Tuesday Reads: A Mixed Bag of News

Good Afternoon!!

I have a mixed bag of articles for you today. There doesn’t seem to be a great overarching story in the news, although there is quite a bit happening.

Right now the Supreme Court is hearing challenges to President Biden’s student loan forgiveness plan.

The New York Times has a live blog if you’re interested in following the arguments: Live Updates: Supreme Court Hears Challenges to Student Loan Forgiveness.

The Supreme Court is hearing arguments Tuesday over the legality of one of the most ambitious and expensive executive actions in the nation’s history: the Biden administration’s plan to wipe out more than $400 billion in student debt because of the coronavirus pandemic.

The justices began hearing arguments on Tuesday morning in two cases. Each will receive at least one hour of arguments but is expected to run well over that. The court does not allow cameras, but audio of the arguments is being streamed live.

• Both cases grapple with two questions. One is whether the challengers have legal standing to bring their lawsuits. The other is whether the program exceeds the authority that Congress granted to the Education Department and whether it followed legally required procedures in devising the plan. Read about how arguments typically unfold.

• The Trump administration initially paused student loan repayments in March 2020 because of the pandemic. The Biden administration kept the pause until August 2022, then decided to forgive $10,000 in debt for individuals earning less than $125,000 per year, or $250,000 per household, and $20,000 for those who received Pell grants for low-income families. The court challenge has left millions of borrowers in limbo.

• A central point of the case is a 2003 law, the Higher Education Relief Opportunities for Students Act, which gives the secretary of education the power to “waive or modify any statutory or regulatory provision” to protect borrowers affected by a war or “national emergency.”

• Lawyers for each side will first present their point of view and then answer the justices’ questions in an unstructured format. It is expected to be several months before decisions are announced.

There’s lots of discussion on Twitter too.

There’s quite a bit of news coming out of the Dominion lawsuit against Fox News.

The New York Times reports:

Rupert Murdoch, chairman of the conservative media empire that owns Fox News, acknowledged in a deposition that several hosts for his networks promoted the false narrative that the 2020 election was stolen from former President Donald J. Trump, and that he could have stopped them but didn’t, court documents released on Monday showed.

“They endorsed,” Mr. Murdoch said under oath in response to direct questions about the Fox hosts Sean Hannity, Jeanine Pirro, Lou Dobbs and Maria Bartiromo, according to a legal filing by Dominion Voting Systems. “I would have liked us to be stronger in denouncing it in hindsight,” he added, while also disclosing that he was always dubious of Mr. Trump’s claims of widespread voter fraud.

Asked whether he doubted Mr. Trump, Mr. Murdoch responded: “Yes. I mean, we thought everything was on the up-and-up.” At the same time, he rejected the accusation that Fox News as a whole had endorsed the stolen election narrative. “Not Fox,” he said. “No. Not Fox.”

Mr. Murdoch’s remarks, which he made last month as part of Dominion’s $1.6 billion defamation lawsuit against Fox, added to the evidence that Dominion has accumulated as it tries to prove its central allegation: The people running the country’s most popular news network knew Mr. Trump’s claims of voter fraud in the 2020 election were false but broadcast them anyway in a reckless pursuit of ratings and profit.

Proof to that effect would help Dominion clear the high legal bar set by the Supreme Court for defamation cases. To prevail, Dominion must show not only that Fox broadcast false information, but that it did so knowingly. A judge in Delaware state court has scheduled a monthlong trial beginning in April.

The new documents and a similar batch released this month provide a dramatic account from inside the network, depicting a frantic scramble as Fox tried to woo back its large conservative audience after ratings collapsed in the wake of Mr. Trump’s loss. Fox had been the first network to call Arizona for Joseph R. Biden on election night — essentially declaring him the next president. When Mr. Trump refused to concede and started attacking Fox as disloyal and dishonest, viewers began to change the channel.

From Politico:

Fox News executive chair Rupert Murdoch admitted in a deposition that some Fox News hosts endorsed President Donald Trump’s baseless claims of widespread fraud in the 2020 election, potentially undermining the network’s assertion that it was neutrally relaying dubious arguments from Trump and his allies, a court filing released Monday said.

The admission from Murdoch came in a libel suit voting equipment maker that Dominion Voting Systems is pressing against the TV network over its coverage of the aftermath of the 2020 presidential election.

However, the ongoing lawsuit is also opening a unique window into Fox’s internal deliberations, particularly in the tense period after Election Day, as the network struggled to hang on to a viewer base heavily invested in Trump’s claims of victory even as senior Fox officials were privately convinced Trump’s claims were bogus and he had lost.

Dominion’s court filing released Monday, a response to Fox’s own recent submission in the case, portrays senior executives at the network as widely in agreement that their network shouldn’t help Trump spread the false narrative. Yet, they repeatedly wrestled with how firmly to disavow it without risking their Trump-friendly audience.

“Some of our commentators were endorsing it,” Murdoch conceded during his sworn deposition, appearing to insist that Fox hosts did not speak for the network. “Yes. They endorsed,” he said.

“It is fair to say you seriously doubted any claim of massive election fraud?” a Dominion lawyer asked the broadcasting mogul.

“Oh, yes,” Murdoch replied.

“And you seriously doubted it from the very beginning?” the attorney asked.

Read more details at Politico.

And more from The Washington Post:

From the article:

More details on this from Raw Story: Fox could be on the hook for campaign finance violations after new court docs drop: former FBI agent.

Among the details revealed is that News Corp. CEO Rupert Murdoch gave election assistance to Donald Trump’s campaign, but it wasn’t just about strategy. Fox got their hands on ads from Joe Biden’s campaign that hadn’t been released publicly. Campaigns submit their ads for commercial buys and typically release the videos publicly after they’re playing on the air. After getting the videos, Fox handed the ads over to the Trump campaign.

Former FBI agent Asha Rangappa questioned whether it could be considered an in-kind donation to a political campaign from a corporation directly to a candidate.

“An in-kind contribution is a non-monetary contribution. Goods or services offered free or at less than the usual charge result in an in-kind contribution,” the Federal Election Commission says on its website. “Similarly, when a person or entity pays for services on the committee’s behalf, the payment is an in-kind contribution. An expenditure made by any person or entity in cooperation, consultation or concert with, or at the request or suggestion of, a candidate’s campaign is also considered an in-kind contribution to the candidate.”

Ron DeSantis is also getting plenty of attention in the press as he looks more and more like a contender in 2024.

From the NYT:

Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida will make his debut appearances in three early presidential primary states in the next several weeks, according to two people briefed on his plans, selling his performance in his own state as he lays the groundwork for an expected presidential campaign.

Mr. DeSantis is tentatively expected to appear in Iowa during the first half of March, making stops in Davenport and Des Moines, according to the people briefed on his schedule who requested anonymity because they weren’t authorized to discuss the plans publicly. Shortly after, he is expected to appear in Nevada, an early primary state, followed a few weeks later by an expected trip to Manchester, New Hampshire….

Hitting the traditional early primary states as he discusses his new book, “The Courage to Be Free: Florida’s Blueprint for America’s Revival,” allows Mr. DeSantis to unofficially test the waters and introduce himself nationally at a time when he’s seen as preparing for a presidential campaign.

Mr. DeSantis is also expected at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library on Sunday, a place that has often been a launching pad for presidential candidacies. And there are stops expected in a handful of other states, including New York.

A chunk of the Republican electorate, some conservative thinkers and a number of major donors have already pinned their hopes on Mr. DeSantis as the future of the party at a time when they are hoping to move on from former President Donald J. Trump. They have praised his aggressive style and use of the powers of his office, and his willingness to dive into battles over cultural issues that have come to define the modern Republican Party.

From New York Times opinion columnist Michelle Goldberg:

Michelle Goldberg: Florida Could Start Looking a Lot Like Hungary.

In 2017, the government of Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orban passed a law intended to drive Central European University, a prestigious school founded by a Hungarian refugee, George Soros, out of the country. At the time, this was shocking; as many as 80,000 protesters rallied in Budapest and intellectuals worldwide rushed to declare their solidarity with the demonstrators. “The fate of the university was a test of whether liberalism had the tactical savvy and emotional fortitude to beat back its new ideological foe,” wrote Franklin Foer in The Atlantic.

Liberalism, sadly, did not: The university was forced to move to Vienna, part of Orban’s lamentably successful campaign to dismantle Hungary’s liberal democracy.

That campaign has included ever-greater ideological control over education, most intensely in grade school, but also in colleges and universities. Following a landslide 2018 re-election victory that Orban saw as a “mandate to build a new era,” his government banned public funding for gender studies courses. “The Hungarian government is of the clear view that people are born either men or women,” said his chief of staff. In 2021, Orban extended political command over Hungarian universities by putting some schools under the authority of “public trusts” full of regime allies.

Many on the American right admire the way Orban uses the power of the state against cultural liberalism, but few are imitating him as faithfully as the Florida governor and likely Republican presidential candidate Ron DeSantis. Last week, one of DeSantis’s legislative allies filed House Bill 999, which would, as The Tampa Bay Times reported, turn many of DeSantis’s “wide-ranging ideas on higher education into law.” Even by DeSantis’s standards, it is a shocking piece of legislation that takes a sledgehammer to academic freedom. Jeremy Young, senior manager of free expression and education at PEN America, described it as “almost an apocalyptic bill for higher education,” one that is “orders of magnitude worse than anything we’ve seen, either in the recent or the distant past.”

Echoing Orban, House Bill 999 bars Florida’s public colleges and universities from offering gender studies majors or minors, as well as majors or minors in critical race theory or “intersectionality,” or in any subject that “engenders beliefs” in those concepts. The bill prohibits the promotion or support of any campus activities that “espouse diversity, equity and inclusion or critical race theory rhetoric.” This goes far beyond simply ending D.E.I. programming, and could make many campus speakers, as well as student organizations like Black student unions, verboten.

There’s much more at the link. I hope you’ll read it if you haven’t already. Also see Don Moynihan at his Can We Still Govern Substack: The latest DeSantis attack on education is part of a broader attack on professional competence.

A minor addition to Donald Trump’s growing legal troubles was accidentally revealed by the FEC.

Roger Sollenberger writes:

When the Federal Elections Commission rejected a recent Freedom of Information Act request related to Donald Trump’s “recount” expenses after the 2020 election, the campaign watchdog had a conspicuous reason for turning down the petition: Trump’s political spending after he left the White House is currently the subject of an FEC enforcement matter.

According to agency records obtained by The Daily Beast, the FEC rejected a FOIA request—filed Dec. 20 by a nonpartisan research group that shared the documents on condition of anonymity—because those records may involve an active inquiry.

“To the extent that the records you requested concern an ongoing FEC enforcement matter, we can neither confirm nor deny that any such records exist,” the agency’s FOIA attorney wrote in the letter, which was shared with The Daily Beast.

The request asked the agency for documents and communications related to a major Trump vendor that has received millions in campaign “recount” funds for seemingly unrelated services—including document production for subpoenas from the congressional COVID subcommittee.

Dan Weiner, director of elections and government at the Brennan Center and a former attorney with the FEC, told The Daily Beast that while the response itself isn’t indicative of any stage of inquiry—“readers shouldn’t get excited”—the particular issue is serious.

“The FEC could be indicating one of many different scenarios,” Weiner said, explaining that the agency opens enforcement matters under a range of prompts, from publicly generated complaints to federal referrals to internal decisions. More often than not, enforcement matters resolve in a whimper—a conspicuously glaring pattern when it comes to Trump.

I’m going to end there. I’ll see you in the comment thread.

Lazy Caturday Reads

Quiet Day, by Lucie Bilodeau

Happy Caturday!!

The weather has been crazy this year. The Midwest has been getting plenty of snow, but here in Massachusetts we’ve seen almost no snow and temperatures mostly above normal–in the 40s and 50s. We’ve also had a couple of freezing cold snaps, including this weekend. Last night it got down into the single numbers with wind chills below zero. The rest of the week we are again expecting above normal temperatures. Dakinikat has been getting more cold weather than usual in New Orleans, with occasional periods of very warm weather. And now Southern California is getting blizzard warnings–and not in the mountains.

The Washington Post: Low-elevation snow, blizzard conditions in California amid season’s coldest storm.

It’s been a week of howling wind and bitter cold in California as winter storms have dropped into the region from the far north. The cold air set the stage for snow at unusually low elevations late in the week. Now, it is combining with an atmospheric river to bring blizzard conditions and possibly unprecedented snowfall to Southern California.

The latest powerful storm, steered by a low-pressure system rotating off the California coast, is taking direct aim at the coastal mountain ranges that run between Santa Barbara and San Diego counties. An atmospheric river could linger over the region for more than 24 hours into Saturday, piling up feet of mountain snow while dousing lower elevations with flooding rains.

The region rarely experiences snow of this magnitude, which is more typical of the Sierra Nevada, according to Alex Tardy, the warning coordination meteorologist with the National Weather Service in San Diego.

“This is not Lake Tahoe, this is not Mammoth [Lakes], and we’re not talking about a month of snow,” he said. “We’re talking about a three-day storm putting 5 to 6 feet at a location like Big Bear.”

Tardy noted that for Big Bear Lake, a popular weekend ski destination about 100 miles east of Los Angeles, it is possible “that these three- to four-day totals will exceed anything that we’ve recorded before.” He also called the flood risk for urban and rural areas “significant,” given how much rain was expected to fall in a short period.

By late Friday night, the Weather Service in Los Angeles was warning of “life threatening flash flooding of creeks and streams, burn scars, urban areas, highways, streets and underpasses.”

Up to 7 inches of rain had fallen in some parts of Los Angeles County, with more on the way.

An extremely rare blizzard warning is in effect until 4 p.m. Saturday for the mountains of Ventura, Los Angeles and San Bernardino counties.

Last night some big news broke about the DOJ’s efforts to get access to Pennsylvania Rep. Scott Perry’s phone in the January 6 investigation. The phone was seized by the FBI last summer, but Perry has claimed the contents are protected by the “speech and debate clause.” It’s the same argument that Mike Pence is using to fight a grand jury subpoena and that Lindsey Graham tried and failed with in his fight to avoid testifying to the Georgia special grand jury. Now the judge in Perry’s case has also rejected the argument.

The Washington Post: Fight over Rep. Perry’s phone has prevented review of 2,200 documents in Jan. 6 probe.

A secret legal fight over the cellphone of Rep. Scott Perry (R-Pa.) has prevented the Justice Department for more than six months from reviewing more than 2,200 documents in the criminal investigation of former president Donald Trump and supporters’ efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential election, a federal judge disclosed Friday evening.

Chief Judge Beryl A. Howell of the U.S. District Court in D.C. released a number of previously sealed opinions after finding that the “powerful public interest”outweighed the need for secrecy in the constitutional battle over Perry’s claims and the historic investigation.

By Dee Nickerson

The Pennsylvania Republican has asserted that 2,219 documents contained on his phone are shielded by the Constitution’s “speech or debate” clause, which grants members of Congress immunity from criminal investigation in their official capacities. But in a ruling in December, Howell rejected that claim for more than 90 percent of the records, ordering Perry to turn over 2,055 text messages, emails and attachments after concluding that they were only incidentally related to his status as a lawmaker, and not central to that status and constitutionally protected as part of his lawmaking.

“What is plain is that the Clause does not shield Rep. Perry’s random musings with private individuals touting an expertise in cybersecurity or political discussions with attorneys from a presidential campaign, or with state legislators concerning hearings before them about possible local election fraud or actions they could take to challenge election results in Pennsylvania,” Howell wrote.

The scope and nature of the Perry fight had been secret, because they involve an FBI search warrant used to seize Perry’s phone on Aug. 9. But Howell said the Justice Department agreed to unseal details Friday because a federal appeals court held fast-tracked public arguments this week after staying Howell’s order and approved the release of her key opinions to certain members of Congress and the House general counsel’s office. That office has taken Perry’s side. Perry’s lawyers objected to the unsealing, but Howell said redactions protected his interests, noting that the government’s specific allegations about why Perry’s phone might contain evidence of a crime remain under seal.

Perry is a key figure who sought to help Trump replace the attorney general after the 2020 election with former Justice Department official Jeffrey Clark and get the Justice Department to reverse its finding that Joe Biden had been elected fairly, according to the House committee that investigated the Jan. 6, 2021, attack by Trump supporters on the U.S. Capitol.

More details from Politico: Judge rejected Perry’s bid to shield thousands of emails from Jan. 6 investigators.

Prosecutors homed in on Perry last year, seeking his contacts with top figures connected to Trump, including Clark and attorney John Eastman, an architect of Trump’s last-ditch bid to remain in power despite losing reelection. And in August, Perry’s phone was seized by FBI agents while he was traveling with family.

Thus far, however, investigators have not had access to any of the records because, last month, a three-judge panel of the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals agreed to stay Howell’s ruling. On Thursday, those judges heard both public and private arguments about the dispute. The stay remains in place as the appeals court considers whether to leave Howell’s ruling in place, set it aside or modify it in some way.

Cats Relaxing in the Grounds at Napsbury, by Louis Wain

The judges — Karen Henderson, Gregory Katsas and Neomi Rao — appeared skeptical of the Justice Department’s position and the breadth of Howell’s ruling, although they discussed her stance only in broad strokes and the details of her opinions remained under seal until Friday.

But the appeals panel’s ultimate leanings remained unclear at the conclusion of the public argument session Thursday. The appeals judges seemed most concerned by Howell’s determination that Perry’s outreach about Jan. 6 was not protected by the speech or debate clause because he was not acting with formal House approval.

That determination was a centerpiece of Howell’s ruling, which she said was rooted in longstanding precedent.

“No matter the vigor with which Rep. Perry pursued his wide-ranging interest in bolstering his belief that the results of the 2020 election were somehow incorrect — even in the face of his own reelection — his informal inquiries into the legitimacy of those election results are closer to the activities described as purely personal or political,” Howell said.

Another judge in Texas is hearing a case that could threaten access to abortion pills in every state.

The Washington Post: The Texas judge who could take down the abortion pill.

ABILENE, Tex. — Matthew Kacsmaryk was a 22-year-old law student when he drove to a small city in west Texas to spend a day with a baby he would probably never see again.

He was in Abilene to support his sister, who, pregnant at 17, had fled to a faraway maternity home to avoid the scorn she feared from their Christian community. But holding his nephew in his arms — then leaving the baby with adoptive parents— also solidified Kacsmaryk’s belief that every pregnancy should be treasured, his sister recalled, even those that don’t fit neatly into a family’s future plans….

Now 45 and a federal judge, Kacsmaryk (kaz-MARE-ik) has the opportunity to impose the most far-reaching limit on abortion access since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in June.

The judge, nominated by President Trump and confirmed in 2019, will soon rule on a lawsuit seeking to revoke U.S. government approval of mifepristone, a key abortion medication. That outcome could, at least temporarily, halt over half the legal abortions carried out across the country, including in states led by Democrats where abortion rights are protected.

While many experts have said the case relies on baseless medical claims, it is Kacsmaryk’s role as presiding judge that has the abortion rights movement bracing foranother crippling defeat.

The abortion pills lawsuit, which Kacsmaryk could rule on any day, is the latest in a long line of politically explosive cases to appear on the judge’s docket. In a practice known as “forum shopping,” conservative groups have zeroed in on the Amarillo division of the Northern District of Texas as a go-to place to challenge a wide range of Biden administration policies. Because Amarillo is a federal district with a single judge, plaintiffs know their arguments will be heard by Kacsmaryk — who, like any federal judge, is positioned to issue rulings with nationwide implications.

Appeals from Kacsmaryk’s district follow a path that has regularly yielded favorable outcomes for conservatives — reviewed first by the 5th Circuit, which upheld a strict Texas abortion ban long before Roe v. Wade was overturned, then ultimately by the conservative-controlled Supreme Court.

Read more at the WaPo.

Relaxing on the Rug, Ryan Connors

Lots of legal cases in the news today, including updates on the Dominion lawsuit against Fox News.

Analysis by Oliver Darcy at CNN Business: ‘It’s a major blow’: Dominion has uncovered ‘smoking gun’ evidence in case against Fox News, legal experts say.

Fox News is in serious hot water.

That’s what several legal experts told CNN this week following Dominion Voting Systems explosive legal filing against the right-wing talk channel, revealing the network’s executives and hosts privately blasted the election fraud claims being peddled by Donald Trump’s team, despite allowing lies about the 2020 contest to be promoted on its air.

While the legal experts cautioned that they would like to see Fox News’ formal legal response to the filing, they all indicated in no uncertain terms that the evidence compiled in Dominion’s legal filing represents a serious threat to the channel.

“It’s a major blow,” attorney Floyd Abrams of Pentagon Papers fame said, adding that the “recent revelations certainly put Fox in a more precarious situation” in defending against the lawsuit on First Amendment grounds.

Rebecca Tushnet, the Frank Stanton Professor of First Amendment Law at Harvard Law School, described Dominion’s evidence as a “very strong” filing that “clearly lays out the difference between what Fox was saying publicly and what top people at Fox were privately admitting.”

A cache of behind-the-scenes messages included in the legal filing showed Fox Corp chairman Rupert Murdoch called Trump’s claims “really crazy stuff,” and the cable network’s stars — including Tucker Carlson, Sean Hannity, and Laura Ingraham — brutally mock the lies being pushed by the former president’s camp asserting that the election was rigged.

It also showed attempts to crack down on fact-checking election lies. On one occasion, Carlson demanded that Fox News White House correspondent Jacqui Heinrich be fired after she fact-checked a Trump tweet pushing election fraud claims.

Tushnet said that in all of her years practicing and teaching law, she had never seen such damning evidence collected in the pre-trial phase of a defamation suit. “I don’t recall anything comparable to this,” Tushnet said. “Donald Trump seems to be very good at generating unprecedented situations.”

Read what more legal experts had to say about the case at the CNN link.

The New York Times has an interesting piece about what Fox hosts were saying on the air as opposed to behind the scenes: What Fox News Hosts Said Privately vs. Publicly About Voter Fraud.

Two days after the 2020 election, Tucker Carlson was furious.

Fox News viewers were abandoning the network for Newsmax and One America News, two conservative rivals, after Fox declared that Joseph R. Biden Jr. won Arizona, a crucial swing state.

Belinda Del Pesco

In a text message with his producer, Alex Pfeiffer, Mr. Carlson appeared livid that viewers were turning against the network. The message was among those released last week as part of a lawsuit by Dominion Voting Systems against Fox. Dominion, an elections technology company, has sued Fox News for defamation….

At the same time, Mr. Carlson and his broadcasting colleagues expressed grave doubts about an unfounded narrative rapidly gaining momentum among their core audience: that the 2020 presidential election was stolen by Democrats through widespread voter fraud. The belief was promoted by then-President Trump and a coalition of lawyers, lawmakers and influencers, though they produced no evidence to support their assertions.

Many hosts, producers and executives privately expressed skepticism about those claims, even as they gave them significant airtime, according to private messages revealed last week by Dominion. What they said in those messages often differed significantly from what Fox hosts said in public, though they weren’t always contradictory.

Two days after the election, Mr. Pfeiffer said that voices on the right were “reckless demagogues,” according to a text message. Mr. Carlson replied that his show was “not going to follow them.” [….]

But he did follow them. The same day, on “Tucker Carlson Tonight,” Mr. Carlson expressed some doubts about the voter fraud assertions before insisting that at least some of the claims were “credible.”

There’s much more at the NYT link.

One more January 6 story at CBS News: Media organizations demand Jan. 6 videos McCarthy shared with Fox News’ Tucker Carlson.

A group of media organizations, including CBS News, is demanding access to a tranche of surveillance and police videos from the Jan. 6, 2021, assault on the Capitol that U.S. House Speaker Kevin McCarthy provided to Fox News host Tucker Carlson.

In a letter to congressional leadership Friday, the media companies argue the footage McCarthy allowed Carlson and Fox News to access should be made available to other media groups.

Sphynx Cat Relaxing, Svetlana Novikova

The letter was sent on behalf of CBS News, CNN, Politico, ProPublica ABC, Axios, Advance, Scripps, the Los Angeles Times, and Gannett.

“Without full public access to the complete historical record, there is concern that an ideologically-based narrative of an already polarizing event will take hold in the public consciousness, with destabilizing risks to the legitimacy of Congress, the Capitol Police, and the various federal investigations and prosecutions of January 6 crimes,” wrote attorney Charles Tobin.

McCarthy’s office has not responded to multiple requests for comment from CBS News about the reported release of more than 41,000 hours of police footage to Fox News.

The House speaker said in a Wednesday interview with The New York Times that he expects to make the footage more widely available after Carlson uses the material.

“I was asked in the press about these tapes, and I said they do belong to the American public. I think sunshine lets everybody make their own judgment,” McCarthy said.

In the letter to McCarthy, Tobin wrote that the media organizations agreed with his “sunshine” statement.

“Now that the CCTV videos have been released to one member of the news media – one whose program is categorized by its own network as opinion programming – they must be released to the rest of the news media as well,” Tobin wrote.

That’s all I have for you today. Please share your thought and any other stories that you’re following.

Tuesday Reads

Good Afternoon!!

I’m extra late today, because I was talking to Dakinikat on the phone. One of her cats, Keely, had two seizures in the middle of the night. They were apparently petit mal seizures, based on information we found on-line. There haven’t been any more seizures this morning, and Keely is behaving normally.

There are apparently multiple possible causes for seizures in cats, including epilepsy, contagious diseases, and brain injuries or brain tumors. Keely has never been outside, so a contagious disease seems unlikely. The problem is that Dakinikat can’t get to a vet today, because everything in New Orleans is shut down for Mardi Gras. I thought I’d mention this here in case anyone has had experience with this.

Now for today’s news . . .

From Kevin Liptak at CNN:

President Joe Biden on Tuesday marked a year since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine by celebrating the strength and resilience of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and his people.

In a second major address from Warsaw, Poland, in less than a year, Biden pointed to his trip to the Ukrainian capital a day before as evidence that the democracies of the world are growing stronger in the face of autocracy.

“One year ago, the world was bracing for the fall of Kyiv. Well, I’ve just come from a visit to Kyiv and I can report Kyiv stands strong. Kyiv stands proud, it stands tall and most important, it stands free,” Biden said.

The speech comes hours after Putin delivered a major speech to the Federal Assembly, again falsely claiming that Ukraine and its allies in the West started the war and offering no signs he is pulling back in his ambitions.

According to senior US and European officials, Putin’s aims have not changed since he launched his invasion a year ago. Despite humiliating setbacks for his military and an apparent power struggle between the mercenary Wagner Group and the Russian defense ministry, Russia has recently made gains in the east. Putin’s troops appear poised to take the city of Bakhmut, the first significant Russian military victory in months.

Visiting the region this week, Biden hoped to again provide a rallying cry for Ukraine, demonstrating to Putin and Russia that Western resolve isn’t weakening. Harkening to the start of the war, Biden said the challenges of the invasion extended beyond Ukraine’s borders.

“When Russia invaded, it was not just Ukraine being tested. The whole world faced a test for the ages,” he said. “Europe was being tested. America was being tested. NATO was being tested.”

Some video from Aaron Rupar:

See more coverage from Rupar on Twitter.

Last night, Vladimir Putin announced that Russia will halt its participation in the START Treaty.

From The Washington Post article:

Russian President Vladimir Putin announced in a state of the nation address Tuesday that Moscow is “suspending” its participation in the New START nuclear nonproliferation agreement, the last remaining arms control treaty between the United States and Russia.

Putin said that Russia will not “withdraw” completely from the treaty, which has been extended to run through Feb. 4, 2026, but that Russia would not allow NATO countries to inspect its nuclear arsenal. He accused the alliance of helping Ukraine conduct drone strikes on Russian air bases that host strategic bombers that are part of the country’s nuclear forces.

The 2011 treaty placed “verifiable limits” on the number of intercontinental ballistic missiles and nuclear warheads deployed by the countries.

“Our relations have degraded, and that’s completely and utterly the U.S.’s fault,” Putin said.

“If the U.S. conducts tests, then so will we,” Putin said. “Nobody should have any illusions that global strategic parity can be destroyed.” Other nonproliferation agreements, including the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces, or INF, treaty have fallen apart in recent years.

Western officials reacted with alarm at Putin’s decision.

“The announcement by Russia that it’s suspending participation in New START is deeply unfortunate and irresponsible,” Secretary of State Antony Blinken told reporters. “We’ll be watching carefully to see what Russia actually does.”

Blinken noted the Biden administration’s role in extending New START in 2021. “We extended New START because it was clearly in the security interests of our country and actually in the security interests of Russia,” he said, adding: “We remain ready to talk about strategic arms limitations at any time with Russia irrespective of anything else going on in the world or in our relationship.”

Another large aftershock has hit Turkey and Syria.

BBC News: 

This is stunning news. Popular Rhode Island Rep. David Cicilline is resigning from the House in June.

From CBS News:

Rep. David Cicilline, a Rhode Island Democrat who served as a House impeachment manager during former President Trump’s second impeachment process, will leave Congress to be the CEO of a foundation, he announced Tuesday.

Cicilline, 61, will leave Congress on June 1, a year and a half before his seventh two-year term is up, to be president and CEO of the Rhode Island Foundation. Cicilline was the mayor of Providence, Rhode Island, before joining Congress in 2011.

Cicilline’s departure will prompt a special election.

“For more than a decade, the people of Rhode Island entrusted me with a sacred duty to represent them in Congress, and it is a responsibility I put my heart and soul into every day to make life better for the residents and families of our state,” Cicilline said. “The chance to lead the Rhode Island Foundation was unexpected, but it is an extraordinary opportunity to have an even more direct and meaningful impact on the lives of residents of our state. The same energy and commitment I brought to elected office, I will now bring as CEO of the Rhode Island Foundation, advancing their mission to ensure all Rhode Islanders can achieve economic security, access quality, affordable healthcare, and attain the education and training that will set them on a path to prosperity.”

A member of the House Foreign Affairs Committee and House Judiciary Committee, Cicilline was an impeachment manager for the second Trump impeachment over the former president’s actions leading up to and during the Capitol assault of Jan. 6, 2021.

Bennie Thompson attacked Kevin McCarthy for giving January 6 video to Tucker Carlson.

From The Hill:

House Homeland Security Committee ranking Democrat Bennie Thompson (Miss.) on Monday blasted Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) for handing over tens of thousands of hours of riot footage from Jan. 6, 2021, to Fox News host Tucker Carlson.

“It’s hard to overstate the potential security risks if this material were to be used irresponsibly,” Thompson said in a statement.

McCarthy’s office granted about 41,000 hours of footage of the Capitol riots to Carlson, Axios first reported. A Fox News spokesperson confirmed the development to The Hill on Monday.

“If Speaker McCarthy has indeed granted Tucker Carlson — a Fox host who routinely spreads misinformation and [Russian President Vladimir] Putin’s poisonous propaganda — and his producers access to this sensitive footage, he owes the American people an explanation of why he has done so and what steps he has taken to address the significant security concerns at stake,” Thompson said.

The Mississippi Democrat headed the select House committee that investigated the Jan. 6 attacks for nearly a year and a half before releasing its final report in December. The committee had interviewed more than 1,000 witnesses, read through documents and reviewed troves of video footage of the riots during its investigation.

Carlson has accused the select committee of “lying” about what happened on Jan. 6, and has boasted that Fox News did not cover the proceedings, or what he called “propaganda,” on live television.

One more shocking story, before I wrap this up:

From Raw Story: Given a chance to apologize for the theft of a Black man’s heart, Virginia House Republicans declined.

In what can only be characterized as a stunningly callous decision, last week members of a Rules subcommittee of Virginia’s House of Delegates killed a resolution to acknowledge and apologize for the state-sanctioned medical misuse of Black bodies in Virginia, a common practice in the 19th and 20th centuries.

Four of the subcommittee’s five members – including House Majority Leader Terry Kilgore, R-Scott, Speaker Todd Gilbert, R-Shenandoah, Del. Barry Knight, R-Virginia Beach, and Del. Kathy Byron, R-Bedford – voted to lay SJ 274 on the table, politi-speak for postponing any action on the legislation indefinitely. The measure had sailed through the Senate with unanimous approval and, at least in the mind of Phillip Thompson, who came up with the idea of the bill, was a no-brainer, low-lift way for the state to recognize the wrongs of the past.

“I thought it had a chance because it’s a very innocuous bill,” Thompson told me. “We weren’t asking for reparations, nothing like that; we just wanted a real apology.”

An apology would be the very least the state could do, considering Virginia institutions’ horrible history of using Black people, living and dead, as guinea pigs.

Thompson said he got the idea for the resolution after reading a Politico article in late 2022 that explained how Black laborer Bruce Tucker’s body was violated in the name of a medical miracle after his accidental death in 1968.

A day after he died from a fatal fall, and without his family’s knowledge or consent, Tucker’s “heart was sewn into the chest of a white business executive” at the Medical College of Virginia, the forebear of what is now Virginia Commonwealth University’s School of Medicine, according to Politico’s report. “It was one of the first heart transplants in the country, and it gave the med school the status it had sought at the forefront of transplant science.”

Tucker’s sad fate also underscored Richmond’s record of body snatching, the practice of stealing the bodies of deceased Black people for doctors-in-training to practice dissection. “Resurrectionists” were known to lurk in Black cemeteries in Richmond, seeking to abscond with the remains of the newly dead, according to the documentary “Until the Well Runs Dry: Medicine and the Exploitation of Black Bodies,” directed by Dr. Shawn Utsey, former chair of VCU’s African American Studies Department.

There’s more at the link. The history of racism in this country is so stunning. It’s enough to take your breath away.

Have a nice Tuesday Sky Dancers! I’ll see you in the comment thread.