In the past few days, two large American banks have failed. Everyone in the financial world is now holding their collective breath, hoping that this will be the full extent of the damage and that we won't see more banks shutter their doors as well. The bank failures (even if they stop at two) will have other widespread economic consequences as well. This all might just convince the Federal Reserve not to hike interest rates another half a percent when they meet next week (which was anticipated by many) and instead leave them where they are for now. Rising interest rates played a role in the failure of Silicon Valley Bank, the first to fail. There will likely be political fallout as well, as Congress holds hearings and investigates and possibly even passes some changes to the banking laws. This would be appropriate, since the real reason these banks failed is that they were allowed to run too much risk.

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Apparently, there was a big murder trial down South that culminated this week, but we have to admit that since it wasn't an overtly political case, we just didn't pay much attention to it. Instead, as always, we had our nose to the grindstone of sifting through the week's political news so that you don't have to. In other words: Welcome to another installment of Friday Talking Points!

We're going to start this week with some good news. Not great news, mind you, but pretty good nonetheless. A spate of actual bipartisanship broke out in the Senate this week and with amazing speed (for Congress in general and for the Senate in particular) they came up with proposed legislation that might actually have a chance of passing. Well, passing the Senate at least, since nobody has any clue of what the GOP House will do these days.

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Trains were at the heart of the political scene this week. Internationally, President Joe Biden took a 10-hour train ride to get to Kyiv in person (which he must have thoroughly enjoyed, knowing his general love of trains). Domestically, the trainwreck in Ohio became sidetracked into a political circus.

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The overturning of Roe v. Wade was seen, by Republicans, as the end of a very long road. Democrats, however, saw it as a call to action and just the start of their own long road, back to full rights for all American women. And the backlash to the Supreme Court removing rights from women continues to drive turnout at the ballot box. A primary election in Wisconsin last night showed how powerful the issue still is for voters, and it may have bigger repercussions than most elections since the office at stake is a state supreme court justice. Currently the court has a 4-3 conservative majority, so if a liberal were to be elected it would change the balance of judicial power in the state.

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We have to begin today with a look at the woes of the Republican Party. Because, when you think about it, why not?

The most amusing news (speaking from across the political aisle) all has to do with the Republican Party trying to come to grips with another presidential nominating process with Donald Trump as the 800-pound elephant in the room. Most of the party establishment would dearly love to see literally anyone else win the nomination than Trump, but they also fear the prospect of Trump going rogue if he doesn't win and launching his own third-party bid.

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Senator Dianne Feinstein announced today that she would not be seeking re-election next year. California is going to get an open Senate race for her seat instead. This announcement was anticipated, although nobody really knew what Feinstein was going to decide. But, speaking as a Californian, I am glad she chose to step down gracefully. Indeed, I urged her to do so six years ago.

Senator Feinstein has carved out an impressive legacy for herself, after serving in the Senate since 1992. She broke a lot of glass ceilings and just last year became the longest-serving woman in Senate history. When she first arrived in the Senate, there were two women senators. Now there are 25. She has a lot of accomplishments to show for her time in office as well, although I certainly didn't agree with many of them at the time. Feinstein is a much more centrist (or even right-leaning) Democrat than I would have preferred to have represent me, but I did appreciate at least some of her brave stands.

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For a little over a week now, America's military might has been called into action to defend our airspace against... balloons. This has led to a frenzy of speculation about what, precisely, is going on up there. It even sparked a bit of a U.F.O. craze of the type not seen since at least Close Encounters Of The Third Kind came out, if not the original U.F.O. craze of the 1950s. This is pretty absurd when you think about it, though, since if advanced civilizations were indeed monitoring humans, you'd think they'd have slightly-more-sophisticated aircraft to do so than the one which travels the slowest and is the easiest to shoot down. But because the tally is now up to four such objects shot out of North America's skies, I thought I'd share my own ballooning thoughts today (pun very much intended).

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President Joe Biden achieved -- in public and on national television -- a seemingly-impossible feat this week, as he vocally unified all of Congress in support of the long-held Democratic goal of protecting Social Security and Medicare from having their budget slashed by Republicans. That was pretty astonishing to see, you have to admit, since Republicans have been attacking Social Security since before Joe Biden was born (which is really saying something, considering he's about as far from a spring chicken as you can get). But suddenly they decided en masse to take exception with this fact, and loudly protested when Biden pointed out what they've essentially been saying for decades and decades. So Biden welcomed them into the fold of politicians who do fight to preserve the safety net, gleefully proclaiming he had achieved "unanimity." This was a warning to the Republicans that the subject of cuts to Social Security and Medicare were now officially off the table. Rarely has so major a bit of political bargaining worked so effectively during a State Of The Union speech. Which is why it was all so astonishing to watch.

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Last night, President Biden gave (depending on how you look at it) a rousing State Of The Union speech or perhaps the first speech of his re-election campaign. Throughout it all, by my count, he uttered the phrase "Let's finish the job" a whopping 10 times (at the very least... I know I must have missed a few...). That sounds an awful lot like a new campaign slogan to me....

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President Joe Biden gave a speech this week on the state of the American economy. On his watch, the economy has greatly improved as we all dug ourselves out of the pandemic recession together. So Biden deserves a victory lap. He also used the speech to draw a stark comparison between Democrats responsibly steering the economy and Republicans who apparently are salivating at the prospect of blowing it all up.

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