February 5, 2023

Helene Cooper & Edward Wong of the New York Times: "The United States shot down a Chinese spy balloon on Saturday that had spent the last week traversing the country, an explosive end to a drama that put a diplomatic crisis between the world's two great powers onto television screens in real time. The balloon, which spent five days traveling in a diagonal southeast route from Idaho to the Carolinas, had moved off the coast by midday Saturday and was shot down within moments of its arrival over the Atlantic Ocean.... That ... came at 2:39 p.m., Pentagon officials said, some six miles off the coast of South Carolina. The Federal Aviation Administration had paused departures and arrivals at airports in Wilmington, N.C., and in Myrtle Beach and Charleston in South Carolina. One of two F-22 fighter jets from Langley Air Force Base fired a Sidewinder air-to-air missile, downing the balloon, which was flying at an altitude of 60,000 to 65,000 feet.... The Pentagon said that Navy and Coast Guard personnel would conduct a recovery effort to retrieve the debris of the balloon, which had landed in relatively shallow water.... The Chinese foreign ministry declared its 'strong discontent and protest' about the United States' downing of the balloon."

     ~~~ For more details, see yesterday's NYT liveblog, linked here yesterday afternoon. CNN's report is here. ~~~

~~~ Matt Novak in Forbes: "Conservative commentators have insisted President Joe Biden should've ordered the balloon be shot down earlier and that a foreign balloon flying over U.S. territory never would've happened under ... Donald Trump.... 'I can nearly guarantee you that that balloon would not still be flying if we were still there,' Mike Pompeo, former Secretary of State under Trump, told Sean Hannity on Friday.... But it did happen under Trump, according to several new reports.... 'One top national security official from the administration of ... Donald Trump said none of the Chinese spy balloons were near sensitive sites or had payloads as large as this one appears to carry,' Bloomberg reported.... 'Craig Singleton, a senior fellow at the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, said Chinese surveillance balloons have been sighted on numerous occasions over the past five years in different parts of the Pacific, including near sensitive U.S. military installations in Hawaii,' the Associated Press reported on Saturday." ~~~

~~~ David Ignatius of the Washington Post spoke to "an authoritative Pentagon official" to get what he characterizes as the inside scoop on how the U.S. shot down the balloon. "The pod apparently fell into the Atlantic largely intact, the official said, and it should provide a useful opportunity to examine and reverse-engineer Chinese intelligence and communications systems.... By waiting until the balloon was over U.S. territorial waters, the Biden administration was able to maximize the likelihood that the pod could be recovered while minimizing the risk that Americans would be injured by falling debris.... As a military operation, the shoot-down was relatively simple." ~~~

~~~ Christian Shepherd of the Washington Post: "China accused the United States of an 'overreaction' when it used a fighter jet to shoot down a suspected surveillance balloon off the South Carolina coast, as nationalist Chinese commentators blamed runaway political pressure in Washington for escalating the incident." MB: China is likely wrong about the means of taking down the balloon, but the commentators are just as likely right about "runaway political pressure." Republicans are still whining about President Biden's handling of the spy balloon, still arguing the U.S. should have shot it down over land. But, IMO, Biden was damned if he did and damned if he didn't. Had anyone been killed by falling debris, House impeachment hearing would have begun tomorrow. Had a few pines trees or a wolf come down in a national park, the GOP would have become instant environmentalists, accusing Biden of desecrating our forests & wildlife; hearings to follow.

Grace Ashford & Michael Gold of the New York Times: "A prospective congressional aide has accused Representative George Santos of ethics violations and sexual harassment, according to a letter the man sent to the House Committee on Ethics and posted to Twitter on Friday. The man, Derek Myers, briefly worked in Mr. Santos's office before his job offer was rescinded earlier this week, according to the letter. Mr. Myers said in the letter that he was alone with Mr. Santos in his office on Jan. 25 when the congressman asked him whether he had a profile on Grindr, a popular gay dating app. Then, he said, Mr. Santos invited him to karaoke and touched his groin, assuring him that his husband was out of town. Mr. Myers's account could not be corroborated...."

Katie Glueck of the New York Times: "Upending decades of political tradition, the Democratic National Committee on Saturday approved a sweeping overhaul of the Democratic primary process, a critical step in President Biden's effort to transform the way the party picks its presidential nominees.... Amid forceful calls for a calendar that better reflects the racial diversity of the Democratic Party and the country -- and after Iowa's 2020 meltdown led to a major delay in results -- Democrats voted to endorse a proposal that starts the 2024 Democratic presidential primary circuit on Feb. 3 in South Carolina, the state that resuscitated Mr. Biden's once-flailing candidacy. New Hampshire and Nevada are scheduled to follow on Feb. 6, Georgia on Feb. 13 and then Michigan on Feb. 27.... Resistance to the proposal has been especially fierce in New Hampshire, where officials have vowed to hold the first primary anyway, whatever the consequences. New Hampshire, a small state where voters are accustomed to cornering candidates in diners and intimate town hall settings, has long held the first primary as a matter of state law." (Also linked yesterday afternoon.)

Michael Rosenwald of the Washington Post: "Following World War II, thousands of Nazi collaborators masquerading as war refugees immigrated to the United States with new identities. They worked as farmers or butchers or assembly-line workers. Some had fenced-in backyards. Allan A. Ryan hunted them down. Mr. Ryan, who died Jan. 26 at 77, ran the U.S. Justice Department's Office of Special Investigations, a unit designated to find and expel anyone in the United States who had assisted the Nazis. During his tenure from 1980 to 1983, Mr. Ryan and his team followed leads around the world.... The presence of collaborators in the United States was ignored for years, Mr. Ryan maintained, because of antisemitism and general apathy toward the plight of Jews during the war.... But in the 1970s, children of Holocaust survivors became politically and socially active, helping move the country toward more public acknowledgment of Nazi atrocities. A new generation of lawmakers became concerned that Nazi collaborators were hiding in plain sight.... In 1979, they pushed the Justice Department to establish the new unit."

2024 Presidential Race. Isaac Arnsdorf of the Washington Post: "The network of donors and activist groups led by conservative billionaire Charles Koch will oppose Donald Trump for the 2024 Republican nomination, mounting a direct challenge to the former president's campaign to win back the White House. 'The best thing for the country would be to have a president in 2025 who represents a new chapter,' Emily Seidel, chief executive of the network's flagship group, Americans for Prosperity (AFP), wrote in a memo released publicly on Sunday.... The move marks the most notable example to date of an overt and coordinated effort from within conservative circles to stop Trump from winning the GOP nomination for a third straight presidential election." The New York Times story, by Maggie Haberman & others, is here.

Beyond the Beltway

Florida. Sara Boboltz of the Huffington Post: "Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis' administration moved on Friday to strip an Orlando performing arts center of its liquor license in retaliation for hosting a holiday-themed drag show in December. A 27-page complaint filed by the state's Department of Business and Professional Regulation alleged that the Orlando Philharmonic Plaza Foundation 'knowingly welcomed' attendees under age 18 to watch 'A Drag Queen Christmas' against Florida law. The move comes as DeSantis, a hard-right Republican, continues to wage war on drag performers and smear members of the LGBTQ community with accusations of child abuse as he eyes a run for the White House. The civil complaint acknowledged that a sign at the venue, called The Plaza Live, warned adults about bringing minors with them but claimed that it 'was barely visible.'" ~~~

     ~~~ Marie: It's about time for presidential* rivals Ron & Donald to weigh in on Rudy's performance here (and Donald's):

~~~ Joseph Contreras of the Guardian: "... Florida's rightwing Republican governor, Ron DeSantis -- and likely would-be presidential candidate for 2024 -- has launched a relentless campaign of attack on higher education in the state, seeking to appeal to his party's Trumpist base by positing that the state's colleges and universities are a bastion of liberal extremism that needs to be reformed. Last week DeSantis unveiled plans for a sweeping overhaul of Florida's state university system.... In one fell swoop that was breathtaking in its scope, dog-whistle racism and naked ambition, DeSantis began with the abolition of diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) programs, which had been mandated by a mostly Republican-appointed board of governors in the second half of 2020 when he was midway through his second year as governor.... DeSantis proposed a full-scale assault on the longstanding faculty tenure system by empowering university boards of trustees and presidents to review tenured faculty members 'at any time'.... The governor also wants to require schools to give priority to 'graduating students with degrees that lead to high-wage jobs, not degrees designed to further a political agenda'."

Way Beyond

Pakistan. Alan Cowell & Stephen Kinzer of the New York Times: "Pervez Musharraf, the onetime military ruler of a nuclear-armed Pakistan who promised critical support for Washington's campaign against Al Qaeda after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, but faced growing resistance at home in a land seething with anti-Western passions, died Sunday. He was 79."

Ukraine, et al. The Washington Post's live briefing of developments Sunday in Russia's war on Ukraine is here. The Guardian's live updates for Sunday are here. The Guardian's summary report is here.

News Lede

Washington Post: "A fire continued to burn Saturday in Northeastern Ohio, after the derailment of a train carrying hazardous chemicals forced officials to order more than 1,500 residents to evacuate their homes. Twenty hours after the Friday night crash, the presence of the chemicals made it too risky for emergency responders to get close enough to put out the fire, local and federal officials said. Fifty cars derailed, 20 of which contained hazardous materials. Some cars contained vinyl chloride, a carcinogen, but federal officials said they couldn’t say whether vinyl chloride was on fire."

Comments

[Ken Winkes]

Weather may not be as warm here this time of year--tho it's nowhere as frigid as the Northeast has been-- as it is in Florida but I'm very grateful to wake this morning in a state diametrically opposed geographically and politically to it and its governor.

I don't know how I'd react if my governor said something this stupid, but I probably not move to Florida to get away...

"The governor (DeSantis) also wants to require schools to give priority to 'graduating students with degrees that lead to high-wage jobs, not degrees designed to further a political agenda'.”

So what do we have here? A claim by a governor that those with high earnings have no political agenda? Like the army of lawyers which litter every political party's apparatus? Like corporate honchos who contribute generously to political campaigns and lobby like mad? Like all those scientists who've irritated the governor by putting the lie to the his false vaccination claims?

What proportion of college graduates don't have a political agenda?

I'd guess every one of them has a position on taxes...for just one instance. On the proliferation of guns? On voting rights?

Is DeSantis saying if you make a lot of money you have no politics?

Probably not. He's likely thinking those who have money are contented like the proverbial cow, chewing their cud, dozing in the green pastures of a monied life, causing no trouble.

Or maybe more like sheep.

What a powerful economic and political analysis from a Yale grad.

More on how little money is associated with politics in DeSantis' state:

https://harpers.org/archive/2023/02/swamplandia-ron-desantis-funders/

[P.D. Pepe]

Add another wrinkle in Ken's list of the governor's house of horrors: Since he wants to weigh menstrual cycle details for female athletes a group of women in that state have tweeted this:

"Send DeSantis a gift every month : women need to send their bloody tampons in large envelopes to"----his address follows.

Whether this has legs, I don't know but the idea or the image of the Sandy man opening an envelope with a bloody tampon inside is delicious!

[Akhilleus]

After screaming that HE would have shot down that Chinese balloon in seconds, information comes along to state that Chinese balloons DID fly over the US when Trump was in the White House. And he did nothing.

His response? Apoplectic as usual, at the truth. He whines that such reports are “fake disinformation”!

Hmmm…so it’s true?

Disinformation is something false. If the false is fake, then it must be true. At the very least, it’s not false.

Grammar and logic matter, but never in right-wing world, and especially not in Trump Land.