Further

Hope glimmers. After an election that saw "democrats in array" rising up to thunderously repudiate anything connected with a doddering tyrant - "Apparently Americans liked the East Wing more than anyone thought" - the final small sweet revenge was a jury acquitting D.C.'s valiant Sandwich Guy for the crime of making it pellucidly clear, with mustard, he doesn't want stormtroopers in his town. One sage: "The only way this week could've been better for America was if Dick Cheney died again."

On Tuesday, voters came out in sometimes record numbers - New York saw its highest turnout in over 50 years - to reject MAGA cruelty, inequity and greed, and win "just everything." New Jersey and Virginia saw double-digit wins for women governors - a veteran and former CIA officer - reflecting a failure of anti-trans bigotry and resurgence of Democrats' big tent. There were comparable wins from Connecticut and Pennsylvania to Mississippi and Georgia. Maine overwhelmingly rejected an effort to restrict mail-in voting, Colorado willingly raised taxes on the rich to fund school lunches, California's re-districting Prop. 50 passed by an almost 2 to 1 margin; Newsom showed how to fight Trump - "After poking the bear, this bear roared” - and urged other states to also "meet this moment head-on."

Variously dubbed Darth Vader, the Prince of Darkness and "one of the most evil people to exist in modern history," Dick Cheney, the lying, blood-stained architect of America's calamitous War on Terror, brutal torture program and an Imperial Presidency that today still afflicts us has died "after a lifetime of people wishing he had died sooner" - and in a prison cell. The consensus on a war criminal who faced no punishment and expressed no remorse: "No hell is hot enough or eternal enough."

The long-awaited death of Cheney, at 84, resists all but the most groveling and dissonant of the hagiographies that often greet the demise of contentious figures; in Cheney's case, much like Kissinger's, schadenfreude rules the day. After years of harsh mock headlines - "Cheney Is Still Undead" - and a website that daily asked, and answered, "Is Cheney Dead Yet?", the actual death of an American supervillain instrumental in creating an iniquitous, ineffective, indefensible, deeply sadistic torture and rendition regime that "destroyed any shred of humanity the U.S. could ever lay claim to" was met with caustic dispatches like, "Dick Cheney No Longer Still Undead" and, from The Nation, "His Works Completed, Dick Cheney, Mass Murderer of Iraqis and American Democracy, Dies."

Hours after exultantly posting 24 photos about his gaudy new marble bathroom and hours before he defiantly refused to fund food stamps and health care subsidies for 42 million Americans, King Donald held a glitzy Great-Gatsby-themed party for his robber baron cronies and their plastic molls, thus adding to his myriad crimes by defiling a luminous, pivotal book that assails the moral depredations of the rich. Tell us without telling us you don't know how it and its toxic Gilded Age ends.

So much winning. As government employees work unpaid, soaring health care costs loom, DOGE cuts slow air traffic and social services, the U.S. debt rockets to a record 38-plus trillion dollars, and health experts say the country wastes nearly $400 billion in food each year, MAGA Republicans are playing a vile real-live version of The Hunger Games, threatening to make over 40 million Americans, about half of them kids, go hungry in order to...umm... wait....stick it to the Marxist libs? Perversely, unwittingly highlight the damage wrought by their fucking Big Beautiful Bill that mindlessly cut $187 billion from food stamps in the august name of making fat cats fatter? Drive home the righteous insistence of these princes among men that if we don't let them take doctors away from sick people they're gonna take food away from poor people?

As our decrepit despot traipsed across Asia, he was fêted by leaders anxious to dodge his peevish trade wars by assiduously plying him, as one would for any dangerous, demented child, with adoration and treats: burgers, golf clubs, trinkets, ketchup and, in South Korea, even a crown for the wounded boy who would be king. Still, he couldn't keep up. In Japan, he wandered off mid-glitzy-ceremony like a nursing-home gramps looking for pudding, to be steered back in place. Nothing to see here.

The decline, of course, is ongoing. Monday, Trump told reporters he'd gone to Walter Reed Medical Center and gotten an MRI as part of a "routine yearly checkup,” except he'd just had one six months ago and an MRI is decisively not part of a routine test, but not to worry: He said it was "perfect," except that doesn't exist. For those inexplicably wondering about his cognitive state, he said he also aced a "very hard" sort of "aptitude test," except it's a very basic dementia screening that requires the patient to solve elementary-school level problems like remembering five words, identifying a giraffe or lion, and drawing a clock; he added that the test "took a while" and "was difficult,” two key factors doctors consider when assessing cognitive skills