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Abbreviated Pundit Roundup: The State of the Union [1]

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Date: 2023-02-07  

Niels Lesniewski of Roll Call notes that one of the big questions about President Biden’s State of the Union address is how much time will he devote to foreign policy generally and, specifically, to the Chinese “spy” balloon that was shot down Saturday,

Always in question is just how much of the speech will be directed at foreign policy, where there’s likely to be more common ground with Republicans especially when it comes to support for Ukraine’s ongoing efforts to respond to the invasion by Russia. There’s also always the issue of the news of the minute, in this case the presence in U.S. airspace last week of an allegedly wayward Chinese balloon that was eventually shot down off the South Carolina coast Saturday. The Associated Press reported on Sunday that the speech would reference the balloon incident in the context of the U.S. response to China’s military and economic influence. The report also said Biden would in fact be touting what his advisers say are his wins on the economy. “It’s constantly being reworked and it will be until the very last moment,” Jean-Pierre said Thursday. Biden was at Camp David over the weekend working on the speech. The address will also kick off traditional post-speech presidential travel with an itinerary that looks like the setup for the president to launch his 2024 reelection campaign. Biden has stops in Wisconsin and Florida planned while Vice President Kamala Harris, who will be sitting next to McCarthy behind the president during the speech, will be heading off to Georgia and Minnesota.

I feel ya, Mr. Belcher.

x The media coverage of VP Harris is a case study in implicit gender bias from both the left and right. pic.twitter.com/EzNIyUo4Sz — Cornell Belcher (@cornellbelcher) February 6, 2023

Paul Krugman of The New York Times revisits many of the pessimistic economic forecasts of summer 2022 and wonders where they went wrong.

Well, the red wave was more of a ripple. And recent economic numbers have been astonishingly favorable. Half a million jobs were added last month, bringing total job creation under Biden to 12 million so far, with the unemployment rate dropping to 3.4 percent, its lowest level since 1969. Inflation was high in 2021 and part of 2022, but it has plunged since; over the past six months, consumer prices have risen at an annual rate of less than 2 percent. If the economic news seems too good to be true, that’s probably because it is. Most of the experts I talk to think that monster employment report for January was a statistical anomaly. The inflation numbers reflect various temporary factors, although these go in both directions; I won’t be surprised if inflation rises somewhat in the months ahead, but that’s by no means certain. What is clear, however, is that until a few months ago many if not most economic prognosticators were far too negative about America’s prospects. In particular, we went through what I think of as the summer of stagflation — a period, actually extending some way into fall, when many influential economists were making extremely grim pronouncements about what it would take to bring inflation under control. And I think it’s important to ask why they were so wrong.

Jennifer Rubin of The Washington Post thinks that President Biden’s legislative and economic successes will tamp down any and all possible challengers within the Democratic Party.

Forget the polling showing Biden’s disapproval exceeding his favorables. The days of positive ratings for any president might be a thing of the past, given the persistence of tribal politics and the gloomy cast of news coverage. As we saw in the midterms, elections are choices, in this case between earnest Democrats working on popular economic proposals, and unhinged MAGA extremists. Put differently, if the economy remains strong, Biden’s chances of reelection will be high. (Recall that President Barack Obama’s approval in 2012 was less than 50 percent as well.) said in announcing the January jobs numbers. “And they said we can’t bring back American manufacturing. They said we can’t make things in America anymore, that somehow adding jobs was a bad thing … or that the only way to slow down inflation was to destroy jobs.” Biden clearly senses that his political fortunes have improved. “For the past two years, we’ve heard a chorus of critics write off my economic plan. They said it’s just not possible to grow the economy from the bottom up and the middle out,” hein announcing the January jobs numbers. “And they said we can’t bring back American manufacturing. They said we can’t make things in America anymore, that somehow adding jobs was a bad thing … or that the only way to slow down inflation was to destroy jobs.” He added with relish, “Well, today’s data makes crystal clear what I’ve always known in my gut: These critics and cynics are wrong.” On the GOP side, Biden’s economic success deepens their dilemma: If they nominate former president Donald Trump, the subject of multiple criminal probes, many rightly fear he’ll bring political disaster up and down the ticket. If he doesn’t run as the Republican nominee, a third-party bid threatens to hopelessly divide the party, with as many as 28 percent inclined to follow him, according to a recent poll.

Prem Thakker of The New Republic reports on the arrests of self-identifying neo-Nazis in a plot to disable electrical substations in Baltimore.

The two suspects, Brandon Clint Russell of Florida and Sarah Beth Clendaniel of Maryland, were arrested last week for their ploy to conduct “sniper attacks” on substations in order to disable power in the majority-Black city. Authorities found the plot was “racially or ethnically motivated.” Baltimore has the fifth highest population of Black people in the country, with some 61 percent of residents being Black. Russell had previously founded a neo-Nazi group in Florida called “Atomwaffen,” which was known to authorities for targeting minorities, Jews, LGBTQ people, the government, journalists, and infrastructure. In 2017, as police investigated his roommate murdering their two other roommates, Russell was discovered to be harboring neo-Nazi paraphernalia, a photo of the Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh, explosives, and more. In an interview at the time, he admitted to being a Nazi and that he had manufactured the recovered explosives.

Also see Lefty Coaster’s rec list diary, complete with Number 45’s escalation of yet more political violence

Alicia Victoria Lozano of NBC News reports that a double amputee killed by police officers in Huntington Park, California was having a mental health crisis.

Dorothy Lowe said her son, Anthony Lowe, awoke on the morning of Jan. 26 "agitated and frustrated" at the loss of both his legs, which were amputated last year. He was scheduled to receive his prosthetic legs Monday, but he was experiencing more depressive episodes that caused her to worry he might try to hurt himself. “That morning I felt something,” she said. “He woke up a bit off, and I asked him if he was OK, and he said: ‘Yeah, I just need some air.’ I offered to take him out, but he wanted to go out alone.” Dorothy Lowe said that she called the police around 10 a.m. and that responding officers spent about 30 minutes talking to Anthony in her driveway. One of the officers, whom she did not identify, assured her that Anthony was depressed because of his legs and just needed some fresh air. “I never knew what they said to him, but he came back emotional,” Dorothy said of her son. “Then he wheeled off, and I didn’t see him again.” Anthony was killed shortly after 3:40 p.m. that same day.

Philip Bump of The Washington Post reports that research to be published next week shows that politically conservative doctors were more likely to prescribe unproven medicines like hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin as a treatment for COVID-19.

From the earliest months of the coronavirus pandemic, there was a partisan divide in the nation’s approach. Then-president Donald Trump fostered this, certainly; his eagerness to get the country back to some semblance of normal with his reelection approaching was unsubtle. But his audience was receptive. Ingrained Republican skepticism of authority was parlayed into skepticism about recommended approaches to containing the virus: distancing, masking and, eventually, vaccination. more likely to see covid-19 deaths relative to their populations than Democratic-voting ones. In fact, research has shown an explicit gap in the death toll between Republicans and Democrats. One result was that polling repeatedly showed Republicans as less likely to express concern about the virus or to take steps to prevent infection. After vaccines became widely available, Republican-voting counties wererelative to their populations than Democratic-voting ones. In fact, research has shownin the death toll between Republicans and Democrats. Not only were Republicans more likely to reject recommended approaches to the virus, they were more likely to embrace unproved ones. Trump’s effort to hype hydroxychloroquine as a solution to the virus — and thereby to tout his “expertise” against government doctors — was echoed among others on the right despite a lack of evidence that it worked. Later, the anti-parasite medication ivermectin was hailed as an effective treatment. That too lacks credible evidence, but it became an article of faith among Trump supporters that there were cheap, effective medicines that drug companies were trying to hide. Research showed that counties Trump won in 2020 were more likely to see prescriptions for ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine. Research being published next week helps explain that latter finding. It turns out that doctors who are politically conservative were actually more likely to consider hydroxychloroquine as an effective treatment, despite the understood research.

Ruth Michaelson, Deniz Barh, and Sam Jones of the Guardian report that the death toll in Turkey and Syria from Monday’s 7.8 magnitude earthquake has reached over 5,000 and may go much higher.

Aftershocks, freezing temperatures and damaged roads are hampering efforts to reach and rescue those affected by Monday’s earthquake in southern Turkey and northern Syria, which has killed more than 5,000 people and destroyed thousands of buildings. As the scale of the devastation from the 7.8 magnitude tremor continued to unfold, the World Health Organization warned the number of casualties could exceed 20,000. Initial rescue efforts were stalled by a second quake on Monday that measured 7.7 magnitude. On Tuesday morning, Turkey’s vice-president, Fuat Oktay, said 3,419 people had been killed in the quake, with another 20,534 had been injured. The number of confirmed deaths on the Syrian side of the border rose to 1,602, bringing the death toll in both countries to 5,021. Turkey’s disaster management agency said it had 11,342 reports of collapsed buildings, of which 5,775 had been been confirmed. People in remote towns in southern Turkey described how relief efforts were stretched to breaking point, amid destruction over a border region spanning almost 650 miles.

Finally today, as soon as I heard about the magnitude of Monday’s earthquake in Turkey, I remembered the lost lives and devastation and damaged infrastructure of the 1999 Izmit earthquake . And so did Asil Aydintasbas , writing for The Washington Post.

In 1999, we quickly learned that it wasn’t the earthquake itself but human-made concrete blocks that kill people. The blame went to contractors who used cheap materials, to the officials who failed to enforce Turkey’s relatively loose building codes, and, of course, to a government that has failed to develop a nationwide earthquake response strategy. Ironically, it was for just such reasons that the 1999 earthquake inspired a huge grass-roots desire for change that ultimately benefited the Justice and Development Party (AKP) — the party of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. When it came to power in 2002, the AKP was all about reform and closer ties with the European Union. E.U. funds flowed into the construction of safer schools and other public buildings in accordance with European building codes. Yet as Erdogan has expanded his own power (and as Turkey’s European dream has faded), the government’s interest in living up to European safety norms has eroded. In 2018, nearly two decades after the massive 1999 earthquake, Turkey finally passed much-awaited earthquake legislation. But those rules have been more honored in the breach than the observance. Erdogan has frequently described the construction industry as the crown jewel of the economy — encouraging a tacit lack of oversight. Turkey’s big public contracts tend to go to the same government cronies. Make what you will of this.

Good day, everyone!

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