What a tense week with the State of the Union address falling right in the middle of impeachment hearings. But we all knew the Senate wouldn’t remove him, so there was no real suspense over that. But then the firings start, and that gets a little tense. Both Lt. Col. Vindmand and his brother are removed, and Gordon Sondland is fired. So far, that’s it, but I’m pretty sure there will be more.

Here’s that and what else happened in politics for the week ending February 9…

Shootings This Week:

1. There were SEVEN mass shootings in the U.S. this week (defined as killing and/or injuring 4 or more people). This week, mass shooters kill 13 people and injure 14 more.

• • A shooter in Machias, ME, kills 3 people and injures 1 other. He knew all the people though he killed them in separate homes.
  • A shooter opens fire in a Greyhound bus in Lebec, CA, killing 1 person and injuring 5. The bus pulls over and lets the shooter out on his request. He leaves the gun behind.
  • A shooter in Indianapolis, IN, kills 4 young adults, aged just 19, 20, and 21.
  • A shooter in Waco, TX, kills 1 person and injures 3 more. Police think it’s a drug deal gone wrong.
  • A shooter in Houston, TX, kills 1 person and injures 3 others. Police think it might be gang-related.
  • A shooter in Youngstown, OH, kills 3 people and injures 2 more.

Russia:

1. FBI Director Chris Wray tells the House Judiciary Committee that Russia is already engaged in information warfare for the 2020 elections, just like they were in 2016.

Legal Fallout:

1. A federal appeals court throws out the weakest of the three emoluments lawsuits against Trump. The lawsuit was brought by Democratic members of Congress, and the court didn’t rule that they were wrong; just that they didn’t have enough plaintiffs to represent either chamber of Congress.

Impeachment:

Including all this info just makes this too long, so I moved it out into its own post. You can skip right over to it if that’s your focus.

Courts/Justice:

1. Attorney General William Barr issues new rules for politically sensitive investigations. He himself must approve any inquiry into a presidential candidate or campaign. He also must approve investigations into illegal contributions and donations by foreign nationals to presidential and congressional campaigns.
2. Barr confirms that the DOJ created a special process for evaluating information that Rudy Giuliani obtained from Ukraine sources about the Bidens.

Healthcare:

1. Trump claims that he saved coverage for people with pre-existing medical conditions, even though this was required coverage under the very ACA that Trump is trying to gut. In fact, Trump’s DOJ is in court right now trying to end the ACA.

International:

1. Boris Johnson and Trump have a contentious phone call that ends with Trump slamming the phone down.

• • Trump has been threatening to withdraw from certain agreements if Johnson doesn’t do as Trump wants.
  • Johnson and other U.K politicians have been criticizing Trump lately, with Johnson saying that Trump is “failing to lead” and that he’s “letting the air out of the tires of the world economy.”
  • Johnson pushes his planned trip to Washington back to March.

2. Trump lifts Obama’s ban on our military‘s use of land mines in places other than the Korean Peninsula. More than 160 countries prohibit land mines, and several condemn Trump’s decision. Land mines kill and injure thousands each year, mostly civilians.
3. A shooter wearing an Afghan uniform and carrying a machine gun kills two U.S. troops in Afghanistan during a joint operation between U.S. and Afghan forces. The shooter injures six others.
4. Protests in Hong Kong quiet down after a series of arrests and injuries (and possibly due to fears of the spreading coronavirus).
5. How’d I miss this? Protests have been going on in Algeria for just shy of a year. They want the president, who was just elected to a fifth term, to resign.
6. A U.S. airstrike killed al-Qaeda leader Qassim al-Rimi last week in Yemen.

Legislation/Congress:

1. The Network Lobby for Catholic Social Justice scores the Senate and House each year on legislation passed that advances social or economic justice. This year is the first time in 47 years that the group is unable to create its annual scorecard for the Senate because Mitch McConnell has obstructed every single vote. There were no voting records to compile.

Border Wall/Shutdown/National Emergency:

1. Construction crews in Arizona bulldoze and blast hills at the border in Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument in preparation for new border wall sections. The monument is a UN-designated International Biosphere Reserve and is part of our national parks system.

• • Most of the work is being done in the Roosevelt Reservation, an area designated by Teddy Roosevelt to remain free of obstruction.
  • Some of the work is disturbing Native American burial grounds.

Travel Ban/Immigration/Discrimination:

1. Human Rights Watch releases a report on what happens to El Salvadorans to whom we deny asylum. At least 138 were killed and at least 70 disappeared or suffered sexual violence or torture after their return. The study includes asylum seekers who were deported under Trump and under Obama.
2. The FBI finally raises racially motivated violent extremism (for example, white nationalists and neo-Nazis) to the same threat level as ISIS. These groups are a threat here and abroad.

• • Two weeks ago, the FBI arrested eight members of the neo-Nazi group The Base. FBI Director Chris Wray says there are more arrests in the pipeline.

3. White nationalist members of the Patriot Front march through the National Mall in Washington D.C. wearing white masks. They get a police escort.
4. California Governor Gavin Newsom issues a posthumous pardon for Bayard Rustin, a civil rights leader who was imprisoned and forced to register as a sex offender for having sex with another man. Rustin was one of the organizers of the historic March on Washington in 1963. Newsom plans to pardon others who were convicted for similar reasons.
5. The Department of Health and Human Services issues a waiver to allow religious foster care agencies in South Caroline to deny services to LGBTQ and non-Christian couples. These agencies are federally funded, which means they are supposed to adhere to the federal government’s non-discrimination policies.
6. Witnesses testify to the House Subcommittee on Immigration and Citizenship that political interference in immigration courts has eroded due process. The Executive Office for Immigration Review has also been hiring judges with no immigration law background; it’s not even in the job description.
7. In retaliation for New York State’s law that limits ICE agents’ access to drivers license information, the Department of Homeland Security temporarily blocks all residents of the state from enrolling in Trusted Traveler Programs. The administration threatens to kick 175,000 New York residents out of the program by the end of the year and threatens to retaliate similarly against other states.

Climate:

1. January 2020 is the warmest January on record, and Antarctica hit a record high temperature of 65 degrees. Not just its warmest January temperature, but its warmest temperature ever recorded.
2. Swarms of young locusts in southern Somalia lead experts to predict one of the worst “plagues of locusts” in recent history.
3. The Interior Department completes its plan to open up areas of southern Utah to drilling, mining, and grazing. These areas were once protected as national monuments. I wonder if this would be happening if the monuments were designated by Republican presidents.
4. Extreme temperatures are causing a decline in the bumblebee population in North and Central America and in Europe.
5. The Department of Energy had $823 billion to spend on clean and renewable energy development last year, but it hasn’t spent any of it yet. The DOE canceled another $46 million designated for solar research and development.
6. Britain is phasing out cars running on fossil fuels, and by 2035, will only allow sales of electric and hydrogen cars.

Budget/Economy:

1. China takes a page out of our playbook and injects 1.2 trillion yuan into its markets to ensure liquidity. That’s about $174 billion. Similar actions by our own Fed have bolstered the stock market for several months now.
2. The number of farms going bankrupt increased by 20% in 2019. It’s the fifth consecutive year of increasing bankruptcies.
3. 1.5 million public school students experienced homelessness during the 2017-2018 school year. That’s the highest number since they started recording it in 2004. This doesn’t mean they’re living on the streets—some are in shelters, some are staying with friends or relatives, and some are waiting for foster care.
4. Trump threatens to veto a $4.7 billion emergency aid package for Puerto Rico passed by the House. Puerto Rico experienced a series of damaging earthquakes in December with aftershocks continuing even now.
5. The U.S. added 225,000 jobs in January, bringing the unemployment rate up a tick to 3.6%.

Elections:

1. The Democratic presidential primaries begin with a slow-moving car crash. The Iowa Democratic Party contracted to use a new app to tally vote totals but failed to train volunteers on it and apparently failed to test it.

• • The app crashes, so precinct captains use the backup plan and phone in the results. Apparently one of the issues is that the app is unable to report a three-way tie, which some precincts had.
  • But the phone lines are jammed for hours at a time, so we don’t have any results until a few days after the caucus.
  • But it turns out the backup on the phone lines wasn’t all their fault. A far-right group trolled the phone lines to deliberately disrupt the caucus counts. Good job and well done for Democracy, you morons.
  • In the end, Bernie Sanders has a slight popular vote lead and Pete Buttigieg has a slight delegate lead. Elizabeth Warren and Joe Biden follow in third and fourth place, respectively.
  • The Nevada caucuses were contracted to use the same app, but they scrap those plans.
  • Trump and his grown sons suggest that the system is rigged. Same old 2016 tricks.

2. Republican Joe Walsh drops out of his race to challenge Trump and asks fellow Republicans to support Democrats. Walsh says he was “booed off the stage by primary voters when I said we should expect decency and honesty from our President.”
3. A federal judge rules against Georgia Governor Brian Kemp in a voter restrictions lawsuit. The judge rules that Georgia’s voting procedures in the 2018 election, specifically the restrictive “exact match” law for voter names, violate voting rights for a large group of people who are predominantly minorities.

• • If you remember, Kemp was the Secretary of State who oversaw voting procedures for his own race for governor.

Miscellaneous:

1. The Trump administration fires Veterans Affairs deputy secretary James Byrne because VA Secretary Robert Wilkie had lost confidence in his ability to carry out his duties. The VA has been in a bit of disarray since a staff member said she was sexually assaulted at a VA hospital.
2. The former welfare director for Mississippi, four of his colleagues, and a former pro wrestler are all charged with fraud and embezzlement in a scheme that siphoned millions of dollars of public money from needy families.
3. After Trump’s acquittal, thousands of people take to the streets at more than 200 ”Reject the Cover-Up” protests across the country.
4. Trump complains that Hillary Clinton was never prosecuted, and he then refers to former members of the FBI as scum.

State of the Union:

1. I’m not sure where to start here. As is usual for most of Trump’s appearances, his State of the Union address is part campaign rally, with Republican members of Congress chanting “Four more years!” Here’s an in-depth annotated version of the speech, if you’re interested.
2. The night gets off to a rocky start when Trump ignores Pelosi’s outstretched hand to shake it. He doesn’t shake Mike Pence’s hand either.

• • Trump and Pelosi haven’t been face-to-face since their altercation at a White House meeting in October.

3. The speech includes quite a few falsehoods, half-truths, and exaggerations. I won’t go into all of them here.
4. Trump says he turned the economy around. Here’s the actual GDP chart for the past 12 years. I’m not denying that the economy is doing well under this administration, but no one should deny the growth that occurred under the previous administration.
   
   
5. He touts the low unemployment rate and says if he hadn’t reversed the failed economic policies of Obama, we wouldn’t be seeing this success. Here’s the actual unemployment trend for the past 12 years.
   
   
6. Interestingly, even though he’s right that the participation rate in the workforce increased under him (by 1 percentage point), we still have a lower rate than we did in the 1990s and lower than most other developed nations.
7. He takes credit for rising wages for lower-income workers, but that’s partly attributable to states raising their minimum wages dramatically.
8. Trump speaks about a young girl in Philadelphia who’s trapped in a failing public school and awards her an opportunity scholarship on the spot. Except that she actually attends a highly competitive charter school that does not charge tuition.

• • This is what Trump said, “For too long, countless American children have been trapped in failing government schools.” It sounds like he doesn’t want us to have any public schools.

11. In the middle of the speech, Trump awards the Medal of Freedom to Rush Limbaugh, who does a terrific job of acting surprised. Limbaugh has been fighting lung cancer. If you’re wondering why people are appalled by this, here’s a taste of the bigotry Rush has let fly over the past 30 years.
12. Trump says he’s working to end our wars in the Middle East and bring home troops, but in reality, he’s been sending thousands of troops there in recent months. However, he does bring home one U.S. soldier and orchestrates a reunion with his family in the middle of the speech.
13. Trump invites Venezuelan opposition leader Juan Guaidó as his guest. Guaidó has bipartisan support from Congress. So after a unifying and bipartisan standing ovation for Guaidó, Trump calls out Socialism, something he continually accuses Democrats of embracing.
14. Trump says he’s increased the border wall by 100 miles. He’s increased it by 1 mile and replaced 99 miles.
15. Trump points out that he released a groundbreaking Mideast peace plan last week, but Palestinians weren’t involved at all and they’ve rejected the plan outright.
16. Trump repeats his laundry list of violent crimes allegedly committed by immigrants. It would take him much longer to list the crimes committed by native-born Americans.
17. To his credit, Trump doesn’t mention the impeachment proceedings.
18. When Trump speaks about protecting the Second Amendment, the father of a Parkland shooting victim yells, “What about my daughter?” Security removes him from the chambers. I wonder why Joe Walsh didn’t get removed for yelling “You lie!” during Obama’s SOTU?
19. And then at the end of the speech, Nancy Pelosi deliberately rips up her copy of the speech, and later calls it a manifesto of mistruths.

• • House GOP members introduce a resolution to condemn Pelosi’s actions.
  • And after the speech, more people are talking about Pelosi than about Trump. That’s a first.