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“Prosecutors explained the plot of a Game of Thrones episode to argue that a Capitol rioter who quoted the character Cersei Lannister on social media showed proof of criminal intent,” Insider reports.
“Two days after the insurrection, Jeremiah Caplinger, 25, posted an image of a soldier from the American Revolution with the caption: ‘As said by Cersi Lannister ‘I choose violence.'”
Politico: “Inside Harris’ office and among her advisers, confidants and close allies, there’s a near universal belief that she is mired by a contradiction: While she’s among the most powerful people in the world, owing to her swift rise in national politics, people still don’t know her at the levels they need to.”
“They point to instances where her work is either ignored or her policy portfolio misinterpreted, as evidence that she remains not just poorly defined but under-defined by the public. They’ve identified a spate of recent polls where voters give Harris and President Joe Biden similar marks for their disapproval rating, but where her approval rating falls several points below his. They explain the disparity not purely as a byproduct of her early, and at times self-inflicted struggles, but of Americans not knowing what she’s been up to. And aides and allies believe the D.C. press corps is obsessed with style over substance, especially when it comes to their boss.”
“Olavo de Carvalho, the coronavirus-denying mentor of Jair Bolsonaro and Brazil’s radical right, has died in the United States, with one of his children citing Covid-19 as the cause,” The Guardian reports.
Carvalho repeatedly trivialized Covid as the “moronavirus.”
“Sean Caddle, a longtime New Jersey Democratic political consultant and onetime aide to former state Sen. Ray Lesniak, pleaded guilty Tuesday to hiring two people to kill a former associate,” Politico reports.
Russia warned on Wednesday that imposing sanctions on President Vladimir Putin personally would not hurt him but would be “politically destructive,” Reuters reports.
New York Times: Here’s what U.S. sanctions on Putin might look like.
New York Times: “No European country matters more to European unity and the Western alliance. But as Germany struggles to overcome its post-World War II reluctance to lead on security matters in Europe and set aside its instinct to accommodate rather than confront Russia, Europe’s most pivotal country has waffled in the first crucial test for the new government of Chancellor Olaf Scholz.”
“Germany’s evident hesitation to take forceful measures has fueled doubts about its reliability as an ally — reversing the dynamic with the United States in recent years — and added to concerns that Moscow could use German wavering as a wedge to divide a united European response to any Russian aggression.”
Euro Intelligence: “Germany has finally reached this Oh My God moment, when the country realizes that it is dependent on Russian gas to get through the winter, and that they have not prepared for a plan B…”
“Do not underestimate the political dynamics of what happens when people freeze to death.”
“Combined with the zero-Covid strategy, the paradoxical result of this ineffective vaccination effort has been to make the Chinese population more vulnerable to Covid-19 than almost any other population on earth,” Foreign Affairs reports.
“A rough estimate of clinical data, for example, suggests that no more than a small fraction of one percent of the Chinese population has acquired natural immunity through a prior infection.”
“Such a large ‘virgin’ population in China means the Omicron variant could potentially multiply and spread unhindered. Unless China abandons the zero-Covid mentality, it may have to adopt ever more draconian social controls until the virus completely disappears or face an Omicron tsunami of almost unimaginable proportions.”
Ezekiel Emanuel and Michael Osterholm: China’s zero-Covid policy is a pandemic waiting to happen.
Wall Street Journal: “Shipping industry officials say the factors that triggered big bottlenecks earlier in 2021 persisted through December and have continued into 2022. Ships can’t unload quickly because terminals are full of containers. Truckers can’t pick up loads due to a shortage of drivers and the steel trailers used to pull boxes. Warehouses near the ports and at nearby logistics hubs are short workers and don’t have space for more deliveries.”
“Port congestion is a major worry for the Biden administration. The backups are exacerbating supply-chain delays and driving up shipping costs that are contributing to inflation reaching its highest level in decades.”
Senate Democrats say a proposal to raise the cap on state and local tax deductions, a top priority of Senate Majority Leader Charles Schumer (D-NY), is likely to be cut from the revised Build Back Better Act, The Hill reports.
“Mehmet Oz’s introduction to GOP grassroots politics is a code-red crisis. In his first three unofficial tests as a candidate in Pennsylvania’s Republican Senate primary, the celebrity physician known as Dr. Oz has been handily rejected by party activists,” Politico reports.
“It’s a disappointing start for a cash-flush, top-tier candidate in one of the most important Senate races in the country.”
A new Politico/Morning Consult poll finds President Biden losing to a generic Republican in a 2024 match up, 46% to 37%.
However, Biden holds small leads over four actual Republicans, including Donald Trump, Ron DeSantis, Ted Cruz and Mike Pence.
Washington Post: “Analysts from the Conflict Intelligence Team, an independent Russian open-source investigative outfit that monitors Russia’s military, reported Tuesday the first confirmed video of Russian paratroopers moving closer to Ukraine, calling the development ‘ominous’ because it follows the movement of Russian military groups into Belarus, north of Kyiv.”
Meanwhile, the White House briefed reporters on two new plans to discourage Putin from an attack.
Bloomberg: “Packed bars in San Francisco. Popular hot yoga classes in Boston. Signs are mounting that many Americans in highly vaccinated places are grasping for a near-normal life, even as the most contagious Covid-19 surge yet passes over.”
Philip Bump: “In new polling from the Pew Research Center, President Biden’s approval rating is at a remarkably low 41 percent. That’s in part because independents view him fairly negatively, as they have for a while. But it’s also because Democrats don’t love him as much as they used to.”
“In Pew’s data, Biden has gone from 95 percent approval among Democrats last spring to 76 percent in January. Since September, the percentage of Democrats who say they strongly approve of the job he’s doing has fallen from 27 to 21 percent. That’s a problem in part because approval ratings are a continuum: Voters don’t go from strongly approve to strongly disapprove in one fell swoop. First they transition from strong to less-strong approval — as many Democrats have.”
Washington Post: “Democratic strategists increasingly worry that Biden faces no easy options to avert a seemingly imminent Russian invasion of Ukraine — and that no matter how he handles Russian President Vladimir Putin’s escalation, he could end up looking weak.”
Said Democratic pollster Mark Mellman: “There’s a lot to lose politically, but there’s not a lot to gain. I think the administration is doing a great job with this, but the Russians are the ones who are going to decide in the end whether to invade or not. If they decide not to invade, there are not going to be ticker tape parades for Joe Biden across America, and if they do decide to invade, people are going to wonder if the administration handled it correctly.”
“The Biden administration on Tuesday approved a massive $2.5 billion arms sale to Egypt despite ongoing concerns over human rights,” the AP reports.
“The sales were announced just hours after congressional Democrats urged the administration not to release a much smaller package of military assistance that had been put on hold last year pending the Egyptian government meeting certain rights-related conditions.”
“A group of lawyers is working to disqualify from the ballot a right-wing House Republican who cheered on the Jan. 6 rioters unless he can prove he is not an ‘insurrectionist,’ disqualified by the Constitution from holding office, in a case with implications for other officeholders and potentially former President Donald Trump,” the New York Times reports.
“The Justice Department is investigating the fake slates of electors that falsely declared Donald Trump the victor of the 2020 election in seven swing states that Joe Biden had in fact won,” the New York Times reports.
“The false certificates appear to have been part of an effort by Mr. Trump’s allies to reverse his defeat in the presidential election. Even as election officials in the seven contested states sent official lists of electors who had voted for Mr. Biden to the Electoral College, the fake slates claimed Mr. Trump was the winner in an apparent bid to subvert the election outcome.”
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.
Goddard is the owner of Goddard Media LLC.
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