-Jon Stewart, on Tucker Carlson's signature look

The Biden Boom not only survived the Omicron variant, but it turns out to have been, once again, even boom-ier than initially reported in the preceding months. (Respectfully; admiringly) OK, Boomer. 
 

• The U.S. economy added a whopping 467,000 jobs in January, the Labor Department said on Friday, to the great disappointment of Fox News hosts who had been promised an Omicron-inflicted economic slump. The unemployment rate ticked up slightly, from 3.9 percent to 4 percent, but mostly because more people started looking for work. Average hourly wages also saw an unexpected jump, rising 5.7 percent compared to January 2021.
   
• The Labor Department carried on the grand pandemic tradition of quietly invalidating a bunch of months-old headlines, more than doubling its estimate of job gains for November and December in its revised data. That means there were roughly 700,000 more jobs added at the end of last year than previously reported. Here’s a great visualization of how dramatic those revisions have been, and the steady growth that becomes clear in the corrected data. 
   
• President Biden took a victory lap at the White House, touting more than 6.6 million new jobs since he took office: “America’s job machine is going stronger than ever.” The surprisingly strong January report is expected to encourage the Federal Reserve to begin raising interest rates, with the goal of reining in inflation.

In more good news, the Omicron variant has officially begun its farewell tour.
 

• While hospitalization numbers in much of the country remain Too High, coronavirus cases are now trending down in all but one state (godspeed, Alabama), and they’re falling as quickly as they spiked. U.S. cases overall have gone down 38 percent since last week. The country is now averaging 2,441 new deaths each day, which is up seven percent from last week (deaths being the laggy metric), but that average may be plateauing.
   
• Omicron may have been much gentler on the economy than expected, but it’s taken a disproportionately terrible human toll. Americans have died of COVID at far higher rates during the Omicron wave than people in other wealthy countries, in large part due to lower rates of vaccination and booster uptake. To explain that discrepancy, we need look no further than the major political party so bent on fueling chaos that Missouri Republicans just blocked the confirmation of the state’s top health official because he spoke approvingly of vaccines, and the major right-wing propaganda network that’s brought the base on board. 
   

Two clear, data-driven stories emerge from the Omicron era: First, the economy has steadily improved under Biden, in spite of Republican’s best efforts to wreck it with disease. And second, the GOP’s antivax messaging has nevertheless been an outright crime against the people who trust it, and those around them.

Catch up on the latest episode of X-Ray Vision! This week, the writer and creator of HBO Max’s Station Eleven, Patrick Somerville, joins Jason to unpack the series, examine human connection and genre, and probe the role of the internet in our collective consciousness. Plus, Jason and Rosie dive deep into the latest episode of The Book of Boba Fett, the upcoming Halo series on Paramount+, and more. New episodes of X-Ray Vision drop every Friday. Listen wherever you get your podcasts.

Labor leaders have been side-eying Rep. Jim Clyburn (D-SC) and his aggressive push for President Biden to nominate South Carolina District Court Judge J. Michelle Childs to the Supreme Court (if Lindsey Graham’s enthusiastic endorsement wasn’t enough to make you skeptical). In her lawyer years, Childs frequently defended employers against racial- and gender-discrimination allegations during her time at a proudly anti-union firm. She seems to have brought the same ethos to her judicial work, with a track record of ruling against workers in cases of alleged discrimination that extends up to this year. In another big red flag for progressives, Childs has a pattern of issuing such harsh criminal-justice decisions that higher courts later overturn them.

• The RNC voted Friday to censure Reps. Liz Cheney (R-WY) and Adam Kinzinger (R-IL) for serving on the January 6 committee, in a resolution that declared the attack on the Capitol “legitimate political discourse.” Folks,…………not great!
   
• We can’t wait to see what the RNC has to say about former Vice President Mike Pence, who said in a Friday speech, “President Trump is wrong. I had no right to overturn the election.”
   
• Attorney General Keith Ellison (D-MN) will review the fatal police shooting of 22-year-old Amir Locke. Police killed Locke on Wednesday while executing a no-knock search warrant in which Locke wasn’t named, as he woke up in confusion and reached for a gun that he had a license to carry.
   
• Gregory and Travis McMichael have withdrawn their guilty pleas and will stand trial on federal hate-crime charges in the killing of Ahmaud Arbery, after a deal with prosecutors fell apart.
   
• Emails obtained by American Oversight suggest that Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-FL) is in regular contact with Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas. Not much to say here except, Clarence Thomas, resign bitch.
   
• The sudden-resignation plot thickens: Former CNN president Jeff Zucker and his undisclosed work sweetheart Allison Gollust reportedly provided then-Gov. Andrew Cuomo (D-NY) with talking points early in the pandemic. Incidentally, Gollust was Cuomo’s communications director before joining CNN.
   
• Tonga has been hit with its first COVID outbreak after last month’s volcanic eruption brought in international-aid workers. 
   
• Four of British Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s top aides have resigned amid the fallout of Partygate. 
   
• Mark Zuckerberg has instructed Meta staff to pivot to video, again, after the company lost a record $251 billion of value in a single day.
   
• Build-A-Bear has unveiled the After Dark series of adult-only teddy bears that you sickos and degenerates kept asking for. This is what happens when school libraries let a whole generation of children read smut like Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret.

Today in Perfectly Functioning Democracies, A Black woman in Tennessee was sentenced to six years in prison for trying to register to vote when she didn’t know she was ineligible. Pamela Moses, Black Lives Matter activist in Memphis, had a history of felony convictions, including a 2015 conviction for tampering with evidence that caused her to permanently lose her voting rights in Tennessee. Moses says that no one told her she couldn’t vote when she pleaded guilty to that charge, and in 2019, the local probation office and county election commission both signed off on her voter registration application. Except, the probation office made an error in saying that Moses’s probation was over, and Moses was charged with trying to register to vote illegally. (The judge who sentenced her said she had “tricked the probation department” into filling out the paperwork.) Meanwhile, as Rachel Maddow pointed out, white men found to have committed blatant voter fraud have been sentenced to…probation.

Tell Biden to Reunite Separated Families Now

The Biden administration recently broke off negotiations to compensate the families that were separated at the border by Trump's cruel and systemic separation practice. 

By abandoning negotiations to help these impacted children and families heal, the Biden administration will have to defend the family separation practice in court.

This is not a partisan issue. Every one should be concerned with helping these families. Tell President Biden to reunite all separated families and provide relief to help them heal. 

The U.S. government deliberately abused young children. And while thousands have been reunited as a result of ACLU litigation, many remain separated – and all children have suffered irreparable trauma.

There's no room for the Biden administration to choose politics over families in the way they have with these negotiations – and that's why we must do everything we can to hold them accountable.

Add your name to our petition and demand resources and relief for these families now. 

Thanks for your action,
The ACLU Team 

The North Carolina Supreme Court has struck down GOP-drawn legislative and congressional maps as unconstitutional gerrymandering.

Medicare recipients will soon be eligible for free over-the-counter COVID tests.

A Mississippi library has raised nearly $80,000 after a GOP mayor denied it public funding over its inclusion of LGBTQ-affirming books. 

A conservative Mississippi law student enrolled in an actual critical race theory course, wound up loving it, and is now fighting a proposed anti-CRT bill.