Kyiv’s frontlines are abuzz with vehicle movement and artillery strikes, with regular explosions hitting vital Russian targets in occupied areas.
Its defense minister has said preparations are "coming to an end" and President Volodymyr Zelensky has assured a counteroffensive "will happen," while demurring on any exact start date.
It may have already started; it may be weeks away. We don’t know — and that fact is a strong measure of Ukraine’s success as this begins.
Moscow, on the other hand, is in the closing-time bar brawl stage of their war. After losing Kharkiv and Kherson, they have had at least seven months to ready the next likely target of Ukrainian attack: Zaporizhzhia.
That has happened, with vast trench defense networks that can be seen from space. That recognition of their enormity is not necessarily a compliment in 2023. They are big, yes, but they are also something anyone can peruse on Google. That’s not great in an era of precise rockets and speedy armored advances.
Then there's the firing of Russia's deputy defense minister, and the mercenary Wagner group's leader Prigozhin's threat to pull out of the battle if supplies don't reach his thugs. On top of the Russian forces' proven ineptitude and morale problems, Ukraine's chances seem to be improving.
A 2018 Senate investigation that found there was “no evidence” to substantiate any of the claims of sexual assault against the US supreme court justice Brett Kavanaugh contained serious omissions, according to new information obtained by the Guardian.
The 28-page report was released by the Republican senator Chuck Grassley, the then chairman of the Senate judiciary committee. It prominently included an unfounded and unverified claim that one of Kavanaugh’s accusers – a fellow Yale graduate named Deborah Ramirez – was “likely” mistaken when she alleged that Kavanaugh exposed himself to her at a dormitory party because another Yale student was allegedly known for such acts.
The suggestion that Kavanaugh was the victim of mistaken identity was sent to the judiciary committee by a Colorado-based attorney named Joseph C Smith Jr, according to a non-redacted copy of a 2018 email obtained by the Guardian. Smith was a friend and former colleague of the judiciary committee’s then lead counsel, Mike Davis.
Smith was also a member of the Federalist Society, which strongly supported Kavanaugh’s supreme court nomination, and appears to have a professional relationship with the Federalist Society’s co-founder, Leonard Leo, whom he thanked in the acknowledgments of his book Under God: George Washington and the Question of Church and State.
Smith wrote to Davis in the 29 September 2018 email that he was in a class behind Kavanaugh and Ramirez (who graduated in the class of 1987) and believed Ramirez was likely mistaken in identifying Kavanaugh.
Instead, Smith said it was a fellow classmate named Jack Maxey, who was a member of Kavanaugh’s fraternity, who allegedly had a “reputation” for exposing himself, and had once done so at a party. [snip]
In an interview with the Guardian, Maxey confirmed that he was still a senior in high school at the time of the alleged incident, and said he had never been contacted by any of the Republican staffers who were conducting the investigation.
“I was not at Yale,” he said. “I was a senior in high school at the time. I was not in New Haven.” He added: “These people can say what they want, and there are no consequences, ever.”
The revelation raises new questions about apparent efforts to downplay and discredit accusations of sexual misconduct by Kavanaugh and exclude evidence that supported an alleged victim’s claims." (our emphasis)
When you take a judicial confirmation hearing conducted by Republican senators and add the Federalist Society and their operatives, you have a corrupt stew. Kavanaugh was a privileged frat boy who had a history of assaulting girls, and they covered for him.
"There is no doubt that we have a crisis of purpose for men, especially young men in this country, and we just need to call these men to something higher," [Sen. Josh] Hawley [Insurrection-MO] told Fox News on Sunday.
"But it comes down to an individual father taking responsibility for his family and his child, whether they're out of wedlock or not," [Fox "News" host Rachel] Campos-Duffy opined. "And it's really shocking that right now, at this very moment, we have the first son, Hunter Biden, shirking his responsibilities as a father to little Navy Biden."
"And we have grandparents in the White House who haven't stepped up at least to step in for him at that," she added.
The politics of personal destruction as practiced by MAGAts won't even leave a grandchild of the President out of the picture. These slimy, fascistic guttersnipes go there as easily as they would discuss the weather. Vile.
