REPEAL! Sort of

 Joe Biden has made toking mandatory, or so you might think from some of the responses.  He issued a pardon for about 6,500 people convicted under federal law of simple marijuana possession, which changes no laws and affects no states, but from the hysteria on the right you might think Cheech and Chong were filling the Lincoln Bedroom with smoke while Willie Nelson shares a doob with Hunter on the White House roof.  (Wait, I think something like that once happened.)  Over on Fox super-rational Laura Ingraham warned, "LEFT'S MIDTERM AGENDA:  POT, PORN, ABORTION, JAN 6."  I didn't hear anything about porn.  I should check the mailbox.

It's just one more burden for the Republicans, already grappling with the creeping socialism of student loan forgiveness, the crisis of grade school pole dancing and the failure to vet several life-forms currently on the ballot.  For instance Dan Bolduc, running for the Senate in New Hampshire, used his outside voice to tell supporters that "gentleman" state legislators should be deciding matters like abortion for the womenfolk, who are too emotional, I guess.  He's a retired general and he knows about giving orders.  Herschel Walker's woman friend is still talking; today she told the New York Times he wanted her to have a second abortion but she chose to give birth to their son instead, a son he has largely ignored apart from court-ordered child support.  Probably he was busy tracking down Whitey Bulger.  (You didn't know he used to be an FBI agent?)

Mehmet Oz continues to be confused about what state he wants to represent.  At a fund-raiser in Santa Ana, California, hosted by Matt Gaetz's in-laws, he delivered his stump speech in the Lyon Air Museum while standing in front of a Mercedes-Benz G4 touring wagon with a large decorative swastika -- not surprising as it once belonged to Adolf Hitler.  

I'm going to swim upstream here and suggest that this is the smartest move the Oz campaign has made.  Trump complaining that his generals were not as "loyal" as Hitler's and introducing a Hitler impersonator at a hate rally; Carl Paladino calling the fuhrer "the kind of leader we need"; Madison Cawthorn making a pilgrimage to Berchdesgaden.  What has he got to lose?  If he gets a bump from this Oz will probably start using "Horst Wessel" as his play-on music.  And no, I don't know how Hitler's car ended up in an air museum.

For a party that's at least Nazi-curious, the Republicans come up short on actual fighting experience.  First it was J.R. Majewski in Ohio claiming to have seen combat in Afghanistan, when the record indicates he was lucky to get an honorable discharge from the Air Force.  Then Tyler Kistner in Minnesota claimed "four combat deployments" as a Marine, which is four more than he actually had.  I'm reminded that Rick Reed, who invented Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, died in August.  He would not be happy to see Republicans swift-boating themselves.  I think it's hilarious.

Over there, the government of the UK remains in chaos and it's about to get weird.  A robot named Ai-Da after Ada Lovelace, mathematician and daughter of Lord Byron, is scheduled to address the House of Lords next week on whether artificial intelligence is a threat to creative industries like fashion and music.  Ai-Da painted a portrait of the late Queen before her Platinum Jubilee:

No worse than the Churchill portrait by Graham Sutherland: