Primary election season for the 2018 midterms continues apace. Last night, voters in Maine reaffirmed their commitment to their new "ranked-choice" voting system. Two Democrats in Wisconsin proved why Governor Scott Walker was so right to be scared of holding special elections, as two more state-level legislative seat flipped from Republican to Democratic (which makes 44, and counting...). A brothel owner in Nevada won his primary. In Virginia, a man who defended the white supremacists in Charlottesville won the GOP nomination and will take on Senator Tim Kaine. So there's plenty of election news to talk about today. But instead of addressing any of these, I simply have to chime in on the fact that in my home state of California a ballot measure has now qualified for the November ballot which will allow voters to decide whether to support the idea of splitting California into three states or not.

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Very early this morning (American time), President Donald Trump did something he's only done once before as president: he held a formal solo press conference. It has been almost 500 days since his last one, which he gave during his first month in office. This is rather extraordinary, considering that if any other president had gone such a long time without formally speaking to them there would have been an enormous outcry from the press. It's always been somewhat of a mystery to me why this hasn't happened with Trump, personally. But now Trump has finally given his second solo press conference, so I guess we can expect the next one in another year and a half.

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Donald Trump has apparently decided to take the advice of that impressive fount of political wisdom, South Park. It's hard to come to any other conclusion, really, when you recall that one of the songs from their first big movie (a song nominated for an Academy Award, no less) was titled: "Blame Canada." President Trump was obviously inspired by the lyrics: "With all their beady little eyes / And flapping heads so full of lies," when he began his tweetstorm against Justin Trudeau after Trump left the G-7 meeting early.

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As usual, there was a whole lot of political news this week, as President Trump continues to flail his way around the world in multiple unhinged ways. But this week, our eye was caught by the story that the Trump Justice Department has announced it is now conspiring to hand Democrats the midterm elections. Maybe Trump should appoint a special prosecutor to look into or something?

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President Trump is the ultimate off-the-cuff guy. He has no problem just winging it, on just about any subject under the sun. This week alone, Trump falsely accused Canadians of burning down the White House (they didn't, the British did, over 200 years ago) and reportedly flirted with the idea of just pardoning himself to get rid of all the pesky investigations. He's also decided there will be no formal process for any presidential pardons, other than "a celebrity asks me for one for somebody." Hey, it worked for both Sly Stallone and Kim Kardashian, so why not others? Today, two stories appeared which aren't exactly surprising, but still raised a few eyebrows. The first is that Trump has apparently decided that he doesn't really need a whole lot of briefing for his summit meeting with Kim Jong Un, and that all he really needs is the right "attitude." What could possibly go wrong with that plan? We'll see, next Tuesday, one assumes. But the second report was much more detailed, about a briefing supposedly on disaster preparedness that Trump just got from the Federal Emergency Management Agency, because hurricane season has just begun. Someone present recorded the meeting and leaked the recording to the Washington Post and CNN. So far, only excerpts have been released, but it is sincerely to be hoped that a full transcript will eventually become available, so we can all bask in the splendor of a president unchained.

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I suppose, if one were more classically-minded, that slogan should be: "Year Of The Woman II." But whatever you call it, 2018 is shaping up to be even bigger for the fairer sex than 1992, the original Year Of The Woman in American politics. There are two reasons this is probably soon going to become conventional wisdom (if it already hasn't): impressive women candidates, and suburban and minority women as the key voting demographics.

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Eight states are holding primary elections today, making it the biggest election day until November. One-eighth of the entire country lives in California, making it the biggest primary contest for House races by far. But what people will be watching from the California returns isn't so much who will win each district as who will come in second. This is because of California's bizarre "top-two jungle primary," where only the two top vote-getters in the primary advance to the general election ballot no matter which party they are from. This sets up the possibility of voters being presented with two candidates from the same party, which is inherently unfair to all other political parties. But this time around, the campaigning has gotten downright weird, because people are attempting to game the top-two system like never before.

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It was another rollicking week in the world of politics, which is admittedly not saying much in the era of Trump. It was revealed this week that the death toll on Puerto Rico from Hurricane Maria was not just higher than had been officially reported, but at least seventy times higher, and in fact was more than twice as high as the death toll from Hurricane Katrina. You'd think this would be a gigantic media story, but (sadly) you would be wrong. Just like everything else about the devastation, most certainly including the media's treatment of it, this bombshell report was largely ignored this week. No wonder Puerto Ricans feel like second-class citizens, when they keep getting second-class treatment like this.

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Illinois just became the 37th state to ratify the Equal Rights Amendment. Since the necessary constitutional requirement for adopting amendments is ratification by the state legislatures of three-fourths of the total number of states, this would seem to indicate that if only one more state did so, the Equal Rights Amendment would become the Twenty-Eighth Amendment to the United States Constitution. But it's not quite that simple.

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Representative Trey Gowdy -- not normally known for being a Trump antagonist -- has been publicly debunking the president's new favorite conspiracy theory, in his latest news interviews. This is a somewhat stunning development, and further marginalizes Representative Devin Nunes, who keeps fruitlessly trying to uncover the smoking gun that proves that Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, and other nefarious Democrats somehow entered into a giant plot to use the F.B.I. to further their own political aims. The F.B.I. and the rest of the "Deep State" conspired to put Hillary Clinton in the Oval Office, according to Nunes and the rest of the tinfoil-hat gang. Of course, this conspiracy theory never really gets around to explaining why, if this was the case, the F.B.I. intervened twice to undercut Clinton during the campaign, but never did so for Donald Trump. Recently, Nunes tried again to reveal the supposed truth of his suspicions by forcing a briefing about a confidential F.B.I. informant, initially to just him and Gowdy. Then Nunes would have run to the television cameras with his proof and the entire Bob Mueller investigation would just disappear like the morning dew. Or something. But the bombshell Nunes anticipated turned out to be a dud, once again. And in the past 24 hours, Gowdy has shot the whole "spygate" theory down in flames.

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