Ukraine claims Starlink never worked outside Ukraine making it impossible to use for offensive operations against Russia

You'll notice that neither side is talking about Starshield lol.

 

 Ukraine contests Musk’s claim that country’s military violated Starlink service agreement

... “It is very strange that Elon Musk is unaware of the operational limitations of Starlink in Ukraine,” Beskrestnov wrote in a post on Telegram, noting that Starlink’s civilian system in Ukraine “does not function over the territory of Russia” and that Ukrainian drones operating with Starlink have had a speed restriction of 70 to 90 km/h (roughly 43 to 56 miles per hour) for months.

“Consequently, it is PHYSICALLY IMPOSSIBLE for us to use commercial Starlink for deep-strike or medium-range strike operations,” Beskrestnov wrote. ...

 

 

 

Andy McCarthy calls out Mad King Ludwig and his supine Congress

 

 Andy McCarthy Shreds Trump for Giving ‘Aid and Comfort’ to Putin in Scorching Column — Demands Congress Investigate Immediately

 ... “Putin’s war of aggression and hoped-for conquest against Ukraine, like his war of aggression and conquest in Georgia (swaths of which he has occupied for nearly two decades), is part of his quest to reconstitute America’s Soviet enemy,” McCarthy wrote. “And President Donald Trump is giving him aid and comfort.”

McCarthy added, “In a properly functioning republic, there would be immediate hearings about this week’s shocking escalation of the Trump–Putin alliance. Since the start of Trump’s second term, it has been excruciating to watch America’s president blame the victim, our ally Ukraine, for Putin’s war of aggression.”

... “This week, in lunatic public statements … the president again blamed Ukraine for the war and gratuitously insulted Zelensky,” McCarthy said. 

... “If we … allow common sense to enter the equation, too many dark signs point in the direction of an American administration — at the very moment it was seeking Ukraine’s capitulation and threatening to leave it defenseless by denying intelligence — taking conscious action that left Ukraine exposed to an intense attack, which Russia just happens to have conducted right at the perfect time,” McCarthy wrote. “This is dark. It demands answers. Now.” 

Cuckservatism: Rush Limbaugh's hero Andy McCarthy also waves the white flag for the red flag

'Red-flag' gun laws are constitutional and sensible

Andrew McCarthy: IG report simply ignored the offence of the Hillary private server set up

Here:

[T]heir analysis left out the best intent evidence, namely, Clinton’s willful setting up of a private, non-secure server system for all official business.

Andy McCarthy is thinking about Joseph Mifsud, too

But not about his connections to Hillary, or how he might have been acting in concert with her campaign to subvert Trump's.

Someone really ought to find out where Joseph Mifsud is hiding.

Here.

Andrew McCarthy wonders why the FBI didn't give the Trump campaign a "defensive briefing" in early spring 2016

Instead, Comey waited until early January 2017 to do this, on instructions from Clapper.

Here:

There are many different ways the Obama administration could have reacted to the news that Page and Manafort had joined the Trump campaign. It could have given the campaign a defensive briefing. It could have continued interviewing Page, with whom the FBI had longstanding lines of communication. It could have interviewed Manafort. It could have conducted a formal interview with George Papadopoulos rather than approaching him with a spy who asked him loaded questions about Russia’s possession of Democratic-party emails.

Instead of doing some or all of those things, the Obama administration chose to look at the Trump campaign as a likely co-conspirator of Russia — either because Obama officials inflated the flimsy evidence, or because they thought it could be an effective political attack on the opposition party’s likely candidate.

From the “late spring” on, every report of Trump-Russia ties, no matter how unlikely and uncorroborated, was presumed to be proof of a traitorous arrangement. And every detail that could be spun into Trump-campaign awareness of Russian hacking, no matter how tenuous, was viewed in the worst possible light.

Andy McCarthy: NYTimes storyline is bunk, Obama FBI abused its foreign spy powers against its domestic political adversary Trump

As usual, McCarthy sums up the matter better than anyone else can, here, from which this excerpt:

But opening up a counterintelligence investigation against Russia is not the same thing as opening up a counterintelligence investigation against the Trump campaign.

The media-Democrat complex has tried from the start to conflate these two things. That explains the desperation to convince the public that Putin wanted Trump to win. It explains the stress on contacts, no matter how slight, between Trump campaign figures and Russians. They are trying to fill a gaping void they hope you don’t notice: Even if Putin did want Trump to win, and even if Trump-campaign advisers did have contacts with Kremlin-tied figures, there is no evidence of participation by the Trump campaign in Russia’s espionage. ... At the height of the 2016 presidential race, the FBI collaborated with the CIA to probe an American political campaign. They used foreign-intelligence surveillance and informants.

Andy McCarthy ties a nice little bow around his thesis that Hillary wasn't prosecuted because Obama was implicated in her felonies

The presidency long ago became a law unto itself. Occasionally the tyranny becomes more evident, depending on the level of the lawlessness in the heart of the man, or the woman. Good character, unfortunately, matters more than ever, but is increasingly in short supply, in each of us, in our neighbors and in our politicians.  

From the story here:

As his counselors grappled with how to address his own involvement in Clinton’s misconduct, Obama deceptively told CBS News in a March 7 interview that he had found out about Clinton’s use of personal email to conduct State Department business “the same time everybody else learned it through news reports.” Perhaps he was confident that, because he had used an alias in communicating with Clinton, his emails to and from her — estimated to number around 20 — would remain undiscovered. ...

[A]n agitated Mills emailed Podesta: “We need to clean this up — he has emails from her — they do not say state.gov.” (That is, Obama had emails from Clinton, which he had to know were from a private account since her address did not end in “@state.gov” as State Department emails do.)

Republicans Lose Again Because They Offered No Conservative Alternative

Andrew McCarthy for National Review here gets it, even if I would quibble about the precision of his election results:

In truth, millions of Americans have decided that Republicans are not a viable alternative because they are already too much like Democrats. ...

Washington’s Republican establishment is progressive, not conservative. ...

[T]he Republican campaign called for enlarging a military our current spending on which dwarfs the combined defense budgets of the next several highest-spending nations. When was the last time you heard a Republican explain what departments and entitlements he’d slash to pay for that? ...

Republicans talk about limited central government, but they do not believe in it ... They look at a money-hemorrhaging disaster like Medicare, whose unsustainability is precisely caused by the intrusion of government, and they say, “Let’s preserve it — in fact, let’s make its preservation the centerpiece of our campaign.” ...

Truth be told, most of today’s GOP does not believe Washington makes things worse. Republicans think the federal government — by confiscating, borrowing, and printing money — is the answer to every problem, rather than the source of most. That is why those running the party today, when they ran Washington during the Bush years, orchestrated an expansion of government size, scope, and spending that would still boggle the mind had Obama not come along. ... No matter what they say in campaigns, today’s Republicans are champions of massive, centralized government. They just think it needs to be run smarter — as if the problem were not human nature and the nature of government, but just that we haven’t quite gotten the org-chart right yet.

That is not materially different from what the Democrats believe. ... Tuesday pitted proud progressives against reticent progressives; slightly more preferred the true-believers. For Americans who don’t see much daylight between the two parties — one led by the president who keeps spending money we don’t have and the other by congressional Republicans who keep writing the checks and extending the credit line — voting wasn’t worth the effort.

McCarthy thinks about 2 million fewer voters showed up in 2012 than in 2004, which is "staggering", except that his election math already looks just a little off. Today I'm showing 122.5 million total votes in 2012, and 122.3 million in 2004, eight years and two elections ago. Still, that is a staggering comparison when you realize that the population has grown by a net 21 million over the period.

Clearly, as McCarthy says, the voters in 2012 "shrugged", but the shrug was actually bigger in 1996 when Republicans again characteristically picked two other moderate losers in Bob Dole and Jack Kemp. Fully 8% fewer ended up voting in 1996 than in 1992 (1% fewer voted in 1988 than in 1984).

Starting with 1968 and ending with 2008, the average increase in total votes cast in the presidential from election to election has been 6%. 2012 compared to 2008 shows 6% fewer votes cast. The slightly smaller shrug over moderate Republicans Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan may reflect the distance in time and understanding from the debates over conservatism in the 1980s and 1990s.

The single biggest gains in total votes cast, incidentally, occurred in 2004 in Bush 43 v. Kerry (16% more votes cast than in 2000) when war in Iraq put patriotism center stage (just barely 51% voted for that despite buying off seniors with Medicare Part D in 2003), followed by 1992 in Bush 41 v. Clinton (13% more votes cast than in 1988) when the issues were breaking the no new taxes pledge (43% voted against that) and "that giant sucking sound" (19% voted against that).

Republicans still haven't learned how to put conservatism all together and wrap it in a bow.