The Supreme Court has put America on notice. Once again, it is about to roll back a basic constitutional right for a major part of the country's population. They did so previously on voting rights when they gutted the Voting Rights Act, and they're about to do so again on the right to an abortion. The clock is now ticking on Roe v. Wade, and time will run out whenever they issue their opinion on the Mississippi case before them, which is expected to happen next June (at the end of their yearly term).

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Today the Supreme Court heard oral arguments in a case involving a new law in Mississippi which bans abortions after the first 15 weeks of pregnancy (more technically: 15 weeks from the woman's last menstrual cycle). This law was enacted as a direct challenge to Roe v. Wade, the Supreme Court case which legalized abortion in this country. And after the arguments were heard the only real question most observers had was whether the court will overturn Roe outright, or just gut it so completely that it will become all but meaningless (as they did earlier to the Voting Rights Act). Either way, it seems we need to start contemplating what a post-Roe country will look like.

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Nope -- we're definitely not in Kansas anymore. We're not even where we're supposed to be, which is Pennsylvania. We may be in New Jersey; it's not immediately clear (which brings up a rather ironic twist on "There's no place like home," I suppose, since we're not really sure where his home actually is right now...). But today the following news appeared from some fantastical locale or another:

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Good economic news keeps right on happening, even if this message isn't really reaching the public in a big way. The mainstream media, of course, bears a lot of responsibility for this, as they love to focus on anything going wrong rather than any good news, so stories about inflation (the price of gas, specifically) and supply-chain problems flood the airwaves while the steadily-improving unemployment situation gets maybe a one-day mention when new figures come out. But at heart, it is the Democratic Party's failure for not shifting the public conversation to positive news about the economy.

Today, new weekly unemployment numbers were released and America just had its best week in over 50 years. Let that sink in for a moment. Fewer people filed for unemployment last week than any other week since 1969. The last time we had such a good week, Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, and Jim Morrison were all still alive. That is some spectacularly good economic news, because not only does it signify that we are now over the Delta wave of economic pandemic effects but that the economy is roaring back far stronger and faster than it did after the Great Recession. The overall (monthly) national unemployment rate fell to 4.6 percent last month as well.

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Are we at the start of a new fifth wave of the COVID-19 pandemic, or is it perhaps just a little bump in the road -- a wavelet instead of a wave? At this point it is impossible to tell, as the data seems to be at an inflection point and could go either way. Add to that the upcoming holiday season, and it's really anyone's guess where we'll be in January.

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A lot actually happened in the political world this week, but the two things that will be remembered most of all were a pair of bookend Biden agenda advancements. The week started off with a bill-signing ceremony -- with Republicans in attendance, even -- as President Joe Biden signed the bipartisan infrastructure bill into law.

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The Republican Party's descent into madness now appears to be complete. At this point their moral compass hasn't just broken down, they've thrown it overboard. The Republican Party is now completely morally bankrupt. The only thing that is even left to debate about this sad state of affairs is whether they had reached the bottom of the barrel months (or even years) ago, or whether they have only more recently arrived there.

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President Joe Biden's job approval ratings with the public have slipped over the past few months, from above 50 percent in July down to the low 40s now. In August and September, Biden's average rating in public opinion polls took a dive, although it has since somewhat stabilized. This was caused in large part by a few bad patches which he hit almost simultaneously (the rise of the Delta variant in the pandemic and the obviously-inadequate withdrawal from Afghanistan), and now the increase in inflation is playing a large role as well. Biden just got a big legislative win (and could have another one before the end of the year), but it remains to be seen whether this will boost his standing with the public much or not. One thing he might do to help himself, though, is to make a lot better use of the bully pulpit.

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This was a rather strange week in Washington politics because the biggest story actually happened almost an entire week ago. The lack of big news since then isn't really all that surprising, though, considering Congress is (once again) off for a week -- meaning little-to-no news from Capitol Hill. But before they scarpered [...]

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President Joe Biden is in the midst of a blitz of salesmanship. He's got every right to do so, after Congress finally moved the bipartisan infrastructure bill to his desk after months of delays. And Biden has long been aware that one of the biggest mistakes Barack Obama ever made as president was failing to properly whip up public support for the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, which would have been easy to do since Republicans were already (derisively) calling it "Obamacare." Biden saw the dynamics of this failure play out, as Obama's veep. So he has long said he's not going to repeat the same mistake during his presidency. Which is why seeing him out in the country selling the various parts of his infrastructure plan was entirely predictable.

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