Good morning! Happy Australia Day, and a happy Constitution Day to our friends in India.
The Great Blizzard of 1978 struck the Ohio-Great Lakes Region on January 26 of that year with record snowfall and winds of up to 100 mph. And on this date in 1998, at the end of a speech about education, Bill Clinton addressed the growing Monica Lewinsky scandal, insisting, “I did not have sexual relations with that woman, Miss Lewinsky. I never told anybody to lie, not a single time—never.”
Stat of the day: 22 percent — the decline in the gross domestic product of Greece since 2008, according to the BBC.
Syriza–> Greek voters sent shockwaves across Europe over the weekend by handing the left-wing Syriza party a major electoral victory. The party campaigned against European austerity policies and called for a write-down of the country’s debt. Syriza’s leader, Alexis Tsipras, will form a coalition government with a small conservative party. Paul Krugman says the long national nightmare of Greece may be near an end. Expect a backlash from the Austerians, he writes, but then argues that they “have no credibility; the program they imposed on Greece never made sense. It had no chance of working.” AND: At HuffPo, Charlotte Alfred considers what the victory may mean for the rest of the world, predicting newly “emboldened radical populist parties” in Europe ALSO: BBC’s Robert Preston notes that the markets aren’t panicking, and tries to explain why.
Worse than ’78? –> Eric Holthaus reports for Slate that the Northeast is preparing to be shut down by a record-breaking blizzard. “The National Weather Service… is calling the potential for epic snowfall ‘historic,'” he writes.
“The GOP is having a seriousness deficit” –> So writes Politico’s Roger Simon about the crowded field at this weekend’s “Freedom Summit” in Iowa — the unofficial kickoff of the GOP presidential primary season. AND: Even some of her conservative fans are panning Sarah Palin’s “bizarre” and “meandering” speech at the conference, according to HuffPo’s Ed Mazza.
His Holiness picks a fight –> Timothy Cama reports for The Hill that Pope Francis will issue an encyclical this summer urging Catholics to battle global warming, and soon after will travel to New York and Washington, DC, just “as leaders in the United States debate what to do about climate change and fight over the Obama administration’s proposal to cut carbon dioxide emissions from power plants.” Cama says that many American conservatives are incensed over Francis’ statements on climate change.
“An acceptable price” –> Martin Strain, a conservative scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, had a weekend op-ed in WaPo headlined, “End Obamacare, and people could die. That’s okay.” Karoli has more at Crooks and Liars. AND: At National Journal, Sam Baker looks at what the White House could and couldn’t do in response to a potential Supreme Court decision striking down Obamacare’s subsidies in states where the federal government runs the insurance exchanges.
“They overwhelmed our troops and forced them to retreat” –> reports for CNN that “hundreds of Boko Haram gunmen on Sunday launched a predawn attack on the Nigerian city of Maiduguri and were locked in a fierce battle with government troops on the outskirts of the city.” The extremists launched a simultaneous attack on the town of Monguno, and reportedly gained control of the both the village and an army barracks located nearby.
“The scenario I have always dreaded” –> NYT columnist Charles Blow writes about his son being detained at gunpoint by a campus police officer while walking home from the Yale library. AND: Tom Boggioni reports for Raw Story that a Marine vet is suing the NYPD, claiming that “two undercover cops beat him up and threw in the back of an unmarked van during an illegal stop-and-search last week.”
Pen and a phone –> Alaska Republicans are “apoplectic” over “Obama’s decision to protect Alaska’s Arctic National Wildlife Refuge from oil exploration and drilling,” according to at the Christian Science Monitor. Said Sen. Lisa Murkowski: “I cannot understand why this administration is willing to negotiate with Iran, but not Alaska.”
“Steak knife-like teeth” –> Meet Nundasuchus, a nine-foot-long carnivorous reptile that roamed Tanzania before the age of the dinosaurs, according to the Virginia Tech team that described it in the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology. (Via: Science Daily)
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