“You Gotta Resign, Bro”

Employees must wash hands, an update on Operation Housing, the Durham Report, and a cute #BeastOfTheDay

Good Evening.

Wow, folks!

We’re 48 hours into #SpecialMilitaryOperation: Housing, and ya’ll have coughed up more than $10,000 for housing for refugees and spotlights. Let’s keep it going. Here are the subscription and gift subscription buttons once again:

A few items on this that people have asked about or that have been on my mind, just so that we are all on the same page about this ethically:

First, I will not do anything that puts any refugees at risk. That may mean a certain amount of cost inefficiency is a possibility here if, say, we can’t house refugees safely in the same apartment as the spotlights. We will, of course, put safety first always, and the more I think about it, the more I think refugee housing is a higher priority than housing spotlights.

Second, similarly, if—for any reason—this project fails and I am unable to rent an apartment, I will donate all of the money raised to refugee resettlement. There are a number of reasons this could happen. The building management might not be willing to rent one of the apartments to me, for example; as I mentioned yesterday, the management might not let me house someone there other than myself in an apartment. The apartments might not be suitable (the angle might be bad or there may be trees in the way). I might get evicted. I have never done a project like this before and I’m not promising that I will succeed at it. I am promising that I won’t profit off of it and that one way or another, the money that you contribute will go to #SpecialMilitaryOperations, Ukrainian refugees, or both. Any money raised through this drive that I cannot spend on some combination of housing for people or spotlights I will donate. And I will account for the expenditure to you, the reader.

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Speaking of #SpecialMilitaryOperations, the second annual Sunflower Planting at the #GatesOfHell will take place on May 27 at 5:00 pm at the entrance to the Russian embassy. This year, I am putting it on with my friends at U.S. Ukrainian Activists.

Here’s how it works: We all show up and plant sunflowers all around the embassy compound. This antagonizes the Russians. Last year, a Russian diplomat kicked a bunch of sunflowers laid out by Ukrainian American children. We got it all on film, of course.

The Ukrainian Ambassador to the United States, Amb. Oksana Markarova, has told me she means to come plant with us again this year. I will post the event announcement when it goes up.

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I had a good conversation with the great Charlie Sykes on the Bulwark Podcast today on the flop of the Durham investigation:

Over at Lawfare, I have started this reading diary of the Durham Report. I posted the first section today. It opens:

On Monday, the Justice Department released the Durham Report—the long-awaited account by Special Counsel John Durham of his investigation into the conduct of the 2016 Russia investigation. Yesterday, I read the executive summary and formed some initial impressions. Starting Wednesday, however, I am reading the entire document carefully, starting at the beginning. Much as I did when I wrote a reading diary of the Mueller Report back in 2019,  I will be writing up my thoughts as I go in this post. There will be no cohesive argument to this journal. It will simply be a collection of my observations, questions, and thoughts as I go through the document. It will get long. I will mostly not attempt to summarize the underlying document, merely to reflect on it, but I will organize this post by document section, so that you can read it as a commentary on the actual text. I will update the post as I read. I hope people find it useful.

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I have stumbled upon a really good Ukraine podcast, for those who are looking for a first-rate set of lectures on Ukrainian history. Yale historian Timothy Snyder, a noted Western scholar of Ukraine, gave an undergraduate course this past fall on the development of Ukrainian statehood and nationhood. It’s a lecture class and Yale has created a podcast out of the sessions called “The Making of Modern Ukraine.” I have listened to the first four episodes so far, and they are genuinely informative and valuable. It doesn’t make me want to be an undergraduate again; nothing could. But these are great to listen to, and I highly recommend them.

Here’s the first episode:

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Quotation of the Day

The New York Times reports that Hero America Has Earned George Santos,

said on Wednesday that he has been “100 percent compliant” with the Ethics Committee’s investigation, but he has not appeared before them yet. As he spoke, Representative Jamaal Bowman, Democrat of New York, loudly heckled him, urging him to step down.

“You gotta resign, bro,” Mr. Bowman said, extending his thumb in a hit-the-road gesture. “You gotta resign.”

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And in case what’s missing from your life is a smiling hedgehog getting an ear massage, behold today’s #BeastOfTheDay: