In the news on Super Bowl Sunday

Yes, indeed, my worthies, in just a couple of hours that screen is going to be filled with Patrick Mahomes and Jalen Hurts startling fans with their scrambling and passing and – somehow – keeping their cool with Rihanna less than 100 yards away in her backstage dressing room getting ready for her halftime show that Republicans, bless their hearts, have already found some reason to whine about.  And we’ll be parked across from the TV under heated blankets with two little fur balls curled up next to us, and damn are the four of us going to be happy watching the Big Game.

And yet, the world continues to spin on its trembling axis.

On the far end of the Mediterranean Sea, the count of those killed by last week’s nuclear-level-back-to-back earthquakes continues to mount.  The New York Times reported this morning that more than 33,000 are dead in Turkey and Syria, most of them in the areas the quakes hit the hardest.  Turkish President Recep Erdogan is coming under increasing criticism for the unequal way rescue and recovery operations have worked in Turkey, with wealthy areas receiving quick supplies of heavy equipment and aid while some poorer areas received almost none for the first two days following the quakes.  Turkish citizens with long memories are beginning to recall the way Erdogan passed out goodies to his wealthy supporters over the past nine years, a good portion of them going to builders who curried favor with him by contributing money to his campaigns and political causes.  Now many of the buildings they threw up have come down.  Erdogan is trying to reduce the criticism by rounding up “people responsible for” the buildings that now lie in huge piles of rubble.  More than 100 have been arrested including contractors and local officials responsible for enforcing Turkey’s building codes, which NPR described as “too rarely enforced.”

In other news, yesterday a folder with classified markings was turned over to the Department of Justice by lawyers for Donald Trump.  The folder is said to be empty, raising more questions than it answers.  Why were so many empty folders marked classified found at Mar a Lago, including the one just turned over to the DOJ?  Trump apologists are already on Fox and other conservative outlets saying that Trump just liked to collect empty classified folders, an explanation about as unlikely as Trump winning every golf tournament he’s ever entered, which is also a claim he has made repeatedly.  Lawfare, a blog that discusses court decisions and other legal issues, backed up reporting on Trump’s efforts early in 2022 to get one of his lawyers to certify to the National Archives that all the materials sought by the archives had been turned over.  The lawyer refused to make the statement to the National Archives, and the FBI went on to discover something like 115 classified documents among the more than 11,000 documents and other materials it recovered from Mar a Lago when the agency served a search warrant on the Trump hotel/club/residence/resort in August. 

Lawfare Blog pointed out that attempting to get a legal representative to make a false statement to the government in January of 2022 may be indicative of Trump’s motive in hiding the documents found in August, and could serve as evidence that Trump intentionally withheld the documents for eight months.  Being able to prove intent is an element in charging anyone under the three federal statutes Trump is suspected of violating.  All relate to the mishandling of national security information, which would include classified documents.  At least one of the statutes relates to unclassified national security information as well.

Meanwhile, the 2024 presidential campaign is heating up, with Governor Ron DeSantis said to be hiring campaign staff and preparing to announce his candidacy sooner rather than later.  DeSantis is indicating that he won’t be running for the job of being President of the United States, which involves being in charge of the government and its various agencies, not to mention overseeing law enforcement and the country’s national security, as much as he will be trying to find so-called “woke” institutions such as public schools and universities and private companies which are making allowances for diversity and inclusion in their work.  DeSantis also promises to scour the Pentagon for “wokeism” in recruiting and the way the military teaches leadership at the service academies, including West Point.

I can perhaps be of some assistance to DeSantis in this regard:  if being a leader means you must supervise and exercise authority over a broad spectrum of Americans who differ racially, religiously, and in sexual preference and identity, then West Point and the Naval and Air Force Academies are doing the jobs the congress has given them in teaching young men and women who will be officers in the service of their country.

In other political news, The New Republic reported today that Democrats lost control of the House of Representatives by just 6,675 votes spread over five congressional districts.  Amazingly, changes in just 22,378 votes from Republican to Democrat in more congressional districts “would have prevented the Republicans from picking up a single seat in the House,” according to The New Republic. “So we are not talking about a normal election—this was the Democrats losing on a wild pitch in the tenth inning of the seventh game of the World Series.”

In news about the war in Ukraine, the Institute for the Study of War, (ISW) reported last week that the Russian offensive in Eastern Ukraine is underway.  “Russian forces have regained the initiative in Ukraine and have begun their next major offensive in Luhansk Oblast,” the ISW reported.  Most of the action along the front lines has been in the far northeast, near the Luhansk/Kharkiv regional border, where the Russians have moved “at least three major Russian divisions” to threaten Ukrainian positions near the towns of Svatove,  Kupyansk and Kreminna.  ISW also reported that some Russian forces have been “subordinated” to the control of the Donetsk People’s Republic (DNR) Militia which may indicate one of two things:  either the Russian Ministry of Defense back in Moscow has lost faith in its own army units now fighting in the northeast of Ukraine, or the Russians are trying to reinforce “depleted” DNR units that have been hard hit in recent fighting and get them ready to fight in the Donetsk area for control of that key city.  ISW sources its reports on the war from public reporting in Russia that most of us never see, commercially available satellite imagery, as well as reports from Russian military bloggers who embed themselves in front-line units and then send their reports on internet Telegram channels which can be read by Russian speakers anywhere.  The ISW assessment that Russia has begun its offensive in the northeast of Ukraine contains a lot of what might be called mitigating information about disorder in Russian units, questions about who is really in command in certain sectors of the front lines, and confusion about where the DNR Militia begins and where the Russian army leaves off.  The DNR Militia is comprised of Ukrainian citizens, most of them Russian-speaking, from the far eastern region of Ukraine who have been fighting for control of the Donetsk and Luhansk regions since 2014.

Back here on this side of the Atlantic, the U.S. has shot down what are being called “Unidentified Flying Objects” over the last few days above waters off Alaska and over the Canadian Yukon.  The Pentagon has not released any information about what these “objects” were, other than estimating them to be about the size of a Volkswagen Beetle.  What the UFO’s are being used for and by whom is unknown at this time, and the uncertainty about them has excited UFO aficionados everywhere.

Have a good Super Bowl Sunday!