Senator John McCain is, as I type this, awaiting the results of today's Arizona primary election. The outcome will likely be that he will once again obtain the Republican Party's nomination for his Senate seat. But the results will probably be a lot closer than any of McCain's other primary races, because he is facing a Tea Party (or perhaps "Trumpesque") challenger who actually has a chance to unseat McCain. Discontent with McCain (and Establishment Republicans in general) from the Republican base voters is palpable -- so much so that McCain has been forced to support Donald Trump's campaign, even after Trump personally insulted him (and all American prisoners of war, for good measure) in a very public manner. But even if McCain, as expected, wins tonight, he'll then go on to face a Democratic challenger in what could also be a very tight race for him.

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Republicans have now, by my count, missed two rather large opportunities to improve their general standing with Latino voters. Donald Trump's speech Wednesday (unless it is further postponed or even cancelled outright, of course) might just become the third big missed opportunity. This is a problem entirely of the Republicans' making, since they are caught in a spiral of trying to prove (to each other) how pure their opposition to immigration truly is. They keep redefining the ugly term they toss around (at each other) to describe apostates on the subject, and now will label anything short of deporting 11 million people as "amnesty." This is the trap Trump found himself in, all last week.

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It's still only August, but already the predictions that this would be an exceedingly banal presidential election campaign look like they've already come true. This week's campaign news might be summed up as an elementary school playground shouting match: "You're a bigot!" "No, you're a bigot!" Sigh. We've still got over two months of this to get through, folks. And nobody sane expects things are going to get any better any time soon -- quite the opposite, in fact.

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Some weeks, it's tough coming up with a subtitle for these columns. Some weeks, not so much. This is one of the latter, because the juxtaposition of a colorful (to say the least) description of Donald Trump with a soap opera's title just naturally presented itself.

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It's one of those days where you can freely pick your favorite movie metaphor to describe the news from the campaign of Donald Trump. "Nobody puts Baby in a corner," perhaps? Ben Shapiro, a former editor of none other than Breitbart News, was being interviewed on CNN where he came up with "a turd tornado." When asked, Shapiro helpfully defined the term: "Well, it's like a sharknado -- except with poop." I'm personally going to go with a favorite West Wing reference, one Trump himself actually seems comfortable with: Trump's campaign is now going to fully commit to "letting Trump be Trump." Because, obviously, the problem all along has been that Trump wasn't being Trump enough. Obviously.

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It's Monday, so Donald Trump just stood up in front of the cameras and read another speech off a TelePrompTer. For the second week in a row, this is supposed to present Trump as being a serious-minded candidate who can manage to "be presidential" when required. But if the past is any prologue, by the end of the week nobody's going to even remember this speech, because by then Trump will have had at least two or three blowups out on the campaign trail -- which will become the story, instead.

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This column has always loved a good rant. Most of the time, we provide our own rant at the end of the column, on a subject too big to be contained in talking points. This week, we provide a number of rants from Republicans about their very own party's presidential nominee. Yes, it's only August and the Republican Party is coming apart at the seams. Which, of course, makes for great summertime reading for all!

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The Drug Enforcement Agency finally just released its long-awaited decision, and it was a disappointing one for anyone hoping for a sane realignment of federal policy towards marijuana. Marijuana will remain a Schedule I dangerous controlled substance, although (the one silver lining) the federal monopoly on marijuana legally grown for scientific research purposes will end, and multiple sites will be allowed (only one now exists). This will help expand medical research on marijuana -- something that the federal government has been actively discouraging for decades, now. So at least there's that. But the D.E.A.'s refusal to recognize that (as Dylan once said) the times they are a-changing means that federal marijuana policy reform is likely to happen from one of two other possible routes.

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It has been an extraordinary two weeks on the presidential campaign trail, but then again that statement could have been uttered pretty much at any point during the past year and still have been just as true. This time around, I'm referring to Donald Trump obviously starting to consider the possibility that he's going to lose the general election. He never used to talk about (or even acknowledge) this possibility before now, but all his dismal post-convention polling may have forced him to begin to think about it.

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It's been a long few weeks covering the two national political conventions, and aside from last Friday, this is really the first day I have had with an open column -- one not predetermined by events or the calendar. And a whole lot has been going on in the meantime. I'm not even going to pretend to cover it all today, instead I'm going to offer up a few random vignettes in the form of brief and disconnected paragraphs. As always when I'm in this kind of mood, I will be doing so in homage to the late, great Herb Caen, master of "three-dot" journalism in San Francisco.

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