Peace proposals for Ukraine

Was just talking with some buddies about the war in Ukraine. They said that the US Peace Council has advocated peace talks between Ukraine and Russia. I then looked at various peace advocates. Russian diplomat Lavrov says that Russia and Ukraine were close to a deal in April, but Zelenskyy agreed with the US and Britain that the deal should not move forward. Found a very interesting paragraph (press people call this the “nut graph,” the paragraph that sums up the most important point in the piece).

Russia has repeatedly rejected Ukrainian and Western demands that it withdraw completely from Ukraine as a condition for any negotiations. US President Joe Biden has indicated he would be willing to talk with Putin if the Russian leader demonstrated that he seriously wanted to end the invasion.

It’s very difficult to see how any negotiations can even begin with Ukraine ceding any territory to Russia. That’s not a permanent or lasting peace as the war would simply continue once Russia had rebuilt its currently devastated army.

Is the possibility of nuclear war increasing? Actually, it’s decreasing. China has made it quite clear to Russia that they won’t put up with Russia using nuclear weapons. India has said the same. The US has also stated that it would respond to a nuclear launch by Russia with non-nuclear weapons.

Update: So if I were in Putin's position and wanted peace with Ukraine, how would I begin? I'd probably agree, in principle, that Russia must leave the territory of Ukraine. Russia's doing the exact opposite,  

"I think you only have to look at Putin's own words in a recent conversation with President Erdoğan of Türkiye in which he says unless and until Ukraine accepts the new territorial realities, as he put it, there's nothing to negotiate. In other words, unless and until Ukraine acknowledges and accepts the fact that the territory that Russia has seized by force, it's not getting back, there's nothing to negotiate. That of course is in and of itself a nonstarter," [Secretary of State Antony Blinken] added.

Some rather silly stuff

 

Dinesh D’Souza says some pretty silly stuff here.

Key differences between Trump and Biden storage of classified docs: 1. Mar-a-Lago is secure b/c it’s under Secret Service protection; Biden’s think tank is not

We went over this when it was first discovered that Trump had numerous government documents that he wasn’t authorized to have in his possession and when Trump was visited by con artists and politically-embarrassing racists. The Secret Service is responsible for seeing to the personal safety of Trump and his family members, period. They are not there to take on the function of secretaries or staff members. They aren’t there to make Mar-a-Lago secure against anything but threats to the physical safety of the former president and his family members.

2. Biden Center is heavily subsidized with Chinese government money

Hard to see what the relevance of this talking point is.

3. Trump had the power to declassify; Biden did not

Declassification is a lengthy process that involves checking with the originating agency to see whether or not a document can be safely declassified. It involves crossing out classification markings. It involves going into databases to change the status of a document. None of that was done in the case of the document that were taken to Mar-a-Lago.

Also, Trump’s ability to legitimately review classified documents ended when his presidency ended. He hasn’t had a security clearance since his term ended.

Has Trump been careful with handling classified data? Actually, no. In 2019, there was a Iranian attempt to launch a satellite into space. The launch failed. A picture of the damaged launcher was shown to President Trump. He tweeted out the picture.

Some officials worried that Trump’s decision to release the image compromised a key U.S. spy capability, potentially giving Iran a leg up in concealing its nuclear and missile programs.

The rest of the piece makes it very clear that the intelligence community was very upset with Trump for releasing the classified image without getting the approval of the intelligence agencies.

Funny stuff

So this is kind of hilarious. In his first two Twitter Files, Elon Musk put out what he thought were two really dread, awful scandals. In the first, the Biden campaign asked Twitter if the company could take some posts down because they appeared to violate Twitter policies. Twitter agreed that they violated policy and took them down. Musk was absolutely flabbergasted that no one was impressed that two private entities agreed between themselves to, y’know, “violate the First Amendment.” But no such violation had occurred.

The second case was where the Arizona Secretary of State did the same thing. She pointed out to Twitter that some posts that her political opponent had put up violated Twitter policies. Twitter agreed and removed those posts. As there were no threats of any kind, simply a notification to Twitter, again, there was no story, no violation.

So I was commenting on a similar case, where lawyers weren’t quite sure that a First Amendment violation had occurred, but where they wanted to conduct a “fishing expedition” to make sure.

Gotta love it! The guy just pulls these “laws” or “rules” out of thin air and just defends them as though they’re actual rules!