Recycling his cartoon from last March:
The WSJ editorialists cover the betrayal: Trump Issues an Ultimatum to Ukraine. (WSJ gifted link)
The Trump Administration is making another run at ending the war in Ukraine, and a lasting peace with honor would be a laudable achievement. But for three years the only peace on offer has been Ukraine’s surrender, and the latest American offer—really, an ultimatum—is merely another dressed-up version.
The 28-point plan that was mooted in the press but became public on Thursday includes a reduction in Ukraine’s military and a cap on its manpower at 600,000, from about 900,000 now. It isn’t clear if foreign peace-keeping troops would be allowed on Ukraine’s soil or if it could maintain long-range weapons.
The deal hands Mr. Putin all of the Donbas in the east. He’d pocket the territory he’s already seized there—and get the rest that Ukraine still holds despite nearly four years of Russian assaults.
Ukraine would forfeit its right to join a defensive Western alliance in NATO. Oh—and the U.S. and Ukraine would recognize Russian control of Crimea, which Mr. Putin took by force in 2014. Mr. Putin has made these demands since 2022 after his failed storming of Kyiv.
There are a couple ways this could not be a total disaster, as the WSJ points out: European leaders might "talk Trump off this plan". Or Putin might overestimate his ability to sway Trump, and try for a deal even Trump might balk at.
I'm disgusted and pessimistic. Sorry.
Also of note:
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Moral panics seldom produce good outcomes. David Harsanyi bucks the tide: Release of Epstein Files Sets a Horrible Precedent.
Former Harvard president Larry Summers has now lost virtually every professional association after a House committee released emails of his exchanges with child sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. There are around 20,000 pages of them. Many of the correspondences are embarrassing. There's going to be little, if any, sympathy for a well-known elite who's angered conservatives and progressives and befriends creeps. And perhaps Summers doesn't deserve any.
Even so, there isn't even a hint of illegality in those emails. There's nothing suggesting that Summers participated in any kind of impropriety or conspiracy. The only purpose of the release was to destroy Summers.
Congress is about to release the so-called Epstein files, a trove of documents that were amassed during criminal investigations into the sex offender who committed suicide in 2019. The contents are likely brimming with thousands of names of innocent people, many who have provided alibis or were never under any suspicion of sex trafficking or anything else. A significant portion of any criminal investigation consists of uncorroborated accusations that are floated by people on the periphery of the case, third-hand accounts, theories and rumors. This is why grand jury files are almost always sealed.
David notes that Democrats had every chance to play this game during the Biden Administration, but didn't. Why not? Silence.
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"I've got a fever, and the only prescription is …" Alas, nobody is finishing that sentence with "more cowbell". As Jim Geraghty notes: So Much for Turning Down the Temperature in American Politics.
The U.S. Uniform Code of Military Justice states, regarding lawful orders:
“Lawfulness. A general order or regulation is lawful unless it is contrary to the Constitution, the laws of the United States, or lawful superior orders or for some other reason is beyond the authority of the official issuing it. . . . An order requiring the performance of a military duty or act may be inferred to be lawful, and it is disobeyed at the peril of the subordinate. This inference does not apply to a patently illegal order, such as one that directs the commission of a crime. The lawfulness of an order is a question of law to be determined by the military judge.”
In other words, a military order does not become unlawful simply because it is controversial or unpopular. If you, a citizen outside the military, believe that one of President Trump’s orders to the military is unlawful, we have a whole separate branch of the government called the judiciary to determine if the order violates the law or Constitution.
For six Democrats in Congress, that just isn’t enough.
Jim looks at how one of the six (Jason Crow of Colorado) "got rather snippy" when a Fox News interviewer probed to discover just what laws Trump had asked the military to break. Or might, someday.
But then Jim observes: "We can always count on President Trump to take a bad situation and make it worse." And that's what happened.
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Realistically, though, what are the chances? Avik Roy says: Now Is the Moment to Deregulate Obamacare. Sample: (archive.today link)
Republicans have long struggled to articulate an alternative to Obamacare, single payer, and other left-oriented approaches to health reform. Republicans usually nibble around the edges, with small-ball ideas that message well, but don’t address America’s structural health-care flaws.
The biggest structural flaw of them all — the original sin of America’s health-care system — is that we don’t purchase health insurance for ourselves, and instead depend on employers or the government to buy it for us. That policy — an unintentional byproduct of World War II wage controls — is the single biggest reason why American health care is the costliest in the world. Few of us have visibility into how much is being taken out of our paychecks to buy health insurance, and we have little incentive to shop for the lowest-cost, highest-value health-care products and services.
The only way off the train track to single-payer health care is to repair and rebuild the market for individually purchased private health insurance. Individually purchased health insurance — that is to say, insurance you buy for yourself independent of your employer or the government — is the sine qua non of free-market health reform. Health Savings Accounts are great, but if you get cancer, or get hit by a bus, or have a stroke, and end up with a $100,000 hospital bill, your HSA isn’t going to save you. You still need insurance for those big catastrophic bills.
Avik outlines a strategy for a package of reforms that might get 60 votes in the Senate. I don't know how plausible it is (health care is so easy to successfully demagogue), but I wish someone would try it.
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Jeffrey Blehar had me at "sordid". He provides The Sordid Olivia Nuzzi Saga, Explained. (archive.today link)
‘Bad things happen when you hear my name
Deny your attraction, but I’ve got no shame.”These are the opening lyrics of a song titled “Jailbait,” recorded by journalist Olivia Nuzzi back when she was a teenager and an aspiring MySpace pop idol, trading under the name of “Livvy.” The track is devoted to the singer’s attraction to older men with money, and, without knowing anything else, I’m inclined to believe Nuzzi wrote the words herself.
Readers, before I begin, I want to stipulate that I loathe every single person involved in the story I am about to discuss, some of them quite passionately, and all of them for slightly different reasons. That means this is going to be fairly vicious. But I feel required to register, at least in some unformed way, my intense disgust at every aspect of the entire Olivia Nuzzi story. Every last miserable goddamned part of it.
Appearing in Jeffrey's saga: RFKJr (of course). But also Mark Sanford, Anthony Weiner, … and "wrinkled old rage-prune" Keith Olbermann.
![[The Blogger]](/ps/images/barred.jpg)
