Putin at a "Goodfellas" Moment?

I am hoping that Putin is approaching a "Goodfellas" moment with his oligarchs. Putin's Ukrainian adventures have brought unwanted heat from the West on the enterprises of kleptocratic Russia. All of Russia's big companies have a lot of short term debt they will find almost impossible to refinance due to sanctions and falling oil and natural gas prices. If the oligarch's companies can't refinance, they will default on the loans and won't be able to do business in the West because any assets they have there or send there will be attached to pay what they owe. It's even possible that the oligarchs' personal assets could be seized to pay their companies' debts as part of future sanctions. In 1999, the corruption charges against the government threatened the oligarchs and Putin's Chechen War helped them avoid trouble. This time, the sanctions and falling oil and natural gas prices threaten the oligarchs, and the Ukraine War made things worse. Analyzing it like a crime family would, the oligarchs may decide it's time for Putin to end up floating in the Volga river. 

Small Ball is the Way to Beat The One

Like a lot of other Conservatives, I was a little disappointed that we didn’t raise slightly more fuss about our Dear Leader’s efforts to make law without Congress.  However, I think the small ball concessions we imposed for the Continuing Resolution is the way to win against the One Not Quite All of Us Were Waiting For.  Small ball puts our Dear Leader on ground he can't hold because he has no attention span and no patience.  His teleprompter tactics are geared towards lying about a few big issues and getting low information voters to believe the lies.   His backers in the Pravda Press are also geared to attacking on a few big issues, like the mythical war on women and the fabricated "hands up, don't shoot."  So forcing the Chicago Machine Prodigy to fight down in the weeds against individual department funding bills festooned with all sorts of riders and budget cuts is exactly how to maneuver him out of his trenches without going over the top into massive machine gun fire from the teleprompter and the MSM repeaters.  A billion here, a billion there is big money whether you're spending or cutting.  Also, technical things, like eliminating the current services baseline budget calculation, can make a big difference and yet be inexplicable to voters, so they can't be vetoed.  

Please excuse my mixed metafors,  Perhaps you should view them as a metaphor smoothie..

Liberals Take Undeserved Credit for Cheap Oil

Liberals are trying to take credit for falling oil and natural gas prices, which is ludicrous.  Fracking in the US and Saudi Arabian oil production policy are the main causes of big moves in energy prices.  The initial falling prices of oil and natural gas came from fracking, which Liberals strongly oppose and have outlawed in New York and California. If the Keystone Pipeline had been built and if it was legal to export crude oil from the US, the price of oil would be even lower. Liberals oppose both of those actions in the name of preventing global warming. The other contributing factor to crashing oil prices is Saudi Arabia's conclusion that the Chicago Machine Prodigy in Chief will not stop the Iranians from building nuclear weapons. They decided to maintain Saudi oil production at current levels to crash the price and bankrupt the Iranian mullahs. For the Saudis, damage to Russia was a nice side benefit, as the Russians sell weapons and reactors to Iran. Which of these actions did our Dear Leader have any positive contribution towards? I grant that the "Reset" with Russia and the endless nuclear negotiations with Iran caused the Saudis to conclude they had to act alone. Do you think that was the intended consequence when the Smartest President Ever made those moves?

Gruber Subpoenas will Cause More Disks to Fail

As everybody in IT knows, the leading cause of disk crashes is subpoenas. All Issa's Congressional subpoenas are going to do is cause more unrecoverable hardware failures. And don't ask for any backup tapes or disks or cloud storage. The government has a very modern system of backup to floppy disks and punched paper tape, but they overwrite it every two weeks in order to economize. 

http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/394553/gruber-documents-subpoenaed-john-fund