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The latest on Ukraine, from the Associated Press:
Residents of Ukraine’s besieged southeastern coast awaited possible evacuation Sunday as the country’s president said Russia’s obsession with capturing a key port city had left its forces weakened and created opportunities for his military.
Two loud explosions were heard in Odesa on the Black Sea, and black smoke was seen rising above the city, which is where Ukraine’s navy is headquartered. It is west of Mariupol, a smaller port that has been under attack for almost the entire war and rescuers are desperate to reach.
The Odesa city council said in a brief statement that a morning airstrike set off fires in some areas. The Russian military said hours later that it used ships and aircraft-fired missiles to strike an oil processing plant and fuel depots that were supplying Ukrainian troops.
HALPERIN SAYS: I can’t believe how blithely people ride the subway without masks, and/but I can believe it.
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The latest on the Democrats’ outlook for the midterms, via Dan Balz:
Democrats need a change in the national mood: events or things to alter what Gallup and other pollsters continue to report. Here are three factors to watch:
Whether the public mood brightens as people try to move on from the pandemic.
What happens to inflation and whether the Federal Reserve can slow things down without triggering a recession.
The war in Ukraine and what a prolonged conflict might do to the world economy and public sentiment toward the Biden administration.
For now, the good jobs report is something for Biden and the Democrats to point to as progress, though recently, monthly employment numbers haven’t had any real political impact. Democrats have only a few months left to begin turning the lines on all these polls upward.
HALPERIN SAYS: I don’t understand how North Carolina was made a #8 seed.
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The latest on Tom Friedman war analysis:
To be sure, Ukraine’s democracy is frail and the country has had its own serious issues with oligarchs and corruption. Kyiv’s burning aspiration, though, was not to join NATO but to join the European Union, and it was in the process of cleaning itself up to do just that.
That’s what really triggered this war. Putin was never going to let a Slavic Ukraine become a successful free-market democracy in the E.U. next door to his stagnating Slavic Russian kleptocracy. The contrast would have been intolerable for him, and that is why he is trying to erase Ukraine.
But Putin, it turns out, had no clue what world he was living in, no clue about the frailties of his own system, no clue how much the whole free, democratic world could and would join the fight against him in Ukraine, and no clue, most of all, about how many people would be watching.
HALPERIN SAYS: The YouTube TV algorithm is really impressive.
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The latest analysis on Putin’s hold on power, via Ross Douthat:
[I]f we intend to make economic war on Russia for a generation, we should be cleareyed about the calculus. In the hopes of making a dangerous great power as weak as possible, we will make it more likely that Putinism rules for decades, and that Russia remains our deadly enemy for as long as anyone can reasonably foresee.
HALPERIN SAYS: When the Wordle word can be made into three or four other words with the change of a single letter, whatever.
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The latest on Donald Trump’s loooooong Michigan Saturday night rally, via the Detroit News:
Former President Donald Trump tried to boost select Michigan candidates running for secretary of state, attorney general and the Legislature in a nearly two-hour Saturday address that aimed to cement his influence in the Michigan GOP.
Three weeks ahead of the Michigan Republican nominating convention, Trump criticized Michigan’s 2020 election as “rigged” and encouraged supporters to ask each state candidate at the April 23 nominating convention “if they will support the Trump ticket.”
“If they won’t give you that assurance, don’t give them your vote,” he said to a crowd of more than 5,000 people at the Michigan Stars Sport Center in Washington Township. Thousands of other attendees stood outside of the at-capacity sports complex, mirroring the crowds Trump attracted at that location while president in 2018 and 2020.
HALPERIN SAYS: It is way too cold for spring.
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The latest on how Democrats have played right into Ron DeSantis’ hands all too often, via Charles C. W. Cooke:
If the Florida Democratic Party understands this, it has a peculiar way of showing it. Instead of calmly rebuilding, it has allowed itself to become so crazy in its opposition to DeSantis, it has elevated him to national status, provided him with all the incentives he needs to play Churchill at the gates, and, by confirming that any Republican (not just Trump) will be treated terribly in the press, turned him into a rock-ribbed conservative hero.
HALPERIN SAYS: I will probably not watch the Grammys.
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