Some weeks, we pre-empt our own talking points here and just deliver a rant (because sometimes the circumstances seem to almost require it). This week, however, we're going to pre-empt the entire Friday Talking Points column. For some reason, we just don't think handing out awards to Democrats (good and bad) or providing talking points is the important thing, this week. At this point, the Democratic talking points are kind of set in stone; new ones wouldn't do much good with such little time between now and Election Day.

America will head to the polls next Tuesday, and the portents do seem rather ominous. In the early-morning hours, a full eclipse of the moon will be visible coast to coast -- or a "blood moon" as it is sometimes called (because it is going to turn blood-red). Anyone susceptible to superstition and reading omens has got to be a little concerned by that, right?

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Two years ago today, we were all glued to our television sets to find out who had won the 2020 presidential election. We didn't find out that night, of course, we had to wait days and days before the final results were in: Joe Biden had decisively beaten Donald Trump, with the exact same Electoral College split as happened in 2016 -- an election Trump had always liked to refer to as "a landslide."

Since then, Trump stopped merely previewing his Big Lie and instead made it his monomania -- because the one thing he cares more about than anything else in this life is that he is never called "a loser." If Biden had somehow won, that must have somehow meant "the election was rigged," because no other answer was acceptable to his planetary-sized ego.

And we have all paid the price for that narcissistic obsession ever since. It culminated (to date) with an insurrectionist takeover of the United States Capitol on January 6th, 2021 -- a date which will indeed live in infamy in American history. The violent mob wanted to hang the vice president for not somehow magically assuming powers he was not entitled to, in order to stop the official count of the Electoral College's votes and somehow hand the election to Trump -- even though he had clearly lost.

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In the past week or so, the Democratic Party has been doing an excellent job of getting out on the campaign trail and making a closing political argument. Both Barack Obama and Bill Clinton have made or will make appearances. President Joe Biden's speech today is a part of this full-court press, but one has to wonder why it took the Democrats so long to get so engaged with the process.

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Perhaps things aren't quite as bad for Democrats as the storyline the entire political media universe has been echoing for the past week or so. That's the message today, and it is an interesting one indeed for Democrats to see. For a while now, the political press has had a rather gloomy outlook: "Democrats peaked too early on the abortion issue and the momentum has now officially shifted to the Republicans in the midterm election races." Now, I'll admit I haven't been following the polls as closely as I do during presidential election years, so I didn't notice something that has apparently been happening (but, to be fair, few others had commented on it either) -- virtually all of the polling done in the past couple of weeks has been from Republican pollsters, not independent, nationally-known polling organizations. Which could explain the whole "momentum shift" as nothing more than bias induced into the polls themselves.

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Normally, I'd do my cheesy Vincent Price imitation here, with lots of spooky talk and Hallowe'en jokes. But this year's stories are a little grim -- or perhaps "a little closer to reality than usual" is a better way to put it.

I almost didn't do a Hallowe'en column this year, because it's pretty obvious what both sides of the aisle would be frightened by. Who controls Congress after the midterms would have (as always) been the easy way to go with today's stories. I could have easily written the basic tales in one tweet: "Republicans win, Democrats horrified... or Democrats win, Republicans horrified."

But the current political situation is grim indeed, even beyond who controls the House and the Senate in January. One of our major political parties either openly encourages or mocks and makes fun of violence directed against politicians of the other party -- all while insisting on their "both-sides-ism" view that both parties are equally responsible.

Which all made me wonder if writing "horror" stories for Hallowe'en was a little... redundant, maybe, this particular year? We've already got enough political horror in the world, what with the man who may be about to become speaker of the House saying in the past he would have to restrain himself when the handover happened between him and Nancy Pelosi: "I want you to watch Nancy Pelosi hand me that gavel. It will be hard not to hit her with it." To date, since Pelosi's husband was brutally attacked with a hammer, I have not heard a single Republican (much less McCarthy himself) asked about this remark. This is the political reality we live in.

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We have to admit, we're more than a little worried about the upcoming midterm elections. Not about who will win (that's a different subject), but about the elections themselves. Because for the first time in a very long period in American history, one of the major political parties is openly attacking the election system itself. This is a dry run for the 2024 presidential election, and at this point it is impossible to say that Election Day (and the counting of the votes thereafter) won't be marred by intimidation, internal sabotage, and/or outright political violence. And that's a pretty sad state of affairs for American democracy.

The signs are all there. Few are paying enough attention to them, but nobody will be able to express shock and surprise afterwards by saying: "Who could have seen something like this coming?" Because people already are.

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I start with a simple truth: nobody knows what the midterm election results will be. I don't know, you don't know, and the people who get paid to tell you they do also don't know. Of course, this is always true -- nobody can perfectly accurately predict the future -- but it used to be that politics was at least somewhat predictable. Polling would show what the voters were thinking, and it usually played out on Election Day.

That's not really true any more, or a lot less true than it used to be. Pollsters weren't very accurate in the past three election cycles, starting with Donald Trump's surprise win in 2016. There are lots of problems modern pollsters have had in trying to adapt and refine their methodologies, such as fewer and fewer people being willing to even talk to them. Cell phones have changed how pollsters cold-call people. Gathering data online is now a bigger part of the mix for many of them. These are fundamental shifts in the methodology of polling, and some of these shifts have been easier for them to adapt to than others.

Even so -- even taking all the modernizations that have happened into account -- there has been another big reason for the polls to be so inaccurate, and that is the question of who actually turns out to vote.

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President Joe Biden made an announcement today that few people probably watched, but which will nonetheless help tens of millions of American families out in the future. This is all part of an ongoing effort (the president's "Competition Council") to end abusive practices in pricing by corporations and other businesses. Today, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau announced a new rule which will ban banks from charging two "junk fees" that are particularly insidious.

This is good news, and it is not an isolated effort. Biden also pointed to several other rules (which will all help consumers avoid being ripped off) that are in various stages of progress through the federal rule-making process. Of course, this news would have been better politically for Biden if he had been able to announce it a month or two ago, but no matter when it happens in the election cycle, this is still going to wind up saving consumers from hidden "junk" fees in the future. And politically, there is absolutely no one (who is not a bank executive) who is a fan of these abusive business practices. What Biden is attacking is impossible to politically defend, to put this another way.

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Those of us of a certain age will immediately recognize that title as being the catchphrase of Emily Litella. At the dawn of Saturday Night Live, Litella was a character (played by Gilda Radner) who would appear on the "Weekend Update" fake news segment of the show. She would rant and rave about something or another, while getting one or two key words absolutely and utterly wrong. In one memorable appearance, she took to task those who were complaining about "violins" on television. After working herself into an indignant frenzy, Chevy Chase would always gently correct her ("that was violence on television... not violins"), and she'd then abruptly reverse course -- always ending with a prim: "Never mind."

That's what sprang to mind today, when reading that a group of progressive House Democrats were withdrawing a letter they had publicly sent to President Joe Biden yesterday. The letter had urged Biden to enter into direct negotiations with Russia to try to get some sort of ceasefire in their ongoing invasion of Ukraine.

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In a number of races in the midterm elections, an extraordinary thing is happening. Both Democrats and Republicans are backing candidates which are not from their own party. Republicans are endorsing Democrats. Democrats are endorsing Republicans or Independents who lean Republican. Each case, so far, is fairly individual. So this isn't yet a big trend or anything, but it is interesting nonetheless because it shows that in the right circumstances politicians still exist who are willing to put "country above party" -- in other words, supporting candidates they feel would be the best for America's future rather than blindly backing their own party's candidate.

There is a theme that runs through all these races, though. It might be called "protecting democracy," since in each of them there is at least one strong candidate who in one way or another has contributed to or since supported the undermining of our democratic system or our election systems. Or, to put it a different way, unquestioning followers of Donald Trump's Big Lie.

Some of these races have gotten more media attention than others. There are a lot of other stories vying for media attention in this midterm cycle, after all. But I thought it was worth taking a quick look at three of the most notable cases today.

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