(C) Daily Kos This story was originally published by Daily Kos and is unaltered. . . . . . . . . . . Abbreviated Pundit Roundup: The Legion of Doom [1] ['Backgroundurl Avatar_Large', 'Nickname', 'Joined', 'Created_At', 'Story Count', 'N_Stories', 'Comment Count', 'N_Comments', 'Popular Tags', 'Showtags Popular_Tags'] Date: 2023-02-14 Jennifer Rubin of The Washington Post explains the Republican conniptions over the singing of “Lift Ev’ry Voice and Sing” at Super Bowl LVII. If the Super Bowl freakout sounds familiar, it’s because it is. Like so many other issues, this is about control — control of U.S. history, of shared culture and of public spaces. Why do MAGA Republicans become so enraged when some Americans choose to say “Happy Holidays” instead of “Merry Christmas”? Why do they go berserk when the College Board constructs an AP African American studies course? Of course, no one is forcing anyone to say “Happy Holidays.” Nor is anyone forcing children to enroll in an Advanced Placement course on African American studies (though doing so might prevent the next generation from going into the world ignorant about basic facts such as when the Civil War was fought). Similarly, no one is preventing anyone from missing the pregame show or — God forbid! — the Super Bowl itself. So why the level of visceral anger at “Lift Every Voice and Sing”? This is a manifestation of the resentment among many Americans that the way they understood their country is being “taken” from them. In their concept of the United States, America is a White and Christian country, and every other group is a footnote — peripheral to the majesty of the “real” American story. Amanda Marcotte of Salon writes about Reps. Marjorie Taylor Greene and George Santos, and the MAGA Republican Legion of Doom. Don Wolfensberger writes for The Hill, proposing that the State of the Union address should be delivered from the Oval Office annually with a written copy sent to Congress. The state of the Union message is rooted in Article II, section 3 of the Constitution which mandates that the president “shall, from time to time, give the Congress information of the state of the Union and recommend to their consideration such measures as he shall judge necessary and expedient.” Our first two presidents, George Washington and John Adams, appeared in person before Congress to deliver their messages. President Thomas Jefferson discontinued that practice in 1801 and submitted his messages to Congress in writing. The change was prompted by Jefferson’s anti-royalist bias that in-person appearances before Congress smacked too much of the British sovereign’s “speech from the throne” at the opening of Parliament, laying-out the government’s program for the coming year. [...] As Washington Post columnist Eugene Robinson wrote on Feb. 8, if he hadn’t known better he would have thought he was watching the British House of Commons heckling the prime minister during “Prime Minister’s Questions.” I had exactly the same reaction: the evening had devolved into a lively and rude interactive shouting match, with President Biden clearly prepared to respond to his detractors with cleverly “adlibbed” zingers. It was evident he had planned to draw-out the boo-birds in a bait-and-switch game in which they went for the bait, and he then took the switch to them. It would be one thing if the U.S. adopted a question period like the British Parliament, but presidents have scrupulously avoided that practice to preserve their dignity and separation of powers status. Instead, they have appeared for questioning by the media at White House news conferences. The SOTU insult-exchange is no substitute. Even congressional committee hearings in which administration officials are called to testify have become highly contentious and testy this year with the opposition party wielding the gavels. I wouldn’t be opposed to a president’s submission to a question period, say, twice annually (“from time to time”). IIRC, the format worked extremely well for President Barack Obama when he attempted it. What do you think? Jon Allsop of the Columbia Journalism Review writes about challenges that crafting “UFO coverage” presents for journalists. While we’re on the subject of aliens, recent days have brought to mind the last time that we saw a concerted period of coverage of UFOs: in the spring of 2021, when the federal government released a report—first to Congress, then publicly—on unidentified aerial phenomena that had been observed, often by military pilots, moving in ways that defied easy explanation. Back then, as well, officials said that they had found no evidence of alien activity but couldn’t rule it out either, and the declaration drove media headlines (and abundant X-Files references). The report stoked a media storm over UFOs; former President Barack Obama appeared on a late-night show and spoke of “objects in the skies that we don’t know exactly what they are”; the topic got the New Yorker treatment and the 60 Minutes treatment . While some journalists were having their minds blown, others criticized the coverage as overly credulous, questioning the credibility of recurring sources and regretting that the whole episode might serve as a gateway to conspiracism (as if we needed one more of those). evidenceX-Files Taken as a whole, the coverage in 2021 explored a sort of liminal space between dismissive ridicule, wide-eyed wonder, and hard-nosed objectivity. As my then–CJR colleague Lauren Harris wrote at the time , this was not necessarily a comfortable space for journalists to inhabit. “When a premise that was once considered taboo becomes permissible, the relative subjectivity of our industry is revealed,” Harris wrote. “The recent spate of UFO coverage points toward the difficulty of reporting on things that we, as a society, don’t yet know or understand—or things we don’t interrogate because we think we already understand them.” Writing for the Washington Post , Charlie Warzel made a related point , situating the UFO report alongside a number of other mind-bending stories from the time, not least the pandemic. “Put together, these disorienting events can create precisely the sense of confusion that disinformation researchers, fact-checkers and swaths of the mainstream media try to bulwark against,” he wrote. “Lately, the task feels increasingly difficult as many of the world’s biggest real-life stories are complex and constantly evolving topics, where today’s fantastical theory could become tomorrow’s truth.” Washington Post Katherine J. Wu of The Atlantic states that long COVID is here to stay, and it remains an emergency. But for all the ground that’s been gained, the road ahead is arduous. Long COVID still lacks a universal clinical definition and a standard diagnosis protocol; there’s no consensus on its prevalence, or even what symptoms fall under its purview. Although experts now agree that long COVID does not refer to a single illness, but rather is an umbrella term, like cancer, they disagree on the number of subtypes that fall within it and how, exactly, each might manifest. Some risk factors—among them, a COVID hospitalization, female sex, and certain preexisting medical conditions—have been identified, but researchers are still trying to identify others amid fluctuating population immunity and the endless slog of viral variants. And for people who have long COVID now, or might develop it soon, the interventions are still scant. To this day, “when someone asks me, ‘How can I not get long COVID?’ I can still only say, ‘Don’t get COVID,’” says David Putrino, a neuroscientist and physical therapist who leads a long-COVID rehabilitation clinic at Mount Sinai’s Icahn School of Medicine. As the world turns its gaze away from the coronavirus pandemic, with country after country declaring the virus “endemic” and allowing crisis-caliber interventions to lapse, long-COVID researchers, patients, and activists worry that even past progress could be undone. The momentum of the past three years now feels bittersweet, they told me, in that it represents what the community might lose. Experts can’t yet say whether the number of long-haulers will continue to increase, or offer a definitive prognosis for those who have been battling the condition for months or years. All that’s clear right now is that, despite America’s current stance on the coronavirus, long COVID is far from being beaten. Hannah Gelbart of BBC News reports on the inevitable: Scammers and profiteers are beginning to target the Turkey-Syria earthquake. TikTok accounts are posting photos of devastation, looped footage and recordings of TVs showing rescue efforts, whilst asking for donations. Captions include phrases like "Let's help Turkey", "Pray for Turkey" and "Donate for earthquake victims". One account, which was live for over three hours, showed a pixelated aerial image of destroyed buildings, accompanied by sound effects of explosions. Off-camera, a male voice laughs and speaks in Chinese. The video's caption is "Let's help Turkey. Donation". Another video shows a picture of a distressed child running from an explosion. The livestream host's message is "Please help achieve this goal"- an apparent plea for TikTok gifts. But the photo of the child is not from last week's earthquakes. A reverse image search found the same image had been posted on Twitter in 2018 with the caption "Stop Afrin Genocide", referring to a city in north-western Syria where Turkish forces and their allies in the Syrian opposition ousted a Kurdish militia in that year. Umat Uras of Al-Jazeera reports that the largest city in Europe fears that it might be home to the next big earthquake.. [Turkey] is particularly prone to earthquakes, as it lies in an area where several tectonic plates meet. Quakes usually occur along the boundaries between plates. The North Anatolian Fault, which divides the Eurasian and Anatolian plates, runs close to Istanbul. According to Sukru Ersoy, a professor of geology from Istanbul’s Yildiz Technical University, the question is when a powerful earthquake will hit Istanbul, not if it will happen. “With the data we have on the past earthquakes, and through certain modellings, we can say that an Istanbul earthquake is near and we would not even be surprised if the city is hit by it today,” he told Al Jazeera, adding that it was impossible to know when the disaster would take place. Istanbul Mayor Ekrem Imamoglu said in a recent interview that there were some 90,000 buildings that were highly vulnerable to earthquakes in the megalopolis with a population of some 16 million people. Jane Ferguson of The New Yorker explains how Syrian President Bashar al-Assad continues to block humanitarian aid to the areas of Syria most affected by the earhquakes. Buildings in rebel-controlled parts of the country collapsed on sleeping families just as they had across the border in Turkey, but, in Syria, virtually no one from the outside world came to help. The White Helmets, a volunteer rescue service that has been pulling civilians out of the rubble of homes bombed by Russian and Syrian government air strikes for years, did their best to rescue survivors. But they had none of the advanced rescue equipment brought to Turkey, where teams from around the world flew in with sniffer dogs, sensitive microphones, and seismic sensors. Syrians mostly dug with backhoes, shovels, and bare hands. People told us that there were some buildings, filled with families, from which no survivors had emerged. They said that the Assad regime and its ally, Russia, are preventing international aid from entering rebel-held areas. Several border crossings with Turkey are within a half hour’s drive from Syria’s disaster zone. So far, though, Assad has only permitted U.N.-distributed aid through one of them, and none of the assistance has included earthquake relief or rescue equipment. In response to criticism, Assad promised to open three border crossings on Monday. Meanwhile, those trapped under the rubble have slowly perished in places like Jindires, and their deaths are a microcosm of what has been happening in northwest Syria for years. Martin Griffiths, the U.N.’s head of emergency relief, tweeted on Sunday, “We have so far failed the people in north-west Syria. They rightly feel abandoned. Looking for international help that hasn’t arrived.” Jonathan Lord and Andrea Kendall-Taylor of The Washington Post posit that Iranian weapon stockpiles confiscated by the United States should be sent to Ukraine. The U.S. Central Command (Centcom), through its work with European allies and Gulf partners, is well on its way to turning the critical waterways around the Arabian Peninsula into a panopticon, making it increasingly difficult for the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps navy to operate without detection. The U.S. Naval Forces Central Command’s Task Force 59 has blazed the trail of innovation in maritime domain awareness, which has enabled more and more seizures of smuggled Iranian weapons at sea. Its success in stymying Iran has left Centcom with vast stores of seized weapons. These weapons, once inspected and recorded by the United Nations as evidence of Iran’s violations of U.N. Security Council resolution 2624, are housed in U.S. military facilities across the region. It’s time to put these weapons in service to a good cause: supporting Ukraine. The Defense Department and NATO allies have mobilized to deliver various weapons to Ukraine, everything from rifles to rockets, and soon tanks. In January, the Pentagon went so far as to raid its weapons stockpile in Israel for artillery shells to support Kyiv. And the need is not going away. [...] Legal obstacles may exist that prevent President Biden from treating these seized Iranian weapons as U.S. stocks and simply authorizing their transfer under Presidential Drawdown Authority, as he has done 31 times so far since August 2021. But if these weapons are technically still the property of Iran, the president should waste no time in seeking legal action to seize them under U.S. civil forfeiture authorities. The Biden administration and its European allies have already demonstrated tremendous creativity in applying new policy tools in support of Kyiv. Biden could, for example, request legal authorities from Congress to enable this transfer of arms. Already, the Biden administration secured congressional support to allow Washington to send the seized assets of Russian oligarchs to support Ukraine’s reconstruction. Congress would welcome the opportunity to find new, low-cost avenues to support Ukraine — and would likely jump at the chance to poke Moscow in the eye with Tehran’s finger. Finally today, Gregorio Sorgi of POLITICO Europe reports that a coalition of victorious right-wing candidates in Italian regional elections have further strengthened Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni. The incumbent governor of Lombardy, Attilio Fontana from the League — who was the right-wing candidate and backed by the coalition — won a comfortable reelection with more than 50 percent, while the Socialist MEP Pierfrancesco Majorino, who was also supported by the anti-establishment 5Star Movement, came a distant second with around 33 percent. Italy’s biggest and wealthiest region, Lombardy is historically a right-wing heartland and, although Fontana’s result exceeds polling during the electoral campaign, there were few doubts that he would win an easy second mandate. The outcome in Lazio, the region which includes Rome, arguably comes as a bigger blow for the left, which has governed the area for the past 10 years. Meloni’s party won 34 percent in Lazio, while coalition partners the League and Forza Italia polled respectively at 6 and 5 percent. The right-wing candidate for governor Francesco Rocca, a former president of the Italian Red Cross and ally of Meloni, came first with just under 50 percent of the vote. The Democratic Party and the 5Stars stood two separate candidates, but the strategy turned out to be a strategic blunder, dividing the left-wing votes and paving the way for a right-wing landslide. Have a good day, everyone! 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