I have been watching the Senate confirmation hearings on the nomination of Ketanji Brown Jackson to the Supreme Court, both today and yesterday, and as usual I am struck by the Kabuki nature of any and all of these hearings. The outcome is a foregone conclusion -- Jackson is going to be confirmed to the high court -- and it is likely that no senator is going to thoughtfully change his or her vote because of anything said in the hearing room. All Democrats seem to be on board with confirming her, almost all Republicans are going to vote against her, and the only real question is whether one or possibly two Republicans will give President Joe Biden a thin veneer of "bipartisanship" to her nomination. Which is ultimately meaningless, since it doesn't matter how many senators wind up voting for any justice's confirmation, as long as it is a majority of them.

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At some point, the House January 6th Select Committee is going to start going public with what they have uncovered. This will begin with open hearings on national television, featuring witnesses chosen to relate a storyline the committee's members already largely know. Soon after, an "interim report" will be released, and then the committee's final report is planned "before the midterm election." The question of when all this will begin to happen, however, is not yet clear.

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Something rather astonishing happened on Capitol Hill this week. The Senate passed a bill by unanimous consent, acting with such blinding speed that some senators weren't even aware of what was happening. Contrast this to the Senate's usual modus operandi, which is for things to move so slowly that a glacier would be seen as zipping along by comparison. Arcane parliamentary procedures are routinely used to gum up the legislative works, which often leads to nothing at all happening -- after spending enormous amounts of time and energy in the attempt.

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In Twelfth Night, William Shakespeare gave us a brilliant construct: "Be not afraid of greatness. Some are born great, some achieve greatness, and others have greatness thrust upon them." Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has had greatness thrust upon him, and he has more than risen to the occasion.

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I mean that headline both ways. This is indeed an article about time. And it's about time for the subject to be addressed, too. Today, in a surprise victory, Senator Marco Rubio actually passed a bill by unanimous consent in the United States Senate that would enshrine, once and for all, Daylight Saving Time (or "D.S.T.") as the year-round standard for time in all of America. No more springing forward or falling back ever again, in other words. In March of 2023, the country would spring forward one last time and then that would be the time we'd all live with forevermore, even in winter. He titled it the Sunshine Protection Act (Rubio is from Florida, after all).

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Earmarks are back! After 11 years in the political wilderness, the budgetary tactic has returned to Capitol Hill. This means that individual members of Congress were once again able to reserve chunks of money in the massive omnibus budget bill that passed last week. The practice was largely seen as completely out of control back in 2010 and became a rallying cry for the Tea Party movement and Republicans in general, which led to a complete ban on the practice in Congress. That ban has now been lifted, and this is the first budget that includes earmarks to pass in over a decade.

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Let's start with some good news this week, because we could all use some, right? Two years ago today Tom Hanks announced to the world he had contracted COVID-19, on the same day that the virus people were then largely calling "the novel coronavirus" was declared a pandemic by the World Health Organization. This was when it all hit home for many -- that this could quite possibly be a very big deal indeed, even though the president of the United States was desperately trying to get the American public to believe otherwise. Salon provides a good rundown of what we all went through next:

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In politics, as in much of life, timing is key. Sometimes there are windows of opportunity that can be missed. Such seems to be the case with the so-called "People's Convoy," a group of American truckers who launched a copycat imitation of the Canadian truckers' protest, in the hopes of bringing media attention to their cause (or just themselves, perhaps). But their time -- if it ever even existed -- seems to have passed long before the big-rigs arrived near Washington D.C.

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President Joe Biden announced today that he was banning Russian oil and gas from the American marketplace. This is a wildly popular position to take and is supported not only by politicians across the political spectrum but also by an overwhelming majority of the American public. We all see the horrific scenes of death and destruction caused by Vladimir Putin and the thought that we are funding that in any small way when we fill up our cars is abhorrent to many. At least, that's the case right now.

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With the world in a very dangerous place after Russia's invasion of Ukraine, the one thing just about everyone worldwide hopes is that saner minds will prevail. There are always plenty of hotheads and madmen in the midst of a crisis, but we can all certainly hope that the cooler heads will win out in the end.

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