For Democrats to survive the 2022 midterm with their majorities intact they must walk a very, very narrow tightrope. They also need a number of things that are mostly out of their control to fall into place. One of those things is the hope that you will see some replay of what happened in 2010 and 2012. The first was an extremely good year for Republicans. The second was just so-so — Mitt Romney lost to Barack Obama after all. But it should have been a decent year for Senate Republicans since Democrats were defending their class of 2006, when they’d won Senate seats basically everywhere. In both years Republicans failed to win the Senate even though by rights they really should have. They just kept nominating crankish and extreme candidates in races that should have been winnable. That’s why there’s a Senator Chris Coons (“I’m not a witch”). That’s why Claire McCaskill (“Legitimate rape”) had one more term in the Senate. There are a bunch of other examples.

At some point around the new year I switched from obsessively checking my curated COVID experts Twitter list to obsessively checking my two newly curated Ukraine crisis Twitter lists (Ukraine Crisis and Ukraine military experts). Such is life.

This morning I was browsing through the COVID list and I found my way to this post by Eric Topol. Topol is a physician generalist who heads up a biomedical institute at the Scripps Research Center in California. He’s not an epidemiologist or virologist. But COVID has been his focus since the beginning of the pandemic. The post is entitled The Covid Capitulation. And it is part of that genre of COVID writing in which a COVID expert bemoans the fact that the whole country has decided the epidemic is over when in fact it’s clearly not.

New polling conducted by NBC News has found that American opposition to overturning Roe v. Wade is at a record high. The poll was conducted after the draft Supreme Court majority opinion overturning Roe was leaked earlier this month.

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 …