You have some good Ukr and defense comments but when you wade into "know it all" politics I just tune your posts out (btw: New York Democrats are gerrymandering the State's districts right now and at one time the Democrats had gerrymandered North Carolina for a 100 years....that is a by-product of the political process, right or wrong).
Please note that polls did not see Trump winning the first time.....it's possible it could happen again given the unique nature of America's electoral process. Biden is the weakest President in my 7 decades of living in the USA and that's what makes it possible. It is not good for America nor the World for Biden (nor Trump for that matter) to be re-elected and very few Democrats or Republicans wants Harris as President either.
Both parties are failing America through pathetically weak Presidential candidates.
Signed,
Not a Trump fan either.
Physically Biden may be the most frail president of my lifetime, but I think he's been the most effective. In the television age he's probably the weakest public speaker to become president. He also has a speech impediment (aphasia related to his childhood stutter) which people claim is dementia. Nobody said that when he talked the same way 40 years ago.
He is very poor at touting his accomplishments compared to his predecessor who routinely takes/took credit for things he never accomplished.
In his first two years he pushed through more substantial legislation and more total legislation in Congress since at least the Nixon era. In the last year the legislation signed into law has been the smallest number in that time span with 1/4 the total bills pushed through compared to the second least productive congress.
A small list of accomplishments
https://www.politico.com/news/magaz...-policy-things-you-might-have-missed-00139046
In the television era, being presentable on TV became a big part of getting elected. Kennedy figured this out when he debated Nixon in 1960. Nixon thought Kennedy was vain for getting make up put on before the debate, but Kennedy looked calm, cool, and collected on stage while Nixon looked shifty. Those who listened to the debate on the radio got a more favorable impression of Nixon.
Since then the two most winning qualities in a presidential candidate are being likeable and being interesting. When there is a likeableness gap, the more likeable candidate has always won the general election. When the likeableness is equal (or they are equally disliked), the more interesting candidate wins. Trump won in 2016 in large part because Hillary Clinton was both boring and disliked. He was disliked too, but he was more interesting.
I did say that it is possible that Trump (or another Republican if Trump is out of the running for some reason) could win. The US has always been split pretty close to the middle. Since states started picking their electoral college by popular vote (1820s-1860s), the popular vote has never been a blow out. The biggest win was 1964 when Johnson got 61% of the popular vote. Almost all presidential elections are 50 something to 40 something. Because of that every major party candidate always has a shot at winning, no matter what the year. Shift a few percent in the right places and you win.
The biggest hurdle Biden faces is much of the media casting Biden as an old doddering man who hasn't accomplished anything in 2+ years, when the reality is the opposite. And casting Trump as somehow equal when his record as president is terrible. Trump only got through one piece of substantial legislation in 4 years: a big tax cut that blew a hole in the national debt and the budget. This is despite having the trifecta of both houses of Congress and the White House his first two years.
The media is also focusing a lot of attention on Biden's somewhat frequent aphasia gaffs and calling it dementia while ignoring Trump's clear signs of cognitive decline. The decline could be due to stress rather than actual mental deterioration, but Trump is about the same age his father was when he started to show signs of Alzheimer's. Biden is only about 3 years older than Trump and does more to take care of himself.
Biden also faces some headwinds dealing with a no-win political situation with Israel. There are factions who vote for Democrats who don't think the administration is doing enough for their side in the conflict.
There are no guarantees in elections. The Republicans could win this fall. The Democrats face a very steep challenge holding on to the Senate. The map is a nightmare for the Democrats defending 22 seats vs 12 for the Republicans. Five of those Democratic seats could flip.
Next year could see a Democratic House, Republican Senate, and Democratic White House.
And in New York there are accusations of gerrymandering by the Democrats, but the recently passed redistricting is much milder than it was originally thought it was going to be. The map in 2022 was set by a Republican coup at the last minute. They got a conservative upstate judge to approve a heavily gerrymandered map just before the deadline which forced that map to be used in 2022. Subsequent court cases got that map invalidated and a map that went through the proper channels has been approved. The new map does favor Democrats, but it should favor them even if drawn completely neutrally. Upstate NY is conservative, but sparsely populated. Where the population is concentrated is also very strongly Democratic.
Many Legionnaires are already fighting in Ukraine. On both sides.
There are foreign fighters fighting for Ukraine and I believe a few poor souls volunteered to fight for Russia, but I doubt there is much overlap in nationalities of these foreign fighters on both sides. Also anybody who was active military in a foreign country when the war started are out of that military before joining Ukraine's army. Some armies gave a sort of suspension of service to people who wanted to join the Ukrainian forces so they could return after serving.
This was how the American Volunteer Group for the Chinese air force was set up. The AVG was made up of American personnel who were released from their service in the US to serve for China, then incorporated back into the US forces when the US joined the war. The units of the AVG were incorporated directly into the US Army Air Forces, though some pilots opted to return to the Navy or Marines. The most famous being "Pappy" Boyington who led VMF-214 in the Solomons campaign.
Okay, I'll bite: when did NATO aid a non-European country? Shirley not the FLQ crisis in Quebec?
As mentioned Article 5 was invoked after 9/11 when the US was attacked. NATO has intervened in other places. The first was the former Yugoslavia when it became clear that the UN was not going to send peacekeepers. There was controversy at the time because it was a war started by NATO and NATO is a defensive alliance. It worked, but it does give Russia reason to fear NATO attacking them.
Another time was the operation to take out Qaddafi in Libya. A couple of NATO members wanted to get involved taking down Qaddafi. The US had to get involved because it was the only country in NATO with the command and control setup to run the operation.
The fact that the US is the only country capable of pulling together NATO forces into a cohesive command structure is something I'm sure the European NATO allies are very concerned about. They could eventually replace US Central Command with their own command, but they would have to rebuild Central Command from scratch.
It truly will be amazing if Putin and his propaganda machine pulls off of the sleight of hand being parroted here, that somehow funding NATO is a waste of US taxpayer money. No American foreign spending is without strings that advance our interests, likely to some inconvenience of many recipients desirous of such aid. We always attach strings - and that's to just the "free" direct foreign aid. NATO funding has strings out the wazoo in that it commits other dudes to fight and die for our interests - a lot of other dudes - but more fundamentally, it is blindingly obviously in our direct interests, unless one believes the post WW2 low-war, largely rules-based, largely America and Europe-led order is somehow against American interests.
This, really, is what Putin and his parrots and bots are trying to do: convince us that the world America excels in and (with NATO allies and diplomacy) keeps largely peaceful with a focus against wars of conquest, and for international diplomacy, commerce, and unprecedented cooperation since WWII ... is awful, and must be burnt down, and replaced with alternative they are demonstrating for us right now, in real time: dictatorship, massive lies, repeated military invasions (Ukraine ain't the first), publicly announced genocides ("Ukraine did not exist, Ukraine does not exist, Ukraine must not exist"), sham elections...
The US isn't giving military aid to other NATO members. It's selling equipment or giving surplus equipment to them sometimes. But the US doesn't fund NATO. The US funds its own military, which in turn would be part of a NATO effort in wartime.
Indeed. And now Sweden accession is all but a done deal -- and one expects that deal will get signed, sealed, and delivered mighty quick.
Baltic Sea NATO Lake - here we come.
Overland supply route from France/Germany industrial base to possible future Finnish front lines, avoiding Kaliningrad: here we come. Thank you Denmark and Sweden for some solid bridge engineering (
Øresund). May Russian fortifications in Kaliningrad rot unused on the vine until they fall into the sea.
As we shall soon learn to say, Välkommen Sverige!
(Welcome, Sweden!)
I posted a video about Kaliningrad about a month ago. It had some interesting information I wasn't aware of in it. Kaliningrad was once the USSR/Russia's biggest threat to NATO. They had a lot of short range ballistic missiles based there capable of carrying nuclear warheads. It allowed the Russians threaten to drop nuclear weapons on any European capital within minutes of launch.
It also allowed Russia to isolate the Baltic states in wartime if they wanted to. They had forces per-positioned to make trying to take back the Baltic states extremely costly. With Sweden and Finland neutral Russia would be able to supply Kaliningrad during wartime.
Finland and now Sweden joining NATO flips that. Kaliningrad is now as isolated as Malta was in the early part of WW II. The Royal Navy was able to keep Malta in the fight via a support campaign that saw many ships sunk. But that was one of the world's best navies with a very large force in the Mediterranean. German and Italian air power chipped away at the naval forces the RN deployed, but the bulk of German air power was in the USSR.
The Russian navy is much weaker than the RN and NATO's air power is much more potent. Kaliningrad would likely be isolated and choked off quickly in the event of war now.
Russia is pulling military assets out of Kaliningrad. Partially due to losses in Ukraine, but also it may be that they see it's hopeless to try and defend the outpost now.
There is also a movement among the people of Kaliningrad to leave Russia. What would happen to the enclave is a big question. Economically they would be better off being a part of another country. As a stand along country I think they would be smaller than Luxembourg. The citizens in Kaliningrad are almost all ethically Russian, but they probably have more experience with Europe than most Russians and they know that Europe is much better than Moscow claims.
kyivindependent.com
