President Joe Biden is reportedly going to unveil his budget proposal tomorrow. Like any White House budget proposal, it will contain both some good ideas and some bad ideas, and it will be argued about by both sides of the political divide. Progressives will argue it doesn't contain enough of their agenda items, moderate Democrats will argue it contains too many progressive ideas, and the Republicans will try to demonize it as the worst idea anyone has had since the dawn of time. Also, like all presidential budgets, it will not pass Congress intact -- not by a long shot. The House and the Senate will want to pass their own budgets, and at most they'll co-opt a few ideas from Biden's budget while charting their own course on much of it. But politically, Democrats will have a window of time where they will be able to make a potent point: something is better than nothing.

House Republicans are full of newfound deficit hawkery, and they've already threatened to use the debt ceiling as leverage to get what they want. Their main problem, however, is that they have no real idea what it is that they want. They want, in a generalized sense, to slash government spending. This has been a conservative talking point for approximately forever. But while it is fun for them to blithely speak of balancing the federal budget in 10 years, actually accomplishing that means making some awfully tough decisions. And then publicly defending those decisions.

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Some people were expecting some explosive news this week from Tucker Carlson's show on Fox News. He had, after all, been handed what could have been something extremely volatile -- access to all 40,000-plus hours of video footage from the January 6th insurrection attempt at the United States Capitol. Carlson himself predicted his revelations from this extraordinary access would land with a bang. But what he just unveiled wasn't just "not a bang," it barely even qualifies as a whimper. It fizzled. It was a dud. A gigantic nothingburger.

What Carlson unveiled on his show was a very weak attempt to make exactly the same nonsensical case that Representative Andrew Clyde proposed, mere months after a violent mob attacked the seat of American government:

Watching the TV footage of those who entered the Capitol and walked through Statuary Hall showed people in an orderly fashion, staying between the stanchions and ropes taking videos and pictures. You know, if you didn't know the TV footage was a video from January 6, you would actually think it was a normal tourist visit.

Got that? They weren't violent insurrectionists bent on overturning a presidential election and preventing the peaceful transfer of power -- they were just ordinary tourists, wandering around the Capitol taking selfies, as tourists are wont to do.

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Donald Trump is running for president again. Forgive me if this was an unnecessary thing to point out, but at times it seems like the public almost needs a reminder of this fact, due to Trump's almost non-existent campaign so far. Personally, I am left wondering when Trump is going to get back to his signature giant rallies and start actively running once again in a big way. If President Joe Biden announces his re-election bid, it will almost certainly clear the Democratic field of serious contenders, so the primary fight on the Republican side is going to be the only game in town for the next year or more. But so far, it has been a real snoozefest.

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Apparently, there was a big murder trial down South that culminated this week, but we have to admit that since it wasn't an overtly political case, we just didn't pay much attention to it. Instead, as always, we had our nose to the grindstone of sifting through the week's political news so that you don't have to. In other words: Welcome to another installment of Friday Talking Points!

We're going to start this week with some good news. Not great news, mind you, but pretty good nonetheless. A spate of actual bipartisanship broke out in the Senate this week and with amazing speed (for Congress in general and for the Senate in particular) they came up with proposed legislation that might actually have a chance of passing. Well, passing the Senate at least, since nobody has any clue of what the GOP House will do these days.

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Today, I'm going to do something I rarely do in this column: praise Marco Rubio. Because Rubio has been the driving force behind trying to change a system that virtually everyone hates, but that which will also probably continue for quite some time to come. And time is the heart of the issue, because I am speaking of the biannual change to and from daylight saving time.

Everybody I've ever met hates making the change twice a year. Maybe I just haven't met some vast silent majority out there who loves it, but I kind of doubt that. It's annoying and disruptive to just about everyone's life (except in the few places such as Hawai'i where they just don't make the change at all and stay on standard time year-round). It takes at least a week to adjust to, each and every time. And for part of the year it leaves everyone annoyed at the time the sun rises and sets.

Which is precisely the problem, because there are indeed two sides to this issue. There are those who would love to stay on standard time (what we are experiencing right now) all year long and there are those who would love to stay on daylight time forever (what we're about to "spring forward" to). It is a divisive issue -- a whole bunch of people might agree that chucking the current system makes sense, but when it comes to which time we should adopt on a permanent basis, there's a vast chasm of disagreement.

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Pharmaceutical giant Eli Lilly announced today that they would be slashing their prices for insulin by 70 percent. Think about that for a moment -- a corporation was pricing a product so high that it can cut the price by 70 percent and still make money off of it. That should be seen as nothing short of obscene to the average person. But what is interesting about this announcement is that it seems a combination of public shame and some competition in the marketplace has brought about this change. And that's worth celebrating a little bit, even if the case isn't exactly cut-and-dried.

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Sorry, there will be no column today. I had to spend a major part of the afternoon cleaning up and repairing some minor storm damage. Don't worry, we only got rain and wind (the snow was up on the mountains) and we weren't even hit particularly badly where we live, but some stuff did get blown over and had to be dealt with. I apologize for the service interruption and never fear there'll be a new column up here tomorrow. Hope everyone else is weathering the winter storms well too... stay safe out there!

-- Chris Weigant

Follow Chris on Twitter: @ChrisWeigant

Game theory is a rather fun branch of mathematics that tries to predict the odds of having what you want happen, when stacked up against other rational agents. I've never studied it formally myself, but it's always intrigued me. The classic example (to me, anyway, and which I am not going to bother to explain) is that the contestant on Let's Make A Deal should always change their choice (of Doors Number One, Two, or Three) after the host reveals one of the prize packages, because doing so actually doubles the odds of getting the best prize package instead of the booby prize. Those are the sorts of puzzles it tries to figure out -- like what is the best amount of money to bet at the end of Jeopardy! (depending on how much you and your opponents have at the time). But both of those are examples with easily-quantifiable odds, which aren't always (in real life, outside of game shows) all that easy to accurately predict. So I'm using the term rather loosely here, not in a strict "figure the odds" mathematical way -- more of "gaming it out" than formal game theory. But the Biden conundrum has certainly been getting a lot of attention lately, so I thought I'd take a shot at playing the game too. Or, at the very least, outlining it in a rational fashion for everyone else to play too.

The problem, in a nutshell: Joe Biden says he's the best Democrat to beat Donald Trump in the 2024 presidential election. He might just be right about that, too -- he certainly is the only person who can provably make such a claim. He made the same claim back in 2020 and the "electability argument" certainly convinced a whole bunch of Democratic primary voters to test it out. Which worked out just fine, in the general election. So to give him the benefit of the doubt, let's say he is the best person Democrats could put up against Trump.

But what happens if Trump loses? What happens if he doesn't win the Republican nomination? Well, then you've got Joe Biden running against a Republican who is most likely: (1) not as unhinged and acerbic as Donald Trump, and (2) younger than either Trump or Biden. Perhaps even a lot younger. The big question: if this comes to pass, will Biden still be the best Democrat to carry the party's banner in 2024? Or will Biden's advanced age become a key factor that convinces swing voters to swing to the Republican side?

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Trains were at the heart of the political scene this week. Internationally, President Joe Biden took a 10-hour train ride to get to Kyiv in person (which he must have thoroughly enjoyed, knowing his general love of trains). Domestically, the trainwreck in Ohio became sidetracked into a political circus.

Biden's surprise appearance in Ukraine had an enormous effect on the goodwill and fighting spirit of the Ukrainians, from all reports. An American president visiting a war zone at great personal risk resonated with the populace, and Biden once again reaffirmed American support for the brave resolve the Ukrainians have felt for one year and counting. The anniversary of the start of the war was precisely the time to make such a journey, and Biden followed it up with a very fiery speech in Poland reminding Vladimir Putin once again of what a colossal mistake he made with his decision to invade. America is on track (sorry, had to throw in a train metaphor) in fighting Russian aggression with the Ukrainians.

Down in East Palestine, Ohio, things went completely off the rails... again. They started with a tragic industrial accident. Then they got a whole bunch of indifference, from both high-ranking government officials and from the mainstream media. Then Republicans sensed an opening and spewed an inundation of politics all over the disaster. This quickly led to a media circus descending on the small town and now they've become no more than a photo op for both sides. It's hard not to feel sorry for the inhabitants of this town, in other words, because they didn't ask for any of this to happen.

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Changes to Senate rules and traditions tend to happen somewhat incrementally. Democrats are currently considering taking another step towards making the Senate actually functional once again, and it is a step that definitely needs taking. Because it is time to kill the "blue slip" on judicial nominations, once and for good.

This is pretty esoteric stuff, so bear with me. The biggest rule change over the past three or four presidencies has been the elimination of the filibuster on judicial confirmation floor votes. Time was when every judicial nominee had to get 60 votes or they didn't become a federal judge. For most this wasn't a problem, since both parties knew the filibuster was only to be used in extreme cases. But then Republicans started blocking President Barack Obama's nominees in a big way. So Harry Reid changed the Senate rule so that filibusters could only be launched for Supreme Court nominations. He left it to Mitch McConnell to take the final step and get rid of even Supreme Court nominee filibusters. Now judicial floor votes cannot be filibustered at all.

All of this served to speed up the confirmation process. But there's another arcane Senate rule that also stands in the way of this streamlining: the "blue slip." This is, in essence, an absolute veto that any single senator can wield over judicial nominations from his or her home state. Here's how it works, from a recent Associated Press article:

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