Daily cartoon / meme roundup: The top tweet is what a real threat of losing freedom looks like.

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Scottie’s world today

lived to be faact check by boy buns

I worked on this all day and only got through a third of the web sites. There is such a back long I did not even get to the fun ones. I will start early in the morning and try to plow through them to get some more fun ones for everyone. Best wishes and my very best hopes for the Ukrainians.

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Hey maskholes, truckholes and gun fetishists: THIS is what the threat of losing freedom looks like. https://t.co/RPXfyYRpyi

— Randi Mayem Singer (@rmayemsinger) February 24, 2022

Andy Marlette for Feb 23, 2022

Andy Marlette for Feb 22, 2022

Andy Marlette for Feb 21, 2022

Putrid campaign ads

Political cartoon

Andy Marlette for Feb 24, 2022

before and after putin

Trump is putin big fan

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destroy you from within.

mexico would like a word

Russian land stealers

Political cartoon

Reaching for a deadly book

it wont stop at the schools

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When the fence fails

before another god impregnates you

what is freedom of religion

selling a gun mean murder

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Misleading right wing media cartoons / memes

The right wing wants to blunt the push to lower college costs and to cancel student loan debts. Look we tell people to get ahead they need an education. Then we make getting that education very hard to get for most people, well out of their price range. Then we allow predatory lending practices especially for the fly by night schools that don’t even graduate students or have jobs programs to charge huge fees and interest. It is all to make sure only the wealthy can get ahead. That only the wealthy can send their kids to higher educations, while poor families face the fact that their kids will have labor or menial jobs. The idea is the lower incomes children will work for and serve the higher income’s children. The other thing this does is promote profit for the lenders instead of that money going to help the economy and giving the people with these loans the chance to live decent lives instead of being financially destroyed by high interest loans.

This is the right wing misinformation media cartoonist Rivers. Need I even address it? While members of the right dress up as Nazis and carry their flag / symbols he accuses the left of doing so. While the right wing defends Putin invading a free and sovereign nation he accuses the left of being Nazis. The whole thing is a projection and an attempt to deflect from the actions from the right, tRump, and Putin.

Now he makes the same claim against Canada’s leader.

Again this is Rivers a far right delusional cartoonist. Here he makes the claim that Canada is an authoritarian nation worse than the Nazis. Well he does like Nazis.

I do not put much stock in this narrative any more. As the population in rural areas shrink it would seem those able would leave, and it maybe that the remaining older people might be stronger Republicans. But the population centers and the over all population in the US remains Democratic. I think this is an attempt to discourage Democrats in the rural areas to keep them from voting and to make the right wing feel stronger than they are.

The right wing media so badly misconstrued the Durham filing that he has to make a new filing explaining that he did not assert the things Fox and other far right media was saying he had claimed. The need by / on the right for something to support tRump’s wild claims and show that he never should have been investigated for the crimes and corruption he committed is so great they have resorted to making things up. But when the rest of the media doesn’t report their fantasys and made up stories they claim the media is bias and wont show things that cast tRump in a good light.

The Durham filing never claimed Hillary or her people spied on tRump. This is another creation of Fox media hosts. The techs looking into the servers at the White House were hired by the White House during the Obama presidency. But you can not gin up outrage by talking about techs hired to look at the traffic on a server by President Obama so they made up a story that would rile up the base.

The right wing has such a warped view of science, biology, and pregnancy they think an abortion is the murder of a human. I have been arguing with a right winger that claims the second of egg and sperm meeting the result is a human baby. Not the potential for one, but is one right then. That then leads to any sex is an attempt to make a baby.

Yes the price of fuel is rising fast. There is a war happening. Stocks are tumbling. Rivers is a right wing media cartoonist who appears to support Putin in this conflict. It is going to get worse. But the US and the world has no choice, we can not let Putin get away with invading a sovereign democratic nation. It will not only embolden him but every wannbe dictator on the planet.

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The sanctions that the US and the other countries being implemented will hurt Russia and the oligarchs badly. I doubt that it will cause Russia to withdraw from Ukraine but as Biden said these are sanctions that will hurt more over time. The longer Putin stays in Ukraine the weaker Russia will get and the weaker Putin’s hold on power will get. I think Putin misjudged the will of the rest of the advanced nations.

Those “sacred cows” didn’t commit treason by attempting to overthrow the government. And those “sacred cows” are fighting for civil equality and justice, not fighting to overturn a fair election under false pretenses. It’s sad when someone tries to compare Trump traitors to people who want the right not to be murdered by the police.

twclix Premium Member about 5 hours ago

@mlester101Mike, you really screwed this one up. The January 6 insurrection was a traitorous effort to support a lying psychopathic malignant narcissist in his effort to overthrow a clean election.

The BLM riots were violent, but much of the violence was instigated by right wing agitators and fools like Kyle Rittenhouse. And why the violence? Not because of a lying psychotic politician. But because of persistent embedded police violence towards Black citizens. Had the January 6 insurrectionists been Black, they all would have been killed before they got inside the Capitol.

Your defense of them shows you are in league with men like Putin and trump. That speaks to deficiencies that make me seriously question your character and your integrity.

The attempt to form an equivalence between an attempt to overthrow a valid federal election with the race riots inspired by right wing agitators and their BLM counterparts is simply wrong. There is no equivalence.

The BLM folks don’t want to be shot and killed by police anymore. They’ve had enough. It doesn’t excuse what a few rioters did, but it is completely understandable, and a civil matter.

On the other hand your insurrectionists were supporting baseless, pernicious lies that you and your ilk have been spreading. They are an open, obvious threat to the United States of America.

I find it hard to believe you cannot discern the difference between race riots and treason.

Why do you hate American aspirational morality, and spout such lying, destructive garbage?

Clearly you’ve been propagandized and brainwashed, but that’s no excuse. If the US survives you and your type, historians will look back at you with open disdain for having supported the destruction of our democracy by a lying psychopath and his fawning media support.

(Oh, and Mike, you are clearly a prime example of the fawning media that supports lies and treason.)

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And now some for fun

Trump Again Celebrates Putin In Mar-A-Lago Speech

Trump Again Celebrates Putin In Mar-A-Lago Speech

The New York Times reports:

Only hours before the Russian invasion of Ukraine began, former President Donald J. Trump again praised the cunning of President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia while lashing out at the intellect of President Biden.

“I mean he’s taking over a country for $2 worth of sanctions,” Mr. Trump said of Mr. Putin to donors and Republican lawmakers at Mar-a-Lago, his private club, on Wednesday. “I’d say that’s pretty smart.”

The kind words a former president gave a foreign adversary locked in a geopolitical showdown with the United States — and committing the most egregious act of aggression in Europe since World War II — would be virtually unprecedented, except that Mr. Trump himself had praised Mr. Putin only a day earlier, saying his aggression was “genius” and “very savvy.”

Read the full article.

A day after Donald Trump called President Vladimir Putin's aggression toward Ukraine "genius" — and hours before the invasion began — Trump again praised the cunning of the Russian leader while lashing out at President Biden. https://t.co/5CPStpH2Rs
— The New York Times (@nytimes) February 24, 2022

NEW: Donald Trump AGAIN repeatedly praised Vladimir Putin from a Mar-a-Lago fundraiser tonight — attended by #NCSen candidate @TedBuddNC, #NVSen candidate @AdamLaxalt, and #GASen candidate @HerschelWalker. pic.twitter.com/TPptW6czHM
— American Bridge 21st Century (@American_Bridge) February 24, 2022

Russian tanks roll past CNN reporter as they appear to head towards Ukraine

Sorry no CC, but the visuals of the rockets launching and the tanks on their way to Ukraine.

Sanctions 2.0

Eight years ago, after Russia annexed Ukraine’s Crimean Peninsula, the U.S. and its allies harshly condemned the invasion and imposed economic sanctions on Russia.

It barely seemed to matter.

Russia still controls Crimea. Russia’s economy, after going through a recession, soon started growing again. President Vladimir Putin remains firmly in control of his government — and has now begun another invasion, this time of eastern Ukraine.

In response, President Biden yesterday announced a new set of sanctions, imposed in tandem with Britain and the European Union. Putin’s aggression, Biden said, is “a flagrant violation of international law, and it demands a firm response from the international community.” Biden also signaled that more sanctions may follow.

The obvious question is whether these sanctions will be any more effective than the earlier ones. Today’s newsletter lays out the possibilities.

The 2014 sanctions against Russia did have some effect — arguably more than many people have realized. They made it harder for Russian banks to obtain foreign loans and restricted Western companies from working with Russian oil companies, among other steps.

By the summer of 2014, Russia’s economy was shrinking, and it continued shrinking for two years. The value of the ruble plunged on global markets, increasing the price of many goods for companies and consumers. Russian businesses had a harder time raising money for new projects.

These economic problems seem to have softened Putin’s domestic support. His approval rating among Russians initially surged after the Crimea invasion — to around 80 percent — before falling. It has hovered between 60 percent and 65 percent for much of the past two years, according to the Levada Center. Last year, opposition groups held some of the largest protests of Putin’s nearly two decades in power.

The sanctions might even have been painful enough to have deterred Putin from invading eastern Ukraine in 2014, which he seemed to be planning, as Anders Aslund and Maria Snegovaya have argued in an Atlantic Council report.

“In 2014, when Putin invaded Ukraine the first time and annexed Crimea, the West acted too slowly and timidly initially,” Michael McFaul, the U.S. ambassador to Russia from 2012 to 2014, told me yesterday.

One reason is that the 2014 sanctions were the product of negotiations with European countries that wanted to be more cautious than the U.S. The sanctions were also intentionally narrow, designed to hurt sectors of the economy with close ties to Putin’s regime while minimizing the effect on most Russians and on the global economy.

The reality is that for sanctions to have big political repercussions, they often need to be harsh. “‘Smart’ or ‘targeted’ sanctions won’t work,” Edward Fishman and Chris Miller, two international-relations experts, recently wrote in Politico. “To really impose pain on Russia, the U.S. and Europe will have to bear some burden, too — although, fortunately, there are ways to minimize the fallout for Western economies.”

Biden acknowledged as much in his remarks at the White House yesterday. “Defending freedom will have costs, for us as well and here at home,” he said. “We need to be honest about that.” He added that he would take steps intended to minimize the increase in gas prices.

This is the approach that the U.S. took toward Iran more than a decade ago. It imposed tough sanctions, despite their likely effect on world oil markets and the damage to Iranians’ living standards. Those sanctions helped push Iran’s regime to negotiate over its nuclear program.

In Russia’s case, a more aggressive set of sanctions would start with a refusal to buy its oil — by far Russia’s biggest revenue source — perhaps phased in to mitigate the price increases on global markets. It could also involve restricting exports to Russia, like automobile parts and computers, or forbidding other banks from working with Russian banks.

More to come?

Which path are Biden and the E.U. choosing?

For now, they have imposed sanctions that Biden said went beyond the 2014 sanctions while still falling well short of what the U.S. and Europe could impose. The measures include blocking Russia’s government from borrowing money in Western financial markets and cutting off two large Russian banks from the U.S. financial system.

(My colleague Edward Wong has more details here. And Peter Coy of Times Opinion has written that isolating banks can be an effective tool.)

In the short term, those sanctions will almost certainly not cause Putin to stop menacing Ukraine. “Russia right now is sitting on quite a pile of extra cash,” Melissa Eddy, a Times correspondent in Berlin, told my colleague Claire Moses. “They have a war chest.”

But there are two big uncertainties: whether the sanctions hurt Russia’s economy once that war chest is drawn down; and whether the U.S. and Europe will impose tougher sanctions if Putin continues his war.

“The U.S. and the E.U. have worked hard over eight weeks to pull together what would be a serious, painful, massive package of sanctions that is designed to hurt,” Steven Erlanger, The Times’s chief diplomatic correspondent in Europe, told us. They have not yet enacted all of those potential sanctions. But yesterday’s announcement, Steven added, “gives them room to hit Putin harder if he does more.”

Biden vowed yesterday to follow that strategy: “If Russia goes further with this invasion,” he said, “we stand prepared to go further.”

I want to thank Nan for the information above. This is from the New York Times. I hope it displays correctly it was a beast to get into the page. I did notice something I want to emphasize in the map. The area under control of the separatists is not the same as the area that Putin declared independent. The separatists actually controlled far less territory than Putin annexed. But it is not really important as Putin is now attacking the capital city Kyiv. He is trying to scare the Ukrainian government into surrendering. If not he will do it the hard way. At this point he is not going to leave without getting what he wants. There has already been Ukrainian deaths, but there will be a lot more.