We start today with Elliot Williams of CNN placing the blame for the various Trumpian sprees right where it belongs, IMO.
Put another way, the fact that something might be true doesn’t mean that even the best prosecutors will be able to establish it in court.
That truth is not comforting to people who are frustrated by the fact that nothing seems to stick to Trump. They are onto something; it cannot be coincidental when the same individual or organizations with his name on them face, at once, a civil investigation regarding property valuation from the New York attorney general; separate criminal investigations from the Fulton County, Georgia, and Westchester County, New York, district attorneys and the Washington, DC, attorney general; civil suits alleging election misconduct in Delaware County, Pennsylvania, and Michigan; a defamation suit by a voting machine company; congressional investigations into his tax returns, conflicts of interest, the lease of his Washington, DC, hotel and potential mishandling of government documents; civil suits from multiple police officers who were injured on January 6; an allegation from the January 6 House Select Committee that he was part of a criminal conspiracy to defraud the United States; a defamation suit from someone who has accused him of sexual assault; and a suit from his niece alleging fraud around her inheritance. And those were just the ones I could remember. (Trump, the Trump Organization and his campaign deny wrongdoing in all.)
Those who are frustrated are right to be upset.[...]
If the raft of claims isn’t enough to convince the electorate to stop rewarding this unfit individual with high office, nothing will. That continued failure, which started with his first election in 2016, is on the American people – not the Manhattan district attorney.
Of course, no politician looking for votes is going to directly say that, true as it is.
The fact is that tens of millions of people in many of the right places voted for Trump in 2016 and eight million more people voted for him in 2020. You can say disinformation, cheating, Putin, Comey, etc. all you want and, of course, to some extent, all of that would be true.
And that still would leave tens of millions of people that thought (and still think) that voting for a Ku Klux Klan-endorsed candidate for President of the United States was a great idea.
Peniel E. Joseph, also writing for CNN, reports on the significance of WNBA star Brittney Griner’s imprisonment in Russia.
For those asking what she was doing in Russia to begin with, Griner’s story puts in harsh light the gender equity gap in professional sports, where male NBA players receive guaranteed million-dollar contracts, while their female counterparts, like Griner, are compelled to hustle for every dollar, including playing overseas in countries such as Russia.[...]
Griner’s predicament also comes as Russian leader Vladimir Putin, the authoritarian architect of the invasion of Ukraine that has galvanized world opposition, faces biting economic sanctions and is ratcheting up threatening rhetoric and violence on the ground.
While it is unclear how any of this may directly affect Griner, as an American gay athlete of color, she embodies multiple battlegrounds on which Putin has, in the past, exercised punishing authority or exerted influence. Putin’s bearing and actions as a strongman have made him a hero to White nationalists. His regime is known for its harsh treatment of LGBTQ people, including signing a 2013 so-called “gay propaganda” law and Putin’s self-presentation as a global champion for “traditional values.” [...]
The intersection of sport, sexuality and identity is an arena in which Griner has experience fighting for herself and winning. During Griner’s collegiate career at Baylor University, she became one of the first women basketball players to consistently dunk in the college game. At Baylor, a school where until 2015 the code of conduct characterized “homosexual acts” as “misuses of God’s gift,” Griner has also said she struggled to acquiesce to demands that she keep her sexuality to herself, cover up her tattoos and play the role of a more conventional athlete.
Jennifer Rubin of The Washington Post notes that Senate Republicans appear to be poised to give control of the Senate back to Democrats on a silver platter.
So if chaos and more acrimony are your speed, definitely vote for the Republicans. They won’t be waylaid by war, pandemics, economic turmoil and dozens of other critical issues that should be occupying their time. Instead, brace yourself for a gusher of crazed accusations about the president and his family.
Then late last month came what might have been the worst policy gaffe in recent political history: Sen. Rick Scott (R-Fla.) rolled out a plan to raise taxes on 100 million Americans and to let Social Security and Medicare expire in five years. Furthermore, he apparently aims to ban abortion nationwide and dictate what every school teaches students about race. (Why else put these items in an 11-point plan for the Senate?) He managed to combine the worst Republican economic ideas with the most abusive designs for government overreach.
And now Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) — purveyor of some of the most egregious coronavirus disinformation, racist rhetoric and Russia propaganda — has confessed that Republicans still want to repeal the Affordable Care Act. (Yes, they did try it when they had control of both houses and the White House, but John McCain gave the thumbs down on that unpopular idea.) To millions of Americans who have benefited from subsidized health insurance premiums, Johnson’s message amounts to: Tough luck.
Sierra Nesbit and Jenna Phillips of STATnews writes that the nation’s health care systems have to make a beginning in mitigating the damage that they have done to the environment.
The U.S. health care delivery sector has been relatively quiet on the topic of climate change and carbon emissions, even though it accounts for an estimated 8.5% of all U.S. carbon emissions and contributes significantly to the climate emergency that industries and governments are tackling worldwide. Health care delivery organizations must take more action to mitigate their contributions to climate change and act now to secure business resilience in the face of an uncertain future.
The Biden administration’s objective to significantly reduce carbon emissions comes with a set of wide-ranging targets and policies applied across U.S. industries, including the establishment of the Office of Climate Change and Health Equity. The administration has expressed its willingness to collaborate with hospital leaders to implement new sustainability practices, but has also emphasized its intention to also use financial penalties to hold hospitals accountable.
While specific environmental sustainability standards have not yet been released, HHS published a Climate Action Plan in October 2021 outlining five climate-related priorities it intends to ask health care delivery organizations to implement in the coming years. The actions most likely to affect hospital systems include reducing their carbon footprints, expanding climate resilience at the local level, and optimizing workforce and space management.
Darryl Fears of The Washington Post suggests that another part of that climate change mitigation by health care systems needs to involve health care equity for people whose neighborhoods were once subjected to the practice of redlining.
The practice known as redlining was outlawed more than a half-century ago, but it continues to impact people who live in neighborhoods that government mortgage officers shunned for 30 years because people of color and immigrants lived in them.
The analysis, published in the journal Environmental Science and Technology Letters, found that, compared with White people, Black and Latino Americans live with more smog and fine particulate matter from cars, trucks, buses, coal plants and other nearby industrial sources in areas that were redlined. Those pollutants inflame human airways, reduce lung function, trigger asthma attacks and can damage the heart and cause strokes.
“Of course, we’ve known about redlining and its other unequal impacts, but air pollution is one of the most important environmental health issues in the U.S.,” said Joshua Apte, a co-author of the study and an assistant professor in the School of Public Health at the University of California at Berkeley.
“If you just look at the number of people that get killed by air pollution, it’s arguably the most important environmental health issue in the country,” Apte said.
A 15-reporter team for Der Spiegel writes up a long form essay about Germany’s about-face with regard to foreign policy and security matters.
War is back on the European continent, and the violence is unfolding just a two-hour flight from Berlin – with German participation in the form of weapons deliveries, sanctions and bellicose rhetoric aimed at Russian President Vladimir Putin. Germany has become an actor in this conflict and must expect potential consequences – including the extremely unlikely possibility of a nuclear strike. The end of history – the peaceful victory of democracy over other systems of government – has definitively come to an end. And now, history is back, marching down its old, extremely dangerous path.
And Germany has joined in, it has accepted the challenge. That was the message of his speech before the special session of German parliament at the end of February. A special fund to boost the German military, weapons deliveries to a warzone, a more active role in the world: Such were the items on Scholz’s suddenly extremely full and revolutionary agenda. And they are enough to completely change the character of an entire country. A rather pacifist country is acquiring military muscle and the ability to actively defend democracy. A country that the world had for decades seen as a languorous economic powerhouse is now to exert a far greater influence on global politics.
I know very little about cryptocurrencies but about a week ago, I did hear Secretary Hillary Clinton talk about the importance of regulating cryptocurrencies in light of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
Gian M. Volpicelli/Wired
What crypto compliance firms do know is that right now cryptocurrency trading is skyrocketing in popularity both in sanction-stricken Russia and war-torn Ukraine. According to figures by cryptocurrency analytics firm Kaiko, cited by Bloomberg, as of February 28, the amounts of bitcoin traded using the Russian ruble had surged to the highest point since May 2021, while trading volumes for the Ukrainian hryvnia had reached the highest point since October. Kaiko reported a similar pattern of frantic trade between the two currencies and Tether, a “stablecoin” whose value is said to be pegged to the US dollar.
The Ukrainian government is pushing for a blanket ban on cryptocurrency transactions coming from all Russian individuals, regardless of sanction status, in order to “sabotage ordinary users” and put pressure on Putin’s regime. Exchanges have so far resisted that call, and the CEOs of Binance and US-based Kraken have come out strongly against the idea, citing crypto’s libertarian underpinnings. Binance’s top executive, Changpeng “CZ” Zhao, published a blog post on Friday elaborating on that position and maintaining that crypto is an unlikely tool for Russia to circumvent sanctions.
Nevertheless, if legally required to do so by US or European authorities, exchanges would have to resort to geo-blocking techniques in order to prevent all Russians from using their services. By one index, Russia ranks 18th in the world in cryptocurrency adoption, according to Chainalysis, and Bloomberg estimated that it is home to at least $214 billion worth of crypto, or 12 per cent of the industry’s total value. Russia also ranks third among all countries at bitcoin mining—the energy-intensive process of minting new cryptocurrency units—just behind the US and Kazakhstan, a country firmly in Moscow’s orbit.
Moisés Naím writes for El País in English, noting the speed and effectiveness of the application of financial and economic sanctions against Russia and muses that, perhaps, that speed and effectiveness can and needs to be applied to the climate emergency.
As Russia’s isolation deepens, many of the world’s democracies have shown an unprecedented capacity to cooperate and defend the values they share. Swiftly designing and imposing the most severe sanctions in history and coordinating their adoption among many countries was not easy, but it got done. This is one of the most welcome side effects of the invasion: discovering that democracies can successfully tackle big problems. This experience can serve as a guide when facing the other global threats that lie ahead for us.
Coincidentally, four days after the invasion of Ukraine, a panel made up of the world’s most prominent scientists published a report warning about the unprecedented human and material damage that we can expect from climate change, as well as the alarming rate at which these catastrophes are increasing. The report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is based on the research of thousands of scientists from around the world. According to the report, we are at risk of adverse conditions becoming so extreme that vast areas of the planet will be uninhabitable, as will some of the most populous urban areas.
The climate crisis is at least as threatening as Vladimir Putin. The invasion of this tyrant is an unacceptable crime that cannot be tolerated and we must support those who oppose it. But the world urgently needs to develop the capacity to respond to more than one crisis at a time. Ukraine should not be abandoned, but neither should the fight against global warming. The latter is very difficult, but now we know that – acting together – the world is capable of achieving difficult things.
The Monitor’s View by the editorial board of The Christian Science Monitor notes three other democratic countries where Ukraine’s battle for its independence is being closely monitored.
In three democracies long threatened by bullying neighbors – South Korea, Taiwan, and Iraq – the invasion has been closely watched to see how much Ukrainians unite around a shared identity based on civic values. Also closely eyed is support of Ukraine by the United States and Europe. That Western resolve, says CIA Director William Burns, helps demonstrate “the resilience of democracies at a time when there’s been lots of speculation about them not being so strong.”
In South Korea, which has enjoyed a thriving democracy for more than three decades, a presidential election took place March 9 amid renewed ballistic missile launches by North Korea. During the campaign, candidate Yoon Suk-yeol cited Ukraine’s strength against Russia and the need for South Koreans to do the same with North Korea. Mr. Yoon won the election.
In Iraq, an election last October resulted in a victory for a coalition of three parties across religious and ethnic lines – and all in opposition to Iran’s support of violent militias inside Iraq. The coalition leader, Shiite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr, promises a “national majority government,” a signal to Shiite-dominated Iran not to meddle in its neighbor. Mr. Sadr is still struggling to form a government.
For Taiwan, the Russian invasion sparked a renewed commitment to its democracy as an underlying defense against threats by China to take the island nation by force. “The determination of Ukrainians has moved the world, making Taiwanese feel the same,” said President Tsai Ing-wen.
Finally today, Jon Allsop of the Columbia Journalism Review notes the points where news coverage of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and coverage of the COVID-19 pandemic intersect.
Nearly two years ago, the Times filled its entire front page with mini-obituaries remembering victims of COVID-19 as the confirmed US death toll from the disease neared a hundred thousand, a milestone that the paper described as an “incalculable loss.” Yesterday—with the confirmed US death toll nearing one million even as many Americans, including some journalists and their editors, seem to have become inured to it—Ed Yong, a science writer at The Atlantic, returned to that Times front page, asking, “What is 10 times incalculable?” More broadly, Yong explored why such large-scale COVID death no longer seems to be inspiring a “social reckoning” in the US. One factor that he cited is a dearth of shocking imagery. “The threat—a virus—is invisible, and the damage it inflicts is hidden from public view,” he wrote. “With no lapping floodwaters or smoking buildings, the tragedy becomes contestable to a degree that a natural disaster or terrorist attack cannot be.” Or a war.
In the spring of 2020, the difficulty of visualizing the pandemic compared to other crises was much discussed in media circles. It’s inaccurate to say that there were no shocking images—there were, of heavily intubated patients dying in hospitals, of funeral pyres, of mass graves. But they were often hard to obtain, not least due to hospital rules around patient privacy and the danger that journalists might bring in, or take home, the virus. And Yong is right, narrowly, to say that the virus itself is invisible. Russian shells are not—though, of course, getting close enough to photograph the damage brings its own grave dangers.
The debate over images is one of many points of contrast that I’ve been thinking about recently as intense coverage of a horrible war has followed intense coverage of a horrible pandemic in the news cycle. Both stories feel generation-defining and world-changing, but in very different ways. Another media debate that took hold in the spring of 2020 concerned a tendency, among journalists and world leaders alike, to compare the pandemic response to a war. Numerous commentators pointed out that the military metaphor was inappropriate, even dangerous, legitimizing political power grabs and anti-Asian racism; as The Atlantic’s Yasmeen Serhan put it at the time, war is “by its very nature divisive—which is not particularly helpful amid a crisis that requires global cooperation.” Ultimately, the coronavirus doesn’t want to kill people, at least not with any sense of moral agency. Putin’s assault on Ukraine is a stark reminder that murderous politicians do.
Everyone have a great day!