CNN (the optimistic take):
The US economy grew by 2.9% in the fourth quarter, more than expected
Wall Street Journal (the pessimistic take):
Fourth-quarter GDP growth was solid, but falling investment bodes ill for 2023.
NPR (the practical take):
So, a shopping basket at a Walmart in Georgia offers a view into the U.S. economy — and the inflation that has roiled it. It's a bit painful if you're shopping for aluminum foil or eggs. But not so bad if you want cabbage or Wonder bread. And you may even find a relative bargain on shrimp.
George Santos: I was Baron von Munchausen’s tutor.
Timothy Snyder, on Twitter:
In April 2016, I broke the story of Trump and Putin, using Russian open sources. Afterwards, I heard vague intimations that something was awry in the FBI in New York, specifically counter-intelligence and cyber. We now have a suggestion as to why.
0/20
The person who led the relevant section, Charles McGonigal, has just been charged with taking money from the Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska. Follow this thread to see just how this connects to the victory of Trump, the Russian war in Ukraine, and U.S. national security.
1/20
David Wallace-Wells/The New York Times:
Britain’s Cautionary Tale of Self-Destruction
For a few weeks last fall, as Liz Truss failed to survive longer as head of government than the shelf life of a head of lettuce, I found myself wondering how a country that had long seen itself — and to some significant degree been seen by the rest of the world — as a very beacon of good governance had become so seemingly ungovernable. It was of course not that long ago that American liberals looked with envy at the British system — admiring the speed of national elections, and the way that new governing coalitions always seemed able to get things done.
Post-Brexit, both the outlook for Britain and the quality of its politics look very different, as everyone knows. But focusing on a single “Leave” vote risks confusing that one abrupt outburst of xenophobic populism with what in fact is a long-term story of manufactured decline. As Burn-Murdoch demonstrates in another in his series of data-rich analyses of the British plight, the country’s obvious struggles have a very obvious central cause: austerity. In the aftermath of the 2008 global financial crisis, and in the name of rebalancing budgets, the Tory-led government set about cutting annual public spending, as a proportion of G.D.P., to 39 percent from 46 percent. The cuts were far larger and more consistent than nearly all of Britain’s peer countries managed to enact; spending on new physical and digital health infrastructure, for instance, fell by half over the decade. In the United States, political reversals and partisan hypocrisy put a check on deep austerity; in Britain, the party making the cuts has stayed steadily in power for 12 years.
Bottom line: austerity is a failure in the United Kingdom, as big a failure as Brexit or the Tories. For those who throw “neoliberal” around as a pejorative, here’s a case where it fits.
The New York Times:
An R.N.C. Remade by Trump Backs Away From His 2024 Campaign
Interviews with more than a third of the Republican National Committee’s members point to a desire for an alternative presidential nominee to emerge from a competitive primary.
“This isn’t 2016,” said Mac Brown, the chairman of the Republican Party of Kentucky. “People have moved on.”
Jonathan Barnett, an R.N.C. member from Arkansas who claims to have been the first member of the committee to endorse Mr. Trump’s 2016 campaign, said the party would benefit from its nominee being forced to navigate a crowded primary field.
Christian Science Monitor:
The Georgia probe that may indict a president
On Jan. 2, 2021, President Donald Trump called Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger and asked him to “find 11,780 votes” to overturn the results of the state’s presidential election.
It was a call that may go down in history as the launching pad of a criminal inquiry. Since then, Atlanta-area prosecutors have conducted a wide-ranging investigation into whether the Trump campaign and its allies illegally interfered in Georgia’s 2020 vote and subsequent electoral certification activities.
Now that probe has reached a turning point. A special grand jury empaneled by Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis has wrapped up its work and written a final report. Following a Jan. 24 court hearing, a state judge is now weighing whether to publicly release the document.
Greg Sargent/The Washington Post:
Biden’s devious plan to break the MAGA fever just might work
It seems almost like a vast controlled experiment. Can enormous amounts of federal spending launched under President Biden, much of it destined for MAGA country, dampen the right-wing populist fervor unleashed by his predecessor Donald Trump?
Associated Press:
How classified documents became a schoolgirl’s show-and-tell
On a winter’s day in 1984, a briefcase stuffed with classified government documents showed up in a building in Pittsburgh, borne by someone who most certainly wasn’t supposed to have them.
That someone was 13-year-old Kristin Preble. She took the papers to school as a show-and-tell project for her eighth grade class. Her dad had found them in his Cleveland hotel room several years earlier and taken them home as a souvenir.
As a different sort of show and tell unfolds in Washington over the mishandling of state secrets by the Trump and now Biden administrations, the schoolgirl episode from four decades ago stands as a reminder that other presidents, too, have let secure information spill.
To be clear: The Feds over-classify things, and possession of classified material happens far more often than reported. But as the piece above by Philip Bump notes, the Trump sitch is qualitatively, and quantitatively, different.
That the media spends so much more time on Joe Biden’s documents than, say, the Timothy Snyder story above, tells you what you need to know about media.