Happy Nunes Memo Day, everyone!

Today, of course, was supposed to be the day when the memo from House Intelligence Committee Chair Devin Nunes caused the skies to split and the F.B.I. building to spontaneously implode in upon itself, leaving nothing left but a mysterious rift to some dark and deep otherworld. Bob Mueller was also supposed to make a public announcement that his entire investigation was nothing short of a sham (secretly directed by Nancy Pelosi, Hillary Clinton, and George Soros), and that he would be shutting down his office just as soon as all the documents could be shredded and the hard drives erased.

None of that, obviously, happened. Instead, the reaction in Washington was pretty incredulous: "That's all you got? Seriously?" The memo was a dud. The rightwing news media had been drooling over the prospects of this memo for weeks now (Sean Hannity claimed the memo "makes Watergate like stealing a Snickers bar from a drug store," and predicted it would be "the biggest political scandal in American history"), but a clear indication of the incredible weakness of the memo was the timing Nunes chose for its release: on the Friday just before Super Bowl weekend. That's not when you release a bombshell story, in other words; that's when you release stuff you are embarrassed about.

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I've been meaning to write about immigration specifics, but hadn't quite come up with a way to present the issues I wanted to address. Then I read a story in today's Washington Post and while perusing the comments came across an excellent set of questions for Republicans. This seemed the best way to launch into the subject.

The comment came from "babsy47," and here it is in full (or you can read it in context with the article and the other comments, if you prefer):

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Poor Donald Trump. It seems fate has pre-empted the media reviews of his first State Of The Union speech with a story about a Republican trainwreck. That has to have annoyed Trump, one assumes. We all know how much he likes seeing people talk about him on television, so seeing the trainwreck story instead certainly must have put a damper on his victory lap.

Now, I don't mean to belittle the accident. One person is dead and many others injured, although it seems that most of the congressmen and their families are going to be OK. But as with any accident involving death or injury, it really isn't a laughing matter. After the train hit the garbage truck, several Republicans with medical training were reported to have leapt to deliver aid, even though the security officers were cautioning them not to. That is selflessness and should be applauded, without regard to their political leanings.

Still, even having said all of that, the irony is pretty obvious. Trump delivers a speech calling on Congress to take action, the Republicans board a train the next day to travel to a retreat to hear more from Trump, and a trainwreck with a garbage truck ensues. I have not seen the news today, but my guess is that the trainwreck is going to be the lead story ("if it bleeds, it leads," right?), and Trump's speech will be treated as an afterthought. Television news just loves big accidents to report on, and I don't expect this one will be any different.

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As usual, I hereby offer up my initial snap reactions after watching both President Trump's first official State Of The Union speech (last year's was just "an address to the Congress"), and the Democratic response. I like to do this before I dive in to what others may have opined about the speech, so as not to be influenced by any Washington media groupthink. Tomorrow morning, I'll be able to see who agreed with me and who didn't, of course.

One caveat throughout -- all quotes are provided as hastily jotted down by yours truly, so I can't be completely certain they match up word-for-word with what was spoken (I do not know proper shorthand, in other words). But they're all pretty close to what was said, of that I am certain. Just to assign errors in transcription where they belong (with me), before we begin. Mea culpa and all of that, as it were.

General impressions

First, some overall thoughts about the speech. Tonight, Donald Trump put in a decent performance, for him. He read off the TelePrompTer the words that others had written for him, and he (mostly) managed not to sound like he had never read any of it before his live delivery. He only had a few stumbles (which late-night hosts will doubtlessly be pointing out with glee, later on tonight), and at times actually sounded like he believed what he was saying. This would be an unremarkable performance for just about any other politician worth his or her salt, but for Trump it was one of the best TelePrompTer performances he's ever given (the other one in his top two being his first address to Congress, last year).

That's not saying the speech was one for the ages, mind you, just that he delivered it without sounding like a struggling fifth-grader in a spelling bee -- which is his usual style when delivering TelePrompTer speeches.

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Tomorrow night, President Donald Trump will give his first official State Of The Union speech. The White House is leaking that his speech will be the first where he reaches out in an attempt to unify the country and offer bipartisan leadership to Congress. That is a pretty tall order for this particular president, for obvious reasons. But even if he manages to deliver an impressive speech, it's not likely to change anything afterwards. At least not in the way of actual bipartisan legislation, since Democrats are not likely to strike such deals right before a midterm election that could put them in a much better bargaining position afterwards.

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American women were in the news this week in a big way, on both sides of the political aisle. Last weekend, millions of women took to the streets to protest, once again, Donald Trump sitting in the Oval Office. By the end of the week, a Republican Senate candidate in Missouri was making headlines for his rather Neanderthal views on, as he put it, "modern womanhood."

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We're all on the brink of entering a brave new world of self-driving cars, but what few have bothered to point out is that we're going to have to come up with an equally brave new world of legal liability in order to do so. Because nobody's really got an answer to a very basic legal question: if a self-driving car causes an accident, who gets sued? Who pays for damages and injuries? These are basic questions, but the answers are going to get complicated pretty fast.

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The state of Vermont has just made some history. It has become the first state in the Union to legalize the recreational adult use of marijuana through its legislature. There was no citizens' referendum where the people voted the new law in; instead, representative democracy worked as designed -- a clear majority of Vermonters were in favor of legalization and their elected representatives actually represented this viewpoint by changing the law. This is important because there are many states like Vermont (24 in total) where the direct democracy of ballot initiatives never took hold. When the people can't directly vote on the issue, it is up to the state government to act, to put it another way. Vermont will become the ninth state with legal recreational marijuana this July, when the new law takes effect. Over one-fifth of the American population now lives where weed is legal. Marijuana legalization can now be said to have reached -- and passed -- the tipping point. There is no going back, at this point, to the failed War On Weed, which has been waged for approximately the last century of American history. All that is really left to happen is for the federal government to wake up to this new reality. That may still take a few years, but at this point it has to be seen as all but inevitable.

Some might call such a proclamation premature. But at this point it is really hard to see how anyone can reverse this tide, even that infamous weed-hater Attorney General Jeff Sessions. There are just too many legal pot smokers and too many other citizens who have seen that life has not appreciably changed after legalization. All the horror stories that were supposed to have happened by now have not, in fact, happened. This is largely due to the fact that the drug warriors have been flat-out lying about the demon weed for almost the entire century that marijuana was illegal. Go see Reefer Madness if you need any proof of this exhaustive propaganda campaign's history. The public has been fed a steady diet of lies about marijuana ever since it was originally demonized as the way Mexican laborers and African-American jazz musicians were destroying American society from within. Again, these are historical facts, easily available for anyone to peruse. The War On Weed didn't just become racist, it actually began with racist motivations.

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Congressional Republicans are reportedly (and not too unsurprisingly) gearing up to run their midterm election campaign on their only significant legislative achievement to date, the tax cut bill. Democrats are also fighting for the battle of public perception over what the bill accomplished (and didn't), and the public is probably going to be rather malleable on the issue right up to the election (and beyond). Because the real effect of the tax code changes -- both good and bad -- won't be realized by most taxpayers for over a year.

Right now, Americans are getting important tax documents in their mailboxes. By the end of this month, everyone is supposed to have all the tax info they need to begin to fill out their 2017 returns. Some will do so quickly, although many will wait until the last minute in mid-April. Either way, nothing will have changed. The new tax laws don't take effect until the 2018 tax year. So while taxes will be on people's minds for the next few months, nothing much will have changed on their current tax forms from last year's returns.

Starting in February, though, everyone's paycheck will begin to be affected by the new tax law. However, the Internal Revenue Service has been struggling with all the momentous changes Congress passed, so the withholding tables may actually be wrong for millions of people. What everyone is supposed to do (but many won't) is to run their numbers through a quick calculation to see if enough taxes are being withheld, and if not, to adjust them with their company's payroll department so the withholding amount is correct. This presupposes a level of dedication that many taxpayers just don't have, though. So most will just trust that the payroll folks are getting their numbers right.

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The Senate Democrats ended their government shutdown today, not with a bang but with a whimper. They did not achieve their stated objective, to force a vote on a bill to save the DACA program, but they did at least raise awareness of the issue in Washington, so it can't conveniently be swept under a rug for the foreseeable future. The moderates and the Democratic Senate leadership point to a rather squishy promise made by Mitch McConnell to hold a floor vote on a DACA bill at some point in the next two months, which was apparently enough of a commitment to assuage the fears of a majority of Democratic senators for now. But lost in all the recriminations is one glaring question: what about the House?

Before we get to that, though, let's take a look at where Democrats currently find themselves. The Dreamers and their advocates are pretty upset with the party, and they have good reason to be angry. When President Trump announced he was singlehandedly ending the DACA program, Democrats swore up and down it would be one of their highest priorities in Congress. They promised that they wouldn't agree to a budget unless the DACA problem was fixed by the end of 2017. Since they made those promises, they voted -- twice -- to kick the budget can down the road without addressing DACA (once in early December, once at the end of December). This was a slap in the face to the Dreamers, so they were already pretty upset with congressional Democrats even before the recent shutdown.

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