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With the horrific war in Ukraine and tough sanctions on Russia, there is a lot of talk of increasing the oil supply. The only trouble is, oil companies don’t particularly want to ramp up that supply. After taking a huge hit during the depths of the pandemic, the oil industry is reveling in this war-fueled spike in profits.
Vladimir Putin is living in a dreamland and wants all of us to live in it, too. (Okay, it’s more of a nightmare-land.) Putin has clamped down on any semblance of free press in Russia and is desperately trying to blame any war, or “special military operation,” on Ukraine and the West.
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has sent oil prices through the roof and volatile markets are desperately trying to determine what comes next in this awful war. Now that Joe Biden has announced a ban on all Russian oil imports to the United States, the cost of gasoline is definitely heading up. The U.S. doesn’t even import much oil from Russia to begin with, but the ripple effects of an embargo impacts the global market for oil.
Oh, how I wish Donald Trump didn’t matter any more and we could just write him off as a disgraced ex-president who is rapidly getting crazier. He is those things, of course, except he does matter. He matters because he still has such strong support in the Republican Party and may very well regain control of the White House in a couple years.
Now that Vladimir Putin has launched a Russian invasion of Ukraine, the Trumpist isolationist wing of the Republican Party looks even more ridiculous. The always eloquent J.D. Vance, the author from Ohio who wrote “Hillbilly Elegy” and is now running for U.S. Senate, said, “I don’t really care what happens to Ukraine one way or the other.”
One of the juicy tidbits Maggie Haberman of the New York Times saved for her just-released book on Donald Trump is that White House staff frequently had to contend with toilets that were backed up with documents. Besides the fact that it seems the Insurrectionist in Chief does not understand the differences in fiber content of various paper products, this behavior is unsurprising for a guy who has no desire to leave a paper trail.
No matter how much Republican “leaders” like Mitch McConnell and Mitt Romney disavow the resolution the Republican National Committee recently passed, they’re not the ones in charge anymore.
I honestly can’t believe we’re still talking about banning books. The “Moral Majority” calls to ban certain books in schools and libraries was archaic way back in the 1980s. Now in 2022 a far-right minority is using the same playbook.
Disgraced ex-president Donald Trump has his platform back, unfortunately for him it’s in court filings and legal briefs instead of on Twitter or Facebook.
Pundits are talking about what screw-ups the Democrats are after their inability to pass voting rights legislation and their signature social spending bill. I still say a political party with two wrong-headed idiot senators is waaaay better than a party with fifty of them.
What makes democracy less democratic? Why, the Senate filibuster rule of course! We’re hearing quite a bit about the filibuster these days because it is what is keeping Democrats in Congress from passing essential voting rights legislation. (You know, the legislation that is vital because Republicans in Washington, D.C. and in statehouses across the country seem determined to subvert our elections.)
It’s been one year since the violent January 6th insurrection, one of the most dangerous assaults on our democracy. Unfortunately, that assault keeps coming and has progressed over the past year in statehouses across the country.
Vladimir Putin seems to favor wearing suits but he may as well start festooning his jacket with all the medals he’s earning in his war on Ukraine. It seems very clear the quick “special military operation” is not going according to plan, I’d be pretty nervous if I were one of Putin’s military advisers.