2.8 Albert Finney dies
2.7 Huffington Post: David Pecker, the chief executive of American Media Inc., which publishes the tabloid National Enquirer, threatened to publish embarrassing photos of Jeff Bezos if he didn’t stop investigating Pecker’s company, according to the Amazon CEO. Bezos revealed the alleged threat, which was sent through AMI chief content officer Dylan Howard, in a blog post published to Medium on Thursday. In it, Bezos also claimed that an “AMI leader” told him that Pecker was “apoplectic” over an investigation the Amazon founder had launched into Pecker’s companies.“Rather than capitulate to extortion and blackmail, I’ve decided to publish exactly what they sent me, despite the personal cost and embarrassment they threaten,” Bezos, who also owns the Washington Post, wrote. In the alleged letter to Bezos, Howard wrote that the paper had obtained a “d*ck pick” (sic) of Bezos, as well as text messages and nine other images of Bezos and Lauren Sanchez, with whom he was having an affair. Bezos also published multiple emails, allegedly from AMI representatives, asking the Amazon CEO to release a public statement asserting that AMI’s reporting is not politically motivated. “Of course I don’t want personal photos published, but I also won’t participate in their well-known practice of blackmail, political favors, political attacks, and corruption,” he continued. “I prefer to stand up, roll this log over, and see what crawls out.”
2.7 John Dingell Jr., the longest-serving member of Congress in U.S. history, dies at 92 of complications from prostate cancer. History will probably best remember the Michigan Democrat for championing the expansion of health care, from Medicare to Obamacare. For legions of former administration officials who found themselves in Dingell’s crosshairs during his 59 years in the House, he will always be most closely associated with vigorous oversight of the executive branch. He was angry that the Republican-controlled House for ignoring its constitutional responsibility to check the executive’s authority. “I’m told by my young friends that when you write something in all capital letters, you’re yelling,” Dingell wrote. “So, let me shout this out: WE HAVE ABDICATED OUR CONSTITUTIONAL SYSTEM OF CHECKS AND BALANCES IN THE UNITED STATES! Understand this: I’m not saying this as a partisan. I’m talking about anybody in any administration, Republican or Democrat, who thinks they’re above the law.”
2.7 Frank Robinson dies.at 83 Tom Verducci in SI: “Baseball and America lost one of its great noble warriors Thursday with the passing of Robinson. Aaron may have hit more home runs, and fellow contemporaries Willie Mays and Roberto Clemente may have played the game with more crowd-pleasing panache. And Robinson may have fallen just outside the glamorous spotlights of 600 home runs (586), 3,000 hits (2,943) and a .300 lifetime batting average (.294). But Frank Robinson—with no formal first name or middle name, even his very name was a statement of his forthrightness in and out of spikes—devoted himself to baseball heart and soul with a ferocious sense of purpose that sets him apart from all others.”
2.7 Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. joined with the Supreme Court’s liberals Thursday night to block a Louisiana law that opponents say would close most of the state’s abortion clinics and leave it with only one doctor eligible to perform the procedure. The justices may yet consider whether the 2014 law — requiring doctors at abortion clinics to have admitting privileges at nearby hospitals — unduly burdens women’s access to abortion. The Louisiana law has never been enforced, and the Supreme Court in 2016 found a nearly identical Texas law to be unconstitutional.
2.6 Max Boot in the Post: Trump was more right than he realized when he said: “The agenda I will lay out this evening is not a Republican agenda or a Democrat agenda.” No, it’s not. And it’s not the “agenda of the American people” either. It is a populist agenda that combines the big government infatuation of Democrats with the xenophobia and racism of the far right. This toxic combination has little in common with the sort of principled conservatism I grew up espousing — and yet the House chamber was full of self-described conservatives lustily applauding his remarks. Trump is a failed president, but the State of the Union speech made clear that he has succeeded in redefining conservatism in his own, deeply unattractive image.
2.5 Mike DeBonis in The Washington Post: “[Pelosi was] the face of Democratic exasperation.”
2.5 Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez said on NBC: “I thought it was, frankly, kind of bizarre. I don’t think that investigations into federal misconduct have anything to do with our economy.”
2.5 Trump: “If there is going to be peace and legislation, there cannot be war and investigation.”
2.5 Trump: “Tonight, we renew our resolve that America will never be a socialist country.”
2.5 Trump at the State of the Union: “We must reject the politics of revenge, resistance and retribution, and embrace the boundless potential of cooperation, compromise and the common good,” Trump said in his State of the Union address. Pelosi then stood and clapped, aiming her applause at Trump in a way comic Patton Oswalt summed up in a tweet:
Congrats to @SpeakerPelosi for inventing the “fuck you” clap. #sotu pic.twitter.com/eueoUf9IBT
— Patton Oswalt (@pattonoswalt) February 6, 2019
2.5 Jamelle Bouie in the Times: American society is still structured by color. Your health, your wealth — your ability to live and act freely — still turns to a large degree on whether you were born white. . . .Any collective reckoning with racism that comes out of this moment must go beyond the personal and offensive to the unequal depths. We should care about racist imagery, but we should care even more about our still-segregated society.
2.5 Albany
2.4 Albany
2.4 Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo on Monday announced a dramatic drop in state income tax revenue of $2.8 billion, which he says will prompt him to revise his 2019-20 budget. Cuomo blamed the shortfall on a federal tax plan backed by Republican President Donald Trump. “At this point there is no doubt that the budget we put forward is not supported by the revenues. It’s as serious as a heart attack.”
2.4 Axios: The massive leak of President Trump‘s private schedules. . . show that Trump has spent around 60% of his scheduled time over the past three months in unstructured “Executive Time,” which includes tweeting, newspaper-reading, TV-watching and phone calls. White House insiders said the leak sowed chaos. Cliff Sims, the former White House official who wrote the dishy “Team of Vipers,” told me: “There are leaks, and then there are leaks. If most are involuntary manslaughter, this was premeditated murder. People inside are genuinely scared.”. . . .The N.Y. Times’ Maggie Haberman tweeted: “A White House aide is weaponizing his schedules, which says a lot about how people in the White House feel about the man.”
2.3 In the last Super Bowl party at the Schmidts‘, the Patriots beat the Rams 13-3. Boring.
2.2 Saw Larry and Teresa at Irvington Town Hall with Cathy and Tim
2.2 The Guardian: JD Salinger’s son has confirmed for the first time that the late author of ‘The Catcher in the Rye’ wrote a significant amount of work that has never been seen, and that he and his father’s widow are ‘going as fast as we freaking can’ to get it ready for publication.
2.1 George Will in the Post: “Only Democrats can save this president. They can do so by nominating someone loopy enough to panic voters who are asking only for someone cheerful, intelligent and tethered to reality.”