What Russia says about ourselves One of the pleasures of writing for an old-school blog is not being assigned a boring end-of-year review or best-of piece. Plenty of those this week elsewhere. These two reports by BBC News Russia editor Steve Rosenberg are more relective. The first examines how Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine has changed Russia. “Special Military Operation” Russia feels different from both communist Russia and independent Russia. “The economy and industry here have been virtually put on a war footing,” says Rosenberg, since its invasion of Ukraine in 2022. Not every Russian supports the war, Rosenburg finds, but “many Russians do buy into the Kremlin’s alternative reality, according to which in Ukraine Russia is fighting Nazis and NATO and fighting to defend Russia.” It is an eerie window into a culture other than our own in which the person beside you on the tram exists in a separate reality of alternative facts. It is a reminder, and not a comforting one, that in some ways MAGA Republicans, for all their chest-thumping claims to patriotism, are more Russian than American. Some might even agree.
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What’s that we hear from Mar-a-Lago? It finally happened at 9 a.m. ET this morning (NBC News): A House committee made public six years of former President Donald Trump’s tax returns Friday, the culmination of years of legal wrangling and speculation about what might be contained in the filings. The House Ways and Means Committee had voted to make the thousands of pages of returns public in a party-line vote last week, but their release was delayed while staffers redacted sensitive personal information like Social Security numbers from the documents. Here they are. What is in there that Trump was so desperate for the world not to see? After all, he bragged in 2016 that paying no taxes made him smart. The smartest guy around. Why not showcase that brilliance? Tax pros will study Trump’s 500 or so business empire of trusts, limited liability corporations and partnerships.
They say this about a lot of people but she truly deserves it: Dolly Parton is a national treasure. Remember this? Last year, Ms. Parton donated $1 million to Vanderbilt University Medical Center, which worked with the drug maker Moderna to develop one of the first coronavirus vaccines to be authorized in the United States. The federal government eventually invested $1 billion in the creation and testing of the vaccine, but the leader of the research effort, Dr. Mark Denison, said that the singer’s donation had funded its critical early stages. On Tuesday, Ms. Parton, 75, received a Moderna shot at Vanderbilt Health in Tennessee. “Dolly gets a dose of her own medicine,” she wrote on Twitter. A truly great American.
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The GOP agenda is something else Oh, and also they need to get to the bottom of the pandemic origins and figure out why kids were kept out of schools. This is just a friendly reminder of the circus that’s raising its tent in Washington DC next week. RICH EDSON, FOX NEWS: Congressman, there is a speakership race coming up in less than a week. Who is going to be Speaker? REP. ANDY BIGGS: We will have to have that vote on January 3. Right now, nobody has 218 votes which is the magic number. I don’t we are going to see that until January 3. Maybe it will take a few ballots to shake that out. EDSON: Is there a candidate you would support or that you want or think should be Speaker of the House? BIGGS: Of course, I’m running. But there are some good people in our conference. I don’t want to put a name. I don’t want to put a target on their back, but there are several people that are very capable, actually more than just a few capable of being Speaker of the House. I think we will get a consensus candidate, and we will get it in fairly short order and move on.
It’s not just Twitter, it’s Tesla too Paul Krugman addresses one of the big questions I think a lot of us have had over the past few weeks. If that guy is running twitter isn’t that guy also running Tesla? How much of his reputation is hype? If you’re one of those people who bought Bitcoin or another cryptocurrency near its peak last fall, you’ve lost a lot of money. Is it any consolation to know that you would have lost a similar amount if you had bought Tesla stock instead? OK, probably not. Still, Tesla stock’s plunge is an opportunity to talk about what makes businesses successful in the information age. And in the end, Tesla and Bitcoin may have more in common than you think. It’s natural to attribute Tesla’s recent decline — which is, to be sure, part of a general fall in tech stocks, but an exceptionally steep example — to Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter and the reputational self-immolation that followed. Indeed, given what we’ve seen of Musk’s behavior, I wouldn’t trust him to feed my cat, let alone run a major corporation.
Helen Branswell of STAT News, one of the best science writers around, interviewed a whole bunch of scientists and public health experts about what surprised them about the COVID pandemic. It’s fascinating. Some of them were surprised by things like the supply chain breakdown or the eerie quiet of the streets during the early days. With others it was the virus itself. You need to read the whole thing, but I’ve excerpted a few of the findings below: The biggest surprise, hands down: How the virus has evolved In the early days of the pandemic, before the new virus had a name, people who had studied coronaviruses offered reassuring predictions about the stability of the virus, which has implications for how often people might be reinfected and how frequently vaccines would need to be updated. Coronaviruses don’t change very quickly, they aren’t as mutable as, say, influenza viruses, those experts said. In fact, the spike protein on the virus’ exterior, the one that attaches to human cells and triggers infection, cannot change too much without losing its ability to infect, they assured the rest of us. That was the dogma.
George Santos is evidence Congressman-Elect George Santos, scheduled to be sworn into Congress in days, is under investigation by a New York prosecutor (NBC News): “The numerous fabrications and inconsistencies associated with Congressman-Elect Santos are nothing short of stunning. The residents of Nassau County and other parts of the third district must have an honest and accountable representative in Congress,” Nassau County District Attorney Anne T. Donnelly said in a statement about her fellow Republican on Wednesday. “No one is above the law and if a crime was committed in this county, we will prosecute it.” Santos, who made history last month as the first openly LGBTQ non-incumbent Republican to be elected to Congress, was the subject of a bombshell investigation The New York Times published this month, which found much of Santos’ background appeared to have been manufactured, including claims that he had worked for Goldman Sachs and Citigroup and had graduated from Baruch College. Daily Beast has reporting on the mysterious source of the $700k Santos lent his campaign from his Devolder Organization.
Piston-powered drones fly ahead of cruise missiles It took a lot of chutzpah for Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov to issue an ultimatum to Ukraine late Monday: “The point is simple: fulfil [Russian demands] for your own good. Otherwise, the issue will be decided by the Russian army.” That’s rich, especially considering The Washington Post’s lead story this morning, headlined, Inside the Ukrainian counteroffensive that shocked Putin and reshaped the war. It is not that Russia does not still maintain the capacity to inflict damage on Ukraine, the way stinging insects raise painful welts. But Lavrov’s boast about the Russian army appears to be just that. The Kremlin’s troops are badly depleted. Conscripts are fleeing the country. So much so that a Kazakh chocolate company created a pointed ad about it. When Moscow diverted troops south to defend the Russian-held regional capital of Kherson, Ukraine advanced toward and retook Kharkiv: In early September, Ukrainian forces would steamroll across hundreds of square miles, routing the Russians and surprising themselves.
But the Durham probe goes on… It was just another expensive pacifier for the big baby. Steve Benen reports: For those who might benefit from a refresher — you’d be forgiven for thinking, “John Durham’s name sounds familiar, but I can’t remember why I’m supposed to care about him” — let’s revisit our earlier coverage and explain how we arrived at this point. The original investigation into Donald Trump’s Russia scandal, led by then-special counsel Robert Mueller, led to a series of striking findings: The former president’s political operation in 2016 sought, embraced, capitalized on, and lied about Russian assistance — and then took steps to obstruct the investigation into the foreign interference. The Trump White House wasn’t pleased with the conclusions, but the Justice Department’s inspector general conducted a lengthy probe of the Mueller investigation, and not surprisingly, the IG’s office found nothing improper. This, of course, only outraged Trump further, so then-Attorney General Bill Barr tapped a federal prosecutor — U.S.