But back to the speech. Biden's delivery was awesome both at the start of the speech and at the end. He showed honest heartfelt emotion when denouncing Vladimir Putin and Russia and metaphorically standing with the people of Ukraine. At the end, he spoke louder than the building applause when he called for what is best about America overcoming our worst impulses. Barack Obama couldn't have done a better job with Biden's closing paragraph, and that's high praise indeed!

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President Joe Biden will give his second speech to a joint session of Congress tomorrow, in his first official State Of The Union address. That seems like a contradiction, due to the quirk that the first time a president gives such a speech it is not officially known as the State Of The Union, but few care about splitting such hairs. After being in office for over a year now, the president will inform Congress and the American people what his view of the country is, looking both backward at his first year's accomplishments and forward to what he hopes to achieve in the coming year. This is normally a balancing act, but this year's speech will be unusual in that large portions of it are being rewritten at the last minute, due to the developing situation in Ukraine.

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The world pauses and holds its collective breath as we all wonder the same thing: What is Vladimir Putin up to? Will he invade Ukraine? Is this all some sort of bluff or feint? Or is he deadly serious about reconstituting the Soviet Union's sphere of influence (of satellite states subservient to Moscow)? Is he just waiting for the Olympics to end as some sort of favor to China? Or will the troops eventually go home and the whole crisis blows over?

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The Republican Party, these days, is the Party of Donald Trump. The question the 2022 elections might answer is precisely how Trumpy the party is going to get, for at least the next two years. A corollary question is how big Trump's influence truly is with both Republican voters and Republican donors. Many are fervently hoping Trump's influence will fade to at least some degree if a few of his anointed candidates lose spectacularly, but no matter how many wind up losing, the near-certainty is that Donald Trump is going to make another presidential run in 2024 -- meaning the 2022 results may not actually matter all that much. An election with no Trump on the ballot is one thing, but if he's at the top of the ballot the next time around then all bets will -- once again -- be off.

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That headline is specific because I have my own personal bias from living in California, but it really could have been generic instead: "All States Should Vote The Way Alaska Votes." Because Alaska (of all places) seems to have come up with the best mix of new ideas in redesigning how people get to vote. They've combined the "jungle primary" system with "ranked-choice voting" and by doing so eliminated the worst aspects of both while keeping the best parts intact. That's quite a feat, which is why I am so strongly endorsing their concept.

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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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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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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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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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I am writing this after watching a rather extraordinary press conference with President Joe Biden. It was extraordinary for two reasons, really -- it was only the second such press conference he's given on U.S. soil since becoming president, and it was monumentally long, clocking in at just under two hours. It was a true marathon of a presser, as Biden seemed almost reluctant to end it -- and at several times even kidded with the reporters that he could go for another two or three hours if they were up for it. Perhaps he was making up for the lack of regular press conferences in his first year by giving what amounted to a double press conference to begin his second?

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