Former Texas Lieutenant Governor Ben Barnes, compelled by the news of President Jimmy Carter entering hospice care, has told the New York Times that there was, in fact, a secret GOP effort in 1980 to prevent Iran from releasing 53 American hostages until after that year’s presidential election.

Barnes said that in the summer of 1980, he accompanied former Texas governor John Connally, on a trip to the Middle East during which Connally asked Arab leaders to communicate to Iranian officials that they should not release the hostages before Election Day because if they waited, Ronald Reagan would offer them a better deal.

Joe Klein: “Deep in the Democratic Party’s DNA is the notion that the economy matters more to voters than cultural issues. Sometimes it does. It certainly did after the crash of 2008. Inflation helped defeat Jimmy Carter in 1980. And then there was 1992, when James Carville wrote his immortal words on the blackboard in Bill Clinton’s Little Rock headquarters: It’s the economy, stupid!”

“It wasn’t, really. We were emerging from a minor recession, but Clinton’s economic policies weren’t what won the election—indeed, he changed them almost immediately after winning office, from stimulus to budget-balancing, palliating the bond market and lowering interest rates (a brilliant choice as it happened).”

“Clinton won the presidency because he convinced voters that, unlike the past 20 years of Democrats, he was tough on crime (including a rather disgusting execution of Ricky Ray Rector, a black man of limited intelligence) and that he wanted to reform welfare (which badly needed it).”

“Jimmy Carter was ensconced Monday at his home as family and friends journeyed to pay what could be their last respects. Down the road, the town he grew up in marked a somber Presidents Day reflecting on their native son’s legacy,” the Atlanta Journal Constitution reports.

“Tourists visited the rustic boyhood farm where the former president grew up, wandering through his boyhood bedroom and a general store as chickens clucked and mules brayed from nearby pens.”

“The shops of Plains flung their doors open for visitors who wished to celebrate the former president in his final days, even as longtime residents wondered what will become of a town whose best-known export is a former president.”

Washington Post: Jimmy Carter, the president who tried to save the planet.

Former President Jimmy Carter has entered hospice care at his home in Georgia.

Paul Krugman: “First of all, if Republicans had absolutely no desire to make major cuts to America’s main social insurance programs, why would they sunset them — and thus create the risk that they wouldn’t be renewed? As Biden might say, c’mon, man.”

“And then there’s that historical record. Two things have been true ever since 1980. First, Republicans have tried to make deep cuts to Social Security and Medicare every time they thought there might be a political window of opportunity. Second, on each occasion they’ve done exactly what they’re doing now: claiming that Democrats are engaged in smear tactics when they describe G.O.P. plans using exactly the same words Republicans themselves used.”

Phillip Elliot: Why the GOP squabble over Social Security and Medicare is about power more than policy.

“The National Archives is weighing whether to ask living former presidents and vice presidents to review their personal records to verify that no classified materials are inadvertently outstanding,“ the Washington Post reports.

“The deliberation comes after the discovery and return of a limited number of records bearing classified markings in recent weeks at President Biden’s home and a think tank bearing his name, as well as at the home of former vice president Mike Pence.”

“During the nearly nine hours that Congress was under attack on Jan. 6, 2021, the official White House call logs show former President Donald Trump not placing a single phone call,” the Daily Beast reports.

“And while historians may consider the missing call logs a crime of inaccurately memorializing history, it may also actually bolster the expected criminal case against Trump.”

Said professor Chris Edelson: “The first thing one thinks of is the Nixon tapes, the missing 18 minutes. It’s never been resolved.”

“A German court convicted a former Nazi camp secretary of complicity in the murder of more than 10,000 people during the Holocaust, in what is likely to be the last process connected to Nazi crimes against humanity in Germany,” Politico reports.

“Statistically impossible to have lost the 2020 Election. Big protest in D.C. on January 6th. Be there, will be wild!”

— Donald Trump, on Twitter two years ago today.

The U.S. National Archives released a new trove of files related to the 1963 assassination of President John F. Kennedy.

President Biden authorized more than 70% of the roughly 16,000 remaining files on JFK’s death to “now be released in full.”

John White: “In many ways, the Republican Party’s history with Donald Trump harkens back to its experience with another demagogue, Joseph McCarthy.”

“For years, Republicans refrained from criticizing McCarthy for fear of alienating their most loyal supporters.”

For more, see McCarthyism in the political dictionary.

“The last Confederate statue in Richmond was removed on Monday, and the remains beneath it of Ambrose P. Hill, the Confederate lieutenant general who was memorialized, were set to be transferred to a cemetery,” the New York Times reports.

“More than 7 in 10 voters want President Joe Biden to honor a commitment he made last year and release the final trove of JFK assassination records on Dec. 15, according to a poll released Tuesday in coordination with a research group that sued the administration to force more document disclosure,” NBC News reports.

“About 16,000 of the most closely guarded government secrets into the assassination nearly 60 years ago still remain hidden — including 44 records that would shed light on a covert Cuba-related CIA program that involved Lee Harvey Oswald less than four months before he shot President John F. Kennedy.”