OK, I can't resist, so let's start off with: "Hear ye, hear ye! President Joe Biden has successfully gotten rid of an outdated and unnecessary rule, which will save millions of people thousands of dollars each." How's that for some good news to start the week? From now on, anyone will be able to walk into a drug store and buy a hearing aid over the counter. No doctor's appointment or prescription will be required.

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Maybe he'll actually take the bait, who knows?

Maybe Donald Trump's planet-sized ego and rampant unbridled narcissism will convince him that there just is no possible downside to testifying in front of the January 6th House Select Committee. This isn't just idle speculation, as hours after yesterday's hearing New York Times reporter Maggie Haberman posted the following (which has since been similarly reported in multiple media outlets):

Since it became public that the House select committee planned to subpoena Trump for his testimony, the former president has been telling aides he favors doing so, so long as he gets to do so live, according to a person familiar with his discussions. However, it is unclear whether the committee would accept such a demand.

Sounds like a plan. Put him on live television. He'd love it. He'd get great ratings (which is truly all he cares about when appearing on television), since tens of millions would watch. All his MAGA followers would watch to cheer for Trump, and the rest of the country wouldn't be able to resist watching, just to see the fireworks. The nation's strategic popcorn reserves would run dangerously low, that's our guess.

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The House Select Committee investigating January 6th presented the ninth in their series of televised hearings today, although (as we were informed at the start by Chair Bennie Thompson) this was not technically a hearing, but rather a business meeting for the committee. The reason for this change became evident at the end, when the committee voted publicly and unanimously to subpoena the testimony of Donald John Trump.

That was certainly a blockbuster or a bombshell (take your pick of explosive metaphors), and it is to the committee's credit that they kept it under wraps until today.

Today's hearing was billed as the culmination of the committee's entire presentation to the public. As always, they have left the door open to hold future public hearings, but the expectation is that this will be the final one. At the very least, there are no more hearings scheduled before the midterm elections -- which will determine the future of the committee itself. If the Republicans manage to take back control of the House, then one of their first orders of business is going to be to disband the committee.

Knowing this, the committee is preparing a final report, which will likely be issued somewhere between Thanksgiving and Christmas. Their initial intent was to provide some sort of draft report before the election happened, but that is now not going to happen.

So today was it, really, barring any unforeseen evidence suddenly coming to light.

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The moral divide between the two major American political parties has become pretty stark. On the one hand, you have a party which stands for respect, inclusiveness, diversity, and multiculturalism; and on the other you have a party which no longer even feels the necessity to cloak its racist language in "dog whistles" anymore. Dog whistles are so passé, at least over on the Republican side of the aisle today. All manner of bigotry (including racism) is now not something for the GOP to condemn or punish or even be ashamed about, instead it is to be either enabled (by saying nothing) or actually celebrated in front of throngs of cheering crowds.

Of course, like most of the breakdown in civilized and upright behavior over on the right, this can mostly be laid at Donald Trump's feet. Not the racism or bigotry itself, mind you (which has certainly been around a lot longer than Trump has been on the political stage), but the embrace and naked admission of it all in public -- which might be called Trump's signature move.

Two incidents over the past week have put this on display in rather obvious fashion. A Los Angeles city politician was caught on tape saying some reprehensible and racist things. And a sitting U.S. senator bellowed some reprehensible and racist things at a political rally. One was a Democrat, one a Republican.

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That title is, of course, a play on words. Just like every other kid who grew up in the Space Age, I have always found space to be rather cool. Watching astronauts walk on the moon is one of my earliest memories, in fact. But if that's truly what I was imparting here -- just an enthusiasm for mankind's forays into the void -- it would have been exclamatory: "Space Rocks!" Instead, it has a more literal meaning, without any verb implied. Because space isn't exactly "full" of rocks wheeling around out there, but there are enough of them that one of them could threaten Earth at some future point. If the space rock was big enough, it could even cause an "extinction-level event," much like the impact which wiped out the dinosaurs. There's even a whole movie genre devoted to the problem: from the 1950s When Worlds Collide to the more-modern Deep Impact and Armageddon to the more recent (and much more cynical) Don't Look Up.

An impact from an asteroid or comet is rather unique in the realm of natural disasters, because unlike earthquakes or hurricanes or tornados, if the circumstances were right it might be possible to prevent the disaster. And today NASA announced that their first-ever attempt to test a system for doing so was (you'll excuse the pun) a smashing success.

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We seem to be entering the homestretch of the midterm election cycle, and I should begin by pointing out that this term is loaded with meaning. A "homestretch," of course, is the last part of a race, generally a horse race. So that's what the political media reports on -- the "horserace" aspect of the contest. Or, put more simply: the polls. But the reputation of professional pollsters has taken quite a beating over the past six years, as they have been proven surprisingly wrong time and time again. So everyone should cast a very skeptical eye over all the polls we'll all be hearing about over the next month. Because the recent polling miscalls (most notably in 2016 and 2020) can all be boiled down to one key cause: pollsters cannot accurately predict who is going to turn out to vote.

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We were reminded of an old political saying this week: "Only Nixon could go to China." Only a president who was long known as a staunch anti-communist warrior could open up American relations with communist China in the depths of the Cold War, without being painted as some sort of pinko/commie back home. This week's update might read: "Only Biden could pardon weed crimes." Joe Biden, before he became Barack Obama's vice president, had spent much of his life in the Senate being the biggest, baddest drug warrior around. He actually coined the term "drug czar" and worked with the Reagan administration to make the Office of National Drug Control Policy a reality. He's never been pro-legalization in any way, a fact that didn't exactly help him in the 2020 Democratic primaries. But there he was yesterday, taking the first steps away from the War On Weed that any U.S. President has ever taken.

Biden, of course, won't face any sort of political payback for his move. The American public is now overwhelmingly against marijuana still being illegal. Three-fourths of the states now allow it to be used medicinally. Currently adults can legally buy and smoke weed recreationally in 19 states and the District of Columbia. Next month, the citizens of five more states will vote on whether to fully legalize recreational use. The tipping point was reached a long time ago, but up until now the federal government has not made any move whatsoever to acknowledge this new reality.

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[The scene: A room deep within the Republican Party headquarters. Applicants are being screened as possible future candidates for office. There is a panel of GOP bigwigs behind a table, as the door opens and a rather large creature with reddish skin enters and takes a seat facing the panel.]

"Hello, Mister... um... Beer... zyub?"

"It's actually pronounced: 'Be-el-ze-bub.'"

"Oh, OK, that certainly is an... um... unusual name." The panel's chair glanced left and right and met worried expressions. "Is it some sort of ethnic thing? We could work with that, if it's one of the ones we approve of, of course."

"It's root is actually Philistine, but the Canaanites had a simpler name for me, if that would help -- Baal."

"Mr. Ball... Ball... yes, I think that might be easier for the voters to remember."

"It's Baal, not 'ball,' but I'm used to hearing that one."

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The Republican Party has gone through a number of complete 180-degree ideological turns in the past few years (since Donald Trump's hostile takeover bid), but one of the most shameless is how they have now perfected a tactic they used to roundly criticize Democrats for using: "Playing the victim card." A few decades back, when marginalized groups started demanding real political power (or even just "a seat at the table"), Republicans would heap scorn on them for "playing the victim card." To them, this meant these marginalized groups were trading on the injustices they had suffered throughout history to get favored status that would dilute the power of straight White males. They rarely came out and admitted it in such stark terms, but that was at the heart of it. By their rights, these marginalized people should have just pulled themselves up by their bootstraps and achieved the American dream and power without any help or consideration from society at large. As far as Republicans were concerned, playing the victim card was a bad and weak and shameful thing to do.

Now, however, Republicans absolutely revel in playing whole decks of victim cards. They've turned it into a farcical artform, in fact. Because they have learned that their own followers support them even more when they can paint any transgression under the sun as the fault of those who pointed it out. It doesn't matter what the transgression is or even how serious, because it will soon get lost in all the victim games they trot out. Trump himself is the master of doing so, and other Republicans have been taking note.

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Once again, the Ukrainian military has impressed the world and humiliated Vladimir Putin's Russia. Whole Russian battlefronts are collapsing, in two major areas of the country. In one, the Russians apparently were ordered to pull back, but in the other they were just plain overrun by Ukrainian advances. Militarily, significant gains have been made (and are being made, even as I write this), but there is still a whole lot of occupied territory left for Ukraine to retake (just to keep things in perspective). But for the time being, Ukraine has scored both a psychological victory and a very real military one on the ground.

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