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Abbreviated Pundit Roundup: The Sneauxpocalypse Now becomes a Walking in a Winter Wonderland [1]
['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.']
Date: 2025-01-23
We begin today with Mike Smith, Ben Myers, James Finn, and Doug MacCash of The Times-Picayune/The New Orleans Advocate and their team coverage of the once-in-a-century 8”-11” snowfall in New Orleans, Louisiana.
Tuesday’s storm left residents in near disbelief as the snow kept falling. Up to 10 inches were reported in New Orleans and Jefferson Parish, as well as 11.5 inches in Chalmette, leaving roofs, yards and vehicles buried. It was the region’s first significant snowfall since December 2009, and the eventual totals rivaled a Valentine’s Day storm in 1895 as the biggest on record. [...] Residents took full advantage, breaking out snowboards, skis, makeshift sleds and their warmest gloves to build snowmen as the flakes fell throughout most of Tuesday, often blown diagonally by sharp winds. The snowfall, which ended in the early evening, was also powdery and relatively dry, providing the type of winter playground that many New Orleanians had only seen on television. [...] The frigid temperatures led New Orleans officials to open a third emergency warming center at the St. Bernard Recreation Center. Over 200 people stayed at emergency shelters at The Rosenwald Recreation Center on Broad Street and the Treme Recreation Community Center on North Villere Street Tuesday night. The cold was also a test for a new shelter set up by the state in Gentilly to house those who had been living near tourist areas around the Superdome and French Quarter ahead of the Super Bowl and Mardi Gras. Ahead of the storm, there had been concerns about keeping the building warm.
Look, there is plenty of coverage of the dastardly deeds of the tacky shoe salesman, some of which I will link to. When I get a chance for something of a feel good story, I’m taking it. The people of New Orleans— and Mobile, AL and Pensacola, FL— appear to be having a good time with this rarest of events. I’ve been having a good time watching a lot of their utter delight.
The reason why I pushed fair use on this particular story, though, was because of the homeless shelter situation in the New Orleans metropolitan area for which I found a couple of stories here and here.
Now having said that...let’s take a walk.
Chris Dolce of The Weather Channel notes the topsy-turvy weather patterns of this winter.
Official storm totals in Lafayette and New Orleans, Louisiana, Mobile, Alabama, and Pensacola, Florida, are greater than what New York City, Philadelphia, Salt Lake City, Omaha, Nebraska, and Sioux Falls, South Dakota have seen since fall. This upside-down pattern has been created by opposite extremes: below-average snow in those northern locales and the historic totals from Enzo along the Gulf Coast. Also notable is that Lafayette, Louisiana (9 inches), almost had as much snow Tuesday as Chicago (9.2 inches) and Minneapolis (9.8 inches) have seen all season. Both the Windy City and the Twin Cities are running snowfall deficits this winter.
So New Orleans got more snow in one day in some parts of the city (there are plenty of rulers that measured 10+ inches of snow) than Chicago and Minneapolis has had all year. I mean, Chicago got a little dusting today of snow today and that’s all it was...a dusting.
It’s been pretty frigid in these parts, though.
x Stooooooooppp!! 🧂 😂 ❄️
These snow videos in Louisiana got me 🤣
New Orleans, Bourbon Street, Blizzard pic.twitter.com/jKAKUwylno — Tammy Grabel 💰 (@TammyGrabel) January 21, 2025
Look, lol, I don’t care what Black people may say about me, I loves my Black people, lol...moving right along.
Adam Serwer of The Atlantic writes about Donald Trump’s latest attempt to rewrite the federal constitution.
Frederick Douglass, who argued that the Constitution did not sanction slavery, responded to the Taney decision by saying that one could find a defense of slavery in the Constitution only “by discrediting and casting away as worthless the most beneficent rules of legal interpretation; by disregarding the plain and common sense reading of the instrument itself; by showing that the Constitution does not mean what it says, and says what it does not mean, by assuming that the written Constitution is to be interpreted in the light of a secret and unwritten understanding of its framers, which understanding is declared to be in favor of slavery.” Sounds familiar. Trump’s executive order similarly rewrites the Constitution by fiat, something the president simply does not have the authority to do. The order, which purports to exclude the U.S.-born children of unauthorized immigrants from citizenship, states that such children are not “subject to the jurisdiction” of the U.S. and therefore not included in the amendment’s language extending citizenship to “all persons born or naturalized in the United States.” This makes no sense on its own terms—as the legal scholar Amanda Frost wrote earlier this month, “Undocumented immigrants must follow all federal and state laws. When they violate criminal laws, they are jailed. If they park illegally, they are ticketed.” The ultraconservative Federal Judge James C. Ho observed in 2006 that “Text, history, judicial precedent, and Executive Branch interpretation confirm that the Citizenship Clause reaches most U.S.-born children of aliens, including illegal aliens.” As such, Trump’s executive order on birthright citizenship is an early test of the federal judiciary, and of the extent to which Republican-appointed judges and justices are willing to amend the Constitution from the bench just to give Trump what he wants. They have done so at least twice before, the first time by writing the Fourteenth Amendment’s ban on insurrectionists running for office out of the Constitution, and the second time by seeking to protect Trump from prosecution by inventing an imperial presidential immunity out of whole cloth. But accepting Trump’s attempt to abolish birthright citizenship would have more direct consequences for millions of people, by nullifying the principle that almost anyone born here is American.
Since the price of eggs are now (or seems to be) an important economic indicator of who will win the presidency nowadays, Laurent Belsie of the Christian Science Monitor notes that the continuing skyrocketing of the wholesale prices of eggs will be felt at the grocery store very soon, if not already in some places.
..one of agriculture’s most potent biological threats, a virulent strain of avian influenza, has infiltrated henhouses over the past three years, roiling the $40 billion industry. Now it’s getting even worse. Surging prices, already setting records at the wholesale level, are heading for the grocery store. What’s the problem? With no known antidote, farmers have had no choice but to kill their entire flock once the virus is detected. In December alone, more than 4% of the nation’s egg-laying hens were culled or died because of the virus, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA). Fewer hens mean fewer eggs. Prices have surged.[...] There’s a lag before those wholesale price hikes show up in the grocery store, says Karyn Rispoli, a managing editor at Expana. And many grocers sell eggs below cost to lure customers to their stores. Last week, for example, they were buying large white eggs for an average of $6.10 a dozen while some were advertising them for sale at an average of $2.24, according to the USDA. The pressure to raise retail prices will mount if wholesale prices continue to climb as expected. ...Once compromised flocks are eliminated, farmers have to buy new chicks and raise them for roughly five months before they start laying. Chicks for sale are also scarce due to the rise in demand from the ravages of the virus. That’s adding more months to the rebuilding process.
x Ice hockey on Canal St., anyone?? 🤣
On a serious note— this is what the streets will be like tonight and tomorrow. VERY TREACHEROUS. #NewOrleans @FOX8NOLA pic.twitter.com/sPoFdiWVy8 — Olivia Vidal (@oliviavidaltv) January 22, 2025
I have a feeling that ~25-35% of people interviewed on TV about the New Orleans Sneauxpocalypse came from cold weather parts of the country. That includes this ice skater.
And yes, these streets are dangerous to walk and drive on.
Elizabeth Dias of The New York Times analyzes a clash of American Christianities featuring the tacky shoe salesman and Bishop Mariann E. Budde.
So, she took a breath, and spoke. President Trump, seated seven feet below and some 40 feet to her right, made eye contact. One representation of American Christianity began speaking to another, and the most powerful man in the world was arrested by the words of a silver-haired female bishop in the pulpit. Until he turned away. [...] The Canterbury Pulpit confronted the bully pulpit on the greatest possible stage. For nearly a decade, American Christianity has been torn apart in every possible way. Christians have fought over whether women should be allowed to preach. Over the place of gay people. The definition of marriage. The separation of church and state. Black Lives Matter. And at the heart of much of it has been Mr. Trump’s rise as the de facto head of the modern American church, and the rise of right-wing Christian power declaring itself the one true voice of God. Many of these fights have been siloed, rarely in dialogue. Christians of opposing perspectives almost never worship in the same sanctuary. They do not listen to one another’s sermons, or hear the other’s prayers. Mainline Protestants have wondered if their voice can have any measure of authority. At a moment when conservative Christians are poised to gain even more power through Mr. Trump’s second term, Bishop Budde tried something different at the interfaith service.
This clash has been going on since the time prior to the founding of the American republic. Ms. Dias is right that it is rare that this clash takes place under the same roof for a moment.
Jessica Grose of The New York Times thinks that the sex abuse scandals that have several religious denominations has resulted in young people’s cynicism about religious institutions.
While the Catholic Church’s sex abuse scandals have been widely publicized, other major denominations have had sex abuse scandals of their own. In 2019, The Houston Chronicle published a blockbuster investigation of the Southern Baptist Convention, finding that 263 church officials and volunteers had been convicted of sex abuse crimes over the preceding 20 years in 30 states and the District of Columbia. And just last week, The Washington Post published another heartbreaker, about an Episcopal Church youth minister named Jeff Taylor who was accused of sexual abuse by children over many years and was not held accountable by several of the organizations that employed him. [...] There’s a dispiriting uniformity to how violations by clergy play out. (And it’s dispiriting to see how Shapira’s excellent reporting barely broke through the social media noise. These scandals are no longer shocking; they’re expected.) Often, church or temple leaders learn about accusations, and instead of dealing with them, they try to make the problem disappear by moving the perpetrator to another location. Upholding the public image of the institution is more important than protecting the vulnerable or seeking justice for them. It’s bad enough when secular institutions do this. But religious institutions are supposed to provide a moral example, even when it’s not easy. When spiritual authorities ignore their values and their responsibility to the parents and children who trusted them, it’s crushing. As a secular, mildly observant Jew, I don’t feel strongly about whether other Americans attend religious services or believe in God. But I do care about the pervasive — and honestly, warranted — cynicism that young people have about religious institutions, because I think it is contributing to a more disconnected, careless and cruel society.
Ms. Grose is correct, perhaps, about the primary reason people are leaving the churches (and synagogues and mosques and temples) but I wish that she had talked about some of the other reasons citizens aren’t going up into churches like they used to. Young men (of all races and ethnicities) aren’t flocking to the churches but they are flocking to the podcasts in the manosphere to fill the void that churches once filled, imo.
Finally today, architecture critic of the Chicago Sun-Times Lee Bey takes a look at one of the little noticed memorandums signed by Trump on his first day in office.
On Day 1 of his new presidency, Trump issued a memorandum that gives the U.S. General Service Administration — the agency that constructs and maintains federal buildings — 60 days to submit to him a list of design recommendations that includes those that “respect regional, traditional, and classical architectural heritage in order to uplift and beautify public spaces and ennoble the United States and our system of self-government.” [...] ...Trump’s call to give preference to traditional and classical designs could wind up saddling us (and the countries where U.S. embassies will be built) with ungainly new buildings struggling to mimic those of ancient Rome or 18th century America. [...] The American Institute of Architects issued a statement Tuesday on Trump’s memorandum. “AIA has strong concerns that mandating architecture styles stifles innovation and harms local communities,” the group representing 100,000 licensed architects said. Much of what Trump proposed is a rehash of an executive order from his first presidency that called for more classically designed federal edifices while largely condemning the structures built in the 1960s and after.
Jackson Square with the iconic St. Louis Cathedral behind the statue of Andrew Jackson.
I’m out.
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