I loved President Biden’s State of the Union speech. He was feisty and sharp. It eas gratifying to see President Biden engage the loud-mouth Republicans who interrupted him. That’s always a risky move in a nationally televised speech, because you never know how it will turn out. But Biden pounced at the opportunity to engage in repartee with his challengers from the Republican side. He showed his quick intelligence and mental sharpness. And did it with a smile.

Thom Hartman agreed. He wrote:

— State of the Union: Dark Brandon shows up & proves he’s still capable of kicking Republican ass. With the exception of rightwing hate media, reviews of President Biden’s SOTU speech Thursday night have been universally positive. He was on fire, filled with energy, and repeatedly went off-script to take on the classless Republicans who heckled and harassed him throughout the speech. Most amazing was how Republicans in the audience refused to applaud lines like, “We will not bow down to Putin” and his call for removing lead pipes to “stop the brain damage they’re causing our children.” The GOP has nearly totally become the party of Putin, and appears to even love lead poisoning America’s kids. They even booed their own legislation to secure the southern border! This is way beyond partisanship: something is really wrong, corrupt, rotten, and bizarre within the party now that it’s been completely taken over by a racist, hateful, orange-faced psychopath. And Senator Katie Britt’s effort to rehearse her tryout for the Scarlett O’Hara role in a high-school performance of Gone With The Wind just made the crisis within the party even clearer: did she really expect people to believe her “American carnage” riff and lies about the border? Now it’s up to us normal people to take our country back and restore sanity to our political processes. Double-check your voter registration, particularly if you live in a Red state, at vote.org. 

In case you missed the story, Alabama Senator Katie Britt was caught in a big fat lie when she gave the Republican response to Biden’s address. She claimed that she met a Mexican woman who had been the victim of sex-trafficking since she was 12, and this happened on Biden’s watch in the United States. An independent journalist named Jonathan Katz did the research on when Britt went to the border and whom she met with. He documented that the Mexican woman she met described events that happened in MEXICO, not the U.S., between 2004-2008, when George W. Bush was president. Why did she lie? She made no mention of the recent Alabama state court decision making it a crime to dispose of frozen IVF specimens, on the grounds that these embryos are unborn children.

— Russians are intervening in the election! The New York Times is reporting on a series of new “newspaper” sites that are popping up across America. With names like D.C. Weekly, the New York News Daily, the Chicago Chronicle and the Miami Chronicle, Russian disinformation experts have put up what are pretending to be American newspapers. They steal content from local papers and national news sites like Reuters, then toss in the occasional pro-Putin, anti-Ukraine, anti-Democrat articles. So far, there’s been no response from our government to this blatant attempt to influence the 2024 election by misleading American voters, and doing anything may be difficult as they’re hosted on Russian servers and outside the reach of US law. Putin was deeply involved in the 2016 election on behalf of Trump — to the point that Robert Mueller indicted nearly two dozen Russians for election interference — and they tried again with a major social media presence in 2020. With Ukraine in the balance (and Medvedev saying last week that they would be taking part of Poland next) expect Moscow to be vigorous in their efforts to get their agent, Trump, back into the White House.