Crooked Media - What A Day: A Walker to remember

- Rep. Tim Ryan (D-OH) pulling out the big guns in his debate with professional charlatan JD Vance

Ukraine and its Western allies are still reeling from Monday’s Russian missile attacks, but many believe the shelling underscored Russia’s inherent weakness rather than strength. 
 

• Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky continued his appeals to G7 leaders for more air-defense capabilities, as the G7 vowed support for Kyiv for “as long as it takes.” NATO said it is closely monitoring Russia’s nuclear forces as missile strikes have continued. Air-raid sirens could be heard across Ukraine for a second day. Today Ukraine received the first of four IRIS-T air-defense systems which Germany had promised to supply. The Biden administration said that the U.S. will speed up its shipment of sophisticated air-defense systems to Ukraine, and has already supplied more than $16.8 billion worth of security aid since the war began. 
   

• Foreign-policy experts believe that Monday’s bombardment was “psychological and physical intimidation” but also an “act of desperation” from the Kremlin, whose troops are losing territory in the parts of eastern Ukraine that Russia already claims to have annexed. The Kremlin is seeking to overwhelm Ukrainian air defenses, a tactic “they have tried throughout the conflict, but never on this scale.” Michael Clarke, a war-studies scholar at King’s College, London, said that Monday’s attacks, however brutal, likely do not represent a turning point in the war, “because in a way, the Russians are already doing their worst.” He’s referring to mass graves and evidence of torture found in cities and towns recaptured after months of Russian occupation. Clarke believes this will only serve to harden the resolve of Ukrainians, who are still winning on the battlefield. 
   

• The missile and drone strikes Russia unleashed this week were deadly and wide-ranging, but according to analysts, not as devastating as they could have been, raising new questions about the quality of Russia’s military arsenal and the capacity of its forces. One expert said it could be a sign that Russia’s guided missiles are not very effective, or that the country is running short on precision munitions. Most of Russia’s attacks thus far—increasingly aimed at civilians—have been long-range missile strikes that used outdated, unguided, and imprecise weapons, including some from the Soviet era. Embarrassing! So last-season!

The Kremlin is trying to psychologically break Ukrainian civilians and its leadership, but neither show signs of cracking.
 

• Meanwhile, president Biden has held hours of calls in recent months with India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi, South African President Cyril Ramaphosa, and other forieign leaders who have wavered over backing the Western coalition in support of Ukraine. He urged these leaders to stand firm against Putin, and was pleasantly surprised when Modi did just that at a summit last month. Biden is desperately trying to hold together the global and domestic coalition supporting Ukraine, a significant challenge since the war began back in February. 
   

• A major test of these efforts will occur tomorrow when the United Nations votes on a draft resolution condemning Russia’s annexation of four regions of Ukraine. Biden and U.S. officials have been working tirelessly in an effort to convince nonaligned countries in Latin America, Asia, and Africa to refrain from taking a neutral position and instead condemn the Kremlin. This effort might well be aided by yesterday’s barrage of missile attacks on civilians. The hope is that at least 100 of the 193 United Nations member states will support the draft resolution (the same number that supported the 2014 resolution condemning Russia’s annexation of Crimea). 

At home, president Biden faces the unenviable task of remaining steadfast in support for Ukraine without over-promising and in turn losing support from the war-fatigued American people, while simultaneously trying to keep the international coalition of Ukraine-supporting allies together abroad. I’ll be honest: being president seems pretty hard!

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The Iranian journalist Niloofar Hamedi, who broke the news about the death of 22 year-old Mahsa Amini with a picture of her parents hugging each other in a Tehran hospital where Amini lay in a coma, has quickly become a state target of her own. Hamedi was able to tell hard-hitting stories for years, specializing in women’s rights, but the consequences for her tweeting that photo of Mahsa Amini’s parents on September 16 were swift. She was arrested days later and her Twitter account was suspended. Hamedi’s lawyer Mohammad Ali Kamfirouzi tweeted that intelligence agents raided her home, arrested her, searched her house, and confiscated her belongings on September 22. She has not been charged and is being held in solitary confinement in Iran’s Evin prison, according to Kamfirouzi. According to the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) 28 journalists have been detained by Iranian security forces since the unrest began, including Hamedi. The CPJ has called on Iranian authorities to “immediately and unconditionally release… all journalists arrested because of their coverage of Mahsa Amini’s death,” and the subsequent protests.

Noted anti-abortion zealot and Georgia GOP Senate candidate Herschel Walker (who urged a former girlfriend to have multiple abortions and paid for one of them) is hitting the campaign trail with Sens. Rick Scott (R-FL) and Tom Cotton (R-AK), two more anti-abortion zealots who nevertheless support abortion when necessary to protect the convenience of the man involved (if he’s a Republican). 

A fired Vermont deputy sheriff, who is the only candidate on the November ballot to become sheriff, continues to insist he did nothing wrong when he was recorded on video kicking a handcuffed and shackled prisoner (the incident for which he was fired). 

South Korea’s military said that it’s capable of detecting and intercepting the kind of projectiles North Korea launched in a series of recent nuclear missile tests simulating attacks on its geopolitical rivals. 

New Zealand’s government proposed a tax on greenhouse gasses that farm animals make via their, well, gasses, as part of a plan to tackle climate change, immediately angering many New Zealand farmers. 

The Supreme Court declined to hear white supremacist Dylann Roof’s appeal to overturn his conviction and death sentence for fatally shooting nine Black people at a church in Charleston, SC in 2015. 

Voters in key battleground states like Arizona, Michigan, and Nevada will be deciding ballot proposals this November that could reshape voting rights and restrictions in the next presidential election. 

President Biden is re-evaluating the United States’ relationship with Saudi Arabia after OPEC+ announced a cut in oil production last week. No more fist bumps for you, Mohammed Bin Salman. 

The National Archives and Records Administration made a statement today rejecting disgraced former president Donald Trump’s claim that his predecessors retained “millions” of White House documents, noting that they took and retained possession of all records from George W. Bush, Bill Clinton, and George H.W. Bush. 

Israeli Prime Minister Yair Lapid announced today that the country has reached a “historic agreement” with neighboring Lebanon over their shared maritime border, the result of negotiations brokered by the United States.

Four Republicans interested in serving as House Budget Committee chairman in the next Congress have said in interviews that next year’s deadline to raise or suspend the debt ceiling is a point of leverage if their party can win control of the House in November. Essentially, they are actively planning to hold the country (and the global economy) hostage if they win, in the hopes of extracting concessions from Dems in the form of gutting Social Security and Medicare, tightening eligibility, imposing spending caps, stiffening social safety net work requirements, and more. This could create the kind of explosive standoff not seen since the Tea Party rolled into Congress in 2011 hellbent on hostage taking to sabotage good government. According to experts, it’s also possible that Republicans will demand legislation requiring a reduction in the debt-to-GDP ratio, which could put major social safety-net programs on the chopping block. Programs like Medicare and Social Security are extremely popular, and any hit to them would be politically perilous, but Republicans as we know are happy to enact unpopular policies when it pads the bank accounts of the richest people in the country. They also don’t care about the deficit when it comes to defense spending, or tax cuts for the wealthy, two of the biggest sources of U.S. debt. Funny how that works!

The Supreme Court has declined to hear arguments over whether fetuses are entitled to constitutional rights. In the June Dobbs decision Justice Samuel Alito said the Court took no position on fetal personhood. Maybe one day pregnant people will have personhood—wouldn’t that be crazy?

The Department of Labor proposed a rule today that would make it more difficult for companies (like Uber, Lyft, DoorDash, etc.) to treat workers as independent contractors, but rather as employees entitled to benefits. Whoever switched Biden’s decaf to caf, we appreciate you. 

Baltimore prosecutors dropped their case against 42 year-old Adnan Syed for the 1999 murder of his ex-girlfriend Hae Min Lee after new DNA testing conducted on the evidence excluded Syed. He had been in prison for the murder for 20 years before he was released after his conviction was overturned last month. 

A NASA spacecraft succeeded in shifting the orbit of a small, harmless asteroid millions of miles away, a promising result suggesting that a future deadly asteroid headed towards earth could be similarly thrown off course. Okay cool! Thanks for that!