“It Depends on Uncle Sam”

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Without more help from Washington, electric-vehicle sales will struggle to live up to the stock-market hype.

That Wall Street Journal lede pretty much tells the tale.

And this:

If the new technology is to live up to high investor expectations, the global record suggests that the US will need to embrace subsidies.

It depends on Uncle Sam. As long as electric vehicles get subsidies of any sort—either on the manufacturing end or to buyers of them on the other end—these battery cars can never be mainstream. As long as they’re getting any sort of subsidy, battery cars are tautologically unready for market.

Inadequate

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Co-President Joe Biden-Kamala Harris are having trouble getting much of their political and (pseudo-)economic agenda passed. (Aside: failure isn’t a done deal; it would behoove the pundits on the right side of center to stop their crowing and predictions of landslide Republican elections in November.)

That’s not a failure of the agenda or of Biden-Harris or of Party managers in the House and Senate, though.

Not at all, insisted Paul Begala.

I think the problem for the Democrats right now is not that they have bad leaders. They have bad followers, okay?

And

In other words, those of us who want to say voting rights– we need to get to work. I do think Biden is putting everything behind this. But he needs– he needs better followers….

This is an example of the contempt Progressive-Democrats have had for us Americans all along. Here is Herb Croly, one of the founders of the modern Progressive movement that has evolved the Democratic Party into its current form as the Progressive-Democratic Party:

But the fault in that case lies with the democratic tradition; and the erroneous and misleading tradition must yield before the march of a constructive national democracy. The national advance will always be impeded by these misleading and erroneous ideas, and, what is more, it always should be impeded by them, because at bottom ideas of this kind are merely an expression of the fact that the average American individual is morally and intellectually inadequate to a serious and consistent conception of his responsibilities as a democrat.

Written Response

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Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov repeated Russia’s demand for

a written response this week from the US and its allies to Moscow’s request for binding guarantees that NATO will not embrace Ukraine or any other ex-Soviet nations, or station its forces and weapons there.

I have a written response for him.

“Nuts.”

Irrationality

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The Harris half of Biden-Harris, Vice President Kamala Harris (D) has made an impressive claim. She said—and she was serious—that

legislators standing in the way of passing the Freedom to Vote Act and the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act are failing to uphold their oath to defend the Constitution.

She added

I’m not going to absolve—nor should any of us—absolve any member of the United States Senate from taking on a responsibility to follow through on the oath that they all took to support and defend the Constitution of the United States.

The Right Reverend Progressive-Democrat Kamala Harris presumes to withhold absolution.

That’s just Progressive-Democratic arrogance.

The Constitution—Art I, Section 4—assigns in clear, certain terms primary responsibility for determining [t]he Times, Places and Manner of holding Elections for Senators and Representatives to each State’s legislature. The changes to those Times, Places, and Manner that are demanded by Party’s Federal level Freedom to Vote Act and the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act require an Amendment to our Constitution, altering that Art I, Sect 4.

Senators upholding our Constitution when they stand[] in the way of passing those bills being castigated by Harris for not uphold[ing] their oath to defend the Constitution? That’s broad irrationality.

That’s what passes for Party’s politics.

Putin’s Coming Invasion

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USAF General and Supreme Allied Commander Europe (NATO) from 2013-2016 Philip Breedlove, along with “former officials and analysts,” have posited a scenario for a partial invasion of Ukraine by Russian President Vladimir Putin. The image below Breedlove’s supposition also is supplied by the WSJ. I’m disregarding Putin’s naval maneuvering in the Black Sea in this post.

The northern portion of Russian forces arrayed against Ukraine could easily drive due west through Belarus and arrive very close to Kyiv relatively unopposed. Ukraine’s best forces are tied down on the line of contact on the border of Donbas. So this northern thrust would bypass the most capable Ukrainian forces.
Such a thrust could be used by the Kremlin to put pressure on Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky’s government and attempt to force concessions or perhaps try to bring about its collapse, former officials and analysts said.
A separate group of Russian forces in the east, General Breedlove said, could push into Donbas to support the Russian garrison there and Russian-backed separatists.
Still a third group of Russian forces in Crimea and southwest Russia could seize terrain along the coast and encircle the port city of Mariupol to cut it off from the rest of Ukraine.

I think Breedlove understates the case. If Putin is going to take that northern route, he won’t stop with merely threatening the government in Kiev; he’ll take all of Ukraine—which is what he wants, anyway.

Beyond that, a thrust up from occupied Crimea won’t be used merely to isolate Mariupol; it will form the other side of the pincer to be used in seizing all of the nation. The attack into the Donbas will serve only to keep the bulk of the Ukrainian military occupied there.

If this is the invasion plan, look, too, for the attack into the Donbas to proceed for a couple of days before the attacks through Belarus and up from Crimea go in; Putin will be looking to get those best forces fully involved and their destruction well in progress first.

In the end, too, the whole invasion and conquering affair will take just four to six days—far too fast for Biden-Harris’ “we’ll sanction the hell out of you if you invade” nonsense even to begin to do anything. Fast enough, even, to be well inside Biden-Harris’ decision loop of beginning recognize the invasion in progress, then beginning to think about applying those “devastating sanctions.”