I know it is not obligatory that I understand why the Supreme Court takes up the cases it does.  Especially this Supreme Court.  That said – I don’t even begin to understand why the Supreme Court has taken up the case, pushed by Trump and MAGOPs, about when you can count mail-in ballots, that only mail-in ballots received by Election Day should be allowed to be counted – not (as is the case now) counting every mail-in ballot that has been postmarked by Election Day.

As far as I understand reality, the issue with voting is when the ballots were cast.  Not when they were counted.  Ballots could sit around for days before anyone decided to count them.  And the results would still be official. 
 
California does, of course, begin counting votes on Election Night – but the state is so populous they notoriously don’t finish counting their votes for weeks.  In fact, county officials in California have a full month to count and certify their votes.  Are the votes they count after Election Night not supposed to be considered valid?
 
Let’s go further and compare.  In the 2024 general election, 15 million people cast ballots in California.  On the other hand, in Wyoming, there were 260,000 votes recorded.  Just as a pure guess, I’d think it takes more time to count votes in California than Wyoming.  Would it proper to penalize states that have more people living in them and therefore require more time to count their votes?  No, obviously. And we don’t do so.  But if MAGOPs don’t want mail-in votes counted after Election Night – why don’t we stop counting after midnight? 
 
For that matter, my sense from following results on Election Nights is that many states stop counting votes around 11 PM and send everyone home.  So, if votes are only qualified if they’re counted on Election Night, does that mean that people who got their votes registered on time, but not counted before registrars got tired and went home would have their ballots invalidated?
 
If so, then what would keep states from sending vote counters home when the candidates they want to win have more votes?

Obviously that’s not going to happen – it’s ludicrous.  But…the question remains.  Which is why this MAGOP challenge to mail-in vote counting is ludicrous.
 
But let’s take it to the next logical step.  If mail-in ballots aren’t supposed to be counted if they arrive after Election Day, even if they were postmarked and registered before then, it should follow (to be fair), then no votes should be counted after Election Night.  Which would then raise the question about recounts?  If you can’t count votes after Election Night…why should you be allowed you re-count them days after Election Night??  You are, of course, and should be allowed to.  But why not mail-in votes?
 
Again, the whole point with voting is when the votes were cast, not when they were counted!
 
Fun Fact:  Mail-in ballots have been counted after Election Day since before the Civil War.
 
I don’t even begin to understand why even this Supreme Court agreed to take up this case.  It strikes me as profoundly illogical and idiotic, to the extent that if the law as it stands in every state is overturned and mail-in votes can only be counted on the day of the election, it raises so many more issues and so many more massive problems.  Which are unnecessary because – the whole point with voting is when the votes were cast, not when they were counted!
 
But then, when any question that relates to why “this” Supreme Court would act – that pretty much provides the answer.  Along with the concept of illogical and idiotic.
 
Who knows how they’ll decide?  They may rule that the case is illogical and idiotic.  Or not.  But I don’t even begin to understand why they took it up.  Even this Supreme Court.
 
But they’re “this Supreme Court.”  And not only do I not have to understand why on earth they do what they do, neither – as it’s so often happened – do lawyers.

If you didn't see "Last Week Tonight" with John Oliver last night, his Main Story was about Structured Settlement companies.  Now, wait, before you way, "Wha, hunh??"  Those are the companies like all those J.G. Wentworth ads with fake opera singers (or whoever) singing about getting "cash now".  It's actually a very interesting report on what these companies actually do and how reprehensible they can be -- and is also fertile ground for a lot of humor.

I was trying to figure out what new story (out of so many) to write about for today, after my return from Chicago, and suddenly an offbeat thought occurred to me.  Offbeat because it’s just pure venting that will have zero impact, but one can only hope that others are feeling the same thing, and that the zeitgeist vent with fill up the same and clog it until it overflows.
 
Before getting to the venting – or more a case of expressing bewilderment – I should note (since it overlaps with the issue here) that I have long-since given up expecting the MAGOP to do anything other than enable Trump.  At least until after the Mid-Term elections when he will officially be a lame duck, and their party gets pummeled.  So, while much of what I write here could pertain to the MAGOP, that’s a separate matter and not related to my vent.
 
What bewilders me, though, and infuriates me, is that the news media still handles Trump’s clear mental collapse with dementia and malignant narcissism (both actual diseases, not quaint, hyperbolic expressions) as if he’s just “glitching,” or just going off-track, or just rambling, or just “being Trump.”
 
It’s not only that a small handful of the media ever use the “dementia” word (and other than Lawrence O’Donnell, almost none ever use it regularly, despite it being on public display regularly), but that few seriously address that Trump merely has the polite term of “cognitive issues.”  Some do reference it when it’s impossible to ignore a particular action (like continually falling asleep during public events), but even at that it’s just mentioned as something offhanded, not as an actual, serious medical condition affecting the U.S. president and commander-in-chief of U.S. military forces who has his finger on the nuclear button.
 
President Joe Biden had clear cognitive issues.  Every psychologist I read said that while they were issues, they were normal ones that are a regular part of aging.  They weren’t diseases.  And no psychologist I read said that he had dementia.  But when President Biden did anything that appeared cognitive related, it became headline news covered by the media as “Oh, my God, what are we going to do about the U.S. president???!!!!”  (And they did so even when he didn’t do anything cognitively concerning.  At an event on the White House lawn, President Biden was seen wandering around, looking completely lost while others were gathered together and addressing the camera.  But a different camera shot from a wider angle showed he was actually just looking for something and making sure helicopter pilots there were okay.  Yet it was the first image that got almost exclusively shown and covered as being “alarming.”)
 
And we saw this news coverage of President Biden happen all the time – time after time after time after time after time.  Not just covered, but often (if not usually) the headline story.  Over and over and over.  “What is wrong with the President??!!”  Never mind that psychologists were saying that it was normal old age.  Not ideal for a president, to be sure, and definitely bad moments, but not an illness, and nothing that showed he was incapable of overall doing his job, nor (most importantly) literally putting the country at risk.
 
And then there’s Trump.
 
I’m not going to attempt a full list.  It would be much too long.  And lose to point.  But this is just a random collection of a few especially lunatic things that come to mind that psychologists have pointed to as being the kinds of things that are signs of dementia.  And the point, too, is not that these things show dementia or merely “cognitive failings,” but rather that they’ve all been largely ignored as even problematic for a U.S. president – just Trump being Trump -- whereas they’d be headline concerns (and deservedly so) if President Biden had done any of them.  Let alone all of them.  And more.
 
So, just for example:
 
There have been regular instances of Trump unable to think of a word, and instead making up a new, fake word that sounds similar and then quickly changing the subject.  “Illegal adlinthin”, “Renoversh”, “Pivobal”, “Patri-skfjsk”, “Chrishus”, “Space capiscle”, “Carrydite-byeraye-(sigh)-en” and many others. Media dismissed these as “glitches” or “slurring,” but psychologists said, no, these are examples of what’s known as ‘paraphasia,” which is a medical term for a sign of dementia.
 
At a campaign Town Hall event, Trump stopped taking questions from the crowd and then literally danced or just stood around swaying to the music for about a half hour on the stage.
 
Trump went wandering around on the roof of the White House -- and when asked questions by the press when they realized he was up there (like, “What are you doing on the roof, Mr. President??!”), yelled his comments to them far down on the ground below.  And, for some reason, made a hand sign of a bomb exploding.
 
At a White House Christmas party event for families, Trump suddenly shifted to telling a story about deadly snakes in South America for about 15 minutes.
 
At a White House Easter event last month, Trump sat down at a table with little children and began telling them about autopens and how President Biden supposedly couldn’t sign his name.
 
Trump keeps making ludicrous statements that he’s somehow convinced himself is true, Most notably repeating that "We've never had a president that solved one war". 
 
Trump has said several times that Joe Biden was president on Jan. 6, contrary to reality, of course, when insurrectionists were rioting on behalf of keeping Trump himself in office.
 
Trump repeatedly told a story of helicopter trouble when he was with Black politician Willie Brown – despite Brown saying he’d never been on a helicopter with Trump, and Black politician Nate Holden explained the story was about him, and happened very differently.  Yet Trump not only ignored reality and continued telling his story, but threatened to sue a newspaper that printed Brown and Holden’s corrections. (The medical term in psychiatry for this is "confabulation," when people remember false information in vivid detail.)
 
We now regularly see Trump fall asleep at events. Which the White House tries to explain Trump’s closed eyes as him “blinking.”

At a White House event when someone in Oval Office collapsed a few feet from Trump and others rushed to help, Trump sat there seemingly oblivious to the health concern and commotion going on around him. Eventually, he got up and wandered off.
 
Again, the point here isn’t that any of these are examples of dementia (though many very clearly are, from what psychologists write and say on podcasts.) Or that so many other things like these have relentlessly occurred.  (Or that I’m leaving out so many other things are just plain disturbing for a U.S. president, let along an 80-year-old man, and not normal on their own – like last week Trump once again tweeting 55 times in a three-hour span in the middle of the night, an average of once every three minutes!)  It’s that all of these have happened and keep happening, over and over and over, and are getting worse.  And that so many people, I’m sure, want to say after each one – “Imagine if President Biden did this.”  It would be a major story.  Each one would be, after each one after each one after each one.  And yet, each one – all of them – are totally ignored as even problematic by most of the media, or at most are just described as just Trump being Trump.
 
In fairness, it is “Trump being Trump.”  The problem is that “Trump being Trump” is someone who has dementia, which is degenerative.
 
And importantly, it’s not what I’m saying, calling it dementia, let alone mere “mental cognitive issues.”  It’s what expert psychologists and psychiatrists and mental health professionals say.  I’m just relating their words, or at times in previous articles, quoting them.
 
There are all the many, countless times when in the middle of telling a story, Trump loses his train of thought and suddenly switches to another, unrelated story, completely off-topic and goes on at length.  The media quotes Trump calling this “weaving,”– but expert psychologists who actually study such things say that what Trump is doing and how he does it is called “tangentiality,” an actual medical term for a sign of dementia.
 
In fact, as far back as 2019, there were 27 psychologists and mental health experts who wrote an anthology on Trump’s mental health failing.  “The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump: 27 Psychiatrists and Mental Health Experts Assess a President.”  Since then, in the book’s most recent edition, that number has risen to 37 professional experts participating. 

Live from the University of Indiana, on this week's 'Not My Job' segment of the NPR quiz show "Wait, Wait…Don't Tell Me!", the guest contestant is six-time Olympic Gold Medal-swimmer Lilly King, who still lives there in Bloomington.  It's a fun, lively conversation with host Peter Sagal about how she got into swimming, getting proposed to at Olympic Trials, the expectation of winning and trash talking at races.

This is the full Wait, Wait… broadcast, but you can jump directly to the "Not My Job" segment, it starts at the 20:30 mark.

As readers of these pages may recall, I was a huge fan of Strike Force Five and linked to several of the podcasts.  For those who don't recall -- or weren't wandering around these hall as the time -- this was a series of podcasts made by the talk show hosts Stephen Colbert, Jimmy Fallon, Jimmy Kimmel, Seth Meyers and John Oliver.  It was done during the most-recent Writers Guild Strike, as a support of the strikers (when their talk shows were off the air, and raised some money for the staffs.)  It was wonderful, often wildly, and its classic episode remains the week the rotating host was Jimmy Fallon who decided to do a sort of Newlywed Game (first contacting all the hosts' wives to get their answers) and pretty much screwed up everything. Repeatedly.  The other four were merciless to him -- not only during that episode, but bringing it up again in the weeks ahead.

I'm not exaggerating.  The way they described the episode on the Strike Force Five website was:  “Episode five is about our wives. Jimmy Fallon hosts the WORST GAME SHOW EVER in our favorite episode so far."

(Here's the article and link to it here.  They even did a sequel several weeks later, when Fallon was again the host and said that he hadn't used all the questions in the first episode.  It wasn't as lunatic as the original, but still very funny.  This is the link to it.)

The other day, as Colbert's show nears its final broadcast on Thursday, he invited the full Strike Force Five hosts to be guests.  I didn't see it when the episode aired last week when I was out of town, but that's just as well since the full, wonderful conversation didn't make it on the air -- and lasted 36 minutes!  This is the whole thing, and it's a joy.  And it's also absolutely fascinating if you take a step back and realize that this is all five competing talk show hosts together on a network broadcast, just having a great time with one other, who they clearly, greatly like and admire.

Also, the five hosts later got together again and did a final Strike Force Five video podcast, which I'll post later.  But for now --

On this week’s Naked Lunch podcast, co-hosts Phil Rosenthal and David Wild welcome Ringo Starr.  As the show writes, “It Don't Come Easy, but Phil & David are full of Peace & Love to bring you our most Fab ‘Naked Lunch/ yet. First Ringo Starr & T Bone Burnett discuss Ringo's fabulous new Country album, ‘Long Long Road’ for a relatively short but sweet conversation that still takes long & winding roads with stories about taking a punch from Muhammad Ali when he was Cassius Clay-- The Greatest vs. The Greatest ! -- the enduring joy of playing with the Fab frontline in Ringo's former band -- John. Paul and George & their Liverpool wits. And don't miss Phil knvelling when Ringo drums ‘Get Back’ and ‘Come Together’ on this week's ‘Naked Lunch’ table.” Plus Elvis Costello offers some words on Ringo.