At this juncture in time, what was once seen as a radical suggestion seems more and more to now be a very smart course of action. This is far from ideal, since the original plans would have been far, far better... but we are where we are. So perhaps it is time for Democrats in Congress to consider using the budget reconciliation rules in the Senate to achieve only one of their stated objectives. And there is no more pressing concern for the voters than limiting pharmaceutical companies from their continual greed when it comes to setting the price of their wares for the American public. Lowering prescription drug prices via reconciliation would chalk up an enormous political win for Democrats, heading into the midterm campaign season.

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Perhaps it is appropriate that I chose to write about this today, since it is Groundhog Day. Because, much like Bill Murray experienced in the movie, it certainly feels like we've been here before. But maybe this time we'll actually get to continue onwards, instead of reliving the same cycle over and over again. That's my hope, at any rate.

I am speaking of the COVID-19 pandemic. The mainstream media has recently lost interest in the story, but there is some great news they really should be sharing with the American public: we may almost be at the end. We may be approaching endemic status rather than pandemic. We may be approaching the vaunted herd immunity. We may, not to put too fine a point on it, almost be out of the woods.

Of course, as we've seen before (see: Delta, Omicron), this could all prove to be illusory. There may be a new variant lurking out there that will make things much worse in a very short time. That's certainly what both of the previous mutations did. But barring that development (knock wood), America is at least on the brink of the Omicron wave being functionally over.

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Today I am revisiting a nightmare. Perhaps it is the situation in Ukraine and Taiwan which caused me to think about this again, or perhaps it was reading an article entitled: "A Normal Supply Chain? It's 'Unlikely' In 2022." The article takes a big-picture look at the issue from all sorts of angles, but ends rather inconclusively. The COVID-19 pandemic changed a whole lot of consumer behavior, businesses made the wrong assumptions at the start of the pandemic, but we may never go back to the "old normal" again since some of these changes may become permanent.

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In his dystopian masterpiece Nineteen Eighty-Four, George Orwell wrote of how truth could be manipulated to control a population. He wrote his novel in the late 1940s, immediately after the horrors of World War II. American schoolchildren are often assigned this book to read, since it is such a literary masterpiece of speculative fiction. Or, at least, they used to regularly be assigned the book. Who knows how many will get to read it in the future?

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We have always been a total sucker for "First Pets," we fully admit. Especially First Cats. So we simply must begin this weekly roundup by extending our warmest welcome to newly-announced First Cat Willow Biden. From the New York Times announcement:

After keeping the nation on tenterhooks since even before taking office, the Biden White House announced on Friday that a gray cat named Willow had joined the first family, more than a year after the plucky farm feline from Pennsylvania caught the eye of the first lady, Jill Biden, while she was on the stump for her husband.

"Willow made quite an impression on Dr. Biden in 2020 when she jumped up on the stage and interrupted her remarks during a campaign stop," said Michael LaRosa, the first lady's spokesman. "Seeing their immediate bond, the owner of the farm knew that Willow belonged with Dr. Biden."

Willow is named after the first lady's hometown, Willow Grove, Pa.

Here are some photos of Willow from First Lady Jill, just because. Now we'll all just have to wait and see if White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki was right when she predicted last year (when asked when the promised First Cat was going to appear): "We know the cat will break the internet."

Meow!

(Ahem.) With that out of the way, let's move on to the lesser (and less adorable) news of the week, as it were.

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Joe Biden just got the best numbers of his presidency, and they have nothing to do with opinion polls. The Commerce Department today released the economic numbers for last year, and they are nothing short of phenomenal. Hopefully the media will make as big a deal over this success as they have been about inflation, because people really should have some overall context for the true state of the American economy. But if the media fails to spotlight the great economic news adequately enough, then Democrats shouldn't let them get away with it -- Democrats should continually remind the voters how good the news is and how much the economy has recovered from the pandemic, with every chance they get.

Let's take a look at the numbers themselves. Growth in the fourth quarter of 2021 clocked in at an astounding annualized rate of 6.9 percent. For the whole year -- and already adjusted for inflation -- the Gross Domestic Product grew at the whopping rate of 5.7 percent, which far outstripped all predictions made at the start of the year.

This is historically-high growth. The last time a number like this was seen was 1984, when Ronald Reagan was president (1984's G.D.P. growth was 7.2 percent). America's economy has completely recovered from the pandemic slump, pretty much no matter which way you measure it. The economy is not only bigger than it was pre-pandemic -- a mark it hit in the second quarter of this year -- but it is now almost exactly where it would have been if the growth that predated the pandemic had occurred without interruption. That is a full recovery.

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Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer has unofficially announced his impending retirement from the highest court in the land. He deserves thanks from all Democrats for doing so. By making this announcement now, Breyer has shown he has learned the lesson of Ruth Bader Ginsburg's death. And since it was such an important and painful lesson, it's gratifying to see Breyer now put the interests of the court itself above his own. For that, he deserves gratitude.

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Republicans, fresh off an upset victory in the Virginia governor's race, are planning to make education a major political issue in the midterm elections. Democrats are going to need to come up with some way of fighting back if they're going to have any chance in November. But so far, Democrats seem to be on the defensive, without a coherent strategy of what the party stands for or how they're going to present it to the public.

It seems obvious that the COVID-19 pandemic is the heart of the issue, at least right now. That could change, but that's what brought the issue into the realm of politics in the first place. When the nation locked down, schoolchildren began learning remotely on a scale never before seen. Practically, this meant that parents got a much closer look at what and how their children were being taught. Add to this the fake rage the Republicans have already been feeding over "Critical Race Theory" and you can see why the GOP thinks it is such a potent issue for them right now. It certainly seemed to work wonders in Virginia, after all.

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For the first time since the Cold War, the nightmare of direct military conflict between what used to be called either "great powers" or "superpowers" seems not to be such a remote possibility anymore. Russia and the United States are in a faceoff over Ukraine. China, meanwhile, is testing the defenses of Taiwan in an unprecedented way. So I thought today was a good day to review a little history.

The people who founded the United States of America did so almost immediately after what could today be called "World War Zero" -- the first-ever military conflict between empires that stretched over the entire globe (although, admittedly, historians quibble about this designation, but it's close enough for our purposes). Americans learn about only one "theater" of this war, the part that happened here. We call it the "French and Indian War," but schoolchildren in Canada and Britain learn about it as the "Seven Years' War." Part of why upstart America was able to defeat the English militarily was due to them having recently fought a much larger war, in fact. No matter what you call it, this war was fought between the large world powers of the day (France, Britain, Prussia, Spain, Austria, Russia) and took place not only in North America, but also in Europe, South America, Africa, India, the Philippines, and in the Caribbean. To me, that's a "world war."

For America's Founders, this was all common knowledge -- they had lived through it, after all. Which is why the United States (a very small and insignificant nation, at the time) was deathly afraid of getting entangled in alliances with any of the European powers (even France, without whom we never would have won the Revolution). Very early on in our history, the "XYZ Affair" scandal (and quasi-war) also cemented this fear of foreign intrigue.

This is why the leaders of the two American political parties at the time (which, as now, had radically different ideas as to what America should be) did largely agree upon one bedrock tenet of foreign policy. Here is George Washington, from his farewell speech: "It is our true policy to steer clear of permanent alliance with any portion of the foreign world." And from a few years later, Thomas Jefferson's inaugural pledge: "Peace, commerce, and honest friendship with all nations -- entangling alliances with none."

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It was an eventful week in Washington, with a holiday and an anniversary thrown in for good measure, so we're going to try to be a little more succinct in this week's rundown. Well... try to, at any rate.

The week began with Martin Luther King Junior Day, saw a historic (but failed) vote in the Senate on voting rights, contained a marathon of a presidential press conference, and marked the first year President Joe Biden has spent in office. Plus a whole lot of other notable developments along the way.

The biggest of the other developments of the week surrounded the investigation into the January 6th insurrection attempt, which seems to have picked up pace in a considerable way. These efforts were aided this week by the Supreme Court ruling 8-1 that Donald Trump's papers at the National Archive could indeed be turned over to the House investigating committee. His claims of executive privilege were essentially laughed out of court, and the transfer has already begun. Which immediately led to the leak of a jaw-dropping document in Politico, which published an extraordinary Trump draft executive order in full. The White House was fully prepared -- although the order was never actually given -- for federal agents to seize voting machines across the country. This is astounding news, and puts the lie to anyone who thinks the events of that day or Trump's connection to them have somehow been "overblown." The president's lawyers put together a document where the federal government would have aided and abetted the stealing of a presidential election. "Stunning" doesn't even begin to describe this development.

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