That should make your blood run cold

In my previous post I told the story of my little red car showing its age (17 years) and refusing to start. The saga continues. I went car shopping on Thursday. A friend took me to a dealer that had an old Honda Insight at a nice low price. I took it for a test drive and immediately saw a deal breaker. Part of the rear window slopes with the roof. Part is vertical. That means there is a bar across the middle of my rearward view. Why anyone – both car designers and government regulators – thought this was acceptable is a mystery. I am leaving behind a car in which I thought the back window was too small. I wasn’t going to buy one with another rearview obstruction. So I said no thanks. I realized the other dealership of interest was less than two miles away. I hadn’t done my daily walking yet so I asked the salesman if it was possible to walk from here to there – if there was a sidewalk the whole way, especially when one major road went under another. He said that wasn’t a problem (I saw later it was), but safety could be – I was in Detroit. So he offered to drive me to the other dealership – in the car I had just declined. I asked him about the bar through the rear view. Yeah, he had to tilt his head up and down to see around it, but he thought he could get used to it. I felt I shouldn't need to get used to it. The second dealer had a Prius I had seen online. I took it for a test drive and decided this would work well. So I bought it. I’ll describe the color as boring black. The paperwork took about two hours. I’ll have to take it back to get the tire sensor replaced. And sometime soon they’ll send the instruction manual. And this car needs one. The big task on Friday was to send the little red car on its way. For that I needed the title. For several years the title sat on one of my cabinets. Then I realized I should put it somewhere safe. Now several years later it wasn’t in the places I thought were safe. After a few hours searching I found it and thought why is it here? There’s nothing safe about this spot. Looking over the title I saw that it had a lien showing. When I bought it I was given a discount if I financed it rather than paying cash – even if I financed for just one month, which I did. The title did not show the lien had been cleared. In what was not my finest hour, I got on the phone and called the loan company. I ended up talking to three different people because when I got disconnected or had to hang up to call somewhere else, I was given a different agent when I called back. The big question was how to get a release letter to me and do so quickly. One guy said we can fax it to you, or to someplace like FedEx or UPS. The next guy said we can only fax it to a DMV office. So I called the Michigan Secretary of State central office to get the fax of a local SoS office. I was told it may not go through on the first try, so I should call the central office and they’ll check with the local office to see if it came through. I wasn’t allowed to call the local office because if they gave out their number they’d spend all day on the phone rather than dealing with customers in their office. After I called the loan company the third time I realized the original release letter would be in the same place I found the title – and it was. The things I do to myself sometimes. A release letter will still come through the mail in two weeks. I didn’t call back a fourth time to cancel that request because the answer bot demands an account number or SSN and because it was a brief loan from 17 years ago it had neither. I called the guy handling the pickup for the car donation company and set a time. I drove the new car to the old one. I transferred the plate and cleaned out the old one. Then I waited a while. The tow truck came and loaded the old car. I said my goodbyes (it had been a part of my life for 17 years), then reached in and pulled out the garage door opener. The car is being taken to a place where it can be sold (likely a scrap yard will buy it) and proceeds given to a charity. The public days of the Detroit Auto Show has been going on for a week and ends tomorrow. I had planned to go on Thursday to see when I might be able to buy an all electric car. I’m sure what I want is still a couple years away. Now that I have a Prius I’m confident will last me a few years the need to find out the electric car schedule is no longer urgent. The Auto Show should be back as an annual event. The nasty guy and his legal difficulties have been in the news a lot this past week. On Wednesday Joan McCarter of Daily Kos reported Letitia James, Attorney General for New York, filed a $250 million civil lawsuit against the nasty guy and his adult children, alleging numerous acts of fraud in the way he valued his real estate holdings. When he needed a loan the claimed value went up (which could act as more collateral for a larger loan) sometimes up to ten times the actual value of the property. When he needed to pay taxes the claimed value went down. This wasn’t a little oopsie. This was intentional and ongoing. Alas, there is no jail time for a civil lawsuit, though James has asked for criminal charges to be brought. I’ve written before that The nasty guy asked for a special master to review the documents taken from Mar-a-Lago, his for profit estate, to see if some of them were really his and should be returned. The nasty guy got as special master one of the people he requested. Also on Wednesday Mark Sumner of Kos reported the nasty guy’s legal team went before the special master Judge Raymond Dearie. It didn’t go well. The legal team tried to cast doubt on whether documents were classified while refusing to show evidence they had been declassified, a “Schrödinger’s cat” position. They wanted to keep the status undetermined. They said future prosecution was “proof” the nasty guy would be endangered by telling the truth. Dearie was quick: show the evidence or shut up. They shut up. In a second post Sumner explained a bit more:

Specifically, Trump’s legal team is refusing to talk about whether, or how, Trump actually tried to declassify any of the documents by claiming it would harm their “defense to the merits of any subsequent indictment.” In other words, they’re saying that if they reveal that Trump didn’t declassify any documents, that could subject him to legal action for stealing and holding highly classified information. Which he did. And if Trump claims he did declassify documents, then he’ll have to prove that in court, and also be subject to possible charges over failure to follow the law regarding declassification. Plus, there’s the whole perjury issue—and the issue of Trump obstructing an investigation—that comes with lying about the whole thing.

The nasty guy has an out – Judge Aileen Cannon, who babied the case all the way and who agreed to the nasty guy’s claims and added a few outrageous conditions of her own, has reserved the right to dismiss the special master if he displeases her. An appeal of Judge Cannon’s ruling is before the 11th Circuit Court. And, as Sumner reported, in a filing for that court the nasty guy made some incredible claims. He, as president, has interest in his own records, no matter the classification. And if he wrote on the documents they are privileged information. Also, the DOJ hasn’t proven the documents are classified. They’re ridiculous claims. See the Presidential Records Act. Also, he’s no longer president. And that last claim should be that the nasty guy hasn’t proven they’re not classified. On Thursday Sumner reported a three judge panel of the 11th Circuit ruled the DOJ and the FBI provided all the legal points and evidence to support their position. And the nasty guy’s team offered only speculation and unsupported claims. The court also had a few things to say to Judge Cannon – such as the reasons she gave for the need of a special master are not in the law. As for the nasty guy the court said he hasn’t shown a need for the classified documents or shown a need to know the contents. Even if he did that doesn’t explain why he should have them. An appeal of an 11th Circuit Court decision goes to the Supremes. What happens there will be a mystery for now. In a late afternoon Thursday post Sumner reported on the latest from Judge Dearie. The nasty guy claimed the classified documents were an FBI plant. Dearie said here’s the list of things the FBI took from Mar-a-Lago. Tell me which are FBI plants. Tell me if the FBI left documents off the list. You can lie all you want to Fox News. But you can’t in my court. Since so many of the nasty guy’s cronies have been subpoenaed Mr. Newberger, who calls himself a political satirist, tweeted a photo of the nasty guy and several cronies at a golf course with the caption: “Leonardo da Vinci’s The Last Subpoena.” Turning to Russia, Mark Hertling, a retired soldier, tweeted:

Putin's announced mobilization of 300,000 "reservists" was jaw-dropping to me this morning, but not for the reason some might suspect. Why? Because I know how Russian soldiers are trained, in basic training & in their units.

He then reviewed the extensive training American soldiers get. Then discussed how little training Russian troops, especially conscripts and draftees, get before being tossed into the war. And they don’t get much training once they’re at the front.

The issue is the Russian army is poorly led & poorly trained. That starts in basic training, and doesn't get better during the RU soldier's time in uniform. Mobilizing 300k "reservists" (after failing with depleted conventional forces, rag-tag militias recruiting prisoners & using paramilitaries like the Wagner group) will be extremely difficult. And placing "newbies" on a front line that has been mauled, has low morale & who don't want to be portends more RU disaster. Jaw-dropping. A new sign of RU weakness.

Sumner reviewed Biden’s speech before the United Nations General Assembly, which was about calling out Russia for violations of human rights and of international law. Some of Sumner’s excerpts of Biden’s speech:

This war is about extinguishing Ukraine’s right to exist as a state, plain and simple, and Ukraine’s right to exist as a people. Whoever you are, wherever you live, whatever you believe, that should make your blood run cold. ... To be very blunt, let us speak plainly: A permanent member of the United Nations Security Council invaded its neighbor, attempted to erase a sovereign state from the map. Russia has shamelessly violated the core tenets of the United Nations Charter—none more important than the clear prohibition against countries taking the territory of their neighbor by force. ... If nations can pursue their imperial ambitions without consequence, then we put at risk everything this very institution stands for. Everything. Every victory won in the battlefield belongs to the courageous Ukrainian soldiers, but this past year, the world was tested as well. We did not hesitate. We chose liberty. We chose sovereignty. We stood with Ukraine. ... A nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought.

Sumner then discussed how that mobilization of 300K men is going. Charles Jay of the Kos community reported that Alla Pugacheva, a Russian pop music icon, has spoken against the war. She started her career in the 1960s and her Instagram account has 3.5 million followers. Her post with the announcement got 800K likes and 110K comments. For her to declare her opposition is a really big deal. Sumner reviewed the history of the war – what Russia intended and how it went so badly for them. Then Sumner discussed this call for mobilization.

Putin had resisted calling for mobilization, because he knew exactly what that meant. It meant that while Russians were perfectly willing to make happy noises about how Putin used his army of contract soldiers that the average Russian sees as a pathetic pile of misfits constantly bullied by Russia’s criminal-based upper class, they would not make happy sounds if they had to actually put an inch of skin in the game. Back in May, a poll showed that poor Russians—those most likely to have relatives in the military—were, unsurprisingly, the ones most likely to be against the invasion of Ukraine. A majority of Russians who had trouble putting food on the table were either hesitant about continuing the war or straight-up wanted to withdraw from Ukraine. At the other end of the scale, wealthy Russians were hugely in favor of watching poor people get slaughtered for sport.

Then Sumner said there is nothing partial about this mobilization. It looks like a million – not 300,00 – are facing conscription. Whole university classes are being hauled away, even though students were supposedly exempt. And, of course, a greater percent of the conscripts come from ethnic minorities, a form of ethnic cleansing.

Vladimir Putin crashed the Russian army on the rocks of Ukraine. What’s left if it is a wreck tottering on the edge of total destruction. The situation is so bad that Putin has turned to what is legitimately a last-ditch effort to patch the holes and try to keep things afloat long enough to … to … And that’s the real kicker. Putin will hold his mock elections. He will proclaim parts of Ukraine to be parts of Russia. But he will never get to keep them. Still, maybe he will get a little ethnic cleansing done and call that victory. Maybe it’s time for another poll on just how much Russians love this war.