UPDATE: Friday, Dec 2, 2022 · 8:41:01 PM +00:00 · Mark Sumner

On the “it’s all one front” front, here’s what’s happening down near Donetsk. Russian forces engaged in small scale assaults against Ukrainian troops in a number of towns, with the biggest push apparently along the highway to Pervomaiske. None of these attacks was successful.

Russia launched multiple attacks out of Donetsk on Friday. None appear to have any success.

Donald Trump has hired more coffee boys than Starbucks over the years, and they all get the same treatment after he’s through sucking the marrow out of their sad, brittle, untermensch bones: He claims he doesn’t know them, and if he happens to have been photographed with them 90 times over the course of 30 years, he’s quick to point out that he’s regularly seen with lots of sketchy people who are mysteriously drawn to his grand, elysian fi

The more we learn about the 2022 midterms, the clearer it becomes just how off the mark many pundits and strategists were in their preelection analysis of the dynamics.

That proved true for the fantastical “red wave,” the notion that abortion was “fading” as a potent issue, and the idea that economic concerns would dominate all other issues.

Late Night Snark: Dinner Is Served Edition

“Last week Trump ate dinner at Mar-a-Lago with Kanye West and a prominent white supremacist named Nick Fuentes. We don’t know exactly what happened at that dinner except that no one ordered latkes.”
—Trevor Noah

“Only Donald Trump would defend himself by saying, I was only planning to eat with one anti-Semite.”
—Jimmy Kimmel

Continued…

You are now below the fold.

On this date three years ago, a man walked into Hubei Provincial Hospital in Wuhan, China, reporting flu-like symptoms. Within two weeks, there were 27 cases showing similar symptoms. Then, just four days before the end of the year, the head of the hospital’s respiratory department, Dr. Zhang Jixian, made a report to state health officials that the cases were caused by “a novel coronavirus.” At that point, the number of known infections was approaching 180.

Dec.

As Russia began positioning forces for an unprovoked invasion of Ukraine at the end of 2021, oil speculators did what oil speculators do in every potentially difficult situation: They drove oil future prices up. A week before the invasion began on Feb. 24, 2022, prices for West Texas crude had already been elevated by $20 a barrel to over $90.

UPDATE: Thursday, Dec 1, 2022 · 8:07:55 PM +00:00

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Mark Sumner

Christmas is coming. Don’t forget to set aside some cash for the guys who make life tolerable — and are more important to your day-to-day life than every athlete, celebrity, and social media influencer in existence.

City workers in frontline #Bakhmut continuing to collect garbage even under shelling. https://t.

In a Thursday-issued ruling, a three-judge panel for the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals has vacated Judge Aileen Cannon’s baffling prior order blocking the federal government from using stolen government documents seized at Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate while instead ordering a new “special master” to evaluate Trump’s alleged ownership claims to those documents.

The ongoing humanitarian crisis situation in Haiti is getting worse. Meanwhile, the Dominican Republic, which shares the same island, continues to round up and deport people they believe to be undocumented Haitians living in the Dominican Republic. They then dump them across the border. Last week the untenable situation became even worse when the United States embassy in the Dominican Republic issued a warning to travelers from the U.S.