Ukraine war: Putin’s Reckoning Is Now

“President Vladimir Putin’s Russian Federation is taking on water. Like the Titanic, it has struck an immovable object — in this case Ukraine — and it is sinking fast,” cheer Jonathan Sweet & Mark Toth at The Hill.

Volodymyr Zelensky’s war strategy is clear: “When Russia grows tired, change comes.”

Putin ally Alexander Lukashenko has “ruled out sending troops to fight in Ukraine,” admitting that Belarus, too, is “very vulnerable militarily” to Ukrainian attacks.

Putin’s “battlefield failures” have led to “nuclear saber-rattling” and attacks against “civilian targets,” including “bomb shelters, churches and cultural centers — all war crimes or even forms of genocide.”

Vlad “can no longer defend his own skies, and he will not come to the defense of his allies”; he’s become “the grandfather hiding in his bunker.”

Legal beat: Feds Must Prosecute Masked Rioters

“Anti-masking laws,” known federally as the “Ku Klux Klan Act,” criminalize gangs of people hiding their faces to “prevent or hinder the free enjoyment of any federal right,” notes Akiva Shapiro at City Journal.

It’s time to enforce these laws to prosecute the “masked hooligans” who have threatened synagogues and harassed people dining in Jewish-owned restaurants.

Even when “caught on video,” few perps have had “to face the consequences of their actions — because their faces were covered.”

Anti-masking laws “helped dismantle the KKK” and can work now against “pro-Hamas protesters” who “hide behind masks to harass people they hate” and “interfere with the free exercise of fundamental constitutional rights.” 

Culture critic: A Tombstone for Obamaism

“Deservedly brutal” takes on the new Obama Presidential Center” compare it to a garbage can or the Death Star, but to UnHerd’s Ryan Zickgraf it’s most like a “mausoleum, the Obamausoleum, if you will” — the “world’s largest headstone” marking the “final resting place of Obamaism,” a “fantasy” of “politics after politics” centered on a bogus consensus.

Obama’s post-presidency — “the Netflix deals, the Bruce Springsteen podcast” — also pushed the “idea that America’s problems are fundamentally narrative rather than structural.”

The building also tries the “trick” of “making his power look like its own critique: socially conscious, locally engaged, and solemnly democratic,” yet it stands most as a “cold and misshapen monument to Obama’s ego.”

In the end, “there is little left of Obama’s legacy to grasp onto other than 2010s nostalgia.”

Intel watch: Gabbard Revives Russian Disinfo

In 2022, “Russian propagandists asserted” that “the U.S. was funding bioweapons laboratories in Ukraine as a justification” for invading that country, recalls Reason’s Ronald Bailey.

US and international organizations “thoroughly debunked” the charge, but “prominent” right-wingers, including Tulsi Gabbard, still “parroted” it.

In her final days as director of national intelligence, Gabbard revived Russia’s disinfo, claiming “newly declassified evidence” was “withheld” from Americans.

But it’s not new: In 2022, the Defense Department readily acknowledged America had supported 46 Ukrainian labs, health facilities and diagnostic sites.

And Gabbard’s released info shows only that Washington funded “reasonable studies” for “a lot of veterinary research labs focused on wild animal and livestock infectious diseases.”

“No evidence of a nefarious bioweapons plot has emerged.”

Centrists: Make Homes Affordable Again

A new Team Trump brief on affordable housing “includes several reform ideas,” such as “capping permitting fees, eliminating duplicative reviews and chopping down the timelines for local agencies to review plans,” cheers The Washington Post Editorial Board.

“Degrowth environmentalists and not-in-my-backyard activists” have gone silent because “both parties understand that fixing the problem requires more construction.”

Per polling, over 60% “of both parties” want Washington “to encourage communities to change their local zoning and land-use laws for new construction.”

More than half of states have legalized “‘middle housing’ — townhouses or starter homes on smaller lots,” allowing a “surge in development,” and a fall in median rent prices.

With such “broad political appeal,” “building new homes should be easy.”

— Compiled by The Post Editorial Board