WNBA Griner Convicted, Russia Ready to Talk Swaps -- Maybe
Column by Gloria Christie THE NEWSLETTER FOR INTELLIGENT WOMEN & MEN
Good morning, my friends! I found out this morning that Instacarts delivered two duplicate orders. And their policy is to never take food back. I tried. So now, I’m just considering it a gift. Although the one that languished overnight on my porch in 70-degree weather unbeknownst to me…well, I’ll consider it possibly endangering — me.
I celebrate my birthday for a month, because I am happy to be alive. I have broken the average longevity barrier of women in my immediate family by several years. And so my month is August. Everyone I meet, stranger or not, gets to celebrate with me. And that means you, too!
Thank you for my first gift, Instacart!
Stay well, stay safe you & yours!
Gloria
Featured image is a screenshot via YouTube.
WNBA Griner Convicted, Russia Ready to Talk Swaps -- Maybe
Negotiating with the Russians is like trying to hold soup in your hands.
If Americans want to know what it would be like living under a Donald Trump dictatorship, just look to Russia. Putin killed off all the media outlets except for the state propaganda channels. That equivalent here would be Fox’s Tucker Carlson.
Then, the Russian president literally killed off any number of his critics. Woah! that would be a whole hoard of people on Trump’s enemy list. A man who ran against Putin languishes in a Russian gulag, but not before Putin poisoned him. We would be talking former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to start with but include nearly every strong women he ever met: Germany’s former President Angela Merkle, Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi (D-CA), Vice-chair of the January 6 Select Committee Representative Liz Cheney (R-WY), and tens of thousands more.
Now the man who hunts bears shirtless has one of the U.S. basketball stars and wants to trade her for two vicious convicted Russians.
They say they will negotiate with us to release WNBA’S Brittney Griner. She has played in Russia for seven years. This time she packed hurriedly and didn’t notice under a gram of prescripted cannabis oil in her luggage. Russian airport guards caught it in Moscow, though. And she was just sentenced to nine years in an extremely tough prison.
Griner stood inside of a defendant's cage, too short for her to stand up fully and pled for leniency. But to no avail. The “judge” hit her with the most extreme sentence, nine years. At 6’9” Griner is a Black lesbian who doesn’t speak Russian. It will be hard for her to blend into a prison population, according to CNN.
Secretary of State Anthony Blinken spoke to the press:
‘We put forward, as you know, a substantial proposal that Russia should engage with us on. And what Foreign Minister Lavrov said this morning and said publicly is that they are prepared to engage through channels we've established to do just that. And we'll be pursuing that.’
The Russians convicted another American of spying and espionage, Paul Whelan, who is part of the deal, too. He was convicted in 2018. But what about Marc Fogel? The American taught children of local officials for years. One of those children belonged to our former Ambassador to Russia, Michael McFaul, who has been working to get the teacher release for 14 years, according to The Washington Post.
Fogel feels forgotten. And Griner is severely depressed. Negotiating for their release is like trying to hold soup in your hands.
#Updated 08.05.22 12:40 pm
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In Gloria Christie Reports & Three White Lions Substack newsletters, Gloria Christie includes her week’s most important news/ commentary stories in the liberal online newspaper The Bipartisan Report. Gloria Christie Report her newsletters are for people on the go. Written in her own unique style with a twist of humor in a briefer version of Bipartisan Report. Christie’s Mueller Report Adventures In Bite-Sizes a real-life compelling spy mystery (in progress). Find her here on Facebook. Or at Three White Lions her book on Amazon Kindle Vella.