The Best of the Rest of the News and Opinion. — The for-profit Medicare Advantage giants are doing exactly what for-profit companies do, and a million or so seniors are about to find out what “advantage” actually means. — Diesel hit a record $6.05 a gallon Friday, and Trump’s insane war with Iran is entirely responsible for it. — Trump closed his midterm convention in Dallas by making the crowd raise their right hands and pledge they would cheat for him, then told them they’ll go to Hell if they don’t vote the way he wants. — A right-wing think tank has spent twenty years secretly building a database on thousands of Muslim Americans, and only admitted it when HuffPost started asking questions. — Trump got asked a simple question by a Black woman reporter on the tarmac in Dallas and responded by lunging and screaming at her. — An active-duty Navy sailor was trotted out on stage at the Republican convention as a prop, which is against Pentagon rules, and the Pentagon so far has nothing to say about it — The people building artificial intelligence spent the week telling Congress it might kill everybody, so Mikey Johnson decided the House should leave town for six weeks and avoid the topic. — Crazy Alert! Apparently Donald Trump isn’t the only one who can rename things.

The mystery surrounding 660 million pounds of imported beef exposes a much larger story about money, deregulation, food safety, and who Trump’s billionaire-run government really serves... In Monday’s New York Times, Eric Schlosser — the guy who freaked out a nation with his book Fast Food Nation a quarter century ago — published an article that kicks off with a simple observation: if you buy a T-shirt at the Gap, federal law requires a label that tells you where it was made and what it’s made of. While the same is true for your car, your refrigerator, your television, and every apple and bag of frozen peas in the supermarket, as a result of lobbyists being able to openly buy politicians in America since 2010, beef and pork are the exceptions. Which is why, Schlosser argues, Donald Trump could sign a one-man presidential proclamation allowing roughly 660 million pounds of foreign beef to enter America with neither inspection nor the usual 26.4 percent out-of-quota tariff. If Americans knew where this mystery meat was coming from, they might not want to eat it, Schlosser notes, but Trump is apparently making sure we’ll never know.

For decades, reporters have treated hours-long voting lines as a “normal” feature of Election Day instead of investigating why some Americans consistently face greater barriers to the ballot… For over 50 years, our media has been covering up Republican voter suppression efforts. This year, though, they’re getting so obvious that it’ll be interesting to see if they continue to whitewash the practice. Remember all those reports you’ve seen on TV during previous elections, where the reporter is outside a polling place with a line stretching around the block?

The Best of the Rest of the News and Opinion. — Vladimir Putin has spent the past year turning “plausible deniability” into a full-time European hobby, and this week Germany finally pushed back sorta, kinda, maybe hard. — Javier Milei has apparently decided that if you can’t win an economy, you can always win back a windswept archipelago full of penguins with 3,000 sheep-farmers. — ICE has found a new frontier for cruelty at California’s largest immigration lockup: outlawing the hug. — Missouri’s Supreme Court just handed Trump’s national gerrymandering crusade its first real faceplant. — Speaking of senators who’ve forgotten what their job is, John Fetterman’s transformation from Bernie-backing mayor of Braddock to Fox News’ favorite Democrat cleared its final decency checkpoint this week. — Trump has apparently spent so much time threatening to weaponize the Federal Reserve, sanction foreign assets, and personally inspect Fort Knox that America’s oldest allies have started quietly walking their gold out the door. — Elon Musk, a man who spent a quarter-billion dollars to buy the last election for Trump and got access to Americans’ private data with it (along with stopping dozens of investigations into him and his companies), is reportedly in a full panic over a documentary he can’t buy his way out of. — Crazy Alert! Do you like to play online games where you can chase brown-skinned people around and hurt them?