Without having read much of what anyone else though about President Joe Biden's first formal press conference today, I'm going to just write my reactions down cold. This is always an amusing test for me, just to see if anyone else picked up on the same things I did.

Heading in, I had fairly low expectations for Biden. I'm not sure why this is, perhaps some of the angsty stories I've read in the political media over the past few weeks have rubbed off. Biden annoyed the press corps by waiting longer to hold his first press conference than any other modern president, so for the past few weeks they've been doing some endless navel-gazing about it all.

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Joe Biden will be giving his first press conference tomorrow. The political press is already annoyed at him, for making them wait so long (longer than any other modern president) for this first formal press conference. The American people aren't as obsessive about this sort of thing, but what it means is that the journalists will all (as usual) be playing to the cameras even more than the president, trying to create the ultimate and defining "gotcha" moment for the glory of their network (and for themselves). That's how this game is played, or at least how it is played now. The only way to change this rather silly dynamic would be to ban television cameras and just release a typed transcript afterwards -- but that's never going to happen.

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Before we get to the other events of the week, we have to comment on one particular political fight that is heating up to a surprising degree. Both sides of the aisle see this fight in fairly existential terms, so it's an important one across the board. But what is rather surprising is that, this time around, Democrats seem to be ready and willing to fight for their beliefs, they appear to have both the much higher moral ground and the support of the public, and they also have a devastating bumpersticker slogan for what they are fighting so hard to prevent. For Democrats, that (sadly) is rather surprising, all around. In bumpersticker terms, the Democrats' position might be summed up as: "Stop Jim Crow 2.0!"

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America is on the verge of an explosion. I can feel its rumblings already. My guess is it's already started happening in a small way, and in the next two or three months it is going to spread like wildfire. OK, I'll stop with the flaming metaphors and just explain what I'm talking about instead, how's that?

Here's the best way to put it: "What are you going to do when it's over?"

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President Joe Biden has kicked off his "Help Is Here" tour, and he and various administration surrogates will fan out across the country for the next few weeks to educate the public on what is contained in the American Rescue Plan Act that Biden signed last week. Meanwhile, Republicans continue to struggle to come up with a reason why voters should be against it. Obviously, Biden and the Democrats have the easier sales job here.

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Last night, the president of the United States stood before us all and uttered the following stirring words, in a call for unity: "Mankind -- that word should have new meaning for all of us today. We can't be consumed by our petty differences anymore. We will be united in our common interests." He went on to inspire us further: "We're fighting for our right to live, to exist, and should we win the day the Fourth of July will no longer be known as an American holiday but as the day when the world declared in one voice: 'We will not go quietly into the night. We will not vanish without a fight! We're going to live on. We're going to survive!'" By the end of it, there was not a dry eye in the house.

Oh, wait, we seem to have mixed up our transcripts. That speech was actually given by "President Whitmore" in the film Independence Day. How could we ever have made such a silly error?

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Remember when presidents used to be presidential? Yeah, so do I. It wasn't that long ago, after all. Tonight, President Joe Biden thankfully gave us a preview of what his next four years will be like -- calm, collected, truthful, and reassuring. And it was just what the doctor ordered, as far as I'm concerned.

Biden spoke on a momentous day. Not only did Biden sign his first big legislative achievement into law earlier in the day (his 50th or 51st day in office, depending on how you count), but it is also exactly one year since the previous president finally had to face the reality that we were in a national crisis. Back then, he begrudgingly declared an emergency, and then went right back to rampant denial over the seriousness of the disease, the likely scope of the problem, and what it would take to get us out of it. Not to put too fine a point on it, he lied to the American people, over and over again. Not only that, he actually mocked anyone with the temerity to disagree with him -- which included his own government scientists. This led to the United States becoming the poster child for the world for "how not to fight a pandemic." It led to the highest infection rates on the planet, and the highest death toll by far -- both per capita and in raw numbers. We have had more deaths than India and China, both of which have over one billion citizens. This record of failure simply did not need to happen, but it did because of the absolute vacuum of leadership from the White House.

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Today marks the halfway period through President Biden's first 100 days. He set a lot of goals for himself during this period, and while no president completes his entire list, Biden certainly seems to be making a lot of progress (the AP ran a handy scorecard today, so you can check the general status of individual promises). Biden's list, to his credit, is a lot wider and deeper than most such lists of presidential campaign promises -- but then again, he had a lot to do to immediately overturn the worst of Donald Trump's disasters and wreckage, both here at home and in the rest of the world as well. Today was a particularly productive day for Biden, because the House just passed his first signature piece of legislation, the American Rescue Plan Act. Biden will sign it by the end of the week, and the breadth of even just this first Biden achievement is truly striking. Not to mention how popular it is with the public, already.

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President Joe Biden is going to take a victory lap Thursday, with a primetime Oval Office address to the American people. He deserves to. As he said to Barack Obama when the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act passed, this is a big [expletive gerund deleted] deal. By some measures, it is the biggest such big deal in history. And even though it is already wildly popular with the public, Biden learned the lesson of Obama's first big emergency stimulus bill and will be touting the American Rescue Plan Act's accomplishments to the skies, while encouraging others to do the same. This is doubtlessly going to pay off politically for him. Which he and his fellow Democrats also deserve.

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It's now official. Senator Joe Manchin is the second-most-powerful person in Washington. Obviously, President Joe Biden is still number one, but Biden's entire agenda now hinges on the whims of Manchin... and everyone knows it. And Manchin is enjoying his newfound stature so much that it seems pretty certain he's going to enjoy flexing his political power over and over again for the next two years.

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