On Thursday night, tens of millions of Americans from across the political spectrum tuned in to see how President Joe Biden would perform in his third State of the Union Address. The president’s age and cognitive ability has become a top issue facing his re-election campaign. 

And with the primary election essentially over, Thursday’s speech was considered a pivotal opportunity for the president to demonstrate once and for all that he has the energy and capacity to stay in office until 2029. 

According to a new report from the federal government’s Bureau of Labor Statistics this week, the US economy added 275,000 jobs for the month of February while the unemployment rate rose to 3.9%.

Comparing Great Depression I with the current Great Depression II, the cause has been the same, and the responses have been similar.

But it’s important to not take the parallels too far. The circumstances differ, so the impacts will differ.

First, the similarities.

Lincoln’s God: How Faith Transformed a President and a Nation
by Joshua Zeitz
Viking, 2023; 313 pp.

Joshua Zeitz, a contributing writer to Politico, has written a very useful book. It belongs to an increasingly common genre: books that are very favorable to Abraham Lincoln, in some cases approaching a deification of him, which nevertheless present material that show Lincoln in a less-than-flattering light.

In April 1845, Karl Marx’s mother-in-law sent to the Marx family a nanny named Helene Demuth, known as “Lenchen.” Marx’s long-suffering wife, Jenny, was thrilled.