures we’re seeing on TV. I’ve even seen people questioning whether a “no fly zone” actually constitutes an act of war.
Continue reading “Enough About “No Fly Zones””
