February 22, 2023

Wednesday, February 22, 2023. Annette’s News Roundup.

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Joe is always busy.

You can watch the President speak from Poland by pressing the picture on the You Tube video below. 👇

“Speaking before a crowd of thousands in the gardens of Warsaw’s Royal Castle, Joe Biden hailed the resilience of Ukraine’s people and the benevolence of Poland and other western allies in helping fend off the Russian invasion.

“Autocrats only understand one word: no.” Biden said. “No, you will not take my country. No, you will not take my freedom. No, you will not take my future. I’ll repeat tonight what I said last year at the same place. A dictator bent on rebuilding an empire will never be able to ease the people’s love of liberties. Brutality will never grind down the will of the free. Ukraine will never be a victory for Russia, never.”

He then condemned Russian president Vladimir Putin for the invasion, which began on 24 February of last year.”

“This war is never a necessity. It’s a tragedy. President Putin chose this war. Every day the war continues is his choice. He could end the war with a word. It’s simple. Russia stops invading Ukraine, it would end the war. If Ukraine stopped defending itself against Russia, it would be the end of Ukraine. That’s why together, we’re making sure Ukraine can defend itself,” Biden said. (The Guardian).

Thinking about the President’s surprise visit to Kyiv:

“Never in Mr. Biden’s lifetime had a president ventured into a war zone that was not under the control of American forces, much less on a relatively slow-moving locomotive that would take nine and a half hours to reach its destination. During that time, he was potentially exposed to circumstances beyond the control of the hypervigilant security phalanx that normally seeks to shield a commander in chief from every conceivable physical danger and minimize his time outside a hardened shelter.” (New York Times)

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Not all Republicans are attacking President Biden for his visit to Ukraine. Here is a surprise.

“I am very pleased that President Biden took the time and effort to visit Ukraine, and meet with President Zelensky. This was the right signal to send at the right time. A presidential visit to Ukraine, along with the statements made by Vice President Harris at the Munich Security Conference that Russia is committing crimes against humanity in Ukraine, are a powerful combination,” GOP senator Lindsey Graham said yesterday, after Biden returned to Poland from Kyiv. (The Guardian).

Lindsey Graham to China: ‘If you jump on the Putin train, you’re dumber than dirt.’

Sen. Lindsey Graham on Sunday said China would be making a colossal blunder if it decides to provide lethal aid to Russia for its war with Ukraine.

“If you jump on the Putin train, you’re dumber than dirt,” the South Carolina Republican said of China in an interview with Martha Raddatz on ABC’s “This Week.” “It would be like buying a ticket on the Titanic after you saw the movie.” (Politico).

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Democratic Senator Ron Wyden (OR) fights for abortion rights.

A top Democrat’s radical plan to deal with Trump’s worst judge and protect abortion rights.

On Thursday, Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR) proposed a radical solution to the possibility that a medication used in more than half of all abortions soon becomes banned. Should Matthew Kacsmaryk, a Trump-appointed judge who is widely expected to hand down a court order banning the drug, end up doing so, Wyden says that the Biden administration should simply ignore that decision.

Wyden offered this proposal at the end of a speech on the Senate floor, where he also laid out several reasons why the lawsuit attacking this abortion drug, mifepristone, lacks merit. “The answer” to a decision banning mifepristone, Wyden declared, “is to ignore it, at least until there is a final ruling on the underlying matter by the Supreme Court.”

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Jill Biden to visit Namibia, Kenya, part of US-Africa push.

WASHINGTON (AP) — Jill Biden headed for Africa on Tuesday, first stop Namibia, declaring as she departed Washington that she had “a lot to accomplish” during a five-day visit focused on empowering women and young people and addressing food insecurity.

The first lady’s visit to Namibia and Kenya is part of a push by the United States to step up engagement with Africa as a counterweight to China’s influence on the continent.

Biden, who teaches English and writing at a community college, said she dashed home from class with only an hour to spare before she needed to depart on the trip. She headed out a day before her husband gets back from his surprise trip to Ukraine and a scheduled visit to Poland.

“This whole trip will be exciting and we have a lot to accomplish,” she said.

Granddaughter Naomi Biden is accompanying the first lady on the trip.

President Joe Biden told African leaders who came to Washington for a summit last year that the U.S. is “all in” on the continent’s future and announced that he, his wife, the vice president and several members of his Cabinet would travel to Africa this year. He joked that the leaders would get tired of hosting everyone.

Jill Biden will be the third U.S. official to visit Africa this year, following Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen and U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Linda Thomas-Greenfield. (Associated Press).

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Originalism.

The bizarre theory of legal interpretation that asserts that the Constitution must be interpreted based on the original understanding "at the time it was adopted" is the Right Wing’s extremist argument of what Laws are constitutional and how we in contemporary America should live our lives.

These same folks often call themselves “Christian nationalists,” and think America should be a Christian nation.

Let’s play their game for a bit, on this issue they have embraced - whether America should be a Christian nation.

Game, Set, Match.

Game over.

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McCarthy’s extremism continues. Perhaps we shouldn’t be shocked? Maybe there is legal action that can be taken?

Why is a member of Congress allowed to give video which belongs to the Congress to a commercial enterprise? He couldn’t give the furniture assigned to him for his Congressional office to a local restaurant, could he?

Exclusive: Kevin McCarthy gives Tucker Carlson access to massive trove of Jan. 6 riot tape

House Speaker Kevin McCarthy has given Fox News' Tucker Carlson exclusive access to 41,000 hours of Capitol surveillance footage from the Jan. 6 riot, McCarthy sources tell me.

• Carlson TV producers were on Capitol Hill last week to begin digging through the trove, which includes multiple camera angles from all over Capitol grounds. Excerpts will begin airing in the coming weeks.

Why it matters: Carlson has repeatedly questioned official accounts of 1/6, downplaying the insurrection as "vandalism."

• Now his shows — "Tucker Carlson Tonight" on Fox News, and "Tucker Carlson Today" and "Tucker Carlson Originals" on the streaming service Fox Nation — have a massive trove of raw material.

Carlson told me: "[T]here was never any legitimate reason for this footage to remain secret."

• "If there was ever a question that's in the public's interest to know, it's what actually happened on January 6. By definition, this video will reveal it. It's impossible for me to understand why any honest person would be bothered by that."

Reality check: The Jan. 6 committee played numerous excerpts of the footage at last year's captivating hearings. (See the committee's archive.)

Between the lines: The process with Carlson started in early February, according to a communication between the show and a McCarthy representative that I was shown.

• The archive was previously reported to be 14,000 hours. I'm told it's now much more.

Flashback: McCarthy told reporters in Statuary Hall last month that he thinks "the American public should actually see all [that] happened instead of a report that's written [on] a political basis." (Video, beginning 10:50)

• Pushing for the release of the footage, Carlson argued on his show last month that Washington has "a regime of secrecy and deceit."

Carlson last year called the attack an "outbreak of mob violence, a forgettably minor outbreak by recent standards."(Axios)

McCarthy’s decision to provide Carlson with the video drew harsh criticism over the security risks of handing over footage that could contain information about the Capitol’s complex security apparatus.
In a letter to fellow Democrats, House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (N.Y.) said party members were working to learn more about the “egregious security breach.”


“I write with respect to public reports that extreme MAGA Republicans in the House have provided tens of thousands of hours of sensitive Capitol security footage to a FOX News personality who regularly peddles in conspiracy theories and Pro-Putin rhetoric,” he said Tuesday, referring to Carlson.

“The apparent transfer of video footage represents an egregious security breach that endangers the hardworking women and men of the United States Capitol Police, who valiantly defended our democracy with their lives at risk on that fateful day.”


Jeffries said House Democrats would hold their virtual caucus meeting Wednesday with presentations from Rep. Bennie G. Thompson (Miss.), who was chairman of the Jan. 6 committee and is the top Democrat on the House Homeland Security panel, and Rep. Joseph Morelle (N.Y.), the top Democrat on the House Administration Committee.


Thompson said Monday that there could be major security risks if the material were used irresponsibly.
“If Speaker McCarthy has indeed granted Tucker Carlson — a Fox host who routinely spreads misinformation and (Russian President Vladimir) Putin’s poisonous propaganda — and his producers access to this sensitive footage, he owes the American people an explanation of why he has done so and what steps he has taken to address the significant security concerns at stake,” Thompson said in a statement late Monday. (Washington Post).

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Qualified Immunity Is Burning a Hole in the Constitution.

Joanna Schwartz is a professor of law at UCLA, where she teaches civil procedure and courses on police accountability and public interest lawyering. She is the author of Shielded: How the Police Became Untouchable, from which this article was adapted.

In the late evening of Aug. 23, 2006, Jayzel Mattos asked her 14-year-old daughter, Cheynice, to call the police. As Cheynice told the officer on the line, Jayzel and her husband, Troy, were arguing and things were being thrown around. But when four police officers responded to the home on the island of Maui, they offered little in the way of help.

Troy and two of the officers began arguing. Jayzel asked the officers and her husband to calm down so that they would not disturb her sleeping children. Instead, one of the officers, Ryan Aikala, moved to grab Troy. Jayzel, standing between Troy and Aikala, raised her hands to keep the officer from smashing against her breasts. “Are you touching an officer?” he said, and, without warning, tased Jayzel in her hand and breast. She fell hard to the floor and lost consciousness for a moment; when she came to, she saw her four-year-old son crouched next to her, looking into her eyes.

Jayzel sued Aikala and several other officers for excessive force and other misconduct, and both a trial court in Hawaii and the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals concluded that Aikala had violated the Constitution. The appeals court could not “identify any reasonableness in the conclusion — whether made in a split-second or after careful deliberation — that tasing the innocent wife of a large, drunk, angry man when there is no threat that either spouse has a weapon, is a prudent way to defuse a potentially, but not yet, dangerous situation.” This was especially so, they explained, given that children were present.

But proving that Officer Aikala had violated the Constitution was not enough — the officer was protected by something called qualified immunity, a legal defense officers use to block suits alleging all manner of misconduct, so long as they have not violated “clearly established law.”

To overcome Aikala’s qualified immunity defense, Mattos’ lawyer would have to find a Supreme Court opinion, or an opinion from this same court of appeals, holding that tasing an innocent person under highly similar circumstances was unconstitutional. No prior decision from that court of appeals or the Supreme Court had ever addressed the use of a taser in “dart mode” — where the Taser shoots out darts with electrical currents that attach to a person — the setting Aikala had used against Jayzel. And, at the time, that court of appeals had never issued an opinion finding that an officer’s decision to use a taser violated the Fourth Amendment.

Welcome to the upside-down world of qualified immunity. (Politico).

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LGBTQ+ Updates.

By offering blessings to same-sex couples, the Anglican Church tip-toed inches toward support for same sex relationships.

Some thought the church moved too slowly. Others thought the church was violating the Bible.

Some Anglican bishops reject British Anglican head Welby over gay marriage.

LONDON — Several Anglican bishops from Africa, Asia, Latin America and the Pacific said Monday that they no longer recognize Archbishop of Canterbury Justin Welby as their leader, deepening a rift within the global Anglican Communion over gay marriage.


Some bishops who belong to the Global South Fellowship of Anglican Churches said they no longer consider Welby to be the spiritual head of the global communion and do not regard the Church of England, which Welby heads, as the “mother church” of Anglicanism. (Associated Press).

South Korea court grants same-sex partners government health insurance .

A South Korean appeals court ruled Tuesday that government health insurance should offer spousal coverage to same-sex couples.

The landmark ruling is the country's first legal recognition of social benefits for same-sex couples. South Korea has not legalized same-sex marriage or civil unions.

The 32-year-old plaintiff So Seong-uk sued the National Health Insurance Service in 2021, after the agency revoked his status as a dependent to his partner Kim Yong-min.

So and Kim held a wedding to publicly declare their relationship in 2019. The next year, the health insurance agency accepted Kim's request to list So as his dependent, on the same grounds that it provides spousal benefits to heterosexual couples in de facto marriage.

But when the media started to report the couple's story, the agency annulled the decision, saying it was a "mistake," and that So did not qualify. A lower court ruled in favor of the agency in 2021, saying same-sex unions cannot be deemed the same as heterosexual unions.

That judgment was overturned at the appellate court on Tuesday. Both groups are "the same in essence" in that they form "emotional and economic community" outside the legally defined family relationship, the court said in its verdict. To recognize dependent status in one group and not in the other based on sexual orientation "constitutes a discriminatory treatment." (AP)

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Biden stops some of Netanyahu’s recent egregious plans, not judicial takeover, but continued West Bank expansion.

Israel promises not to approve additional West Bank outposts.

JERUSALEM — Israel has told the Biden administration it will rein in the approval of new West Bank settlement outposts, the prime minister’s office said Monday, a day after a potential diplomatic crisis was averted at the United Nations over Israeli-Palestinian tensions.


The office of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Israel would not greenlight any new wildcat settlements in the West Bank beyond nine such outposts built without authorization that it approved retroactively earlier this month.

The statement, however, made no mention of the thousands of additional settlement homes in existing settlements officials say are to be soon approved.
A contentious U.N. Security Council resolution pushed by the Palestinians and their supporters slated for Monday would have condemned Israel for settlement expansion and demanded a halt to future activity.

According to multiple diplomats, the Biden administration managed to forestall the vote by convincing both Israel and the Palestinians to agree in principle to a six-month freeze in any unilateral action they might take.

The United States, along with much of the international community, say the settlements are obstacles to peace by taking over land sought by the Palestinians for their state. Over 700,000 Jewish Israelis now live in the West Bank and east Jerusalem — territories captured in the 1967 Mideast war and claimed by the Palestinians. (Associated Press).

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Humiliated by President Biden’s year long strategy on Ukraine, culminating in his visit to Kyiv, Putin rants and threatens the world.

Putin delivers a nuclear warning to the West over Ukraine.

Putin tells West that Russia cannot be defeated

• Russia suspends participation in New START nuclear arms treaty

• Putin puts new strategic nuclear weapons on 'combat duty'

• President says Russia will resume nuclear tests if U.S. does

• Blinken: move is deeply unfortunate and irresponsible

MOSCOW, Feb 21 (Reuters) - President Vladimir Putin on Tuesday delivered a warning to the West over Ukraine by suspending a landmark nuclear arms control treaty, announcing that new strategic systems had been put on combat duty, and threatening to resume nuclear tests.

Nearly a year after ordering an invasion that has triggered the biggest confrontation with the West in six decades, Putin said Russia would achieve its aims and accused the West of trying to destroy it.
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This 👇 is a great analysis of what Biden has done for the last year, not just embarrassing Putin but making it clear how puny the Russian is. A Must Read.

Opinion: In a war of unending surprises, Biden has another up his sleeve.

(CNN) — As the world prepares to mark the one-year anniversary of Russia’s unprovoked invasion of Ukraine, President Joe Biden held a historic visit unannounced to the beleaguered country’s capital.

Monday’s risky trip to an active war zone was not only a powerful symbol of US support, but an injection of encouragement to a population that has endured devastating Russian attacks on residential buildings civilians, hospitals, schools and the power stations They provide heating and electricity.

“It’s unbelievable that at a time like this the president of the United States comes to Kyiv,” Andrei Ketov, a 48-year-old Ukrainian serviceman, told CNN.

Biden’s visit to Ukraine a year after the start of the biggest war in Europe since World War II underscores the extent to which Russian President Vladimir Putin miscalculated. Putin not only misjudged Ukraine’s determination to resist and its revulsion at his claims that Ukraine is not a real country.

It may have bought into the Kremlin’s malicious propaganda about the leadership weakness American, which is echoed and amplified by Biden’s political enemies.

Together with the president of Ukraine, Volodymyr Zelensky, Biden recalled a phone call that the two had “that dark night” a year ago, when the war began. Zelensky could hear explosions in the background. The world was preparing for the fall of Kyiv, Biden recalled, “perhaps even the end of Ukraine.”

Now, a year later, “Kyiv is still standing and Ukraine is still standing. Democracy is standing,” he declared, adding: “The Americans are with you, and the world is with you.”

Who could have imagined in 2022, when the situation in Ukraine seemed so desperate that the United States offered to evacuate Zelensky — and he famously refused — that a year later the Ukrainian people would put up such strong resistance , and that the West would be so supportive of their efforts? And that instead of Putin holding a military parade in Kyiv, it would be Biden who would walk the streets from the Ukrainian capital, arriving at the ornate Mariinsky Palace, the official residence of the Ukrainian president?

Russian military bloggers were horrified. A “illustrative humiliation of Russia” is how Russian journalist Sergey Mardan described the moment. A Telegram account run by Russian service members commented with bitter sarcasm that “we are waiting in the Russian city of Kyiv for the president of the Russian Federation, but not for the (president of) the United States.”

Recall that in the first days of the invasion, Ukraine said that it had discovered that the Russian forces had brought their dress uniforms, apparently hoping for a victory parade.

Instead, the war has given the world an endless series of surprises. The Russian army turned out to be much less competent than anyone expected; Putin was not the genius that many believed.

Zelensky was much more fierce and inspiring than almost any leader of recent times. NATO was more united and the Europeans more willing to support Ukraine than anyone—including Putin—had anticipated.

And then there is Biden.

It is a curious phenomenon that those who have feared Biden the most have tried to undermine him by claiming that he is weak and incompetent.

Biden is 80 years old and walks with a stiff gait. But he does not lack courage (raid sirens sounded over Kyiv while Biden was there) and, above all, competence.

It is possible that, under another American president, Russia would have quickly conquered the Ukraine.

Biden minced Putin’s strategy to make it look like the war was the result of a Ukrainian provocation, revealing the plan before it was developed. Next, he brought together the NATO alliance, which had been so badly underestimated by former President Donald Trump.

Perhaps Putin, after observing the divisions exacerbated by Trump’s rhetoric, thought that NATO would not support Ukraine.

In fact, Putin could be excused for thinking that the US would not support Ukraine very strongly. After all, one of America’s two major political parties had made Trump their leader. And Trump — in one of the sharpest contrasts to Biden — had toyed with Zelensky’s pleas for help.

Who can forget the infamous phone call after which Trump was impeached, when Zelensky pleaded with the US president for help in deterring an aggressive Russia? Trump’s response: “I’d like you to do us a favor,” trying to pressure Ukraine into launching an investigation against Biden, the candidate Trump viewed as weak, even though he feared her as his most effective opponent.

Now Biden has made it possible for the Ukrainian people to stand strong in the face of a Russian president so obsessed with conquering their neighboring country that he has destroyed Russia’s standing in the world, rolled back three decades of progress and seems ready to send a number untold numbers of Russians to die to prevent a democracy from flourishing alongside their autocracy.

A cheerful Zelensky said Biden’s visit “brings us closer to victory,” adding that it will “reverberate on the battlefield to liberate our territories.”

Biden promised continued support from the United States, which is what most Americans want, even though the endorsement has weakened a bit. Republican Representative Michael McCaul, president of the House Foreign Relations Committee, told CNN that bipartisan support for Ukraine “still very strong”.

Of course, some members of the Republican Party criticized Biden for going to Ukraine. Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene called the trip “incredibly insulting”a sign of a policy of “America Last”. And Rep. Scott Perry, at the center of a legal dispute with the Justice Department over his cellphone in the special counsel’s Jan. 6 investigation, called it “shameless” that Biden would help Ukraine defend its borders and not do the same for the United States.

The day after his visit to Kyiv, Biden will deliver an important speech rallying the world on Ukraine’s side, and pledging to continue to help Ukraine defend its independence and democracy, because Ukraine is today the front line in the world contest between democracy and autocracy. (CNN).

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Congratulations to Yale. Save the Birds!

Building a Bird-Friendly Yale, With Campus as a Living Lab.

On a brisk October morning last fall, Viveca Morris and Kristof Zyskowski were canvassing Yale’s campus in search of “bird strikes”—songbirds killed after colliding with glass windows. After a few minutes of scanning sidewalks and lawns, they found a casualty: a ruby-crowned kinglet, so named for its bright orange crest.

With a gloved hand, Zyskowski carefully picked up the bird while Morris photographed it to log in iNaturalist, the mobile app they use to catalog data such as location and species of birds they collect during monitoring walks. Every struck bird they find moves them a step closer to finding solutions to a major biodiversity challenge: the more than 1 billion birds killed by window collisions every year in North America.

The research taking place this fall morning is part of the Yale Bird-Friendly Building Initiative, a collaboration between the Law, Ethics & Animals Program at Yale Law School (where Morris is Executive Director), the Yale Peabody Museum of Natural History (where Zyskowski serves as Collections Manager for Vertebrate Zoology), the Yale Office of Sustainability, the Yale Office of Facilities, and the American Bird Conservancy.

With support from a seed grant from the Yale Planetary Solutions Project, the Initiative is conducting two research projects in the 2022–2023 academic year, drawing on the expertise of Yale faculty and staff across multiple departments and disciplines and using the campus as a living laboratory to advance biodiversity protection and research.

Halfway into its yearlong study, the Initiative’s research has already yielded critical insights about where bird strikes are occurring—data that will help inform retrofits and new building design standards that could drastically reduce avian mortality.

“Our hope is that Yale will become a gold standard model for how universities nationwide can become more bird-friendly both by addressing existing and new buildings,” says Morris. (Yale Sustainability).

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BIG NEWS.

Jennifer McClellan makes history as the first Black woman elected to Congress in Virginia.

The Democratic state senator won a special election Tuesday in Virginia’s 4th Congressional District. (NBC)

A Democratic Candidate moved forward in Wisconsin.

In Wisconsin, the top two vote-getters moving on to the general election on April 4. Janet Protasiewicz is the pro-choice candidate, who hopefully will be elected to the Wisconsin Supreme Court on April 4th, turning a radical conservative court into a fair-minded court, which will protect Abortion rights and end Republican Gerrymandering.

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