WEDNESDAY 9 MARCH 2022

Ukraine Update: 11:30 AM

MSNBC

• Blinken speaking.   
• More excuses about the No-Fly Zone.  Blinken: Ukrainians are amazing, I (like Zelensky) would be asking for everything possible.  The US and UK have done “extraordinary things,” we have made sure they have everything to defend themselves.  (Note: If they lose it’s their fault.)  The goal is to “save lives.”  Have to see to it that this war doesn’t expand, that the war is not prolonged.  We don’t want this was to be “even deadlier, involve more people…make things harder to resolve in Ukraine itself.” (Note: Bullshit.)
• UK Foreign Minister: (Note: London is awash with Russian money.)  She is citing the action of private industry.  (Note: So now we are relying on McDonalds to stand up for democracy and using them as an excuse for why governments in the West don’t need to.)
• Blinken:  “I’m absolutely convinced that Putin will fail.”  (Note: So now we are just sitting and waiting for Putin to fail.  What a laudable position.)
• “We’re committed to defending them.  We’re committed to standing for them until we succeed in making it clear that they will hold and Putin’s efforts to undermine them will fail.” (Read: We will stand up for Ukraine until it wins.  We ain’t fighting.”)

CNN

• Vindman: US. defense systems have been moved to show that we will defend NATO. That defense system on Ukrainian soil would defend against missiles.  Patriot batteries moved closer to the Ukraine border. 
• An aircraft carrier has been moved into the Aegean Sea.  Vindman: It’s more than the ship and its planes.  It’s mainly a deterrent.
• Offer of fighter jets from Poland.  Offer was to fly them to Germany and then fly them back to Ukraine.  The US has declined that as an option.
• Vindman: The US tried to stop discussion of planes being provided earlier.  They think it’s way too provocative.  This is a “fundamentally flawed assumption.”  There is no reason for us to limit ourselves and not supply Ukraine with what they need.  Vindman fears that the blocking of the offer from Poland is a sign that the Biden administration is not willing to go for more serious weaponry.  This is a mistake.

FOX

• I was going to say that this note wasn’t about Ukraine, but it is.  Fox News is evidently marketing (using the shill Huckaby) children’s books about how wonderful Trump is.  The books are illustrated with badly drawn cartoons.  One of them shows Donald Trump with Abraham Lincoln.  These are being used to indoctrinate children.  As always, the right complains that the left is doing what they are doing (cheating on elections, indoctrinating children, attempting an authoritarian take over of democracy, on and on and on).  Just as an aside, I would like to remind you that the right accuses the left of organizing a child sex traffic ring and also eating children.  Just think about that one.
• Fox advances the narrative that a rise in oil prices has nothing to do with oil and gas companies.  They are pimping the line that Biden is using that as a distraction for his own bad administration.
• Fox is interviewing the CEO of the American Petroleum Institute.  He’s trying to scare people about policies that don’t allow the oil and gas industry to drill without constraints.  Sommers (CEO) trying to portray oil and gas as responsible for winning WWII.
• Fox and the right never let an opportunity go by to advance their interests, not even a war.  See the book: “Disaster Capitalism.”
• Horrible woman on Fox argues that when Trump was in office the bureaucracy was wiped away.  What is that woman’s name?  Harris? 
• Note: Yesterday she was telling these long-convoluted stories about what her father always told her.  Usually, these stories are composed of short, pithy statements.  No, she was going on and on about what her father supposedly always told her.  Something like: My father always told me that you had to give oil and gas free hand to do whatever the fuck they wanted to do because it was essential to the freedom of black people and the free world.  You have to watch this stuff to believe it.
• Fox is reporting that the RT editor resigns in protest over Putin’s war.
• Fox News hosts Petraeus on to comment on Ukraine.  Petraeus who gave classified information to his lover so she could write a great biography of him. This is who they have on?

TWITTER

• The EU has agreed on a ban on the provision of euro banknotes to Belarus.

NOTES

• There are so many things to learn about Ukraine and Russia, but the corporate media keeps spending hours and hours of time interviewing individuals on the ground in Ukraine.  I understand the effort to make the war personal, human, but I think we get it by now that there are real people involved in this disaster.  Simply repeating story after story after story of people who are fleeing serves only the purpose of filling air time and not talking about the things that brought us here.  The corporate media refuses to educate.  We need an educated population, not an entertained population. 
• I used to tell my students: I’m not here to make you happy.  I’m here to make you think. 
• I’ve been thinking lately about what this point in history could mean.  If people see by watching the Ukrainians, what ordinary people can do, how they can change the conditions of their existence, it may have profound implications beyond Ukraine.  That, in fact, is what Putin is so afraid of, the demand for democracy from the Ukrainians, the fact that the Ukrainians with just their bodies, threw a Russian stooge president out of the country.
• On the podcast @skullduggery, they have a Ukrainian MP on the phone and the question?  The significant question?  Whether we can expect there to be more refugees.  Jesus.  Michael Isikoff