In which the pond endures another history lesson from the hole of the bucket in man, with the grave Sexton as the warm-up act ...

 

The pond would have liked to have lead with that story from old Alabamy noted by an esteemed correspondent, Two Alabama clinics pause IVF services afer court rules that embryos are children.

The god botherers are at it again, and it would have been a great chance for the pond to do a rendition of "every sperm is sacred" and demand that onanists be shot out of hand... (the pond would also have noted that Nikki, allegedly the great saviour, was in on the god bothering).

But life with the reptiles denies the pond such simple Pythonish spermish pleasures, with good old Alabamy not making the top of the digital edition this day ...

Instead at the top of the far right perch showing off a favoured reptile, there was the meretricious Merritt demanding that people be locked up ...

It was by the pond's count one of two stories taking one side, confirming yet again that Media Watch story, while the current genocide in Gaza yet again went MIA ...

There was also a curious juxtaposition ...

Strange, but the pond needed a warm-up for the usual Henry, so it went with the grave Sexton ...

Why there's the sort of snap that sent the meretricious Merritt into a queenly 'off with the heads, lock 'em up' rage.

It seems you can mention the Gaza genocide, just not in reptile company ...

Ah, but how soon before 18C rears its predictable, Bolterish head, you might ask, and the answer is soon enough...

Yes, the rights of the reptiles to keep on insulting assorted communities must be preserved ...but if talking about genocide, best not mention Gaza, stick to something safe, like Turkish denialism, and throw in a few snaps ...

Indeed, indeed, a snap of a Holocaust denier and a brazen ginger hussy make suitable company in any reptile column ...

Now how to preserve the right for any loon to believe what they read in the lizard Oz or see on Faux Noise ...

Outrageous. Who wouldn't want the return of a king or a dictator to run the United States?

Sorry, our Henry's siren song is calling, best wrap up the grave Sexton ...

Indeed, indeed, it has been instructive to learn who are the supporters of a Gaza genocide. Why it turns out that the reptiles loves themselves a decent genocide, replete with apartheid, gulags and ghettoes ...

Now as is the pond's habit, the pond did do a quality control measure and checked the hole in the bucket man's competition ...

Accept no substitutions! 

Why row with Rowan when you can have our Henry? And why spend time with Vicki? 

The last the pond heard of the Poms, they were having a war about the war, in the comfort of their parliament, while the genocide kept raging ...

And forget miners and the Zuck, our Henry must hold the floor, especially as the pond had a bet riding on the result ...

The pond has no problem with railing at the behaviour of the sociopathic Vlad the impaler, and will even allow a tediously long traducing of the Ruskis, as if British empire hadn't inflicted its own share of misery on the world, and will even allow the usual gaggle of cheap snaps imported from Getty or the like...

But the pond has a bet riding on the result, and so must endure a lot of rambling, though the pond reckons it's on a sure fire winner ... what with gambling all the go this season ...

Sorry the pond meant no harm, it just had to slip in the infallible Pope of the day. Carry on regardless, hole in the bucket man, the pond is expecting a big pay off ,...

Ah, that's a bit like "everything that promotes the British empire is moral, everything that hinders it is immoral", but at this point the pond must break cover, and provide details of the bet ...

The pond is betting that not once will our Henry mention useful idiots of the Tuckyo kind, or the lickspittle lackey fellow travelling GOP, or the mango Mussolini's supine kowtowing to the sociopath, even when confronted by the death of Navalny ...

The pond can't believe it's quoting Time magazine, but here we go ...

...Donald Trump, the former President and current Republican frontrunner for renomination, has stubbornly refused to condemn Russia or President Vladimir Putin for their role in Navalny’s death in a remote arctic prison. In turn, he blamed Navalny for returning to Russia after an earlier attempt on his life—he would have been better served “staying away and talking from outside of the country”—and then baselessly likened his own legal woes to those of Navalny, who as Putin’s chief critic never stood a shot at a fair trial in Russia.

Those comments came just days after Trump’s admonition that Russia should feel free to attack any NATO member that isn’t paying its fair share, further casting doubt on his—and, in turn, U.S.—commitment to the defense alliance that requires any attack on a member be met with a response from all. “I would encourage them to do whatever the hell they want,” Trump said.

For years, the party treated Trump’s Putin adoration as something to be ignored or grudgingly tolerated. That’s no longer a tenable position. With Russian forces capturing Avdiivka while a desperate Ukraine waits for U.S. aid blocked by the House GOP Caucus, Trump’s apologist posture toward Russia and the Republican Party’s position are essentially indistinguishable; it’s a dynamic that has enormous consequences across the globe.

The clearest sign of the party’s shift may be apparent at this week’s CPAC, where a who’s who of conservative luminaries will deliver speeches, most of which are likely to either avoid mentioning or waive away inconvenient stories like Navalny’s death, the stakes of Ukraine’s fight for self-determination, or the bombshell news that the GOP’s drive to impeach President Joe Biden may have been largely orchestrated by Russian intelligence.

Trump has been consistently against helping Ukraine defend itself against the Russian invasion and onslaught. Back in 2019, Ukraine’s leader didn’t bend to Trump’s request to weaponize the justice system in Kyiv to hurt Biden, so this is personal.

Republicans have tried to have it both ways, striking a critique of Putin’s regime while saying Biden cannot counter Moscow’s aggression. Antagonizing Trump is not a good gambit, as so many vanquished rivals have learned the hard way. It’s why Sen. J.D. Vance, an Ohio Republican, has aggressively tried to sour his new colleagues on spending in Ukraine, suggested Ukraine concede with land transfers to Russia, and most recently, floated the notion that the proposed money for Ukraine was actually a backdoor scheme to begin impeachment proceedings against Trump should he win. (No, really.)

Speaker Mike Johnson, whose grip on the Speaker’s gavel is weak given his party’s razor-thin majority, has been offering his own master class in compliance. As long as Trump opposes sending desperately needed help to Ukraine, there will be no immediate vote—a reality that could complicate even keeping the government open in the coming weeks.

And so on, and t's not just Vance or creationist Mike or the Donald or useful idiots of the Tuckyo kind, it's the GOP, aided and abetted by Faux News, that has made the lurch ...

Will our Henry make any note of this as he rages at the Ruskis? Not bloody likely ... he always prefers to live in the past and show off ...

Meanwhile, in an alternative universe, you can find Philip Bump in WaPo ... A new lens into the ongoing folly of Republican ‘Russia hoax’ rhetoric (paywall):

The filing articulated some of those alleged contacts, including with people linked to Russian intelligence. When the Justice Department was interviewing him in February before his arrest, for example, Smirnov allegedly introduced a new claim about Hunter Biden — a claim that was sourced to Russian actors.

“Smirnov suggested that investigators check to see if [Hunter Biden] made telephone calls from the Premier Palace Hotel since those calls would have been recorded by the Russians,” the filing states. “Smirnov claimed to have obtained this information a month earlier by calling a high-level official in a foreign country. Smirnov also claimed to have learned this information from four different Russian officials.”

“According to Smirnov, the Russians want Ukraine to assist in influencing the U.S. election,” the filing reads at another point, “and Smirnov thinks the tapes of [Hunter Biden] at the Premier Palace Hotel is all they have.”

The Premier Palace Hotel is in Kyiv, a city Hunter Biden has never visited. The filing bolsters the idea that this came from Russian actors by including raw intelligence reports documenting Smirnov’s previous reports about the hotel and its infiltration by Russian intelligence.

In other words, the filing argues, not only do the “effects of Smirnov’s false statements and fabricated information continue to be felt to this day” — that is, the fallout from his bribery claim — but he “is actively peddling new lies that could impact U.S. elections after meeting with Russian intelligence officials in November.”

Understandably, critics of Donald Trump seized on this aspect of the filing. Here was an explicit example of Russia spreading false claims about American political actors — specifically Democrats — as it attempts to influence the presidential election.

But, of course, this is already well established.

Over the past five years, since the release of Robert S. Mueller III’s assessment of how Russia attempted to influence the 2016 presidential election, the contours of that effort have been worn smooth in the public conversation. On the right, in particular, the hundreds of pages of research earn shrugs: It’s all a hoax!

Trump began trying to reframe Russia’s actions even before he took office and inculcated a knee-jerk hostility among his Republican allies to anything that might suggest Russia did anything untoward. However, the evidence that Moscow did so is robust, from the consequential infiltration of the Democratic National Committee’s network and a top campaign official’s emails to the probably-not-consequential efforts to inject rhetoric into the national conversation. There were multiple points of contact between Russia-linked actors and Trump’s campaign team, triggering the federal probe into possible coordination. This part of the story was not proved.

Trump was so successful at waving all of this away, though, that there is still a huge market for efforts to disprove Russian actions or to punish those who alleged that Russia had tried to affect the outcome of the race. Fox News recently elevated a report citing anonymous sources that purported to show how President Barack “Obama’s CIA set up the Russia hoax,” in the overheated verbiage of host Jesse Watters.

Or consider Luna. Two weeks after she seized on the bribery claim that even then seemed highly unlikely, she was the lead sponsor of a measure censuring Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) for having promoted the idea that Trump’s campaign was linked to Russia. The censure motion argued, falsely, that this was a “conspiracy theory … invented, funded, and spread by President’s Trump’s political rivals.”...

And because the pond is just doing excerpts:

...There’s nothing particularly surprising about this to anyone who has seen a spy movie or two. That Russia would try to feed the United States misinformation or reshape American politics is a basic Occam’s razor assumption about how the world works. That the CIA contrived Russian outreach to hurt Trump only once he was elected — or whatever the reframing du jour happens to be — is the sort of acrobatics that Trump-loyal Republicans have been practicing for more than seven years.

Trump appeared Tuesday night on Fox News for a conversation with host Laura Ingraham. She offered that Russia and China wanted to keep Biden in office because “they can dominate the global, you know, the global situation much easier with him in office.”

Trump agreed.

“They want him very badly to be president,” Trump said. “I mean, I’m sure a lot of money is being spent on — between Russia … and China? No question with China. Russia, too.”

Setting aside the assertion that Russian President Vladimir Putin would not prefer an American president who has publicly stated he would look the other way at Russia invading NATO countries, notice that Trump is acknowledging how this all works — when it’s not purportedly benefiting him. Sure, Russia and China are probably spending money trying to influence the election outcome. Why wouldn’t they? Why wouldn’t we assume such efforts are underway? We have inordinate evidence that Russia in particular attempts to do so.

The revelation from this week’s Smirnov filing isn’t that Russia is trying to influence the outcome of the election. It’s that the Trump-led effort to pretend that hasn’t happened is so blinkered that it ends up putting Republicans in rhetorically embarrassing positions.

Note in all that how the likes of Laura and the rest at Faux Noise have been helping out. (Jesse Watters has bee doing sterling work - sorry it's more Bump at WaPo but it's a fun read).

Will our Henry mention any of these contortions? Not bloody likely ...not when there's a shoe fetish to indulge ...

The pond was gaining in confidence on his bet and had already put down a deposit on the purchase of the harbour bridge and the Opera House, or perhaps a pair of fool's gold shoes, as our Henry carried on ...

Must the pond resort to a CNN listicle to note all the things that our Henry might have mentioned in his tirade?  All the ways Putin is playing in US politics

Putin is advancing Russian interests against the US on multiple fronts.

• Yet another US election appears to be falling prey to Russian interference, after prosecutors accused long-time FBI informant Alexander Smirnov of “actively peddling new lies that could impact US elections.” In 2016, US intelligence agencies assessed that Moscow meddled in the election to help Trump.
• Smirnov, who was last week charged with making up false evidence over Biden family corruption in Ukraine, told investigators after his arrest that the material came from Russian intelligence, a court filing from prosecutors said Tuesday. The development suggests yet another attempt by Russia to hurt one of Trump’s electoral opponents.
• House Republicans once held up Smirnov’s evidence as the center piece of their evidence-challenged bid to impeach Biden. Now that it’s been discredited, they are insisting it didn’t matter. But Putin can’t lose. The GOP is seeking to further discredit the FBI — the agency responsible for hunting Russian spies. Even if the credibility of Republican impeachment plans has been shattered, Russia may already have benefited by fomenting more discord and divisions in Washington. “I think it’s another brilliant success as a part of Russian intelligence in meddling in our elections,” Douglas London, a former CIA counterintelligence chief for south and southwest Asia, said on CNN on Tuesday.
• Even the death of Russian opposition hero Alexey Navalny in a penal colony last week opened bitter new divides in US politics. It has refocused attention on Trump’s odd refusal to ever criticize Putin. And Trump’s comparison of Navalny’s persecution to his own legal plight is not just grotesque — it’s doing the kind of damage to the reputation and integrity of US political and judicial institutions that Putin relishes.
• The result is that Russia will again be at the epicenter of a US election campaign certain to deepen the national political estrangement as Biden lambasts Trump over his relationship to Putin. “It’s shameful. It’s weak. It’s dangerous. It’s un-American,” Biden said last week.
• Whatever happens next, Russia will be central to Biden’s legacy. The invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 led the US president to invigorate NATO and to send billions of dollars of arms and ammunition to help President Volodymyr Zelensky stave off his country’s elimination from the map. Biden is also shepherding two new members, Sweden and Finland, into the alliance, further weakening Russia’s strategic position.
• In the most unfathomable recent transformation, the Republican Party – which lionized President Ronald Reagan, who beseeched ex-Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev to “tear down this wall” in Berlin – is now enabling Russian expansionism. The refusal of House Republicans to pass a new $60 billion aid package for Ukraine is leading to battlefield gains for Moscow’s forces. And Trump, the front-runner for the Republican presidential nomination, is vowing to quickly end the war if he’s elected to another term — which would likely mean rewarding Putin’s illegal invasion and snatching of territory that has become the biggest land conflict in Europe since the end of World War II.
• Trump’s warning that he’d invite Russia to invade NATO allies that didn’t reach defense spending targets, meanwhile, rattled the Western alliance and cast doubt on its bedrock mutual defense mantra. If Trump wins a second term and pulls out of NATO, he’d hand Putin Russia’s greatest strategic victory since the Cold War.
• Russia’s capacity to create fear and recriminations in Washington was laid bare again last week, when House Intelligence Chairman Mike Turner sparked alarm by revealing a supposed plan by Moscow to develop a nuclear space weapon that could potentially cripple vast numbers of commercial and government satellites.
• On Wednesday, it emerged that yet another American citizen is being imprisoned in Russia. Moscow typically seeks to use captives as bargaining chips for Russian criminals and intelligence operatives held overseas. Ksenia Karelina, a US-Russian dual citizen, was arrested on charges of treason for allegedly donating just $51 to a Ukrainian charity, her California employer told CNN. Other Americans jailed in Russia include Paul Whelan – a former US Marine, who has been held for more than five years and denies espionage charges – and Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich, who was detained last year on espionage charges he and his employer vehemently contest. Their ordeals represent a convenient way for Putin to dial up political pressure on Biden whenever he pleases.
• Geopolitically, Russia is increasingly finding common interests and military synergies with other US adversaries like China, North Korea and Iran. The cooperation is well short of the formal alliance that Washington has long feared. But this united front of autocracies is dedicated to challenging US global power. Putin recently formalized his warming ties with North Korean tyrant Kim Jong Un by presenting him with a new limousine.

Well yes, and then there are the useless diots ...

The reptiles settled for a snap ...

And then the pond knew that  the pond had won those sneakers ...

Appealing not to the West? A Hobbesian battle? 

At least it wasn't a bagel, think of how he would have looked if he'd picked up a bagel ...just as well he wasn't doing that in old Alabamy where every sperm is sacred.

As for tedious old Henry, here's an idea.

Tell all that to the GOP and god-loving Mike Johnson and that hillbilly Vance and the nest of ratbags at Faux Noise, and their pandering to Vlad the impaler, arising from their ongoing never-ending worship of their mango god, craven and cowering in fear at the punishment he might dish out ... 

Why they might even have to join the pond in donning a pair of sneakers...