Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell told 60 Minutes that the U.S. economy is at an “inflection point,” with growth and job creation forecasts looking strong.
Said Powell: “We feel like we’re at a place where the economy’s about to start growing much more quickly and job creation coming in much more quickly.”
He added: “I would identify the principal risk to our economy right now really is that the disease would spread again more quickly.”
Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-FL), who’s facing a federal investigation into sex trafficking allegations, was recently denied a meeting with Donald Trump at his Mar-a-Lago estate as the ex-President and his allies continue to distance themselves from the Florida congressman, CNN reports.
“As the mother of daughters, the charges certainly are sickening. And as the speaker noted, there is an ethics investigation underway. There are also criminal investigations underway. And I’m not going to comment further on that publicly right now.”
— Rep. Liz Cheney (R-WY), talking about the sex trafficking allegations against Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-FL) on Face the Nation.
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John Anzalone tells Axios his extensive polling and research “has found that few issues receive broader support than raising taxes on corporations and people earning more than $400,000 a year.”
“Anzalone’s view — which he pushed during the campaign, and which the new president’s inner circle seems to share — is that Biden should go on offense on tax hikes.”
“He should make raising taxes on the wealthy and corporations a standout feature of his messaging, rather than a necessary evil to fund his $3 trillion-plus spending plans.”
“Federal regulators are probing financial reporting discrepancies stemming from an effort to funnel $75 million through state Republican parties to the national GOP effort to reelect Donald Trump,” Axios reports.
“It’s not clear mechanically how such large transfers could have taken place without explicit buy-in from state parties ostensibly responsible for them.”
Wall Street Journal: “Mr. DeSantis has burnished his brand with a Covid-19 response that has enthused the voter base of former President Donald Trump while—in Florida, at least—also impressing the kind of moderate and suburban voters who turned away from Mr. Trump in 2020.”
“As the GOP looks to rebuild after losing the presidential election last year, that formula could give Mr. DeSantis an advantage over rivals who similarly are trying to forge their own path in the shadow of Mr. Trump.”
Said DeSantis: “We are an oasis of freedom in a nation that’s suffering in many parts of the country under the yoke of oppressive lockdowns. Florida got it right, and the lockdown states got it wrong.”
Politico: “Jennifer Davis, the de facto chief of staff to Amb. Linda Thomas-Greenfield, is a career Foreign Service officer who has worked at the State Department for 18 years.”
“The decision to revoke Davis’s clearance came after a three-year administrative investigation conducted by the State Department’s Bureau of Diplomatic Security.”
“Members of Congress have begun a frenzy of lobbying to ensure that their pet projects and policy priorities are included in President Biden’s $2 trillion infrastructure and jobs plan, eager to shape what could be one of the most substantial public works investments in a generation,” the New York Times reports.
Washington Post: “President Biden’s legislative ambitions face a crucial test in the narrowly divided Congress this month, with key Democratic senators signaling they want to pump the brakes as party leaders move to quickly pivot from last month’s $1.9 trillion pandemic relief act to an even larger infrastructure and jobs bill and other pressing policy items. Republican leaders, meanwhile, are beginning to mount fierce opposition to those plans, even as a subset of GOP centrists share rising frustration about a lack of meaningful outreach from Biden, who has billed himself as a bipartisan dealmaker.”
Playbook: “Liberals are pushing Biden left on infrastructure; moderate Dems are calling for bipartisanship. And Republicans? Well, they’re pissed about Biden suggesting they didn’t try to negotiate with him during the Covid relief negotiations.”
USA Today: “Rather than handing conservatives a string of wins, the Supreme Court has left advocates on the right grasping for answers about high-profile cases.”
“More than 100 chief executives and corporate leaders gathered online Saturday to discuss taking new action to combat the controversial state voting bills being considered across the country, including the one recently signed into law in Georgia,” the Washington Post reports.
“Executives from major airlines, retailers and manufacturers – plus at least one NFL owner – talked about potential ways to show they opposed the controversial legislation, including by halting donations to politicians who support the bills and even delaying investments in states that pass the restrictive measures.”
Wall Street Journal: CEOs plan new push on voting legislation.
Secretary of State Antony Blinken criticized China’s handling of the Covid-19 pandemic in a Meet the Press interview, arguing that the country’s “failure” to cooperate in the early stages of the virus led to the situation getting “out of hand.”
Said Blinken: “I think China knows that in the early stages of Covid, it didn’t do what it needed to do, which was to, in real time, give access to international experts, in real time to share information, in real time to provide real transparency.”
He added: “One result of that failure is that the virus got out of hand faster and with, I think, much more egregious results than it might otherwise.”
Zeynap Tufekci: “Since the pandemic began, there has been a lot of talk about the supposed lack of scientific information available at the outset, a void which led to our failures to contain the virus. The science has evolved, this line of thinking goes, allowing us to pursue the proper mitigation strategies.”
“On the one hand, of course, that is true for any event like this. Especially one so dramatic, involving a global pandemic with a novel pathogen. We learn more as events proceed.”
“On the other hand, that’s not a completely accurate reflection of what happened. A lot of what was known from very early on took months, if not more, to make its way into our public health guidelines. Some are still being debated, to great frustration.”
“The head of China’s Centers for Disease Control admitted that the efficacy of Chinese coronavirus vaccines is ‘not high’ and they may require improvements, marking a rare admission from a government that has staked its international credibility on its doses,” the Washington Post reports.
Politico: “Beijing has distributed hundreds of millions of doses abroad while trying to promote doubt about the effectiveness of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine made using the previously experimental messenger RNA, or mRNA, process.”
New York Times: “At least 300,000 more people died last year during the coronavirus pandemic than were reported in Russia’s most widely cited official statistics.”
“Not all of those deaths were necessarily from the virus. But they belie President Vladimir V. Putin’s contention that the country has managed the virus better than most. In reality, a New York Times analysis of mortality data shows deaths in Russia during the pandemic last year were 28 percent higher than normal — an increase in mortality greater than in the United States and most countries in Europe.”
“For much of the last year, Russia has appeared more focused on the public-relations and economic aspects of the pandemic than on fighting the virus itself.”
“Iran’s underground Natanz nuclear facility lost power Sunday just hours after starting up new advanced centrifuges capable of enriching uranium faster, the latest incident to strike the site amid negotiations over the tattered atomic accord with world powers,” the AP reports.
“As Iranian officials investigated the outage, many Israeli media outlets offered the same assessment that a cyberattack darkened Natanz and damaged a facility that is home to sensitive centrifuges. While the reports offered no sourcing for the evaluation, Israeli media maintains a close relationship with the country’s military and intelligence agencies.”
“Former president Donald Trump called Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell a ‘dumb son of a bitch’ as he used a Saturday night speech to Republicans to blame him for not helping overturn the 2020 election and reiterated false assertions that he won the November contest,” the Washington Post reports.
Said Trump: “If that were Schumer instead of this dumb son of a bitch Mitch McConnell they would never allow it to happen. They would have fought it.”
He later called McConnell a “stone cold loser.”
Politico: “Trump veered off his prepared during a roughly 50-minute speech before several hundred well-heeled GOP donors at his Mar-a-Lago resort in South Florida, saying that he was ‘disappointed’ in former Vice President Mike Pence, calling last year’s presidential election election a ‘fraud’ and mocking Dr. Anthony Fauci.”
Taegan Goddard is the founder of Political Wire, one of the earliest and most influential political web sites. He also runs Political Job Hunt, Electoral Vote Map and the Political Dictionary.
Goddard spent more than a decade as managing director and chief operating officer of a prominent investment firm in New York City. Previously, he was a policy adviser to a U.S. Senator and Governor.
Goddard is also co-author of You Won - Now What? (Scribner, 1998), a political management book hailed by prominent journalists and politicians from both parties. In addition, Goddard's essays on politics and public policy have appeared in dozens of newspapers across the country.
Goddard earned degrees from Vassar College and Harvard University. He lives in New York with his wife and three sons.
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