Donald Trump's Big Lie continues to reverberate through American politics. The latest iteration of this is a growing Republican push to ban all machines used in the elections process and instead hand-count all the ballots. They've even got a snappy slogan: "Vote Amish!" I suppose that's better than "Vote Luddite," since it has a distinctly American flavor. But the entire concept is so unworkable and ridiculous (and downright dangerous) that it would be a near-guarantee of more election chaos, longer waits before the counts are complete, and lots and lots of new opportunities for challenging vote results that Republicans don't like (when Republicans lose, in other words). Which could be the entire point, of course.

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President Joe Biden has just announced he will be using the Defense Production Act of 1950 to support the mining of some critical minerals, to ensure that America produces more of these elements that are necessary for the high-tech world we live in. This is important, as we've all seen the automobile industry struggle to build cars when things like computer chips are in short supply. The scarcity of one product (or even one element of one product) has ripple effects throughout all sorts of supply chains. It's not just cars, either -- the biggest thing Biden's new order addresses is the minerals needed for the batteries which power hundreds of millions of the devices which are now almost necessary for modern life. But I have to wonder whether this is going to include rare earth elements -- because it really should.

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That headline isn't a judgment in any way, nor is it a metaphor or pun or even a boast. It's the literal truth -- California's state government has too big a budget surplus. They've got too much money, and the only question is what to do with it. This may sound strange, since governments normally don't fret about having too much in their coffers, but there is a 1970s-era state law that says that they're going to have to send some of it back to the taxpayers. So that's what the politicians in Sacramento are now arguing about -- how to rebate this money and to whom.

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Lo, how far the moralistic mavens of the Republican Party have fallen! They keep attempting to take the moral high road so they can piously point out all the failings of their political opponents in this realm... but they keep being undermined by fellow Republicans who have embraced the new amoralism Donald Trump ushered in to the GOP.

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Something rather astonishing happened on Capitol Hill this week. The Senate passed a bill by unanimous consent, acting with such blinding speed that some senators weren't even aware of what was happening. Contrast this to the Senate's usual modus operandi, which is for things to move so slowly that a glacier would be seen as zipping along by comparison. Arcane parliamentary procedures are routinely used to gum up the legislative works, which often leads to nothing at all happening -- after spending enormous amounts of time and energy in the attempt.

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I mean that headline both ways. This is indeed an article about time. And it's about time for the subject to be addressed, too. Today, in a surprise victory, Senator Marco Rubio actually passed a bill by unanimous consent in the United States Senate that would enshrine, once and for all, Daylight Saving Time (or "D.S.T.") as the year-round standard for time in all of America. No more springing forward or falling back ever again, in other words. In March of 2023, the country would spring forward one last time and then that would be the time we'd all live with forevermore, even in winter. He titled it the Sunshine Protection Act (Rubio is from Florida, after all).

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Earmarks are back! After 11 years in the political wilderness, the budgetary tactic has returned to Capitol Hill. This means that individual members of Congress were once again able to reserve chunks of money in the massive omnibus budget bill that passed last week. The practice was largely seen as completely out of control back in 2010 and became a rallying cry for the Tea Party movement and Republicans in general, which led to a complete ban on the practice in Congress. That ban has now been lifted, and this is the first budget that includes earmarks to pass in over a decade.

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Let's start with some good news this week, because we could all use some, right? Two years ago today Tom Hanks announced to the world he had contracted COVID-19, on the same day that the virus people were then largely calling "the novel coronavirus" was declared a pandemic by the World Health Organization. This was when it all hit home for many -- that this could quite possibly be a very big deal indeed, even though the president of the United States was desperately trying to get the American public to believe otherwise. Salon provides a good rundown of what we all went through next:

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In politics, as in much of life, timing is key. Sometimes there are windows of opportunity that can be missed. Such seems to be the case with the so-called "People's Convoy," a group of American truckers who launched a copycat imitation of the Canadian truckers' protest, in the hopes of bringing media attention to their cause (or just themselves, perhaps). But their time -- if it ever even existed -- seems to have passed long before the big-rigs arrived near Washington D.C.

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President Joe Biden announced today that he was banning Russian oil and gas from the American marketplace. This is a wildly popular position to take and is supported not only by politicians across the political spectrum but also by an overwhelming majority of the American public. We all see the horrific scenes of death and destruction caused by Vladimir Putin and the thought that we are funding that in any small way when we fill up our cars is abhorrent to many. At least, that's the case right now.

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