Today's Liberal News

WTF Roundup: Propaganda for whom, exactly? Also, it turns out Sarah Palin is still around!

What is there to say about Fox News and the right-wing-o-sphere that hasn’t been scratched by the nails of demons into the toilet stall walls of hell? Every day, every hour, every minute, Fox News and the propaganda machines it has birthed are either selling their audience lies, misinformation, and disinformation about the world, or selling them pillows, telling them to sell their gold, and saying that the way out of debt is to give Magnum P.I. your home in a reverse mortgage.

Abbreviated Pundit Roundup: How Putin handles losing is the key question

WaPo:

Putin’s KGB past didn’t help him with intelligence on Ukraine

The botched invasion suggests that—as happens with many authoritarians—his analysts told him what he wanted to hear

Putin’s present problems can be reduced to two main options: Either he ignored the advice of his national security and intelligence advisers; or, as with so many authoritarian leaders before him, he set the conditions under which his subordinates only told him w

A lot of action on the Jan. 6 docket, including incoming cooperation from perps

Friday made for a very busy day in court as deals were struck, guilty pleas were entered and sentencing dates scheduled for defendants facing charges—including conspiracy—related to the Jan. 6 assault of the U.S. Capitol. 

First up before Senior Judge Royce Lamberth in Washington, D.C., was ex-police officer Jacob Fracker. The 30-year-old pleaded guilty Friday to corruptly conspiring to obstruct or impede the counting of votes by Congress on Jan. 6.

Why Robert Pattinson’s Grim Batman Is Cause for Optimism

In The Batman, Matt Reeves’s long and grim superhero epic, Robert Pattinson plays a brooding sophomore of a dark knight. He wears mascara. He journals. He is vengeance. He is the shadows. But despite all the memes and fanboy hand-wringing generated from the Twilight actor’s casting, Pattinson’s is a back-to-basics Batman. He isn’t the tired, aging crimefighter played by Ben Affleck, nor is The Batman the umpteenth pearl-scattering origin story for the character.

Kyiv’s Sublime Urban Spaces Are in Danger

Kyiv is often described as the cradle of Slavic civilization. According to legend, the city was founded in 482, when a group of siblings from a royal Slavic tribe staked out a settlement along the banks of the Dnipro River. By the end of the millenium, under the leadership of Volodymyr the Great, it had become the capital of a major European civilization—Kyivan Rus. At this point, Moscow was barely a village.

America’s Energy Security Is Falling Apart

For the past few decades, whenever a geopolitical crisis or market tumult has led to higher oil prices, policy makers in the United States have generally followed the same playbook.First, they try to get more oil on the market as soon as they can. That almost invariably has meant asking Saudi Arabia, which geology has blessed with the world’s most agile oil reserves and which the U.S. has blessed with several billion dollars in weapons, to pump and sell more petroleum.

The Slasher Film X Is a Modern Classic

A month ago, another installment in the Texas Chainsaw Massacre series was released, an attempt to modernize the horror franchise while still harkening back to its gritty 1970s roots. It was a creative failure, too reliant on digitally enhanced gore and thudding callbacks. The task of matching an all-time classic seemed impossible.

Republicans Think They Can Win the COVID Funding Fight

If a new coronavirus variant surges in the United States this year—perhaps the one currently tearing through Europe—there’s a reasonable chance that the country will be unprepared to fight it. You can thank Congress for that.Last week, lawmakers passed a massive spending bill without any additional funding for COVID-19 relief, despite White House pleas for more. Democrats would like to fulfill the administration’s request.

U.S. Accuses Russia of Using Cluster Bombs in Ukraine as Both Refuse to Endorse International Ban

President Biden called Russian President Vladimir Putin a war criminal for the first time Wednesday for atrocities in Ukraine, as the House Foreign Affairs Committee held a hearing on whether Russian forces have been using cluster munitions in populated areas in Ukraine. Cluster bombs explode in midair and spew hundreds of smaller “bomblets.” The U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights said their use in Ukraine may amount to war crimes.

Syrian Activist Condemns Russia for Targeting Civilians & Hospitals from Aleppo to Mariupol

As the war in Ukraine enters its fourth week, Ukrainian officials say Russian forces have increasingly attacked civilian areas to pound Ukrainian cities into submission, a strategy Russia has employed to devastating effect in Syria, where the Russian Air Force has bombed many cities to rubble in an effort to support the government of Bashar al-Assad since entering the war in 2015.

Ukraine update: No, media, it’s not a ‘strategic pause’ anymore, Russia is just stuck

  • by

This map shows us the gains by each side in the last seven days. Red are Russian gains, blue are Ukrainian gains. 

If you’re wondering, yeah, that’s pretty much nothing. Russia consolidated some territory northwest of Kyiv, while Ukraine pushed Russia out of western Kyiv suburbs. There were offensives reported there last few days, and looks like they did good work—important because it pushes Russia outside of artillery range of central Kyiv.