Sunday News: “Time to Panic” Over Climate Crisis; Dems Need Another “Blue Wave” in 2020; SNL Does Trump “Wall” “Emergency” Press Conference; “Northam needs to listen a lot more than he talks”

by Lowell

Here are a few national and Virginia news headlines, political and otherwise, for Sunday, February 17.

• Trump foreign policy under attack from all sides at European security conference
• Merkel Rejects U.S. Demands That Europe Pull Out of Iran Nuclear Deal (Go Merkel!)
• Trump: EU must take back 800 Isis fighters captured in Syria (“Trump: EU must take back 800 Isis fighters captured in Syria. US doesn’t want to watch ‘fighters permeate Europe’ with caliphate ‘ready to fall’, says president” What?
• Munich Insecurity Conference (“Transatlantic differences laid bare at annual defense powwow.”)
• Pompeo and Pence send a poor message with their bumbling tour of Europe (“Mr. Pence is no doubt right about the growing rift, but its source is not the Europeans but Mr. Trump.”)
• Trump’s make-believe crisis is untethered from truth and reality (“Illegal crossings between ports of entry, as measured by Border Patrol arrests along the Mexican border, have plummeted since the turn of the century, falling to just below 400,000 in the most recent fiscal year, from more than 1.6 million in 2000…Most illegal drugs that enter the country from Mexico are discovered by authorities at legal crossing points, not in remote areas where a wall would serve as a deterrent…The number of illegal immigrants in the United States has been falling for more than a decade”)
• Pence met with silence after mentioning Trump in Munich speech
• Two Witnesses Back Account Rosenstein Considered Taping Trump
• Trump’s ‘National Emergency’ Is a Dangerous Fraud (“Declaring a bogus emergency to overrule Congress on public spending is an affront to the Constitution.”)
• ‘Finish that wall’: Trump seeks to turn his failure to build the wall into campaign rallying cry (The Cult of Wall)
• House Democrats take steps to obtain notes from Trump-Putin meetings
• Heather Nauert withdraws name from UN ambassador consideration (Other than the fact that she’s completely unqualified for this job, what’s the problem? LOL)
• Time to Panic (“The planet is getting warmer in catastrophic ways. And fear may be the only thing that saves us.”)
• The War That Wasn’t: Trump Claims Obama Was Ready to Strike North Korea
• Trump Is Driving Out Precious Republican Voters (“The young in particular are slipping away.”)
• Police sources: New evidence suggests Jussie Smollett orchestrated attack (The hell?)
• Jussie Smollett Case: Brothers Questioned By Police Were Paid $3,500 To Stage Attack, Which Was Rehearsed Days Before, Sources Say
• New White House, Congressional Spending Fights on the Horizon (“Lawmakers must once again raise the federal borrowing limit by late summer or early fall, and reach a new budget deal by the end of September”)
• Trump campaign adviser Roger Stone directly colluded with Russian operatives behind DNC email hack (Nope, no collusion here! Haha.)
• Scholar Matt Sears: Someday MAGA hats will be shameful secrets, like Klan robes
• Trump Is Trying to Hollow Out the Constitutional System of Checks and Balances (“The other two branches might let him.”)
• Harris off to best start among Dems in race, say strategists, donors
• California’s move to Super Tuesday hands Harris a big edge in 2020 (“‘Our strategy runs straight through California,’ says a top adviser. But a subpar performance in her home state could also sink Harris’ candidacy.”)
• Bernie Sanders records video announcing 2020 campaign
• Kamala Harris’s Blackness Isn’t Up for Debate (“Her identity and motives are being unfairly challenged on all sides.”)
• Why is the media showering Howard Schultz with free airtime?
• SNL: Alec Baldwin’s Trump Hopes His ‘Personal Hell of Playing President’ Will Be Over Soon (“If he knew during the election what he knows now, Trump said, ‘I would have told Putin to just give the job to Hillary instead.’”)
• Alec Baldwin’s Trump returns to declare a national emergency on ‘SNL’
• One blue wave was not enough: Democrats need another in 2020 (“Beating Donald Trump might not be Democrats’ biggest task in 2020: A second blue wave could reshape history”)
• Amazon’s New York ‘disaster’ reminds leaders to address gentrification
• The lengthy history of white politicians wearing blackface — and getting a pass (“White politicians from the North and the South — Democrats and Republicans — have been caught on camera in blackface. Few suffer lasting repercussions.”)
• Gibson: We will soon learn what kind of governor Northam can be (“‘Northam needs to listen a lot more than he talks,’ Sabato said. ‘Maybe he can try out a couple of policy proposals and see how people react The audience shouldn’t be handpicked. If this looks and feels like a stage-managed public relations tour, it will have a short off-off-Broadway run.'”)
• Schapiro: Va. Democrats crafting ‘lily-black ticket’ for ’21?
• Barbershop: Virginia Gov. Northam Plans His ‘Racial Reconciliation Tour’ (“I think he faces a fundamental choice. If this is about political survival for his governorship, no. If this is about him being an instrument of society, potentially. And I think what he needs to be prepared for is that this will not be a civil conversation. We can’t ask people to engage in civility here because that just means lower your voice, don’t be emotional. This is an incredibly emotional topic. People feel loss. They feel anger. They feel a sense of rage. This has been coming for generations. And I think he needs to be prepared for a very hard-nosed, tough emotional conversation that’s coming his way.”)
• Editorial: Is the reincarnation of Henry Howell a conservative Republican? (Wait, what? I’ve got to ask Henry Howell’s son Hank about this one.)
• EDITORIAL: Lt. Gov. Fairfax deserves due process
• Gordon C. Morse: Sorting through the mess in Richmond
• Amazon deal delivers ‘certainty’ for key transportation projects in Northern Virginia (“As part of the agreement to lure Amazon to Crystal City, Virginia committed to $195 million in transportation improvements, which also include an expansion of the Metroway bus system, a south entrance to the future Potomac Yard Metro station, improvements to Route 1, and the construction of a pedestrian bridge connecting Reagan National Airport to Crystal City.”)
• Margaret Edds column: How would Oliver Hill regard Virginia’s current scandals?
• Tina Freitas challenges Sen. Emmett Hanger (She’s as far-right extreme as her husband Nick Freitas. The Power Couple O’ Crazy?)
• Mountain Valley Pipeline Under Criminal Investigation
• Northam Given Pass On Blackface By Black Virginia Statehouse Workers
• Richmond’s donor class and the VMI brotherhood stand behind embattled Virginia governor (“Lawmakers will leave Richmond after Feb. 23, easing some of the pressure and focus on the executive branch. The state also has no clear mechanism for conducting hearings or an investigation into the allegations against Fairfax — other than impeachment, which has not occurred in at least 150 years and which legislators have so far resisted. Herring, who admitted to his own instance of wearing blackface as a college student in 1980, has been out of public view for two weeks, with the public’s focus mostly on Northam and Fairfax.”)
• In Northam’s hometown, some support the embattled governor and defend the Eastern Shore
• “The 2019 Primary Season Has Begun”: Republican-Turned-Democrat vs. Democratic Socialist in HD50 (Manassas, PW County)
• Roanoke Times Publishes Op-Ed From Self-Proclaimed “White Supremacist” Who Argues that Anyone Mentioning Racism Is a Racist, etc.
• When Mark Herring was at U-Va., the Cavalier Daily was calling out racism (“As editor, I oversaw coverage that chronicled ‘the black experience,’ and the paper denounced student events at a whites-only club.”)
• Democrat Amy Laufer Announces Bid for Virginia State Senate District 17 (49% Northam, 52% Kaine District)
• Laufer kicks off campaign for state Senate
• City’s activist Democrats want Northam and Fairfax to resign
• Editorial: Study shows opportunity exists for Beach contracts
• Saturday’s college basketball roundup: Both CNU teams gain top Capital tournament seeds; Kentucky upends No. 1 Tennessee; Knight scores 35 in Tribe’s win (Congratulations to my nephew Jeremy Brown on helping to coach the CNU men’s basketball team to a 22-3 record and the #1 seed in the Capital Athletic Conference tournament. Good luck the rest of the way!)
• A little rain and sleet later today; significant winter storm possible late Tuesday night and Wednesday