Here’s a fascinating and humorous (for reasons I’ll explain presently) quick segment from Russian TV. One of the panelists is a Russian military affairs commentator who goes completely rogue and starts setting forth the dire strategic picture Russia faces — poor morale, an almost unlimited supply of soldiers in Ukraine, arms pouring in from Europe and the United States, geopolitical isolation.

The other panelists take potshots at his reasoning but to little real effect.

But the best part is about halfway through he says, no, not even Rand Paul can save us. Really! He doesn’t refer to Paul by name but he notes that the Lend-Lease type program is finally getting underway, marrying unlimited troops with unlimited weaponry “and even the resistance of a single senator will be overcome quickly.” That single senator is Rand Paul, who he is so far blocking passage of the bill.

Video after the jump …

We all get stuck in our ways. And over time we all learn the peculiarities of how our brains function. Relatively early in my writing career I realized that I write in a way that is different from how most people do it. I don’t actually write. Not precisely. What I do is speak in my head and basically transcribe the sounds. This sometimes leaves funny artifacts in my writing. Like many who write fast and online I have no shortage of missing words or typos, “theirs” that should be “theres” and vice versa. But that’s not what I mean. Sometimes I will actually include words which sound vaguely similar to the intended word but are not homonyms and are totally different words. They just create a similar set of sounds if you run them together in a spoken sentence. Read English sentences they can read like gibberish. but if you speak them quickly aloud the meaning will often be clear.

People will sometimes point out that I’m clearly using transcription software that is screwing up. But in fact I’ve never used transcription software in my life. My brain is just wired in this particular way. There actually is transcribing. But I’m the one doing it.

According to Susquehanna Polling & Research, a GOP polling firm, the Republican Senate primary in Pennsylvania is now a dead heat between Trump endorsed TV Doctor Mehmet Oz (28%) and outsider candidate Kathy Barnette (27%), with the late-breaking deciders favoring Barnette.

John Fetterman, the Lt. Gov. of Pennsylvania and the leading Senate candidate for the Democratic nomination for Senate, suffered a stroke on Friday. According to the statement he put out today, it was a minor stroke and he suffered no cognitive impairment. He says he is continuing the race. “I had a stroke that was caused by a clot from my heart being in an A-fib rhythm for too long. I’m feeling much better, and the doctors tell me I didn’t suffer any cognitive damage. I’m well on my way to a full recovery.”

It’s hard to say that one mass shooting is worse than the next — other than in the brutal metric of body counts. They’re all different flavors of the same horror. But the news out of this afternoon’s shooting in Buffalo is particularly sobering, shocking, enraging. One of the ten dead was a retired cop working as a security guard at the grocery store. He engaged the shooter and shot him. But it didn’t stop him because the shooter was wearing body armor. That little detail is the one that just stopped me in my tracks.

Police appear certain that the shooting, allegedly by an 18 year old from out of town, was racially motivated, though they haven’t yet discussed the evidence that makes it so clear. Eleven of the thirteen who were shot are Black. Two are white.

You can never understand national politics without understanding the elite mores of Washington, DC. People toss around the word “elite.” But here I mean it in a more specific sense of the mix of journalists, staffers, elected officials, lobbyists, activists and more who have power in and essentially run the political town of Washington, DC. (The actual place where most of the population lives is a different thing.) As I’ve written in various contexts over the years that strata of the city remains heavily wired for the GOP, even though there are lots of people from that world who certainly aren’t conservatives and by definition many are Democrats. I wanted to flag something to you that kind of captures it.

Biden is thinking about and asking the right question: “[Putin] is a very, very, very calculating man. And the problem I worry about now is that he doesn’t have a way out right now, and I’m trying to figure out what we do about that.”

The quote is courtesy of this piece by Friend of TPM Olivier Knox.

According to a new Monmouth Poll, abortion (25%) is now tied with the economy (26%) as the most important issue in the midterms.

Republicans are falling over each other to tell us as clearly as they can that the reversal of Roe is a massive electoral liability. You have longtime “pro-life” diehards running towards TV cameras insisting the whole thing is totally no big deal. In fact, you’ll barely notice anything happened. Lots of states will still have abortion. Abortions will be so easy to get you’ll be getting abortions right and left. Or at least that seems to be what virtually every Republican senator is saying.

Sen. Ron Johnson’s comments on abortion today are revealing. He has the yikes quote: Abortion “might be a little messy for some people” post-Roe. But the real takeaway is his other comment, suggesting that the whole thing is no big deal because women will still be able to cross the border to Illinois and get an abortion there. That tells you very clearly that he doesn’t want to run on opposition to abortion in his state when it really matters — not just a hypothetical about what judges might do in the future or the options for women in deep red states. It’s an issue that can be used to pry that Senate seat right out of his hands.