POKING AROUND 12-17-24
The late General Kirillov
The Ukrainians killed one of Putin’s generals outside his home in Moscow this morning with a bomb in a scooter parked in front of the building that went off when he came out to go to his car. The Ukrainian Security Service (SBU) had leveled criminal charges on Monday against Lt. Gen. Igor Kirillov, chief of the Russian nuclear, biological and chemical protection forces, accusing him of war crimes for directing the use of banned chemical weapons in Ukraine. The general’s assistant also died in the blast. Kirillov was also under sanctions from several countries, including the U.K. and Canada, for his actions in Ukraine. The SBU said it recorded more than 4,800 occasions when Russia used chemical weapons on the battlefield since its invasion in February 2022. In May, the U.S. State Department said it had recorded the use of chloropicrin - a poison gas first deployed in World War I - against Ukrainian troops.
A warning about Trump and the military - this is a very accurate view of what could happen: “President-elect Trump will almost certainly seek to have ideologically and temperamentally sympathetic colonels and captains promoted so that they would be responsive to his potential direction, with the support of a like-minded secretary of defense and attorney general. The fear is that, as Mr. Trump reiterates his preferences, promotion boards and lists alike could become stacked with acolytes, whereupon a constitutionally corrupted military could quickly become a fait accompli.” (From the NYT)
Bad news for a MAGA scumbag, good news for us: Alex Bruesewitz collapsed on stage Sunday night at the New York Young Republicans’ Gala. Why is that good news for anyone? Well, because Alex Bruesewitz is the motherfucking scumball who came up with “They’re eating your pets!” about Haitian refugees in Springfield, Ohio. He’s also the genius who hired the “insult comic” who came to Trump’s Bund Rally at Madison Square Gardens and insulted everyone with a brain (no damage to any of the stormtroopers who came to see Dear Leader). “The 27-year-old CEO of the political and corporate consulting agency X Strategies suddenly began to slur, admitted he was ‘forgetting my words’ before going silent and then tumbling to his side.” As of this morning, December 17, he’s still in the hospital; maybe we’ll get lucky and they’ll bring him out feet-first in a plastic bag.
Staffers working for Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy at DOGE have contacted Trump’s first-term cabinet secretaries and asked them to prepare two lists of people they served with: one for political appointees and the other for career officials. They are to write an “A” by the names of those they believe Trump should bring back or keep, and a “B” by the names of those they think should be blacklisted or fired. Trump has vowed to use Schedule F, an executive order that would make the civil servants fireable.
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When you're a civil servant, as I was for 34 years, during the day, you come to know the territory well and know where to set the Claymores and when to turn the bag of lab rats loose. I hope the fed workers are preparing their "What-me-I-wasn't-even-in-the-building" faces. And they need to stick together. It's a declared war.
Good for Ukraine. I wonder how much help they got from Russian citizens in Moscow. This is the second assassination of a high level official responsible for the chemical weapons attacks. The IFC had accused both of violating laws prohibiting the use of them.
Our military. I don't have confidence that it will resist TFG. I believe he will do what he wants, ignoring processes in place that should slow him down.
That is to me a very scary prospect.