February 18, 2023

Saturday, February 18, 2023. Annette’s News Roundup.

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Joe is always busy.

White House doctor says Biden remains 'fit for duty' after physical.

WASHINGTON — President Joe Biden remains "fit" to conduct his duties as president, according to a medical memo the White House released after a routine physical exam Thursday.

"President Biden remains a healthy, vigorous 80-year-old male, who is fit to successfully execute the duties of the Presidency,” the White House physician, Dr. Kevin O’Connor, said in a five-page memo.

O’Connor said his assessment was based on a “comprehensive review” of Biden’s medical history and a detailed physical examination that included specialty consultations at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center in Bethesda, Maryland. (NBC).

Here is Dr. O’Connor’s 5 page assessment.

Biden officials weighing civil penalties in Ohio's toxic rail disaster.

The Biden administration is considering civil penalties for freight railroad Norfolk Southern, along with possibly a legally binding order to ensure the company pays for cleanup costs associated with the toxic derailment in Ohio on Feb. 3, senior officials told reporters on Friday.

In a call designed to highlight the work of several agencies on the ground in East Palestine, Ohio, administration officials detailed the work being conducted by FEMA, the EPA, Health and Human Services, Transportation Department and independent investigatory agency the National Transportation Safety Board. The railroad has already pledged to pay for the costs of the cleanup, but officials said Friday that if it does not, the government would do it and charge Norfolk Southern three times the cost. (Politico).

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Kamala is always busy.

Harris headlines Munich summit as world braces for Ukraine fighting surge.

MUNICH — Vice President Harris touched down here Thursday in preparation for a speech to world leaders that will express enduring solidarity with Ukraine in its conflict with Russia, even as the White House has warned Kyiv it could soon see limits in support from the United States and other countries.


Harris is scheduled to speak at the Munich Security Conference on Saturday, the second straight year she has led the U.S. delegation to the international gathering of political, intelligence and defense leaders.

This time, the vice president is addressing the global summit just days before the first anniversary of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, as the world braces for what could be a decisive spring fighting season.


A year ago, Harris addressed the conference with the continent on the brink of war; 150,000 Russian troops were massed at the Ukrainian border and efforts to reach a diplomatic solution had been nearly exhausted. She also held meetings with European leaders, including Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, pledging America’s support in the face of Russian aggression. Russian troops invaded Ukraine five days later.



In the year since, the Western coalition has largely held firm, imposing sanctions on Moscow and sending substantial weaponry to Ukraine. But Republicans retook the House in November, and many conservatives have vowed to pull back their support to Ukraine, while Europe’s long-term appetite for funding the war effort remains unclear, especially as leaders agonize over the conflict’s effect on the global economy.


On Saturday, Harris will convey the continuing U.S. commitment to Ukraine, aides say, emphasizing that the Biden administration is determined to maintain support for Zelensky’s efforts to defend his country. Privately, White House officials have told leaders in Ukraine that its most recent aid packages represent Kyiv’s best chance to decisively change the course of the war.


Biden will travel to Europe on Monday to commemorate the first anniversary of the conflict, giving a speech in Poland and meeting with foreign leaders.

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The Republican Record.

Good to remember.

Republican U.S. Senator Rick Scott drops plan to cut Social Security, Medicare.

WASHINGTON, Feb 17 (Reuters) - U.S. Senator Rick Scott on Friday revised his plan to end all federal programs after five years to exclude the popular Social Security and Medicare programs, after enduring weeks of mounting criticism from Democrats and his fellow Republicans.

Democratic President Joe Biden had been hammering the "Rescue America" agenda, which Scott last year unsuccessfully urged his fellow Republicans to adopt as a midterm election platform. It called for all federal programs to end after five years unless Congress voted to reauthorize them.

"I believe that all federal legislation should sunset in five years, with specific exceptions for Social Security, Medicare, national security, veterans' benefits, and other essential services," Scott wrote in an Op-Ed published online on Friday by the conservative Washington Examiner newspaper. "If a law is worth keeping, Congress can pass it again," he said.

The White House said the newly revamped Scott plan should not be taken at face value.

"We congratulate Senator Scott on joining the post-State of the Union red wave of Republicans acknowledging that they have, in fact, been attempting to put Medicare and Social Security on the chopping block," White House spokesman Andrew Bates said. (Reuters).

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Thinking about John Fetterman.

Opinion. The example John Fetterman is setting.

EDITOR’S NOTE: Dr. Peggy Drexler is a research psychologist, documentary film producer and author. The opinions expressed in this commentary are hers.

CNN) — In 1972, Democratic presidential candidate George McGovern chose as his running mate Thomas Eagleton. Eagleton was a choice pick—the youngest-ever Attorney General in Missouri history who became a popular senator.

But not long after, the rumors began: Eagleton had been hospitalized for depression the decade before and undergone shock therapy. It didn’t matter that Eagleton had gone on to build a successful career—the suggestion of any sort of mental illness, ever, was enough.

It was a campaign that ended before it began. McGovern dropped Eagleton from the ticket, but eventually lost in a landslide anyway to the Republican nominee, Richard Nixon.

Some 50 years later, depression is less of an outlier, to say the least. Figures from the National Institute of Mental Health show that an estimated 21 million adults in the United States—nearly one in 10—has had at least one major depressive episode. The incidence of any type of mental health issue is even greater: one in four Americans have suffered from some form of mental illness, according to Johns Hopkins Medicine.

If we’ve been lucky enough to not count ourselves among the afflicted, most certainly we’ve known someone who has. Depression is so widespread that very few of us are not impacted.

But are we ready to see elected officials through their depression publicly? On Thursday, Democratic Sen. John Fetterman of Pennsylvania checked himself into Walter Reed National Military Medical Center “to receive treatment for clinical depression,” according to his chief of staff. Fetterman had a near-fatal stroke during his campaign last year and has spent many of his months of recovery not so much recovering as pushing through, campaigning competitively and now, as a freshman senator, working to prove himself to his peers and his constituents.

The good news is that he sought out the helps he needs—and that, at least so far, his supporters seem to be compassionate. As they should be: Besides the fact that, statistically, most of us have been impacted by depression in some form or another, many people do not get their depression treated. It’s a sign of strength to know when you need help and to get it.

And yet: Almost immediately, a number of conservative voices callously and prematurely questioned whether Fetterman was fit to serve. (Of course, more liberal readers may also have political motives when unquestionably backing Fetterman.)

The best response, of course, is somewhere in the middle—commending Fetterman for his courage to seek treatment while considering, with sincerity and when the time is right, whether continuing to serve in a stressful position that impacts so many is in both his and his constituents’ best interests. The fact is that it’s a fair question to ask. But it’s crucial to remember that depression is as common as the common cold. In itself, depression simply isn’t prohibitive to thriving in life and career.

We’re right to want to know about the health issues facing our leaders and the steps they’re taking to get the help they need, but it’s important to remember that millions of Americans battle depression and lead highly productive, successful lives. We aren’t living in the 1970s anymore; we’ve come far in our understanding of an illness that affects so many people.

In fact, Fetterman’s depression—and his willingness to talk about it—may make him a more compassionate leader and appealing candidate. We’re living in tough times, and almost everybody hurts; if our leaders are meant to represent us, how can we possibly fault them for being, in fact, just like us? (CNN).

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The Fox Folks knew Trump was lying. They just have no shame.

Tom Nichols, Patronizing for Profit (Atlantic) described Tucker Carlson’s behavior when the Trump cult started to spread The Big Lie in 2019 -“Of course, Carlson wasn’t worried about the truth; he was worried about the profitability of the Fox brand. When the Fox reporter Jacqui Heinrich did a real-time fact-check on Twitter of a Trump tweet about voter fraud, Carlson tried to ruin her career. “Please get her fired,” he wrote in a text chain that included Hannity and Ingraham. He continued:

Seriously…What the fuck? I’m actually shocked…It needs to stop immediately, like tonight. It’s measurably hurting the company. The stock price is down. Not a joke.”

Thursday, revelations from Dominion Voting Systems’ defamation lawsuit against Fox News and the Fox Corporation over claims of election fraud broke loudly and made it clear that, while on-air the Fox stars were faking belief in The Big Lie, off-camera they were mocking the fraudulent, outrageous Trump spokespeople, like Sidney Powell and Rudy Giuliani.

Later on Thursday, even after the truth about the network’s 2020 lies hit every major news outlet in America, a shameless Carlson went on air and lied again to the American public.👇

Tucker Carlson Hints AGAIN At Election Fraud And The Timing Is So, So Awkward.

Tucker Carlson expressed doubt about the 2020 presidential election results Thursday after court documents emerged showing he actually didn’t believe ex-President Donald Trump’s baseless fraud claims.

On “Tucker Carlson Tonight” the Fox News host opened with musings on “what the hell is going on in our country.”

“There are so many unanswered questions ― some of them lingering,” he said. “How, for example, did senile hermit Joe Biden get 15 million more votes than his former boss, rock star crowd-surfer Barack Obama? Results like that would seem to defy the laws of known physics and qualify instead as a miracle. Was the 2020 election a miracle? Honestly, we don’t know and we don’t expect to get an answer to it tonight.” (HuffPost).

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Where do we as a nation and a world stand on gender equality?

CNN’s morning anchor Don Lemon, roiled colleagues on Thursday when he asserted on the air that Nikki Haley, the 51-year-old Republican presidential candidate, “isn’t in her prime, sorry.”

“A woman is considered to be in her prime in her 20s and 30s and maybe 40s,” Mr. Lemon said, to the visible dismay of his “CNN This Morning” co-anchors, Poppy Harlow and Kaitlan Collins. He refused to back down after Ms. Harlow questioned his remarks, telling her to “look it up.” (New York Times),

Is Lemon alone in his sexism?

Lemon is one thing. The Taliban is another. But below are 3 articles taking into account the current national and world situation for women.

Is this article 👇 right about where our nation stands about electing a Female President?

Is a Woman Ever Going to Win the White House? By Susan B. Glasser

Will America ever have a woman President? We’re closer to that than at any time in history, but what worries me most about this tired old question is that hardly anyone seems to be asking it anymore.

On paper, of course, the gender imbalance in American politics has changed substantially—and for the better—in the decades since [the “year of the woman” in 1992, when women made up seven per cent of the Senate.]

Women are now twenty-five per cent of the Senate and twenty-seven per cent of the House. There are twelve women governors, and women are, for the first time, a majority of the Cabinet. Kamala Harris, who served for three years alongside Feinstein and continued the tradition of an all-female Senate delegation for California, is today the first female Vice-President.

And yet it sure doesn’t seem like a moment of female ascendance. Roe v. Wade is no more. Feminism—whether first-, second-, or third-wave—is barely mentioned in the national political debate. Democrats every few years talk about resurrecting the Equal Rights Amendment; they haven’t slash can’t. After all the activism, all the #MeToo revelations, women currently make up ten per cent of Fortune 500 C.E.O.s—which is both a record high and ridiculously low.

Harris, meanwhile, could become President at any moment, but the thrust of many conversations in Democratic politics these days is a persistent worry about her weakness as a potential candidate if Biden, willingly or otherwise, does not run again. A deeply reported take by Jonathan Martin in Politico on Thursday makes the point that high-level Democrats don’t want Biden to run again but are afraid of saying so because their greater fear is Harris becoming the 2024 nominee and not being able to win in the general election. A recent Times piece was even harsher, quoting dozens of Democrats as saying that “she had not risen to the challenge of proving herself as a future leader of the party, much less the country.”

The prospects for a female breakthrough are hardly better among Republicans.

On Tuesday, Nikki Haley formally launched her candidacy for the 2024 G.O.P. Presidential nomination. South Carolina’s first woman governor before serving as Trump’s first Ambassador to the United Nations, Haley is the only woman to seriously figure on the longlist of potential Republican candidates this cycle, but in her announcement speech on Wednesday she treaded cautiously on the subject of her background. She is, after all, a daughter of Indian immigrants running in a party in which immigrant bashing is de rigueur. “This is not about identity politics,” Haley said. “I don’t believe in that. And I don’t believe in glass ceilings, either.” With polls showing her in the single digits, most pundits give her close to zero chance of winning.

At a moment when both parties, for very different reasons, seem to be hurtling toward an outcome that few voters want—a rerun of the 2020 election, between two geriatric white men—Hillary Clinton’s failed 2016 campaign looms large over the question of when, how, or whether a woman can finally shatter that ultimate glass ceiling.

In 2018, the Pew Research Center asked Americans whether they believed that they would see a woman President in their lifetime. Sixty-eight per cent said yes, which was lower than the previous time the question was asked, in 2014, when seventy-three per cent thought that would happen. Clinton’s defeat sent hopes, at least temporarily, into reverse.

This is the context for the current, paradoxical moment: expectations remain high, but so, too, do fears that a woman simply can’t win. There’s a fatalism to the question, post-Clinton, that is profoundly depressing. How naïve, now, all that “year of the woman” cheerleading seems. My 1992 self would not be thrilled by the fact that it took women three decades to get to a quarter of the Congress and one embattled female Vice-President.

The reality is that American politics since Trump beat Clinton has taken a turn back to the macho. The rise of a would-be strongman in the Republican Party has made performative displays of aggressive masculinity the prevailing style in the rebranded G.O.P. Whether Trump himself returns as the nominee or not, the up-and-comers in the Party are a bunch of confrontational men. They are brawlers like Ron DeSantis or Twitter trolls like Ted Cruz.

The Trump factor hangs heavy over the Democrats as well. I’ve heard many of them voice the conviction that Trump’s election proved how deeply rooted American sexism remains. And, yes, I know that for everyone who believes that, there is someone else is who convinced it’s just that Clinton was a terrible candidate or that Harris is an awful Vice-President or that it’s simply not the right time for a woman. And that, in the end, is the point: so long as the threat of Trump winning another term in the White House hangs over the country, many Democrats aren’t willing to risk nominating anyone besides another white man to take him on.

“Biden is the guy that can beat Trump,” Joyce Beatty, a senior Black Democratic congresswoman, told Politico. The current President is the only politician, as his departing chief of staff, Ron Klain, reminded my colleague Evan Osnos the other day, who has ever beaten Donald Trump. So, too bad, Kamala Harris and Nikki Haley. Once again, it appears, history will have to wait. ♦

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Then there is this.

Scottish First Minister Nicola Sturgeon's resignation echoes that of New Zealand’s Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern's.

Two’s company. One month after former New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern announced her plans to resign, another female world leader is following in her footsteps. Scottish First Minister Nicola Sturgeon said yesterday that she plans to step down from her leadership role after eight years in the job.

The explanation Sturgeon gave in a speech is eerily similar to the kind of burnout Ardern described when she said she “no longer had enough in the tank” to do the job of PM. Sturgeon described the “brutality” of serving in the top leadership role, which she said left no room for a private life or even to “meet friends for a coffee or go for a walk on your own.” The pressures of the 24/7 news cycle and the political media’s focus on lawmakers’ personalities rather than policies made the job no longer sustainable for her, she said.

Funnily enough, Sturgeon used the same language as Ardern just three weeks ago but came to the opposite conclusion at that time. She said last month that she had “plenty left in the tank” for the job of first minister.

So what changed? As Scotland’s leader, Sturgeon has often been cast in opposition to the U.K.’s conservative government in Westminster. She was a critical supporter of Scottish independence at the time of Scotland’s 2014 referendum on the question. More recently, she clashed with U.K. politicians who blocked a Scottish bill that would have made it easier for people to change their gender identification on government documents. Trans rights have become a flashpoint issue in the U.K.; Sturgeon called Westminster’s obstruction of the bill a “full-frontal attack on our democratically elected Scottish parliament.”

But like Ardern, the popularity of Sturgeon and the Scottish National Party she leads is falling in public opinion polls, in part because of the gender ID bill debacle. She’s been the subject of scandals, including an investigation into a loan her husband made to the SNP. (Sturgeon said her decision was not related to “short-term pressures.”) Similar to Ardern’s Labour Party in New Zealand, the SNP has no obvious successor to Sturgeon.

Sturgeon isn’t stepping off the political stage entirely; the 52-year-old plans to serve out the rest of her term as a member of parliament until her seat’s May 2026 election. But she’s certainly stepping back.

The past three years saw the emergence of female leaders on the global stage as many were credited with successful responses to the COVID-19 pandemic. We heard endless talk of how women lead more successfully, no matter how difficult the election, once in office. With Ardern and Sturgeon out of the spotlight, we can hope it won’t take another pandemic for others to emerge with the kind of star power that COVID-era leaders wielded. After all, women should be given the opportunity to lead in moments of calm—not just in crises. (Emma Hinchliffe, Broadsheet, Fortune.)

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Last, there is also the plight of female journalists.

Story Killers: Women journalists abused by scourge of online attacks.

When Gharidah Farooqi interviews a male politician for television, she does research and plans out her questions, as any journalist would. She is professional, well-dressed and asks pertinent follow-up questions.

But every move she makes, every gesture and expression, is scrutinized by mobs of observers online. Everything — the clothing she wears, the questions she asks while interviewing someone — is fuel for an avalanche of mostly anonymous online abuse that for years has ridiculed her and her work.

“I see my male counterparts — they’re also abused, but not abused for their bodies, their genital parts,” she said. “If they’re attacked, they’re just targeted for their political views. When a woman is attacked, she’s attacked about her body parts.”
The ordeal of Farooqi, who covers politics and national news for News One in Pakistan, exemplifies a global epidemic of online harassment whose costs go well beyond the grief and humiliation suffered by its victims. The voices of thousands of women journalists worldwide have been muffled and, in some cases, stolen entirely as they struggle to conduct interviews, attend public events and keep their jobs in the face of relentless online smear campaigns.

Stories that might have been told — or perspectives that might have been shared — stay untold and unshared. The pattern of abuse is remarkably consistent, no matter the continent or country where the journalists operate.

Farooqi says she’s been harassed, stalked and threatened with rape and murder. Faked images of her have appeared repeatedly on pornographic websites and across social media. Some depict her holding a penis in the place of her microphone. Others purport to show her naked or having sex. Similar accounts of abuse are heard from women journalists throughout the world.

The ordeal of Farooqi, who covers politics and national news for News One in Pakistan, exemplifies a global epidemic of online harassment whose costs go well beyond the grief and humiliation suffered by its victims. The voices of thousands of women journalists worldwide have been muffled and, in some cases, stolen entirely as they struggle to conduct interviews, attend public events and keep their jobs in the face of relentless online smear campaigns.

Stories that might have been told — or perspectives that might have been shared — stay untold and unshared. The pattern of abuse is remarkably consistent, no matter the continent or country where the journalists operate.

Farooqi says she’s been harassed, stalked and threatened with rape and murder. Faked images of her have appeared repeatedly on pornographic websites and across social media. Some depict her holding a penis in the place of her microphone. Others purport to show her naked or having sex. Similar accounts of abuse are heard from women journalists throughout the world. (Washington Post).

Killing of Indian editor sparks an investigation

This article is part of “Story Killers,” a reporting project led by the Paris-based journalism nonprofit Forbidden Stories, which seeks to complete the work of journalists who have been killed. The inspiration for this project, which involves The Washington Post and more than two dozen other news organizations in more than 20 countries, was the 2017 killing of the Indian journalist Gauri Lankesh, a Bangalore editor who was gunned down at a time when she was reporting on Hindu extremism and the rise of online disinformation in her country.

New reporting by Forbidden Stories found that shortly before her slaying, Lankesh was the subject of relentless online attacks on social media platforms in a campaign that depicted her as an enemy of Hinduism. Her final article, “In the Age of False News,” was published after her death.

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