The Cleveland Indians' season is over. While this was a cause for sadness among their fans, there is also a good reason for everyone else to rejoice at the close of Cleveland's 2018 season. Because the 71-year tenure of the maniacally grinning and blatantly racist Cleveland mascot "Chief Wahoo" is also now at an end. Sort of. The Indians, starting next season, will not display this offensive logo any more on their uniforms -- however, they will still (sadly) continue to sell Chief Wahoo merchandise to their fans. A step forward, in other words, but not the true end of the road for what unquestionably has to be the most racist and offensive logo in modern professional sports.

For those of you who don't follow baseball and may be unaware of precisely how offensive this logo is, please decide for yourselves:

In this day and age, that is an image that is absolutely impossible to defend, on any reasonable grounds. Change the skin color to black (and remove the feather), and it would be nothing short of a version of Little Black Sambo. Which no sane team owner today would pick for a logo for their franchise, it goes without saying.

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Four weeks from tomorrow, America will vote in the 2018 midterm congressional elections. We're officially in the homestretch now, in other words. And even with all the recent political events, things stand pretty much how they have all year -- Democrats are still favored to take control of the House of Representatives, but Republicans are still favored to retain control of the Senate. The political pundits right now are focusing too tightly on possible effects of the Brett Kavanaugh Supreme Court fight, but the bigger picture hasn't really shifted all that much.

Democrats are still confident (perhaps too confident) that a big blue wave is a-comin', which will wash dozens of Republicans right out of Congress. Republicans are confident (definitely too confident) that "the polls were wrong once, so that means they'll always be wrong," and that their own base has now woken up and will match Democrats' enthusiasm at the polls due to successfully seating another conservative on the Supreme Court.

Personally, I'm not ready to buy into either argument quite yet, for the simple fact that we've still got four whole weeks to go. And, in the age of Trump, four weeks is an absolute eternity. Anything could happen, and if the past is any prologue, it probably will. I'm reserving overall judgment until we're a lot closer to Election Day, myself.

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Brett Kavanaugh is going to be confirmed to the Supreme Court tomorrow. That was the breaking news this afternoon, as Senators Jeff Flake, Susan Collins, and Democrat Joe Manchin all indicated that they're going to vote in favor of Kavanaugh's confirmation. Republican Lisa Murkowski had briefly given rise to hope on the Democratic side when she announced she'll be voting against confirmation, but as things stand now Vice President Mike Pence won't even be required to break a tie, because tomorrow (if every senator votes how they now say they will) the total will be 51 votes for confirmation to 49 against.

This brings an end to the most extraordinary court fight since Clarence Thomas. For three weeks, America has been riveted by the drama that played out at the very end of the confirmation process. From the initial accusations to the lengthy hearing where Dr. Christine Blasey Ford told her story and Brett Kavanaugh showed his true temperament, to the dramatic move by Jeff Flake which forced a week's delay, to today's final vote announcements, the entire process has been completely consuming the political world for weeks.

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It has long been said that when every single U.S. senator looks in the mirror each morning, he or she sees a U.S. president looking back at them. In reality, making the leap from the Senate to the White House is actually quite rare in modern American history -- before Barack Obama managed the feat in 2008, it hadn't happened since John F. Kennedy's win in 1960. But that doesn't really matter to the senators, as they all still see themselves as valid contenders for the presidency anyway, each and every morning.

Currently, there are quite a number of senators who are mulling a 2020 bid, although almost all of them are Democrats. The obvious reason for this is that Donald Trump is still in his first term as president, and therefore is already the presumptive 2020 Republican nominee. Any Republican who decides to challenge him will have a very steep hill to climb, as is the case with any sitting first-term president. But there's one senator who is reportedly considering such a move, even though he won't actually still be in the Senate in two years. Sitting senator or not, though, Jeff Flake certainly sees himself as a viable alternative to Trump.

This is somewhat delusional, in reality. But things could always change. Two years is a long time for any politician, and it's an absolute eternity for Donald Trump. Anything could happen between now and then, and Flake must surely be hoping something cathartic will eventually trip Trump up. It's really the only way he'd have any sort of chance at dethroning Trump, no matter what that guy in the mirror tells him every morning.

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We could all use a dose of good news right about now, which is why it was heartening to hear that the leader of Amazon just announced he would be raising his employees' pay so that nobody working for his company will make less than $15 an hour. That's good news for hundreds of thousands of American families, and it deserves to be praised and celebrated. But the lion's share of the thanks really should go to a politician, because if Senator Bernie Sanders hadn't publicly shamed Amazon's Jeff Bezos, this probably never would have happened.

The two are now buddies, at least if their Twitter feeds are any indication. They've both had warm words for each other since the announcement was made, with Sanders giving Bezos credit for acting and Bezos giving Sanders credit for his efforts to ensure that all full-time workers receive a living wage. Bezos even committed to pushing Congress to increase the federal minimum wage for all, and he could now bring some real weight to that argument.

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America now awaits the results of the F.B.I.'s new investigation into Brett Kavanaugh's truthfulness with bated breath. Will they uncover anything? Will they provide clarity? Will they prove he was telling the truth or blatantly lying? We've all got until Friday to wonder what will be in their final report.

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Five weeks from tomorrow, the 2018 midterm elections will happen. But, as we all know, a lot can happen in five weeks (especially these days). Up until about two weeks ago, the conventional wisdom had coalesced into a belief that the Democrats were more likely than not to take control of the House of Representatives, but also that they'd probably fall short in the Senate. However, within those two weeks, the Brett Kavanaugh confirmation fight has taken an unexpected turn. And today, perhaps as a very early "October surprise," President Trump announced a new trade deal with both Mexico and Canada. So it's time to consider what impact these two events might have on the midterms, if any.

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When we thought about what to write in today's article, we had a pretty good idea of what we were going to say. But then, as sometimes happens, events overtook us. As of this writing, the Senate Judiciary Committee has now voted to recommend Brett Kavanaugh to the full Senate for a confirmation vote. However, while Senator Jeff Flake did vote along party lines, he also apparently demanded something in return -- which was precisely the thing Democrats have been calling for all along: reopening the F.B.I.'s background investigation into Kavanaugh, due to all of the new accusations against him back when he was a student. Almost immediately, Senator Lisa Murkowski backed up Flake and said she too supported letting the F.B.I. do their job before she would be willing to vote to confirm him. Since the Republicans only enjoy a 51-49 majority, two defections is all it would take for Kavanaugh not to be confirmed in the final vote.

Chuck Grassley, the chair of the Judiciary Committee, bowed to the inevitable by punting the football to Mitch McConnell. This was appropriate, since Grassley has now done his job and secured the committee vote -- the floor vote before the full Senate is entirely up to McConnell. The rather surprising thing is that Donald Trump also completely deferred to McConnell, saying he'd agree to wait if the Senate wanted to delay the vote. Later, Trump completely caved and instructed the F.B.I. to reopen the background check into Kavanaugh, which is supremely ironic (if you'll pardon the pun), since this was exactly what Republicans have been fighting so hard against for the past two weeks. All the histrionics from the Republicans were ultimately for naught, and the F.B.I. will now be allowed to do their job anyway. As the Democrats have been demanding, all along. And as should have happened two weeks ago.

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Well, that was certainly an interesting nine hours, wasn't it?

I write this immediately after having watched the gavel-to-gavel coverage of the Christine Blasey Ford / Brett Kavanaugh hearing in front of the Senate Judiciary Committee. My strongest reaction takes the long view, because I think in 20 or 30 years' time, Christine Blasey Ford's name will be as recognizable as Anita Hill's still is today. No matter what happens next, this was definitely a historic moment.

This article's title comes from the definition of post-apocalyptic: after the apocalypse. This continues the metaphor which started when then-Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid went with what was called at the time "the nuclear option" -- changing the Senate's rules so that all judicial appointments below the level of the Supreme Court could no longer be filibustered. Majority Leader Mitch McConnell later launched his own retaliatory nuclear strike on the Supreme Court confirmations. So, with both sides having "dropped a nuke" each, we are now in a political landscape that can only be described as post-apocalyptic.

I am reminded, in fact, of one of the most jarring lyrics from the rock band Yes (who normally wrote some rather ethereal and uplifting lyrics). In the song "Yours Is No Disgrace," however, one line appears which seems to fit what we just witnessed: "Death-defying, mutilated armies scatter the Earth. Crawling out of dirty holes, their morals, their morals disappear." At this point, that seems an apt description of our post-apocalyptic politics.

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President Donald Trump just achieved a rather dubious distinction -- one he has often falsely levelled at previous presidents, in fact. Because President Trump has now officially and quite literally become the laughingstock of the world.

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