In addition to the superb daily coverage here from Markos and Mark Sumner, this quick summary from Maria Drutska will get you up to speed on what’s happening in Ukraine with Russia’s collapse in Kharkiv Oblast:
Brief recap:Mid-July to late August, Ukraine systematically targeted russian supply lines around Kherson, Kharkiv, Crimea, Donbas & other areas. The 80km HIMARS range, and other undisclosed arms allowed clinical strikes. The AFU warned of an imminent Kherson counter offensive
…
6th cont: OSINT & commentators started talking about a small town called Kupiansk, which was the key to russian supply lines for Izyum, a city they’ve occupied for months. russians started to realise the level of crap they were in, and became desperate to reinforce
By the 7th, Balakliia was confirmed to be around Ukraine, huge advances in and around Kherson, & it was clear the russians were unable to reinforce in any way. Stories of 1000+ POWs, 600+ KIAs started coming out. Meanwhile, AFU opened up 2 axes to take Kupiyansk
By the 8th, reports of further progress had appeared on all fronts, and the AFU was rumoured to have taken Kupiyansk, though not confirmed.russians lost another 650+ KIA, and serious panic started to spread. Videos surfaced of russians reinforcing, but those were fake.
And then see:
Meanwhile:
‘The environment is upside down’: Why Dems are winning the culture wars
Changes in public opinion may have reversed the political landscape for the culture wars.
It’s already the consensus that abortion is going to be a good issue for Democrats in November.
What’s only now becoming clear — as Republicans scrub their campaign websites of prior positions on abortion and labor to turn the focus of the midterms back to President Joe Biden and the economy — is just how much the issue is altering the GOP’s standard playbook.
Black swan is defined as an unpredictable or unforeseen event, typically one with extreme consequences.
‘Something horribly failed.’ How did so many of America’s secrets end up at Mar-a-Lago?
“Something horribly failed… at Trump’s White House for him to have walked away with all these documents without somebody raising an alarm before he left,” said Larry Pfeiffer, a former high-ranking CIA officer in the George W. Bush administration and former senior director of the White House Situation Room in the Obama administration.
The process of getting records back for preservation when a president leaves office has been honed over decades. The power rests in the hands of the White House staff secretary, who is tasked with making sure the president has the information needed to be prepared for every conversation and decision he’ll have to make each day — and with the responsibility of getting the records back.
“The thing people may not realize is just how highly organized this process has become,” said Rep. Sean Patrick Maloney (D-N.Y.), who was staff secretary for the final months of President Clinton’s second term.
What horribly failed is that people willingly voted for Trump even knowing who he was and is.
David Rothkopf/Daily Beast:
We Need to Know Trump’s Motive For Taking Classified Documents
[Marco] Rubio, as vice chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, ought to know better than to so willingly transform himself into a political parrot, demonstrating such little regard for the vital interests of the United States. The documents found at Mar-a-Lago are highly classified because they would cause grave damage to our country—and potentially to individuals working on our behalf—should they fall into the wrong hands. Storing them in Trump’s desk, or a closet at a country club that is already known to be a favored stop for foreign spies, certainly raises the likelihood that could have happened.And that is to say nothing of the damage that could result had Trump—or anyone with access to the documents— shared them with the wrong people.
That is why it is vitally important that, contrary to the impulses of Judge Aileen Cannon, the last-minute Trump appointee whose ruling that the investigation be put on hold pending the appointment and review of a special master, is not only wrong-headed from a legal perspective as experts have argued, it is also profoundly dangerous.
To be honest, I’m expecting Trump to assert espionage privilege on those documents.
Max Boot/WaPo:
Putin is losing his ‘war of choice’ in Ukraine
Putin has been trying to use the threat of Russian energy cutoffs to persuade Europe to stop supporting Ukraine. A Kremlin spokesman just announced that Russia was shutting the Nord Stream 1 natural gas pipeline to Europe until Western sanctions are lifted. But the Europeans haven’t wavered. Rather, they have accelerated their efforts to end dependence on Russian energy. European gas storage facilities are nearly 80 percent filled already, well ahead of a November deadline, and the European Union is ramping up imports of liquefied natural gas, putting off plans to close nuclear plants, and reducing energy use.
Western sanctions haven’t led to an economic implosion in Russia or forced Putin to discontinue his invasion, but they are taking a toll that will only grow. Russia will be hard put to run its production lines, military and civilian, without Western semiconductors — and it has seen a 90 percent drop in chip imports. According to Bloomberg, an internal Russian government document warns of a much “longer and deeper recession” than officials admit in “their upbeat public pronouncements,” with the economy not returning to its prewar level until “the end of the decade or later.”
Ruby Cramer/WaPo:
When a man with a pistol shows up outside a congresswoman’s house
Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.) recounts the night an armed man shouted at her and her husband outside their Seattle home — and how threats of political violence haunt and alter the lives of elected officials.
“I am a freedom loving nonregistered libertarian who votes in every election no matter how big or small,” the man wrote in his email.
“You, Pramila, are an anti-American s—pit creating Marxist.”
“We are incompatible.”
The primary is Tuesday.
91 Texas state troopers responded to the Uvalde massacre. Their bosses have deflected scrutiny and blame.
The state police agency is tasked with helping all of Texas’ 254 counties respond to emergencies such as mass shootings, but it is particularly important in rural communities where smaller police departments lack the level of training and experience of larger metropolitan law enforcement agencies, experts say. That was the case in Uvalde, where the state agency’s 91 troopers at the scene dwarfed the school district’s five officers, the city police’s 25 emergency responders and the county’s 16 sheriff’s deputies.
The state police agency has been “totally intransparent in pointing out their own failures and inadequacies,” said Charles A. McClelland, who served as Houston police chief for six years before retiring in 2016. “I don’t know how the public, even in the state of Texas, would have confidence in the leadership of DPS after this.”