Insight: “The republic was not established by cowards, and cowards will not preserve it.” —Elmer Davis (1890-1958)

“Governments promised they would stop covid. They lied. Now reality is setting in. They can either recognize reality — that government is not capable of stopping covid, and that you must live your life — or double down, blaming you. Guess which path they’re taking.” —Ben Shapiro

“You can tell that the polling is bad for Democrats when they start yelling about the urgent need to change election laws.” —Senator Tom Cotton

Worship of Self: “Men like me have also long been the direct beneficiaries of safe abortion access. Giving women the choice not to carry unwanted pregnancies often means we, too, can delay parenthood until we are ready. Since I’ve spent 10 of the past 11 years as a student, most of the women I’ve had sex with were also students, also progressive, and also not at a point in their lives where they were looking or ready to have children. I try to share responsibility for birth control and if a woman tells me she’s on it, I also trust that. If she still got pregnant, however, though entirely her decision, I assume we would both want the same thing: an abortion.” —Institute for Education senior advisor Kaivan Shroff

What could possibly go wrong? “We had obviously lots of practices that are anti-democratic, that entrench in some ways minority rule in this country, and I’m talking about things like, you know, the Senate, the Electoral College, and the maldistribution of political power that results from those institutions.” —Biden judicial nominee Dale Ho in 2018

Political theater: “To restore balance and integrity to a broken institution, Congress must expand the Supreme Court by four or more seats. Some oppose the idea of court expansion. They have argued that expansion is ‘court-packing,’ that it would start a never-ending cycle of adding justices to the bench, and that it would undermine the court’s integrity. They are wrong. And their concerns do not reflect the gravity of the Republican hijacking of the Supreme Court.” —Senator Elizabeth Warren (“Why ‘four or more’? Because Elizabeth Warren likes three of the current justices and dislikes six of the current justices … and because adding four or more new justices would ensure that the people she likes would have a majority. That’s it. That’s the case.” —Charles C. W. Cooke)

Fearmonger-in-chief: “For unvaccinated, we are looking at a winter of severe illness and death — if you’re unvaccinated — for themselves, their families, and the hospitals they’ll soon overwhelm.” —Joe Biden

Understatement of the year: “The inflation that we got was not at all the inflation we were looking for.” —Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell

The BIG Lie I: “The president [and] the secretary of agriculture have both spoken to what we’ve seen as the greed of meat conglomerates. … You could call it ‘corporate greed.’ Sure. You could call it ‘jacking up prices during a pandemic.’” —White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki

The BIG Lie II: “Gross profit margins for big meat processes are up 50%, and net margins are up over 300%. That should not be the case. That is not all attributed to supply chain issues.” —Jen Psaki

The BIG Lie III: “Families are rightly upset that the price of meat has gone through the roof. Who’s to blame? Meatpacking monopolies that are using inflation as cover to raise prices and make record profits. I’m fighting for stronger antitrust enforcement to lower prices.” —Elizabeth Warren

The BIG Lie IV: “The cause of rapidly rising energy prices for consumers and manufacturers is clear: some of the nation’s largest and most profitable oil and gas companies are putting their massive profits, share prices and dividends for investors, and millions of dollars in CEO pay and bonuses ahead of the needs of American consumers and the nation’s recovery from the pandemic.” —Elizabeth Warren

And last… “Blaming producers for price increases is kind of like blaming an airplane crash on gravity. It’s technically accurate, but it’s not very informative, and it doesn’t tell you what to do.” —University of New Haven economics professor John Rosen