Today Politico caused somewhat of a stir, by publishing an article that examined the question of the chances Democrats will have to avoid getting wiped out in the midterm elections this November. Up until now, the conventional inside-the-Beltway cocktail-party-chattering-class wisdom was that Democrats were toast and might as well not even bother running much of a campaign at all. Historical trends were against them, gerrymandering was going to take the House of Representatives away from them, and Republicans were going to emerge with new congressional majorities pretty much no matter what Democrats did or said in the meantime.

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President Joe Biden had a pretty good week, as political weeks go in Washington. First and foremost, the Omicron variant of the COVID-19 pandemic is fading fast -- the numbers are now down below half of the peak they hit roughly two weeks ago. That's good news for everybody, not just President Biden.

Then it was announced that the United States military had taken out the leader of the Islamic State, Abu Ibrahim al-Hashimi al-Qurayshi. Questions still remain about the mechanics of this daring raid in Syria, but nobody is questioning the fact that the targeted terrorist leader is now dead.

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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.

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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:

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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.

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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 Ginsberg'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.

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