The ushers are flashing the lights in the lobby. Intermission is over, and the last act of the "Bipartisan Infrastructure Kabuki" extravaganza is about to begin. Actually, truth be told, we were among those who thought this play would be over by now, but apparently a final act was hastily added at the last minute, for no real apparent reason.

President Joe Biden called Senator Shelley Moore Caputo today, in what most view as the final negotiation attempt which will try to hammer together a compromise infrastructure package that 10 Republican senators will actually vote for. Biden is, in essence, making his final offer. It is eminently reasonable, considering where the two sides started from, but that doesn't mean it will have any chance of success, since Republicans are really just trying to run the clock out and stall for as long as they can get away with before they admit to the world that there simply is no infrastructure bill that 10 Republican senators are ever going to vote for -- at least not while a Democrat sits in the Oval Office.

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The biggest thing America gained with the election of President Joe Biden was the freedom to ignore Donald Trump once again. And it seems, with each passing day, that more and more people are happily exercising that freedom. Trump is fading. Call him the incredible shrinking Donald Trump. This was what went through my mind upon hearing the news that Trump's personal blog/website (all it ever really was, despite Trump touting it as a "a new social media platform") had turned out the lights and disappeared from the internet. It didn't even survive three Scaramuccis, which is a pretty short life span indeed for something Trump had promised would rival Twitter and Facebook and all the other social media platforms which had evicted Trump from their sites. A month later, Twitter, Facebook and the rest of them are doing just fine, while Trump's site is dark after only 29 days, due to lack of interest.

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We now have to jump forward to what the state of Florida is attempting to do, with their new law. Florida is run by Republicans and its governor is widely reported to be considering an eventual presidential run. He's always been a big supporter of Donald Trump and so the state Republicans have taken up the insistence on the right that somehow social media platforms banning conservatives is some sort of tyrannical outrage that must be stopped by governmental intervention. In this one area -- social media and Big Tech in general -- Republicans are for all the regulations they can impose, which obviously runs counter to their longstanding drive to remove as many regulations on as many corporations as possible. So far, though, Republicans don't seem to have any ideological opposition to more and more regulations in this one area, and it's doubtful they ever will.

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The Republican Party has officially divorced itself from reality. They have, quite simply, moved their headquarters to Cloud Cuckoo Land. Any among their ranks who do not swear fealty to the fantastic lies they now believe must be either shunned or expelled. That is the state of one of the two major American political parties, in the twenty-first century.

Normally, such a development would be a reason for glee among the other political party, but this is not merely a matter of Republicans believing that the world is flat, the moon is made of green cheese, or tax cuts always pay for themselves -- no, this is no mere pedestrian fantasyland they have now taken up residence within. This is far more dangerous.

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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 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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It's now official. Senator Joe Manchin is the second-most-powerful person in Washington. Obviously, President Joe Biden is still number one, but Biden's entire agenda now hinges on the whims of Manchin... and everyone knows it. And Manchin is enjoying his newfound stature so much that it seems pretty certain he's going to enjoy flexing his political power over and over again for the next two years.

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The next few weeks are going to be rather critical for the Republican Party. They have a clear choice to make, and at this point it's pretty obvious that most Republican members of Congress are about to choose the most self-destructive path now available to them. Call it the final capitulation to Trumpism.

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Three momentous things happened last week which so overshadowed everything else in the political world that we're just going to ignore everything else up front, here.

First, Donald Trump slouched off to his golf resort in Florida a few hours early, for purely petty reasons -- he wanted the flight to still officially be "Air Force One" (a designation that only exists when the current president of the United States is on the plane), and he also didn't want to have to ask President Joe Biden for the routine favor of one last flight home on the big plane. So he flew while he was still president, after staging a pathetic goodbye rally at Joint Base Andrews (home base of the two planes that serve as Air Force One and Two). He forced the military into giving him one last 21-howitzer salute, and then flew south for the winter. And, hopefully, forever.

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