Progressives such as Senator Bernie Sanders have been pushing for a national $15-an-hour minimum wage for quite some time now. So far, they have been unsuccessful, due both to the Senate filibuster and to corporatist Democrats like Senator Joe Manchin (who, the last time the subject came up, would only even consider raising the minimum wage to $11 per hour). But the natural forces of the marketplace seem to be forcing employers towards this goal anyway, now that they're finding it so tough to hire workers. This shouldn't be all that surprising, because it is basic supply and demand. When the demand (for workers) is high and the supply is low (fewer people returning to work), then the marketplace will do what it always does when the formula is applied to merchandise: prices will rise. Or, in this case, "wages," not prices.

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The ushers are flashing the lights in the lobby. Intermission is over, and the last act of the "Bipartisan Infrastructure Kabuki" extravaganza is about to begin. Actually, truth be told, we were among those who thought this play would be over by now, but apparently a final act was hastily added at the last minute, for no real apparent reason.

President Joe Biden called Senator Shelley Moore Caputo today, in what most view as the final negotiation attempt which will try to hammer together a compromise infrastructure package that 10 Republican senators will actually vote for. Biden is, in essence, making his final offer. It is eminently reasonable, considering where the two sides started from, but that doesn't mean it will have any chance of success, since Republicans are really just trying to run the clock out and stall for as long as they can get away with before they admit to the world that there simply is no infrastructure bill that 10 Republican senators are ever going to vote for -- at least not while a Democrat sits in the Oval Office.

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The biggest thing America gained with the election of President Joe Biden was the freedom to ignore Donald Trump once again. And it seems, with each passing day, that more and more people are happily exercising that freedom. Trump is fading. Call him the incredible shrinking Donald Trump. This was what went through my mind upon hearing the news that Trump's personal blog/website (all it ever really was, despite Trump touting it as a "a new social media platform") had turned out the lights and disappeared from the internet. It didn't even survive three Scaramuccis, which is a pretty short life span indeed for something Trump had promised would rival Twitter and Facebook and all the other social media platforms which had evicted Trump from their sites. A month later, Twitter, Facebook and the rest of them are doing just fine, while Trump's site is dark after only 29 days, due to lack of interest.

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The Republican Party continued its downward slide into shamelessness today, as they successfully used the Senate's filibuster to block a bill which would have created an independent commission to investigate the unprecedented attack on the United States Capitol (by insurrectionists who wanted to stop Congress from officially declaring the winner of the presidential election, because they didn't like the election's result). Six Republicans voted for the measure, and one more has said he would have if he had been present. Forty-eight Democrats voted for it, and assumably the two who were absent (Patty Murray and Kyrsten Sinema) would also have voted to approve the measure. But that only adds up to a possible total of 57, which still would have left the bill three votes short of the necessary 60. An odd footnote: the final vote (54-35) actually represented 60.7 percent of the senators who were actually present for it -- but that's not the way the filibuster rules work.

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The Senate Republicans who are trying to appear as if they are negotiating an infrastructure plan in good faith with President Joe Biden are, in reality, trying to con both the media and the public into thinking their plan can be directly compared to the White House's offer. I say this not because of all the bickering over what really and truly constitutes "infrastructure," but instead over the numbers themselves. Because comparing Biden's plan to the GOP's plan is like comparing apples to peanuts.

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We now have to jump forward to what the state of Florida is attempting to do, with their new law. Florida is run by Republicans and its governor is widely reported to be considering an eventual presidential run. He's always been a big supporter of Donald Trump and so the state Republicans have taken up the insistence on the right that somehow social media platforms banning conservatives is some sort of tyrannical outrage that must be stopped by governmental intervention. In this one area -- social media and Big Tech in general -- Republicans are for all the regulations they can impose, which obviously runs counter to their longstanding drive to remove as many regulations on as many corporations as possible. So far, though, Republicans don't seem to have any ideological opposition to more and more regulations in this one area, and it's doubtful they ever will.

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State-level Republicans are up to a whole new set of antics these days, in their continuing refusal to ever learn the true meaning of the First Amendment. The governor of Florida just signed a law whose purpose is to somehow protect the "free speech" rights of state-level politicians and conservative commenters -- by which they mean the non-existent "right" of government and politicians to dictate to social media companies how their own platforms must be used. As usual with such Republican flimflammery, the law is the exact opposite of what it purports to be -- it is a governmental attempt to "abridge the freedom of speech." Which is exactly what the First Amendment was written to prevent in the first place.

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Republicans, these days, just seem rather lost. They used to be so good at coming up with semi-cohesive talking points to use against Democrats, and they have always admirably been able to all sing from this same songbook every Sunday morning (for the political chatfest shows on television). But these days, all the issues they choose to highlight are all so incredibly short-term that the problem usually disappears before their politicization of the issue really even has a chance to take hold.

Case in point: Republicans' heavy lean on school reopenings. They've been so convinced this is going to be a big winning issue for them, they rode it all the way to getting a recall election called for California's governor (Gavin Newsom). But by the time Californians vote on it (later October or early November of this year), everyone will already be back in school again.

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Bipartisanship has been achieved! You would think that this news would make Republicans happy, since they've been whining so incessantly about President Joe Biden somehow not being sufficiently interested in bipartisanship in Congress, but you would (of course) be wrong about that. Instead of celebrating the milestone, Senate Republicans from their leadership on down are now desperately trying to create more partisanship, to kill the bill. There's an object lesson here, for people like Joe Manchin, but it remains to be seen whether this lesson will be taken to heart or not.

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The more I see of President Joe Biden, the more I am reminded of Ronald Reagan. Not in substance, mind you (their policies could hardly be more opposed), but rather in style. Joe Biden is just likeable, no matter what you think of his agenda. He's beyond avuncular, he's downright grandfatherly. Just like Reagan was. Where Reagan had: "There you go again," Biden has instead: "C'mon, man." Both express exactly the same (and extremely rare) political quality -- the ability to defuse a story completely, right before reframing it in a way that most average non-political Americans would agree with (or at least relate to), even if it drives the pundits bonkers. You could call this inherent skill the ability to project being a "commonsense politician," I suppose.

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