You and your significant other each earn $60,000 a year. That’s a total household income of $120,000.
Your bills – housing, transportation, loan payments, food, everything you do – come to $10,000 a month. Your family budget is balanced.
You go out to the casino one night, and get the luckiest break ever; you walk out $80,000 ahead. 
You buy a bigger house, a newer car (and a bridge loan to finish paying off your old one), do some remodeling, put a couple of vacations and cruises and a whole lot of happy hours, on your capital one card. 
With the new mortgage, car loan, revolving credit and loans to pay for all the other goodies, your monthly expenses go up to $16,000 a month – requiring a $200,000 a year income between you and your significant other – who, remember, are still earning $120,000 a year between you. So when you’ve burned through that $80 windfall, you’ll be coming up $80,000 a year in the red.
Your options to avoid insolvency, foreclosure, and repossession are:
a. Downsize, quick – go back to a smaller house, cheaper car, etc.
b. Keep going back to the casino and hope for another big score, and hope your significant other isn’t too stupid to know what a longshot that is.
c. Browbeat your significant other into earning more money so you don’t go bankrupt, and hope he or she doesn’t leave you. As the significant other why they hate children if they don’t ratchet their income up, but fast.
That’s exactly what the state legislature and Governor Klink have done; the pandemic left the state with a one time windfall that they have spent, and much more. 
And you and I, the taxpayers of Minnesota, are the significant other. 
So what are they going to do about it?
Well, they’re going to hope that you’re a dumb spouse that thinks you can bank on casino winnings. But they are just going to hold out for option C, and demand you pony up more.
That’s exactly what just happened.
If this were a marriage, you would call the big spender an abusive spouse. 
So when you are the victim, what do you call the perpetrator? 
Yes, all the ammo is gone, which is why….the Russian advance in Bakhmut is still glacial, and the Russkies gave up a few square km crucial to the approaches to the city. That’s what always happens when the defenders run out of ammunition. Apparently they’re holding back the vaunted Red Army with balalaikas and vyshyvankas and varenyky.
Ya wanna see a fool, Kremlin Tom, all ya gotta do is shave.
Putin delenda est!
“Russian advance in Bakhmut is still glacial…”
SoURce, plEasE! 😂
The Russian advance isn’t glacial in Bakhmut, Mr. Bubble. It’s stopped…because they own it!
Lmao.
I’ve heard more than a dozen anti-Russia, pro-Ukraine pundits push for escalating the amount and quality of American war weapons supplied to Ukraine.
What none of them has said is what our actually strategy for Ukrainian victory is. That’s because they have no victory strategy, at least none that aren’t so ridiculous they refuse to speak them in public.
Occasionally one of them will speak the truth, that supplying arms & money to Ukraine is a good way to kill Russian soldiers & degrade the Russian military w/o sacrificing American soldiers.
The American public has been sold another war with no declared goals or conditions of victory. We not only have no plan for winning, we haven’t even stated that we want to win.
I don’t think that I have ever seen a post by Mitch Berg, or a comment on SITD promoting Kari lakes “stolen election” claims.
So we have another case of the Emery Blather machine turned up to 11.
I have no particular insight into the Ukraine war, I just have a question about the premise.
Everybody acts as if Russia is losing. After all, they initially attacked air bases and military installations all over the entire country so that must mean they wanted to conquer the entire country, right? But they’re not doing that, they’re stuck in the East with two lousy provinces, so that means they’re losing, right?
Unless . . . what if the initial attacks were merely to degrade Ukraine’s military capabilities, and the goal all along was to take control of the two breakway provinces in the East? What if all Russia wanted was a limited incursion, exactly as Lesko Brandon authorized? If that were the case, then Russia would be winning exactly what it wanted and exactly what it was promised.
If that were the case, all the money promised to Ukraine would be a waste of time. The war could end this minute. The Eastern European nations closest to the war want that because it would end their refugee problem. But politicians in Washington don’t want it. Why not? What are they (or their campaign donors) getting from prolonging the war?
Qui Bono?
Big, did you finally look up Mearsheimer? Sure sounds like his take on the situation from day one. And as far as I know nobody had yet claimed his bounty.
Thanks for the reminder, jpa. I had not previously heard his take on Ukraine but I am flattered that my musings remind you of his. He is obviously a brilliant guy. 😃
If someone forces Ukraine to negotiate away its territory, then we would have learned nothing from the horrors of all the wars we have fought, particularly WWII for Europe. Yes the price of supporting Ukraine is high, but the price of allowing an aggressor to succeed will be much higher in the long run.
My take regarding Ukraine is that the last time Russia conquered a free Ukraine, millions of Ukrainians died in a famine engineered from Moscow. Ukraine has a d**ned good reason to fight this invasion.
Regarding the notion that Russia just wanted a “limited incursion”, precisely why would they have been targeting Kyiv if that had been the goal, and precisely why would they be willing to sacrifice thousands of tanks and other armored vehicles for that, not to mention the lives or health of hundreds of thousands of soldiers? Watch what Russia does, not what Russia says–what they say is about 99%+ bull****.
My take on how to win this one is to send ATACMS systems to Ukraine so they can light up every ammunition and fuel depot in Crimea. Russia retreats when their supply chain collapses. And yes, it’s a lot of materiel for the country–the rest of the world (including Russia) screwed Ukraine over by giving guarantees of territorial integrity that they never intended to keep. End result was that the signers were not allowing Ukraine to arm itself, and were not helping Ukraine to extricate itself from the tentacles of Russia’s FSB. We’re fixing that now.
I don’t propose any new information, but I always like good sarcasm. From Zero Hedge today
In Bakhmut/Artyomovsk, all of NATO, all 31 member nations, were defeated by a restaurant owner and a bunch of convicts, is how I saw someone describe it. That of course caricatures the situation somewhat (Wagner is well-organized), but it’s not that far off. And that spells a serious problem for NATO.
The GOP was formed in the 1850s to oppose Mormonism and polygamy, of all things.
The Democrat Party was formed in the 1830s, by Andrew Jackson & John Calhoun, to protect the institution of slavery.
Fools say that the D’s and R’s have switched places. That is nonsense. The Democrats, since the time that they were founded, have been race-obsessed and believe that it is the most important job of the federal government to parcel out civil rights based on race.
Bikebubba wrote:
My take regarding Ukraine is that the last time Russia conquered a free Ukraine, millions of Ukrainians died in a famine engineered from Moscow. Ukraine has a d**ned good reason to fight this invasion.
Before WWI Ukraine was part of the Russian Empire. During WWI, Ukrainian nationalists were supported by the Germans & Austrians (You know, the bad guys). After WWI Ukraine collapsed into chaos with various factions backed by several flavors of Ukrainian nationalists, Russian Bolsheviks, and the French. The divisions were political as much as they were ethnic. Eventually the factions aligned with Bolsheviks were victorious & Ukraine was essentially annexed by Stalin, and so Ukraine, in 1923, assumed the same relationship with Russia it had had from the 17th century until 1914.
Most Americans cannot understand the relationship between Russia and Ukraine because it does not fit into the model of the American colonies vs Great Britain in 1776.
Ukraine is a multi-lingual, multi-ethnic state with tremendous agricultural wealth and borders which are not easily defended. It’s soil is soaked in blood. It’s Cossack rulers allied themselves with the Russians beginning in the 17th century because they wanted protection from invasion & foreign domination.
MP, all you had to say (or hum) was, “don’t know much about history…”
Before 1930, Ukraine had been under Russian control for around three centuries. But sure, the holodomor of 1930-1935 was the result of Russian domination. The clever Russkis had just been biding their time for three hundred years.
“Ukraine had been under Russian control for around three centuries”
So, for the most part, had the Poles and Finns.
“Stare Decisis” doesn’t really apply to nationalism…
LIke I said, UMMP, the last time Russia conquered a free Ukraine, the end result was the Holodomor orchestrated from Moscow. Rule from Moscow has never been a good thing, even for most ethnic Russians, and Moscow’s pattern of settling ethnic Russians in conquered provinces (among other minorities) to obscure ethnic distinctives does not change this.
Put differently, there is a reason that the rabbi in Fiddler on the Roof gave this prayer for the Tsar: Lord, bless and keep the Tsar….far away from us!. There is a reason that, ahem, so many Jews emigrated from the Russian Empire that a portion of the Catskills is called the “borscht belt.”
Regarding the babblings on Zerohedge, the way I’d phrase it is that, provided with about 1-2% of NATO’s resources, Ukraine has pushed the theoretically mighty Russian army back. Yes, we’ve used a lot of 155mm ammunition and a lot of Javelins to destroy most of Russia’s functional tanks and armored vehicles, but I consider that a darned good investment.
And a darned bad sign for Russia.