Biden, Jobs, China, Vlad, Ukraine, Hawley, Trump, Jan 6, GOP, Psaki

Outrageously wonderful:

  • Everyone knew the January jobs report was not going to be good. Pandemic and all. Tommy Christopher watches financial people pick up their teeth from where they fell on the table, as Biden policies produce jobs creation at multiples of what those analysts had predicted.
     
    It isn’t just January. Biden’s first year’s jobs report was the highest in the history of jobs reports.
     
  • News Corpse watches the gleeful anticipation on the Fox Network of a horrible jobs crisis. When record smashing, massive, jobs creation emerges instead, the televised disappointment is palpable. Fox anti-American hopes are crushed as pundits discover that, no, the numbers were not a misplaced decimal.
     
  • Of course, the economy is not all that is at stake:

  • At The Moderate Voice Professor Amitrajeet A. Batabyal of Rochester Institute of Technology explores one great weakness of dictatorships and how that flaw applies to China’s future.
     
  • In the Palmer Report, our own Josh Hawley, Senator from here in Missouri, goes all Tokyo Rose, coming an inch or so from explicitly defending Putin’s right to invade Ukraine.
     
  • At the Borowitz Report, Vlad Putin claims the Ukraine as consolation for losing the White House.
    That was parody.
     
  • This is not:

  • In Letters from an American, renowned historian Heather Cox Richardson takes a look at two stories this week.
     
    The more widely reported: The carefully planned battle in which US forces killed terrorist leader of the Islamic State militant group – ISIS, Abu Ibrahim al-Hashimi al-Qurayshi.
    As Biden announced, it sends “a strong message to terrorists around the world: We will come after you and find you”
     
    The less reported story, potentially as significant to the Republic, was a Trump administration proposal after the election to use intelligence agencies illegally to target the private information of individual voters. The idea was to generate disinformation about fictional vote interference by foreign governments.
     
    The Trump attempt to overturn our democracy is now documented to have been more developed and detailed than is generally recognized.
     
  • In Hackwhackers, it turns out that then-President Trump actually went a little further than inciting an insurrection. He plotted to seize voting machines.
     
  • Ted McLaughlin at jobsanger points out how Donald Trump has always been a control freak, trying to micro-manage pretty much everything. Should we be surprised that he was behind so many details of the Jan 6 insurrection?
     
  • Dave Dubya watches Trump rally in Texas, promising that if criminal laws are applied to him he will have his mobs tear the country violently apart.
     
    Too big to jail.
     
  • I admit this made me chuckle:

  • CATO Institute’s own Julian Sanchez gives Mike Pence semi-applause. Okay, maybe applaw:
     

  • Wisconsin conservative James Wigderson has a word for Liz Cheney:
     

  • What we have known for a while is finally official. tengrain at Mock Paper Scissors has the details. In addition to condemning Reps. Adam Kinzinger and Liz Cheney for investigating the coup attempt, the Republican National Committee has declared last year’s January 6 violence to have been legitimate political discourse.
     
  • Green Eagle also reads the Republican manifesto on the legitimate insurrection and explains the really frightening part.
     
  • Seems violence and insurrection are becoming acceptable through much of contemporary conservatism. Scotties Playtime tracks a Republican candidate for Michigan state senate who tells backers to bring guns to voting places.
     
    …if we can’t change the tide, we need to be prepared to lock and load.
    That’s a quote.
     
  • Vixen Strangely at Strangely Blogged, has a suggestion for Florida Governor DeSantis. Nazis are bad, very bad, and it doesn’t hurt to say that again and again.
     
    In the interest of fairness, I suppose I should point out that DeSantis did have a brief lapse early this week, mentioning during a Monday session that some jackasses had done something on an overpass and would be held accountable for anything criminal. That’s about as far as he would go.
     
    At least he didn’t travel into good-people-on-both-sides territory.
     
    So why the reticence from some Republicans? Why the difficulty in saying the obvious: that what is truly and obviously evil is truly and obviously evil?

Tweets I thought worthy:

And I’m allowed a few of my own:
Beginning with my attempt to keep up with James –

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