Hello, I'm welcome to Useful Idiots. I'm Katie Alper. And I'm Aromatic. How are you, Katie? I'm good. I'm a little sore. I worked out, which I apparently don't do enough because if I did, I probably wouldn't feel the sore. But yeah.

Legs are very sore, hurts to walk. You know, the saying just came to me, I just invented and it goes, no pain, no gain. We think I like it. I think it's going to stick. I think you're going to find now that you put this out there. I think we're going to find it that it has a lot of popularity and staying there. Yeah. Very sticky.

You're welcome, world. Again, you tune into to Useful Idiots. Why not just for your politics, not just for your pop culture, occasional river based adventure stories, but also for great idioms and expressions that we create on demand, on site in real time.

That's right. That's right.

Great show for you today. Lindsay Snell journalists going to provide you with a perspective that is never really allowed to be in mainstream media. That's going to be great. Yeah. That's a very cool interview that we're very excited to be hosting with Lindsay Snell.

A real rare independent journalist who gets on the ground in a number of conflict zones, a clean Ukraine. So it's very exciting to hear what she has to say.

Yeah. And make sure you become a sub-stack supporter at usefully.subsack.com because the extended interview with her is really fascinating. And she talks about how her position on Syria changed and how she was kidnapped. And it's very informative.

So that's useful. Idiots at sub-stack.com.

All right. Should we get to our form? Yeah. Let's do it. Yeah. So just going to talk about Joe Manchin reading at democracy now. Senator Joe Manchin's office said Monday, the conservative West Virginia Democrat has secured a promise from part of the world.

And I'm sure to promise her party leaders and the White House to complete a highly contested gas pipeline in 2020 construction of the mountain Valley pipeline was halted by a federal court after activists argued its construction violates environmental laws and good post catastrophic threats to nearly 1000 streams and what lands.

The deal to complete the pipeline came as senator Manchin ended months of opposition to President Biden's legislative agenda and agreed to support a scale down bill to combat the climate crisis.

So one step ahead. Two steps backwards. This is how you get Joe Manchin on board with something. You give him a, you know, you give him a treat. And the treat is drilling, constructing pipelines. The tree is getting to ruin the planet. So we're so happy that he's on board. What a hero. What a victory for the Democrats. Yeah.

Both a climate bill and a climate polluting bill. Yeah, exactly. Everyone gets what they will ever get something. Everyone wins. Yeah, especially the, especially Mother Nature.

So that's a Democrat suck. And that's Democrat suck because you're buying sucks and the White House sucks for not being able to whip him into green to this without this kind of sweetheart deal for guess speaking of lawmakers who suck.

So to Lindsey Graham for this week's edition of Republicans suck for months into this thing.

I like the structural path we're on here as long as we have Ukraine with the weapons they need in the economic support they will fight to the last person. So Secretary Blinken.

I didn't think there was an issue under the sun that would get 100 votes. We found it Russia's the state sponsor terrorism.

So you know how Katie, you know, people like myself will say the US policy new crane is to fight Russia to the last Ukrainian.

We'll get criticized for saying that will look here is Lindsey Graham saying the exact same thing that he's saying four months in.

He's liking how things are going and he says that as long as the US arms Ukraine they will fight to the last person.

Yes, Lindsey Graham, you're exactly right. The difference is is that some people myself included don't think it's ethical or wise to use Ukraine to fight Russia to the last person.

He feels differently and here he is bragging about it.

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