Although some very serious things are going on right now, this is supposed to be the political Silly Season, that long August period when Congress has left Washington and not much happens in the world of politics. Before Donald Trump's time, this was marked by the punditocracy deciding to focus their ravenous attention on some incredibly silly tempest in a teapot and blow it all completely out of proportion -- just because they had nothing better to write about and pontificate upon. Of course, Donald Trump's entire time in office was a 4-year Silly Season gone amok, so we really haven't had a "normal" Silly Season (if that isn't oxymoronic to say) since Barack Obama's time.

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Astoundingly, the United States Senate just had a very productive week. We know the word "astoundingly" is a bit snarky, but we do try to be honest, after all. After months and months of delays and headfakes, this week the final two legs of President Joe Biden's three-legged economic agenda passed the Senate, just before they left on an abbreviated summer break.

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Ronald Reagan was the first president in the modern age who truly understood the importance of television cameras and snappy one-liners to advance his political agenda. This wasn't that big a surprise, seeing as how he had been a minor Hollywood movie actor and learned the impact of visual presence on the screen at an early age. He used this to great advantage both in his campaigns for president and, once he won, in the Oval Office itself. And one of his best lines was a take on a very old joke. Reagan was fond of summarizing his antipathy towards "big government" with the following quip: "The nine most terrifying words in the English language are: 'I'm from the government and I'm here to help!'"

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In all the discussion over how to convince unvaccinated Americans to get vaccinated, I have noticed one suggestion popping up repeatedly -- but always down in the comments, never proposed by any pundit or politician (that I am aware of, at least). It's a simple and elegant answer to the problem, although I have no idea whether it could actually be legally implemented or not. Or if it should, for that matter. The idea? If you choose not to get vaccinated, then your health insurance company should inform you that you will not be covered if you get it and are hospitalized. Your insurance would still work for all other ailments and treatments, but not for COVID-19.

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In the midst of all the excruciating (and completely unnecessary) delaying tactics Senate Republicans are now deploying over the bipartisan infrastructure deal, Senator Bernie Sanders today apparently decided enough was enough and released his draft of a $3.5 trillion "human infrastructure" bill. It is just as breathtaking as promised, although the nature of this first bill means it is still vague on a lot of the details. This is by design, since the bill will pass under budget reconciliation rules which necessitate a first "topline" bill that just has the totals for various different areas of the budget, while later on (Majority Leader Chuck Schumer has set a soft deadline of September 15, although this may prove to be optimistic) the details will all be filled in by the various committees on a second (and final) budget reconciliation bill.

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President Joe Biden gave a speech this week on where the country stands with respect to the COVID-19 pandemic. This was a timely thing to do, since with the Delta mutation so ascendant, we've now entered a fourth wave which has already grown bigger than the first two waves (but, thankfully, not yet bigger than the third). Right now, 100,000 people are getting sick each day -- which is up from just 12,000-per-day a few short weeks ago. The good news is that fewer people are dying than when the third wave surpassed the 100,000-infections-per-day mark, because now over 70 percent of all American adults have gotten at least their first vaccine shot. But what's changing now is that vaccinated Americans have pretty much lost all tolerance for the unvaccinated among us. When the graph lines were all heading downwards and restrictions easing, it wasn't that big a deal. With them skyrocketing back up again, it is. And businesses and governments and the vaccinated population are at the end of their rope when it comes to making allowances for the anti-vaxxers.

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As I write this, it is still unclear whether the Senate will undergo the marathon parliamentary endurance contest known as "vote-a-rama" tonight or not. If so, the Senate will likely be in session until the wee hours of Friday morning finishing up the amendment process on the bipartisan infrastructure deal. This could even lead to a cloture vote and final passage of the bill before the weekend, although that still has to be considered a longshot. Saturday passage might be a lot more realistic, although the chances of at least the vote-a-rama happening tonight appear to be greater [note: former Senator Mike Enzi's funeral is scheduled for Friday, which effectively scratches that day from the schedule].

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There are two interesting special election primaries happening today in Ohio for two vacant seats in the U.S. House of Representatives. The winners of the races today will likely coast through the special election itself, since both are in reliably partisan districts (one Democratic and one Republican). They are even more interesting because they are both fierce factional races which will provide a few tea leaves for those looking to see what the future of the two parties might be. Which factions will prevail? Whether it means anything in the grand scheme of things or not, it's at least something for pundits to discuss during the long "silly season" of August.

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There is an abject lesson in the failure to successfully get federal help to renters and landlords in a timely fashion. And I'm not talking about how Congress and President Joe Biden couldn't manage to extend the eviction moratorium deadline, either. That was a preventable tragedy, but what's even more instructive is the fact that of the billions earmarked for rental assistance, only a tiny fraction of the money actually made it to the people it was intended to help. Compared to how the direct COVID-19 pandemic aid payments were distributed, it's pretty easy to see there's a right way and a wrong way to deliver federal aid. With Bernie Sanders now putting the finishing touches on a vast expansion of federal programs to make people's lives better, one certainly hopes this lesson has been learned so that future programs won't get so bogged down in red tape or bureaucracy that they wind up being both ineffective and frustrating.

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President Joe Biden is now getting very close to securing the second leg of his three-legged economic legislative stool. To put it another way: this week we all finally got to experience the almost-mythological "Infrastructure Week" which we had been promised for lo, these many years. Bipartisanship struggled back to life, fulfilling not just a campaign promise from Biden but also his deep-seated desire to return Washington to some sort of pre-Trump normality.

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