Hi, this is Al Franken.

Welcome to the, and pardon the egotism, to the Al Franken podcast.

But it's, look, it's one of 600,000 podcasts.

In fact, at first, I was going to do a podcast on cuts of beef, focusing on

brisket. But I discovered there are currently 12 podcasts on brisket. And seven of them are really

quite good. So instead, I decided to do a podcast about my interests

in what I consider important policy issues, more than in the day-to-day politics. It seemed to get

chewed over quite a bit. For example, last week I interviewed Michael Mann, the Nobel Prize-winning

climate scientists, and my first question to him was, how fucked are we? And Michael paid me a great

compliment. He said, how fucked are we is the right question as opposed to the commonly asked are we fucked and i felt actually

quite good about that but his message was that what we do now will make an enormous difference

in what the future will be like for us and for our children and our grandchildren and I have four grandchildren who range from age six down to two and a half months.

And very likely they will be around for the end of this century.

And what we do in the next few years will make an enormous difference in what their world will be like. And that is just one,

just one of the reasons that this election is so important. In fact, I think this election,

I think this is the second most important election of our lifetime. The most important one

being the last one. Donald Trump cannot be president for six and a half more years. The damage

that this guy has already done to the courts. Last week, this 5-4 Supreme Court

decision that federal judges can't strike down the most egregiously partisan gerrymandering by

state legislators and governors in order to elect as many state legislators and congressmen from

their own party as possible.

That's last week.

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