2022 mid-term elections

12/9/22 - Kyrsten Sinema switches from Democrat to independent 

12/7/22 - Warnock defeats Herschel Walker for Senate in Georgia runoff

12/3/22 - Georgia Lt. Governor thinks Herschel Walker will probably go down as one of the worst candidates in our party's history

11/30/22 - House Democrats elect Hakeem Jeffries as first Black party leader

11/22/22 - Black voters prefer Warnock to Walker 89% to 8%.

11/17/22 - Pelosi to step down as House leader

[11/15/22] The 2022 midterms elections proved to be disappointing for Republicans as Democrats were able to hold onto their Senate majority even amid President Biden's record-low approval ratings.

Typically, the party for a first-term president does not do well in midterm elections. Moreover, polling and other data indicated that Democrats were behind in key Senate races in Pennsylvania, Arizona, and Nevada. However, the party was able to win all of those races. Battleground state Georgia will go to a runoff election next month between Incumbent Democratic Sen. Raphael Warnock and Republican challenger Herschel Walker.

The losses in the Senate for the GOP have promoted in-fighting as some Republicans look to blame Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell and former President Donald Trump. In the House, Republicans may barely gain a majority, and GOP Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy recently won the party nomination for speaker of the House after defeating Arizona Rep. Andy Biggs.

As power struggles consume the GOP, Democrats are celebrating their historic win and are looking to pass key legislation before the 117th Congress ends in January. Current Senate Majority Chuck Schumer will likely hold his leadership position going into the new Congress.

This week, Schumer announced he plans to support a vote on the Respect for Marriage Act, which would codify same-sex marriage into federal law. The bill currently only needs ten Republican votes in the Senate.

"I want to be clear that passing this bill is not at all a theoretical exercise, but rather it is as real as it gets," Schumer said on the Senate floor Monday. A procedural vote is set to occur on Wednesday, and Democrats believe they have enough votes from across the aisle to reach the 60 vote threshold to avoid a filibuster. 

The group of bipartisan senators looking to codify same-sex marriage include Democratic Senators Tammy Baldwin of Wisconsin, Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona, and Republican Senators Thom Tillis of North Carolina, Susan Collins of Maine, and Rob Portman of Ohio.

We’ve crafted commonsense language that respects religious liberty and Americans’ diverse beliefs while upholding our view that marriage embodies the highest ideals of love, devotion, and family," said the bipartisan Senate group in a joint statement on Monday. 

Even if the vote fails, which would be unlikely, Democrats would likely still have enough votes to move past the filibuster. The rush to codify same-sex marriage by Democrats before the new Congress convenes comes on the heels of the Supreme Court overturning Roe v. Wade.

The Senate win for Democrats also has other benefits for the Biden administration for the next two years. The party will be able to confirm the president's judicial nominees as well as vote against bills passed by a likely Republican House and uphold Biden's legislative agenda.

what's up with Tulsi?

[11/15/22] Tulsi Gabbard to join Fox News as a contributor

[2/21/22] Tulsi Gabbard to speak at CPAC

[3/13/20] Cataluna on Gabbard

[3/8/20] Why Tulsi is continuing her campaign

[1/22/20] Tulsi sues Hillary for $50 million (at least)

[11/11/19] Tulsi demands Hillary publicly retract her comments

[10/25/19] Tulsi won't seek re-election to Congress in 2020

[10/21/19] Trump claims Gabbard NOT a Russian agent

[10/20/19] Gabbard runaway debate winner

[10/20/19] Hillary suggests Russians are grooming Tulsi as a third-party candidate

[10/19/19]  WEST BRANCH, Iowa (AP) — Hillary Clinton’s suggestion this past week that Hawaii Rep. Tulsi Gabbard is being “groomed” by Russians to act as a spoiler in the 2020 race may have had the opposite effect of what the 2016 Democratic presidential nominee intended: It’s elevated Gabbard’s candidacy and may have inspired even more ardent interest in her campaign among Clinton critics.

On Saturday, Gabbard found fans among the many Clinton skeptics across Iowa, where Clinton barely won the 2016 Democratic caucuses against Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders.

“What is this horrible thing that Hillary said about you?” one person asked Gabbard at a house party in West Branch.

Gabbard responded that “it revealed the truth that I have been experiencing for a long time now — which is that, because I have been trying to bring about an end to our country’s long-held foreign policy of waging one regime-change war after the next . I am labeled as a traitor.”

“This is a message that is being sent to every single American . who speaks out for peace,” she said.

[10/14/19] WASHINGTON — Stephen K. Bannon, President Trump’s former chief strategist, is impressed with her political talent. Richard B. Spencer, the white nationalist leader, says he could vote for her. Former Representative Ron Paul praises her “libertarian instincts,” while Franklin Graham, the influential evangelist, finds her “refreshing.”

And far-right conspiracy theorists like Mike Cernovich see a certain MAGA sais quoi.

“She’s got a good energy, a good vibe. You feel like this is just a serious person,” Mr. Cernovich said. “She seems very Trumpian.”

Among her fellow Democrats, Representative Tulsi Gabbard has struggled to make headway as a presidential candidate, barely cracking the 2 percent mark in the polls needed to qualify for Tuesday night’s debate. She is now injecting a bit of chaos into her own party’s primary race, threatening to boycott that debate to protest what she sees as a “rigging” of the 2020 election. That’s left some Democrats wondering what, exactly, she is up to in the race, while others worry about supportive signs from online bot activity and the Russian news media.

Perhaps strangest of all is the unusual array of Americans who cannot seem to get enough of her.

On podcasts and online videos, in interviews and Twitter feeds, alt-right internet stars, white nationalists, libertarian activists and some of the biggest boosters of Mr. Trump heap praise on Ms. Gabbard. They like the Hawaiian congresswoman’s isolationist foreign policy views. They like her support for drug decriminalization. They like what she sees as censorship by big technology platforms.

Then there is 4chan, the notoriously toxic online message board, where some right-wing trolls and anti-Semites fawn over Ms. Gabbard, calling her “Mommy” and praising her willingness to criticize Israel. In April, the Daily Stormer, a neo-Nazi website, took credit for Ms. Gabbard’s qualification for the first two Democratic primary debates.

Brian Levin, the head of the Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism at California State University-San Bernardino, said Ms. Gabbard had “the seal of approval” within white nationalist circles. “If people have that isolationist worldview, there is one candidate that could best express them on each side: Gabbard on the Democratic side and Trump on the Republican side,” Mr. Levin said.

Ms. Gabbard has disavowed some of her most hateful supporters, castigating the news media for giving “any oxygen at all” to the endorsement she won from the white nationalist leader David Duke. But her frequent appearances on Tucker Carlson’s Fox News show have buoyed her support in right-wing circles.

Both Ms. Gabbard and her campaign refused requests for comment about her support in right-wing circles or threat to boycott the debate. Even some political strategists who have worked with her are at a loss to explain her approach to politics.

“She’s a very talented person but I’m not sure, I just don’t know what to say about the campaign exactly,” said Mark Longabaugh, a Democratic strategist who worked with Ms. Gabbard when she was campaigning for Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont in 2016.

There is potential upside for Ms. Gabbard: Drawing more attention could energize her donors and perhaps attract more supporters, extending her candidacy’s life span.

Yet there is only confusion for several Democratic officials, activists and party officials, who privately say they have been a little spooked by Ms. Gabbard. Rival campaigns worry about her unpredictable attacks if she participates in the debate, pointing to her sharp jabs against Senator Kamala Harris of California in an earlier matchup.

“She’s taken a series of policy steps which signal to the right that she has deep areas of alignment,” said Neera Tanden, a longtime policy adviser to Hillary Clinton who now leads the Center for American Progress, a liberal think tank.

The questions deepened on Thursday after Ms. Gabbard threatened to boycott Tuesday’s debate, arguing that the corporate news media and the Democratic National Committee are working together to rig the event. (The New York Times is a co-sponsor of the debate with CNN.)

That message resonates with many of Ms. Gabbard’s supporters. In a moment marked by fractured politics, Ms. Gabbard’s nontraditional positions are a major part of her appeal for voters seeking to break out of polarized partisan divisions. Joe Rogan, the popular podcast host, said he planned to vote for her. Jack Dorsey, the chief executive of Twitter, donated to her campaign.

But it’s also an argument that reminds some Democrats of the narrative pushed by Russian actors during the 2016 presidential contest, when an operation by internet trolls worked to manipulate American public opinion: that the electoral system is broken and cannot be trusted.

Some of those who have worked with Ms. Gabbard say that, as an Iraq war veteran whose chief message is that America should stop trying to police the world, she is representing viewpoints that draw support from an array of people in the United States as well as abroad.

“In reality, Tulsi is really running on an antiwar message that’s consistent with where a lot of veterans are,” said Jon Soltz, chairman of the liberal veterans organization VoteVets.org, which worked closely with Ms. Gabbard during her first congressional campaign. “I know everyone thinks there’s a conspiracy theory here but that’s really what she’s doing.”

Still, Democrats are on high alert about foreign interference in the next election and the D.N.C. is well aware of the frequent mentions of Ms. Gabbard in the Russian state news media.

An independent analysis of the Russian news media found that RT, the Kremlin-backed news agency, mentioned Ms. Gabbard frequently for a candidate polling in single digits, according to data collected by the Alliance for Securing Democracy, a group that seeks to track and expose efforts by authoritarian regimes to undermine democratic elections.

Disinformation experts have also pointed to instances of suspicious activity surrounding Ms. Gabbard’s campaign — in particular, a Twitter hashtag, #KamalaHarrisDestroyed, that trended among Ms. Gabbard’s supporters after the first Democratic debate, and appeared to be amplified by a coordinated network of bot-like accounts — but there is no evidence of coordination between these networks and the campaign itself.

Laura Rosenberger, a former policy aide to Mrs. Clinton’s campaign and director of the Alliance, sees Ms. Gabbard as a potentially useful vector for Russian efforts to sow division within the Democratic Party.

“The Russian activity could be part of a longer-term effort to drive a wedge among Democrats,” she said. “This messaging has echoes of 2016.”

That kind of speculation inflames Ms. Gabbard’s supporters online, who are known for swarming Ms. Gabbard’s critics on Twitter, for attacking the news media and the Democratic establishment for perceived bias against her and for compiling YouTube clips of her “destroying” and “shutting down” her Democratic rivals.

Ms. Gabbard’s fans are especially sensitive to claims that she is supported by Russian bots and amplified by the Russian state-funded news media outlets — a conspiracy theory, they say, that is designed to delegitimize her campaign and her foreign policy views.

“This whole thing the Democratic Party has done by putting forward this false idea that there was collusion between Russia and Trump has hurt our relations in a huge way with the Russians,” Mr. Graham said. “I can’t speak for Tulsi, but I think she feels kind of the same way on some of these things.”

While Democrats in Washington fret about Ms. Gabbard, her primary rivals have largely stayed silent, seeing little advantage in attacking a low-polling candidate.

She is likely to get harsher treatment back in Hawaii, where a cottage industry of researchers, former opponents and Democratic strategists has sprung up to track her connections and background and ties to the teachings of the guru Chris Butler, who founded The Science of Identity Foundation, and whose work she said still guides her. Ms. Gabbard has said the focus on her relationship with Mr. Butler and her faith was fueled by anti-Hindu bigotry.

She already faces a serious primary challenge for her House seat from State Senator Kai Kahele, a Democrat. Though his campaign is focused on economic issues, he sees Ms. Gabbard’s support from extremists as a potential liability.

“Clearly there’s something about her and her policies that attracts and appeals to these type of people who are white nationalists, anti-Semites and Holocaust deniers,” Mr. Kahele said. “To her credit she has denounced David Duke, rejected these endorsements. But it does beg the question why.”

Ms. Gabbard, once a Democratic darling as a telegenic newcomer and the first Hindu member of Congress, began falling out of party favor during the Obama administration, when she picked a series of fights over foreign policy, joining Republicans in demanding that President Barack Obama use the term “radical Islam.”

In 2016, she resigned her position as vice chair of the D.N.C. to endorse Mr. Sanders over Mrs. Clinton.

While Ms. Gabbard has opposed recent military interventions in the Middle East, she has developed relationships with leaders known for their authoritarian tendencies. She touts her support for Prime Minister Narendra Modi of India, who has empowered Hindu fundamentalists at great cost to India’s minorities. Ms. Gabbard also met with Egypt’s strongman leader, Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, during a 2015 trip to Paris with Dana Rohrabacher, a former Republican congressman known for his ties to Russians.

Most controversially, she has repeatedly defended the brutal Syrian dictator, Bashar al-Assad, whom she met in January 2017.

Those positions confound even some of her former Republican supporters.

Rabbi Shmuley Boteach, a pro-Israel activist who founded the World Values Network, said he first met Ms. Gabbard through Senator Cory Booker of New Jersey, who brought the congresswoman to dinner at a kosher restaurant in Washington.

His group, which is funded by the Republican megadonors Sheldon and Miriam Adelson, awarded Ms. Gabbard their “Champion of Freedom Award” at their annual gala in 2016. A picture from the event shows a grinning Ms. Gabbard posing with Rabbi Boteach and Ms. Adelson.

In the three years since, Ms. Gabbard has criticized Israel for its reaction to protests, met with Mr. Assad and made several statements defending his regime.

“To have a moral woman like Tulsi who is a military hero suddenly sit with a man who did that was inexplicable,” Rabbi Boteach said. “I don’t understand it until today. I can’t figure her out.”

Bolsonaro defeated by Lula in runoff

Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, the leftist Workers’ Party leader, narrowly edged out far-right populist incumbent Jair Bolsonaro to win a fiercely fought runoff election for the Brazilian presidency on Sunday.

Da Silva, the 77-year-old known as Lula, swung 50.8 percent of the vote with Bolsonaro breathing down his neck at 49.2 percent, according to the country’s electoral authority, which announced 98.8 percent of votes had been counted.

Bolsonaro led the race for much of the day, but as Lula overtook him with around 70 percent of the vote tallied, car horns began to sound on the streets of downtown São Paulo, according to the Associated Press.

“Our dream is coming true. We need to be free,” an elated 62-year-old man celebrating on São Paulo’s Paulista Avenue told a reporter for The Guardian. “Brazil was in a very dangerous place and now we are getting back our freedom. The last four years have been horrible.”

The Queer Brazilian Filmmaker Taking on Jair Bolsonaro

Lula has stoked his legend as a working-class hero, having risen from shining shoes as a boy to become a union leader, and eventually Brazil’s president in 2003. He served two terms, leaving office in 2010. A corruption scandal yanked him abruptly out of political life, landing him in prison on a nine-and-a-half-year sentence in 2018. He spent 580 days in jail, much of it in isolation, before being freed the next November.

His conviction was nullified last year by Brazil’s Supreme Court, though he was never declared innocent of his money laundering and corruption charges.

Lula’s incarceration kept him from running in the 2018 presidential election, clearing the way for Bolsonaro’s ascendance. The populist firebrand, now 67, touted conservative Christian values during his term. A professed fanboy of former U.S. President Donald Trump, Bolsonaro was widely criticized for his handling of the COVID-19 pandemic, with some calling his response one of the worst in the world.

Last October, a Brazilian congressional panel recommended Bolsonaro be charged with “crimes against humanity” for his alleged deliberate stoking of the pandemic, intentionally inflaming infection numbers in a desperate bid to achieve herd immunity and revive a flailing economy.

In this year’s knock-down, drag-out campaign, Lula cast himself as the savior of Brazil’s democracy, promising to return its population of 214 million to a more prosperous time.

Inside the Bromance Between the ‘Trump of the Tropics’ and the Original

“I’m expecting our victory, for the good of Brazil,” Bolsonaro told reporters on Sunday morning as he cast his vote at a Rio de Janeiro military complex.

His defeat makes him the first Brazilian president since the end of the nation’s military dictatorship in 1985 to be voted out of office. Every president who tried for a second term before him—Fernando Henrique Cardoso, Lula himself, and Dilma Rousseff—won a second term.

“Today we are choosing the kind of Brazil we want, how we want our society to organize. People will decide what kind of life they want,” Lula told reporters from Sao Bernardo do Campo on Sunday morning. “That’s why this is the most important day of my life. I am convinced that Brazilians will vote for a plan under which democracy wins.”

Lula will be sworn in in January.

Shinzo Abe assissinated

Former Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe died after being shot on the street in the city of Nara on Friday — a shocking act of violence in a country with one of the world's lowest rates of gun crime. A 41-year-old man was arrested by police, who said he admitted to shooting Abe.

The widow of the assassinated former leader was seen in the car leaving the Nara Medical University Hospital in Nara prefecture on Saturday morning. Akie Abe is traveling with her husband’s body back to Tokyo, where the family resides, according to public broadcaster, NHK.

Here's what you need to know:

The shooting: Abe was shot at about 11:30 a.m. local time Friday in Nara, east of Osaka, as he gave an election campaign speech on the street. Video aired by public broadcaster NHK captured the moments before the shooting, showing Abe speaking to a small crowd in front of Yamatosaidaiji railway station. In subsequent videos, two shots can be heard and smoke can be seen in the air.

Rushed to the hospital: Abe was rushed to hospital via helicopter at 12:20 p.m. local time. He went into cardiopulmonary arrest — a term used to describe the sudden loss of heart function and breathing — at the site of the shooting and arrived at hospital in a state of cardiac arrest, according to doctors at Nara Medical University. During surgery, doctors discovered a gunshot wound to his neck and a large wound on his heart.

Confirmed dead: Abe died from excessive bleeding and was pronounced dead at 5:03 p.m. local time, doctors at the Nara Medical University hospital said. The doctors said the bullet that killed the former Japanese leader was "deep enough to reach his heart" and a team of 20 medical professionals were unable to stop the bleeding.

The suspect: Police arrested unemployed man Tetsuya Yamagami, 41, who admitted to shooting Abe. According to police, Yamagami said he holds hatred toward a certain group, which he thought Abe was linked to. He used a homemade gun in the shooting, and authorities confiscated several handmade pistol-like items from his apartment, police said. Yamagami is being investigated as a suspect in a murder case, to which 90 investigators have been assigned, the police added.

World leaders horrified: Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida paid his "deepest condolences" to former leader Abe, saying he "was a personal friend, with whom (he) spent a lot of time." Kishida said he had a "great respect for the legacy (Abe) left behind" and would continue election campaigning on Saturday, adding a free and fair election must be defended at all costs. News of the shooting and Abe's subsequent death horrified leaders around the world, many of whom had worked with Abe during his long tenure. US President Joe Biden said he was "stunned, outraged, and deeply saddened," adding he had worked closely with Abe and his killing was "a tragedy for Japan and all who knew him."

Shootings are extremely rare in Japan because of strict gun ownership laws: In 2018, Japan, a country of 125 million people, only reported nine deaths from firearms — compared with 39,740 that year in the United States. Under Japan's firearms laws, the only guns permitted for sale are shotguns and air rifles — handguns are outlawed. But getting them is a long and complicated process that requires strenuous effort — and lots of patience. The laws and the thorough process of background checks have kept the number of private gun owners in Japan extremely low.

Boris Johnson steps down

British Prime Minister Boris Johnson stepped down Thursday (July 7) amid multiple scandals and public pressure to do so, as well as other members of his cabinet having already resigned earlier this week.

“In the past few weeks, I have been trying to convince my colleagues it would be eccentric to change governments when we have achieved so much,” Johnson said during a speech outside No. 10 Downing St. via NBC News. “I regret not to be successful in those arguments and, of course, it’s painful not to be able to see through those projects myself.”

Johnson said he will remain prime minister until his successor is selected, which is expected to be a decision that is opposed by other members of Parliament.

Johnson is now the third consecutive British prime minister to resign prior to the completion of their term, following his predecessors Theresa May (2016-19) and David Cameron (2010-16).

The pattern of politics

For congressional Republicans, the election can’t come soon enough. In the modern era, it’s hard to think of a time when the party out of power had more things going its way. Harry Enten, CNN’s political data analyst, recently noted that going by the generic ballot, things haven’t looked this good for Republicans to pick up House seats in the midterms since 1938. Since 1980, the party of the president in power has lost an average of 22 seats in the midterms. Republicans only need nine to win the majority.

Of course, Republicans think this means they’re doing something right. But if recent history is any guide, you can be sure that once elected, Republicans will blow it.

For decades now, our national politics have been caught in a bizarre pattern. The party in power governs as if it were about to lose power, so it shoots the moon on big ambitious, base-pleasing gambits that annoy the center and make its own electoral defeat all the more likely. The other party then wins and comes in believing it has a broad mandate for similarly sweeping changes from the other ideological direction. This, in turn, leads it to being thrown out of power. The cycle repeats itself in a pas de deux of self-fulfilling prophecy.

One key to this dynamic is the delusion that the party-in-power’s unpopularity is synonymous with the opposing party’s popularity. But that’s an illusion, created in part by the two-party system. If you have a menu that only offers snails or tofu entrees, it doesn’t mean that diners love tofu every time they get tired of snails.

There’s a reason more Americans identify as independents (42%) than as Republicans (28%) or Democrats (28%), and why 60% of voters now want a new major party to provide an alternative.

Again, in a binary system, one side’s unpopularity creates a mirage of popularity for the other party when in reality voters are merely expressing a preference for the lesser of two evils. In 2020, a majority of Americans voted against Donald Trump, but that doesn’t necessarily mean they loved Joe Biden.

The Democrats are unpopular right now for reasons that have little to do with GOP popularity. Inflation in general and high energy prices, in particular, are a toxic drag on whichever party is in power. The Democrats’ misreading of Biden’s “mandate” — swinging for a new New Deal, for instance — wasn’t some GOP masterstroke. It was an unforced error of their own making, perfectly consistent with this trend in American politics.

As a result, Biden’s low approval ratings make it easy for Republicans to criticize and to run as symbols of discontent. This has given Republicans the misplaced confidence to indulge their worst base-pandering instincts on the assumption that their antics are why things look so good for them right now. They’re like Ferris Bueller running to the front of the parade, thinking everyone is turning out for them, not the parade. Of course, Bueller’s performance was harmless fun.

Meanwhile, the Texas GOP just voted to declare the 2020 election “illegitimate,” to rebuke Sen. John Cornyn for negotiating a sensible and popular gun policy reform, and other political asininities. In the wake of two horrific mass shootings and amidst justifiably heightened fears of political violence, Eric Greitens, Republican Senate candidate in Missouri, released a video in which he carries a gun and literally advocates for “hunting” GOP moderates. And, of course, the GOP’s collective reaction to the Jan. 6 House committee doesn’t exactly suggest they’re listening to anyone outside their echo chamber.

My favorite recent data point for the coming congressional clown show is an interview last week with Trump. Radio host Wayne Allyn Root suggested that Trump had endorsed Rep. Kevin McCarthy for House speaker if/when the Republicans take back the House. “No, I haven’t,” Trump replied. “No, I endorsed him in his race. But I haven’t endorsed anybody for speaker.” And then, at Root’s prompting, Trump left open the idea he should be speaker (the Constitution, some argue, allows a non-House member to hold the job).

Ignoring the preposterous proposition that Trump is the master of parliamentary procedure America needs, the larger point is that for all the Democrats’ well-deserved problems there’s no reason to believe that the country is poised for a new era of Republican control. That would require a GOP interested in governing for the long haul. And our parties don’t do that anymore.

-- Jonah Goldberg, Star Advertiser, 6/25/22 (among others)

Roe v. Wade

6/25/22 - Manchin and Collins played by Gorsuch and Kavanaugh

6/24/22 - Supreme Court overturns Roe v. Wade

6/3/22 - Susan Collins was conned to dooming Roe v. Wade says Rolling Stone

The Great Chinatown Fire

On New Year's Eve one hundred years ago, the first of a number of controlled fires were set in Chinatown as a way of defending Honolulu from bubonic plague, known in history as Black Death. Next to the Pearl Harbor attack, the outbreak of plague was the greatest public-safety disaster in Hawaiian history. The government was determined to do anything to save the city -- even burn it to the ground. Today we begin the first of a four-part series describing the events leading up to what became known as the Great Chinatown Fire.

- Star Advertiser, 1/24/00, 1/25/00, 1/31/00, 2/1/00

The one country that could stop Russia

With every passing day, the war in Ukraine becomes a bigger tragedy for the Ukrainian people but also a bigger threat to the future of Europe and the world at large. There is only one country that might have the power to stop it now, and it’s not the United States. It’s China.

If China announced that, rather than staying neutral, it was joining the economic boycott of Russia — or even just strongly condemning its unprovoked invasion of Ukraine and demanding that it withdraw — it might shake Vladimir Putin enough to stop this vicious war. At a minimum, it would give him pause, because he has no other significant ally aside from India in the world now.

Why would President Xi Jinping of China take such a stand, which would seemingly undermine his dream of seizing Taiwan the same way Putin is attempting to seize Ukraine? The short answer is that the past eight decades of relative peace among the great powers led to a rapidly globalizing world that has been the key to China’s rapid economic rise and the elevation out of poverty for some 800 million Chinese people since 1980. Peace has been very good for China. Its continued growth depends on China’s ability to export to and learn from that world of steadily integrating and modernizing free markets.

The whole Faustian bargain between the Chinese Communist Party and the Chinese citizenry — the C.C.P. gets to rule while the people get to be steadily better off economically — depends to a significant degree on the stability of the global economy and trading system.

To Chinese strategists caught up in old-think — that any war that weakens modern China’s two primary rivals, America and Russia, has to be a good thing — I would say the following: Every war brings with it innovations (new ways to fight, win and survive), and the war in Ukraine is no exception.

We have already seen three “weapons” deployed in ways we’ve never seen before or not seen in a long time, and China would be wise to study them all. Because if China doesn’t help stop Russia now, these weapons will either ultimately hammer Putin into submission — which means they might be used against China one day, should it seize Taiwan — or damage Russia so badly that the economic effects will radiate everywhere. These weapons might even prompt Putin to do the unthinkable with his nuclear arms, which could destabilize and even destroy the global foundations on which China’s future rests.

The most important innovation in this war is the use of the economic equivalent of a nuclear bomb, simultaneously deployed by a superpower and by superempowered people. The United States, along with the European Union and Britain, has imposed sanctions on Russia that are crippling its economy, critically threatening companies and shattering the savings of millions of Russians at an unprecedented speed and scope that bring to mind a nuclear blast.

Putin has now figured that out — and said so explicitly on Saturday: The U.S.- and E.U.-led sanctions are “akin to a declaration of war.” (Vladimir, you haven’t felt the half of it yet.)

Second, because the world is now so wired, superempowered individuals, companies and social activist groups can pile on their own sanctions and boycotts, without any government orders, amplifying the isolation and economic strangulation of Russia beyond what nation-states are likely to do. These new actors — a kind of global ad hoc pro-Ukraine-resistance-solidarity-movement — are collectively canceling Putin and Russia. Rarely, if ever, has a country this big and powerful been politically canceled and economically crippled so fast.

The third weapon is both new and old, and it’s a spiritual and emotional one: The West has rediscovered its voice. Faced with the raw, primitive onslaught by Russia against a flawed but aspiring democracy like Ukraine, the free world has been aroused. America and liberal societies in general can often look and act dumb and divided — until they aren’t. Ask Adolf Hitler.

These three weapons should be enough to get China’s attention. So let’s look closer at how they work in practice.

The Biden administration, in an effort to deter Putin, assembled a powerful package of deep and broad economic sanctions and warned the Russian leader that if he invaded Ukraine, he’d be betting his whole farm — the economic viability of his country and regime. Tragically, Putin bet the farm, and the results have been swift and merciless.

The Russian ruble-based stock market has been closed ever since Russia’s major financial institutions were either placed under sanctions or thrown off the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication (SWIFT) system, Barron’s reported, but “the dollar-denominated secondary listings of Russian companies in London are still trading. The destruction of market value is astonishing.” It added that shares in Sberbank, Russia’s largest bank, “have collapsed more than 99 percent since mid-February, when its stock traded at around $14.” Last Wednesday in London trading, Barron’s noted, “the shares bottomed out at 1 cent.”

On Thursday the rating agencies Fitch and Moody’s “downgraded Russia by six notches to ‘junk’ status, saying Western sanctions threw into doubt its ability to service debt and would weaken the economy,” Reuters reported.

Ever since Putin faced sanctions in 2014 for annexing Crimea and fomenting rebellion in eastern Ukraine, he has been amassing reserves of foreign currency and gold — some $630 billion worth — to try to insulate Russia from more global sanctions by giving his central bank all the ammo it needed to protect the value of the ruble. Or so he thought.

“It turns out that Russia’s foreign reserves strategy had a major flaw: About half of the money was held overseas in foreign banks — and now Russia can’t get to it” because of the sanctions, noted Fortune. So the ruble savings of many Russians are being ravaged.

Bloomberg quoted Marina Gretskaya, a 32-year-old Russian living in London who moved last year to work in communications. She kept a ruble savings account in an online Russian bank, Tinkoff. Two weeks ago, her assets there were worth $7,400. On Monday, the ruble plummeted more than 30 percent against the dollar. That evaporated more than $2,000 from her savings. “It’s a month’s salary,” she said. The same is almost certainly true for tens of millions of Russians — and it’s just starting.

Oh, and by the way, in this wired world, guess who owns a significant portion of Russia’s commercial airline fleet.

Not Russia.

Roughly two-thirds of Russia’s commercial airliners were made by Boeing (334 jets) or Airbus (304), Reuters reported. A significant portion of those are owned by Irish leasing companies. The Dublin-based AerCap, the world’s biggest airplane-leasing company, owns “152 aircraft across Russia and Ukraine valued at almost $2.4 billion,” The Irish Times reported. In addition, the Dublin-based companies SMBC Aviation Capital and Avolon own 48 aircraft between them that are leased to Russian airlines.

E.U. sanctions require those companies to repossess all those planes on lease to Russian airlines by the end of March. And Boeing and Airbus announced that they will no longer service or provide spare parts for any of these planes. On Saturday, Russia’s state airline, Aeroflot, said that it would suspend all international flights because of “additional circumstances that prevent the performance of flights.” Domestic flights are sure to follow.

Russia spans 11 time zones. If this persists, the grip of the Russian central government over the Russian landmass could begin to loosen. In the Russian Far East there are a lot of cities closer to Beijing than Moscow. Just saying …

Now add the sanctions, boycotts and pressure points coming from the superempowered nonstate actors. My favorite is Jack Sweeney, a 19-year-old University of Central Florida student who created a Twitter account — @RUOligarchJets, or Russian Oligarch Jets — that tracks the private jets of Russian billionaires close to Putin. “While the 19-year-old is hardly the only person to offer such services,” noted Bloomberg, what makes his account different is its “easy accessibility and the enticing window” it offers on the lives of Putin’s cronies.

The account garnered 53,000 followers in just a few days, and it now has almost 400,000; a single individual, Sweeney is making it more difficult for Putin’s pals to hide their often ill-gotten wealth.

This is the globalization of moral outrage: It goes from watching a short video online showing Russian soldiers firing on a Ukrainian nuclear energy facility to an employee posting that video on his or her Facebook page to a group of employees emailing their bosses or going on Slack — not to ask their C.E.O.s to do something but to tell them they have to do something or they will lose workers and customers.

It is happening in companies all over the world. Shortly after Putin invaded Ukraine, BP, on its own, said it was quitting its operations in Russia after working with an oil firm there for roughly 30 years. For Russia to lose the petroleum engineering talent of BP is a huge blow.

Russia and Russians are now being canceled from every direction — from ballerinas to soccer teams to companies to orchestras — and it is being driven increasingly by superempowered individuals and small groups. And when the cancel juggernaut gets going globally, it acts without mercy. As The Times reported last week, “A day after organizers of the Paralympic Winter Games announced that they would allow Russian and Belarusian athletes to take part in the competition, the board made a stunning reversal and barred athletes from both countries on the eve of the opening ceremony.”

There are two big dangers, though, with these innovations. If the economic nuclear bomb that the United States and its allies just detonated in Russia crushes its economy as quickly and deeply as I suspect it will, there is a danger, however remote, that Putin will go to greater, even unthinkable extremes, like launching a real nuclear weapon.

The second danger — and China, in particular, should keep this in mind — is that while nation-states may choose to lift their sanctions at some point for hard-core realpolitik reasons, the nonstate actors may not. These are highly decentralized organizations.

When Anonymous, the global hacker consortium, announced that it was attempting to take down Russian websites, that was not by government order; it just acted on its own. Who does Russia call to get Anonymous to accept a cease-fire?

Putin was a total ignoramus about the world he was living in, and so he bet the farm in the 21st-century casino of globalization, where, in the end, the house always wins — or there is no house left.

There are signs that China recognizes some of these new realities — that no country is too big to be canceled in the wired world. But its initial instinct seems to be to try to insulate itself from that reality, rather than step up to help reverse Putin’s aggression. To which I say: Good luck with that. China cannot be connected and disconnected at the same time.

So I hope not only that China’s leaders don’t bet their farm on a quick grab of Taiwan. I hope Beijing joins instead with the West and so much of the rest of the world in opposing Putin. China would emerge as a true global leader if it did that. If it chooses instead to ride with the outlaws, the world will be less stable and less prosperous for as far as the eye can see — especially China.

What will it be, Xi?

-- Thomas Friedman, New York Times, 3/6/22

Ukraine-Russia scenarios (Thomas Friedman)

The battle for Ukraine unfolding before our eyes has the potential to be the most transformational event in Europe since World War II and the most dangerous confrontation for the world since the Cuban missile crisis. I see three possible scenarios for how this story ends. I call them “the full-blown disaster,” “the dirty compromise” and “salvation.”

The disaster scenario is now underway: Unless Vladimir Putin has a change of heart or can be deterred by the West, he appears willing to kill as many people as necessary and destroy as much of Ukraine’s infrastructure as necessary to erase Ukraine as a free independent state and culture and wipe out its leadership. This scenario could lead to war crimes the scale of which has not been seen in Europe since the Nazis.

The wired, globalized world has never had to deal with a leader accused of this level of war crimes whose country has a landmass spanning 11 time zones, is one of the world’s largest oil and gas providers and possesses the biggest arsenal of nuclear warheads of any nation.

Every day that Putin refuses to stop we get closer to the gates of hell. With each TikTok video and cellphone shot showing Putin’s brutality, it will be harder and harder for the world to look away. But to intervene risks igniting the first war in the heart of Europe involving nuclear weapons. And to let Putin reduce Kyiv to rubble, with thousands of dead — the way he conquered Aleppo and Grozny — would allow him to create a European Afghanistan, spilling out refugees and chaos.

Putin doesn’t have the ability to install a puppet leader in Ukraine and just leave him there: A puppet would face a permanent insurrection. So, Russia needs to permanently station tens of thousands of troops in Ukraine to control it — and Ukrainians will be shooting at them every day.

I wish Putin was just motivated by a desire to keep Ukraine out of NATO; his appetite has grown far beyond that. Putin is in the grip of magical thinking: As Fiona Hill, one of America’s premier Russia experts, said in an interview published Monday by Politico, he believes that there is something called “Russky Mir,” or a “Russian World”; that Ukrainians and Russians are “one people”; and that it is his mission to engineer “regathering all the Russian-speakers in different places that belonged at some point to the Russian tsardom.”

To realize that vision, Putin believes that it is his right and duty to challenge what Hill calls “a rules-based system in which the things that countries want are not taken by force.” And if the U.S. and its allies attempt to get in Putin’s way — or try to humiliate him the way they did Russia at the end of the Cold War — he is signaling that he is ready to out-crazy us. Or, as Putin warned the other day before putting his nuclear force on high alert, anyone who gets in his way should be ready to face “consequences they have never seen” before. Add to this the mounting reports questioning Putin’s state of mind and you have a terrifying cocktail.

The second scenario is that somehow the Ukrainian military and people are able to hold out long enough against the Russian blitzkrieg, and that the economic sanctions start deeply wounding Putin’s economy, so that both sides feel compelled to accept a dirty compromise. Its rough contours would be that in return for a cease-fire and the withdrawal of Russian troops, Ukraine’s eastern enclaves now under de facto Russian control would be formally ceded to Russia, while Ukraine would explicitly vow never to join NATO. Meanwhile, the U.S. and its allies would agree to lift all recently imposed economic sanctions on Russia.

This scenario remains unlikely because it would require Putin to basically admit that he was unable to achieve his vision of reabsorbing Ukraine into the Russian motherland, after paying a huge price in terms of his economy and the deaths of Russian soldiers. Moreover, Ukraine would have to formally cede part of its territory and accept that it was going to be a permanent no man’s land between Russia and the rest of Europe. It would also require everyone to ignore the lesson already learned: Putin can’t be trusted to leave Ukraine alone.

Finally, the least likely scenario but the one that could have the best outcome is that the Russian people demonstrate as much bravery and commitment to their own freedom as the Ukrainian people have shown to theirs, and deliver salvation by ousting Putin from office. Many Russians must be starting to worry that as long as Putin is their present and future leader, they have no future. Thousands are taking to the streets to protest Putin’s insane war. They’re doing this at the risk of their own safety. And though too soon to tell, their pushback does make you wonder if the so-called fear barrier is being broken, and if a mass movement could eventually end Putin’s reign.

Even for Russians staying quiet, life is suddenly being disrupted in ways small and large. And then there is the new “Putin tax” that every Russian will have to pay indefinitely for the pleasure of having him as their president. I am talking about the effects of the mounting sanctions being imposed on Russia by the civilized world.

On Monday, the Russian central bank had to keep the Russian stock market closed to prevent a panicked meltdown and was forced to raise its benchmark interest rate in one day to 20% from 9.5% to encourage people to hold rubles. Even then the ruble nose-dived by about 30% against the dollar — it’s now worth less than 1 U.S. cent.

For all of these reasons I have to hope that at this very moment there are some very senior Russian intelligence and military officials, close to Putin, who are meeting in some closet in the Kremlin and saying out loud what they all must be thinking: Either Putin has lost a step as a strategist during his isolation in the pandemic or he is in deep denial over how badly he has miscalculated the strength of Ukrainians, America, its allies and global civil society at large. 

If Putin goes ahead and levels Ukraine’s biggest cities and its capital, Kyiv, he and all of his cronies will never again see the London and New York apartments they bought with all their stolen riches. Instead, they will all be locked in a big prison called Russia — with the freedom to travel only to Syria, Crimea, Belarus, North Korea and China, maybe.

Either they collaborate to oust Putin or they will all share his isolation cell. The same for the larger Russian public. I realize that this last scenario is the most unlikely of them all, but it is the one that holds the most promise of achieving the dream that we dreamed when the Berlin Wall fell in 1989 — a Europe whole and free, from the British Isles to Vladivostok.

— Thomas L. Friedman, New York Times, March 1, 2022

a history of corruption in Hawaii

Unethical and criminal behavior from people in positions of trust in most cases begins simply enough.

An elected official accepts a free lunch. A bookkeeper short on cash takes $100 with the intent of paying it back. Employees at the city’s Department of Permitting and Planning welcome malasadas from people trying to get their projects approved.

The justifications for violating the faith placed in them by constituents, local families, churches, community groups and businesses can vary.

They typically boil down to: Entitlement. Hubris. Feeling unappreciated and underpaid. Or, even more cynically: Everyone else does it.

Their betrayal and the price tag of their crimes escalates until they’re caught, criminal charges are filed, reputations are ruined and offenders end up in state jails or federal prisons.

Hawaii political polls 2022

2/6/22 - Josh Green has high approval ratings

2/6/22 - Only 16% have unfavorable opinion of Blangiardi