Another week for me (like you, I’m guessing) spent riding the rollercoaster of family, inflation, COVID, and American politics. As the questions and answers at President Biden’s marathon news conference demonstrated, there is a lot going on in the world right now, but the negative, toxic and confrontational always threaten to crowd out the optimistic, good and inspiring. So let me end our shared week on an upbeat note. How wonderful that two United States senators – Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema – did the right thing at the right time for the right reasons. By opposing the Democratic Party’s effort to scrap long-standing Senate rules giving the minority party the capacity to influence legislation, our two allies genuinely saved us all from an escalation of Blue-Red hostilities that would have been (to use the D.C. term) nuclear. Both senators care passionately about voting rights and ballot integrity, as we all should. Both of them can at times be frustrated by the failure of the two parties to work together. And both of them knew that the votes they cast would tick off their party colleagues, the White House, and progressives around the county. In making the choice to push for more two-party solutions and a better way of governing, Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema showed us all the reality of the possible, that individuals are able to send a loud message to the country that we can, in fact, change the bitter course we have been on for far too long. If you haven’t watched it yet, check out the video we made, contrasting those who practice the partisan politics of personal destruction with the optimism and uplift of these two senators: | 
