(C) Daily Kos This story was originally published by Daily Kos and is unaltered. . . . . . . . . . . Abbreviated Pundit Roundup: 'I have to tell my son' [1] ['Backgroundurl Avatar_Large', 'Nickname', 'Joined', 'Created_At', 'Story Count', 'N_Stories', 'Comment Count', 'N_Comments', 'Popular Tags', 'Showtags Popular_Tags'] Date: 2023-02-15 The majority whip of the Michigan state House did not mince his words. x Today, we begin to collectively heal from the horrific events which transpired, tomorrow we work. My official statement regarding the Michigan State University shooting is below: Fuck your thoughts and prayers. pic.twitter.com/iHCOxOmDA3 — Rep. Ranjeev Puri (@RanjeevPuri) February 14, 2023 FYI: Greg’s computer is out of commission. He will hopefully be returning on Friday. Alex Walters, writing for Michigan State University’s student newspaper, The State News, interviews an MSU student whose younger sister attended Oxford HIgh School at the time of that school’s mass shooting in late November 2021. “Both times felt really similar,” [Zoe] Haden said. “Because, both times I was safe, but I knew people who weren't, and I just felt completely out of control.” Haden spent the ensuing hours listening to the police scanner, “terrified” by various unverified reports of shots-fired, bomb-threats, and locations of the shooter or shooters. She knew it was unreliable, that it was mostly untrue, but “at the time, I just needed some sense of control, so I had to listen,” Haden said. Since Oxford, Haden and her sister attempted to regain a sense of agency by getting involved with their local March For Our Lives chapter – a national gun-violence activism organization founded by survivors of the 2018 school shooting at Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida. Haden has since started MSU’s chapter of the organization, Spartan Against Gun Violence. On how the Oxford community has moved on from its mass shooting, if there’s a timeline for when normalcy will resume, Haden said, “it’s impossible honestly to truly heal from something like this.” Community activist Emily Wright writes an opinion piece for The Columbus Dispatch, calling out Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine. I live a few short miles from the derailment site. I also work with a non-profit, grassroots community organizing group, River Valley Organizing. We have been on the frontline around environmental community hazards in the Appalachian Ohio River Valley for several years. I can tell you, in this instance, people as far as 30 miles away have experienced symptoms of nausea, headache, teeth pain, vomiting, diarrhea, sinus congestion, and shortness of breath. People well outside the evacuation zone have left their homes because the waterways are polluted with chemical smells and dead fish. Some people have had to seek medical attention for their breathing. I myself am still wheezing as I write this. [...] The poorly named “controlled burn” of cancer-causing vinyl chloride swept four counties and two states as high winds came through the area. Media and elected officials demanded we shelter in place while also telling us we had “nothing to worry about." Paul Krugman of The New York Times continues his analysis of Republican threats to Social Security and Medicare, this time looking more generally at the reasons for “sunset” legislation. Even in our personal lives, everyone knows that it’s much harder to start doing something good than it is to continue a good routine. I don’t decide every morning whether I feel like working out; I’ve made morning workouts my baseline, to be canceled only in exceptional circumstances. (For younger readers: Staying in halfway decent shape later in life isn’t easy. Also, you kids, get off my lawn.) In much the same way, the Senate doesn’t have to decide every five years to actively continue these programs that many older Americans deeply rely on. For decades they’ve been our baseline, without the periodic meltdowns engendered by the debt ceiling and other recurring deadlines that require our legislators to actually come together and do something. One of the most famous results in behavioral economics is that workers are far more likely to make use of financially advantageous retirement plans when they must opt out in order not to be enrolled, as opposed to having to opt in, even though the cost of opting in is trivial. So even if politics weren’t a factor, someone who actually wanted to preserve Medicare and Social Security wouldn’t require that Congress opt back in to those programs every five years. Lynn Sweet of the Chicago Sun-Times reports that President Joe Biden and first lady Jill Biden are hosting a special film screening at the White House on Thursday. They are intending to send a “strong message” during Black History Month about hate crimes when they view “Till,” the powerful story about the lynching of Chicago’s Emmett Till, whose death at age 14 helped spark the modern civil rights movement. The movie, released last year, tells the story about Till’s lynching on Aug. 28, 1955, while visiting family in Mississippi and how and why it became a turning point in civil rights history. In an era before ubiquitous iPhone videos, police body cams and omnipresent street cameras providing evidence of brutality, Till’s mother made a crucial decision that led people to see that Till was a victim of lynching. [...] The Grio’s April Ryan reported that among those invited to the screening are high school students from Chicago and the state of Mississippi. The White House told the Chicago Sun-Times the invitees “include cast of the film, the family of Emmett Till, students, civil rights leaders, historians and families of victims of hate-fueled violence.” x Get excited! Time for a new generation. Let’s do this! 👊 🇺🇸 pic.twitter.com/BD5k4WY1CP — Nikki Haley (@NikkiHaley) February 14, 2023 Robin Givhan of The Washington Post reports that Nikki Haley’s video announcing her entry into the presidential race for 2024 amounts to a big and “ambitious blur.” She doesn’t mention Donald Trump. She doesn’t actually mention the United Nations, either. But these are the two reasons she is able to lay claim to recent foreign policy experience. When she talks about the shooting of nine Black congregants in Charleston’s Mother Emanuel AME Church in 2015 when she was South Carolina’s governor, she doesn’t mention that the shooter described himself as a white supremacist or that she agitated to have the Confederate flag removed from the state’s capitol grounds, which was then seen as a powerfully symbolic act. Instead she shows pictures of herself at a statewide day of prayer and notes that the community “turned away from fear and turned to God,” which does little to explain the hate, history and privilege that was compressed into that tragic moment. She strips her résumé of the details that might help a viewer better understand her political point of view, her cultural perspective, her waxing and waning on Trumpism or even her moral vantage point. She is a glossy headshot framed against a soft-focus backdrop. She is an easy-listening candidate, the one who doesn’t scream about critical race theory or woke politics in her three-minute riff on her qualifications. What did children learn in her state when she was governor? That “it’s a great day in South Carolina.” In this video, she is an ambitious blur. [...] Haley is not focused on differences, which is to say she isn’t focused on other people’s identity and history and lived experiences. She’s not interested in the fact that most Black Americans do not have an immigrant story; they have an enslavement story. Some of them have no story at all because it was never recorded. They’re not trying to rewrite history, but to get it down on paper for the very first time. Don Moynihan writes for his “Can We still Govern?” Substack about the origins of the House Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government. The idea of weaponization is not new. You can find the term in past Fox coverage for example. Journalist Matt Gertz (not to be confused with the aforementioned Matt Gaetz), took a look at the prominence of “weaponization” on Fox News. It turns up (for example, Sean Hannity in 2017 saying “we now have proof that intelligence wasn't the only powerful government entity that was weaponized by the Obama Administration”) but is an episodic rather than constant theme. “Weaponization” of course implies a martial aspect. It is similar to the linguistic trick of calling the Biden administration the Biden regime to evoke an illiberal approach to governing. It carries the whiff of a rogue state, implementing Stasi-like operations to suppress dissent. “Federal agencies have a long and sordid history of illegally targeting American citizens to gain political advantage. Government agencies like (but not limited to) the FBI, DHS, and DOJ are actively working to silence and suppress citizens who subscribe to ideas that differ from the regimes” says the Center for Renewing America. You probably have not heard of the Center for Renewing America, but it offers an important insight into both the origins and meaning of the weaponization trope. The Center for Renewing is a Trump aligned think-tank. As best as I can tell, the Center promoted the idea of the weaponization committee in the form it has now taken before anyone else. Last October, characterizing it as a “Church-style” committee, the Center stated: “we call on Members of Congress to assemble a stand-alone committee with broad investigative powers focused on woke and weaponized agencies and personnel within the federal government.” GOP hardliners who opposed Kevin McCarthy’s leadership bid used similar terminology when they successfully demanded, in a December 8th letter, that McCarthy: “Form a “Church Commission”-Style Committee to Target Weaponized Government.” Manuel G. Pascual of El País in English wonders if, and why, Russia is losing in the field of cyberwarfare in its war against Ukraine. Is Russia losing in the field of cyberwarfare? Has it deployed its entire arsenal, or does it have an ace up its sleeve? “Russian APTs [Advanced Persistent Threats, organized groups of hackers with no official ties to governments, but which often receive funding and instructions from a national administration] are well-known internationally. I would be surprised if they have not been interested in attacking until now,” says Guillermo Suárez-Tangil, a researcher at the IMDEA Networks Institute in Madrid, Spain. It is impossible to know if Moscow has more resources than it has so far used. Analysts are divided between those who believe that the Kremlin’s potential in the cyber arena has been overestimated and those who believe that, for whatever reason, Moscow still has not unleashed its full virtual firepower. Adam Meyers, vice president of intelligence at the Texan cybersecurity company CrowdStrike, speculates that the Russians did not launch any devastating attacks at the beginning of the war because they thought they would reach Kyiv in two or three days, and they would need the country’s infrastructure, which would also explain why they did not destroy Ukraine’s mobile networks. [...] There are many reasons to doubt the effectiveness of the Russian army in the virtual field. Early in the war, Russian troops were largely dependent on the infrastructure of captured territories. They used ordinary cellphones for military communications. Had that failed, Meyers points out, it would have been a problem for the war effort. It was because of their use of civilian phones instead of encrypted communication systems that the world found out the highest-ranking Russian officer deployed in Ukraine, General Vitaly Gerasimov, died a few weeks after the start of the war. That leak cast serious doubts over Russia’s cyber capabilities. The Guardian’s team of Stephanie Kirchgaessner, Manisha Ganguly, David Pegg, Carole Cadwalladr, and Jason Burke report that an undercover investigation has revealed that a team of Israeli contractors manipulates elections worldwide. The unit is run by Tal Hanan, a 50-year-old former Israeli special forces operative who now works privately using the pseudonym “Jorge”, and appears to have been working under the radar in elections in various countries for more than two decades. He is being unmasked by an international consortium of journalists. Hanan and his unit, which uses the codename “Team Jorge”, have been exposed by undercover footage and documents leaked to the Guardian. Hanan did not respond to detailed questions about Team Jorge’s activities and methods but said: “I deny any wrongdoing.” [...] Hanan told the undercover reporters that his services, which others describe as “black ops”, were available to intelligence agencies, political campaigns and private companies that wanted to secretly manipulate public opinion. He said they had been used across Africa, South and Central America, the US and Europe. Jason Horowitz of The New York Times says that after her first 100 days in office, Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni is receiving better than expected reviews from the rest of Europe, and even some Italian critics. The unexpected ordinariness of her early days has vexed the European establishment and her Italian critics, prompting relief but also raising a quandary as to what extent the toned-down firebrand should be embraced or still cautiously held at arm’s length. Ms. Meloni has made a case for herself. She has calmed international concerns over Italy’s ability to service its debts by passing a measured budget. She has had cordial meetings with European Union leaders and has muted her famously rapid-fire invective against the bloc, migrants and elites. She has followed in the footsteps of her predecessor, Mario Draghi, Mr. Europe himself, seeking to carry through on his blueprint to modernize the country with billions of euros in E.U. pandemic recovery funds. While her coalition partner Silvio Berlusconi went full Putin apologist this weekend — blaming President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine for the Russian invasion of his own country — her popularity has effectively minimized the damage from the loose cannons in her right-wing coalition. Finally today, Jessica Washington and Bertha Wang report for Al Jazeera that homelessness is on the rise in Hong Kong. In Tai Kok Tsui, ImpactHK, a charity which supports people experiencing homelessness, welcomes hundreds of people into one of its community centres, offering them fresh clothes, hot meals, and a chance to connect with social workers. “Every night on the streets is an emergency. This is a very wealthy city — but one in five at this moment are experiencing food insecurity,” ImpactHK founder Jeffrey Rotmeyer told Al Jazeera. “These are scary times. We’ve seen the percentage of females on the street double [since the pandemic], and we’ve seen about a 25 percent increase overall. And we are seeing homeless communities pop up in new areas.” A report by Oxfam in 2022 found the pandemic worsened Hong Kong’s wealth gap, with the richest residents making almost 50 times as much as the poorest in the first quarter of 2022. Have the best possible day, everyone! [END] --- [1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2023/2/15/2153063/-Abbreviated-Pundit-Roundup-I-have-to-tell-my-son Published and (C) by Daily Kos Content appears here under this condition or license: Site content may be used for any purpose without permission unless otherwise specified. via Magical.Fish Gopher News Feeds: gopher://magical.fish/1/feeds/news/dailykos/