MAGA Continues: Full Speed, to November!
Posted on 03/31/2024 8:59:30 PM PDT by Jane Long
Keven McCarthy-Luntz has to be laughing his backside off.
Unreal what we are seeing, with this tool Speaker.
He’s making Boehner look good.
We need to light up the phone and social media, of these Reps!
Charlie is right on, on this.
>>>Thankfully, my congressman Dr Andy Harris voted NO.
IMO, it’s hypocritical to reauthorize/renew FISA when we are doing NOTHING to secure our borders.
Hi, LG!
I was taking a break when I came across that.
How are you?
All is well here and there are lots of wonderful changes happening among my loved ones, but it makes for busy times!
So thankful!
God is good!
Hi, Jane!
I hope the storms this week skipped around you and yours!
We had lots of rain and some hail but no damage.
Opinion | J.D. Vance: The Math on Ukraine Doesn’t Add Up
President Biden wants the world to believe that the biggest obstacle facing Ukraine is Republicans and our lack of commitment to the global community. This is wrong.
Ukraine’s challenge is not the G.O.P.; it’s math. Ukraine needs more soldiers than it can field, even with draconian conscription policies. And it needs more matériel than the United States can provide. This reality must inform any future Ukraine policy, from further congressional aid to the diplomatic course set by the president.
The Biden administration has applied increasing pressure on Republicans to pass a supplemental aid package of more than $60 billion to Ukraine. I voted against this package in the Senate and remain opposed to virtually any proposal for the United States to continue funding this war. Mr. Biden has failed to articulate even basic facts about what Ukraine needs and how this aid will change the reality on the ground.
The most fundamental question: How much does Ukraine need and how much can we actually provide? Mr. Biden suggests that a $60 billion supplemental means the difference between victory and defeat in a major war between Russia and Ukraine. That is also wrong. $60 billion is a fraction of what it would take to turn the tide in Ukraine’s favor. But this is not just a matter of dollars. Fundamentally, we lack the capacity to manufacture the amount of weapons Ukraine needs us to supply to win the war.
Consider our ability to produce 155-millimeter artillery shells. Last year, Ukraine’s then defense minister assessed that their base line requirement for these shells is over four million per year, but said they could fire up to seven million if that many were available. Since the start of the conflict, the United States has gone to great lengths to ramp up production of 155-millimeter shells. We’ve roughly doubled our capacity and can now produce 360,000 per year — less than a tenth of what Ukraine says it needs. The administration’s goal is to get this to 1.2 million — 30 percent of what’s needed — by the end of 2025. This would cost the American taxpayers dearly while yielding an unpleasantly familiar result: failure abroad.
Just this week, the top American military commander in Europe argued that absent further security assistance, Russia could soon have a 10-to-1 artillery advantage over Ukraine. What didn’t gather as many headlines is that Russia’s current advantage is at least 5 to 1, even after all the money we have poured into the conflict. Neither of these ratios plausibly lead to Ukrainian victory.
Proponents of American aid to Ukraine have argued that our approach has been a boon to our own economy, creating jobs here in the factories that manufacture weapons. But our national security interests can be — and often are — separate from our economic interests. The notion that we should prolong a bloody and gruesome war because it’s been good for American business is grotesque. We can and should rebuild our industrial base without shipping its products to a foreign conflict.
The story is the same when we look at other munitions. Take the Patriot missile system — our premier air defense weapon. It’s of such importance in this war that Ukraine’s foreign minister has specifically demanded them. That’s because in March alone, Russia reportedly launched over 3,000 guided aerial bombs, 600 drones and 400 missiles at Ukraine. To fend off these attacks, the Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelensky, and others have indicated they need thousands of Patriot interceptors per year. The problem is this: The United States only manufactures 550 every year. If we pass the supplemental aid package currently being considered in Congress, we could potentially increase annual production to 650, but that’s still less than a third of what Ukraine requires.
These weapons are not only needed by Ukraine. If China were to set its sights on Taiwan, the Patriot missile system would be critical to its defense. In fact, the United States has promised to send Taiwan nearly $900 million worth of Patriot missiles, but delivery of those weapons and other essential resources has been severely delayed, partly because of shortages caused by the war.
If that sounds bad, Ukraine’s manpower situation is even worse. Here are the basics: Russia has nearly four times the population of Ukraine. Ukraine needs upward of half a million new recruits, but hundreds of thousands of fighting-age men have already fled the country. The average Ukrainian soldier is roughly 43 years old, and many soldiers have already served two years at the front with few, if any, opportunities to stop fighting. After two years of conflict, there are some villages with almost no men left. The Ukrainian military has resorted to coercing men into service, and women have staged protests to demand the return of their husbands and fathers after long years of service at the front. This newspaper reported one instance in which the Ukrainian military attempted to conscript a man with diagnosed mental disability.
Many in Washington seem to think that hundreds of thousands of young Ukrainians have gone to war with a song in their heart and are happy to label any thought to the contrary Russian propaganda. But major newspapers on both sides of the Atlantic are reporting that the situation on the ground in Ukraine is grim.
These basic mathematical realities were true, but contestable, at the outset of the war. They were obvious and incontestable a year ago, when American leadership worked closely with Mr. Zelensky to undertake a disastrous counteroffensive. The bad news is that accepting brute reality would have been most useful last spring, before the Ukrainians launched that extremely costly and unsuccessful military campaign. The good news is that even now, a defensive strategy can work. Digging in with old-fashioned ditches, cement and land mines are what enabled Russia to weather Ukraine’s 2023 counteroffensive. Our allies in Europe could better support such a strategy, as well. While some European countries have provided considerable resources, the burden of military support has thus far fallen heaviest on the United States.
By committing to a defensive strategy, Ukraine can preserve its precious military manpower, stop the bleeding and provide time for negotiations to commence. But this would require both American and Ukrainian leadership to accept that Mr. Zelensky’s stated goals for the war — a return to 1991 boundaries — are fantastical.
The White House has said time and again that they can’t negotiate with President Vladimir Putin of Russia. This is absurd. The Biden administration has no viable plan for the Ukrainians to win this war. The sooner Americans confront this truth, the sooner we can fix this mess and broker for peace.
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Wall Street Journal article on President Trump’s Veep search.
NY Times OPED by VP favorite Ohio Senator J.D. Vance on how to get out of the mess in Ukraine.
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😢😢😢Just saw that ByeDone now has taken the edge in the betting markets over our RPOTUS
Yup, bet he is laughing at this horrible debacle.
Not saying that he wouldn’t be doing the same thing Johnson is doing but he can sit back and enjoy since he isn’t the one getting all lit up over it.
Sounds like things are looking up for you, dear pax.
So glad to hear that.
We are just fine for a couple of old coots, just the usual old age complaints.
Here is an HTML Test Site.
You can paste in your HTML code and run it to see what it looks like without actually putting it online
http://www.csgnetwork.com/htmlcodetest.html
https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=-XA2YKRHoN8
Here’s full coverage of Michaelah Montgomery’s interview with Lawrence Jones this morning on Fox & Friends talking about her Viral Hug with RPOTUS at the Atlanta Chick-fil-A.
It looks to me that whatever the democrats showed Johnson it was enough for them to own him and his vote whenever they want.
IMHO - breaking this tie in favor of the democrats shows that he is just another democrat operative posing as a republican.
Section 702 must be dumped. The DOJ, FBI and CIA have abused this law, using it against innocent American citizens for political purposes. Now these agancies need to be denied its use.
The onus is then on the FBI to get intel on the streets rather than doing it online on their fat arses.
THis section was used to comit espionage against a duly elected President of the UNited Staes and the idjits expect it to be renewed? It will be used again against President Trump after his election.WAKE UP !
COME ON!
HEAR! HEAR!
Preach it, Candor!
It looks to me that whatever the democrats showed Johnson it was enough for them to own him and his vote whenever they want.
Another compromised Congress rep ... no telling what the have on, er, showed him.
😡
We had terrific storms, overnight ... loud thunder and LOTS of rain, here in the swamp.
But, thankfully, no hail or any damage.
Glad y’all missed any damage, too.
Don’t work too hard, over there, ya hear?
IMO, it’s hypocritical to reauthorize/renew FISA when we are doing NOTHING to secure our borders.
I have to respectfully disagree, dear Edie.
I think the FISA privilege ship has sailed.
These IC agencies have proven to be admitted liars and NOT trustworthy. They spied on a Presidential candidate/sitting President for NO reason.
FISA needs to die and not come back.
What did we ever do BEFORE FISA? We caught bad guys.
Thank you for posting this JD Vance OpEd!!
He is one of the VERY few we have fighting for US, in the Senate.
Thank you for stopping by with your spot on Sect 702 post, dear Candor7!!
A couple of surprising names on that list.
Scalise and Stefanik, are a couple of disappointment votes :-(
You’re most welcome, dear Jane.
What did we ever do BEFORE FISA? We caught bad guys.
Touche, dear Jane. I agree, but we also HAD a more honest government protecting us.
These IC agencies have proven to be admitted liars and NOT trustworthy. They spied on a Presidential candidate/sitting President for NO reason.
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I ABSOLUTELY AGREE with you that such abuse of power must never be allowed to happen again!!
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