Ever since President Joe Biden rolled out the first part of his infrastructure plan, Republicans have been largely caught flat-footed. They just don't have much of an answer for why they don't support it. Which makes sense, because most of what is contained in the plan is actually widely supported by the public. So the one thing Republicans really haven't been able to do is to point to the plan and give any good examples as to why it would be such a terrible idea.

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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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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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Today marks the halfway period through President Biden's first 100 days. He set a lot of goals for himself during this period, and while no president completes his entire list, Biden certainly seems to be making a lot of progress (the AP ran a handy scorecard today, so you can check the general status of individual promises). Biden's list, to his credit, is a lot wider and deeper than most such lists of presidential campaign promises -- but then again, he had a lot to do to immediately overturn the worst of Donald Trump's disasters and wreckage, both here at home and in the rest of the world as well. Today was a particularly productive day for Biden, because the House just passed his first signature piece of legislation, the American Rescue Plan Act. Biden will sign it by the end of the week, and the breadth of even just this first Biden achievement is truly striking. Not to mention how popular it is with the public, already.

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President Joe Biden is about to have a very good month. The Senate is on the brink of passing (after all the Republican time-wasting obstacles are cleared) a mammoth $1.9 trillion pandemic recovery bill. The White House has taken to calling it the "Rescue Plan." It is wildly popular with the public. Next week, the House will pass the same version and Biden will likely sign it immediately thereafter. It will be the first big legislative victory for the president and the Democratic Congress.

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On the third day of Donald Trump's second impeachment trial, the prosecution rested. Having made a very strong and climactic case yesterday, today the House managers finished up their presentation and ended with their closing argument, part of which was a pre-buttal to the expected arguments from the defense.

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This week we were treated to the spectacle of the Republican Party largely voting in support of an advocate of using deadly violence towards her political opponents. How the mighty have fallen -- since this used to be the party that dearly loved to sanctimoniously lecture everyone on how high morals were an absolute necessity in politics, and that even the concept of "moral relativism" was evil. That all went out the window when they nominated the most amoral man imaginable for president, of course, but it's still rather shocking to see this once-publicly-righteous party wallow in the filth of QAnon and flirt with ideas like advocacy for assassinating political opponents.

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Welcome back to the second part of our annual year-end awards column series! If you missed it, you can check out last week's installment too. But a warning -- for both this column and last week's -- they're long. Incredibly long. Monstrously long. It's been that kind of year, what can we say?

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What a year. Seriously, that was a tough one for us all, wasn't it?

Before we begin with the awards, I would just like to thank all the people -- both online and in person -- who helped out by giving me their suggestions and nominations for all of these awards. I have tried to credit individuals where appropriate, but I probably forgot to do so here and there too, so I apologize in advance.

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