Better in their words…

Trump easily beats Haley in SC; Newsweek pours gas on Fani Willis story; dot-connecting AT&T outage to US aircraft carriers; Ukraine and election analysis; Bill Maher accidentally tanks Gavin; more.

Source: PAINFUL FLAREUP ☙ Sunday, February 25, 2024 ☙ C&C NEWS

WORLD NEWS AND COMMENTARY

📈 For anyone still questioning the Republican primary’s inevitable outcome, the AP ran a story last night headlined, “Trump wins South Carolina, easily beating Haley in her home state and closing in on GOP nomination.”

So. Get ready. The real campaign is starting soon.

📉 Newsweek — which seems to be greatly relishing the final flight of the Hinden-willis — ran another jocular article yesterday, piling on its earlier, Geraldo-centered, article. The newest one was encouragingly headlined, “Court could refer Fani Willis for prosecution after new evidence: Attorney.”

This time, Newsweek heavily quoted George Washington University law professor Jonathan Turley, who agrees with my assessment that the question of prosecutorial perjury has now totally eclipsed the prosecutor’s political persecution of the President. And I’m starting to wonder whether Judge MaCafee might even begin to see the Willis/Wade disqualification as some kind of lifeline, a way out, a perjury pipe down which he could flush the case — he would have no choice — neatly, and more importantly, uncontroversiallyresolving the entire case without inescapably earning the hatred of one half of the country or the other.

Turley suggested that Willis’s hyper-passionate denials that Wade had ever slept over would come back to haunt her. On the stand, when defense attorneys asked Willis whether Wade ever visited her condo, Willis erupted, frenziedly shouting, “So let’s be clear! ‘Cause you lied in this,” while waving around a handful of court papers. “It is a lie! It is a lie!”

I’m not sure I totally agree with Turley. I think Fani’s outburst-style answer was staged. Within the outlines of her angry answer, one can detect a Clintonesque deflection, an alternate reality where Fani will argue that she wasn’t answering the question about Wade, so she didn’t lie. Arguing that she was just equivocating about the unidentified court papers, which — the papers — were “a lie,” she could quibble she never even intended to say whether Wade was sleeping over.

If it comes to that, the tactic would probably fail. But it does give her future perjury lawyers an argument, and if Fani got a very friendly judge, he might find her answer too ambiguous to uphold a perjury conviction.

It was a recurring theme. There are other, similar tricksy examples in both Willis and Wade’s answers on the key questions. Which is one reason I think they were carefully prepared by some very slippery, high-level lawyers. Still, most people — like Turley — will skeptically view such thinly-sliced excuses, and there’s a decent chance a court would at least find that the pair of law-enforcement professionals “lacked candor,” which isn’t perjury but isn’t great, either.

I love Turley’s optimism (you know me), but perjury prosecutions are rare in First Class, so don’t get too excited about that. But Fani could soon be fighting to keep her bar license. The only thing we know for sure is this case is utterly unpredictable; we are completely off any known map. So, almost anything could happen.

🔥 This week’s massive, extended, nationwide AT&T network outage was officially and incredibly blamed on a software update, suggesting the vital carrier network has zero redundancy and a single point of failure somewhere, but whatever. Still, independent analysts largely ignored that excuse, as if government lying were so commonplace now it no longer even deserves mention. Either way, everyone but credulous corporate media seems to be referring to the outage as a cyber-attack or solar flare incident.

Certainly, no one, not even corporate media, seems to dispute that the pharmacy outages that happened at the exact same time were a cyber-attack:

I won’t comment on the pathetic software update story, except I will discuss the government lying. But as to the outage, after a couple days of additional thought, I lean more toward it being a cyber-attack than a solar flare. The short version of my reasoning is that only AT&T was affected. While other carriers did experience limited outages, those are easily explained by capacity-sharing agreements. So, for example, when some Verizon users lost signal Wednesday, it was probably because they were really using AT&T’s network.

As if some kind of sign in the heavens, the next day another mystery balloon appeared in the skies over the US. Yesterday, the military waved it off as a harmless hobbyist balloon. Nobody identified which hobbyist, or what company supposedly made the hobby balloon, or any useful details at all. But even more oddly, major media outlets reported conflicting stories about the balloon’s fate, all citing US military officials. One story variant said the balloon was shot down, the other strain said the balloon exited US airspace. For examples, a BBC headline on the left, CBS on the right:

But … why would the government lie? If it were a cyberattack, or an enemy balloon, why not just blast that all over the media, and angrily demand a U.N. investigation, embarrass the bad actor, inform the citizenry, and things like that?

Well, maybe because we are poking at bears all over the world. Maybe it’s our fault. Maybe the cyber attack was a counter attack. Biden spent the week in advance of the outage discussing how he planned to further sanction Russia, which he then did, two days after the outage, blaming it on a dead Russian — not even a dead Ukrainian! — who nobody ever heard of:

Not only that, about a week prior to the national outage, on Valentine’s Day, the U.S. ‘leaked’ its intent to send a historic number of aircraft carriers — half the fleet — to the Western Pacific, to support Taiwan. It might’ve been the highest concentration of U.S. Naval vessels since World War II.

Could the cyber-attack have been a Chinese response to the carrier fleet announcement?

I only ask that because three days before the AT&T outage, which was four days after the carrier announcement, for no particular reason, FBI Director Wray suddenly and unexpectedly announced we should prepare for a Chinese cyberattack:

And what do you know? We experienced an infrastructure attack three days later — the AT&T outage. Boy that Chris Wray is a smart fella. Then, the day after the AT&T outage, corporate media went wide with a “leaked” story about Chinese hacking that also exposed — burned — a Chinese hacking front group:

What a coincidence! Wray warning → outage → burned Chinese hackers. Or you could believe it was a software update that took longer than expected, like the AT&T system is running on Windows 95 or something.

Here’s the timeline that I can make out from open-source data. This is a nine-day period:

• A: Feb 14 — US leaks intent to send five of eleven carriers to the Pacific theater
• B: Feb 16 — Biden says he plans another Russian sanctions package
• C: Feb 18 — FBI warns of unprecedented Chinese Cyberattacks
• D: Feb 21 — AT&T and pharmacies attacked
• E: Feb 22 — Corporate media burns Chinese hackers
• F: Feb 23 — US announces giant new Russia sanctions package

As you can see, there’s a lot of murky geopolitics swirling around. Yesterday, the U.S. informally denied intending to send half our carriers to the Pacific, suggesting the original story was just a rumor.

In other words, it looks like we backed down after the AT&T outage.

I’ll spell out my working hypothesis. I think the Chinese are increasing both the scale and the frequency of attacks in response to what we are doing in the Pacific and in Ukraine. Chris Wray basically admitted as much on February 18th. The AT&T attack was the largest infrastructure attack to date — it was nationwide! — but it was not deadly. Nobody got hurt.

The cyber attack was kind of like the refinery sabotage: so far, nobody’s been badly hurt. The unspoken message is: that could change. Just keep it up.

Thanks to Joe Biden, we now find ourselves in a new and different type of war, a type of war that is playing out on many levels, a type of war that is playing out in various forms. But the common ingredient so far is political deniability. Not deniability between nation states — they probably intend for each other to know, that’s the whole point — but rather, deniability between each state and its own citizens.

In short, they wish to play at war unencumbered by criticism from citizens at home. That’s my working theory, at least. What do you think?

🔥 NATO’s unexpected defeat in Avdiivka, Ukraine, may have unexpectedly been the turning point in the war, if for no other reason than domestic U.S. politics. As you can imagine, now Russia’s occupied the key, strategic,fortified town, it is now supporting further Russian military gains heading west toward Kiev.

Which must be the reason why the New York Times ran this depressing headline yesterday, outside its paywall:

Even from a weakened position! Remember the old slogan, “not one inch!” You aren’t likely to hear that tired canard anytime soon. Indeed, the New York Times floated a Chinese trial balloon, which is now bobbing around somewhere over Utah (lightly edited):

Mr. Zelensky faces a stark choice: whether to keep every inch of sovereign Ukrainian territory, or find a way to secure an economically viable state, with a democratic future.  In private, some senior Biden administration officials say they have been trying to nudge Mr. Zelensky in that direction.

Zelensky faces a stark choice. The West has disappeared, right when he needed it most.

In other words, having done everything they could to improve Ukraine’s prospects for a negotiated settlement, the fall of Avdiivka bombed Ukraine’s negotiating leverage into smithereens. Before it can hope to return to an offense, Ukraine must endure a long, painful period of defending itself, stopping the Russian advance, retrenching, and then having to push Russia out of yet more occupied territory — which Ukraine failed to do in the lastcounteroffensive.

Turning the ship around could take a year or more. Ukraine doesn’t have anywhere near that much time.

Consider the battlefield from Team Biden’s point of view.  I refer, of course, to the political battlefield, here in the United States. Set Ukraine to the side for a moment. Joe Biden has several problems. He is facing a kinetic war in the Middle East that is not going well. U.S. soldiers have been killed in action. Just yesterday, the Houthis blew up a commercial fertilizer shipper, which is certain to trigger Joe’s liberal base. Check out this headline from yesterday’s Stars and Stripes:

A fertilizer spill! The article flatly described the missile attack as “an environmental disaster.” Imagine how the Earth feels about Biden being unable to protect it from crazy Houthi rebels, or whatever we’re calling them these days.

Imagine the pain Greta must feel.

Not just that, but Biden’s partisan base is 100% opposed to his support for Israel, and even some all-in democrat voters are starting to talk about stomaching four years of Trump just to punish the democrats for supporting Israel:

CLIP: MSNBC Michigan voter panel of democrats vow to vote against him (1:40).

Next, as discussed earlier in today’s post, Biden has a bright-red, painful political hemorrhoid growing in the Pacific near Taiwan, a dispute that is probably already causing destabilizing cyber attacks harming the faltering U.S. economy, an economy critical to a successful election campaign.

Note that our carriers are currently sailing to the Red Sea and to the PacificOcean — but not to the Black Sea or to the North Sea near Ukraine.

Ominously, Biden’s team has abandoned its relentless Ukraine boosterism, and now even young, low-information democrat voters are starting to turn on Ukraine:

CLIP: Okay, Mr. Biden, why are we sending so much money to Ukraine? (0:18)

When does the heart of election season begins? By October, new developments are “October surprises.” The clock is ticking. The heart of election season probably begins once Trump has secured the Republican nomination, stops running against Nikki Haley, and starts running against Joe Biden. It could start anytime.

Does Team Biden really want to defend the progress — or its lack of progress — in three wars theaters? Granted, politically Biden would hate to “lose” Ukraine. Nor does he want Ukraine to settle for something unfair. Both would be politically damaging and give Trump talking points.

But out of the three major conflicts, Ukraine is the only one over which Biden has any control.

So, if you’re Team Biden, and you are pretty sure you’ll have to accept a bad deal over Ukraine sooner or later, would you rather do it now, and get it over with, so you still have eight months to recover? Or, do you gamble that things might turn around in eight months, even though Avdiivka’s loss has pushed Ukraine onto its disorganized back foot for several months at least.

Or do you want to take a chance that Putin could roll into Kiev in October?

You can see what I think will happen. I think time is almost up for Ukraine. Obviously, the situation is fluid, and there’s more going on behind the scenes than out in the open, making it impossible to handicap.

But the electoral clock is ticking louder and louder and Zelensky can hear it echoing down the palace corridors.

🔥 On his “Club Random” podcast this week, Bill Maher, while trying to stitch together some pathetic case in favor of a Gavin Newsom presidency, walked right into the propeller blades during an interview with fitness icon Jillian Michaels. Maher was obviously suggesting that California’s problems are exaggerated, localized, and they don’t really affect regular folks. But if Bill were trying to help Gavin get elected, he should’ve shut up.

CLIP: Bill Maher asks one question too many during an interview with Jillian Michaels (1:58).

“I’ve been trying to get Gavin to run for president for a really long time,” Bill languidly drawled, dropping names like Biden drops his chain of thought. “Are you serious!?,” Jillian, 50, exploded. After Bill suggested she was just overreacting to some goofy liberal laws she didn’t like, Jillian looked at Bill, mouth gaping, and said, “I moved to Florida because of that guy.”

Meaning, Gavin Newsom.

When a surprised Bill asked whether she was really happier in Miami than Malibu, Jillian contentedly sighed, “oh, yes.” Astounded, Bill asked, but why?That was where he crawled out onto the branch that couldn’t hold him, cracking off and dropping him and Gavin down to the ground.

By way of an answer, Jillian told Bill the story of how her house in Malibu was broken into — by a repeat offender that Gavin freed during covid:

“It was the guy’s third offense. He broke into our house [with] duct tape and a video camera. I mean give me a f**king break. Third strike, guy goes to jail, gets let out during Covid.”

That short answer was terrifying, despite Jillian’s stage laughter. Duct tape and a video camera? What did the guy have in mind? Something horrible. I’d rather not try to imagine. Now Jillian lives safely in Miami, Florida, where we keep those kinds of public menaces in jail.

Welcome to Florida, Jillian! Now stop voting for thugs like Gavin Newsom.

Have a perfectly blessed Sunday! Thank you for your continuing loyal support. And sail back here tomorrow morning for another amazing installment of Coffee & Covid, to start off your new week the right way.

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