Finally Friday Reads: Resplendent with Breaking News Edition

John Constable,
Seascape Study with Rain Cloud (c.1824-1828)

Good Day Sky Dancers!

Wow, is it hard to keep up with the headlines this week!  Just this morning, we learned that the ICC issued an arrest warrant for Russian President Vladimir Putin. This is from NBC News. “International Criminal Court issues arrest warrant for Putin over alleged Ukraine war crimes. The court said Friday that the Russian leader is responsible for overseeing the forced deportation of children. The Kremlin has previously denied the accusation.”  It’s reported by Henry Austin.

The International Criminal Court issued an arrest warrant Friday for Russian President Vladimir Putin, accusing him of being responsible for war crimes in Ukraine.

Putin committed the “war crime” of overseeing the unlawful abduction and deportation of childrenfrom Ukraine to Russia, the court said in a news release.

“There are reasonable grounds to believe that Putin bears individual criminal responsibility for the aforementioned crimes,” the court, based in The Hague, Netherlands, said its pre-trial judges had assessed.

It added that Putin had failed to “exercise control properly over civilian and military subordinates who committed the acts, or allowed for their commission, and who were under his effective authority and control.”

Maria Alekseyevna Lvova-Belova, Putin’s presidential commissioner for children’s rights, is also alleged to have committed similar crimes, the ICC said.

While warrants are often issued in secret “to protect victims and witnesses and also to safeguard the investigation,” the release said that the court was “mindful that the conduct addressed in the present situation is allegedly ongoing, and that the public awareness of the warrants may contribute to the prevention of the further commission of crimes.”

From the early days of the invasion last February, Kyiv has accused Russia of forcibly transferring children and adults.

Franz Marc-In the Rain(Im Regen) (1912)

Turkey is backing Finland’s entrance into NATO.  The NATO expansion may also give the Russian people some reason to feel less safe with Putin in charge. Hungary has also agreed to the deal. This is from Bloomberg News.

Turkey and Hungary both signaled they plan to ratify Finland’s entry into NATO, bringing the military alliance a step closer to welcoming its 31st member as the ripples from Russia’s invasion of Ukraine spread across the European security landscape.

“We’ve decided to start the process for the approval of Finland’s membership in our parliament,” President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said at a news conference Friday together with his Finnish counterpart Sauli Niinisto in Ankara. He added he hoped to complete the approval process for Finland by May 14 elections due in Turkey.

Meanwhile, Hungary plans to approve the Finnish entry March 27, Fidesz parliamentary leader Mate Kocsis said in a Facebook post. Prime Minister Viktor Orban has continually delayed a parliamentary vote in contrast with his statements of support for NATO’s enlargement.

The stance taken by Turkey and Hungary decouples the Nordic countries’ bids to join the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, filed in May to deter any Russian aggression following its invasion of Ukraine. The comments cast further doubt on the timeline for Sweden’s accession.

“Progress on Sweden’s bid depends on steps it will take,” Erdogan said. Hungary also said it will decide on Sweden’s membership at a later date.

In The Rain, 1882, Vincent van Gogh

I vividly remember someone trying to leave with the Abraham Lincoln bust during Trump’s removal from the White House. It seems more stuff went missing.  This is from the Washington Post. “Two gifts to Trump family from foreign nations are missing, report says. More than 100 gifts worth nearly $300,000 were not properly reported to the government, a new report finds.”

Federal officials cannot find two gifts received by President Donald Trump and his family from foreign nations, including a life-size painting of Trump from the president of El Salvador and golf clubs from the Japanese prime minister, according to a new report from House Democrats.

The gifts are among more than 100 foreign gifts — with a total value of nearly $300,000 — that Trump and his family failed to report to the State Department in violation of federal law, according to the report, which cites government records and emails.

The 15-page report, a result of ayear-long investigation by the House Oversight Committeeinto Trump’s failure to disclose gifts from foreign government officials while in office, revealed that the Trump family did not disclose dozens of gifts from countries that are not U.S. allies or have a complicated relationship with Washington. That includes 16 gifts from Saudi Arabia worth more than $48,000, 17 gifts from India worth over $17,000, and at least 5 gifts from China. Trump reported zero gifts entirely the final year of his presidency, according to the report, while he reported some of the gifts received in previous years.

Trump repeatedly told advisers that gifts given to him during the presidency were hisand did not belong to the federal government, former chief of staff John F. Kelly and other aides have previously told The Washington Post.

Investigators are continuing to search for the large portrait of Trump gifted to him ahead of the 2020 election by Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele and the golf clubs worth more than $7,000 thatTrump received from Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe during visits to the Trump International Golf Club and Kasumigaeski Country Club in 2017 and 2018, the report says.

Vasily Kandinsky Landscape with rain Guggenheim, c 1944

Count the silverware before and after anywhere this family travels.  They’ll take anything!  Meanwhile, court watch continues, and bets on Trump’s indictment are that both Manhattan and Georgia will come for him next week.  Lock him up!

I’m beginning to wonder if Charlie Sykes reads us.  Who besides me penned Orange Caligula?  This is from the Bulwark.  “Trump Picks an Enemy: Us. The Orange Caligula sides with Russia.”  Of course, he does.  I bet he heads there if those indictments come through too.

Because on Earth 2.0, this would be the stuff of endless news cycles and nightmares.

Here is Donald Trump channeling Kremlin propaganda, siding with Russia, even as he declares that our real enemy is . . . other Americans.

Despite the wishcasting punditry, the magical thinking of his rivals, and the fervent hopes of the Hollow Men of the GOP, this man is the presumptive nominee of the Republican party, and therefore possibly the next president of the United States. (The DeSantis bubble hasn’t burst. But it’s leaking.)

I don’t mean to alarm you. You should be alarmed.

Let’s break this down:

*The Purge

TRUMP: The State Department, the defense bureaucracy, the intelligence services, and all of the rest need to be completely overhauled and reconstituted to fire the Deep Staters and put America first.

We have to put America first.

At a time of growing international tension, the former president is threatening a massive purge of the nation’s defense infrastructure. He proposes dismantling — and completely overhauling — the Defense Department, the nation’s intelligence agencies (our eyes and ears), and the country’s foreign policy capabilities.

Mass firings, the loss of centuries of experience. A purge of independent, adult voices, and anyone else who might tell the new president “no.”

More important though, after the purge of the “Deep Staters,” he would “reconstitute” the country’s destroyed defenses, presumably by stacking the agencies with his own loyalists.

All while Russia advances, China rattles sabers, and the Middle East boils.

You can read the rundown that includes dumping NATO.  We just found out Hungary and Turkey aren’t even up for that.

Nixen (Silberfische). Nymphs, Gustav Klimt, cc 1899,

We all know Trump is just full of shit.  This Washington Post article on the report of his commission on election fraud just shows how much he knew and chose to ignore. “Trump-commissioned report undercut his claims of dead and double voters. A report commissioned by the former president’s campaign and obtained by The Post did not back up his claims of fraud and did not provide evidence to overturn the 2020 election.”

When Donald Trump called Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger on Jan. 2, 2021, in a now-infamous bid to overturn the 2020 election, he alleged that thousands of dead people had voted in the state.

“So dead people voted, and I think the number is close to 5,000 people. And they went to obituaries. They went to all sorts of methods to come up with an accurate number, and a minimum is close to about 5,000 voters,” he said, without citing his study.

But a report commissioned by his own campaign dated one day prior told a different story: Researchers paid by Trump’s team had “high confidence” of only nine dead voters in Fulton County, defined as ballots that may have been cast by someone else in the name of a deceased person. They believed there was a “potential statewide exposure” of 23 such votes across the Peach State — or 4,977 fewer than the “minimum” Trump claimed.

In a separate failed bid to overturn the results in Nevada, Trump’s lawyers said in a court filing that 1,506 ballots were cast in the names of dead people and 42,284 voted twice. Trump lost the Silver State by about 33,000 votes.

The researchers paid by Trump’s team had “high confidence” that 12 ballots were cast in the names of deceased people in Clark County, Nev., and believed the “high end potential exposure” was 20 voters statewide — some 1,486 fewer than Trump’s lawyers said.

According to their research, the “low end potential exposure” of double voters was 45, while the “high end potential exposure” was 9,063. The judge tossed the Nevada case even as Trump continued to claim he won the state.

The “Project 2020” report conducted by the Berkeley Research Group has now been obtained by prosecutors investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol. A copy was reviewed by The Washington Post, and it shows that Trump’s own campaign paid more than $600,000 for research that undercut many of his most explosive claims. The research was never made public.

The Justice Department has sought and obtained multiple reports, emails and interviews from witnesses that show campaign officials analyzing, and often discrediting, claims that Trump was making publicly, according to several people involved in the investigation, who like some others spoke on the condition of anonymity to disclose internal details. The Berkeley report was provided to the Justice Department earlier this month, one of the people said, after some people involved in its crafting received a subpoena.

Why do people believe this idiot?  Nothing he says is true.

Anyway, I’m cold and achy. It’s raining like crazy and has gone into the 40s. It’s the second coming of Winter. I have to dig out clothes I just boxed up, and I’m ready to sleep for some time.  Between this and the time change, I feel like a slug.

Have a good weekend!  Indictments are coming!

What’s on your reading and blogging list today?