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Morning briefing

Morning briefing

Monday, Feb. 22, 2021

Here’s some thoughts from this past weekend while appreciating electricity and running water just a little bit more than usual:

Joseph Girard III continues to have an up and down season at Syracuse as he continues to adjust to his role as a point guard looking for a great passes rather than long shots.

Girard and his Syracuse teammates will be on ESPN tonight when the Orange take on Duke. Oddly, the Orange have a much better record than Duke and should be favored to win.

Syracuse, on the bubble for the NCAA tournament, had a strong come-from-behind win over Notre Dame on Saturday, but Girard sat most of the second half after scoring five points in the first half with freshman point guard Kadary Richmond pushing him for playing time.

I’ve watched just about every Syracuse basketball game this year. The pandemic and my discovery of the ACC basketball network has made that possible.

While Girard’s scoring is down a a couple points this year - he averaged 12.4 as a freshman and 10.5 this year - his shooting has been a little better. He is shooting 36.8 percent of his shots this year compared to 34.8 last year. He has hit 34.3 percent of his 3-point attempts this year compared to 32.4 last year, 

Statistically, the one big drop has been his free throw shooting. He is hitting 78.8 percent of his free throws compared to 89.4 percent last year.

Reporter goes north

Former Post-Star reporter Kathleen Phalen-Tomaselli, a terrific writer and reporter who was unfortunately laid off by The Post-Star during one of its recent cutbacks, has landed a reporting job at The Bangor Daily News in Maine.

She shared her first story on Facebook this past week about some Maine towns attempting to adopt “Second Amendment sanctuary” designation. One town council approved the move, making it one of the first in Maine. She quoted one Maine official as saying the local law would protect the town from “bogus gun laws” even though Maine has few gun laws. Another official said that he was not sure what the town was seeking sanctuary from because there were almost no gun laws in Maine.

Kathleen reported that the sanctuaries are modeled after immigration sanctuary cities with ore than 1,200 jurisdictions in 37 states adopting the measures.

It reminded me of one of my cousins husbands after Barack Obama became president. He told me that he and several of his friends were each putting in $100 each to buy ammunition because the news president was coming to get their guns.

By the time Obama was in his second term, he acknowledged that he had stopped buying the ammo.

My recollection is that no one ever came for their guns.

In Washington

Congress will begin hearings today on President Biden’s pick for attorney general - Merrick Garland. While Garland is best known for having his Supreme Court nomination blocked by Mitch McConnell eight months before the 2016 presidential election, what I didn’t know was that Garland was chosen head the investigation into the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing. That will give him some insight into prosecuting domestic terrorism.

Timothy McVeigh was later found guilty of the bombing and Garland was instrumental in seeking the death penalty in the case.

Going on the record

CBS News reported this week that it contacted all 50 Republican U.S. Senators to ask them who won the 2020 presidential election. Only five responded.

The 21st Congressional District

Brian Mann, the long-time North Country radio reporter who is now a correspondent for National Public Radio, noted on Twitter this week that while our local congressional district voted significantly for Donald Trump (54 to 43 percent), there were pockets that supported President Biden.

Majorities in Clinton and Essex County supported Biden and Warren County and Franklin County were just about split. He wondered if that opened the door for future Democratic challenges around the district.

N.Y. Well represented

Mann also pointed out that NPR has reported that 10 percent of the people arrested in connection with the Capitol riot on January 6 came from New York.

Saturday Night Live

It was nice to see Gov. Andrew Cuomo get lampooned by Saturday Night Live with Pete Davidson playing the governor with a pretty good accent. I just think he needed to be angrier.

The home front

My son is back to work in Texas with both electricity and running water. Temperatures were in the 70s on Sunday. A colleague of his shared a video showing a line of cars more than a mile long for fresh water.