Smile More, Show Your Papers, and Stop Asking About the Fifteen Dead Soldiers

Every story this week is the same story: powerful men demanding that you prove yourself to them while refusing to prove a goddamn thing to you.

Prove your citizenship, in person, on paper, to register to vote. Prove you condemned the right slogans loudly enough to be allowed at a memorial in your own city. Meanwhile a sitting United States Senator cannot be produced on camera after 43 days, the Pentagon subtracts fifteen wounded Americans from its own ledger and offers a duty officer who is never at the desk, and the President of the United States announces a fourth term in a red hat and then says he is only kidding.

This episode covers the Weekend at Mitchie's Counter and the EMS audio nobody wants to talk about, the SAVE Act as a pre-written excuse rather than a bill, four female reporters attacked in six days, a six hour Truth Social bender that produced a time travel epic and a wall against Canadian air, three hundred families petitioning to bar the first Muslim mayor of New York from Ground Zero, the debut of a brand new recurring segment with original music, James Carville nominating from his recovery bed the kid his party threw out an airlock, and Nick Turse's reporting on a casualty count that runs backwards.

Reality Check is the one that will get Robin yelled at: the policies are popular, the vehicle cannot carry them, and the reason is machinery, not messaging....the DSA