President Joe Biden today gave a speech outlining the next steps the federal government will be taking to combat the COVID-19 pandemic. While some of these steps do not go as far as some had been hoping, there were several which will be significant in upping the pressure on unvaccinated people to get their shots. Although Biden didn't explicitly say so, at this point the best way to convince more people to get vaccinated is to make life harder and harder for the unvaccinated. And Biden took several large steps which will do so.

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This week began with conservatives and liberals upset because the women of Afghanistan will now lose their freedoms under a tyrannical extremist government. It ended with liberals upset that the women of Texas have now lost freedoms under a tyrannical extremist government. Conservatives were notably silent, which is understandable since they were the ones instituting this unconstitutional denial of rights from the women of the Lone Star State.

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The anti-abortion movement finally got what it wanted all along: a pliant Supreme Court that would overturn Roe v. Wade. It took them a long time and a lot of effort to accomplish this -- this movement truly started in the Reagan years with the self-titled "Moral Majority," after all -- but they've finally reached the end of the road. Maybe this will finally get Democrats to pay a little more attention to the importance of Supreme Court picks when voting in presidential races, because the rightwingers have known this for decades now. And it has finally paid off for them.

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This was never going to be a good week for President Joe Biden. The ongoing crisis in Afghanistan pretty much guaranteed that. But although the week started out with signs of optimism -- more and more people being airlifted out of Kabul, to top 100,000 by week's end -- it ended in disaster. A suicide bomber exploded his vest right at the gate to the airport, which killed at least 13 American servicemembers and over 100 Afghans (as of this writing the official death toll for Afghans had hit 169). So while this week could have been perhaps tense but slightly optimistic, by week's end that was no longer possible. It was disastrous; there's just no other way to put it. One grim way to measure it is Biden has now made his first addition to the number he always carries around with him in his jacket pocket -- the number of fallen U.S. servicemembers from both Iraq and Afghanistan.

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House Speaker Nancy Pelosi just pulled off a very big win. The House just voted (220-212) to advance the $3.5 trillion budget reconciliation bill, which will allow both houses of Congress to begin hashing out the actual details and draft the language into a final bill. This was accomplished by cutting a deal with the Mod Squad -- the nine conservative House Democrats who balked at voting for the reconciliation bill before the final vote on the bipartisan infrastructure deal. In the end, Pelosi convinced them to do what they had sworn they wouldn't -- vote to move the reconciliation bill forward. To get them on board, Pelosi gave them an iron-clad promise to put the infrastructure bill up for a vote on September 27. Pelosi has always said she was going to schedule a vote on it "before October 1" (when transportation funding runs out, making it a hard deadline), so this wasn't all that big a concession for her to make.

Of course, there's still no guarantee Pelosi's "two-track" strategy will work, in the end. But she just moved a big step towards making it work. There are really only three important votes left in the process: the House infrastructure bill vote, and both houses passing the same version of a budget reconciliation bill. And since the infrastructure bill's clock is now ticking (with a hard deadline), it means the Senate and the House only have a little over a month to make the other two votes happen.

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I haven't written about the progress of the pandemic data for a while, so I thought it was time to take a close look at the fourth wave. Mostly because one thing the Delta mutation of the COVID-19 virus has brought back (at least for me) is "doomscrolling" -- checking in on a daily basis to see what the numbers are and what the data show. It's not exactly a pleasant picture, but there are glimmers of hope here and there, at least.

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In my mail today, I received my ballot for the upcoming gubernatorial recall election here in California. But while plenty of pundits have been sounding alarms and all but tearing their hair out over the prospects that Democratic Governor Gavin Newsom could be out of a job in a matter of weeks, I am much more sanguine. The reason I am so calm is that the one poll which caused everyone to freak out was really a comparison of apples and oranges. I think Newsom will sail through the recall unscathed, in fact, winning by at least a 10-point margin. The entire exercise will be yet another example of "fiscally responsible" Republicans wasting a whole bunch of money for no apparent reason -- to the tune of the over $200 million that this recall is costing California taxpayers.

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Astoundingly, the United States Senate just had a very productive week. We know the word "astoundingly" is a bit snarky, but we do try to be honest, after all. After months and months of delays and headfakes, this week the final two legs of President Joe Biden's three-legged economic agenda passed the Senate, just before they left on an abbreviated summer break.

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Ronald Reagan was the first president in the modern age who truly understood the importance of television cameras and snappy one-liners to advance his political agenda. This wasn't that big a surprise, seeing as how he had been a minor Hollywood movie actor and learned the impact of visual presence on the screen at an early age. He used this to great advantage both in his campaigns for president and, once he won, in the Oval Office itself. And one of his best lines was a take on a very old joke. Reagan was fond of summarizing his antipathy towards "big government" with the following quip: "The nine most terrifying words in the English language are: 'I'm from the government and I'm here to help!'"

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In all the discussion over how to convince unvaccinated Americans to get vaccinated, I have noticed one suggestion popping up repeatedly -- but always down in the comments, never proposed by any pundit or politician (that I am aware of, at least). It's a simple and elegant answer to the problem, although I have no idea whether it could actually be legally implemented or not. Or if it should, for that matter. The idea? If you choose not to get vaccinated, then your health insurance company should inform you that you will not be covered if you get it and are hospitalized. Your insurance would still work for all other ailments and treatments, but not for COVID-19.

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