Tomorrow is Election Day in certain parts of the country. As usual in odd-numbered years, the handful of major contests to be decided tomorrow night will be seen as a harbinger of what is to come in the 2018 midterm congressional elections. These off-off-year elections always seem to have an outsized effect on the narrative used by the political chattering class, as one party or another once again claims "the wind is at our backs" heading into the midterms. Sometimes these narratives prove to be correct, but other times they are later seen as nothing short of wishful thinking on a national scale. Figuring out the accuracy of the narratives which tomorrow's elections will breed won't be possible for another year, of course, but it won't stop the narratives from spreading in the meantime. Such narratives will certainly have an effect on the midterms, whether correct or not. So even if they prove to be false narratives in the end, they're worth paying attention to for the time being.

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To date, the two best hashtags we've seen to counter the just-released Republican tax plan are #BillionairesFirst and #NotOnePenny, so we decided to use them in our title. Because over the next few weeks, there will be a monstrous messaging battle between Republicans and Democrats over how their new tax cut plan should be framed. Democrats seem poised to win this battle, but then again there is no guarantee that's how it will play out. So today we thought we'd devote a large portion of the column to mustering up the arguments Democrats should immediately start making to any who will listen.

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There's an easy test to see whether Republicans in Congress care about financial deficits: Is there a Democrat in the White House? If so, then deficits are so important that the situation requires threats of government shutdowns and defaulting on the national debt to fight deficit spending. However, if there's a Republican in the White House, then (as Dick Cheney so eloquently put it) "deficits don't matter." This was on full hypocritical display once again this week, as congressional Republicans voted to blow a $1.5 trillion hole in the national debt, so that the wealthy and big corporations can enjoy massive tax cuts.

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While admittedly the Democrats have some fence-mending to do between the two wings of their party, at least their rhetoric doesn't lean quite so much towards military metaphors. But over on the Republican side of the aisle, both sides seem to be using the term "open warfare" to describe what is going on. Steve Bannon was the first to use the belligerent "warfare" terminology, but it now looks like allies of Mitch McConnell are just as committed to a battlefield fight over the course of the next year.

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I have to begin with an apology for that headline... but in the era of Donald Trump, it was impossible to resist. Senator Jeff Flake made the news today by announcing he will not be seeking re-election next year. He did so in a rather spectacular fashion, with a Senate floor speech that came close to denouncing Trump and all he stands for. As time goes by, more and more Republicans are taking the opportunity to do the same thing, but so far this hasn't much impact on the political world beyond the realm of rhetoric. So while I appreciate Flake's statement for the entertainment value alone, I also have serious doubts as to whether it means much in the grand scheme of things.

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Call this the week when White House Chief of Staff John Kelly lost all remaining shreds of credibility. Kelly, as we all know, was supposed to bring the adult supervision to the White House that would magically transform Donald Trump into a serious president. A retired Marine Corps general was going to whip the White House into shape, and clear sailing ahead would thus quickly ensue.

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In a few weeks, there will be elections for two governorships, in New Jersey and Virginia. These off-off-year contests are always closely watched, especially by those hoping for a shift in the balance of power. However, no matter the outcome, these two states aren't always accurate harbingers of how the midterm elections will turn out in the following year. Still, it being an off-off year, political pundits don't have any other key election results to talk about, so expect to be hearing lots of opinionating over the next three weeks or so.

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It's been two months since we last took a look at it, so it seemed like a good time to check in on President Donald Trump's job approval ratings. During this time period, Trump went down, then up, then back down again, finishing up within one point of where he started.

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Here we are again. We all know the drill by now. We all know pretty much what the eyewitnesses will say, what the talking heads on the television will say, and what the politicians will say. None of it ever seems to change, and none of it seems to change anything going forward, either. We go through the cycle of "mass gun attack" and hear the same words over again. We go through the cycle of grief which will then fade, right up to the time when it happens anew all over again. This is, sadly, the new normal for America.

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As we sat down to write this, the news broke that Secretary of Health and Human Services Tom Price has resigned. So, of course, we immediately had to come up with a snappy "price" pun for our title. We could have gone with the Rolls Royce slogan ("If You Have To Ask The Price, You Can't Afford It"), or maybe "The High Price Of Airfare These Days," but both are kind of wordy. So we had to settle for "Price Break!" (we did consider "Price Cut," but that would have been more appropriate if he had actually been fired). The news of Price's resignation came immediately following the news that President Donald Trump was going to decide -- tonight -- whether to fire him or not. So, one way or another, the Price would have been lowered, so to speak.

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