"Joe Pera Reads You the Church Announcements" (the Baba O’Riley episode) and "Joe Pera Talks With You About the Weekly Trip to the Grocery Store" are two of the greatest moments in American television history, and I will rewatch them on repeat until the day I die.

In a meeting with Ukrainian officials in Kyiv last week, U.S. Army Secretary Dan Driscoll delivered a grim assessment: their troops face a dire situation on the battlefield and will suffer an imminent defeat against Russian forces, who can "fight on indefinitely."

NBC News

U.S. Army secretary warned Ukraine of imminent defeat while pushing initial peace plan

The meeting last week was just the latest example of a long-running rift inside the Trump administration over how to end the war in Ukraine.

This is the United States of James Carter. I'm the president, I'm the emperor, I'm the king. I'm Michael Jackson, you Tito. Your ass belongs to me.

A couple of weeks ago, amid a bonkers corruption scandal, it seemed that Zelensky would be forced to make major concessions in domestic politics, and then maybe in the war itself. So far, however, that ain't happened.

Meduza

Why hasn’t the biggest corruption scandal of Zelensky’s presidency forced him into political or diplomatic concessions? — Meduza

Earlier this month, Ukraine’s National Anti-Corruption Bureau (NABU) uncovered an embezzlement scheme at Energoatom, the state-owned operator o...

i call on all Witkoffs in this administration to disobey illegal nudges and winks from either Trump or Putin

so, did somebody leak the Witkoff-Ushakov call to Bloomberg in another attempt to sink the doomed-anyway peace plan, or was it to corroborate that the U.S. is leading this process, or is the Kremlin leaking it to sow chaos, or or or

Wow. WSJ obtained a recording of Steve Witkoff's October 14 phone call with Yuri Ushakov, Putin’s top foreign policy aide. This post-Gaza peace deal talk "appears to be the genesis of the 28-point peace proposal." Witkoff looks pretty dumb here. Amateur hour. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-11-25/witkoff-discusses-ukraine-plans-with-key-putin-aide-transcript

No shade on the journalists breaking their backs to cover every twist in the Russia–Ukraine diplomacy chaos, but I’m starting to think we might be better off ignoring it entirely until something actually happens.

Trump says a “fine-tuned” (lol) peace plan has “only a few remaining points of disagreement,” but then cautions that any Putin–Zelensky summit is hardly imminent. Moscow has stayed mostly silent throughout this whole process, which makes real progress hard to imagine.

this guy gets way too much oxygen in the US media