Is President Joe Biden poised on the brink of a resurgence in the polls? Well... maybe. It's no sure thing, but the conditions do seem to be improving for him so it wouldn't come as a complete surprise. The next two months will be key.

Presidents used to routinely get a bump just after their State Of The Union speeches to Congress, but these events have become less and less impactful over the past decade or so. Fewer people watch, being instead content to read or hear what someone else thought about the speech. But by at least one measure, Biden's speech last night was well-received by the people who did watch it -- a CBS insta-poll showed an astonishing 78 percent of those polled approved of his remarks while only 22 percent disapproved. Will that translate into better job approval ratings for Biden overall? It's certainly possible.

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But back to the speech. Biden's delivery was awesome both at the start of the speech and at the end. He showed honest heartfelt emotion when denouncing Vladimir Putin and Russia and metaphorically standing with the people of Ukraine. At the end, he spoke louder than the building applause when he called for what is best about America overcoming our worst impulses. Barack Obama couldn't have done a better job with Biden's closing paragraph, and that's high praise indeed!

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President Joe Biden will give his second speech to a joint session of Congress tomorrow, in his first official State Of The Union address. That seems like a contradiction, due to the quirk that the first time a president gives such a speech it is not officially known as the State Of The Union, but few care about splitting such hairs. After being in office for over a year now, the president will inform Congress and the American people what his view of the country is, looking both backward at his first year's accomplishments and forward to what he hopes to achieve in the coming year. This is normally a balancing act, but this year's speech will be unusual in that large portions of it are being rewritten at the last minute, due to the developing situation in Ukraine.

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Some weeks, obviously, are more momentous than others. This past week may be looked back upon as being one of the most historic anyone alive has ever lived through. The world order shifted on its axis and nobody is quite sure what is coming next.

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The invasion has now officially begun. Vladimir Putin wasn't bluffing. President Joe Biden's warnings that this was going to happen were not overblown or premature. Russia is redrawing the geopolitical lines in Eastern Europe and the rest of the world is going to have to adjust to the new reality. This is all very grim to contemplate, obviously. We are going back in time to the 20th century, when wars of aggression were a reality that killed untold millions. So it behooves us to look ahead to what this new order will mean, especially what it will mean militarily.

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This is going to be an article on political spin. I admit it, right up here at the start. But every once in a while, an opportunity arises for Democrats to do what Republicans always manage to do so effortlessly -- paint their entire opposition party as dangerously out of touch because of the extreme positions of a handful of them. Look how much mileage the GOP has gotten out of not only demonizing but also painting the entire Democratic Party with the broad brush of "Defund The Police," for instance. So when Democrats get a chance to return the favor, they really should leap at it.

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How much does America care what happens in Ukraine? That is the question that is at the heart of how this crisis is going to play out politically, here at home. So far, there's no real clear answer. It's hard to ascertain, mostly because events on the ground are changing so swiftly. Americans are still forming their opinions rather than having long-held ideological positions to fall back on. Ukraine has never been a close ally of America historically, unlike other European countries such as Britain and France. We don't really have a close relationship that stretches back centuries, in other words. This is the biggest reason why the American public's opinion is so malleable right now. To put it another way, if Russia had tried to invade and annex parts of Scotland and England, we'd immediately know how we felt about it -- there wouldn't be any question at all.

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The world pauses and holds its collective breath as we all wonder the same thing: What is Vladimir Putin up to? Will he invade Ukraine? Is this all some sort of bluff or feint? Or is he deadly serious about reconstituting the Soviet Union's sphere of influence (of satellite states subservient to Moscow)? Is he just waiting for the Olympics to end as some sort of favor to China? Or will the troops eventually go home and the whole crisis blows over?

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Did what happened at the United States Capitol on January 6th, 2021 constitute "legitimate political discourse" or not? That was the question that has divided the Republican Party all week, and may serve to be the one memorable phrase that sums up the difference between those in the GOP who have completely surrendered all their morals and thought processes and attachment to reality to Donald Trump -- and those who have not. Because that's what it all boils down to, really.

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Today Politico caused somewhat of a stir, by publishing an article that examined the question of the chances Democrats will have to avoid getting wiped out in the midterm elections this November. Up until now, the conventional inside-the-Beltway cocktail-party-chattering-class wisdom was that Democrats were toast and might as well not even bother running much of a campaign at all. Historical trends were against them, gerrymandering was going to take the House of Representatives away from them, and Republicans were going to emerge with new congressional majorities pretty much no matter what Democrats did or said in the meantime.

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