There will be no new column today, sorry. I had to spend time on minor site maintenance today, which didn't leave time for much else. Advance warning: there will be at least one more future day of site maintenance upcoming, as the site migrates from one server to another at my local ISP, but this should (hopefully) be completely transparent to site users. This will not happen until after the midterm elections, though, so it'll be a few weeks at least until it happens, and I'll try to warn everyone in advance. I will also try to answer some comments tonight, to make up for the lack of column today.

As always, I would comment on the recent domestic terrorism news this week with a blanket condemnation of violence for political ends in just about any circumstance short of a civil war or revolution. Mail bombers are cowards, plain and simple, and deserve no respect or support from anyone sane. The targets' political views do not matter -- this, to me, is universal, period. But then that's long been my position here in these pages and elsewhere. That's likely what I would have written about today, had I time to put together a full column.

-- Chris Weigant

Follow Chris on Twitter: @ChrisWeigant

Does anyone else remember the Soviet Union, and their grandiose "five-year plans"? They'd plan their country's economic future out using these plans, which were always constructed backwards: they would take the result they wanted to achieve, and then work the numbers back from that to show that it would happen (on paper). The thing about them was, though, they were wildly unrealistic and not connected to the reality on the ground at all. So the rest of the world just laughed at them, for the most part.

I've been reminded of all this while watching the amazing progression of President Trump's new promise to pass a ten-percent tax cut for the middle class. It all started with an ad-libbed moment during one of his rallies. Trump obviously went off script, and announced that Congress would pass a ten-percent middle class tax cut "before November!" Before we get to where the idea went after Trump blurted it out, though, it's fun to imagine how it popped into Trump's head in the first place. You can picture him speaking with his speechwriter, just before the rally, demanding: "Make the part of the speech about the economy better -- why are we not bragging more about the tax cut?"

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Two weeks from today the 2018 midterm elections will happen across America. For most voters, this will be the first time since Donald Trump was elected president to register their approval or disapproval in the voting booth. Many voters have, in fact, been eagerly waiting to do so.

We won't know until then what kind of message the electorate will send to Trump. Will it be a big blue wave, as many have been predicting for months? Or will it surprisingly be a red wave, as Trump has been predicting for months? Or perhaps something in between -- a more nuanced result that has some wins and losses for both sides? As always, at this point it's really anyone's guess.

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Nancy Pelosi is not on any ballot outside of San Francisco, but you certainly wouldn't know this fact from seeing all the Republican campaign ads currently running nationwide. Pelosi is pretty much the only demon the GOP has left to demonize, at this point. Barack Obama sailed off into the sunset, and Hillary Clinton is pretty old news these days as well. Until a Democratic frontrunner for the 2020 presidential contest emerges, Pelosi is the biggest target the GOP has to take potshots at. It helps (for them) that she's a "San Francisco liberal," which doesn't have as much negative weight as it used to (it used to be nothing short of a thinly-veiled anti-gay-rights slur), but still arouses a goodly amount of disgust in the Republican heartland. So they've been trying to tie her to just about every Democratic candidate running east of the Sierra Nevadas.

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As usual, there was all sorts of idiocy in the political news last week. But, for a change, we're only going to skim lightly over most of it in an abbreviated weekly roundup, because we've got a special talking points section at the end, where we try our hand at writing a "closing argument" speech for all Democratic congressional candidates to consider using. So there's that to look forward to. Before that, though, let's take a very quick look at the week that was.

President Donald Trump really wants the whole scandal over the killing of Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi to quietly go away. However, this hasn't been happening -- it's been headline news for weeks, and shows no signs of abating. Trump also really wants to just go back to being buddies with the Saudis without anyone looking too closely at how totalitarian their government is. After all, they rolled out the red carpet for him! With a sword dance and everything!

America is now so little respected in the world that dictators who are purportedly our friends feel unrestrained enough to viciously murder an American legal resident inside their own consulate, without the fear of serious consequences. Trump tries to mouth the words, but he obviously doesn't believe that he should be all that concerned with the fate of the guy -- after all, he wasn't a citizen, it didn't happen here, and maybe it was just rogue assassins or something. He continues to parrot the line his advisors have fed him, about how murdering journalists should bring severe consequences, but then he goes out on the campaign trail and praises a Republican congressman for body-slamming a journalist. It's pretty easy to see what Trump really believes about all this, in other words.

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Admittedly, it must be tough to be a California Republican these days. Although not on the official endangered species list, they are still definitely a dying breed. The state's large coastal urban population tilts the state deep blue, so the rural parts of the state are becoming increasingly irrelevant to the state's politics, because they're so outnumbered. The only Republican elected statewide in the past few decades wasn't even really a Republican, he was just an actor playing one for votes. Remember when the rest of the country laughed at California for electing a complete novice to the highest state office solely because of name recognition and the entertainment factor? Seems almost prophetic, these days. The state's "top-two jungle primary" has only made things worse, since now Republicans don't even have their own candidates on the ballot in many races on Election Day. Such is the case this year for the race for a U.S. Senate seat, because Dianne Feinstein will be facing off against fellow Democrat Kevin De León in November. Which got me thinking about a bizarre confluence of events that could actually see Republican voters propel the more liberal candidate into office.

This is just one of the strange situations the jungle primary has begotten. And by pointing it out, I draw no conclusions as to the likelihood of it actually happening. In other words, this is nothing more than sheer speculation on my part. But as strange as it seems, Republican voters may indeed help a very liberal guy defeat a sitting and very centrist Democratic senator.

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Our neighbor to the north made some big news today, as Canada is now the largest country in the world where marijuana can be freely bought, sold, possessed, grown, and used by all of its adult citizens. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has now made good on one of his big campaign promises, and today Canadians from coast to coast began legally purchasing recreational marijuana for the first time since it was outlawed.

In related news: the sun still rose in Canada's east, the sky did not actually fall down, people did not riot in the streets, fire and brimstone did not rain down on the populace, and life as Canadians knew it beforehand went on as usual. Canada is proving by example that marijuana legalization does not mean (as its critics would have you believe) the end of civilization as we know it. Far from it.

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At a first glance, this may resemble a political column, but it's not. Instead, it is a digression to examine the awesome progression of exponential mathematics. No, really. I'm taking a slight break from the political world to opine on the powers of two.

Of course, this idea didn't pop into existence out of a vacuum. There is indeed an event in the political world that gave rise to it. But I already spent yesterday talking about Elizabeth Warren's DNA test, so today I'd like to address a common misperception among anyone claiming any specific ancestry in the far and distant past. Again, Warren's situation provoked this column, but this column is not about her specific case.

I've actually had this entire conversation before, in my private life. A good friend of mine is proud that her family traced her lineage all the way back to the Mayflower. While not dismissing her claim in any way, I pointed out that we all love to trace one single branch out of our family tree, but usually in doing so we discount the thousands upon thousands of others on all the other branches.

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It's hard to see today as anything short of the unofficial launch of the 2020 presidential contest, at least on the Democratic side of the aisle. That may be either exciting or frightening (depending on your view of endless political campaigning in general), but either way it's kind of hard to deny. Because Senator Elizabeth Warren -- again, unofficially -- just threw her hat in the presidential ring, in a big way. She did so by calling President Donald Trump's bluff, which has so far resulted in yet another Trump million-dollar promise being broken.

If it seems a little dated and unusual for presidential candidates in this day and age to be questioned about what degree of whiteness they possess in their genes, well, that's because it is. A century ago and more, such a thing was paramount, of course, since in the Deep South even "one drop" of African-American blood in your family tree made you automatically "black," no matter what your genetic makeup said otherwise. This was a very big deal, back then, to certain people. There were even words used to describe the proportion of white blood to black blood any individual possessed (look up "quadroon" and "octoroon" in a good dictionary).

You'd think that in the year 2018 we'd be beyond such hair-splitting, but apparently we're not. Not with Donald Trump in charge. But in an unusual twist, he's not questioning an opponent because of some secret non-white genetic history, instead he's questioning a claim of non-whiteness because he doesn't believe that Senator Elizabeth Warren's family stories about having Native American ancestry are true. So it's no longer "you're not white enough," but instead "you're totally white, I don't believe you have any other ancestry." This, it should be pointed out, is not exactly progress in racial harmony.

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There's a debate going on right now among the chattering classes in Washington over whether Democrats should be "civil" or, alternatively, whether they should "kick" back at their opponents. No, really. The hilariousness of such a genteel debate seems to have escaped everyone engaging in it, apparently. Because it is pretty funny, when you consider the actual facts. Which show that Republicans completely abandoned civility altogether, right about the same time they started supporting Donald Trump -- and things have (if it's even possible) now gotten even worse in the midterm campaigns. So all they're really doing is attempting to hold Democrats to a standard they don't even pretend to hew to themselves anymore (after decades of being the moralizing, finger-wagging party, it bears mentioning).

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