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He was clear in what he was going after with these sanctions: - Russian banks, freezing assets not only in the US but sounds like quite a few other countries. Also prohibiting them from using a multitude of currencies. - Oligarchs - Russian state run companies - Tech imports He also followed that up with confirmation of full NATO support and went into describing article 4 a bit and indicated this isn't necessarily the end of our actions. So the high level view of our actions was there. I'm definitely interested in details as to what those sanctions look like specifically still though.

I didn't find the speech that bad, but yes, the Q&A was not good. Not even just the dazed and confused look when trying to select who to call on, but he didn't seem to confident in some of his answers. Would have loved to have heard more about SWIFT. In looking online right after that question, it looks like there are some concerns that could backfire where just yesterday I was hearing that was the 'nuclear option' in terms of sanctions.

Likely all he was able to give Putin about our defense abilities were limited to the logistics of putting a military parade together down Pennsylvania Ave.

Likely very little. My guess is that even POTUS is on a 'need to know' level of access, where just because he's president, if he's not specifically involved in something, he doesn't need to know what is going on.

To be fair, HLN is more or less a more light-hearted recap of news. A small portion I caught had Robin Meade interviewing a CNN correspondent from Ukraine. That is pretty much unheard off on that show. Just out of curiosity, I switched over to Fox News to see how they were responding. Not what I expected based on everything I hear about Tucker and some of Trump's garbled hot mess of idiotic speak on this. Very anti-Russia. I mean, it is FoxNews though so they did focus on some comments from various UN/Ukraine members that wanted sanctions in place due to the build up of forces alone and questioned if Biden didn't do enough to prevent this.

Just turned on the UN Security Council Emergency Meeting on CSPAN. Who is the current president of the Security Council, Russia of course. </facepalm>

He's not getting the Baltic's. Belarus is trying to court favor by being as much of an ally as possible, but their leaders should be watching their back. Moldova definitely would be next. And while I joked about Obama's dissing of Romney over Russia, Obama obviously was right that China as a major concern. China and Taiwan are very interested in how this plays out.

Absolutely, it takes time to regroup.

If Craig sought out to find the worst possible folks to run his campaign, than I think it proves he has some remarkable leadership quality because he succeeded with flying colors. At the same time that's coming out, Bloomberg with some good news for Whitmer. https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2022-02-16/michigan-governor-gretchen-whitmer-leads-the-no-1-u-s-economy

Yup, that's a name I hadn't heard in forever. Reminds me of a buddy informing me about a celebrity death recently. "Ivan Reitman died today", followed up shortly with: "In other news, Ivan Reitman was alive as of yesterday"

Honestly that wasn't on my mind, but yeah, that was a mess. I was thinking more of W advocating for Ukraine and Georgia into NATO. I guess you could argue in hindsight, if that was done, Russia wouldn't be able to do what they did afterwards, but also, here we are several presidents later and even Ukraine's president was pleading for NATO to simply say yes or no to put that talk to bed just last week. Lot's of what if's. One thing I can say confidently, Putin has always been the constant in the equation.

It's not even about more nuclear development, but rather keeping what you have. They have roughly doubled the capacity of their energy grid in the last 20 years and did it on the back of renewables, which is fantastic. But due to Nuclear power being removed, coal and oil usage is down only minimally and natural gas usage is up. It just annoys me that they like to claim a higher morale 'green' policy and then do this crap. https://www.cleanenergywire.org/news/qa-why-germany-phasing-out-nuclear-power-and-why-now So yes, if we can get Germany to purchase from the US and other US allies, great for our oil companies and bad for Russia, but also tough on those that buy gas in the western hemisphere. Also bad for those that want to decrease carbon emissions.

It was snarky, but towards Obama and not ROMAD. Yes though, it was prompted by ROMAD only pointing out Trump. Putin had a sympathetic voice in Trump without a doubt, but it's not like Putin didn't run over Obama. Many pieces went into where we're at today, many even before Obama too.

If only the Germans had some type of technology, let’s say a technology that is safe, produces energy with minimal carbon footprint, and could be made right in Germany…if only. Obviously Donald didn’t push back, but just him, really? You sound like you think Russia is a threat. The 80’s called, they want their foreign policy back.

I suspect this is exactly what Putin is hoping for. He gets a little bit more of Ukraine, sanctions aren't that bad, and my guess is he's hoping when everything dies down, Nord gets started back up.

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-10536311/Biden-phones-Zelensky-gathers-National-Security-team-Putin-speech.html Biden's first sanctions prohibit business with those two States that Russia has moved into. More apparently expected tomorrow, but the line I don't like is this: I hope that's a mistake and not the thinking of this administration. Putin remembers Obama's red line in Syria. He chose to cross it, the penalties should be just as severe as if he took the whole country. Might be the only chance to prevent him from taking it all if we do in fact hold him to our word.

FWIW, I don't want to pay any taxes. That doesn't mean there isn't a need for them. I also don't like the GOP mindset that anytime the state has a surplus, it demands we cut taxes, especially when Michigan demands a balanced budget every year and as you state below, we could put that additional money to good use, per an example you provided below: Federal spending has gotten out of control and at the same time, money towards States/Localities is still shrinking as a percentage as their pension liabilities have grown. It may not be sexy, but Whitmer announced that 3.5 billion dollar bond for roads, we're paying for that sooner or later. Instead of a tax cut, financially it makes sense to have this surplus cover that, heck with the Infrastructure passed, maybe we don't even move forward with it and use the surplus to shore up some pension payments freeing up more money for day to day operations.

i heard a report that Russian TV has already shifted from Ukraine human rights abuses to talk about Russia being able to convince the world that they need to deal with Ukraine without a shot fired and mocking western media for saying war was inevitable. Obviously they control the narrative, so it can change quickly. That said, I think that's telling. Rather Putin planned on invading and backed off after seeing surprising support or what, i'm not sure, but hopefully this is a good sign.

This infrastructure bill, along with excess Covid money, has created a huge boon for the state which she will/can point to it going to the roads. That said, even with it appropriated and it will greatly improve our roads, it's essentially still running on a promise as it won't be done by the time we go to the polls. Outside of that, is it just that she stood up to Trump? Outside of Covid, what big bills has she signed? The only one I can think of was the auto insurance bill which moved us from the highest paid insurance to only the 2nd highest paid insurance and we got that benefit at the detriment of some of the most seriously injured people. That said, i see bills like the ones just put forward by the MI GOP where they want to cut taxes just becuase we're getting so much Federal money and it makes me feel a Dem in the Governor's seat is good to safe guard from that.

When I saw it was Wisconsin, this was one of my initial thoughts. Similar to that old Chappelle bit, trust me Juwan, I get it, but you can't do that. You need to do that Juwan....but you can't do that. You have to do that....damnit, but you can't do that. If Michigan gets ahead of it and suspends him for the rest of the season, I think he can stay. If they wait for the Big10/NCAA to weigh in, they risk public outcry/support issues that may make the decision for them.

I apologize if I wasn't clear, in reviewing I honestly am not sure where I went wrong, but do show that I mentioned various differences in different posts. For example I started here mentioning several different protests in recent years. I only referenced shutting down roads which BLM/George Floyd riots, i'm sorry, peaceful protests were ongoing. But I did think it was common knowledge that a precinct in Minneapolis was burned down. Pretty sure Portland had a precinct that was started on fire too. Still, I'm mentioning several different ones though. After that, comes to this comment by me below. At this point I am claiming that I believe there is a double standard in how the Freedom Truckers are being viewed. IMO, they are being viewed the same way the violent and illegal segments of the BLM/George Floyd riots, again, sorry, peaceful protests, should have been viewed. So again, I'm pointing to multiple things, - camping/Wall Street - taking over city blocks/Seattle - Burning down a police station/BLM - shutting down interstate and service roads/BLM - International traffic/Freedom Truckers. Ok, here is where it went sideways: My point here wasn't that you guys were downplaying Occupy Wall Street, my complaint was that previous to this last above comment, when I questioned why Freedom Truckers deserved universal bad press from MSM everyone seemed to ignore BLM/Floyd and the Seattle CHAZ occupation which I had brought up and focused on the one protest I mentioned that the illegality of it was as little as a trespassing ticket. I wasn't saying that horrible things happened during this protest.

I'm guessing at least based on reports I heard from him here in Detroit that he's not often in a situation where he would be able to practice this training, so I'm guessing that's not it. With that though, we see this happen from the crowd vantage point, not from the Stafford's view. I'm sure there were security and other folks that rushed to her side immediately who were already down where she fell. In twitter-world, Kelly came off looking good and Matt looked bad. This happens on a highway, people are yelling at Kelly to stop gawking and telling everyone to act like Matt and let the folks attending to the situation deal with it.

Grabbing my original posts. I pointed out a very draconian way to deal with a protest, then said I’m game for it here. I even took a dig at Wall Street that the Wall Street Occupy protest may not have been impacted as Wall Street stole all those protesters money already. i really have no patience for legal protesters that take nothing but my time, go ahead and cost the economy money due to illegal actions while protesting…I’m not saying I wish them dead, but…..

You guys made the comparison, and yes it sucked. I merely stated they were protests, which they were.

haha, you are quite talented at selective reading/hearing. I have said nothing about different rules. In fact, I haven't said anything about my views on the protests themselves nor the level of illegality that the protesters used in order to protest nor a ranking of that illegality. I simply pointed to previous 'peaceful' protests have occurred and were cheered on by the left and the media. Some were as small as taking over a public park, no big deal without a permit. Others resulted in horrific destruction to some inner cities. The fact that each of you keep pointing to the Occupy Wall Street portion of my statement, which I simply argued was indeed a protest, just like this border thing is a protest, points that you know you can't speak to how the media, dem party, and each of you viewed the BLM protests which caused a significant larger economic damage to impoverished areas, resulted in deaths related to the riots that came with the protests, burned down businesses (and police stations), among other things.