During the presidency of Donald Trump, the term "infrastructure week" became a running joke. Team Trump would tee up some big infrastructure event or announcement (in the hopes of driving the media narrative), but then the team captain would just self-destruct in front of everyone, derailing any hope of actually achieving anything meaningful. The first time this happened -- although few now remember it as the first infrastructure week fiasco -- was at a press announcement event with Trump's secretary of Transportation, Elaine Chao. There were a few dog-and-pony props set up, and Chao made her announcement, which mostly dealt with cutting what Republicans consider onerous rules and regulations, in order to move things like highway projects forward faster with less red tape. After her presentation was over, though, Trump took the podium and was soon asked by a journalist about the other big story of the day: the violent and deadly clash in Charlottesville, Virginia, between white supremacists and people opposed to white supremacy. Few may remember the context, but everyone remembers what happened next -- Trump's: "very fine people on both sides" rant. That was the first infrastructure week under Trump.

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Every so often, a political issue rises to the fore and I just have to scratch my head and wonder at the sheer stupidity of it all. Not often -- usually even when an idea I don't agree with gains traction in the political debate, I can at least see the other side's reasoning. In other words, I may not agree with the proposed solution, but at least I can understand where the other side is coming from. But the COVID-19 pandemic has given rise to more just flat-out stupid political fights than anything else in recent memory. Wearing a face mask is somehow a political statement? What a monumentally stupid idea! Last year, most of this came straight from the top, right out of the Oval Office. But Donald Trump is now just a sad shadow of his former political presence (he's taken to crashing weddings at his resort to whine about how put-upon he is politically, which is pretty sad indeed). So this time it's just free-floating Republican (or Libertarian) craziness.

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Americans are newly discovering their ability for shared sacrifice in the name of the good of all. Now, this isn't universal -- disasters tend to bring out both the best and the worst in us, it seems -- but it is pretty close to universal in the areas hardest hit. Life has changed, in major ways. Daily routines have been obliterated. We all have to protect ourselves and in doing so protect each other as well. This has meant radical changes in the way we interact with each other which will likely be with us for months, if not years. What I find interesting is that we're shouldering the burdens -- so far -- about as well as can be expected.

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We're going to start off in a rather inane fashion today, by noting that we were slightly confused at one point during President Joe Biden's first formal press conference yesterday. Biden was speaking about the alarming movement in over 85 percent of the states to curtail voting rights. But he tried to introduce a new term or metaphor and we have to admit we're still not sure what he really meant. Here's what Biden said about the voter-suppression efforts: "This makes Jim Crow look like Jim Eagle." Which begs the question: is "Jim Eagle" a good thing or a bad thing?

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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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Two more horrific shootings happened in America recently. They will join the increasingly-long list of all the other horrific shootings from the past few decades. There are enough of them at this point that the news media even separates them into sub-categories, such as "horrific shootings just within Colorado" (remember Aurora? Columbine?). We've mourned so many for so long -- with absolutely nothing happening politically as a result -- that it's easy to get cynical and pessimistic about the chances for any meaningful changes to our gun laws getting enacted now. After all, if the massacre of 5-year-olds at Sandy Hook Elementary School didn't get anything passed, why would these two? But this time, things might -- just might, mind you -- be different. We might see at least the tightening of our rather lax background-check laws, this time. Which isn't much, but it's more than has ever succeeded in recent memory.

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Joe Biden has been president for over two months now. And, so far, the most momentous development in his presidency has been the result of something which happened a few weeks before he even took the oath. Because, throughout his entire term in office so far, Biden has been able to completely and utterly ignore Donald Trump. His absence from Twitter and Facebook and all the rest of the social media universe has rendered Trump completely irrelevant to the day-to-day political conversation. Which has allowed Biden the elbow room he needs to get his job done. And, from what one Trump spokesman just said, it looks like this period of lying low is going to continue for at least two or three more months.

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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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