The polls may show Democrats ahead, but are they missing the Red state voters who won't be allowed to cast a ballot? It’s Election Day and if you believe the polls both Democrats and democracy itself are heading for a very good night. The final generic ballot averages show Democrats about 9 points ahead, which is the widest margin by which either party has carried a midterm in years. And while I hope those numbers hold up — or even turn out to be conservative — I’m haunted by the last week of October of 2024 when Kamala Harris had a solid 4-point lead over Trump in the national polls but still lost the election by an average of 2.7 points, a spread of almost 7 percent. Fully sixty percent of the 81 national polls taken in the final two weeks before the election had Harris winning big. According to the pundits, there are a zillion “reasons” for the big spread between the polling and the final vote (she also lost the popular vote by about 1.5%) but the biggest variable has never been included in the polling and should be: voter purges by Republican secretaries of state in Red states with large Blue cities.

What’s a “well-regulated militia”? “A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.” — Second Amendment, ratified on December 15, 1791 . Every argument about gun control and safety in America eventually runs into the thirteen words that open the Second Amendment: “A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State...”

The billionaires promise a technological paradise while predicting the decline of human labor. But if their gamble collapses, who loses their jobs, who keeps their fortunes, and who pays the bill? The AI bubble and it’s possible disintegration gives us some pretty grim insights into the question of what happens when the richest people in the world rebuild the economy in a way that it no longer needs working people, but still expects them to pay their bills. Reuters reported this week that China’s AI and semiconductor stock boom has suffered a sudden and staggering reversal: their STAR50 index of Beijing’s AI and chip champions (like our NASDAQ) has plunged 40 percent in less than four months, wiping out roughly $480 billion in market value.

The golf industry wants longer evenings, but sleep researchers say permanent daylight saving time would disrupt our biological clocks and expose children to darker school commutes… His greed seems to have no limits: Trump wants to make more money off his golf courses, and you and your kids may pay for it with your lives. And one lone Republican is standing up to him. Back in 1974, the year Richard Nixon put into place year-round daylight savings time, Louise and I were living just outside Lansing, Michigan. I remember the sun not coming up that January until nine in the morning; we drove to work in full darkness, kids stood under streetlights to catch the school bus, and eight schoolchildren were killed in traffic accidents in Florida alone. When Nixon first flipped the switch, 79 percent of Americans supported year-round daylight savings time; by the end of 1974 that had collapsed to 42 percent support. President Gerald Ford signed the repeal that October. The biggest force behind this bizarre idea of year-round daylight savings time was the golf course industry. The Englishman who invented the idea of shifting the clocks was an avid golfer named William Willett; the whole idea was to give golfers another hour to play in the evening.