From: The Economy Does Much Better Under Democrats. Why? – The New York Times

“A president has only limited control over the economy. And yet there has been a stark pattern in the United States for nearly a century. The economy has grown significantly faster under Democratic presidents than Republican ones.”

“It’s true about almost any major indicator: gross domestic product, employment, incomes, productivity, even stock prices. It’s true if you examine only the precise period when a president is in office, or instead assume that a president’s policies affect the economy only after a lag and don’t start his economic clock until months after he takes office. The gap “holds almost regardless of how you define success,” two economics professors at Princeton, Alan Blinder and Mark Watson, write. They describe it as ‘startlingly large’.”

” . . . if the causes are not fully clear, the pattern is. The American economy has performed much better under Democratic administrations than Republican ones, over both the last few decades and the last century.” 

From: AOC isn’t going to forget about the insurrection and move on – The Washington Post

“Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez says she was told that trauma victims should ‘tell their stories’ as a part of their healing. And that is what she did Monday night . . . The New York congresswoman initiated a live stream on Instagram and . . . recounted what had happened to her during the violent invasion of the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6.’

“She talked about flattening herself behind her bathroom door as someone entered her office, screaming, ‘Where is she? Where is she?’ It turned out to be a police officer, but until she learned that, ‘I thought I was going to die’.”

“She talked about eventually escaping to the office of Rep. Katie Porter (Calif.), where the two Democratic congresswomen rifled through staffers’ gym bags, searching for sneakers they could change into in case they needed to jump out a window or run. . . .” 

“Ocasio-Cortez, her voice wavering, revealed during the live stream that she was a survivor of sexual assault, something she said many people did not know, because there were only so many times she’d wanted to tell that story. But she was mentioning it now, she said, because of its relevance to the attack at the Capitol.”

“Almost immediately after Jan. 6, she said, people began implying . . . that reconciliation depended on ‘moving on’. Those words, she said, were the tactics of ‘an abuser’.”

“She compared it to a sexual harasser telling his victim that the quickest path to normalcy would be her forgiving him. Or to parents telling the child they once abused that the mistreatment had happened in the past. . . .”

“There needs to be accountability, she said, because forgiveness does not happen when a perpetrator wants to move on. It happens when a victim is ready. . . .”

From: It’s Marjorie Taylor Greene’s Party Now – The New York Times

“Some decent Republicans imagine they’re in a battle for their party’s soul. Representative Adam Kinzinger, who . . . voted to impeach Txxxx, recently started a PAC devoted to fighting the forces that led . . . the Capitol rampage. “The time has come to choose what kind of party we will be,” he said in an introductory video. The thing is, Republicans already have chosen.

Just look at the party’s state affiliates. On Jan. 4, the Arizona G.O.P. retweeted a “Stop the Steal” activist who’d pronounced himself willing to “give my life” to overturn the election. Said the party’s official account: “He is. Are you?” An Arizona lawmaker has since introduced a bill that would let the Legislature, controlled by Republicans, override the presidential vote of the state’s increasingly Democratic citizenry. The Oregon Republican Party approved a resolution suggesting that the Capitol siege was a “false flag” attack. The Texas Republican Party has adopted the QAnon slogan “We are the storm” as its motto, though it insists there’s no connection. . . . 

[QAnon supporter Marjorie Taylor Greene] is not the outlier in this party. Kinzinger is.

“American conservatism — particularly its evangelical strain — has fostered derangement in its ranks for decades, insisting that no source of information outside its own self-reinforcing ideological bubble is trustworthy.”

“If you’re steeped in creationism and believe that elites are lying to you about the origins of life on earth, it’s not a stretch to believe they’re lying to you about a life-threatening virus. If what you know of history is the revisionist version of the Christian right, in which God deeded America to the faithful, then pluralism will feel like the theft of your birthright. If you believe that the last Democratic president was illegitimate, as Trump and other birthers claimed, then it’s not hard to believe that dark forces would foist another unconstitutional leader on the country.”

“There was a moment, after the Capitol riot, when it seemed as if a critical mass of the Republican Party was recoiling at what it had created. But the moment passed, because it would have required the party’s putative leaders to defy too many of their followers.”

From: More than two-thirds of Americans side with Biden on COVID relief — and most support the rest of his agenda – Yahoo News/YouGov Poll

“When asked about the 20 policies that define President Biden’s agenda, more Americans support than oppose all 20 of them, according to a new Yahoo News/YouGov poll.”

“The margins are decisive. The majority of Biden’s proposals garner at least twice as much support as opposition. Nearly half are favored by more than 60 percent of Americans.”