Watching State of the Union addresses is one of my least favorite parts of what I do at TPM. I find them a mix of tedious and stressful to watch. By and large they don’t matter. I’d prefer not to watch them. But it’s part of the job. This was very different from any of the State of the Union addresses I’ve seen in 40-plus years of watching them.

Joe Biden isn’t a particularly rousing public speaker normally. The first 10 or 15 minutes of his address were fairly boilerplate, occasionally halting. The substance was pitched toward mid-sized and small towns in post-industrial America. This was unsurprising but well-executed. But then it went somewhere entirely different, not in substance but in presentation, energy and tone.

I don’t need to describe the speech to you because you presumably saw it. Here are the two points that stood out to me.

Back to my Miami Herald reading list. This evening I got a new headline via email: “Florida high school board to hold emergency meeting after menstruation question controversy.” What’s the “menstruation question controversy,” you ask? Since I’m up to date on Florida politics, I can clue you in.

The Florida High School Athletic Association recently ruled that on the standard form to play high school sports in Florida there will now be a mandatory question about whether a student athlete menstruates: Date of first period, days between periods, most recent period. The strong suspicion is that this was a way to ferret out trans athletes, since it’s not clear why the coaching staff or the schools (where the records would be stored) would have any medical need for this information. Others feared it would be used to find proof of illicit abortions. These forms aren’t protected by anything like HIPAA. Coaches, staff or whoever else can just pull them out of the bank box and see what they say.

From The Springfield News-Leader …

Federal law enforcement officers say they seized 11 guns, a silencer, more than 1,000 rounds of ammunition, body armor plates and several pounds of a binary explosive from a Springfield man with ties to the Boogaloo extremist anti-government group.

I subscribe to a bunch of regional papers, mainly in swing states or states that tend to be politically kinetic. It comes in handy at election time and it keeps me up to speed on things outside the national news generally. One of those papers is The Miami Herald. In the DeSantis Era that turns out to be quite a trip. Almost every day I get an email about some new gambit of his, each of which seems aimed generally at paving the way for his 2024 presidential campaign and specifically at owning the libs. That’s his program, essentially.