February 6, 2023

Monday, February 6, 2023. Annette’s News Roundup.

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Joe is always busy.

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President Biden’s State of the Union address. When to watch, where to watch and what to expect.

Did you think I wouldn’t keep reminding you about the SOTU?

State of the Union 2023: What to know ahead of Biden's speech on Tuesday.

President Joe Biden will deliver his third State of the Union address on Tuesday, Feb. 7, at 9 p.m. EST during a joint session of Congress in the House of Representatives chamber.

House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) sent a letter to Biden on Jan. 13, inviting the president to address Congress and the nation – a constitutionally mandated tradition that dates back to George Washington.

“The American people sent us to Washington to deliver a new direction for the country, to find common ground, and to debate their priorities,” the California Republican said in a letter to Biden. “Your remarks will inform our efforts to address the priorities of the American people,” McCarthy added.

White House spokesperson Karine Jean-Pierre quickly announced that Biden accepted and was “grateful” for the invitation.

“He looks forward to speaking with Republicans, Democrats, and the country about how we can work together to continue building an economy that works from the bottom up and the middle out, keep boosting our competitiveness in the world, keep the American people safe, and bring the country together,” Jean-Pierre said in statement shortly after McCarthy sent his invitation.

Who is delivering the Republican response?

Newly elected Arkansas Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders will deliver the Republican response to Biden’s speech, taking on a task often assigned to an up-and-comer in the party that does not control the White House.

Sanders, the daughter of former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee, served as press secretary under former president Donald Trump for nearly two years, and has been floated as potential Trump running mate in 2024. She is the youngest governor in the U.S., and the first woman to serve as governor in Arkansas.

In a joint statement announcing Sanders’ response, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell and House Speaker Kevin McCarthy touted Sanders as a powerful advocate for conservative values.

Iowa Gov. Kim Reynolds, who gained national attention for her opposition to the Biden administration’s Covid guidelines, spoke for the GOP last year.

Are there any other responses?

Democratic Rep. Delia Ramirez of Illinois will be the voice for progressives in the legislature, giving remarks Tuesday that will respond to Joe Biden’s speech and rebut Sanders’ response.

Speaking on behalf of the Working Families Party, the first-term representative will use her response to address social security, medicare, abortion and immigration, and will urge Biden to take executive action on progressive priorities like lowering drug costs.

It’s not the first time liberals will deliver a response to a Biden speech. Progressive Reps. Jamaal Bowman (D-N.Y.) and Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.) delivered responses to Biden’s speech in 2021 and 2022 respectively.

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Cheering for America.

Let’s talk about the Chinese Balloon.

Let’s talk about the Pentagon’s disclosures.

Senior Defense Official and Senior Military Official Hold an Off-Camera, On-Background Press Briefing Update on the High-Altitude Surveillance Balloon > U.S. Department of Defense > Transcript.

Thanks, everybody, for hopping on the call.  As you know, the United States government detected and was tracking closely a high-altitude surveillance balloon.  President Biden asked the military to present options. 

On Wednesday, President Biden gave his authorization to take down the Chinese surveillance balloon as soon as the mission could be accomplished without undue risk to U.S. civilians under the balloon's path. 

Military commanders determined that there was undue risk of debris causing harm to civilians while the balloon was over land.  As a result, they developed a plan to down the balloon once it was over water in U.S. territorial airspace.  That mission has now been successfully completed.  At the direction of the president, the U.S. military, at 2:39 p.m. this afternoon, shot down the high-altitude surveillance balloon off the coast of South Carolina and within U.S. territorial airspace. 

Shooting the balloon down addressed the surveillance threat posed to military installations and further neutralized any intelligence value it could have produced, preventing it from returning to the PRC. In addition, shooting the balloon down could enable the U.S. to recover sensitive PRC equipment.

I would also note that while we took all necessary steps to protect against the PRC surveillance balloon's collection of sensitive information, the surveillance balloon's overflight of U.S. territory was of intelligence value to us. I can't go into more detail, but we were able to study and scrutinize the balloon and its equipment, which has been valuable.

PRC government surveillance balloons transited the continental United States briefly at least three times during the prior administration and once that we know of at the beginning of this administration, but never for this duration of time.

As Chinese officials have themselves acknowledged, this high-altitude surveillance balloon belonged to the People's Republic of China. The balloon never posed a military or physical threat to the American people. However, its intrusion of our airspace for multiple days was an unacceptable violation of our sovereignty.

SENIOR DEFENSE OFFICIAL: Thanks, Dan. So, we've been tracking this high-altitude balloon for some time. It entered the Alaska Joint Operating Area on January 28th, having entered the U.S. Air Defense Identification Zone north of the Aleutian Islands, and therefore passing into sovereign U.S. airspace. It then entered into Canadian airspace on January 30th, and re-entered U.S. airspace over northern Idaho on January 31st.

We've confidence that the high-altitude balloon, as I said, was a PRC surveillance balloon. We assessed that it did not pose a threat at any time to civilian air traffic because of the altitude of the balloon. We also assessed it did not pose a military or kinetic threat to U.S. people or property on the ground. Although we were constantly updating both of those assessments and prepared to take it out if that threat profile changed.

Let’s talk about the Predatory GOP, angry at President Biden, not China.

Or the Republican Representative from Kentucky, James Comer, who went on NewsMax to say there could be truth to the idea that one of Biden’s aides when he was Vice President might have had ties to the Chinese government. Comer, who now chairs the House Oversight Committee also claimed, with no basis, that Biden’s energy policy suggests he has been “compromised by China.”

Or Marco Rubio (touch 👇 to watch his face when he learns about Trump’s silence when 3 Balloons from China crossed America).

Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.) told CBS, “I think this entire episode telegraphed weakness to [President] Xi [Jinping] and the Chinese government.” (Washington Post).

Republican Sen. Tom Cotton of Arkansas on Sunday criticized the Biden administration’s response to the suspected Chinese surveillance balloon, saying the White House was “paralyzed for an entire week” and calling the incident an “embarrassment.”  (CNN).

House Republicans are also reportedly considering passing a resolution criticizing President Biden’s actions in this episode on Tuesday, the day Biden delivers his annual State of the Union address. Resolutions are nonbinding, primarily symbolic statements, often delivering a message from one party to another. This resolution could pass the House, where Republicans have a slim majority. An email seeking comment from House Republicans was not immediately returned Sunday afternoon. (Washington Post).

Or Trump himself.

Let’s talk about a few sane Politicos.

I found one on the red side of the aisle.

Not too much talk on the blue side, but what there is is choice.

Touch 👇to watch the Transportation Secretary.

U.S. Navy Divers Work to Recover Debris From Chinese Spy Balloon as Diplomacy Dwindles.

WASHINGTON — Navy divers were searching for debris from the Chinese spy balloon that a U.S. fighter jet shot down off the coast of South Carolina, defense officials said on Sunday, as the fallout from the dramatic confrontation between the world’s two great powers showed no signs of easing.

The recovery effort, which is expected to take days, began not long after debris from the balloon hit the water on Saturday, a defense official said. He added that a Navy ship had arrived on the scene, and that other Navy and Coast Guard ships, which had been put on alert, had also been dispatched.

The shooting down of the balloon, occurring at the end of a remarkable week of high-stakes international drama playing out in the open skies and behind closed doors, introduced a new phase in the increasingly tempestuous relationship between the United States and China, as each vies to be the pre-eminent world power across the economic, military and technological realms — with intelligence-gathering occupying a critical role in their competition.

That a confrontation over a single surveillance balloon deemed harmless by the Pentagon could destabilize diplomacy between the two countries showed the difficulties of putting “guardrails on the relationship,” a goal stated in those terms by President Biden and his aides. (New York Times).

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How difficult it is to be an immigrant. This love story 👇 with a successful couple still makes that clear.

A Friendship Evolves, Thanks to an Unusual Date — With Grandpa

For Mr. Ng, 30, wondering how to maneuver his way from a bad predicament into a better one felt familiar. Born in Toronto, he was raised as an only child by his mother, Mona Kwong, a factory seamstress who immigrated from Hong Kong to Canada in 1979 hoping to escape poverty. When he was 13, his parents divorced. His father, who also immigrated from Hong Kong, had been an infrequent presence at home, working at restaurants and casinos hours outside the city and returning only sporadically. “He kind of flowed in and out of my life, but mostly out,” he said.

Ms. Kwong, he said, “taught me everything I know.” Lesson No. 1 was to work hard. In 2005, shortly after his parents split, Ms. Kwong was laid off from her seamstress job. To help pay the bills, Mr. Ng cleaned houses with her on weekends. His domain was tubs and floors. “She did all the above-the-waist work, because bending over isn’t easy after you’ve spent a lifetime hunched over a sewing machine,” he said. Academic hard work and extracurricular hustle earned him full financial aid at Harvard.

Ms. Chen’s parents, James Chen and Wendy Pan, also immigrated to Canada, but from Beijing, where she was born and lived until the family left for Toronto in the late 1990s. Her maternal grandparents, who raised her while her parents worked long hours as producers on film and TV sets, came with them. Ms. Chen’s younger sister, Harriet, was born in Toronto. Three years later, the family settled in Vancouver. Better educational opportunities had brought them to Canada.

Ms. Chen is now 30. When she left for college, she was unsure about a career path. She had a triple major in business administration, economics and rhetoric, earning two bachelor’s degrees in 2013 while working part-time jobs to pay her tuition. She wasn’t done exploring her professional options when she signed on with Goldman Sachs in 2012. In 2015, she earned a law degree from the Chinese University of Hong Kong. A year later, she helped form the San Francisco venture capital firm IOVC, where she is still a general partner.

The zone confusion began to clear in 2020, when Mr. Ng, who had returned to Harvard to work as a career adviser, sent an end-of-year personal update email to friends and mentors. He had written a book, “The Unspoken Rules: Secrets to Starting Your Career Off Right,” to help job seekers from underrepresented backgrounds find their way to leadership positions. The group email was both a news blast and a collective thank you.

“I was reflecting on all the people who helped me become the person I am, and everything I was grateful for,” he said. Ms. Chen, who was teaching an entrepreneurship class at Berkeley, wrote back. “I was excited to hear about the book,” she said. “I said, ‘Wow, my students really, really need this.’”

“The Unspoken Rules,” published in the spring of 2021, won Mr. Ng a flurry of publicity and a spot on The Wall Street Journal’s best-seller list at a time when Ms. Chen wasn’t feeling quite as fortunate. Her grandmother, Shao Chen, was diagnosed with blood cancer in 2019. The correspondence that picked up between Ms. Chen and Mr. Ng after the book announcement became a source of comfort. (Source. The New York Times. Click the article title above or here to read the whole article.).

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Biden Administration and ordinary citizens welcome immigrants.

Biden admin's new private sponsorship program is a winner across party lines, polling shows.

Afghani evacuee Sayeda, 23, prepares to make a morning smoothie, an American concept her and her husband Israr have been trying for a few weeks, in Charlestown, Massachusetts on Feb. 21, 2022.

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New polling reveals that Americans across party lines support a new Biden administration initiative that allows everyday Americans to financially sponsor refugees seeking safety in the United States. Welcome.US said in a statement received by Daily Kos that YouGov polling reveals that 60% of respondents are supportive of the historic Welcome Corps initiative.

“Americans are not only in favor of private refugee sponsorship, many are ready to serve as sponsors themselves,” Welcome.US said, revealing that nearly 20,000 people signed up for more information on the program in the first week that followed the administration’s announcement. (Daily Kos).

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Want to be a sponsor to welcome a newcomer to America? Here is the link to the sponsor circle application. https://www.sponsorcircles.org/

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Pennsylvania has 2 important elections on Tuesday. What will you do to get out voters in Pittsburgh?

Pennsylvania House: Special elections set for Feb. 7, 2023.

PITTSBURGH —

Voters in three Pittsburgh area state house districts will decide in next Tuesday's special election who will fill vacant seats to represent them in the Pennsylvania House.

Their choices on Feb. 7 will determine which party has the majority in the state house and whether Democrats keep their recently won, narrow-edge control of the body.

Mail-in and absentee ballots must be returned by Feb. 7 before the polls close at 8 p.m. The deadline to register to vote was Jan. 23. The last day to apply for absentee or mail-in ballots was Jan. 31.

"We have been actively contacting those voters, alerting them to the fact that there's an election and asking them to vote for our Democratic candidates. I think they're out actively campaigning," Sam Hens-Greco, chair of the Allegheny County Democratic Committee, told Pittsburgh's Action News 4.

The voters in the 32nd, 34th, and 35th legislative districts are choosing who will fill the vacancies left by Tony DeLuca's death, Summer Lee's election to Congress and Austin Davis' election as lieutenant governor. (WTAE.com).

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The 2023 New York Liberty gets stronger and stronger, at least on paper.

forward Breanna Stewart (30) during a WNBA game between the Seattle Storm and the Chicago Sky on August 9, 2022.

Superteam? WNBA star joins Breanna Stewart on New York Liberty.

Central New York native Breanna Stewart is bringing a superteam to her home state.

The Associated Press reports WNBA star Courtney Vandersloot announced Thursday she would join Stewie on the New York Liberty, now loaded with Sabrina Ionescu, Betnijah Laney, and 2021 MVP Jonquel Jones. Vandersloot, Stewart, Ionescu and Jones were all WNBA All-Stars last year; Laney was an All-Star in 2021.

Vandersloot is currently playing with Stewart in Turkey. Vandersloot spent her entire 12-year career with the Chicago Sky, leading the league in assists six times and helping the Sky win the 2021 WNBA championship. (Source. Syracuse.com)

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More on Black History Month.

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This could have been included in More on Black History Month above 👆but the great Viola Davis seemed to deserve more space.

Viola Davis achieves EGOT with Grammy win for her audiobook.

CNN — 

After winning a Grammy Award, Viola Davis has officially completed the holy grail of entertainment awards.

Davis’ Sunday win for the audiobook of her memoir “Finding Me” completes her EGOT collection. She previously won an Emmy for her role in “How to Get Away with Murder,” an Oscar for “Fences,” and two Tony awards for “King Hedley III” and “Fences.”

Davis, 57, won the award for “Best Audio Book, Narration, and Storytelling Recording,” according to a tweet from the Recording Academy, which hosts the Grammys.

In her acceptance speech, the multi-hyphenate performer paid tribute to her younger self.

“I wrote this book to honor the 6-year-old Viola,” she said. “To honor her life, her joy, her trauma, everything. And, it has just been such a journey – I just EGOT!”
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