A Waste of Time: President Biden in his first news conference announced a more ambitious goal of getting 200 million Covid vaccine shots in the arms of Americans by his 100^th day in office.

  He also said he didn’t think the surge of immigrants at the southern border are coming because people think he’s a nicer guy than Donald Trump.

  Biden said the filibuster rules in the Senate are a relic of the Jim Crow era of segregation and also that it will be hard to get all American troops out of Afghanistan by the May 1 deadline.

  Biden’s pledge on vaccines might be a safe bet. The country appears to be on track already for 200 million shots in his first 100 days.

  The President also batted away notions that immigrants are coming because he’s more welcoming than Donald Trump. “It happens every single solitary year,” he said of the winter months of January, February, and March when there’s less chance of dying in the Mexican desert. “And by the way, does anybody suggest that there was a 31% increase under Trump because he was a nice guy and he was doing good things at the border? That’s not the reason they’re coming.”

  After complaining that Biden has waited to give his first press conference, reporters squandered much of their time with him. They didn’t ask about his dramatic $3 trillion plans for rebuilding the country’s infrastructure. He had to bring it up himself.

  And just two months into Biden’s four-year term, CNN’s Kaitlan Collins pressed on whether he will run for a second term and if Kamala Harris would be his running mate.

  “And do you believe you’ll be running against former President Trump?” Collins asked.
  Biden replied, “Oh, come on. I don’t even think about it. I have no idea. I have no idea whether there’ll be Republican party. Do you?” 

  Washington Post columnist Jennifer Rubin wrote that the media did not distinguish themselves. “By asking about immigration multiple times and echoing the false narrative that Biden had created a ‘surge,’” she wrote, “they showed they were more interested in sound bites than actual news.” She wrote, “They never laid a glove on Biden; they did, however, make the case for why these events are an utter waste of the president’s time.”

Voting: Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp yesterday signed a law overhauling election law in his state,  limiting mail-in voting, expands most voters’ access to in-person early voting and caps a months-long battle over voting in a battleground state.

  It is clearly designed to suppress votes for Democratic candidates but Kemp said, “With Senate bill 202, Georgia will take another step toward ensuring our elections are secure, accessible and fair.” 

  The bill adds new identification requirements for absentee ballots and moves back the deadline to request one. A record 1.3 million absentee ballots were cast in Georgia last fall, drawing unproven claims of election fraud.

  The 92-page law also makes it a crime to give food or water to people waiting in line to vote.

  Republican politicians across the country are re-writing election laws to limit voting in the belief that they do better when fewer people vote.

  President Biden said at his press conference, “What I’m worried about is how un-American this whole initiative is. It’s sick. It’s sick. Deciding in some states that you cannot bring water to people standing in line waiting to vote, deciding that you’re going to end voting at five o’clock when working people are just getting off work, deciding that there will be no absentee ballots under the most rigid circumstances.” 

Twister: Waves of tornados ripped through Alabama, Georgia, and Tennessee last night, killing five people. Dozens of homes were ripped apart and even levelled.

The Gun Rack: The gun wielded by the Boulder, Colorado shooter reveals the growing popularity of an assault weapon that’s really a rifle but legally treated as a pistol.

  The shooter, Ahmad Al Aliwi Alissa, used a Ruger 556 pistol, which to most people looks like an assault rifle. It’s shorter and configured slightly different. An assault rifle barrel is commonly 16 inches, but a pistol in that category has a 9.5 to 10.5 inch barrel. Instead of a shoulder stock, it has what’s called a “brace” that’s shorter and performs the same function.

  The shortness of the gun makes it easier to stow in the passenger area of a car, a bag, under a coat, and to wield in grocery aisles while randomly killing people.

  It’s also easier to buy. Buying a short-barrel rifle requires a deep background check that could take months and invloves fingerprints, a photo, buying from a specialized dealer, and paying a $200 tax. The largely cosmetic difference of an automatic pistol avoids all that.

  Alissa was able to buy his gun in a day and use it to kill ten people just six days later.

The Spin Rack: The University of Southern California has agreed to pay $852 million to about 700 sexual abuse victims of the school’s former gynecologist. It is by far the biggest such settlement ever made by a university. — The giant container cargo ship wedged in the Suez canal might take days or even weeks to be freed and moving again. It’s causing a massive shipping traffic jam. — New York is on the brink of legalizing recreational marijuana, creating what’s estimated would be a $4.2 billion industry and thousands of jobs.

The Obit Page: Actress Jessica Walters, whose career ranged from playing the obsessed fan of a disc jockey in Clint Eastwood’s 1971 “Play Misty for Me,” to the cutting, martini-swilling matriarch of the Bluth family on the television comedy “Arrested Development,” died in New York City at age 80.

  She specialized in playing women who were a little off beam. “Lucky me, because those are the fun roles,” said in 2012. “They’re juicy, much better than playing the vanilla ingénues, you know.”

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