“Were you struck, as was I, by the absence of an ad hominem attack on Pence in Trump’s responsive statement? Trump attacks ‘Old Crow Mitch McConnell’ but nary a word against Pence. Looks to me like an invitation for a quid pro quo — I won’t attack you if you are circumspect with the Jan 6 Committee.  He knows that Pence has the goods but he is offering a non-aggression pact.”

The Republican National Committee today voted to censure Reps. Cheney and Kinzinger. But in the course of doing that they officially declared the January 6th insurrection and the conspiracy that preceded it as “legitimate political discourse.”

As we’ve been saying for months, it is an explicitly pro-insurrection political party.

I think public opinion, which is currently sour on the direction of the country and thus on the Democrats as well, isn’t mostly driven by jobs numbers or other government statistics. It’s more fundamentally driven by lived experience. And a lot sucks right now, even though there’s been a lot of positive economic news. Having said that, there’s really no question the consistently flawed jobs tabulations have hurt Joe Biden significantly. Again and again we’ve found out that a slackening recovery was actually a series of counting errors. The reports are “revised” later. But those revisions, in the nature of things, don’t get a fraction of the attention that the monthly reports do. I’m basically certain there’s no funny business going on. At least in broad outlines the cause seems pretty clear: the chaos of the pandemic has at least temporarily broken our system of tabulating jobs numbers.

Journalists have taken way too long to absorb this fact.